Naked Came the Stranger

by Penelope Ashe

  “Who?” she said.

  “Solly Madchen.”

  “You mean the Solly Madchen?”

  “That’s him,” said Varth.

  “No kidding,” said Gillian. “He’s the pervert the police are looking for.”

  “I know,” said Varth. “But they’ll never find him. Old Solly. What a character! You know where he is? He’s hiding out in a kibbutz in Israel. No fooling. Old Solly bought his own kibbutz, and for all I know he’s back in business. He’s probably trying to sell cola-flavored hormones to the Arabs.”

  “I forget the whole case now,” said Gilly. “Why was it the police were after him?”

  “It was the LSD thing,” said Varth. “That was strictly Solly’s operation. He mixed LSD with Spanish Fly. We were netting close to $10,000 a week on it, but I always told him there would be trouble. That’s dynamite. The thing blew apart when a woman in Corpus Christi impaled herself on a fire hydrant, and a kid in upstate New York mutilated himself in a milking machine. Luckily, the police only got Solly’s name.”

  Gilly was up now, removing her pants, and Varth’s eyes fastened on her golden triangle. “Now the business is all mine,” he said. “I have outlets in thirty cities. But I stick to books and movies. My first book was called The Captain’s Wife. It was a classic. The captain is a sea captain who gives his wife a German shepherd pup just before he leaves on a long voyage. By the time the pup is eight months old, he is getting down on her. You can imagine what the pup is doing to her when he’s full grown. And then I wrote a book about a wandering gypsy who travels around the countryside with six earrings in his foreskin.”

  Gilly was on the bed now, stretched out, her naked body beginning the motions that had become second nature to her.

  “Another book I wrote,” said Varth, “it was about this squirrel monkey who had an enormous dick. This monkey’s keeper used to take him around to bridge clubs and charge the housewives for his services.”

  “Shhh,” said Gilly. “That’s enough for now.”

  Varth slowly took his clothes off, folding each garment neatly on a chair. Then he stood nude alongside the bed.

  “Come on,” said Gilly.

  Ansel Varth, pornographer, never moved. Suddenly, he turned his head away.

  “Come on,” Gilly said again.

  Varth shivered. “I can’t,” he whispered. “I can’t.”

  “You’re Jack the Fucker and I’m Lady Asshole,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “I’m Jack the Phony. I can’t. Don’t you understand? I haven’t had a woman since I stopped doing it with Astrid. All I do is write books and make phone calls. I can’t get it up any other way.”

  Gilly made a brief visual examination. He was telling the truth. The poor bastard was positively flaccid. “Come to Gilly,” she said, reaching for it.

  Nothing.

  “Poor Jack the Fucker,” Gilly said.

  “Oh God!” Varth yelled. He leaped away, ran to a dresser and furiously started opening drawers.

  “What’s the matter?” Gilly cried.

  “I’m looking for a pencil,” he said. “Pencil and paper. I told you, all I can do is write books.”

  “Look,” Gillian said, holding out her nipples. “I got a pair of big ones.”

  “I can’t,” Varth screamed. “I can’t get the goddamn thing up!” He was still looking through the drawers.

  Gilly tried to trigger him with words. “Cunt!” she yelled.

  “Pecker!”

  “Dick!”

  “Suck!”

  Varth had found a pencil and was jabbing at the air with it. “Paper!” he screamed. “Where the hell’s the paper?”

  Just like that, the answer hit Gillian. “Ansel!” she shouted. “There’s a way.”

  “What?”

  “I know how to do it.”

  “No. No. I can’t get it up.”

  “You can, Ansel. You can. We’ll act out a story.”

  Varth looked at her.

  “Yes,” she said. “We’ll act out a story.”

  “How?”

  “Well,” Gillian was thinking fast. “Let’s make believe that I’m a lady chimpanzee and you’re a big horny camel.”

  Varth dropped his pencil.

  “See,” shouted Gilly. “I’m a chimpanzee.” She scratched herself under the arms and chattered. “See.”

  Varth saw. He leaned over and loped toward her as if he were indeed a desert beast. “I’m a camel!” he shouted. “I’m a camel.”

  Gilly hopped around chattering.

