Sin Hellcat

Nine

Don’t talk to me about fate. It’s 1946 and you’re offered some IBM stock at seventy percent of market price and you turn it down and today that block is worth about five million dollars more than what you would have had to pay for it, and you try to console yourself by saying it’s fate, that’s the way it goes with fate, you can’t fight fate.

Phaugh. It ain’t fate, comrade, it’s you. You decide not to buy that stock, you. Nobody twisted your arm. It’s just that you’re an imbecile that’s all.

But don’t feel bad, brother of mine, don’t feel badedoo, I’m an imbecile, too. We’re all imbeciles, marching along arm in arm together, with Corrigan leading the way. It isn’t the fluke of fate when we make a wrong decision, podnuh, it’s the fickle finger when we make a right one.

When was the last time you made a right decision? Yeah, you, hiding over there behind that eight ball.

What gets me mad is that we didn’t even talk about it. Jodi and I, I mean. We rode up in the elevator, and we were both thinking the same thought, and we both knew that the other was thinking the same thought, and we didn’t even talk about it. Arm in arm, brother, imbeciles we.

You know what I’m talking about, don’t act coy. Jodi and I and the little bastard, that’s what I’m talking about. A series of really monumental wrong decisions had brought me thus far to Rio de Janeiro of all places, in company with a college-educated whore and a five-year-old basketball who wanted to live with us forever. Do you realize how long forever is? More than a year.

And we didn’t even discuss it. Never mind right decision wrong decision, I’m not talking about that. It was far too late for a right decision by then. What we had to do was choose which wrong decision to plummet into. And the best wrong decision we didn’t even talk about.

There are shades and shades of rightness and wrongness. Now the blackest wrong decision we could have made, the wrongest wrong decision, was to act sensibly, in line with our previous wrong decisions, and simply turn Everett Whittington over to his dear papa and take our next plane back to New York and never see one another again. And the whitest wrong decision we could have made, the rightest wrong decision, was to act with total incoherence, to run off somewhere with Rhett, and the three of us remain an unlikely trio forever. Of course, there were complications of legality and income and language and a few dozen other hurdles far too high to leap so we didn’t even talk about it. That’s what makes me so mad, brother, that we didn’t even talk about it. I don’t mind being an imbecile, it’s part of my humanity, but I hate being a coward as well.

So I bit my tongue as a punishment, and we went up in the elevator again, and Rhett looked up at me and said, loud and clear. “Whatcha gonna do with my suitcase?” And the elevator operator glanced around, wondering too.

I said, “Hush, Rhett, we’re skipping out on the bill.” So then the operator figured we couldn’t possibly be skipping out on the bill, so he ignored us again, and I bit my tongue harder for even more of a punishment because it wasn’t a bill we were skipping out on; we were skipping out on Rhett.

Outside, a gaily colored taxi was a reminder of our gaily colored homeland far to the north. I looked at it, standing there in the Southern Hemisphere sunshine, and a strange thought went gliding unasked through my mind: I never have liked New York.

The lemmings rush to the sea. The bright young humans rush to New York. I think now that the lemmings have the smarter idea. Drowning is so much cleaner a death.

We boarded this northern chariot and I withdrew from my pocket the slip of paper and read from it the address, and on the second try the driver comprehended, and we jolted away into traffic.

“Where are we going?” That was Rhett.

“To see your father, dear.” That was Jodi.

“Are we all going to live with my father?” That was Rhett again.

“Grrrrr.” That was me.

“I don’t remember what my father looks like.” Rhett once more.

“Oh, Harvey.” Jodi again. “Oh, hell.” Me.

The conversation continued in that vein, sporadically, until we turned through a blacktop turnoff between pale stone walls and along the curving drive to a low rambling white manor which lacked only the darkies’ quarters out back. We emerged from the cab, and I’m certain that this time I was overcharged, and we rang the bell.

A haughty male servant allowed us ingress, and ordered us to wait upon the marble entrance hall. He went away toward the back of the house, and when he opened the distant massive door sounds of revelry poured forth, snipped off again when he closed the door once more behind him.

