by Troy Conway
“Temporarily, it sounds like fun. Thanks.”
“Forget it. I’ll see you—eventually.”
He waved goodbye and I bounced down the stone steps of the embassy building and vaulted into the Renault. Paris smiled that day.
I think I broke every speed limit in Paris, racing for the Academie Sexualite.
And those hundreds of sexy, swinging young things that yearned to know what little boys were made of. Well, I was just the stud to show them and tell them and lead them out of the wilderness of their naivete and ignorance.
Madame Lilly de Jussac was already packing. Stuffing some papers and notes into a leather briefcase in her sanctum sanctorum as I bowled my way in. She was dressed in the leather regulation skirt and she still was going topless. I wondered if she was going to leave the building that way. The Hong Kong Flu just never seemed to bother that bonnie broad.
I dropped the can of hot film on her desk.
“What’s your hurry? Got a woman waiting for you?”
She stiffened as if I had insulted her. A fine flush of red filled her cheeks. All four of them.
“You have won. I am disgraced. I can teach these young ladies no more. Do with them what you will. I know you are replacing me. The building has buzzed with comment all morning.”
Three ways not to keep a secret: telephone, telegraph, tell a woman. I bet Walrus-moustache had told Brigitte Lebeau earlier that day when they were shacked up at her place and the redoubtable ex-Fifi La Fleur had passed the word on to Mady Morrow and Viviane Fresnay. Dames. How can you beat them?
“You can’t go, Lilly,” I said. “Oh, you’re fired and all that and I do plan some excellent symposiums all the rest of the week. But you can’t go.”
She stopped packing and drew herself up proudly. Mamma mia, what a fine figure of a woman she was!
“And why not, may I ask? What’s to keep me here?”
“I want you to stay and take lessons from me. You can be saved, you know.”
“Really? What is it you want of me? Another feather for your oh so protean cap?” She deliberately avoided the can of film.
“Uh uh,” I said, putting my arms around her and taking each of her incredible breasts full in the face. “I have to find out whether you’re a real redhead or not.”
“Is that all that interests you?” she sighed wearily, letting herself sag against me. She began to cry softly. I kissed the yummy tips of her areolas. She shuddered and held me tight, her fantastically lithe body rocking against me. In no time at all, all bets were off. The chips were down and I was up.
“Oh, Damon, Damon. . . .”
“Who, me?”
“Yes, you. I am willing to try to be a woman. I care no longer about the Académic But can you give me what Mei Ling High gave me? Can you offer me the gates of true paradise as she did?”
“What are you talking about?”
She had her eyes closed, her red lips chewing into each other in unbridled ecstasy.
“Mei Ling High,” she whispered, “placed me under the influence of hashish and then covered my body with roaming, moist tongues for a period of twenty-four hours! Do you know what that was like? Do you think any man could make me feel as she did? I became their slave, their tool, because of Mei Ling High. What man can equal burning lips and flaming drugs?”
“Try me,” I urged. I added my weight to the urging.
“Lock the door then,” she breathed fiercely, opening her eyes. “I’ll show you how natural I truly am. I was born a redhead and I will die a redhead. I could have posed for Titian.”
She was beginning to talk like a real woman now. I ran and bolted the door and got back to her before she started thinking about Mei Ling High again. It’s this way with me. To hell with French jobs and hashish. I was convinced that one real sample of Damon and she’d be out of the Lesbian business forever. Lesbos are made, not born, same as everybody else.
Madame Lilly de Jussac was way ahead of me and not going anyplace. The leather skirt was off and she leaned back against one corner of the desk. Her smooth abdominal muscles undulated and bumped at me. She held out her long cool arms. Her green eyes glowed like a hungry cat’s sizing up a nice fat sparrow.
“Come, Rod, my dear one,” she murmured. “Let me see how you can make me forget Mei Ling High. Save me if you can, but I warn you, I still like girls. . . .”
“So who doesn’t?” I laughed and shafted her where she stood. Coming in at forty-five degrees on a zing and a swear. She howled, in all her naked flaming glory, and enveloped me without batting an eye.
After that, it was off to the races and if you had asked her a long lime later who Mei Ling High was she might have told you she never cared for Chinese food.
One thing about Madame Lilly de Jussac.
I’ve always admired a woman who’s willing to learn.
There’s always hope for that kind.
One thing more before I get back to my main interest in life. I had already made up my mind as to who my successor would be at the Académie Sexualité after I got my fill of the place. And the girls.
Brigitte Lebeau, of course.
There was one old dog who could teach all the young ones a whole new bag of tricks.
And then some.
My mind boggled when I thought of what Madame Brigitte’s Departmental could and would be like.
Ooo-la-la-la!
Everything from soup to nuts.
And her idea of dessert would have to be in a class by itself.
But now I must draw the shade down on Madame Lilly de Jussac’s sighs, screams and shouts of agony and sheer ecstasy.
I am also a gentleman, above all things.
Especially the ladies.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The peace talks had got no further when I took a night plane out of Orly Airport, but what the hell. At least the situation had a fair chance now without any busy little bodies to louse things up. I had done the job that Walrus-moustache and the Coxe Foundation had asked me to do. My assignment was over and closed and done. A success, on all counts.
There were a few tearful farewells which deserve passing mention. About Madame Brigitte Lebeau, I had no qualms and little to fear except fear itself. With the whole platoon of young willing ladies at the Academic Sexualite to keep her busy, she soon forgot about Rod Damon. Quite a warhorse, the Madame. She had already instituted some daring procedures as part of her curriculum for the school. I spied a Friday program that ommincluded the Art Of Love In Five Special Stages. The Madame demonstrated in the school auditorium with five willing male specimens from the French Academy of Athletes. I was sorry I couldn’t stay to see the show. It must have been a gas, and those young ladies of the school had gotten more in one lesson from her than nine months with Madame Lilly de Jussac.
