Sin Doll

by Orrie Hitt

  She walked to the desk and dropped the pictures on it. She never wanted to see them again. Never.

  “I can’t pose for you tonight,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m just not up to it.”

  There was a little cabinet over the desk. He opened that and came out with a full bottle of liquor.

  “Have a drink and you’ll change your mind.”

  She was shaking all over. She needed the drink.

  “I’ll take a drink, but I won’t change my mind.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “I won’t.”

  Tom had no ice or soda and they drank the liquor straight, out of paper cups. The first swallow made Cherry cough and burned her throat, but the second one went down easily enough. She began to relax, to feel more like herself. He might be right. This was only a small part of her life; it didn’t have to count for much. Other girls, girls who were supposed to be nice, did things that were worse. What was the difference whether he photographed her with a camera or if some artist painted her? She could make some real money working for him and eventually her dreams would come true. In fact, even if the dreams didn’t come true she still would have the money. That much, at least, would be good.

  “Does your wife know what you do, Tom?” she asked.

  “She knows I work long hours. That’s all she knows.”

  “Doesn’t she ever wonder?”

  “It wouldn’t do her any good if she did. She has her life and I have mine.”

  “I couldn’t bear a marriage like that.” Cherry poured herself another drink. “It would have to be all the way or not at all for me.”

  “You seem that type.”

  “I am,” she agreed.

  He tilted the bottle to his cup and she had to blink her eyes to focus them. The liquor had hit her and hit her hard. She didn’t care if he did take her into the back room and have her strip. She was making two hundred dollars a week and he could take all the pictures he wanted to take. Why should she fight the fate that was so obviously hers? In a way, she tried to convince herself, that kind of photography could be called art. Naughty art, maybe, but art.

  “My wife and I are getting a divorce,” Tom was saying slowly. “She was running around with this guy and he got her into trouble.”

  Cherry felt like talking frankly.

  “Maybe it was you,” she said.

  “Not me. I haven’t been with her in over six months. All she’s been is a fixture in my life and a mighty expensive one at that. I give her a thousand dollars and she comes back broke.”

  “Must be nice.”

  “For her — not for me. This guy she’s been going with doesn’t work and she’s been keeping him. She even gave him a couple of my suits.”

  “That’s real nerve.”

  “Exactly. While I’m working she’s pounding the sheets with him.” He helped himself to another drink. “Well, that’s all over with. That’s done. Knowing your wife has a lover is one thing but bringing up another man’s kid is another. We had a hell of a row when I got home last night and she’s going to Reno. I told her she wouldn’t get a dime from me. Let the guy go to work and support her. Or let her go back with her people. They’ve got money. They can bring up the little bastard if they feel like it.”

  The bottle had been full when they started but it didn’t seem to be lasting very long. He looked in the closet but couldn’t find another one. She was glad that he couldn’t. She was drunk, careless drunk; she had had enough to drink for one night.

  “Let’s get on with the pictures,” Tom said.

  “All right.”

  He grinned.

  “I said you would see it my way.”

  “What else can I do?”

  “Do you want to see it any other way?”

  She thought about that for a moment. She would be in Northtown only a short while and she might as well make as much money as she could. Even if she didn’t keep the job in the factory she could save a lot on two hundred a week. She would buy new clothes and make sure she had enough money to hold her for quite a while in New York without working.

  “I guess not,” she admitted to Tom. “Forgive me if I spoke out of turn.”

  “You’re forgiven.”

  She followed him into the back room. He was big, big. She watched the swing of his broad shoulders and felt a thrill of pleasure wash through her. He was bigger than Joe, every ounce of him a piece of powerful manhood.

  “Nudes tonight,” he said, closing and locking the door.

  “Huh?”

  “Nudes. Down to nothing. I want six different poses, all of them good. And get the same look on your face that you had last night. You gave the impression that you wanted some man to take you.”

  He turned on the lights and she began to get out of her clothes. What was the difference? So she was going to her bare skin in front of him. He had probably seen a hundred girls do the same thing, many of them as pretty as she was. Flesh was a product to him, nothing more. It was almost as though she were alone, getting undressed.

  “You’ve got it,” he said. “You’ve got it with miles to spare.”

  She removed her bra and glanced down at herself. Without meaning to she touched her own flesh, remembering how Joe had caressed her, his hands the hands of fury and of desire.

  “Good shot,” Tom said from behind the camera.

  “I didn’t know you were taking pictures already.”

  “I decided to follow your movements. I’ve taken three and they can be worked into the set. You have the natural motions of a stripper.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “It’s good in this business. The action has to be sensual and delicate, yet it has to convey a hell of a lot of meaning.”

  He took a lot of shots of her wearing nothing, shots from every angle. One, despite the liquor, she hated. She was on the bed and he was directly over her.

  That was the last picture he took.

  “Hell,” he said, putting the camera aside and staring at her. “Hell!”