Guilt and indecision faded for a time from my mind, as I stood waiting for Dixon Whittington to put in his appearance. I was, like unto bird and snake, fascinated by the man. I wanted to know what he would look like. What would a corporate thief look like? What would be the physical appearance of a man who entrusted his son for a three thousand mile journey to the hirelings of mobsters? What possible face could front such a mind?

Renewed revelric reverberations signaled the re-opening of the door. I looked up and saw the face I’d been wondering about.

One thing was certain. No Dorianesque painting was locked away above stairs in this villa. The face of Dixon Whittington reflected the man. The eyes, of course, were the features one noticed first. Small and nearly round, with a darkish gray-green tinge, they were set deep in the forepart of his skull, widely separated by pasty flesh. The nose was thick and veined, with flaring deep-lined wings and black gaping hair-filled nostrils. Lines of sour discontent fanned down across the flesh from his nose to the corners of his mouth. His cheeks were rounded and mottled, though meticulously shaved, and his small mouth was thick lipped, the lower lip protruding in a moneyed pout. His forehead was high and pale and gleaming, with thick black brows hung awninglike over those beetle eyes. In ridiculous contrast to the jungly under-brush of brows, his coal-black hair was plastered straight back on his bulky head in the style of Valentino.

The body on which this head sat solidly and truculently was, in a word, gross. Is that the right word? Does it get the idea across? What I’m trying to picture for you is, see, a businessman. You know what businessmen are built like, they’re the ones for whom the double-breasted suit was invented. Kind of barrely. Chunky. Now, you take that businessman, and you give him a nasty mind and a life of ease and dissipation, and pretty soon that same double-breasted suit, when he puts it on, is single-breasted. And he isn’t chunky anymore, he’s soft and flabby. Gross, in other words. But the original businessman body is still down inside there someplace. You have the feeling that if you prodded him with a finger, it would be like prodding a thick layer of dough over a honeydew melon. Soft and flabby, with the original chunkiness down underneath. Gross. See?

I looked at this thing, this seven hundred thousand dollar mistake, this Dixon Whittington, and then I looked at Rhett. The gross mistake before us had created this tiny child, and what that proves I don’t really know. I’d have to see the mother first. But of course, the mother had flung herself from a window, and was unavailable for the viewing.

Come to think of it, that fact alone made the viewing unnecessary. It didn’t matter what the mother looked like. Having been betrayed by this dank troll here in front of me, she had taken the easy way out, totally ignoring her own responsibility to the child she had brought into the world.

Isn’t it amazing? The most utter wretches of creation, civilization’s anal excretion, the vilest black souls of Newgate, still are capable with their scabrous swords and gaping maws, in an act of loveless conquest, of producing beauty and value. Rhett, now, was surely the only even remotely possible excuse for the existence of Dixon Whittington or his cowardly spouse. How had they done it? The rose on the dung pile, and it never fails.

The troll advanced. “You got him,” he said. He might have said exactly the same thing, in precisely the same tone, to a servant who had finally bagged the rat in the basement.

“Yes,” I said. I looked once again from father to son, and this time I looked at Jodi. She looked ill.

The troll had closed the door behind him when coming out to this hall, and now the door opened again, drenching us with another burst of alcoholic vivacity, and a slut emerged.

Here we go again. You never know, really, what words mean. Such as gross previously, which can also mean twenty of something. Or is that a score? Or a stone? Maybe a gross is twelve twelves. A hell of a point to make, at any rate.

But about words. Take slut, for instance. By dictionary definition, Jodi was a slut, and the woman who came toward us from the revels was not a slut. By dictionary definition. But dictionaries are usually wrong. I don’t know whether you’ve ever noticed that before, but it’s true. Being a Mad Ave word purveyor for so long, it was brought home to me fairly often.

A slut, for instance, is not a prostitute, though the dictionary might claim so. No, a slut by usage is a promiscuous slattern, a sloppy slobby easy make. Jodi, though she worked the midnight trampoline for pay, was not a slut. The woman who had just joined our little group was a slut. Not the dictionary definition. She looked like the kind of woman you would mean if you said the word slut. Okay?

So that’s what she looked like in loose wrinkled clothing, barefoot. Black-haired, by the way. A good-looking woman about three or four years ago, before she decided to be a slut. Also, she was drunk.

