Naked Came the Stranger

by Penelope Ashe

  Arthur ignored it. He had a great ability to hear only the things that really interested him.

  “Okay, here’s something even better,” he said. “‘Father and mother, both 32, with son, 12, and daughter, 8.’ It goes on to say they raise muskrats but they’re very interested in leather, especially boots.”

  “Leather, for God’s sake,” she said. “Don’t you think that’s a little passé? And look at the address. Taos, New Mexico. How would you figure on getting there?”

  “Hey, do you think they’re Indians?”

  Arthur brightened for a moment. His experience up to this point had been strictly with Negroes and whites. He wanted some Orientals to round out the picture, but Indians—Jesus, they’d be something else. He stared at Raina. That long, straight black hair. A little snarled, maybe, and most Indian women kept their hair in tight, neat braids. But it was passable. Hell, more than passable. It would do. And those dangling silver earrings. They had turned her ear lobes black, but even that gave it a touch of authenticity. Not too many bathtubs around those little Indian villages. Yeah, she’d do. For the moment, anyway.

  “Querida,” he said, grabbing her left ankle brutally. “Say something dirty in Uxmex.”

  “Fantasy-break time again?” She stared back at him balefully.

  The question turned Arthur off. He liked spontaneity—in fact, when he had first met Raina a year earlier, that had been her most attractive and endearing quality. When he wanted to play Unicorn, she had obligingly curled into the shape of a horn. When he had wanted her in the chapel, she had sweetly stretched herself into the form of a crucifix and—no questions asked—accepted his love-making in Latin. (“Vidi, vici, veni”—he had been inspired by the sight—“I saw, I conquered, I came.”)

  But now it was a totally different story. Raina moved away from Arthur and eased her thighs into the Lotus position. She was let down, bruised to the depths of her superego. Perhaps Yoga could help her. It was better than pot or LSD, especially Tim Leary’s much touted LSD trip without LSD (you sat barefoot in a quiet setting contemplating a tin can and fruit seed). Tim Leary, what a sellout. It was all right, of course, for producing visions, but she didn’t want visions now. She wanted calm, higher understanding.

  What upset her was not the fact of rejection. That would pass. The thing that bothered her was that they had played Indian before. Arthur was repeating a fantasy. Jesus H., if things were going to get boring, that was it. Boredom was Raina’s major fear in life; it was the one evil to be avoided at any cost.

  She waited there, in the Lotus position, waited for inspiration to overtake her. Arthur tried to pull the serape from beneath her and wrap it around his neck, possibly in imitation of a lei. (“Welcome to Hawaii,” he said.) Unamused, thoroughly unamused now, Raina stood up, the serape still wrapped around her, and walked out of the room with dignity.

  Arthur didn’t give her a second thought. He rarely concerned himself with thinking about other people. His own moods were so much more fascinating. He began thumbing through the magazine again. And just as he hit upon another intriguing item—“Husband and wife, 21 and 19, both like hairy men—no women need apply”—the doorbell rang, and Arthur got up, still nude, to answer it.

  It was Dexter, a huge Negro who had been Arthur’s buddy in the army. (Arthur had allowed himself to be drafted a year after flunking out of Brandeis. So many of his friends had burned and urinated on their draft cards, feigned catalepsy, encouraged hideous rashes, learned to lisp and so forth that the only cool, the only truly cool, thing left to do was to go into the army, and so Arthur had allowed himself to be drafted. His friends had congratulated him on his imaginative stand, and Arthur was not unhappy about it himself. Actually he had enjoyed the army. Being an MP directing traffic on a Nike base in Maryland was a whole new bit. And even when he was discovered chewing morning glory seed on duty—his clearance had been lifted—he found that being a typist in personnel was just this side of wiggy. He had spent most of the time drawing obscene portraits of the thyroid-eyed WAC who sat opposite him and telling her such wild stories that, by the end of his stint, her mind was completely but permanently blown and she was reduced to mopping floors in Headquarters Battalion’s psychiatric ward.)

