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by John D. MacDonald


  It would be unfair and inaccurate to say that Monica Killdeering’s personality and pattern of existence were in any way molded by hereditary factors. Her personality and her habits were the result of the horrid conflict between face and body.

  She was an intense, explosive, almost hysterical bore. It was well known in Kilo that if you were putting on a carnival or a drive or a church affair, you should get Monica working on it. Her energies were inexhaustible. But if you wanted to turn a dinner party into pure horror, just invite Monica. Whoever she button-holed would end up in a curious condition—nerves frayed from the shrill and nervous tumult of her intensity, lapels damp from the fine explosive spray of her conversation, and quite ready to scream with such an excess of ennui that, afterward, it was difficult to understand just what she had done to you. Analysis would disclose that she had bored you by talking about you, a feat almost unparalleled in its rarity.

  Childhood had been the best time for Monica. She had been skinny and ugly but in great demand because she could hit the long ball, climb the highest tree, and catch any kid her age in the county.

  Adolescence had been the black time. The body bloomed, warm and ripe, full of an independent arrogance, aware of its own obvious destiny. But for a time Monica was too shy to speak to anyone. She acquired hopeless, helpless, bitter crushes, and wept them into her pillow. And there were the constant cruelties. The phrase overheard, or meant to be heard. And then to lie in the tumid night, and sense, but not understand, all the strengths of the body’s yearnings, and touch then the flowering breasts and feel such an aching emptiness that she wanted to die.

  But the adjustments came in time. The painful shyness was obscured by a highly nervous imitation of an outgoing personality. And it was inevitable that she would choose a career that would chronically exhaust the unfecundated body. In her adjustment she taught herself to believe that a career involving the young was a more valid and satisfying destiny than the obvious triviality of home, husband and children. She became militant about the rights of women. And, with more difficulty, she taught herself to believe that the physical act of love with a man would be degrading and repulsive, a nastiness that she was highly fortunate not to have to endure. She believed all rapists should be gelded.

  As her expenses were small—she ate with Mrs. Hipper and spent little on clothing and practically nothing on cosmetics—and her salary was adequate, she saved her money during her first year of teaching and, that first summer, attended a Festival of the Dance in Biddleton, New Hampshire. She remembered the joyous sense of anticipation that grew stronger and stronger throughout the last weeks of the high school term. Surely, in Biddleton, she would meet people far more interesting and receptive and cultured than could exist in Kilo, Kansas. They would be able to appreciate Monica Killdeering. It would be a warm and wonderful and stimulating three weeks.

  But after the first five days of the Festival, she felt that she had made a mistake. All the others seemed to be in cabins for two and three and four, and somehow she had been stuck in a shed in the middle of an apple orchard. Close little groups had formed, and she did not belong to one of them. She attended the lectures and the demonstrations and the recitals and the group participation experiments with dedication and energy, but she had the feeling that somewhere there was some other Festival, and she had attended the wrong one.

  One night, toward the end of the second week, she had been awakened at about two in the morning in her orchard shed by hoarse cries outside. She sat up and heard a man nearby, calling, “Ruthie! Ruthie! Where the hell’d ya go, Ruthie?”

  She felt indignation rather than fear and put on her robe and went out onto the shallow porch into the cool white moonlight.

  “What do you want?” she demanded, and saw a man come wavering toward the porch, holding a bottle by the neck. She recognized him as a man from New York, one of the staff of the Festival, a big round-faced man with a small neat mustache.

  “Whad’ya do with Ruthie?” he demanded.

  “I haven’t seen Ruthie, whoever she is. You better go home, Mr. Rudnik.”

  He planted his feet, uptilted the bottle, lost his balance and caught it again, and said, “Hah!” and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. A disgusting spectacle, Monica thought. He came closer to her and said “Ruthie run out on me.”

  “That’s too bad. You better go home.”

  He lost his balance again and swayed toward her and clasped her in an effort to save himself. She half turned and caught his weight easily but she was off balance and they both sat down heavily, side by side, on the edge of the porch.