  “I’m getting it up!” Varth yelled. “I’m getting it up.”

  Gilly chattered faster.

  “I’m a camel!” Varth screamed. “I’m a camel!”

  “Hump me!” Gilly shrieked. “Hump me!”

  Varth was on her, grunting, gasping, humping. They heaved together on the white sheets faster and faster and harder and harder. Ansel turned to thunder, and the surf broke warm and dark on Gilly’s beach. Again, it broke. And again.

  Two hours later, Ansel Varth dropped off Gillian Blake at her parked car near the King’s Neck Post Office. He told her that he was mad about her, that he couldn’t wait to see her again, that she had changed his whole life. He said that Gilly had given him fresh inspiration. He was a real man. This time, he would surely write the great American dirty novel.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said.

  “Sure,” Gilly said. “Sure.”

  As he drove away, Varth affectionately made an obscene gesture at Gilly. She laughed, and then she turned away from her car and walked into the post office, where she slipped into a telephone booth. “Hello,” she said in a disguised falsetto voice after she had reached her party. “Is this police headquarters? Fine. Are you still looking for Solly Madchen’s partner?”

  EXCERPT FROM “THE BILLY & GILLY SHOW,” MAY 4TH

  Gilly: I’d have to agree with you, Billy. Fidelity is the key to a successful marriage.

  Billy: Yes, it may sound corny, but when I read about all these wife-swapping clubs and such, I wonder what the world’s coming to.

  Gilly: I know, and the ideas some of our young people have about, well, sex. I mean, it’s almost as if they advocate promiscuity.

  Billy: I suspect that there are more moral people around than you think. It’s just that the others get all the publicity.

  Gilly: You may have something there. And I’ll tell you something else. The men who do philander, well they’re the ones with problems. I think they doubt their own virility.

  Billy: My wife, the psychiatrist.

  Gilly: No, really. Actually, I don’t think there’s anything more attractive than a truly moral man.

  MELVIN CORBY

  THE afternoon sun caressed his face, drawing its golden fingers across his neck. In his mind, Melvin Corby was bronzed, muscled, a man-God behind the wheel of a Lotus-Climax at Le Mans. The Formula One motor throbbed and roared with loin-tingling power as he dominated the turns, conquered the straightaways. Women watched with excitement—the sun glinting on their tanned shoulders and the down-curves of their full breasts. Gillian Blake was in the front row, stretched forward on the tiptoes of her nylon-clad legs; her bust and behind snugly sheathed in white, her face eager, her pink tongue peeking out of her parted lips.

  RRRRRR. RRRR. RRR. ROWR. ROWP. His power mower stalled, and the daydream disappeared in a kaleidoscope of splintered images. Gillian, he thought. Gillian. Gillian. Gil-li-an. Gilly. Oh, Gilly, Gilly, Gilly. He was still excited as he got off the power mower and faced the fact that he was out of gas. Melvin Corby paid a gardener to take care of most of the landscaping, but running the ride-on mower was a treat he reserved for himself. It was one of Melvin’s special joys; the power mower represented a pleasure he could revel in openly. Sitting astride the mower, Melvin Corby—myopic, curly-haired, thin-shouldered, soft-bellied—was somebody. The power mower symbolized his material, if heavily mortgaged, achievement—the front-to-back split-level hom
e and the half-acre that went with it. The house had cost $32,850—about $6,000 more than it was worth, but he was paying for the address. King’s Neck. 69 Selma Lane, King’s Neck. The builder had named the street after a daughter; probably, thought Melvin, in honor of her bathmitzvah. He wondered if it bothered the goyim who dominated King’s Neck that the builder was a Jew.

  It was some address, all right. King’s Neck. It meant something. Last winter Melvin and his wife, Myrna, had followed the sun to Miami Beach. They had spent two weeks in that fabled land of papaya juice and potato knishes. Well, it had been worth every cent they had spent on the house to be able to say, “Yes, we live on the Island. King’s Neck.” When you said King’s Neck, people looked up. People paid attention. They figured you were somebody. It didn’t matter that Melvin lived in the southern section of King’s Neck, that his property had once been part of a potato field, that there was a Negro slum strip on the edge of town less than two miles away. It was still King’s Neck. An address like that, it was instant status. It was something you did for your children. In his case, for your child. David was only seven years old, and already he was going to a place where they taught horseback riding. Imagine, his son riding a horse. Only in America. My boy takes horseback-riding lessons.