  Fond memories aside, here was Dexter. Good old Dexter. A tall, silent Black who communicated only in two-word sentences. “She fly,” he would frequently say, meaning “She’s good.” Or he might say “She bad”—also meaning “She’s good.” “Woofing” (putting down) and “jammed up” (crazy) and “rapping” (playing up to) were some of his other judgments.

  He seemed more excited than Arthur had ever seen him. Arthur looked at him with a tender smile spread across his pale bony face. He liked Dexter, truly liked him. Dexter never got mad, never asked questions, never thought about anything. He just grooved along from one day to the next, so cool he was almost dead. Arthur liked him so much, in fact, that if he ever got up the nerve to have a homosexual fling, Dexter would be his man. (Though he was loath to admit it, Arthur had never been able to make it with a man. He felt ashamed of this idiosyncrasy but could do nothing to conquer it.)

  “Man.” Dexter was staring at him, glassy-eyed as usual. “I have just had me one real-life experience.”

  “Yeah?”

  “There am I, buzzin’ through this supermarket you got here, lookin’ to cop a salami, somethin’. [Dexter knew that if he wanted something to eat, he’d have to bring his own provender. Brown rice and nuts filled the refrigerator, and that was not Dexter’s idea of soul food.] All of a sudden what do I see but this chick who is the most fly chick I have seen in my life ever. This one I say, this one, baby, is a trip and a half, only she is crying there.

  “So right away I ease myself up to her and say why is she cryin’. She is sayin’ a friend of hers has checked out. So then I tell her I’m from SNAC. And she says, very cool, ‘a breakfast cereal representative?’ And I say I mean SNCC, you know, baby, civil rights, you know, integration and like that. And by this time she is laughing. Hooowee and a half, baby, she is something else.”

  Arthur drew his buddy into the house. Never in his three-year friendship with Dexter had he heard him communicate so long, so enthusiastically and so coherently. However, his sense of hospitality had not deserted him altogether.

  “Wanna smoke some grass?” he said.

  Dexter nodded almost imperceptibly and Arthur reached for the Christmas ball on the mantelpiece, cracked it open and offered his friend some marijuana. The two of them sat there for a while, smiling at the wall, until Arthur broke the silence.

  “You get her name, Dexter?”

  “Gilli-Anne, brother, Gilli-Anne Blake.”

  The rest of the story came from Dexter in barely coherent fragments. She was tall, blonde and slim. Her breasts were full without being maternal. Dexter had, of course, propositioned her. She claimed to understand the meaning but the phrasing troubled her. At any event, she had turned him down, but charmingly. Dexter took no offense. Living in New York as he did, his sexual experience had been rather severely limited to one type of girl—fleshy, Jewish, painfully liberal and painfully frustrated. It even pained Dexter to think of the last one, a flabby-thighed, snaggle-toothed young lady named Minna who had clutched him to her pendulous bosom and offered him corned beef sandwiches and sympathy after he had done his best to devastate her. He had sensed that her basic goal in life was to feed, mother and talk him to death, and he wasn’t having any of it. This Gilli-Anne was much more his type.

  Arthur assembled the fragments, and came up with a reasonably accurate reflection of Dexter’s meaning. He allowed that he had seen the woman in question, had spoken to her three times, once at a party and twice on the street. And that it was too bad it didn’t work out so that Dexter could ball her because that would be something else.

  “Yeah, but baby,” Dexter said, “when I tell her I know you, she say you her type.”

  “Her type?”

  “She say she want y
ou, baby.”

  The meaning of this was unmistakable. And, while Arthur in no way trusted Dexter’s recollection of the conversation, he fully trusted Dexter’s instincts. If Dexter believed that Mrs. Gillian Blake wanted him, well then, in all probability, she did. And if Dexter wigged out like that over her, he probably sensed that she would be wilder in bed than a female rhinoceros. Rhinoceros, hmmmm.

