Sin Doll

by Orrie Hitt

  Cherry swallowed hard.

  “I’m tired,” Millie confided. “Men are crazy and when it comes to sex they fall completely off the limb. Last night I picked up an old guy and he didn’t leave me until this morning. He was making more of a fool of himself than a kid of twenty.”

  Cherry blinked her eyes and stared at the girl beside her. Those breasts were so wonderful and it didn’t seem right that a man had known them. She thought of Tom and what they did when making love. She failed in her attempt to find some beauty in the act. She had known of beauty in sex only with Millie. Closing her eyes, Cherry tried to shut out the image of the woman’s body. But the desire building in her would not be denied.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” Cherry said, opening her eyes. “Picking up men, I mean.”

  “Why not?”

  “It isn’t right.”

  “I suppose what you’re doing is right.”

  “Well — ”

  “It isn’t. You’re the same as I am but you sleep with one man. Does that change anything? I don’t think so. If it’s one man or half a dozen it’s the same.”

  “Not if you love the man,” Cherry defended herself.

  “You don’t love him. There’s only one thing you love and you know it. You’re in love with your own sex and that doesn’t leave any room for a man. I found that out in the apartment. That’s why I came when you called me, that’s why I knew you would call me.”

  “Please — ”

  “Don’t fight it. Why bother? You can’t fight it. It’s inside of you and you can’t help it, just as it’s inside of me. You are what you are and you can’t change that. Enjoy what you are.”

  Cherry wished that she had never telephoned Millie. She wanted Millie but she didn’t want the shame that went with that kind of love. She had tried with Tom to kill the insane urge that often flooded through her, but she had lost the battle. She saw now that having a child wouldn’t help. Nothing would help. She was on the wrong side of the fence and she couldn’t get across it.

  She drank heavily, hoping to find something that would rip away the pangs of unnatural desire that curled around her stomach. But the liquor solved nothing. All it did was deepen the desire.

  “Take off your blouse,” Millie said softly.

  “Why?”

  “You shouldn’t be ashamed of what you have. You’re built to be loved, to give love.”

  Cherry leaned forward to pick up the bottle and felt gentle hands at her back. The front of her seemed to explode as the snap came open. The bra was a strapless affair and it dropped to the floor at her feet. She left it there and managed to pour a drink.

  Cherry knew what was going to happen, what had to happen. She had not forgotten the glory of that day in the apartment with Millie and she wanted to know it again. If a girl, she reasoned, couldn’t find satisfaction with a man she was entitled to seek it with another girl. Twilight love, people called it. Well, let them call it what they wished. For some girls sex with men was as natural as growing up. For other girls it was not; Cherry was one of these. She couldn’t help it. It was better than selling her body to a man, better than lying to herself.

  Cherry’s head started to pound and thrill upon thrill raced through her. She was breathing heavily and could feel her breasts swelling.

  “Afterward I’ll have nothing but contempt for myself.”

  “Will you? You know this is love, the greatest love of all.”

  Cherry sat down on the davenport, leaving her drink untouched this time. This was what she wanted, what she had to have.

  Millie came to her and Cherry was ready, her mouth wide open, her lips wet, her tongue a thing of flame.

  “Oh!” Cherry exclaimed, feeling the warmth of the body pressing against her. “Oh, be good to me!”

  They kissed again and again. Millie kept saying odd things, things that Cherry didn’t understand.

  When ecstasy finally came, she was half insane with the wonder of it, her body twisting on the davenport, her words pleading with Millie not to stop, never to stop.

  They were entwined on the davenport, their love still not satisfied, when the door opened and Tom walked in.

  Cherry didn’t see him at first. She couldn’t see anything. The light of day was dark before her eyes. But suddenly she knew that someone was in the room, that someone was watching them.

  “Tom!” she cried.

  She pushed Millie away from her and sat up. Tom’s face was white, his eyes blazing. Millie gasped.

  Cherry was speechless. She sat there, nude, unable to move, unable to think.

  “A couple of lesbians,” Tom said bitterly. “If I hadn’t forgotten my wallet and come back here I’d never have known.”

  He turned and walked up the stairs, his shoulders bent, his step slow. The two women remained sitting, saying nothing, doing nothing. They were still there when Tom came down and left the house.

  Cherry began to cry.

  “I wish I were dead,” she managed to say. “I wish I could die this very instant.”

  “A little of that goes for me, too. I’ve never been caught before.”

  “Well, we were caught that time.”

  “And how.”

  “We were caught and he’ll hate me. He’ll hate everything about me. I’m done. Finished. I know it.”

  “It doesn’t have to end our love.”

  “That’s already finished.”

  Millie reached to take Cherry in her arms but Cherry pushed her away.

  “Don’t touch me,” Cherry said. “Please don’t touch me. Just go. Get out of here and go away. I never want to see you again.”

