"Hmm, tell me more," she said, and leaned forward to kiss him, relishing the compliment that might have sounded false and cloying coming from anyone else.
Malcolm felt a familiar stirring in his loins, and he called over his shoulder, "Hey, Jer, I think I'll leave early, if it's okay with the boss." To Holly he said, "Don't go away, please! I'll be back in a minute." He kissed her again and then walked quickly away. As Malcolm Harker rushed back to the kitchen to let the owner know that he was leaving, Holly Larsen whipped a compact from her purse and gave herself a quick once-over. Lookin' good, she thought to herself. I hope he's okay tonight. It doesn't matter to me if it happens once in a while … they say it happens to every guy once in a while … but I don't want anything to mess up this relationship.
Jerry Herman walked toward her from the other end of the bar, waving a greeting. She smiled at him and said, "Hiya, sailor. Buy me a drink?"
"Cute, Holly," he said, grinning. "Real cute. So, it's your fault that I'm gonna have to tend this bar all by myself tonight!"
"You can handle it," she said, amused by his feigned rebuke. "The place is emptying out."
"Yeah, I know, I know." He nodded. Then, as if the thought had just occurred to him, he said "Hey, how's Marlene? I haven't seen her for weeks. How's she doing?"
Holly laughed. "She still doesn't want anything to do with you, if that's what you're asking."
He blushed slightly and grinned again. "Really? I thought maybe she might have sort of missed me, just a little bit."
"She says that you're an octopus, Jerry. Lots of hands, and all of them all over her all the time."
He shrugged. "So I'm enthusiastic."
"I don't think that's quite the description she would choose," she chuckled.
He shrugged again. "C'est la vie."
"C'est la guerre, more likely," Malcolm said as he approached them. "You think of women as enemy territory to be conquered, Jer."
"Ah, yes," his friend replied, tapping his fingers contemplatively against his lips, "the thrill of combat."
"Come on," Holly said to Malcolm as she slid off the barstool. "Let's go before Jerry starts to make me ill."
Jerry Herman watched as Malcolm held the door open and he and Holly left the Strand. He shook his head, muttering, "You got it bad, buddy boy," as he emptied a tray of clean glasses and placed them into the overhead glass rack. You're too romantic, Mal, he thought, too unrealistic when it comes to women. You think everything is like in the movies. Holly's a fine-looking woman, and real nice, all right, but don't kid yourself into thinking that her feelings for you have nothing to do with your family's bank account. It's the old story. The guy is after the body and the girl is after the wallet.
"C'est la guerre," he said aloud, "c'est la guerre, c'est la guerre …"
Jerry's cynicism would have outraged both Malcolm and Holly, had they been privy to his thoughts. True, Malcolm was not immune to Holly's physical beauty, which was considerable, and the joint motives of love and lust mingled in him without distinction; but overriding both of these urges was the simple fact that he liked her, that he enjoyed being with her, that, until the previous evening at any rate, he felt comfortable with her. It was true that Malcolm sowed his wild oats with the recklessness characteristic of young men, and that he had initially regarded Holly as just another warm furrow to be ploughed, but his feelings for her had very quickly grown deeper and more meaningful.
For her part, Holly Larsen was neither the self-serving gold digger Jerry assumed her to be nor the wide-eyed, selfless innocent of Malcolm's fantasies. She knew that Malcolm Harker came from a wealthy family, and she would have been a fool not to have been pleased by that fact; but her own career as a real estate agent in a time of booming prices had persuaded her that she did not need to be taken care of by Malcolm or any man. Only twenty-six, she already possessed a good and growing stock portfolio, a number of bank accounts, and a co-op apartment in the better part of Forest Hills. She was not wealthy, of course; but she had every reason to believe that she would be, five or ten years down the road.
