Sin Hellcat

by Lawrence Block

  Will Brockheimer was then, and still is so far as I know, an account executive with a fantastic knack for liquor ad copy. Actually, it wasn’t so fantastic as all that if you understood that by Will Brockheimer, liquor ad copy was a love letter. Will has lived on the product of the distiller’s art for fifteen or twenty years by now, and I don’t believe there’s anything else in the world he loves half so much as booze, not even himself. And particularly not his wife.

  You know how it is with booze. You drink a lot of it and then you think about sex, and you discover that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. There’s nothing like good Scotch or rye or bourbon or blended whiskey or vodka to make you crave what you can’t perform. After a while, as in Will’s case, this results in even the craving fading away.

  Will Brockheimer was married. Will Brockheimer was alcoholically undersexed. Will Brockheimer, so I was told, had a wife who welcomed all substitutes for her booze-limp husband. All you had to do was go along with Will one night after work. He would head immediately for the nearest bar, and drink steadily till around midnight or one in the morning. If you stayed with him, and made sure he swallowed enough to be really reeling, then of course you’d have to take him home. His wife would help you put him to bed, and then, so the scuttlebutt ran, she would help you put her to bed.

  I heard about this interesting possibility during a particularly dry spell in my sexual life, all puns intended. And so, two days after first hearing of it, I took action. Seeing to it that I boarded the elevator with Will Brockheimer, whom I knew only casually, I started up a conversation with him on the way down to the ground, and the two of us wound up in a cozy dark joint off Madison Avenue, and Will proceeded to get smashed.

  What a strange oblique seduction that was! Plying a girl with liquor in hopeful preparation of later plying her with me, that was something I understood and was familiar with. But plying a man with liquor, in hopeful preparation of later plying his wife, that was strangely twisted, and not entirely enjoyable by any stretch of the imagination.

  And he wanted to talk. This man on whom I was even attaching the cuckold’s horn wanted to talk to me, and I must, perforce, talk back. I must smile at him in all guile, and tell him stories, and listen to his stories, and be his pal. And all the time thrust down the quirks of conscience plucking at my mind. For isn’t it drummed into us from earliest childhood that it is more important in life to get laid than anything else? Isn’t copulation our chiefest goal, over mere honesty or truth or pity? Given all the choices of all the magic rings or Araby, comrade of mine, what would your first wish be?

  And so, when at the witching hour out he passed, strode I unto the street and flagged a cab. It cost a dollar to get that worthy’s worthless assistance in carting the carcass from bar to car, and then all at once I realized that I didn’t know my drinking pal’s address.

  Are you paying attention? Not only did I cuckold this sweet and sodden creature, I even picked his pocket. Out came his wallet, and from the identification card therein I parroted the address to the surly hacky, then nicked back the dollar I’d so far paid the driver, plus another for the trip, before stuffing the wallet back into his pocket.

  They lived uptown a ways on the West Side. Not too far uptown, not far enough for a police lock to be necessary or for housewives to feel frightened of tripping down to the corner grocery after dark. Just far enough uptown to be expensive without being too expensive. (I’m going around the bush this away, to be honest, because I don’t properly remember exactly what the address was. Somewhere between Broadway and the park, between Columbus Circle and the Planetarium. Up in there.)

  Will blessedly recovered somewhat by the time the cab reached his apartment building. It was at least possible, once the driver had helped me drag him out of the backseat and get him vertical on the sidewalk, for him to stand and even to walk, so long as one held onto his arm and guided him.

  Entering the apartment building, the amount and intensity of qualms and queasiness I had to ignore suddenly increased, and it became effectively impossible for me to ransack Will’s pockets once more, in search of keys. Instead, I found the button tagged Brockheimer and pressed it firmly.

  In a moment, I heard the voice of the object of my desires, albeit electronically distorted to something similar to the croaking of a frog, and saying only: “Who is it?”

