“Hey,” he said.
She raised her face.
“Do you always dance like this?”
“I don’t know. I just follow,” she said.
“Do you know what you’re doing to me?” he asked. “I’m getting very excited.”
Her eyes were level. “I didn’t know I was doing that. I thought you were doing it to me.”
“You mean you’re excited too?”
“I think if you let go of me I’d fall. My legs feel so weak.”
He stared at her. He had been wrong. All the time he had thought she was just an innocent little girl. Abruptly the orchestra broke into a fast number. He stopped and looked down at her. “JeriLee, let’s get out of here.”
“Okay,” she said and followed him through the open terrace doors. They cut across the lawn toward the parking lot. She didn’t speak until he held the door of his car open for her. “Where are we going?”
“Someplace we can be alone,” he said.
She nodded as if she had known that was what he would say and got into the car. In ten minutes they pulled into the driveway of a small house just off the beach.
He cut the motor and looked at her. “There’s no one at home. My father won’t be in from New York until tomorrow and the housekeeper’s gone home.”
She looked at him without comment.
“Don’t you have anything to say?”
She looked down at her hands folded in her lap, then back at him. “I’m a little frightened.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t be,” he said, not knowing her real fears. “No one will know you’re here. The nearest neighbor is a half mile down the beach.”
She didn’t answer.
“There’s a heated pool out back,” he said. “It’s great to swim there at night. Would you like that?”
She nodded. “But I don’t have a swimsuit.”
He smiled. “That’s one of the nice things about swimming at night. It’s dark.” He got out of the car and walked around to open her door. “Coming?”
She suddenly laughed. “Why not?”
“What are you laughing about?”
“I’m afraid you’d never understand.” For the first time in a month she was beginning to feel better. It was almost as if she had always known that this was the way it would happen.
They walked through the house and out the back door to the pool. He pointed to a small cabana. “You can leave your things in there.”
“Okay,” she said, starting toward it. “Where are you going?” she asked when she noticed he was heading back into the house.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said. “I just want to get a few cold drinks.”
Entering the cabana, JeriLee looked at herself in the large mirror over the vanity table. There was a calmness about her face that surprised her because it did not reflect the excitement seething within her. Quickly she unfastened her blouse and her breasts sprang free. The nipples were swollen and distended. Softly she touched them. They still ached but the touch was pleasant. Actually that was why she had not worn her brassiere. It had hurt her breasts too much. Gently she pressed her breasts again and felt the pleasure run down into her groin. She slipped out of her skirt. Her panties were moist and she could see the dark pubic hairs clearly in the wet nylon material. Slowly she stepped out of them and spread them neatly on the bench so that they could dry.
She wondered what he was thinking. She remembered how hard he had been when they were dancing, so hard that it hurt as he pressed against her mound. Twice she had almost stumbled and fallen as she climaxed during the dance. Each time she wondered if he had known what had happened, but there were no signs that he did.
She heard him call from outside. “I’m back. Are you coming out?”
She pressed the light switch, plunging the cabana into darkness, and opened the door. He was spreading some towels on the large chaises near the far end of the pool. He was still dressed, his back toward her. Silently she slipped into the water. He was right, it was warm and soft.
He turned quickly. “That’s not fair,” he said. “You got in before I could even see you.”
She laughed. “You’re the one that’s not fair. You’re not even undressed yet.”
He bent over the table and turned on the portable radio he had brought with him. The music drifted softly across the pool. With his back to her, he undressed quickly, dropping his clothes to the ground, then swiftly he turned and, almost before she could catch a glimpse of him, dived in. He came up on the other side of the pool.
“How do you like it?” he asked. “Is the water warm enough?”
“I like it. This is the first time I’ve ever gone skinny dipping. It feels good. Better than when you have a suit on.”
“That’s what my father says. He says that if nature meant for us to have clothes we would have been born with them.”
“Your father might be right,” she said. “I just never thought about it.”
“My father has a lot of peculiar ideas. About everything. He says if people would only learn to be honest with themselves it would be the end of most of the problems in the world.”
“Are you honest with yourself?” she asked.
“I try to be.”
“Do you think you could be honest with me?”
“I think so.”
“Why did you bring me here?”
“I wanted to be alone with you. Why did you come?”
She didn’t answer. Instead she swam away toward the deep end of the pool. He swam after her. Abruptly she turned under water and came up on the other side of him. He laughed and caught her at the shallow end.
He held her by the arm. “You didn’t answer my question?”
Her eyes looked into his. “Because you weren’t being honest with me.”
“Why do you think I brought you here?” he asked.
“Because I thought”—she hesitated a moment and then, unable to think of another way to say exactly what she meant, she went on—“you wanted to fuck me.”