  It annoyed Melvin that his mother wasn’t impressed by this. “Fancy, schmancy,” his mother had said during one of their phone conversations. “Who needs it? Better he should get good marks.” His mother still lived in the four-room apartment in Brooklyn in which he had grown up. Melvin was a good son; he called her every few weeks. He had even offered to come and get her one weekend and bring her out to see the house and David, but she had refused. “So what’ll you tell the fancy neighbors? My name is Corby, and this is my mother, Mrs. Korbinsky?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, ma,” he had said, relieved by her refusal.

  “Don’t worry,” she had answered. “I wouldn’t embarrass you or Miss High and Mighty. Sadie Korbinsky don’t go where she’s not wanted. You could give me a million dollars, I wouldn’t come.”

  Miss High and Mighty was Myrna. His mother and Myrna had never gotten along. “A Jewish girl who don’t know enough to save chicken fat,” was the way Mrs. Korbinsky had characterized her daughter-in-law. Whereas Myrna said that Mrs. Korbinsky, despite living in Brooklyn, was the “most East Side person” she had ever met.

  “After all, Melvin,” Myrna had once explained, “she simply refuses to change. You know I’m not class conscious. I mean how could I be? Doesn’t my own mother play mah-jongg? So it’s not that. It’s just that your mother refuses to fit in. She acts sort of—well let’s face it, she acts kikey.”

  Myrna, of course, didn’t play mah-jongg. She played bridge. She also belonged to the PTA, she was in a volleyball league at adult education, and she was a member of the King’s Neck Garden Club. Melvin was extremely proud of the way she was active in the civic life of King’s Neck. She was making sure that they fitted into the community.

  You had to hand it to Myrna, thought Melvin. Myrna Gold from Forest Hills, the dentist’s daughter whom Melvin had drilled at Grossinger’s. That first night, before they had even finished the peach soup, they had discovered their mutual interests—books, music, the fact that they were both Democrats. Later, they had cha-chaed together and that was it. Her parents were fine people; oh, maybe her mother was a little overbearing, but after all Myrna’s father was a dentist. And the Golds had helped out financially in a number of ways; they had even helped with the house. And he loved Myrna, he owed her a lot. Besides, after nine years of marriage you know that nothing is perfect, that the thing is to do the best you can. Myrna was dark, intense, skinny; she was a good hostess and she could talk about Dostoevsky and Camus. At first, it had been her very nervousness that had attracted him—all that tension. It had held the promise of explosion, but that had never happened. Still, you kept trying. Even after nine years. He’d had great hopes for the two weeks in Miami Beach. A second honeymoon, he’d told Myrna. Just the two of them. But it hadn’t worked out. Maybe it had been Myrna’s bathing suit. A bikini, but she had looked bony in it, she had looked—well, neuter. And there was a stringiness about her hair. It hadn’t helped the way she looked that there had been a couple of real good-lookers at the hotel. There had been one who had looked a little like Gillian Blake—a slim blonde with a good bust. He had watched her at the pool, at the beach, and in the dining room. In Melvin’s daydreams, she had seduced him in her cabana—he imagined that she wore black lace lingerie and used alluring perfume. And, also, that she was incredibly skilled in sex. When he was on top of Myrna in their hotel room, he had tried to visualize the blonde. One night, the fiction had succeeded and he had functioned well. But usually it had been the same as at home—no good. The body beneath him was neither soft nor firm, and they achieved little that was mutual except perspiration. Afterward, when he was in the bathroom with a men’s magazine that he had hidden in his luggage, he thought he heard Myrna crying. But he didn’t let on. Nothing was perfect. And it wasn’t his fault. And anyway, they had so much together that was good—the house, David, common interests. Besides, sex was overrated. It wasn’t everything. And there were always the men’s magazines—a harmless preoccupation.

