Naked Came the Stranger

by Penelope Ashe

  Gillian offered no resistance. She allowed herself to be coaxed down onto the lawn beside a stranger named Ernie Miklos. She felt removed, alienated, singularly unexcited. Through the nearby living-room windows she could see the silhouetted figure of Johnny Alonga as he sang to all the other strangers. She could feel the softness of the still warm grass beneath her. And she could feel the lips of Ernie Miklos against her throat, feel the lips and then the hand as it reached through the side of her low-backed dress and snared her left breast.

  Gillian didn’t move, didn’t dare breathe. His lips had now moved up to her own and his hand had for some unknown reason switched breasts. She could feel all of him leaning against her now—his teeth against her lips, his hands on her breasts, his body thrusting hard against her own. There was at first fear, fear and revulsion, but she refused to protest, fought the impulse to pull away from him.

  And then she began to feel the beginning of a response. The feeling was foreign to her and quite involuntary. But it was there and it soothed her. Gillian moved her weight slightly to accommodate Ernie Miklos and then she reached out to him and pulled him closer against her. And from the far reaches of her throat she felt the start of a low pleading moan.

  Thus was the matter decided. It would be Ernie Miklos. Yes, it would be a stranger and neighbor named Ernie Miklos. For starters.

  EXCERPT FROM “THE BILLY & GILLY SHOW,”

  OCTOBER 3RD

  Billy: Wasn’t it lovely driving in today, Gilly?

  Gilly: It certainly was, Billy. You know, I’ve always thought that October is the loveliest month. And that’s especially true in the suburbs. It’s the whole marvelous cliché of Indian summer.

  Billy: The golden autumn.

  Gilly: The tang in the air.

  Billy: The falling leaves.

  Gilly: The ripening pumpkins.

  Billy: The fresh apple cider.

  Gilly: The grand finale of the chrysanthemums.

  Billy: The Saturday afternoons in front of the television set.

  Gilly: The what?

  Billy: The Saturday afternoons in front of the television set.

  Gilly: I guess it’s my slow day.

  Billy: I’m surprised at you, dear. Football. The college football games on Saturday afternoons.

  Gilly: I am slow, today. Of course,… football. The game with all the numbers. I just love those announcers. “Now the Giants are in a three-four-five with an X-Y-Z and a split disc.” Ridiculous!

  Billy: A split end.

  Gilly: Come again?

  Billy: A split end, not a split disc.

  Gilly: Well, I knew something was split.

  Billy: A can of beer, a color TV, and Army against Notre Dame. Like tomorrow. Now that’s living!

  Gilly: It’s stupid, wasting a Saturday afternoon that way.

  Billy: Oh come on. What’s wrong with sports?

  Gilly: I think games are for playing. I mean there’s something so absolutely dreary about a man lying around in an old T-shirt or something, watching a football game all day.

  Billy: He works hard, he deserves a little rest.

  Gilly: Sure. But what women hate is that everything has to stop while his highness watches the quarterback go in the whatchamacallit.

  Billy: In the pocket.

  Gilly: Well, whatever he goes in. I mean, it’s all supposed to be so important.

  Billy: It is. You just don’t disturb a man when he’s watching football.

  Gilly: Phooey.

  Billy: No, really.

  Gilly: I think the best thing you can do for a man is disturb him.

  Billy: Ouch.

  Gilly: Okay girls, let’s all get out there tomorrow afternoon and make him pay attention to us.

  Billy: Hold fast to your couches, men—your way of life is at stake.

  ERNIE MIKLOS

  THE old champ on the TV was telling the rookie to steer clear of the greasy kid stuff. Ernie Miklos sat back and pressed his chunky fingers against his forehead. Oh. For Ernie it was a small hangover, a band of numbness stretched across the temples, and that wasn’t bad, not for Ernie. Usually he bombed himself out at those neighborhood bashes. Last night, for some reason, the bar wasn’t the center of attraction for him. He kept thinking about the way she had moved inside that dress.

  He turned again to the TV and put the cold can of beer against his forehead. A former football “great” on the pre-game show was employing stop-action to demonstrate how the guard pulled out of the line to block for the halfback.

  “Another great effort by an all-time great,” the former great said. “That’s why Fuzzy’s so … great.”