  “Time for a little bike ride,” Arthur said. Dexter blinked, meaning yes.

  Arthur stepped into a pair of white levis, snapped on the big white helmet, the jacket and the boots. The two of them strolled out to the garage where Big Momma, Arthur’s Harley-Davidson 1200, rested in all its multi-geared splendor. And fifteen cursing neighbors later, the machine was idling in the Blake driveway.

  It was easy. Dexter banged on the door. Gillian had opened it and smiled. The smile was her mistake. Dexter lifted her off her feet, hoisted her over his right shoulder and carried her onto the waiting motorcycle. Within five minutes they were cruising back to Arthur’s house, Gillian slung across the center of the motorcycle.

  Gillian had complained, then pleaded, but her cries were drowned out by Big Momma. She decided to take it slowly and did everything in her power not to smile. In a nutty kind of way it was almost romantic. Not candlelight and champagne romantic, but nutty romantic. Nothing like this had happened since college, since the time her Medieval Philosophy professor tried to make love to her under water while a chilly April moon glittered over College Pond.

  When they finally arrived at their destination, Raina opened the door to meet them. She took one look at Gillian and floated off—ethereally, she hoped—to the upstairs bedroom, where she sucked on an LSD-saturated sugar cube and pondered life’s inequities. A little mind expansion was sorely needed. Arthur’s total insensitivity had stretched both her heart and soul to the breaking point. She was sorry for a moment that she hadn’t played Indian for him—even a second time.

  No one had yet spoken to Gillian—at least not directly. She walked, of her own power, into the living room. She was struck by the frightened look on the face of the young woman who retreated up the stairs. When she turned around, Arthur was in the process of removing his Levis. Dexter had wandered into the kitchen to munch his salami sandwich in peace.

  “Was there something you wanted to tell me?” she finally asked.

  “Nope,” he said.

  “Was there some reason for the ride, for being kidnapped?”

  “You can split any time you want,” Arthur said. “No one’s making you stay.”

  Gillian was not frightened. She realized, in a way, that Arthur had undressed in order to make her feel more … comfortable. She tried not to look at him, but the lean, young body struck a chord, a chord of memory rather than desire, and she was happy at least for that. It had been a long time, she realized, since a boy had held any interest for her.

  “Are the two of you married?” she finally asked.

  “No,” he said. “Dexter’s just a buddy from the army.”

  “Not Dexter,” she said. “I’m talking about the little creature who just took such an obvious powder.”

  “That depends on what you mean by married,” Arthur said. “We share the pad. And she uses my name, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I take it, then, it’s a common-law marriage.”

  “Who knows?” he said. “Do you smoke?”

  “I’ve got my own”—she patted the handbag containing a package of Luckies.

  “Crazy,” he said. “I could tell you’d swing. Excuse me then while I light up.”

  From the manner in which he inhaled the smoke, the exaggerated swallowing with eyes closed, and from the bittersweet smell of the exhaled smoke, Gillian realized the boy smoked marijuana. She was neither shocked nor caught off balance. Charlie, in college, had smoked marijuana, and the small furnished room in the town of Annandale was often filled with that same smell. She often thought that those had been the best times of all. Never mind that in a very real sense they were all blind; at least they all tried to find some light.

  “You remind me of someone I once knew,” she said. “You remind me of someone I knew in school.”

  “You don’t,” he said.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t remind me of someone I once knew in school,” he said. “Don’t remind me of anyone ever. You’re something else. That’s why you’re so wiggy.”

  “He was blind,” Gillian went on. “He was a blind piano-playing boy and he used to sit around like you are, without clothes, and he’d talk and talk. The things we were going to do, the things we believed in, the world problems we were going to solve.”

  “That’s cool,” he said.

  Dexter returned to the living room, munching at a new salami sandwich. He evinced no surprise at the sight of Arthur completely stripped except for the motorcycle helmet. He asked where Raina was and then walked upstairs.

  “You let your wife …?” Gillian didn’t complete the question.