  “Li’l drink?” he said. “Didn’t spill a drop.”

  “No, thank you,” she said and started to get up. He caught her by the waist immediately and kept his arm around her.

  “You stay right here, honey,” he said.

  Monica was outraged. She had no intention of being pawed by a drunk. It was degrading. She tried to pull away from him. He set the bottle aside and got both arms around her, one hand sliding further around her so as to be able to reach her breast.

  Monica wanted absolutely no part of such a messy situation. But, quite suddenly, she could no longer resist. It was as though she had to stand aside, in a revolting and helpless dream, stricken by horror as she had to watch herself get up and help Mr. Rudnik up and then lead him into the black of the shed toward her narrow bed.

  The unused body had suddenly taken over. It had been like a retired fire-wagon horse cropping grass in a pasture and suddenly hearing the sound of the siren down in the village. I lifted its head and its eyes went wide and its ears went flat And quite suddenly it was off in a cumbersome, rocking gallop panting, whinnying and blowing, pounding toward the pasture gate and the sound of the siren, aware of its essential function tousled mane flapping in the wind.

  When she woke up in first daylight, Mr. Rudnik was putting on his shoes. She looked at him in fear and yearning and a horrid shyness. His face was gray. He looked at her and looked away. Neither of them said a word. He went out and she heard him walking heavily away.

  She was certain she was pregnant. She could not stand the thought of looking at him again, of looking at anyone who could know how she had been, like a crazy person. She had no way of knowing that Rudnik had suffered a complete black out, with no awareness of anything that had happened from about ten the previous night until he had awakened at six sentangled with a woman on a narrow bed that he had to extricat himself gingerly to get far enough away from her to see who it was. Nor could she have imagined the appalled horror with which he had stared at the sleeping countenance of the young woman he had privately termed the Venus Sheep.

  Monica packed and left that day, in emotional confusion and a sentimental agony. She existed in a special nightmare until she learned that she was not with child. Only then could she permit her memory to range timidly back to the episode with Rudnik, and feel a delicious disgust at the unexpected abandon of the traitorous body. It was said a virgin should expect, should be prepared to endure, intense pain. But the eager, reveling body had felt no pain. She could no longer entertain the conviction that such union was entirely degrading and disgusting. It was degrading and disgusting, she thought, to the sensitivities of a lady, but now a new factor had to be admitted—and guarded against in the future. She had learned there was a terrible weakness of the body, a veritably bestial need, which should never be given the opportunity of displaying itself again.

  She rigidly suppressed the sleazy and shameful little twinge of pride she felt in the body’s co-operative competence, and resolved that from then on she would spend her summers in Kilo where she belonged, and where there would be no opportunity for evil temptation.

  But, by April of the following year, she had signed up for The Horse Mesa Writers’ Conference in Atcheson, Nevada, telling herself that Rudnik was an unfortunate episode in the remote past of Monica Killdeering.

  There, in the penultimate week of the conference, she was enthu
siastically and repeatedly undone by a squatty, hairy, fiftyish man from San Diego named Vincent Hurlberth who operated a florist shop and composed unsalable science fiction on the side. Hurlberth, unlike Rudnik, was not in his cups. He was merely an eminently practical and hot-blooded little man who, having ascertained the unavailability of other possible targets, had decided to ignore the face and the personality as being factors having no bearing on his immediate needs, and found no cause to regret his decision.

  So Monica Killdeering had crept back to Kilo, feeling soiled and betrayed and degraded. She had gone with such high anticipation that this would be the time. Certainly, from now on, a twice-burned child would shun the fire.

  But the next summer was the Rocksport Music Festival. Where nothing happened. And she told herself she should feel proud and stanch that nothing happened. But as she had been given no opportunity to test the strength of the will power she had determined in advance to exert, it reminded her of those childhood days when she had swung mightily at a fat pitch … and missed. She had wanted a chance to prove her own ability to say no, to exert the dominance of the mind over the body’s insidious frailty, to prove that it had not really been the real Monica Killdeering who, at the first blunt, quizzical and knowing glance from Vincent Hurlberth’s small blue eyes, would go all swarmy and humid and buttery. That couldn’t be the real Monica.

