Naked Came the Stranger

by Penelope Ashe

  “Face up to it, Willoughby,” she said. “You’re more straight than you thought you were.”

  “No,” he said. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “You just never met the right woman before, that’s all.”

  “It’s the liquor,” he said.

  “Oh, come off it, Willoughby.”

  “But Hank.…”

  “What about Hank? Like what do you think he’s doing right now?”

  Hank, thought Willoughby. Damn him. Damn him to hell, the bitch. “Forget about Hank,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, “let’s forget about him.” And their tongues were touching once again.

  Gillian moved back and smiled. The peanut butter jars were empty, and Gillian and Willoughby stared at each other. Gillian’s expression was omniscient; Willoughby looked confused.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “No.”

  “Don’t look so sad, Willy. You’ll love it.”

  “It’s crazy,” he said. “The whole idea is crazy.”

  “It’s a perfectly marvelous idea.”

  “I can’t. I just can’t.”

  “You can, you can.”

  The martinis sloshed about inside Willoughby’s head. He couldn’t understand what was happening. No woman had ever attracted him before. Yet he couldn’t lie to himself. Gillian Blake had a certain … well, a certain excitement. Only he loved Hank. Still, there had been the hairdresser. And Hank. With that stupid Vince. The bitch!

  Gillian reached out and took his hand. Her fingers played with the hairs on the back of his wrist. Then she was tugging gently at him.

  “Come on, Willy,” she said. “When in Rome, do as the groupers do. Or something. Let’s take a walk.”

  Double damn Hank, Willoughby thought. “Yes,” he said. “Let’s. I mean, why the hell not?” But he knew nothing would happen. Not with a woman. He simply couldn’t.

  They walked alongside the dunes, Willoughby sometimes hesitating, and then moving on. Gillian kept pace—not leading, not following. They came to a hollow in the dunes just beyond the cluster of houses, and they stopped.

  “This really is nonsensical, Gillian,” Willoughby said.

  “You don’t really believe that, do you, Willoughby?” She snuggled against him.

  “Yes, I do. Look, Gillian, I’m a homosexual because I want to be. Women make me sick.”

  “But I don’t make you sick, do I, Willoughby?” she said, and she leaned forward and brushed her lips against his.

  “No,” he said. “I guess you don’t. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

  “Sure you could.” Now she was nibbling on his ear.

  “No.”

  “Yes.” Now she was kissing him with her tongue. “Ummm,” she murmured. “You do that very well.”

  Willoughby was beginning to feel good. “It’s my specialty,” he said.

  “What’s Hank’s specialty?”

  “Can you guess?” said Willoughby.

  Her hand was inside his trousers now, and Willoughby sat as if he was riveted to the sand. An incredible thing was happening. Something that had never happened before in his entire life. He was experiencing a physical reaction to a woman! A physical reaction!

  Now Gillian was at him with her mouth—with her soft lips and her skilled tongue. Willoughby lay back with closed eyes. He was being transported out of himself. Christ, but she was good. She was better than Hank! Oh my God! Oh! Oh! Oh my God!

  Gillian sat up. “Well,” she said. “Do you still think Hank has a corner on the market?”

  “Gillian,” he said. “Oh, Gillian.”

  “I know,” she said, and they reached for each other and found pleasure in gentle caresses.

  They spent perhaps an hour touching each other, exploring each other; Willoughby making new discoveries all the time. Why, a woman’s body was interesting! They were both naked now; lying in the cool sand near the breaking sea. Gillian cupped her breasts with her hands and offered them to him. The nipples were firm and erect. Willoughby stared at the proud breasts blossoming in the shadows. Breasts, he thought, breasts. There was something he should do. Breasts. He fastened his eyes on them, and then, with primeval instinct, he leaned forward. He sucked.

  A little while later, Gillian gently pushed him away. Her hands were on him again, eliciting stiffness. He tried to push her mouth down to him.

  “No,” she said. “This time we do it my way.”

  “But I can’t. I never have.”

  “Come to Gilly,” she crooned, caressing him.