She arrived and cast a jewel-fingered hand upon the troll’s elbow. She smiled sickeningly at Rhett, her unfocused eyes damply gleaming. “And is this Everett?” she said, the way women like that say things like that to little children, trying to be cute and motherly simultaneously and missing both by a mile.

The troll — no, I’m not going to call him Dixon Whittington — pushed her hand away ungraciously. “Go on back to the party,” he said.

She went down on one knee, but not too steadily, so she went down on both knees. Then she extended her arms — both draped with gold bracelets — toward Rhett and mulched, “I’m your new mama, honey. Come to mama.”

Rhett, understandably, did his best to fade into the material of Jodi’s skirt.

“Sober up first,” said the troll to mamacita. He had the grace, surprisingly, to look embarrassed.

Me, too. Hadn’t I brought Rhett here?

I suddenly remembered something that I had successfully managed to avoid conscious thought about for eight years. This was before Helen, when I was still a normally oversexed bachelor grinding away at the prevarication factory, finding my physical ease wherever I could, and a fellow pulser on advertising’s bed of gold told me about Will Brockheimer’s wife.

Will Brockheimer was then, and still is so far as I know, an account executive with a fantastic knack for liquor ad copy. Actually, it wasn’t so fantastic as all that if you understood that by Will Brockheimer, liquor ad copy was a love letter. Will has lived on the product of the distiller’s art for fifteen or twenty years by now, and I don’t believe there’s anything else in the world he loves half so much as booze, not even himself. And particularly not his wife.

You know how it is with booze. You drink a lot of it and then you think about sex, and you discover that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. There’s nothing like good Scotch or rye or bourbon or blended whiskey or vodka to make you crave what you can’t perform. After a while, as in Will’s case, this results in even the craving fading away.

Will Brockheimer was married. Will Brockheimer was alcoholically undersexed. Will Brockheimer, so I was told, had a wife who welcomed all substitutes for her booze-limp husband. All you had to do was go along with Will one night after work. He would head immediately for the nearest bar, and drink steadily till around midnight or one in the morning. If you stayed with him, and made sure he swallowed enough to be really reeling, then of course you’d have to take him home. His wife would help you put him to bed, and then, so the scuttlebutt ran, she would help you put her to bed.

I heard about this interesting possibility during a particularly dry spell in my sexual life, all puns intended. And so, two days after first hearing of it, I took action. Seeing to it that I boarded the elevator with Will Brockheimer, whom I knew only casually, I started up a conversation with him on the way down to the ground, and the two of us wound up in a cozy dark joint off Madison Avenue, and Will proceeded to get smashed.

What a strange oblique seduction that was! Plying a girl with liquor in hopeful preparation of later plying her with me, that was something I understood and was familiar with. But plying a man with liquor, in hopeful preparation of later plying his wife, that was strangely twisted, and not entirely enjoyable by any stretch of the imagination.

And he wanted to talk. This man on whom I was even attaching the cuckold’s horn wanted to talk to me, and I must, perforce, talk back. I must smile at him in all guile, and tell him stories, and listen to his stories, and be his pal. And all the time thrust down the quirks of conscience plucking at my mind. For isn’t it drummed into us from earliest childhood that it is more important in life to get laid than anything else? Isn’t copulation our chiefest goal, over mere honesty or truth or pity? Given all the choices of all the magic rings or Araby, comrade of mine, what would your first wish be?

And so, when at the witching hour out he passed, strode I unto the street and flagged a cab. It cost a dollar to get that worthy’s worthless assistance in carting the carcass from bar to car, and then all at once I realized that I didn’t know my drinking pal’s address.

Are you paying attention? Not only did I cuckold this sweet and sodden creature, I even picked his pocket. Out came his wallet, and from the identification card therein I parroted the address to the surly hacky, then nicked back the dollar I’d so far paid the driver, plus another for the trip, before stuffing the wallet back into his pocket.

They lived uptown a ways on the West Side. Not too far uptown, not far enough for a police lock to be necessary or for housewives to feel frightened of tripping down to the corner grocery after dark. Just far enough uptown to be expensive without being too expensive. (I’m going around the bush this away, to be honest, because I don’t properly remember exactly what the address was. Somewhere between Broadway and the park, between Columbus Circle and the Planetarium. Up in there.)