  Came next the Caribbean Camera Cruise, a rather squalid venture that took off from Miami in an elderly ship and made a twenty-day circuit of Caribbean ports of call, during which circuit she spent a humiliating number of days locked in her cabin with a lean, balding, very brown and thoroughly tattooed eccentric named Vasquez Mooney. She saw him in one of two conditions, either naked, or clothed and festooned with a dangle and jangle and clatter of light meters, lens cases, cameras, reflectors and flash bulbs.

  During the winter that followed, while enduring the double curse of a Kansas winter with gym classes, she came to realize that she was the victim of a dreadful disease, an unwilling victim of her own unselective lust. Once the epidemic form of the disease was in progress, the mind and spirit of Monica Killdeering could do nought but stand aside, wringing its hands and moaning, like an embarrassed, idealistic and sorely troubled lady-in-waiting who is forced to watch her beloved queen in orgy and debauch. She had to admit to herself that she rationalized the pre-cruise trip to Miami shops where the body purchased for itself shipboard clothing designed to prevent a recurrence of the barrenness of Rocksport. And, in cruel honesty, she could not permit herself to forget that she had enticed Vasquez Mooney to her cabin to repair her camera on the second day out.

  Yet the vagrant body had to be punished, and so she spent the following summer in Kilo, doing good works. And, in February, found the advertisement for the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop. And, after signing up, began to feel that first tingle of hope that this would be the time. Hope and anticipation had reached a crescendo as the big aircraft turned into the landing pattern over Mexico City.

  She did not know what she meant by this. This time, this place, this summer. If she had been forced to put it into words, she might have said that somewhere, somehow, she could find a situation which would combine the bright bursting delights of the body with a lack of consciousness of evil and shame. She wanted to be involved and used without being soiled and afraid and alone. She wanted a joy that would involve both the body and the soul, combining them in good purpose.

  The lights were on when she came out of customs. She heard her name called. She turned and saw two men, both of them so attractive, as she hurried toward them, her nervousness was like a recurrent spasm. They introduced themselves. She shook their hands with fevered strength. She made sharp jolting sounds of delight and showed a wide expanse of the square, powerful teeth and adored both of them with her brown and helpless eyes.

  Chapter Six

  The girls came over the mountain just before dusk in the cream-colored convertible Mercedes SL 190 that Mary Jane Elmore’s father had given her for her twentieth birthday two months before. Bitsy Babcock sat beside her with a half bottle of José Cuervo tequila pinched safely between her bare brown thighs. The girls came whizzing down the mountain and, in voices made husky by cigarettes and raw liquor and a conscious effort to pitch their voices lower, they sang “Jailhouse Rock.”

  They were the girls of Texas, Mary Jane—twenty, Bitsy—nineteen, leggy and brown and arrogant and derisive of everything in the world including themselves, They wore very short shorts and very narrow halters and, at stops during the trip down, had come dangerously close to causing civil riot and insurrection.

  They were the girls from Forth Worth, and from the moment they had learned to talk they had begun to ask for things, and they had gotten everything they had asked for, and it had been paid for out of the almost limitless funds that came from fat herds and deep wells. They were slim and they were beautifully constructed, and they had sun wrinkles and laugh wrinkles at the corners of their eyes. And they had been asked to leave two schools simultaneously, not for academic reasons. Mary Jane was the blond one, the slightly taller one, her hair cut like a boy’s—a style which was not at all likely to lead to any confusion. Bitsy was just a little more solidly built, but equally slim of waist and long and sleek of leg—a coppery, curly redhead, the tight cropped curls like old coins in the late sun as they came down the mountain.