  Chapter Twelve

  CHERRY’S ENTIRE body felt unclean. As soon as Millie left she took a long hot shower. Now fully dressed, she sat in the living room, hating herself and wondering what to do. But she knew what she had to do. She must find Tom and make him understand how she felt, tell him about all the things that bothered her. Surely he would understand. She had made a mistake, a terrible mistake. But a lot of girls made mistakes — that didn’t mean that they were bad all the way through. Tom had made mistakes, too. The way he made money was one of them. To destroy the beauty of sex, to make a thing so natural become something shameful was a mistake, was almost a sin. He might have used his wife’s demands as reason before but he had no such excuse now. Cherry would be happy to live in a three-room apartment with him in a cheap neighborhood. She would be willing to help him in the photo shop, to help him in any way that she could. She had learned a lesson there in the living room, a frightening lesson. Love with another girl could be as unsatisfying as love with a man. More important than that, she had realized that girls weren’t meant to love each other. They were meant to love men, to take into their bodies the seed of conception and bring new life into the world. This was woman’s destiny. Cherry believed she had violated that destiny and now she must pay the price. She would humble herself, she would beg and plead and make Tom see that they had a future together.

  Cherry left the house before seven and walked to the corner to catch a cab. She would face him, would pour out the truth as it lay in her heart, tell him about Joe Black and all the other men. Then everything would be all right. She believed that. They would come back to the house and make love. She would be good to him and he would be patient with her, guiding her, giving her the love a girl always dreamed of. She would have him, all of him, and if she were lucky she would conceive his child, later grow fat with it, and she would be happy.

  A cab came along but it was taken and she had to wait. Her impatience grew and grew by the moment. She had to get to him, had to see him. He must know that the need for sex was a thing you couldn’t always control. Tom had had enough experience with sex himself to understand that. He would listen to her. He had been angry and hurt at the house but he loved her; she knew that.

  The next cab was empty and stopped. She got in and gave the address, adding, “Please hurry.”

  She lit a cigarette
and tried to relax. She couldn’t relax. Now that she was on her way to Tom she no longer felt so confident. A man could stray but a girl couldn’t. That was the unwritten law. A woman was expected to stay at home with a flock of noisy kids, waiting for a husband who was having his fun with another girl. But if the woman so much as looked at another man she was considered a slut. It was neither fair nor right.

  “Good baseball game today,” the cabbie said.

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “But those Yanks have got to keep plugging. They let up and I’m out twenty bucks. And when I lose twenty bucks the old lady screams her head off about gambling. You can bet she doesn’t say anything when I win.”

  Traffic wasn’t heavy and it didn’t take them long to get to the shop. Cherry paid the driver the fare and tipped him a dollar. If things went the way she wanted them to go the tip was worth every cent.

  She had to walk about a block to the photo shop and she walked slowly. How would she begin to say what she had to say? He had seen her on the davenport with Millie and Millie had been very active at the time. Should Cherry cry or just listen to Tom rant and rave? She didn’t know. Never in her life before had she felt so helpless, or so weak.

  The shop was open and she entered, closing the door behind her.

  “Hello.”

  He was in the back room. Cherry took a deep breath and moved forward.

  Tom was standing by the small desk and merely frowned when he saw her.

  “Tom?”

  He dropped some papers on the desk.

  “I didn’t think you’d have the guts to come down here,” he said, searching his shirt pocket for a cigarette. He lit the cigarette and filled his lungs with the smoke. “I know I would have run in the other direction.”

  “I’m not running.”

  “I see you’re not. But you should. You should run so fast you can’t see where you’re going.”

  “I know where I’m going. I’m here.”

  He shuffled the papers on the desk and puffed on the cigarette.

  “So I see,” he said. “Ready to work?”

  “If you want me to, yes. But I thought you weren’t going to sell any of my pictures.”

  “I wasn’t going to. But that was before this afternoon, before I knew that I had lost you. As soon as I got down here I sent them all out. I’ll get a fancy price for them. I figure if I can’t have you I might as well have the money.”

  “But you do have me.”

  “It didn’t look that way a few hours ago.”

  “I can’t help how it looked. It just — happened.”

  “Those things aren’t one-sided.”

  “You’re right. But, Tom, I have learned a lesson.” She moved toward him. “I want you to know that.”

  “My wife learned a lesson, too. With another man,” he added.

  She was close to him, so close that she could smell his shaving lotion.

  “Don’t you believe me, Tom?”

  “I believe what I see. And I know what I saw. How long has it been going on?”

  She had to be honest with him.

  “It was only the second time.”

  “Both times at the house?”

  “No, once at the apartment. That was one of the reasons I was glad to get out of there. I had been drinking too much — I did this afternoon, too — and I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “Every les tells the same story.”

  “Well, it’s true. And I’m not a lesbian.”

  He crushed out his cigarette in an ash tray.

  “Tom — ”

  “Don’t argue with me. I don’t want to argue. When I brought you into this thing I brought you in because I wanted you for myself. I don’t any more. I saw enough at the house to make me sick.”

  She had lost him and she knew it. In giving herself to Millie, Cherry had given as well everything that was important to her. Tom thought she was a lesbian and she did not honestly believe that she was. A lesbian would have laughed at him, would have enjoyed his pain; but joy was not what Cherry felt. He was a man and, desperately, she wanted him to comfort her, to take her in his arms and love her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “You’re really sorry? Or are you sorry that I found out what you were?”