  She knew what was going to happen. It had to happen. There was nothing to stop them. She had seen the longing in his eyes and she had felt it rip through her own body, an intense longing that could only be satisfied in one way.

  “Joe,” she heard herself involuntarily say as Tom came to her.

  He paused.

  “Who is Joe?”

  “Just a boy I know.”

  “You’ll forget him after tonight.”

  She turned her head to avoid his kiss.

  “Sure of yourself, aren’t you?”

  “Very sure.”

  And then his mouth was over her lips, sealing them, driving the need deep inside of her, making desire become madness.

  “Hurt me!” she cried, pulling her head back.

  She rolled her head from side to side, barely able to breathe.

  “Hurt me and hurt me until I can’t stand it.”

  He did, hurting her the way no man had ever hurt her before, hurting her until she whimpered with pain. But it was a glorious pain and she clung to him, begging for more and more, pleading with him never to stop, to give her all that he had to offer.

  But he did stop. Too soon.

  He lay beside her, breathing heavily. The lights were hot upon their bodies.

  “What are you, anyway?” he asked after a moment’s silence.

  Cherry had no answer.

  She didn’t know any longer what she was.

  Chapter Eight

  SHE KEPT her job in the factory and nights she posed for pictures in the back room of Tom’s photo shop. Sometimes they made love and sometimes they didn’t.

  “I never see you,” Joe Black complained. “Never see you at all.”

  “Well, I’ve been busy.”

  “Even weekends?”

  “Even weekends.”

  “You keep this up and you’ll have enough money to get out of Northtown before you know it.”

&n
bsp; “Let’s hope so.”

  By the end of the first month she had enough money — but she didn’t go. Now that she had this much money she wanted more and more. She wanted the clothes that she had never been able to afford, a car to drive. And — she found this difficult to admit to herself — she wanted Tom Lester. She wanted him so badly that when he was busy, as he was most of the time, she drank heavily in one of the bars near Center Square. Her drinking caused arguments with Rita and Oscar and Cherry wasn’t getting along very well at home.

  “You come in at three or four in the morning and you go to work at eight,” Rita said. “You can’t keep that up.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because nobody can. Everybody needs rest. Any doctor will tell you that you need eight hours sleep a night.”

  When Rita mentioned the doctor Cherry smiled secretly. She wasn’t pregnant. The month had told her that and the day she had known she felt as though somebody had lifted a terrible weight from her shoulders. She didn’t have to worry about Tom. He was as concerned and careful as she was.

  “I’ll live my own life,” Cherry told Rita one morning. “And I’ll live it the way I see it.”

  “Not while you’re in this house.”

  “I pay my board, don’t I?”

  “It isn’t the board I’m worried about. It’s you. I heard you when you came in. It was four-thirty in the morning. And you stumbled on the stairs.”

  “So?”

  “You shouldn’t drink so much.”

  “Maybe I like to drink.”

  “So do I,” Oscar cut in. “I like a little beer. There’s nothing wrong with that. But I know when to stop. I don’t get drunk. I’ve never been drunk.”

  She remembered a time when a taxi had brought him home and he had slept on the porch but she didn’t bring that up. There was no point in fighting with them. They didn’t see things her way and they never would.

  “You should settle down and marry Joe,” Rita said. “What you need is the responsibility of a home.”

  “And a baby in less than a year?”

  “Well, that’s what you get married for. Joe has a nice job and you wouldn’t have to work. He’s told us his folks would fix the upstairs of their house for you. Your rent wouldn’t be high.”

  “Thanks, but it isn’t for me.”

  “Joe loves you,” Rita persisted.

  “That doesn’t matter. I don’t love him.”

  And Cherry didn’t. She had thought about it at great length over the last month and she had decided that they had never known love, not the real meaning of love, She couldn’t quite explain it even to herself but she knew there was more to love than physical satisfaction alone.

  “You don’t know what you want,” Oscar said. “You’re at just that age. One day you want one thing and the next day you want something else. It isn’t unusual. Almost every girl goes through that period.”

  Cherry finished her milk and went upstairs to get ready for work. Rita followed her.

  “I went through your pocketbook while you were sleeping,” Rita said standing in the doorway.

  Cherry was shocked. “You had no right to do that!”

  “Right or not, I did.” It was very quiet in the room. “Where did you get so much money, Cherry? There’s almost four hundred dollars in there.”

  Cherry hadn’t found time to go to the bank in almost two weeks.

  “I earned it,” she answered.

  “Not at the factory.”

  “That and my other job.”

  Rita’s face was stern.

  “I don’t believe you. All I have to do is add your drinking and your late hours to the money and I come up with one thing.”

  “What?”

  “Men.”

  Cherry examined her face in the mirror. Her eyes had dark circles under them and she looked tired.

  “There aren’t any men,” she said.

  “What else am I to think?”

  “Think what you want.”

  Rita was silent for a moment.

  “You have to stop this running around,” she finally said. “I’ve tried to be reasonable with you and guide you without actually telling you what to do. But I am telling you now. You have your factory job and that money should be enough for you to live on. You’ve got to stop running around at night.”

