Time Out of Mind

by John R. Maxim

  But here she was. Seduced by Georgiana Hastings with a promise of having independent means and the freedom from relying upon the whims of any man in return for two years of selling a body which a husband, whether chosen well or recklessly, could use as he sees fit anyway. That, Tilden was sure, was the hub of Georgiana’s argument. She doubtless told Margaret of the many who've retired to respectable lives but not of those who have been unmasked by a chance encounter with a former patron or an anonymous letter to a husband. Or of those who retire not soon enough, who waste their money or are cheated of it and who, as age overtakes them, desperately seek employment in an ever-more-disreputable sort of house until at last they are like those pathetic disease-ridden hags who prowl past hotels, smiling through rotted teeth at every passerby.

  ”I will undress now if you wish.” Margaret folded her napkin and placed it on the tray.

  I do not wish it, Tilden shouted in his mind. I wish you to leave this place with me at once and then I wish you to learn to care for me and I wish you to love me and only me because you are, by heaven, every beautiful thing I could have hoped for in Ella but have been denied.

  “Yes,” he choked. “If you are quite ready.”

  He watched as Margaret rose from the table and walked slowly to the side of the canopied bed, her back to him and her fingers working the buttons of her bodice. He saw her shiver but she did not pause. One bare shoulder appeared, then another. Her back was wonderfully straight and its unmarked skin was naturally tan like that of some French women he'd seen. She stepped out of the bottle-green dress she wore and folded it neatly over a bedside chair. Her fingers moved to the straps of a lacy chemise.

  “Might we turn down the lamps?” she asked, her face still turned from him.

  “If that pleases you,” he answered hoarsely. He reached under one Tiffany shade and extinguished it altogether. On the other he left only a tiny crescent of blue flame. When he looked at her again, the chemise and other silken things had fallen. She stood naked in the semidarkness, her arms folded across her breasts. She looked small. Tilden crossed to her and placed his hands upon her shoulders, turning her, feeling the thrill of her skin as he held her. Slowly, she made herself relax, allowing her head to lean against his lapel and bringing her hands tentatively to his hips. He could smell the scent of almonds in her hair.

  “Margaret...”

  Please do not speak, she begged silently. Just let it be done. She reached for his lapels and peeled them back, draping his jacket across her gown. She unbuttoned his waistcoat and then her fingers worked to solve the knot of his cravat. It both pleased and saddened him that she was inexpert at loosing it. Tilden did it for her, then quickly removed his shoes and trousers and held up the comforter for Margaret to slip beneath it.

  “Margaret...”

  She kissed him and put her fingers to his lips.

  She traced the fingers of her other hand down his chest and stomach and, pausing only for a heartbeat, lowered them further until they took .him and caressed him in a way that Ella had done only when the wine was in her. Tilden shuddered and his breath came more quickly. Her free hand reached to his neck and she gently guided his body over hers and in the same motion eased him into her. He could feel that she was tight, yet he entered smoothly. She must have prepared herself, he realized. Georgiana must have shown her how.

  “Margaret, you are so tender. So beautiful.” His body began its slow and delicious motion. His hands sank deep into the soft down mattress on either side of her. Even holding his elbows straight, he feared that he was pressing too hard against her. He raised himself up further.

  “Is that better?” he whispered.

  In answer, she placed both arms around him and drew him down to her.

  “That is better, Tilden,” she said gently. “Enjoy me now. Just enjoy me.”

  He tried.

  He did.

  The end, when it came, was too soon. But he stayed inside her, moving with a rhythm that matched her own as long as he was able.

  “You have honored me,” he said at last. The words, though odd in choice, seemed appropriate.

  “And you have pleased me greatly,” Margaret told him.

  Tilden frowned. “There is no need to tell me that. I had almost forgotten that I am a patron here.”

  Margaret took his hand and kissed it. “It is true, Tilden.” Then, more sadly, ”I suppose I too had forgotten.”

  He chose to believe that. She'd said, he recalled, that she was not yet artful at this trade. Tilden was glad that she was pleased. He remembered a time when it would have shocked him to learn that a woman took any satisfaction from this act beyond that of performing her duty to her man. After all, everyone knew of Dr. Otis Willard's statement that to suppose that a woman takes animal pleasure in the performance of the reproductive act is the most damnable calumny upon the soul of this noble creature.

  But some of his friends had told him of women who actually invited the act and who laughed and talked during it and to whom it seemed great fun, but he had supposed such women must be whores at heart. And he'd heard that there were other women who cried out, not in pain but in pleasure, and some who moaned in the same way he did when his back was being scratched. These too, he felt, must be depraved at heart. A friend, at last, had given him a book written for women by a woman doctor and there it all was, in cold print: the affirmation that nature's design had made the act pleasurable for the females of all species and especially pleasurable for the one species possessed of an imagination, and to deny this any longer could lead to nervousness and even madness.