  That stumped me. She didn’t know my name, she didn’t even know me. The whole project suddenly seemed absurd. I had been planning to go up to an apartment and have intercourse with a respectable married woman whom I’d never even met before. Ridiculous.

  The object of my waning desires spake again, in precisely the same words: “Who is it?”

  Since I couldn’t answer that question, I answered another one instead: “I have your husband here, Mrs. Brockheimer.”

  There was a pause, and then Mrs. Brockheimer strained the building’s electronics to the utmost, by forcing it to reproduce a sigh. Even through the distortion, it came through as a bitter and fatalistic sigh, a there’s-no-way-out sigh. And she said, “All right. Come on up.”

  I wonder now what that sigh meant. Was she being fatalistic about Will, or about herself, or about me? Or all of us, equally though divergently doomed.

  At any rate, she told me to come on up, and the door buzzed. I pushed, it opened, and Will plodded docilely if unsteadily to the elevator. Up seven flights we groaned, and down the hall to where she stood waiting for us.

  I remember her clearly. Not because she was stunningly beautiful, for she wasn’t. And not because she was startlingly ugly, for she wasn’t that either. I remember her because she was so fantastically ordinary. She wore a housewife sort of dress, and old bedroom slippers, and no stockings. She had no make-up on, and her features were regular and plain to the point of invisibility. That slightly idealized housewife in the washing machine ads was this woman, without the idealization. Hair black and neither short nor long, done in a style of total anonymity. You have seen this woman a thousand times, usually in supermarkets, and you see that she was probably a striking teenager, but marriage and cookery had made her sexless. She still has the slender body and the good breasts and the clear unblemished features, but domesticity has leeched her blood, the fire is out. Or so you think. You look at her and feel none of the stirrings aroused by palpitating femininity in bikinis on the beaches. No spark shoots out from her, and so no answering spark is ignited in you, and you glance at her and that is all, you walk on.

  Trepidation, I’m afraid, was the order of my day as I steered the lurching Will down the hall toward home and wife. Not only was she my drinking companion’s wife, not only had she never even met me before, she was a housewife! Do you get it? A housewife! You don’t lay housewives, for Pete’s sake.

  Will providentially afforded a diversion by passing out again, across his own threshold. Mrs. Brockheimer and I had to drag him into the living room. When she bent beside me to grab his arm, the loose neck of her dress fell open a bit, enough to show me the first swelling of a breast hung for the hand, strong yet yielding, full and desirable. And beneath that housewife disguise, she wore no bra!

  Get thee behind me, trepidation! Housewives wear bras!

  Mrs. Brockheimer, of course, had had plenty of experience of putting her husband to bed unconscious, and so she directed me in assisting her. We half-carried and half-dragged his hulk down the hall into the bedroom, rolled it onto the bed, and stripped it. I was for leaving the poor man whatever dignity can be afforded by a pair of boxer shorts, but the woman stripped him naked, and thus bare and sodden he lay before us on the bed.

  She tweaked a portion of his anatomy with a contemptuous linger. “Look at that thing!” she said, her voice low with controlled anger and disgust. “What good is it? I ought to cut it off him.”

  “The amount he drinks,” I said, “he still does need it for something.”

  She looked at me unsmiling. “You want some coffee?”

  “Yes, please.”<
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  I followed her back to the living room, where she unexpectedly turned around and said, “Do you really want coffee?”

  Perhaps brutal honesty was what this woman wanted. “No,” I said. “It isn’t coffee I want.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Harvey.”

  “Sit down here on the sofa with me, Harvey. Tell me about yourself.”

  We sat down, and neither of us said a word. She leaned forward, as though listening attentively, and once again the front of her dress hung away from her body. I reached out and slipped my hand inside and cupped her left breast, feeling the tip hard against my palm, the swelling slopes soft against my fingers. She smiled, then, a smile of cynicism and animal pleasure, and quickly opened my trousers. Then her face slipped down out of my vision, and her mouth was warm.