So the wealth of the Harker family, while pleasant, was not what made Malcolm attractive to her. He was simply so utterly different, so totally outside the range of her experiences with men. Holly had lived in New York City for only five years, but she had gone through her share of urban playboys, pseudosophisticates, perpetual adolescents, and upon occasion, closet queens. Social relationships had seemed much less complicated—or at least the men had been more honest and unpretentious—in the small town of New York State's Finger Lakes region where she had been born and raised, but Holly had adjusted to the urban social scene easily enough. She had shed some element of her rural naïveté while pursuing her business degree in college, and by the time she met Malcolm she was close to being as hard and unfeeling as her environment; and New York City can be a cold town.
But that all changed when she went to a party given by her coworker Marlene and there met Marlene's friend Jerry Herman and Jerry's friend Malcolm Harker. He was, as the saying goes, tall, dark, and handsome, and she had allowed herself to be drawn to him by his physical attractiveness, all the while suspecting that he was as big a jerk as the other men she had been meeting lately. She had not hopped into bed with him at the first opportunity, for Holly was too intelligent and too cautious to be promiscuous in an age of frightening sexual diseases; but she realized very soon that Malcolm was unique, and she found herself wanting him very badly, physically, emotionally, romantically.
She wondered, as they walked along Queens Boulevard toward her apartment, making small talk, just when it was that his uniqueness had first become evident to her. Perhaps it was when he told her that he had graduated from Columbia with a major in European history and a minor in classical languages—and had gone on to do graduate work in both areas before dropping out, bored and impatient with the restrictions of formal study. It had struck her as so odd that in a time of self-centered ambition, with everyone in her generation obsessed with money and wealth and upward mobility, that someone such as Malcolm would spend his college years reading Cicero and Plato and Xenophon, or studying Bismarck and Disraeli and Lenin. She understood, of course, when she learned of his family's wealth. She realized Malcolm's job at the Strand was just a way of killing time and having fun, that he had never felt the kind of economic pressure which she had felt, that he had always been able to pursue his academic interests without ever having to worry about earning a living, that while she and her peers had been studying accounting and management and business law, he had been studying German and French, Latin and Greek, philosophy, history, literature and music and art.
He fascinated her.
And when they began seeing each other, Malcolm did not take her to bars and dance clubs. He took her to Ingmar Bergman film festivals, to the opera, to museums. And two weeks before, as they sat upon a blanket on a grassy knoll in Forest Park, drinking wine as he read to her from the poetry of Lord Byron, two thoughts had occurred to her. The first was that the afternoon's activity would have been embarrassingly corny with anyone else, but with Malcolm it was ineffably romantic. The second, which almost took her by surprise, was that she had fallen for Malcolm Harker. She had fallen hard.
They turned from Queens Boulevard and walked down Austin Street toward the charming old building where Holly lived. They mounted the stairs to the second floor and went to the door of her apartment. As she inserted the key into the lock, Malcolm kissed the back of her neck and whispered in her ear as his hands reached around and moved gently over her breasts. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back, allowing Malcolm's hands and mouth to express his need. She opened the door, they entered, then she closed and locked it behind them.
Three hours later she lay quietly in his arms upon her bed, listening to his heartbeat as the first rays of the morning sun began to drift into the room through the open shades. "Malcolm," she said softly.
"Hmm?" he replied curtly.
"
It really doesn't matter. Honest to God it doesn't. It happens to …"
"Yeah, yeah, I know," he said irritably. "It happens to every guy once in a while. But two nights in a row?"
She leaned up upon her elbows. "Listen, Mal, you just make it happen again by worrying about it. It doesn't mean anything, not a damn thing. The psychiatrists call it performance anxiety. Nobody feels like making love all the time, no matter what the movies try to tell us. So you didn't really feel like it last night, and worrying about last night messed us up for tonight." She kissed him lightly. "Just don't worry about it."
"Yeah, yeah, I know," he said, his tone indicating dismissal, not agreement. "Maybe I ought to see a doctor."
She yawned, saying, "Oh, don't be silly! You don't need a doctor for something like this! It's very common and very unimportant."
"It's not just this," he muttered. "I think I need a checkup or something."
"Why?" she asked. "Are you feeling ill?"
"Not ill, exactly," he said, sighing. "I've just been feeling … I don't know, funny. I never have much of an appetite. I feel weak and listless all the time. I can't seem to sleep at night …"
"You're never home at night. You work at night."