  ”I wish I could stay here with you,” he told her. ”I wish I could stay here always.”

  “Stay a while, Tilden. Hold me a while.” Margaret closed her eyes. It was done at last. After all the urging from the other girls. Just once, Margaret dearie, to show your appreciation to Georgiana. She did not know whether the urging was done at Georgiana’ s request, but it did not truly matter. She had to know whether she could do this. They all wash off, dear. After they leave you're as good as new and a little richer. Could she do it for the two years Georgiana promised in a place where she would be protected and where all the men were well behaved and where she would have companions who were, after all, not unlike herself? She still did not know. Not all would be as tender as this battered warrior who knew Bach when he heard it and who tried, at least, to make love slowly, and who lingered with her when other men she'd heard about would turn and snore or even begin to smoke. She did know, however, how much she'd wanted to be held by a man she trusted.

  “Margaret,” he asked softly, “what happens now? After tonight?”

  ”I don't know.”

  “Perhaps ...” He searched for the words. “Perhaps, until you've made a decision, that is if I can arrange it, you would care to see only me.”

  She raised her head.

  ”I mean, not just this way. Not at all if that's what you'd like. We can visit. And talk. And you can play the piano. And perhaps we could slip away and hear one of those operettas by Herbert and Sullivan.”

  “Gilbert.”

  “Exactly, yes. Do you play cards? We could play cards as well.”

  “That would be lovely, Tilden.”

  “What? Which part?”

  “All of it, Tilden. If you mean it, it would all be lovely.” Yes, it would, she thought. But Margaret could not allow herself to hope that the ardor he felt tonight would survive into tomorrow, let alone to days beyond.

  “Of course I mean it.”

  “Dear Tilden.”

  “You say ‘dear Tilden' as if I am a little boy who doesn't know his mind.”

  “No, Tilden,” she told him, ”I say it as if I am a woman who would rather not be hurt if I can help it.”

  ”I will not hurt you, Margaret.”

  She kissed him.

  ”I would die first.”

  After a while, they made love again.

  “This is a business, Tilden,” Georgiana H
astings reminded him as she poured his brandy. ”I charge three times the normal rate for the exclusive use of a girl. Seventy-five dollars a night, every night, would put a considerable strain upon your pocket.”

  ”I too am a businessman,” he answered. “And Margaret is not yet one of your girls. Let us negotiate seriously, Georgiana.”

  “Make your offer.”

  “Make yours.” :

  “I'm afraid it's a seller's market, Tilden. Whether we reach agreement or not is all the same to me.”

  “Nonsense. At the moment, you have no income from her at all. I'll pay you twenty-five, but you must keep paying her the salary she earns as your secretary.”

  “How is your brandy, Tilden?”

  “Not good enough to derail me.”

  “Seventy-five.”

  “Georgiana, we both know that you are fully prepared to split the difference at fifty dollars and still be satisfied that you have bested me. Let us get on with it.”

  “Fifty then,” she agreed, “plus five hundred for tonight.”

  “Ridiculous.”

  “Most of the five hundred is for Margaret. I'll keep less than a hundred of it.”

  “Fair enough. What is her share of the fifty?”

  “None. I'd make more than that on the average girl.”

  ' 'Georgiana—''

  “It's true, Tilden.”

  “'Then I will pay you seventy-five on condition that you bank twenty-five of it for Margaret. Can I rely on you for that?”

  “It is we whores”—Georgiana winked—“who are supposed to have hearts of gold, Tilden.”

  “Do we have a bargain, you barracuda?”

  “Pay me fifty, Tilden. I shall bank half of it for Margaret.”

  “Of course,” Tilden said, “some barracudas are quite nice.”

  “And I'd like you to look over my investments. Your advice will be without charge, naturally.”

  “Of course. Would you like a dollar for the brandy?”

  “That won't be necessary, Tilden.”

  “It looks like Berlin at the end of the war, doesn't it,” Gwen observed. She was looking out the car windows at row after row of gutted tenement buildings along the Cross Bronx Expressway. Most did not seem like slum dwellings at all. There were red brick apartment houses, which looked perfectly middle class, and one in particular, on a parklike knoll, was faced with yellow brick and had pleasant terraces at its corners. It must have been quite nice at one time, she thought. But now it sits there looking back at you rather like a dog who's been left at home and doesn't understand why he's being abandoned.

  “This is the South Bronx,” Harry Sturdevant announced, ‘It's becoming a ghost town. Thousands of buildings like these, many of them burned out.”