  Ernie glanced around the room, his room, done in cherry-wood paneling that had run 45 cents a foot. He stared at the pictures—his high school football team and the photo of seventeen men wearing Marine Corps uniforms. “Iron Man Ernie Miklos” was what he was called in those days, and to Ernie things had never changed. He was the same man despite forty-one years, thinning hair and expanding girth. Beside him were the weights and the exercise bench. He’d spend thirty minutes lying on the bench pushing metal in the morning. The thought of it today, though, forced him to rest his head back on the head rest and prop both feet on the red leather ottoman. The pregame show was ending, and it seemed pretty certain now that the rookie had switched from the greasy kid stuff.

  Ernie had reached that point in life where his Saturday afternoon football game was more than welcome respite, it was his raison d’être. This Saturday afternoon there was a small bonus. Laverne had packed up the kids and retreated to her mother’s apartment in the city. He was left alone with his six-pack, his Fritos, his memories. The garbage—the lawn, the leaves, the yelling, the kids—that was locked out on this Saturday afternoon. And for the moment he forgot about that woman in the dress and concentrated on the game.

  The phone rang. It took only one ring, mainly because Ernie’s head couldn’t take more.

  “Hello there.”

  Ernie waited for the voice to give him the weather—it was that kind of voice, soft but mechanically so.

  “Huh?”

  “It’s Gillian, remember?”

  “You’ll have to do better than that.”

  “You must have been more smashed than I thought,” she said. “And that doesn’t seem possible. The party last night. You said you wanted to drink beer from my … bra.”

  Oh yes. The one in the dress. Gillian? All he could remember at the moment was that he had seen her at the Plaza West with some woman, and that she had a sweet-working rump, and he hoped he’d see her again, but didn’t until he saw her at the party.

  “Yeah,” Ernie said, chewing off the rest of a mouthful of Fritos. Army had just kicked off. “What’s—”

  “I have your cuff links,” the voice said. “Or one of them anyway, the one you lost outside.”

  “Cuff links?”

  “In the garden,” she said. “Remember? You were doing a lot of talking. I think you were complimenting me in a sort of, well, basic way.”

  “If the old man is upset,” Ernie said, “tell him I was bombed out, smashed, you know.…”

  “It’s not that.” Gillian looked across the room at Bill. He was reading. “It’s just I thought you might want it back. I mean it looks like it might be something special, as though it were made specially for you.”

  Ernie wished the lady would get to the point. Notre Dame was on Army’s fourteen-yard line and he had no idea how they got there.

  “If you want to know the truth,” he said, “I took it off a dead nigger in Hempstead.”

  “That’s just fine,” Gillian said—a wince her only reaction. “When would you like me to bring it over? I mean when would be the best time?”

  “My wife’s in New York now,” Ernie said.

  “Now it is then,” she said.

  Bill hadn’t looked up from his reading. Gillian brought her fingertips to her mouth, blocked a manufactured yawn, went upstairs to change. The pink
slacks, the halter with the white ruffles, yes. The pony tail as is. When she left, Bill was making a gimlet in what he would probably always call the rumpus room. And while all this was happening, Ernie Miklos was looking into a dead telephone receiver. He didn’t even see Notre Dame make the game’s first extra point.

  “Aren’t you going to offer a good Samaritan a drink?” Gillian was saying.

  “It’s over there.”

  On any other occasion the tailored pink slacks would have been at least distracting. But Ernie had the head. And the Irish were leading ten-zip. The bar was done in Early American. Laverne liked it and Ernie hated it. The only bar in the Western Hemisphere that Ernie couldn’t stand. Who ever heard of an Early American bar? Ernie often thought he would like to take an Early American match and destroy it. Right up to the Early American refrigerator with the golden eagle.

  “You could drink it up here,” Ernie said. Ernie sighted in on the sweet-working rump. “That is, if you like football.”

  “Only football players,” she said, thinking, even as she said it, that it was almost as trite as it was untrue.

  “You could bring the olives with you,” Ernie said. “Or do you take onions?”

  “A twist ordinarily,” she said, “but an olive will do.”