  “I want to,” he said. “I want to.” And it was as if the confession gave him strength. He mounted her as she fell back on the sand.

  Slowly, gently. Slowly, gently. Slowly, nicely. Oh lovely, lovely. Then faster, quicker, faster, needful. Willoughby was lost in immense, billowy softness and riotous colors and roaring winds; he was the sand and the sea and the star-pierced sky. Faster, faster, faster. Oh, oh, oh.…… ahhhhhhh. From far off he heard a faint cry that turned into a moan; it was Gillian, and then Willoughby realized he had been moaning, too.

  Afterward, they smoked and talked.

  “Was I really good?” he asked.

  “One of the all-time greats,” she said.

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” said Willoughby. He got up and strode to the water. He felt manful as hell. He urinated. Then he dipped his hands into the cold surf. He reached up and washed the make-up from his face. He strode back to Gillian.

  “What about Hank?” she said.

  Willoughby Martin breathed in the night air. “If that son of a bitch ever bothers me again,” he said, “I’ll knock him on his ass.”

  They laughed. Willoughby thought his voice sounded deeper. By God, he was a man.

  They spent the night on the beach. That Gillian. He couldn’t get enough of her. And imagine all the women who were out there in the world waiting for him. Just wait till Hank tried to come crawling back. Hank! thought Willoughby, and he snorted to himself. The damn queer.

  A few weeks later, King’s Neck lost its pet homosexuals. They moved out shortly after neighbors reported hearing a terrible row. The day after the fight, someone saw Hank in town with a bandaged nose and blackened eyes. A month after that, one of the garden club officers reported meeting Willoughby in the city. She said she had hardly recognized him; he was wearing a sweatshirt, and he had gotten a crew-cut. And believe it or not, she said, he had tried to proposition her. Someone told Gillian about it. “Well,” she said. “It’s like they say. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.”

  EXCERPT FROM “THE BILLY & GILLY SHOW,” JULY 2ND

  Billy: The man says he doesn’t want any publicity, that’s what the man says. And, speaking personally, I find that attitude a refreshing change from most of the authors we manage to lure onto the show.

  Gilly: You’d think that out of sheer neighborliness.…

  Billy: Neighborliness? That fellow moves about in much the way an astronaut does—except, from what I hear, at a lower level. And I have to admit I’ve always felt he was overrated as a writer, strictly a one-book author.

  Gilly: You mean The Hard and the Moist?

  Billy: What else?

  Gilly: Well, how about Mountaintop?

  Billy: Same book, different title. Look at him, honey. What is he—forty-four years old?—the world’s oldest flower child.

  Gilly: But still, still he’s Caradoc.

  ZOLTAN CARADOC

  GILLIAN realized there was no legitimate reason to include Zoltan Caradoc on her list. He had been married four times—most recently to Paige Marchand, the dancer—but they were never marriages in the customary sense. It had been several years since he had allowed a woman to share his bayside castle for more than a night or two. In fact, for nine months of every year Caradoc was a virtual hermit, a professional loner, a man who spent long hours fashioning sentences while studying the sullen winter waters of Long Island Sound.

  These wer
e his working months, his caged-in months. Caradoc spent the time roaming from one room to another, one glass-fronted cubicle to another, always within sight of the water and always surrounded by the tape recorders and stereo sets and color television consoles and electric typewriters. He lived three-fourths of his life in an ultra-modern electronic womb. Cable umbilicals carried him regular progress reports from the outside world; sensitive microphones were always handy to transmit and preserve his thoughts and memories for posterity. And though only forty-four years old, Zoltan Caradoc had already strung together enough words to more than equal the lifetime output of Proust.

  And every year, as the cold season came to an end, Caradoc once again ventured into the real world. Ventured … no, say rather, exploded. He would, in that three-month interval, be photographed stalking chamois in Bhutan, hunting wild boar in Bulgaria, pursuing teenyboppers in San Francisco.