"Yeah, but not every night, and I don't go out and do things every night when I'm off. When I go to bed, I just toss and turn. I can't seem to fall asleep until morning half the time, and when I wake up, I feel like shit for hours."
Holly sighed. She had never been the type of person who enjoyed reviewing personal problems with friends, and she was not particularly interested in Malcolm's sleeping habits. Part of her was hoping that he would snap out of this malaise, part of her was worrying that he might have some sort of sexual problem, and part of her, though her conscious mind denied it, was reluctant to continue a relationship with a crippled libido. What she said was, "Okay, so you have insomnia, and you can't stand your sister's cooking, and you're suffering from performance anxiety." She forced a laugh. "If that's all that's bothering you, you're a lot better off than most people."
They were silent for a long while, and then he asked, "Do you think something's wrong with me?"
"Yeah," she muttered sleepily. "You think too much. That's the problem with you intellectual types. You spend so much time thinking about life that you can't live."
He considered this for a moment and then said, "Holly?"
"Ummm?" she asked.
"Okay if I close the blinds? The sunlight hurts my eyes."
"Yeah, sure, go ahead," she said indistinctly, and then a slight contraction in her nether regions was followed by a moist trickle of warmth. "Ah, shit," she muttered.
"Get your period?" he asked distantly as he rose from the bed to block out the sunlight.
"Yeah. It's due, and I felt it coming all day. 'Scuse me for a minute." As she went to the bathroom, she wondered, That's odd. How did he know? I didn't tell him.
Malcolm lay back down upon the bed, too self-absorbed to ask himself the same question. Had he taken the time to think it over, he might have realized that he had smelled the blood.
Chapter Two
At four o'clock the following afternoon, Jerry Herman knocked loudly on the door of the Harkers' house. He waited patiently, reasoning that whoever was home needed some time to get to the door. Jerry had come from a long line of apartment building dwellers, and he assumed that anyone who lived in a house this large probably spent their leisure time in the library or the conservatory or the aviary or in some other unusual room far from the front door.
He knocked again and waited longer, and at last Rachel opened the door and said, "Yes … ? Oh, it's you"
"Afternoon, Mrs. Rowland," he said, grinning.
"It's almost evening," she snapped. "What do you want?"
"Is Malcolm in?"
She appraised him critically for a moment and then pulled the door open wider. "Yes, he's upstairs sleeping. Why don't you go and wake him up?"
"I hate to disturb him," he said untruthfully as he walked past her into the foyer.
"Feel free," she said. "Still asleep at four in the afternoon! I've never heard of such a thing! At least you seem to get up at a decent hour."
"Yeah, I've been up since noon," he said, ignoring the daggers her eyes shot at him. He walked toward the staircase and stopped as he noticed old Quincy sitting in his easy chair in the large sitting room to the left of the stairs. "Hi, Mr. Harker," he called out.
The old man raised his rheumy eyes from his newspaper and squinted in the direction of the voice. Then he smiled and said, "Hello, Jerry. How are you today?"
"Fine, just fine. And yourself?"
"I can't complain, boy. I think Malcolm is still sleeping."
"Well, I'll go and see," Jerry said, and started up the stairs.
"Malcolm is going to mass this Sunday afternoon. Why don't you come along with him?"
Jerry smiled, slightly perplexed. "Well, uh, maybe I will. We'll see." As he continued up the stairs toward Malcolm's room, he wondered if the old man was losing his memory. He was reasonably certain that Quincy knew that Jerry was Jewish, but old folks sometimes have a hard time remembering their own names, let alone the religions of their grandchildren's friends.
Rachel watched him disappear around the corner just past the landing and sniffed disapprovingly at her grandfather. "I don't see why you have to be so friendly to that person," she huffed.
"He's Malcolm's friend," Quincy muttered distractedly, returning to his Times. "Never hurt anyone to be civil."
"He's a bad influence on Malcolm," she insisted.
"I don't think anyone is an influence on Malcolm, for good or ill."