  The dress was all she wore. My hand slid up her leg, beneath the dress, to equatorial climes, and busy fingers spoke in sign language. She lay half prone now on the sofa, her head in my lap, and down the slope of my side her hips twisted and writhed. With my free hand I stroked the upper rise of hip, feeling the muscles moving beneath dress and flesh.

  Then she sat up, all at once, and pushed my hands away, and harshly whispered, “Take your shoes off. Take them off.” And leaped up to pull the dress over her head, wriggling her body energetically as she did so.

  The housewife, with the dress, was gone. Beneath was a panther, a leopard, a cheetah. A female animal demanding the male. A musk rose from her, the scent of carnal battle. As I stood up to strip away my trousers and shorts, leaving shirt and T-shirt on—having removed my tie already and tucked it in my jacket pocket several bars ago—she dove back onto the sofa, twisting around onto her back, knees up-thrust at outward angles, belly hot and quivering, hips alive and vibrant, demanding their fulfillment. “Come on,” she whispered, harshly, urgently, straining fingers reaching up for me. “Come on, come on.”

  I came on.

  It has always been my technique to tease with small nibbles, finding this works wonders in increasing the receptivity of the female, but this woman would have none of such dandification. I lowered slowly between her shaking impatient knees, pointing at my target, and she lunged upward to grab me in her hands and yank me down atop her. The legs shot out straight, then in-curved, met above my back, and locked, squeezing me down and in and under. Her arms embraced me, her mouth was hot on mine, and it seemed that she wanted to absorb me, to assimilate me entirely to pull all of me down inside her skin and make us one body.

  A driving female like that destroys her own purpose, of course. Hardly had we begun when I for one was done. But that mattered not to her at all. She pulsated on, thrusting and squeezing and clamping me tight, and lo and behold I was begun again.

  And a teeny tiny voice from far away across the room said, “Mommy.”

  I was off her like a shot, staring madly around in all directions, and seeing a teeny tiny girl-child, no more than three or four, garbed in cotton pajamas with feet rubbing her little eyes in the doorway to the bedroom.

  The woman disentangled herself from me, and hurried across the room, her flanks gleaming in the dim light of the room, her half-crouch as she ran, breasts hanging, feral and magnificent. I heard the girl-child murmur sleepily, “What are you doing, Mommy?” and then the mother had removed her, and I was alone in the room.

  When she came back, to tell me that the child had been put back to bed and was now definitely asleep for the night, I was smoking a cigarette and seriously studying my trousers. Though my second beginning had not yet had its finis, I too seemed to be definitely asleep for the night.

  She would have none of it. She snatched the cigarette from my hand and stubbed it angrily in a tray, then knelt before me, cajoling, threatening, stroking, pleading, kissing, urging, mouthing her need, until I found myself—despite myself—coming awake again. And we finished what we had begun. I got no enjoyment from that, but we finished anyway. Because she wanted to, and what she wanted in that line of things she surely got.

  Though she assured me I would always be welcome, I never returned to Mrs. Brockheimer. Nor did I ever manage to feel comfortable around Will Brockheimer after that. It was guilt, of course, at least partially. Guilt and embarrassment at what I had done to Will. But it was also embarrassed humiliation at what Will’s wife—you know, I never learned her name?—had done to me, emasculating me, unmanning me in the very act of proving my manhood.

  And the child. I hadn’t known they had a child. And I had come in stealth by night to copulate upon the child’s mother, and she the child had seen me and wondered what her Mommy was doing. There was a guilt and an embarrassment in that that transcended all else.

  And now I felt much the same sort of feeling toward little Rhett. I looked upon the physical father to whom I was delivering this child, and the slut who would mother him, and I felt that guilt and shame and embarrassment again, and it was almost as though I could square things with both Rhett and the Brockheimer child at one.

  There was only one course of action I could, in all dignity and self-respect, allow myself to take. And so I made my decision, and my course of action was chosen.

  To begin with, just sort of as an opening gun, you might say, I stepped forward and punched the troll smack in the nose.