I took Mady Morrow on the town for one whole day and wound up with her in a private orgy atop the Eiffel Tower after the gates had closed and all visitors had left. A bribe to the elevator man didn’t hurt at all. For a handful of francs, he disappeared and I endured some wonderful romping in the name of Sexual Research. Now I know what I am talking about when I discuss the Art Of Intercourse Seven Hundred Feet Above The Ground. It’s the highest kind of flying and when Mady and I finally came down at three o’clock in the morning, staggering along the Left Bank for some fresh air, it was a dizzying sensation. Mady cried genuine tears when I bid her farewell but she understood.
“Golly, Damon, never a one like you!”
“You aren’t so bad yourself, you blonde bomber.”
“I can’t thank you enough. I mean about telling me all about Yankowski and showing me all those tricks.”
“You’re a good woman and you deserved it. I take care of my girls.”
She sighed and placed my right hand over her pulsating left breast. “See? Feel it?” There was plenty to see and plenty to feel.
“Sure. Your heart’s beating. Congratulations. You’re still alive.”
“Dopy,” she l
aughed happily. “Don’t you understand? My heart hasn’t beaten that way in years. You woke me up!”
“Then don’t ever go back to sleep, Mady Morrow.”
“I won’t,” she promised.
And I don’t think she ever will.
My parting with Viviane Fresnay was a delicious, intimate, quiet, sturdy little romance. She’d managed to borrow a pal’s pad on the Rue de la Paix, so we lived it up for a night. Viviane was all full of the French movie syndrome. A Man And A Woman and The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg. She was dreamy, enchanted, waltzed up with me and what I had, and the few hours we shared in a candlelit, cafe espresso atmosphere of love, passion and sex. What a charmer. If you wanted them all softness, curves and delectable femininity, the Vivianes of this world are the whole ball of wax. She could have won me forever were I not the sort of man I am—to whom variety is indeed the spice of life.
After a dozen explosions and collages of sex and fun, we said our goodbyes on a little bridge overlooking the Seine. She had stars in her eyes but she knew I was going. She put her arms around my waist as we both gazed down into the dirtiest water this side of the East River in New York.
“Rod, you are going back to America?”
“Tomorrow’s first plane. I have to. You understand?”
“Of course. A man such as yourself must get back to all the other waiting ladies in the world.” She sighed. “I will miss you. You have given me so much.”
“You weren’t exactly a miser either.”
“I had much to give and you are a man who takes.”
“Ain’t it the truth?”
She smiled in the murky darkness of the night and pulled me toward her, and I came willingly. But she had obviously made her mind up about something already.
“Adieu, dear Rod,” she murmured sadly and before I could stop her or cry for help, she put both hands against my chest and shoved. Back I went like the town drunk. And down. Into the dirty, gagging waters of the Seine. I never saw or heard Viviane Fresnay walking out of my life forever.
So it goes.
Win a few, lose a few.
And then the Last Goodbye was for Madame Lilly de Jussac.
It was a tryst with a twist. A date with a mate who had come a long, long way too. My women always emerge from associations with me as something different. A little better for it, I like to think, but you can never tell. You can’t be too sure about anything in this day and age of spies, tricks and deceits.
She asked me to meet her at an address somewhere in the Rue de Pigalle. I went. I still had a half of a day left before I took wings and left Paris. My heart was happy and full. I was the cock of the walk. I had come, I had seen, I had conquered. The Paris of the postcards had become one of my finest hours. A true Damon pilgrimage down among the unschooled, ignorant women of the world.
Madame Lilly de Jussac opened the door of her darkened boudoir, invited me in and poured us a couple of cognacs.
She was naked, of course. For all my care and feeding of her soul, she had remained the true extrovert, the hopeless libertine.
“You will get naked,” she commanded. “We have much to do.”
“Honest?”
“Yes. I am hungry for you. Since that time in the office, I have experimented. With other men. I even paid a few husky boys from the grocers to consort with me. But—it is you I want. You who seem able to satisfy me. Is that all right with you?”
I was already down to my socks. The boudoir was a dim dark place of invitation. I jumped into bed. Madame Lilly came around the other side. In the gloom, those splendid howitzers of hers trained down upon me. Her long wonderful body glowed dimly. I could hear her breathing. Soft and velvet-like. If you rubbed two pieces of velvet together, you would have gotten the same sound.
“Ready when you are, C.B.”
“I am ready. I have stayed ready, Monsieur Rod.”
She climbed into the bed, mounted me, trapped me with her gorgeous thighs and raised herself so that the divining stick was the very next thing she would feel. For a long moment, she held herself erect and then, like a dive-bomber plummeting On Target, she came down.
I kept my eyes open until she hit me.
Then I closed them.
Then I opened them again.
When the waves had hit her, she had transformed from a vengeful, sad pussycat to a true lioness and mate to the master of the pride.
Oh, yes, I cured Madame Lilly de Jussac. For all the time left to me, I scoured and cleansed her of sickness and cleared her mind for the finer things of life.
My last goodbye to her was the biggest hello in the books.
After all, I did have to catch a plane.
Also, there was somebody waiting for me in America.
Minda Loa.
With her feather, her tongue and her thesis.
Hell—isn’t that the way this whole damn business started in the first place?