by Orrie Hitt
“Oh, shut up!”
They left the shop and he locked the door behind them.
“Car is around the corner,” he said.
As Cherry walked beside him she decided that he had never loved her. He wouldn’t be doing this to her if he had. Something inside her died when she realized that.
“What do I have to do?” she said as he pulled the car away from the curb.
“When?”
“When we get to the barn — the movies.”
“You can do a two-reeler with Millie or you can do one with a guy. Take your pick.”
“I don’t really want to do either.”
“Do you have a choice?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Then you can do it with a guy.”
“I won’t —
“No, nothing unusual. You kiss some and then he undresses you. Some of the girls even get a kick out of it. You’d think it would be tough under the lights but it isn’t. You lose yourself in what you’re doing.”
“I’m already lost.”
She tried smoking a cigarette but then it seemed tasteless and she threw it away. What she needed was a drink, several drinks. She was hitting bottom. Tom was making a bum out of her and only whiskey would help her forget.
“Can we stop for a drink, Tom?”
“Nervous?”
“Plenty.”
“I thought you would be.” His tone was almost gentle. “I don’t want to do this to you but I’m only paying you back for what you did to me.”
They stopped at a bar on the edge of the city and she drank doubles, drank them one right after the other. If she had to make those films, she would get so drunk that she wouldn’t know what was going on.
“We’ve got to go,” Tom said.
“One more.”
“You’ve already had enough. If you can’t stand up you aren’t any good to me.”
He had to help her out to the car and she fell asleep almost immediately. She didn’t awaken until they arrived at the barn and he shook her.
“Come out of it,” he said. “You’ve got a job to do.”
“Huh?”
“This is where you work.”
“Don’t make it sound so decent.”
She got out of the car unaided and followed him toward the entrance. She noticed that the barn wasn’t a large structure and that the windows had been boarded up.
“Four hundred a month,” he said. “That’s what it costs me out here. But it’s safer than in town.”
“Someday you’ll find out how safe it is.”
“I can wait.”
There were three girls and a young man waiting inside. The girls were rather pretty and the man was close to being handsome. They had a bottle and they were drinking.
“Part of the gang,” Tom said.
One of the girls started an argument with Tom right away. She said she hadn’t worked in a week and that she needed the money. He told her to stick around, that they would shoot a scene later and that he would use her.
“Millie ought to be here pretty soon. You can work with her.”
“Millie was here and she said to tell you that she wasn’t coming back.”
“Small loss. I suppose she can make more in the sheets.”
“I suppose so.”
Tom led Cherry toward the rear of the building and told the young man to come along.
“This is going to be a pleasure,” the young man said. “With that kind of body I won’t know that anybody else is in the room.”
The room was small, furnished as a bedroom, and when Tom turned on the lights it became very bright.
“I’ll only be gone a couple of minutes,” Tom said, going to the door. “You two get acquainted. Tell her what it’s all about, Rex.”
“There’s hardly anything to it,” Rex said as the door closed. “We pitch some woo and he picks it all up with his movie camera.” He paused. “Haven’t you ever done this before?”
She looked at the bed and then at the young man in front of her.
“No,” she said in a thin voice.
“Well, there isn’t much to it. Pardon me for being personal, but you’ve been with a man before, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“It’s the same thing. We love it up and I help you out of your clothes. Then you do the same thing for me. You act anxious, like you can’t wait. It’s the play that counts. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“No.”
Tom came into the room and he wanted to know if everything was ready.
“I’m ready,” Rex said.
“You’re always ready. What about you, Cherry?”
“I can’t,” she whispered. “I simply can’t.”
Some of the hardness returned to Tom’s eyes.
“Remember what I told you.”
“I’m remembering but I can’t help it.” Her voice was unsteady and she fought for words. “The other was bad enough but this is beyond me. I can’t do what it isn’t in me to do.”
Tom was angry and tried to argue with her but she refused to listen. She was drunk, but she wasn’t that drunk.
He threatened her when she left but she paid no attention to him. Nothing he would do to her could be worse than this.
It was quite a long trip back to the city but she walked every foot of the way. When she reached the city limits she caught a cab and had the driver take her to the house on Bowling Drive.
“Wait for me,” she said as she got out. “I’m moving and it won’t take me long to pack.”
“Where are you going then?”
“Orange Street.”
Yes, she was going home, home where she belonged. She shouldn’t have left there in the first place.
Chapter Thirteen
SHE RETURNED to her job in the factory and she got a five-cent-an-hour raise almost immediately.
“You’re fast,” the boss told her. “Keep it up and I’ll put you on piece work. That way you can knock down about eighty a week.”