Will blessedly recovered somewhat by the time the cab reached his apartment building. It was at least possible, once the driver had helped me drag him out of the backseat and get him vertical on the sidewalk, for him to stand and even to walk, so long as one held onto his arm and guided him.

Entering the apartment building, the amount and intensity of qualms and queasiness I had to ignore suddenly increased, and it became effectively impossible for me to ransack Will’s pockets once more, in search of keys. Instead, I found the button tagged Brockheimer and pressed it firmly.

In a moment, I heard the voice of the object of my desires, albeit electronically distorted to something similar to the croaking of a frog, and saying only: “Who is it?”

That stumped me. She didn’t know my name, she didn’t even know me. The whole project suddenly seemed absurd. I had been planning to go up to an apartment and have intercourse with a respectable married woman whom I’d never even met before. Ridiculous.

The object of my waning desires spake again, in precisely the same words: “Who is it?”

Since I couldn’t answer that question, I answered another one instead: “I have your husband here, Mrs. Brockheimer.”

There was a pause, and then Mrs. Brockheimer strained the building’s electronics to the utmost, by forcing it to reproduce a sigh. Even through the distortion, it came through as a bitter and fatalistic sigh, a there’s-no-way-out sigh. And she said, “All right. Come on up.”

I wonder now what that sigh meant. Was she being fatalistic about Will, or about herself, or about me? Or all of us, equally though divergently doomed.

At any rate, she told me to come on up, and the door buzzed. I pushed, it opened, and Will plodded docilely if unsteadily to the elevator. Up seven flights we groaned, and down the hall to where she stood waiting for us.

I remember her clearly. Not because she was stunningly beautiful, for she wasn’t. And not because she was startlingly ugly, for she wasn’t that either. I remember her because she was so fantastically ordinary. She wore a housewife sort of dress, and old bedroom slippers, and no stockings. She had no make-up on, and her features were regular and plain to the point of invisibility. That slightly idealized housewife in the washing machine ads was this woman, without the idealization. Hair black and neither short nor long, done in a style of total anonymity. You have seen this woman a thousand times, usually in supermarkets, and you see that she was probably a striking teenager, but marriage and cookery had made her sexless. She still has the slender body and the good breasts and the clear unblemished features, but domesticity has leeched her blood, the fire is out. Or so you think. You look at her and feel none of the stirrings aroused by palpitating femininity in bikinis on the beaches. No spark shoots out from her, and so no answering spark is ignited in you, and you glance at her and that is all, you walk on.

Trepidation, I’m afraid, was the order of my day as I steered the lurching Will down the hall toward home and wife. Not only was she my drinking companion’s wife, not only had she never even met me before, she was a housewife! Do you get it? A housewife! You don’t lay housewives, for Pete’s sake.

Will providentially afforded a diversion by passing out again, across his own threshold. Mrs. Brockheimer and I had to drag him into the living room. When she bent beside me to grab his arm, the loose neck of her dress fell open a bit, enough to show me the first swelling of a breast hung for the hand, strong yet yielding, full and desirable. And beneath that housewife disguise, she wore no bra!

Get thee behind me, trepidation! Housewives wear bras!

Mrs. Brockheimer, of course, had had plenty of experience of putting her husband to bed unconscious, and so she directed me in assisting her. We half-carried and half-dragged his hulk down the hall into the bedroom, rolled it onto the bed, and stripped it. I was for leaving the poor man whatever dignity can be afforded by a pair of boxer shorts, but the woman stripped him naked, and thus bare and sodden he lay before us on the bed.

She tweaked a portion of his anatomy with a contemptuous linger. “Look at that thing!” she said, her voice low with controlled anger and disgust. “What good is it? I ought to cut it off him.”

“The amount he drinks,” I said, “he still does need it for something.”

She looked at me unsmiling. “You want some coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

I followed her back to the living room, where she unexpectedly turned around and said, “Do you really want coffee?”

Perhaps brutal honesty was what this woman wanted. “No,” I said. “It isn’t coffee I want.”

“What’s your name?”

“Harvey.”

“Sit down here on the sofa with me, Harvey. Tell me about yourself.”