  Ernie did the mixing. He spilled the Vermouth when Harvey Jones dropped the pass deep in Notre Dame territory. That son of a bitch. Gillian accepted the dripping glass and dropped into the overstuffed chair. She pulled her legs up under her, tucked them in. Army was punting and Ernie slammed his fist into the armrest of her chair.

  Laverne would never have come into the room while he was watching a big game. Maybe it was that. Maybe it was the hangover. Whatever the reason, Ernie was having trouble focusing on the set. It was like that time one of the curtains was flapping in the wind—it was a distraction without being an interruption. He could feel her eyes. What in the hell was she up to anyway? The first commercial he turned quickly to meet her look. Too quickly. The pain came back.

  “Oh God,” he said.

  Gillian went to the ice bucket and picked up an ice cube. She walked back to Ernie and held it against his forehead. Ernie began to feel his breath quickening. That damn ice cube. Had he said anything about ice cubes last night? No. He couldn’t have. The cube in Gillian’s hand was melting, sending small rivulets of water into the edges of his eyes. Ernie’s pulse was throbbing now, and what happened next was more instinct than design.

  Army was driving and Ernie was too. His eyes went to the TV and then back to Gillian. A Christian Scientist with appendicitis. Gillian watched it as it happened. She knew she had aroused the creature in the torn paint-spattered T-shirt. Well, she told herself, that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? That’s what you wanted. She saw the Marine Corps tattoo barely visible beneath the sleeve on his right arm. So what did you expect, she asked herself, candlelight?

  Ernie didn’t bother to talk. He merely grabbed out for Gillian, pulled her across the armrest into his lap and bit into her neck.

  “No marks,” she squealed. “Don’t leave marks.”

  “Don’t give me any of that shit,” Ernie said.

  “All right, armchair quarterbacks,” the voice on the television was saying, “what would you do? Go through that same hole again or try for the end?”

  Gillian began to fight back, stiffly, ineffectually. She felt her fingernails gouge through the flesh of his back. He didn’t seem to feel it. If he did, it only increased his ardor. Her body went limp then, and as their mouths met and then their tongues she gave it up and began to play the game Ernie’s way.

  “He’s in there; he’s in there!” The voice from the TV seemed to come from another world. “And, fans, it’s all knotted up.”

  Sixty-eight thousand fans were screaming in the stadium. But on Barnacle Drive in King’s Neck at the home of Ernie Miklos there was only quiet. Gillian had disengaged herself, risen. She looked at Ernie and reached down to touch him gently. He didn’t stir. So that’s it, Gillian thought. It’s over in less than a minute and already it is as though nothing had happened. Ernie didn’t acknowledge her presence in any way. He was watching the set again, watching Army kick off to Notre Dame.

  Ernie was dozing when Laverne called from downstairs.

  “Isn’t it over yet?” she said.

  Ernie rubbed his eyes, and all he could see was the face of Walter Cronkite. His hangover was gone and so was Gillian. He could hear kids running across the kitchen floor and the sound of the dishwasher being activated.

  “You couldn’t even wash the goddam dishes.” Laverne was yelling.

  He came downstairs then and she asked him whether the game had gone into extra innings. Laverne never knew when the baseball season ended and the football season began and Ernie never bothered to explain it to her. What was the use? What in goddam hell was the use? He returned to complete consciousness as he went back upstairs, and wondered vaguely what had happened to Gillian. His T-shirt was on the floor. The only trace of his visitor was the empty cocktail glass. He shoved it into his desk drawer and went into the bathroom. His eyes were puffy. He turned around to look at Gillian’s brand on his back. Goddam broads who scratch. They should all be declawed.

  “I’ll be right down,” he shouted from the bathroom door. He turned on the shower.

  When Ernie finally crawled into bed, he was played out. Still, sleep came hard. Laverne was suspicious when he put on pajama tops. Ernie never wore pajama tops, even in winter. In fact, the only reason he wore pajama bottoms was that Laverne had made it a condition for sharing the same bed. Sometimes now he wondered why he had ever wanted to share the same bed. They’d been married fifteen years but sometimes, on nights like this one, Ernie felt he had been born married. Born married. He remembered his father used to say something like that—exactly that, as a matter of fact, whenever he got high on boilermakers. That had been his father’s salvation, those boilermakers on payday at the bar across the street from the paymaster’s shack at the zinc works. Ernie sometimes thought about Donita, Pennsylvania, and how far he had come from that. It was only four hundred miles but it was a whole other world.