  “What happened?”

  Sturdevant shrugged. “These were mostly rent-controlled apartments. When oil heat and electricity shot up, their owners couldn't operate them at a profit and they couldn't sell them because the area was deteriorating anyway, so they just abandoned them.”

  Corbin, irritable, tried to shut out their voices. He'd dozed off for a minute there and he'd had some kind of dream, which he was losing now, but he knew it was about something very exciting. He'd pulled off some great coup or had a terrific idea that made him happy and excited.

  “Now it's New York's dumping ground,” Sturdevant continued. “You'll see whole streets lined with abandoned wrecks of cars. And massive brick piles where the city has leveled rows of buildings because they've been dangerously weakened by fires. You watch, though. Ten years from now this could be a garden spot. You'll see developers flattening all this and starting from scratch because it's wonderfully convenient to the city. But the first two or three will be like fortresses, I'm afraid. This area has one of the highest crime rates in the world.”

  Corbin squinted, trying to remember who that was. The one who was talking about developers. It didn't matter. What was that about crime, though? What's there to steal out here? Chickens? That fellow was right about the future, though. Some day soon all these little farms will be gone and the main roads paved and the elevated will reach all the way out here from New York to create whole new villages in this great empty space between Vanderbilt's railroad lines.

  Jonathan, Gwen realized, had not said a word since they turned off the West Side Drive. She leaned forward until she could see his eyes. They were open, not glazed, just a bit dreamy. She sat back, placing one hand on his shoulder and idly massaged it. He grunted appreciatively. His left hand reached back and gave her thigh an affectionate squeeze.

  “You are a magician with those fingers,” Tilden murmured. He lay facedown upon the canopied bed, fully dressed but for his coat and tie, which he'd replaced with a red floor-length robe of Japanese silk. Margaret sat at his side, upright, her long legs tucked under a white summer dress that made her look like a bride. “They do wondrous things with piano keys; they turn stiff muscles into jelly, not all muscles, of course, and they—”“Why, Tilden Beckwith”—Margaret playfully slapped

  his head—“that is the first racy remark I've ever heard you make.” .

  ”I can't be blamed for it. I am bewitched. I am not the man I was.”

  “As long as you're a happier man.” Her hands returned to his shoulders.

  ”I am,” he said after the smallest pause. ”I am indeed.”

  Margaret knew perfectly well why Tilden hesitated. She knew that as water rises in one place it must fall in another. So it must be with Tilden's happiness. And her own. These past two weeks, almost three, she had been living each day only to pass the hours until the call finally came from Wilkins that Tilden had arrived.

  ”I did not ask if you were content, sir.” She poked him lightly. ”A pig having his back scratched with a stick is content.” She brought her fingertips down until they touched his ribs. ”I asked if you were happy. You must reply in a happy manner or I will tickle it out of you.”

  ”I warn you, woman ...” His left hand snaked free and found her waist. “In all that time you spent practicing the piano, I was learning to tickle. At the age of eight I bested Fat Fannie Bumpus in two tickles flat and before I was ten I—ouch.”

  Margaret easily broke his grip and threw herself across his back, at once burrowing both her middle fingers under his rib cage.

  “It is no use,” he said, his face purpling. “See? I am like stone. Job himself would envy my self-command.”

  Her lips brushed against his ear and parted. “Fat Fannie Bumpus is one thing. Mad Meg Barrie is quite another.” A warm wet tongue darted into his ear as both fingers found hidden nerves. Tilden screamed.

  “Yield,” she demanded.

  “That's a foul!” he roared. “An absolutely shocking foul!”

  “Yield, I say.”

  “This won't be forgiven.”

  “Last chance, Tilden.”

  ”I yield.”

  “On your word? No revenge?”

  “On my word, Margaret.”

  She released him slowly, in steps. Then, satisfied that he would not spring at her, she turned her attention to the straightening of her dress. It was a fatal error. “You promised,” she squealed as Tilden's mass rose up like a wrathful bear and rolled across her body until both crashed loudly to the floor. They wrestled desperately, each thrusting and parrying with index fingers until they suddenly froze at a sharp rapping on the door. Margaret struggled to her feet and, patting her hair in place, ran to answer.

  “All is well, I take it.” Tilden heard Georgiana’s voice. He imagined that both her hands were behind her back and that there would be a blackjack or bung-starter in one of them.

  “Yes, Georgiana,” he called, “just a bit of giddiness.”

  “It was a tickling fight.” Margaret laughed, breathing hard. ”I won and he said there would be no reprisal but he broke his word.”

  “No such thing.” Tilden came to her side. ”I gave my word to Margaret. I gave nothing to Mad Meg Barrie.”