  Gillian, like most of the cognoscenti, kept up with the ever growing legend that was Zoltan Caradoc. She recalled the news account of his bloody encounter with a killer shark off Tanzania; Caradoc had lost three fingers of his left hand but had saved the life of a native oarsman. And she recalled another hair-raising adventure—his being arrested in his suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel in the company of three blonde call girls, an ancient Negro sculptress and a Shetland pony.

  Gillian had first met Caradoc in early winter—midway between Morton Earbrow and Joshua Turnbull, as she now measured time. It was during the power failure, the electric blackout of King’s Neck that lasted twenty-seven hours. Caradoc had endured the power failure as long as he could and then had deserted his suddenly lifeless machinery for the candlelit warmth of Moriarity’s Shamrock Bar & Grill. Gillian, too, had stopped in for a moment’s warmth. She stood, her back to an open fire, and she instantly recognized his face—the face she had seen on the jacket of a book called Mountaintop.

  The photo, however, was no more than a sterile reproduction of the original. Never before had she seen a man with such piercing blue eyes, diamonds blazing out of a square face beneath a mop of coal-blue hair that curled and roamed over head and neck. The nose had been broken more than once, the jaw was firm, the total effect was softened slightly by the full and sensual lips. The author was still in his working garb—jeans with ragged cuffs, a faded denim shirt with rolled-up sleeves. His forearms were thick, powerful, corded with veins and bristling with hair. Gillian noticed the absence of three fingers from his left hand.

  The stool beside Caradoc was empty and Gillian walked to it.

  “Martini,” she said. “On the dry side.”

  The bartender looked momentarily bewildered and Caradoc roared with laughter.

  “Not here,” he said. “Here, Mrs. Blake, you better settle for a beer.”

  “A beer then,” she said to the bartender before turning to Caradoc. “My mistake. I didn’t mean to be so radical. How did you know my name?”

  “The same way you know mine,” Caradoc said. “I read the papers, same as you do.”

  “You’ve got me there,” Gillian said, smoothing her sweater.

  “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Didn’t have to do what?”

  “That bit of business with the sweater,” he said. “I noticed them without any assistance from you.”

  “I like your work,” Gillian said. “I loved Mountaintop.”

  Mountaintop was the latest. The critics had described it as a bristling, earthy and not unpoetic story of girls on the loose and boys on the bum. Kids with flowers in their hair and fire in their loins, to quote the Time critic. In the novel they had demonstrated for peace, group marriage, male prostitution and free public toilets. In the memorable final scene they had all stripped, guzzled cheap wine and chewed peyote. There had been a wild dance in the firelight followed by the hero expressing his love to a twelve-year-old girl and a three-year-old ewe. Gillian had sensed then, sensed again now, that the author had lived the scene. And that was Caradoc’s strong point. Even his harshest critics agreed that he wrote from life, that this was the literature of experience.

  “It wasn’t a bad book,” the author said. “It wasn’t as good as some, not as good as Anteaters and Belly Dancers, but it wasn’t bad.”

  As he spoke, the overhead lights flickered once, twice, then remained on. The end of the power failure. Gillian was sorry in a way. The candles that had lined the long dark bar at Moriarity’s were extinguished one by one; the saloon could now be seen in all its 60-watt splendor. Sawdust on the floor, grime on the windows, glasses coated with dust. The six other patrons of the moment, the regulars, should have been swept out with the sawdust; they wouldn’t have noticed.

  “My place or yours?”

  “What?” she said.

  “My place or yours?” he repeated. “I’m assuming you don’t want this to end any more than I do.”

  “Yours,” she said.

  Her intentions were innocent enough. There was no reason to look on Caradoc as a prospect. There was no marriage to be tested. And so, humming gently to herself, she calmly followed the writer as he drove through downhill woodland toward the shore. The house, every window now ablaze with light, sat on a rock base in a protective cove. The tide was high and the bay water had risen above the foundation and lay flat below his living room windows.