  Donita was one of those mill towns that edge the Monongahela River on its flow to Pittsburgh. Like all those towns, it was dirty and its people were poor, not so much in money as in spirit. The mill did it to the town. Its people were a potpourri of Polish immigrants, Irish and Negroes. The parents worked, got drunk, reproduced, died young, figured on the same life for their children, only hoping it might happen somewhere else than Donita.

  The Donita football teams were the terror of the state, and Ernie Miklos was the terror of the team and this was his salvation. Lying there late at night, listening to the snores of the stranger who shared his bed, Ernie liked to think back and remember those days, the days of his escape. It was about the only time all day anyone would let him think.

  Ernie’s father had liked to sing; he had never forgotten his father’s voice, especially when he’d had one or two: He had the soul of a poet, Ernie felt. But the mill in those days was the beginning and the end. The town was built around the mill and had never been broken up into sections for slums or ethnic groups. The money people, the mill owners, lived eighteen miles beyond town limits and everyone else lived in town. Ernie’s house was just a spot somewhere midway between abject poverty and blind hope. There were nine children in that house and Ernie had always been the favorite. He was the second of two sons; the older boy had died of consumption.

  Ernie never disappointed his father, and that was important to him. Those days after the football games and his father hitting him across his back and the girls waiting for him to come by. Ernie had gotten laid when he was thirteen, by Sonia, who fucked for three cents. Three cents. God, what she would have done for a dime. The boys used to save milk bottles for the refunds and it was always a big day when you could carry three of them over to Jake Rubenstein’s. Everybody hated old Jake. Not because he always kidded about th
em bringing in three milk bottles. But because he was a Jew. Ernie delighted in tormenting Jake’s son, Harvey, but Ernie never started a fight. It would have been no fight and Ernie was never that much of a bully when he was in high school.

  Ernie had picked the University of Indiana. It had been a tough choice because there were forty-six schools competing for the pleasure of educating him. He picked Indiana for a simple reason: They paid more than anyone else. Still, Ernie would have flunked out after that last season if he hadn’t joined the Marines before exams.

  The war was the best thing that ever happened to Ernie Miklos. Better than the football games and better than getting laid by a cheerleader named Donah. Once, knee-deep in mud at Cape Gloucester, sharing his foxhole with six dead land crabs, he said to himself—and Ernie always spoke the truth when he spoke to himself—“There are days when I’m sorry this war has to end.”

  Ernie loved that war and he loved what his drill instructor at Parris Island had told him: “Boy, I’m gonna make a paid fucking killer out of you.” And that sergeant would have been proud. Ernie won the Silver Star at Bougainville by wiping out three Japanese strong points with a handful of grenades and a BAR. He was wounded twice and his face still bore the scar of a Jap bayonet. But when Ernie was telling war stories, that wasn’t the one he liked to tell. He liked to tell about the time he broke into a hut and found a Japanese lieutenant about to commit hara-kiri. Ernie helped him along, but he performed the ceremony by inserting the knife eleven inches into the lieutenant’s rectum.

  Ernie’s wounds on Bougainville got him returned to Honolulu—something he considered worse than a Section 8. It was in Honolulu that Ernie got the scar that no one saw, the scar he carried on his brain. It was in a slop jar off Hotel Street that Ernie found his absolution. The whores had been thick along Hotel Street that night; but they always were. It was like Piccadilly in London or Pigalle in Paris except that the women sat in bars instead of under street lamps or in doorways. Whores, Ernie discovered, were wonderful when you felt the need of dying quickly with the reasonable assurance you’d rise again from a quick grave. Ernie didn’t actually survive that night, not wholly. He had really been buried, and so he still felt, forever. And his executioner was a half-caste little girl with bad teeth, a girl who couldn’t have been more than eighteen. In a way Ernie felt it was retribution for what he had done to the Jap lieutenant. He’d known that was wrong, but he couldn’t help himself. And while the lieutenant had been fortunate enough to look forward to his Imperial Heaven, Ernie would spend the rest of his life looking forward to absolutely nothing.