  “And give up my extra pay?”

  “Give up whatever you’re doing.”

  “Just what do you think I’m doing?”

  Rita brushed a strand of hair away from her face.

  “You’re like your mother,” she said. “Stubborn. And you look like her. I don’t want you to end up the same way — disgraced. You can talk all you want about earning honestly the kind of money you have in your pocketbook but I won’t believe you. There’s only one way a girl could make so much.”

  “How?”

  “By selling herself to men.”

  Cherry had expected something of this nature to happen but she hadn’t expected it so soon. It was true that she had been drinking too much but it wasn’t true about the men. There was only Tom.

  “Maybe I should get a room somewhere,” Cherry said.

  “I don’t want you to do that,” Rita responded. “All I want you to do is be somebody decent. I want to be proud of you, Cherry, and I want other people to be proud of you, too.”

  “What have I done that’s so wrong?”

  “Perhaps you should tell me. I found that money and all I could think of was the tramp your mother used to be. That isn’t any life for you, Cherry. It can only bring you trouble, big trouble, more trouble than you’ll ever know what to do with.”

  Cherry was already late for work but she didn’t care. She had decided not to go to work. She would look for a room or an apartment and she would move out. That was the only way. To stay in the house and continue arguing with Rita and Oscar was silly. Living alone, she would be able to come and go as she pleased.

  “I have to leave,” she said.

  Rita looked worried.

  “Are you angry with me?”

  “No.” And Cherry wasn’t angry with her.

  “I mean only good for you. When we adopted you I meant well and I still do. You aren’t my flesh and blood but I’ve come to look upon you as though you are. You don’t know what it means to a woman unable to have a child of her own. You go to all the doctors and they give you charts and pills but nothing happens. So you do the next best thing and take in somebody you can love. We’ve loved you, Cherry. Believe me. We have loved you with all of our hearts.”

  It was nine before Cherry left the house and caught the bus on the corner. Perhaps Rita did mean well but in trying to do the right thing she was cruel, too. She couldn’t seem to let the issue of Cherry’s mother die.

  Cherry found a place that noon on Gordon Road. It was a three-room apartment in a large building and the rent was a hundred a month, furnished.

  “Just what I need,” she told the agent.

  “The only thing you can’t have is wild parties.”

  “Of course not.”

  She paid a month’s rent in advance and accepted the keys.

  “I’ll move in today,” she said.

  “Whenever you’re ready.”

  Oscar and Rita were on the porch when she arrived at the house. She told them promptly that she had taken an apartment and was leaving them.

  “I hate to see you go,” Oscar said.

  “It might be for the best,” Cherry answered.

  “What have we done to you?” Oscar asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Then you can’t have good reason to leave us. You have a nice room here. If the board you pay is bothering you, we can forget about it.”

  “It’s not the board.”

  Rita followed Cherry upstairs and sat on the bed while she packed.

  “You’re doing the wrong thing,” Rita said.

  “Time will tell.”

  “And time will tell if I’m right abou
t you. You’ll have nobody to account to and you’ll drink and have men. Some night you will drink too much and you’ll be careless. You’ll find yourself in a family way and you’ll be like your mother. God help you, Cherry. The men you meet in bars aren’t any good. They take a girl and then they leave her. You’ll find that out.”

  Rita continued talking but Cherry didn’t listen any longer.

  “You had me fooled,” Rita was saying. “I never thought you would do this to us.”

  When Cherry made no reply, Rita went on.

  “Some of it might be my fault. Maybe I’ve talked too much. But I did it to help you, Cherry, not to hurt you.”

  Cherry got everything in two suitcases and carried them downstairs. Joe Black was sitting on the top step of the porch.

  “Going somewhere?”

  “I’ve taken an apartment.”

  “How come?”

  “I just felt like it.”

  He stood up.

  “Can I drive you?”

  The bags were quite heavy and she would have to walk to the corner to catch a cab. It would be easier to ride with Joe.

  “All right.”

  Joe took the bags from her and Rita, her voice trembling, asked Cherry to let them know her phone number. Cherry said she would but she doubted that she would keep her promise. This was a clean break with the past. She would call them once a week to see if they were all right but other than that she wouldn’t contact them.

  “Good car,” Joe said as they pulled away from the curb. “And the mileage I get is great.”

  The car was a fine car and it rode well but it wasn’t as good as Tom’s car. Tom had let Cherry drive the Caddy a few times and it had been a wonderful feeling to guide the big smooth monster through traffic.

  “I’m getting another route,” Joe said.

  “Are you?”

  “A bigger one. I should be able to knock out a hundred and fifty a week on it.”

  “’Not bad.”

  “More than enough to support a wife.”

  “Let’s not go into that.”

  He could have driven faster but he didn’t.

  “You’ve been avoiding me,” he said.

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “Day and night?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your mother says you’ve been hitting the bottle.”