  She would not beg or plead — even that would fail. He wouldn’t listen to her. He had sent out her pictures and that meant he had made up his mind.

  “I won’t bother you again,” she said in a small voice. “I’ll get my things packed and move out.” Her laugh was a little hysterical. “You can tell your neighbors that your sister went home.”

  He shook his head.

  “I want you to move out, yes, but the rest isn’t quite that easy. I’ve invested quite a lot in you and if one thing is no good for me then the money has to be. You’ll keep on working or I’ll spread your pictures all over Northtown.”

  “You wouldn’t do that!”

  “The hell I wouldn’t,” he almost shouted. “I loved you, baby, loved you, and what did you do to me? You ripped it up like you would a scrap of paper. I planned on getting out of this racket and settling down to a decent business. Now I don’t care. The only thing I have to work for now is money. Money, money, money. Isn’t that great? Why don’t you laugh? Why don’t you laugh at a guy who has been a first-class sucker?”

  She couldn’t laugh. All she could do was cry, cry for herself and for him. She had made a mess of things. She could leave Northtown but then her photos might come to the attention of Rita and Oscar. She didn’t want to hurt them. Her singing career was pushed into the background. What did she have that a thousand other girls didn’t have? A body? Maybe. But having a body wasn’t enough. A girl had to have the drive to get ahead. And she didn’t have the drive. She was defeated, sick with what had happened to her. Thousands could sing and dance as well as she could. If she went to New York she wouldn’t know how to start. Why hadn’t she realized that before? It was a big city, a cement jungle, and she would be lost in it. She was better off in Northtown.

  He continued speaking and once he called her a filthy name. Cherry didn’t object. She had it coming to her, every bit of it. She had strayed from the right path and this was her reward. Yet she almost hated him because he was being so brutal.

  “I wasn’t the first man for you,” he went on. “I knew it. A man knows those things. There was that fellow who used to pick you up once in a while when you were receptionist here and I knew there must have been others. That didn’t bother me. I’m not perfect. I’ve taken what I could get from the girls who would give it to me. I started when I was sixteen and I slowed down only after I met you. I thought you were the answer to something. Now that I look back I know that it never was that way with you. You put on a show for me but I didn’t please you. How could I?”

  “Stop it,” she said.

  “I won’t stop it. You’ve hurt me, hurt me bad, and I want you to know it. I had a lot of plans for us, big plans, and now they’re gone. As soon as we were married I was going to take you to Florida and spend a month on the sand. I can understand now that you wouldn’t have liked that very much. You’d rather be with a girl than with a man.”

  The tears returned, filling her eyes.

  “It isn’t true, Tom. Not a word of it. Oh, it’s true that you found me with her but the rest of it isn’t right.” Now that she was losing him she was sure that she loved him. “We could try, couldn’t we?”

  He took a bottle from the cabinet and poured a couple of drinks into paper cups.

  “Here,” he said, handing her one. “You’re going to need this. You’ve got a big night ahead of you.”

  “Then you won’t listen to me?”

  “No.”

  “I wish you would.”

  “I can’t listen. I know what I saw and what I saw changed everything.”

  They had several drinks and she said nothing. What she had done had been wrong as far as he was concerned. In some ways she coul
dn’t blame him. He didn’t know what had been in her heart, didn’t realize the torment that raced through her now.

  “Let’s get on with it,” he said after a while. “I’ve got time to make a set of you and then we’ve got to get out to the barn.”

  She followed him into the rear room. If he wanted to behave like this, all right — she would show him. If she had to be a slut she’d be a slut, the biggest slut in the city. It didn’t pay to be honest, to do the right thing. A man just wouldn’t permit himself to understand. Joe hadn’t understood her ambition to be a singer and now Tom couldn’t understand that she had made a mistake and she was sorry for it.

  “You ready, Cherry?” he asked.

  “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

  “Then start stripping. Hold it when I tell you to hold it. And smile. Give them something for their money.”

  She did, halting when he told her to halt, eventually going down to her bare skin. There was a smile on her face, a tight smile, and she knew that her teeth would be white and even in the finished photos.

  “You’re good,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “The other girls just go through the motions but you put meaning into them.”

  The last shot was on the bed, her body stretched out for all the world to see.

  “Take a deep breath and hold it.”

  She did as she was told.

  “You can get dressed,” he said when he had finished.

  She lay there, laughing up at him.

  “Don’t you want me the way you used to?”

  “I wouldn’t touch you.”

  She wanted him then, wanted him desperately and terribly. But she wouldn’t beg him. She had lost him but she would find somebody else. She would find a man who could make her live, who would prove to her for once and for all that she was a normal female.

  She dressed, having trouble with the bra snap and almost forgetting the garter belt.

  He turned off the lights and they walked out of the room.

  “That’s one of the best sets you’ve ever done,” he said.

  “Was it?”

  “Either it was the booze or something else. More than likely it was something else. Did I look like Millie while you were undressing?”