"And he's nothing but a middle-class oaf, to boot!"
Quincy looked at his granddaughter over the rim of his bifocals. "Don't try to be a snob, Rachel," he said seriously. "You can't afford to be, not with your background."
Her jaw dropped open at his raising of the unspoken topic. "Wh … whatever are you … ?"
"The boy may be a middle-class oaf, but I'll wager his father was never hanged for murder, not to mention … well, the other thing."
She trembled angrily, considered a stinging retort, considered reminding him that her father was also his son, but then thought the better of it and marched away in a huff, muttering to herself. Quincy watched her leave and then, shaking his head sadly, returned to his newspaper.
Upstairs, Jerry pushed Malcolm's bedroom door open softly and leaned his head into the room. "Mal?" he whispered. "Mal? Are you awake?"
He saw a huddled mass beneath heavy blankets stir on the bed in the dark room and heard a hoarse voice say, "Go away, goddamn it. Leave me in peace."
"Mal, it's me, Jerry." He did not enter, but neither did he withdraw.
After a moment, Malcolm said, "Come on in, Jer." He sat up in his bed and rubbed his eyes. "Sorry. I thought you were Rachel or Daniel."
"Hey, thanks a lot." Jerry laughed and walked over to the window and opened one of the venetian blinds, allowing the late afternoon sun to illuminate the room. "I wanted to know if you'd like to catch a movie before work. They're showing the new Woody Allen at the Midway." He paused and frowned. "Hey, you look like shit!"
"Thanks," Malcolm muttered as he climbed out of bed and went over to examine himself in the mirror above his bureau. His eyes were bloodshot and his skin chalky white. His customarily thin face seemed somehow haggard and slightly emaciated. "God, I look like I just came down from a five-day binge."
Jerry sat down on the edge of the bed and grinned at him. "I guess Holly really knows how to party!"
He glared at him. "What was that supposed to mean?"
"Hey, nothing, man," Jerry said quickly, startled at Malcolm's anger. "I was just kidding. I mean, I thought that since you were with her last night, the two of you probably drank too much or smoked too much or something, that's all. What's bugging you, anyway?"
Malcolm sighed and sat down on the bed beside his friend. "Jerry, can you keep somethin
g to yourself?"
"Sure. I'm as tight-lipped as they come. What's the matter?"
"I'm not kidding, because if you ever told anybody about this, I'd kill you!"
"Don't worry about it, Mal," he said sincerely. "I won't tell a soul."
Malcolm sighed again. "The last two times I was with Holly, I … well, I couldn't … I mean, when we started making out and stuff, I … well, you know, I just couldn't …"
"You couldn't get it up?" Jerry asked simply.
Malcolm grimaced. "You've got a delicate touch, Jer."
"Okay, so what's the big deal?" he asked. "Happens to everybody."
Malcolm looked over at him. "Ever happen to you?"
"Of course it has!"
This surprised him. He had expected a vehement denial. "No kidding?"
"No kidding." Jerry paused. "Of course, I'd kill you if you ever told anybody I said that!"
Malcolm laughed, slightly relieved at having someone in whom to confide. "You got a deal. So you don't think I should worry about it?"
"Nah, course not! If you can figure out why it's been happening, fine. If not, forget about it." Jerry grinned. "Or why it hasn't been happening, actually."
"Holly says it's performance anxiety," Malcolm said as he began to dress.
"Probably right." Jerry nodded. "Hey, aren't you gonna take a shower?"
"Took one before I went to sleep," Malcolm muttered. "Anyway, I don't know if I can just forget about it."
"Well, it's like riding a bike or rolling off a log. Get right back up into the saddle."
Malcolm shook his head and smiled. "You're confusing your similes, Jer."
"Huh?"
"But I know what you mean. Problem is, I've probably convinced myself that … well, that Holly and I won't … well …"
"No, no, you dope, not with Holly." Jerry laughed. "You find another chick, get it on with her, show yourself that you've still got what it takes, feel silly about worrying about being impotent, and then everything'll be okay with you next time you're with Holly."
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