  TEN

  I am not a violent man by nature. My earliest memories are memories of acute physical cowardice, and I have been known to go to great lengths to avoid a fight. And that is one of the tragedies of the modern world. All our brain-workers (for this is the term they persistently apply to us boys who make the yokels buy things they don’t need) have gone physically soft. We are vicious enough, and we will twist a verbal knife as deftly as Cyrano ever wielded a blade, but the physical sends us scrambling for the exits. We have but one sword, and it is a poor thing used only upon women, and our hands are better at holding pencils than making fists.

  A sad affair.

  Which makes it all the more amazing. Because, while my fist was in the air and on the way to the nose of Dixon Whittington, a most unseemly thought raced through my feverish brain. I won’t hit him hard enough, I thought sickly. I haven’t hit anyone in years, I don’t know how anymore, and I was never much good at it to begin with. I watch Kirk Douglas movies and an occasional prize fight, but I haven’t hit anybody and I am about to mess it up. I’ll pull the punch or something. Or, oh, God, I’ll miss him. I’ll just flail at empty air and seem like a total fool.

  A lot of thinking while throwing a punch. But my thoughts stopped suddenly, you see, because my hand ached. And my hand ached because my fist had just collided quite magnificently with the nose of Dixon Whittington. The punch, by God, had landed. I hadn’t, by George, pulled it.

  Not a wee bit.

  I stood there for a moment and merely watched things. I watched Dixon Whittington, the troll, with his thick veined nose more misshapen than ever. Blood streamed from those black hair-filled nostrils. The color combination at least was passable—like red leather seats in a black Jaguar. And I watched him reel backward, ever so slightly, until he was sitting on the floor and covering his revolting nose with a hairy paw.

  I watched. And out of the corner of one eye I saw Jodi gaping and smiling at once, and reaching to take my arm. And out of the corner of my other eye I saw Rhett, laughing like an Indian and slapping his hands to his knees. And out of the corner of my third eye—

  No, that’s wrong.

  “You socked him,” Jodi was saying, hysterically.

  “You socked him,” Rhett was saying, jubilantly.

  “Socked the old bastard,” Jodi squealed.

  “What’s a bastard?” Rhett asked, undaunted.

  The old bastard, speak of the devil, was getting to his feet. He pawed at the air with his hands, and that was a mistake because it let the blood come pouring through those black holes of Calcutta once again. There was blood on his fingers, too. I looked down at my hands, and there was blood on the knuckles of t
he hand I had hit him with.

  “Now what the hell,” the troll grunted. “Now what the hell.”

  “Old bastard,” Rhett chirped. “Old bastard old bastard old bastard old bastard—”

  Jodi covered his mouth with her hand, demonstrating again that she had a way with children. And the slut appeared in the doorway, looking thoroughly puzzled, and Dixon Whittington swung a heavy hand to the side of her face, demonstrating that he had a way with women. The slut went back, presumably, to her bottle. And the troll fixed two uncertain eyes upon me.

  “I don’t get it,” he said.

  I probably should have hit him again. But picture please the scene in its entirety. Picture driving a furious fist into the nose of a total stranger, and imagine him getting up bloody and bowed, and staring at you, and telling you he doesn’t get it. Would you have hit him again? Would Kirk Douglas?

  I didn’t. I placed hands upon hips and played a waiting game, and he looked from me to Jodi to Rhett to Jodi to me. And then he looked at Jodi, and he seemed to be concentrating on her ample bust, and I’ll be damned before I’ll let a troll look at my unlawful wife that way. So I hit him.

  I got that poor old nose again, and he sat down again, and there was more of that red stuff. He tried to hold it in with his hands and the damned blood leaked through his fingers. I thought of a few speeches from Macbeth. I tried to decide whether a person could have a fatal hemorrhage through his nostrils. And the troll stayed right where he was again, which was on the floor.

  He looked up at me. Not at Jodi now. Not at Rhett.

  At me.

  “Listen,” he said, “just tell me what it’s all about. That’s all.”