I went over and sat on the couch while he took a quick pull on the brandy bottle and then disappeared beneath the black cloth and went to work loading the camera with a fresh roll. Aileen finished her cigarette and came over and sat down next to me.
I reached for her.
“Not just yet,” Gregor called out cheerfully. “I’ll be set in a sec, keed.”
“Aileen,” I whispered, “you’ll drive me up the walls.”
“Poor baby.”
“Look, I—”
She ran her tongue over her lips. This was a little trick of hers that didn’t exactly leave me cold when she did it first thing in the morning over instant coffee and cold cornflakes. Now it was absolutely criminal.
“You’ll like this,” she said.
“Ready to roll,” Gregor said.
“God in Heaven,” I said.
“Lie down, baby.” Her mouth was inches from my ear, blowing into it as she whispered. “Poor baby has had a mean night, huh? Mama will fix.” Her hand moved over my chest and belly. My stomach contracted violently. “Ticklish,” she murmured, blowing into my ear some more. The hand went on its merry way and grabbed. “Got small again,” she said. “But Mama’s gonna fix that, too.”
Click!
I really felt like a baby, too. I lay there like a lump and felt so small and weak and helpless and so goddamned young I wanted to curl up and die. She kissed me on the mouth, and then on the throat, and then her mouth moved downward so that her long blond hair brushed over my face and chest and stomach.
Click!
I had my eyes closed, and my body was sort of stretched out the way you do when you float on your back in a swimming pool. I had that same kind of buoyant feeling, too.
She kissed it, and her hands did things, and the camera made stupid clicking noises, and the hard core was harder than ever. I could feel the blood in my head and I thought I was going to have a brain hemorrhage and die.
She did a million teasing things with her mouth. But there wasn’t any contact to speak of. Just her warm breath.
Click!
Breathing in and out, in and out.
Moistly.
Oh God, I thought, oh God, don’t stop, for Christ’s sake don’t stop, whatever you do, don’t stop, just another minute, just another second, God, don’t stop—
Click!
And she stopped.
Since then I must have tried a thousand times to figure out why she bothered getting started if she wasn’t going to finish it. I mean, face it, it’s not as though she was some drippy virgin who didn’t realize that a man had to finish what he started or get horribly frustrated. Everybody knows this; anybody old enough to read Ann Landers’ column can figure it out. And Aileen was a long ways from a virgin. She may not have slept with anybody but Gregor since they were married, but I’m sure she must have had a few hundred men before he came around.
So she obviously knew what she was doing, but then why do it? She wasn’t a cruel person. She was nice, really, and she seemed to like me.
I mean, I could understand why she felt compelled to perform the act without any actual contact. That is, I could understand it about as well as I could understand why it was all right for us to pet like crazy but not all right for me to get into her. Which is to say that I didn’t understand and it didn’t make any sense but at least I knew the basic rules of the game.
But if she was going to leave me high and dry, why start anything in the first place? What was the point? Gregor had been ready to pack up and go. So had I. And she hadn’t wanted to have anything done to her. I was just supposed to lie there and leave everything to her, and I did, and it hadn’t ended quite the way I had hoped.
I lay there like an overwound watch, going ping ping ping inside and staying drawn hellishly tight. I couldn’t talk or think or breathe or see. I didn’t know where she was, but I knew where she belonged. In Hell, with a hot poker rammed up her behind.
And then I heard her voice, talking, not to me, but beyond me, to Gregor:
“Honey, baby, I have to give him some relief. He’s a kid, you know, and I guess it was all too much for him. The excitement. Being with me, and in front of the camera and all, and going through the motions, and the different positions, and then this last thing. I think it stopped being just an act for him, and he got very excited, and if you look at him now, you can see how tense he is.”
“So?”
“I have to do something.”
“Well, I don’t—”
“I wouldn’t be unfaithful.”
“Because I wouldn’t like that, keed.”
“And I wouldn’t do it.”
“I should hope not. I should just sonofabitching hope you wouldn’t.”
Her hand on my leg.
“But this would be just like a massage. I knew a girl who was a nurse in a hospital—”
“That’s the best place to be a nurse.”