He was startled. “If you thought that why did you come?”
“Because I wanted you to fuck me.”
Abruptly he let go of her arm and climbed out of the pool. He picked up a towel and tied it around his waist and made himself a rum and Coke. He sipped it without speaking.
She rested her arms on the edge of the pool. “Are you angry with me? Did I say anything wrong?”
He took another swallow of his drink. “Christ, JeriLee, you sound cheap and vulgar.”
“I’m sorry. I was only trying to be honest. I felt you against me while we were dancing and I thought that was what you wanted.”
“But girls don’t act like that,” he protested. “You just don’t make it with every guy that gets a hard-on for you.”
“I don’t.”
“But the way you talk. What’s a fellow supposed to think?”
“Is that what you think?”
“I don’t know what to think. I never had a girl talk like that to me before.”
Suddenly the warm feeling left her and she was perilously close to tears. She was silent for a moment. When she spoke her voice was calm. “It’s getting late, Walt. I think you better take me home. My parents will be wondering what happened to me.”
***
He let her out of the car in front of her house but made no move to get out of the car himself.
“Good night, Walt,” she said.
“Good night,” he said abruptly. Then he put the car into gear and drove off, leaving her on the sidewalk. Slowly she went into the house.
Her father looked up from the television set as she came in. She kissed his cheek. “Where’s Mom?”
“She was tired and went up to bed,” he said. “You’re home early. Who brought you?”
“A boy named Walt. He’s one of the members.”
“Is he nice?”
“Yes.” She started from the room
, then stopped. “Dad.”
“Yes?”
“Is there such a thing as being too honest?”
“That’s a strange question, darling. Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. It seems to me that whenever I answer a question truthfully my friends get upset with me.”
He looked at her thoughtfully. “Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth. They would rather live with illusion.”
“Is it always like that?”
“In a way I guess it is. I try to be as honest as I can with people. But there are times when it’s not always possible.”
“Are you honest with me?”
“I hope I am.”
“Do you love me?”
He reached over and turned off the television set. Then he turned and held out his arms to her. “I think you know I do.”
She knelt in front of his chair and laid her head on his chest. He closed his arms around her and held her quietly against him. For a long while they did not speak.
Finally in a tight small voice of hurt she said, “You know, Dad, it’s not easy growing up to be a woman.”
He kissed her cheek and tasted the salty wetness of the tears on her cheeks. A curious sadness came over him. “I know, darling,” he said gently. “But then I think that it’s not easy to grow up to be anything.”
Chapter 9
It was like a storm that had passed. For weeks the pressure of having to know and understand the nature of her sexual being had been tearing her apart. Then one morning she awakened and the urgency was over.
She knew what she did not know. But she was no longer driven by the need to force the knowledge. The things she felt were part of her expanding consciousness and somehow she knew she would experience them all in their own time. She became more herself, more relaxed, more able to enjoy the simple exchange of being with other people.
Once again she and Bernie could be friends. Now when they parked and petted at the Point she was able to respond without having to push further and further into her desires. Sex no longer permeated her every thought. She knew that it would come in time. But it would come when she was equipped to deal with it as a part of her total being.
And it was not with Bernie alone that she had dates. Martin too was a good friend. They would sit on her porch for hours talking about the books they had read and discussing different people in town. Often they shared laughter at the ridiculous postures that some people assumed in order to seem important. Once she even let Martin read a short story she had written.
It was about a mayor of a small town who during the war became depressed because all the towns around him had war heroes and his small town did not. So he made up his mind to make a hero out of the first returning veteran. It happened to be a man who had gotten a medical discharge and had never been near the front. Nevertheless he was given a welcoming ceremony at which everything went wrong. In a way it was very much like the story of her real father but with a twist. In the midst of the proceedings, two M.P.s appeared and took the hero away, because it seemed that he had faked his discharge from a psycho ward.
“It’s great, JeriLee,” he told her enthusiastically after he’d finished it. “I recognize almost everybody. You should send it away to a magazine.”
She shook her head. “I’m not ready yet. I still feel there are too many things wrong with it. Besides I’m working on another I think might be better.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s about a girl like me. About growing up in a town like this.”
“Can I read it when you’re finished?”
“It may not be finished for a long time. There are too many things I have to learn before I can begin to write about them.”
“I understand that,” Martin said. “Hemingway says the best writing comes from gut experience.”
“I don’t like Hemingway. He knows nothing about women. He seems not to care about them at all.”
“Who do you like?”
“Fitzgerald. At least he feels for the women characters in his books as much as he does for the men.”
“To me, all of his men seem strange, weak sort of,” Martin said after a moment. “They seem to be afraid of women.”
“Funny. I think that about Hemingway. His men always seem to me more afraid of women because they are always trying to prove themselves as men.”