  He had read about men with worse fetishes than men’s magazines. Whips, fruit jars, all sorts of things. He was no nut. He was a professional man. A lawyer. A junior member of a New York law firm who specialized in real estate work. At the garden club’s party the previous weekend, Gillian Blake—oh Gilly, Gilly, Gilly!—had asked him about it. “It must take a great deal of intelligence,” she had said. Imagine. Gillian Blake! The Gillian Blake who was on the radio, and whose picture turned up in the newspapers. He and Myrna had seen the Blakes around King’s Neck, but they had rarely talked to them. After all, the Blakes were celebrities. You couldn’t just walk up and talk to them.

  But at the party, Gillian had been very nice. She had seemed very natural to Melvin. Of course, her husband, William Blake, had been a little snobbish. But then he had been a little high. “Corby?” he had said. “That’s not a Jewish name, is it?” Melvin had blushed. He had tried to stammer a reply, but Gillian had simply taken his arm and walked him away.

  “Don’t mind Billy,” she had said. “That’s the Princeton in him. I mean, he still sends to some silly store there for his sports jackets.”

  Myrna had smiled at him from across the room, obviously pleased that he was talking to Gillian Blake. Other people had noticed, also. Melvin remembered how self-conscious he had been. In heels, Gillian Blake was about an inch taller than he was. He had found himself staring at her breasts, which had seemed to be beckoning to him through that low-backed green dress. She had leaned in front of him to put down a drink, and her hair, tawny and sweet-smelling, had brushed his face. He had been able to see that she was wearing a strapless white bra. Just talking to her, he had gotten excited. There had been a smile at the edge of her lips as if she knew. She was the most provocative woman he had ever seen. And she was very intelligent, she knew all about existentialism. She said she had majored in Far Eastern religions and existentialism at Bard. After she had left him, it had taken a while before Melvin was able to walk across the room.

  Now, as he got the gas can and filled his power mower tank, Melvin felt himself becoming excited just thinking about her. What a woman! And those breasts! Melvin shivered as he imagined how she would be in bed. There was nothing wrong with thinking about it; hell, he was only human. And the important thing was that, in nine years of marriage, he had never cheated on his wife. Never. Not once. Unless, of course, you counted the men’s magazines in the bathroom, but that wasn’t, well, with a person or anything. Besides, he loved Myrna. It was a fact of which he frequently reminded himself. You live with somebody for nine years, and you build something together. He had once heard Gillian Blake say something similar on her radio show; something about the good and bad of everyday life building a solid foundation for marriage. B
ut it was hard to believe that there was anything everyday about Gillian.

  “Gillian Blake?” said Charlie Rider, when Melvin mentioned that she lived in King’s Neck. “Yeah, I’ve seen pictures of her. Now that’s what I’d call a piece of ass. And I bet she throws it around, too.” It was Charlie’s frequently cited belief that Melvin’s faithfulness was doing him a great deal of harm. “What you need,” he told Melvin, “is a good piece of ass.”

  “I never even think about things like that,” Melvin had said on one occasion.

  “Bullshit,” said Charlie. “You think about it, but you’re afraid. It’s your upbringing. You’re a victim of Judeo-Hebraic morality.”

  “That’s nonsensical, besides being redundant,” Melvin had said.

  “No guts,” said Charlie.

  “I just don’t believe in the double standard,” Melvin answered. “I think fidelity should be a part of marriage.”

  “For chrissakes,” Charlie said, “you knock something off and your wife’ll respect you a lot more than she does now.”

  “Listen, I love my wife,” said Melvin.

  “What the hell has that got to do with it?” said Charlie.

  “You don’t understand,” Melvin had said.

  “Love!” said Charlie, and he had practically snorted. “Hey, you don’t have to love a woman to bang her. In fact, if you love her you’re in trouble. You have to be cool. You never love ‘em. You just screw ‘em.”

  “That’s disgusting,” Melvin had said.

  “Bullshit,” said Charlie. He said Melvin should get blown. “I bet you never had a good blow job,” he said. “What the hell, that’s not being unfaithful. It’s not like you’re getting laid.”

  Melvin didn’t say so, but the idea fascinated him. Sometimes, when he was eyeing women, he stared at their lips and tried to visualize a good blow job. Myrna’s lips were thin, and she had a faint mustache. Gillian Blake had firm, mobile lips. They were very sensual.