“—and she told me how they used to give the patients rubdowns all the time, and if they got excited they would give that a rubdown, too, and that isn’t wrong, do you think?”
“I suppose not.”
Her hand gripped me.
“Of course it isn’t,” she said, her voice softer than ever now, and now she was talking less to him than to me, and her words moved in a jerky rhythm as her soft sure hand moved up and down, up and down, pumping up and down.
“Of course…it isn’t…wrong…baby…baby…it’s all right…all right…”
Not like this, I thought. Not with your hand, and not in the middle of the air, not like this.
“It’s all right…it’s all right…it’s all right…it’s all right…”
Oh, yeah, I thought. Okay. Sure, sure, oh. “It’s all RIGHT!”
It was all right, all right.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE NEXT DAY Gregor didn’t bother doing his sidewalk photographer number. He went off to see Mark Somebody to turn a suitcase full of dirty pictures into as much money as possible.
“Soon as I get back, keed,” he said, “you get your twenty-five smackers.”
“Fifty,” I reminded him.
“Oh, sure. My mistake.”
“Sure.”
As soon as he was out the door, I went into the kitchen and cornered Aileen. She asked me how come I wasn’t working that morning. I said that a photographer’s assistant didn’t have much to do when the photographer wasn’t on the job. There wasn’t much point in me handing out the little yellow cards if there was nobody on hand to take the pictures.
“I meant one of your other jobs,” she said.
“Well, I didn’t think I’d bother today. I earned fifty bucks last night.”
“You make sure Greg gives you the whole fifty, Chip. Sometimes he tries to chisel people.”
“He already tried.”
“Well, you get the whole fifty. You worked for it.”
“Yeah.”
I wanted to reach for her but I didn’t quite know how to go about it. You can’t imagine how goddamned awkward the whole thing was. I mean, here we had gotten in this wild tangle the night before, with results that I told you about in probably too much detail already, so we won’t go into that all over again, and now here it was morning and she was in the kitchen, wearing an apron and rinsing out coffee cups, and her whole attitude left me feeling that last night had never happened, that it was another dream of mine and when I woke up I would have a damp sticky sock in the bed with me. I mean, I knew it wasn’t a dream, but it might as well have been.
“Chip?”
“What?”
“Are you angry with me?”
I looked at her. “Why should I be?”
“Because I teased you last night.”
“Well, I knew what I was getting into.”
“What you weren’t getting into, you mean.”
“Well.”
“You’re not angry?”
“No.”
“I’m glad.” She grinned quickly.
“Because I like you a lot, Chip.”
This time I did reach for her, and she moved her head aside, and I missed. I suppose practically any woman can make practically any man feel like an idiot, but it seemed to me that either she was particularly good at it or that I was particularly inept.
She said, “Last night was business, Chip.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“I’m not going to say I didn’t enjoy it.”
“You enjoyed it, huh?”
“Why, of course I did. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with enjoying your work, do you?”
“I guess not.”
“I should certainly hope not.” She put the dish towel on the drainboard and walked past me to the living room. There wasn’t an abundance of room in the kitchen, and she managed to brush against me pretty good on the way, giving me the full treatment with that round rear end of hers. She got to me, all right. I suppose I’m pretty easy to get to, generally speaking, but old Aileen had a real knack for it as far as I was concerned.
I followed her into the living room. She went around straightening things up and emptying ashtrays, talking as she went. “There’s nothing wrong with enjoying any kind of work,” she went on. “I wouldn’t pose for those pictures if I didn’t get a certain amount of kick out of it. I like to think of all those people looking at pictures of me and getting excited. Sometimes I stop and think that there are men all over the country looking at naked pictures of me and playing with themselves. Having sex with me in their minds. And couples looking at different pictures of me, either alone or with someone, and getting so hot and bothered that they want to make love. When I think about that sort of thing I get a very strange feeling.”
“Sure,” I said.
She put an ashtray back on a tabletop and turned to look at me. “Just think of all the people who will look at those pictures of the two of us,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Do you like the idea?”
“I don’t know. I got bothered by that before. I mean, I thought somebody might recognize me, but then I thought that I didn’t have anybody to care one way or the other. If some jerk I went to some school with saw it, well, what do I care? You know, let him envy me, let him eat his heart out. If I had any family it might be different, I guess.”