Rita and Oscar were glad to have her back and she stayed home at night. Joe came over rather often and she told him each time that she was tired. She was tired — and went to bed early every night. But she didn’t sleep. It was a rare night when Cherry slept more than an hour or so. She kept thinking of the money she had in the bank, nearly a thousand dollars, and wondering about going to New York. She had paid for a break with her flesh but she wasn’t sure that she should take advantage of what she had gained in that way. And other things bothered her, too. There was Millie. Cherry was convinced that the whole thing had been a mistake, that she was a girl with a normal girl’s desires. Someday she would find a man and prove that to herself. Would that man be Joe? Cherry didn’t know. And Tom? Tom was out of the picture. That love was destroyed. Yet she thought of Tom almost constantly. He had been an adequate lover, thoughtful in many ways, and she realized now that she hadn’t given him a real chance. But when she thought of Tom she thought of those photo sets of her. What if some of them were sold locally? She would be ruined. Then she would have to leave. How had she been so foolish? How could she have gone so low so fast?
On her first Saturday at home Oscar and Rita drove out to the country with some friends.
“We’ll be back late tomorrow night,” Rita said. “There’s plenty to eat. Have a good rest.”
“Thanks. And enjoy yourselves.”
Cherry didn’t get up until noon but she didn’t sleep as she lay in bed. She had won those beauty contests and what had they gotten her? What had her singing and dancing gotten her? The answer was plain — nothing. She had become a sin girl for money and now she was trying to live it down. Not that it couldn’t have been worse. It could have been. If she had worked in that movie with Rex she would have absolutely no self-respect left. It was hard enough to find a shred of it even now. Perhaps that was why she tried to avoid Joe. He was a regular guy and she didn’t think of herself as a regular girl.
She arose and
walked naked across the bedroom, glancing in the mirror as she passed. It was probably true that she had a lovely body but that loveliness had brought her a lot of misery. If she had been flat-chested and shapeless Tom would never have wanted her. In that second she envied the girls who were ugly and unattractive.
She dressed in shorts and halter and put on a pair of flat-heeled shoes. It was a hot day, the sun bright, and it would be a good afternoon to spend at the pool. If she didn’t go to the pool she would probably end up in some bar and she hadn’t been in a bar since she came back home. For the first few days she had missed the whiskey but now she didn’t need it. She would never drink so heavily again but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t drink at all. A few drinks were all right but to have much more than that was partly insane — just as some of the other things she had done must have bordered on insanity.
Cherry left the house, carrying the bathing suit under one arm, and locked the door behind her. She didn’t take a towel because she didn’t plan on going into the water. She would lie in the sun and get some tan. During the early part of summer she had had a good tan but most of it had vanished.
The boys were playing ball in the vacant lot and the bigger boy whistled at her. He was near the sidewalk and there was a leer on his face.
“They bounce,” he said.
She stopped and faced him.
“Why don’t you shut your rotten mouth?”
He grinned. “Can I help it if I like what I see?”
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
She laughed at him, feeling a little reckless.
“You wouldn’t know what to do with them,” she said.
She turned and continued walking down the street.
She caught the bus on the corner, got off at Kennedy Place and went to the pool.
The place was crowded and a girl was changing in the dressing room. The girl was in her teens with a lush young body and she took her time about getting into her suit. Perhaps because of the red hair the girl reminded Cherry of Millie. As Cherry got out of her shorts and halter, she wondered what Millie was doing now. Probably she was going to bed with one man after another and making a lot of money. Well, she was welcome to it.
“Hot day,” the redhead said.
“Very.”
The girl was staring at Cherry.
“I wish I had your figure,” she said.
“Yours isn’t bad,” Cherry replied.
“But I’m not big where I want to be.”
“It can be a disadvantage.”
“Can it?”
“Take my word that it can.”
The suit was tight and Cherry had trouble getting into it. Was she stilll growing? But that was silly. A girl stopped growing before she was twenty.
Outside she found a place in the sun and lay down on the sand. She had forgotten to take a blanket and the sand felt hot, burning against her skin. She lay on her back, her eyes closed, and she knew that more than one man was looking at her. They always looked, the single ones and the married ones. Sometimes she thought the married men were worse than the single men. They were interested in only one thing from a girl and wanted no strings attached. They would lie to their wives and cheat to get what they wanted.
“Hi.”
She opened her eyes. It was Tom.
“Hello.”
He sat down beside her.
“I took a chance on your being here.”
“Who’s watching the shop?”
“Nobody. The girl is off this afternoon.”
“You can’t make any money that way.”
“What I would make you could fit in your ear. With this kind of weather nobody thinks of having his picture taken.”
She was surprised to see him and yet she was somewhat pleased, even though she wasn’t sure in her own heart how she felt about him. He had pulled her down into a canyon of sin and she couldn’t bring herself to forgive him for that. Still, she had agreed to his offer initially.
“What are you doing these days?” he asked.
“Working in a factory.”
“Making any money?”
“Forty-seven a week.”
“Not much.”
She sat up and leaned on one elbow. She knew that her suit was very low in front but she made no move to adjust it. He had seen her naked and wouldn’t be particularly interested in a few inches of her cleavage now.