We sat down, and neither of us said a word. She leaned forward, as though listening attentively, and once again the front of her dress hung away from her body. I reached out and slipped my hand inside and cupped her left breast, feeling the tip hard against my palm, the swelling slopes soft against my fingers. She smiled, then, a smile of cynicism and animal pleasure, and quickly opened my trousers. Then her face slipped down out of my vision, and her mouth was warm.

The dress was all she wore. My hand slid up her leg, beneath the dress, to equatorial climes, and busy fingers spoke in sign language. She lay half prone now on the sofa, her head in my lap, and down the slope of my side her hips twisted and writhed. With my free hand I stroked the upper rise of hip, feeling the muscles moving beneath dress and flesh.

Then she sat up, all at once, and pushed my hands away, and harshly whispered, “Take your shoes off. Take them off.” And leaped up to pull the dress over her head, wriggling her body energetically as she did so.

The housewife, with the dress, was gone. Beneath was a panther, a leopard, a cheetah. A female animal demanding the male. A musk rose from her, the scent of carnal battle. As I stood up to strip away my trousers and shorts, leaving shirt and T-shirt on — having removed my tie already and tucked it in my jacket pocket several bars ago — she dove back onto the sofa, twisting around onto her back, knees up-thrust at outward angles, belly hot and quivering, hips alive and vibrant, demanding their fulfillment. “Come on,” she whispered, harshly, urgently, straining fingers reaching up for me. “Come on, come on.”

I came on.

It has always been my technique to tease with small nibbles, finding this works wonders in increasing the receptivity of the female, but this woman would have none of such dandification. I lowered slowly between her shaking impatient knees, pointing at my target, and she lunged upward to grab me in her hands and yank me down atop her. The legs shot out straight, then in-curved, met above my back, and locked, squeezing me down and in and under. Her arms embraced me, her mouth was hot on mine, and it seemed that she wanted to absorb me, to assimilate me entirely to pull all of me down inside her skin and make us one body.

A driving female like that destroys her own purpose, of course. Hardly had we begun when I for one was done. But that mattered not to her at all. She pulsated on, thrusting and squeezing and clamping me tight, and lo and behold I was begun again.

And a teeny tiny voice from far away across the room said, “Mommy.”

I was off her like a shot, staring madly around in all directions, and seeing a teeny tiny girl-child, no more than three or four, garbed in cotton pajamas with feet rubbing her little eyes in the doorway to the bedroom.

The woman disentangled herself from me, and hurried across the room, her flanks gleaming in the dim light of the room, her half-crouch as she ran, breasts hanging, feral and magnificent. I heard the girl-child murmur sleepily, “What are you doing, Mommy?” and then the mother had removed her, and I was alone in the room.

When she came back, to tell me that the child had been put back to bed and was now definitely asleep for the night, I was smoking a cigarette and seriously studying my trousers. Though my second beginning had not yet had its finis, I too seemed to be definitely asleep for the night.

She would have none of it. She snatched the cigarette from my hand and stubbed it angrily in a tray, then knelt before me, cajoling, threatening, stroking, pleading, kissing, urging, mouthing her need, until I found myself — despite myself — coming awake again. And we finished what we had begun. I got no enjoyment from that, but we finished anyway. Because she wanted to, and what she wanted in that line of things she surely got.

Though she assured me I would always be welcome, I never returned to Mrs. Brockheimer. Nor did I ever manage to feel comfortable around Will Brockheimer after that. It was guilt, of course, at least partially. Guilt and embarrassment at what I had done to Will. But it was also embarrassed humiliation at what Will’s wife — you know, I never learned her name? — had done to me, emasculating me, unmanning me in the very act of proving my manhood.

And the child. I hadn’t known they had a child. And I had come in stealth by night to copulate upon the child’s mother, and she the child had seen me and wondered what her Mommy was doing. There was a guilt and an embarrassment in that that transcended all else.

And now I felt much the same sort of feeling toward little Rhett. I looked upon the physical father to whom I was delivering this child, and the slut who would mother him, and I felt that guilt and shame and embarrassment again, and it was almost as though I could square things with both Rhett and the Brockheimer child at one.

There was only one course of action I could, in all dignity and self-respect, allow myself to take. And so I made my decision, and my course of action was chosen.

To begin with, just sort of as an opening gun, you might say, I stepped forward and punched the troll smack in the nose.