  The wide tile-floored entranceway to the house was dominated by a huge wire statue, a male nude with an erection. Indeed, the small placard proclaimed the title of the work to be “Male Nude With Erection.” Each room held its own array of wonders. Gillian noticed the names—Cezanne, Picasso, Van Gogh, Pollock, Warhol, Rivers—and was suitably impressed. There was a huge portrait of Caradoc’s left eye—no mistaking the brilliance of that blue. An oil of Paige Marchand in bra, panties and leather boots. Ivory tusks, a mounted stingray, loudspeakers on every wall.

  In the main room Caradoc paused to depress a wall switch that simultaneously dimmed the lights and started the record player—jetting the raucous sounds of the Jefferson Airplane from every available wall.

  There were none of the standard overtures. Caradoc simply stood in the center of the huge room and undressed. First his jacket and his shirt, then his trousers and his shorts. Though Gillian had done nothing, said nothing, the author was in a state of visible excitement. The sight was impressive enough. What was even more impressive was the realization that Caradoc had served as model for the wire sculpture beside the front door. There was no mistaking the likeness; Gillian found herself wondering how long he had been able to hold the pose.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she said.

  “It’s the visuality,” he explained. “Very important.”

  “I think you’ve misjudged me, Mr. Caradoc,” she said.

  “I don’t think so, Mrs. Blake,” he said. “And I want to be completely honest with you. Everything that you say from now on will be recorded.”

  “Will be what?”

  “Taped,” he said. “If I ever write about this experience, if there is anything here worth writing about—and that should be a challenge to you, Mrs. Blake—I want to get it right, letter-perfect. I want to tell it like it is.”

  “You’re wasting your time—there’ll be nothing to tell.” She backed slowly toward the door. Caradoc, crossing the room with surprising agility, stood between Gillian and her escape route. Still in a clear state of sexual excitation, he advanced toward her.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Please don’t.”

  “I won’t do anything you don’t want,” he said.

  “I don’t want anything but out,” she said.

  “That’s what you say,” he replied. “Some day you’ll thank me for what I’m going to do.”

  Gillian, paralyzed now, saw his right hand, his good hand, reach out, felt his fingers close slowly over the top of her sweater. And then in one swift sure move, he ripped the sweater away from her. Then he reached for the skirt, shredded that.

  “This is rape,” Gillian said.
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  “It may begin as rape,” he said, “but that’s not the way it generally winds up.”

  “Please don’t,” Gillian said. “I don’t want this to happen, not this way. I’ll come back some other time when we feel better. I’ll.…”

  The promise was interrupted as his hands, gentle now, reached around her and expertly unlatched the brassiere strap. As it fell to the floor, Gillian turned and ran toward the first door she saw. A mistake—it was the bedroom and it was too late to escape. Caradoc stood at the doorway to the room, then came toward her, forcing her to retreat back onto the most enormous bed she had ever seen.

  He stood over her then and smiled down at her. She closed her eyes to shut out the sight of the man but there was no way to eliminate the other sensations.

  Gillian felt cold. She shivered, braced herself for the attack that never came. What Gillian recalled later was the surprising gentleness of Caradoc as he applied himself to his task. For long moments he did not put a hand on her. There was only his mouth to reckon with—a mouth that fastened itself to her throat, then moved down to her breasts. She could feel his tongue as it traced the outline of her rib cage, paused to explore her navel, continued to chart a downward course.

  Despite herself, despite a fear she could not really explain, Gillian felt the warmth returning. The mouth kissing, pleading, cajoling, insisting. Gillian felt herself relaxing, felt the tension flowing from her legs, felt her body beginning to writhe, responding to the mouth with the harmonic precision of an orchestra responding to a conductor’s baton. The tongue was alternatingly gentle and impertinent, loving and demanding—very much like Caradoc himself.

  Gillian was aware of an argument raging within herself, a great debate between body and mind. She felt herself lose all control over her legs. The insistent tongue urged them open and they opened. She felt her back stiffen and arch. It was not what she wanted, not really, but she found her hands reaching down to Caradoc’s head, holding tight to his long blue-black hair, encouraging him now, guiding him, directing him.