“No, it isn’t much money,” she said. “But it’s respectable. I can go home at night and not feel dirty.”
He was carrying cigarettes and lit two, handed her one.
“I was pretty sore at you for running out on me,” he said.
“Well, I couldn’t help it. I had reached my limit and couldn’t go any further.”
“The others got a big kick out of it.”
“I don’t care if they did. I suppose you become calloused when you do those things but I’m not. Even what I did for you haunts me. I wake up at night and think of my folks finding out about it.”
A girl came by and she had a swinging shape. Tom stared after her, taking in the long legs and the rolling hips.
“I was half crazy that night,” Tom said. “That’s why I wanted to see you. You have to believe that. I was in love with you and then I found you with Millie. It tore me apart.”
“I haven’t seen Millie since then.”
“And you won’t.”
“I hope not.”
“You won’t. Don’t you read the papers?”
“Not much.”
“She was picked up in the Hotel Bristol. A cop was posing as a blade from out of town and she made a date with him. He gave her a marked bill and nailed her. She’s been arrested before and this time she got six months.”
“I wonder what will happen to her boy.”
“I didn’t know she had a son.”
“There are a lot of things you don’t know.”
“So it would seem.”
The girl with the figure came by again, showing herself off. Cherry got a look at her face this time. The girl wasn’t pretty in the face but the rest of her was fine. She was the kind who would hang around the pool until dark and then make a date with some boy. They would go to the park or for a ride, have a few drinks, and then the sky would be the limit. A lot of girls of this type came to the pool. They wanted men and they wanted men badly. None of them were professionals and they didn’t charge for what they gave. If they found a man who pleased them they might stick and they might not. They were the girls who got into trouble, who had babies without legal fathers, who wound up on the relief rolls.
“I had a letter from my wife,” Tom said.
“Did you?”
“She’s four months pregnant and she doesn’t think she’ll come back here. The guy she is with got a job with some insurance company and they like it out there.”
“I’m glad she’s happy.”
“I am, too. We tried to make our marriage work but it didn’t work.” He flipped his cigarette away. “I suppose that’s why I was so critical of you. I was looking for somebody perfect. Nobody is perfect.”
“That’s true.”
“I thought it over after you left the barn and I knew you were right. But I knew more than that. I knew you weren’t a lesbian. If you were you wouldn’t have cared. Most of the girls take it with a grain of salt and go through the motions for the movies. If they go to bed with a man it’s okay with them and if it happens to be another girl that’s okay, too.”
She remembered the walk back to town, the fear that had gripped her when a dog had barked from the darkness, a savage bark that had shot fear through her.
“I wasn’t cut out to be a model,” Cherry told him. “I drifted into it because I thought I wanted something else and now I know I don’t want even that.”
“Given up the singing idea?”
“Just about. I only want to settle down and lead a good life. The only thing that bothers me are those pictures you took. If I
find a man and he learns what I’ve done, he’ll leave me.”
Tom lit another cigarette.
“I tried to get them back,” he said. “The next day I put in a call and tried to get them back. But I couldn’t. The buyer went nuts over them and he said they would sell like crazy. There was nothing I could do. He mailed me a check the next day, a big check, and all I could do was cash it.”
“Thanks for trying, anyway.”
“Don’t thank me. I did it for you, for both of us. I’ll admit that my love for you took a beating but by the next morning I knew it had to be you and nobody else. I went back to the house that night, after you had gone, and I was so lonely I was sick. I knew that you were right and I was wrong, that no matter what you had done it was all right.”
“I told you the truth about Millie.”
“I’m sure you did.”
“I was a fool and she was much smarter than I was. A little time away from the terrible life she leads might change her. I hope so. She isn’t such a bad sort underneath.”
“A true lesbian never changes.”
“I wouldn’t know about that.”
He kept smoking and talking. He wanted her to move back to the house on Bowling Drive. She wouldn’t have to work and she would have all the money she could spend. And as soon as his wife got her divorce he and Cherry would get married.
“There’s no reason to wait,” he said. “She’s getting her divorce. She has to get it. When that’s cleared up we’ll be free to do as we please.”
“I couldn’t,” she said. “Oscar and Rita would wonder about me and I’ve caused them enough heartache already.”
“It would be good for us, Cherry.”
“But I have to think of them.”
“I think that’s just an excuse. You aren’t sure about us, are you?”
She could not lie to him.
“I don’t know,” she said. “So much happened with us that I’m very confused. You took me to the barn and you wanted me to do an awful thing. I have to think about it, Tom. I have to be sure. You wouldn’t want me if I wasn’t sure, would you?”
“I’d want you under any conditions.”
The sun was going down and the air was getting cooler. The girl with the swinging shape passed by once more but Tom paid no attention to her this time. He was trying to convince Cherry to move into the house with him again and she was refusing. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to. She did. But she knew that it would be wrong and she had done enough that was wrong. If they were going to marry their love had to be clean and fine.