  “She’s got her life,” he said. “I got mine. Where shall we go?”

  “Where?” Gillian said.

  “Where?”

  The question where had, in fact, been on Arthur’s mind for the past five minutes. He and Raina had made love in every available square inch of the house, everywhere from the broom closet to the refrigerator (a little cramped even with the shelves removed, but delightfully cool in August) and now, with a new chick, it seemed only right to find a new spot.

  Gillian almost said no. She came perilously close to exiting from the absurd little drama, but something made her stay. The thought of destroying a union as ephemeral as this one, this semi-marriage of Arthur and Raina, seemed more than redundant. There seemed no way to rationalize coupling with this youthful madman.

  Maybe it was his very youth—that frail, pale little boy, his chest bare of hair, his little-boy face twisted in effort as he thought of a suitable spot to carry his lover. The incongruity of the moment. The contrast between Arthur and Rabbi Turnbull. Arthur’s naturalness compared to Turnbull’s pomposity. Who’d ever have thought the rabbi would turn out to be such an ass? The episode had left a bad taste in her mouth. Perhaps the boy would help purge it.

  “Wherever,” she said finally.

  “I can’t think,” he said. “I can’t think of a place.”

  “Well, really, dear,” she said, “not here. I’m sure your wife is very understanding about this, but … not here. Shall we adjourn to the bedroom?”

  The bedroom—Arthur was amazed. The bedroom, of course. Floors, fields, beaches, even once in a sewer—but the bedroom? The thought had never occurred to him before. The bedroom? That was even better than a snowbank. This Gillian Blake was unbelievable, unbelievable!

  Walking up to the bedroom with Gillian, Arthur suffered through a curiously deflating moment or two. It was personal recognition of the clearly superior imagination of the woman beside him. This was a woman who had some things to teach him, and he only hoped she would find him an apt pupil.

  Passing by Raina’s Meditation Room, they noticed that the door was open, and they paused to study a curious tableau. Dexter, completely nude, was stretched out on the Prayer Table, his manhood rising toward the ceiling. Raina had scattered talcum powder over his entire body, and the effect was one of salt and pepper. She was at that moment gently massaging him at his point of greatest altitude with a bottle of pink Johnson & Johnson baby lotion. Gillian surmised that it was a religious ceremony, possibly something directly from the Kama-Sutra, and she said nothing irreverent. Arthur, on the other hand, realized they were playing the Baby Game and was vaguely disappointed in Raina’s lack of innovation since the last time.

  Hand in hand they approached the door of the second bedroom, and Arthur hardly dared ask again. He didn’t have to this time. Gillian walked straight over to the bed, removed her pink-flowered muumuu and stretched luxuriously across the bed. Arthur loped across the room after her.

 
The bed! Of course, the bed. All thoughts he had been entertaining quickly slipped from him. The ascetic sensations of the glass-topped cocktail table, the cooling joys of the refrigerator, the exoticism of the attic trunk—these images passed immediately from his mind. The bed—comfortable, soft, capacious—called out to him. Why hadn’t he thought of it himself? How could it have been anywhere else but the bed?

  He looked at Gillian, at the slender winding body covered with tiny blonde hairs, at the full lips parted slightly as they awaited his throbbing mouth, at the rhythm of her rising breasts. And suddenly he knew. He knew that hanging from the chandelier with her poised happily under him—this was not for Gillian. That leaning over the bed’s backboard with toes curled toward Mecca—that would never satisfy her. That somersaulting into the mainsprings—that would never do.

  There was only one thing left to do. He flopped onto the bed and climbed atop Gillian, arranging himself in the position that had been handed down from generation to generation since the beginning of time.

  “Normal,” he thought, “normal for the first time.”

  The word was no longer anathema to him. As he climbed aboard, a vision came to Arthur Franhop. It was a vision of life—a life of calm, steady sex, of marriage even, of charming little children whom he could teach all he knew about sex and drugs, or perpetuating the race in this natural and noble manner.