“I have to think about that,” he said, getting to his feet. “Now I’d better be getting home.”
“Everything all right there now?” she asked. They had long since dropped pretenses and she was openly inquiring about the problems he had with his parents.
“A little better,” he said. “At least they’re not drinking as much now that Dad’s got that job at the gas station.”
“I’m glad.” She rose from the chair. “Good night.”
Martin stood looking at her without moving.
She touched her cheek self-consciously. “Is there anything wrong?”
“No.”
“Then what are you staring at?”
“You know I never realized it before. You really are very beautiful.”
Another time she might have smiled but there was a sincerity in his voice that moved her. “Thank you,” she said simply.
“Very beautiful,” he repeated, then he smiled and ran down the steps. “Good night, JeriLee,” he called.
Bit by bit JeriLee’s popularity was growing. There was something in her that seemed to attract friends. Boys and girls alike. Maybe it was because she dealt with each of them on their own terms and within their own frame of reference. At the same time she was still a very private person. In the end they liked to talk to her because they all felt that she really listened.
Once the season was in full swing, the club stayed open every night for dinner and there was a dance on Wednesdays as well as on Fridays and Saturdays. Since it became impractical for the musicians to return to the city every night, Mr. Corcoran put them up in a small cottage out in the back of the tennis courts. The back of the cottage faced out on the parking lot, so they did not have to come through the club in order to get to the bandstand.
JeriLee, who now worked late on Wednesday nights, was on the terrace railing sipping a Coke and talking to Fred between sets when Walt came out the terrace doors.
“JeriLee,” he said, ignoring Fred completely.
It had been more than a month since that night at his house and this was the first time he had spoken to her.
“Yes?”
“I have some friends down from school and we’re getting up a beach party. I thought you might like to join us.”
JeriLee looked at Fred. There was no expression on his face. She turned back to Walt. “Do you know Fred?”
“Yes. Hello, Fred.”
“Waltuh,” Fred’s voice was as expressionless as his face.
“It’ll be fun,” Walt said. “And if the Sound is too cold, there’s always the pool at my house.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I have to be here early tomorrow. I’m working lunch.”
“Come on, JeriLee. We won’t be too late. We’ll just have a few drinks and a few laughs, that’s all.”
“No, thank you,” she said politely. “As a matter of fact I was thinking of leaving early. There’s still time for me to catch the eleven thirty bus.”
“You don’t have to do that. We can drop you off at your house.”
“I don’t want to trouble you. It’s out of your way.”
“Not much. Besides it’s no trouble.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll get the guys,” Walt said and went back into the cocktail lounge.
Fred looked at her. “You got a thing for that boy?”
JeriLee thought for a moment. “I thought I did. But not now.”
“He’s angry with you,” Fred said.
She was puzzled. “How do you know?”
“I feel it. But I could be wrong. He also don’t like me much. But that might
be because he don’t like black folk in general.”
“I hope you’re wrong. He might be a little spoiled but I wouldn’t want to think that about him.”
It was time for the orchestra to go back to work. Fred looked at her. “See you on the weekend?”
“Sure.” She nodded. “Sing pretty for the people.”
He smiled. “I always do.”
“Good night, Fred.”
“Night, JeriLee.”
The sound of music began to drift through the doors just as Walt came out.
“Okay, JeriLee. Let’s go.” He started down the terrace steps. “We can cut across here to the parking lot.”
“What about your friends?”
“They already went to the car with Marian Daley.”
She followed him down the steps and they crossed the tennis courts to the parking lot. She could hear the laughter coming from his car. “Sure I wouldn’t be spoiling anything?” she asked. “I can still make the bus. I don’t mind.”
“I said it was okay, didn’t I?” He sounded annoyed.
“Okay,” she said.
Silently they walked the rest of the way to the car. It was an open convertible. Marian and two boys were already in the back seat. “What took you so long?” one of the boys called as they came up.
“I had to sign the bar check,” Walt said. He opened the door of the car. “Fellows, this is JeriLee. JeriLee, Joe and Mike Herron. They’re brothers. You now Marian.”
JeriLee nodded. “Hi.”
Marian seemed cool, but both boys smiled and one of them held a bottle up to JeriLee. “Join the party,” he said. “Have a drink.”
“No, thank you,” JeriLee said.
“I’ll have one,” Walt said. He took the bottle and held it to his mouth. He took a long swallow, then handed the bottle back to the boy. “That’s good rum.”
“It should be.” The boy laughed. “Your father has nothing but the best.”
Walt closed the door and got in behind the wheel. He started the motor and gunned the car out of the parking lot. They turned down the highway in the direction that led away from her house.
The Lonely Lady Page 6