  At twenty, Mary Jane Elmore had seen and done and knew well a great many things that, in a more orderly world, she would have neither seen nor done nor known. Daddy was a big man. He had the ranch and the duplex in the apartment hotel in town, and he had lawyers and tax accountants and a slew of corporations—little ones that sort of traded stuff back and forth, and he had his cars and his plane and his pilot, and when he wasn’t busy with business, or with the hunting crowd or the poker crowd, he was terribly busy with Prissy, who was wife three, a pretty little horse bum who wouldn’t hardly ever leave the ranch unless it was to go to a horse show with all that picnic off the tailgate stuff, and everybody half blind before it was over. Mommy had gone off on the religion bit, and she was in some kind of a retreat in California, and those long letters came from her, all full of God and Suffering and Inner Vision. There was a wife in the middle, between Mommy and Prissy, and her name was Caroline, and she was sure a drain on Daddy because in addition to the alimony thing he was all the time supporting her in one of those happy houses for the bottle babies. Soon as they let her out, pow, she was back in. Mary Jane hadn’t felt so alone in the whole mess while Brud was still around, but Brud had been queer on the road rally bit, and two years ago he had racked up the Porsche so bad you couldn’t even tell what it had been, and like they always said, he didn’t feel a thing. Mary Jane had just been stoned for months and months, crying at nothing and everything because Brud had been a really darling guy and when you thought about it it seemed like such a waste.

  There wasn’t quite as much money behind Bitsy Babcock, almost twenty, but you’d never know it from the way ole Bits flang it around. Bitsy had been born in a tarpaper shack, first child of Pops and Maggie Babcock. Pops was one of the last of the shoestring wildcatters, a dry-hole specialist, a con man at getting his backing. When Bitsy was three Pops had spudded in right over the Chisholm dome, and for once his leases were in shape. When Bitsy was nine, and the little kids were two and three, Pops had a perfectly timed coronary that hit him while he was standing in the men’s bar at the Waldorf in his big rich hat and his seven-stitch boots with a beaker of Jack Daniels in his big hard hand, while Maggie was on a looting expedition up and down Fifth Avenue. Pops was dead before he hit the floor. Had it happened six months earlier, the estate would have been all tangled up, and had it happened six months later, he would have been all committed on the Cuban deal. It happened when he was liquid, between deals, and it happened just thirty-two days after he’d made a will, made it because Doc Schmidt had scared him a little.

  It set up a trust for Maggie and one for each of the kids, and
it minimized the tax bite, and it made damn well certain that nobody was ever going back to a tarpaper shack. Maggie was a big-boned, vital, handsome, redhead, forthright woman, and you would have thought she could endure anything without falling off at the curves. But losing Pops cut the living heart out of her. Maggie spent a couple of months in black depression, then stuck the kids in private schools and took off to postwar Europe. When she came back she had gaunted herself by dieting off twenty pounds. She wore high-fashion clothes and a weird hairdo. She stuck French and Italian words here and there in her conversation. She was on a nickname basis with minor members of defunct royal houses. And she brought back a husband, a big, sleepy, twenty-five-year-old Swede named Lars, who had an accent, perfect manners, solid-gold accessories and a bottle-a-day habit. Maggie opened the house, got the kids back, staffed the house, and embarked on a lot of entertaining.

  Lars lasted until Bitsy was twelve, and then the kids were plunked back into private schools until Maggie was ready to try again, this time with a hell of a big man named Pete Kitts she met in San Francisco. He was bigger than Lars. He was even bigger than Pops had been. Among other things he had been a wrestler, pro football player, carnival strong man, sports reporter, and bodyguard to a gangster.

  He had lasted until Bitsy was nearly sixteen. The current one was Captain Walker-Smith, a man of such insignificant stature that Maggie had given up high heels entirely, and, when she walked beside him, tried to keep her knees slightly and inconspicuously bent. Captain Walker-Smith, one-time hero of the RAF, had a cold gray eye, an arrogant mustache and a manner of speech so incomprehensible that one was led to wonder whether perhaps the mustache grew on the inside as well as the outside. Maggie had dominated Lars and Pete. And was now dominated by the Captain, as thoroughly as she had been by Pops. So Bitsy had a hunch this one might last.

 

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