“Poor baby. All alone in the world.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“I called you that last night.”
“I know.”
She crossed to the television set, switched it on, collapsed neatly on the couch. My couch. She patted the cushion next to her, and I remembered how she had given the same invitational pat to the green couch in the studio last night. I felt lightheaded and shaky.
I pretended not to notice the invitation. “I think I’ll have another cup of coffee,” I told her. “You want one?”
“I’ll make them.”
“No, stay there,” I said. “I, uh, I need the exercise.”
She was still sitting in the same spot when I brought back the two cups of coffee. She said, “You know, Chip, that was fun last night.”
“Here’s your coffee.”
“For you, too.” She put the cup down next to mine on the coffee table. “We could have a lot of fun, you know. There are lots of times like this morning when Gregor is out and I’m home all alone. If you didn’t try to force things, we could have a real good time.”
“What kind of a real good time?”
“Like last night. Except without anybody watching or snapping pictures.”
“And without finishing what we started.”
She raised her eyebrows. “You finished, didn’t you? I spent half an hour wiping the floor. If that wasn’t what you would call finishing—”
“You know what I mean.”
She put her hand on my cheek. “Didn’t you get your kicks last night, baby?”
“I wanted to do it the right way.”
“There’s no right way, honey. Sex may be a game but there’s no yo-yo keeping score. Whatever turns you on, that’s the right way.”
“I never got laid in my life, Aileen.”
I turned away as I said this. I felt excited and happy and miserable all at the same time, and all tied in knots. She had my hand in both of hers and was petting it.
“I know that, Chip.”
“It’s pretty obvious, huh?”
“Well, reading between the lines of what you said. It’s a big thing for you, huh? Being all hung up about being a virgin.” I nodded.
“Being a virgin, you know, is something everybody is and something everybody gets over sooner or later. Even I was a virgin once. You may find that hard to believe—”
“Cut it out, will you?”
“Hey.” I turned and looked at her. She gave me the wise grin, and some of the tension went out of me. “Now listen a minute, baby,” she said. “We can have a little fun, if you want, or we can just let it stay nice and loose between us, if you’d rather have it that way, but one thing not to do is be so serious about everything, because that’s nothing but a big bring-down.”
I nodded again. “But why can’t we—”
“Because we can’t. Because that’s where I draw the line. That’s for Greg and nobody else. Look, if all you want to do is stick it in, you can go out and find a pro. You’re getting fifty dollars from Greg. You’re a rich man. If you want to just get on top of some syphilitic pig and get rid of your precious cherry, all you have to do—”
“You know what I want.”
“Uh-huh, baby, but I also know what I want. And that’s some nice tender sweetness from my baby, and you don’t have to worry, I won’t tease, I won’t leave you frustrated. You’ll come, honey, and so will I, and it’ll be very nice, just leave everything to me.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“What’s to say?” She laughed deep in her throat. “Come here,” she said. “Do something brilliant, like kissing me.”
Do you have any idea how many ways there are to do it without really doing it?
Neither did I.
There’s just no end to the possibilities. There were just three rules to the game—or one rule, actually, that closed three doors to me. What it boiled down to, really, was that I couldn’t enter her. (With what she still liked to call my hard core, that is. Other things, yes.) I guess there’s precedent for this. In the legal definitions of rape and sodomy and other nice things like that, the dividing line is that same line Aileen used. Penetration. If you don’t get in, the argument goes, then you haven’t really Done Anything Wrong.
We didn’t Do Anything Wrong.
But we did just about everything else.
You know something? I’ve thought about it, and I’ve come to the conclusion that if only I hadn’t been a virgin at the time, I would have been the happiest man on earth. Because from a physical standpoint there was nothing frustrating about the relationship we had. I was getting there, and not in the therapeutic massage way I had made it in the photo studio, either. We weren’t playing that little game at all. It had been strictly for Gregor’s benefit, and now that we were on our own, we didn’t try to hide the fact that the name of the game was Getting Kicks.
Sometimes we spent five or six hours in a row on that couch, and by the time we stopped I had made it so many times that I didn’t have the strength to lift a finger, let alone my unhard core. So in simple terms of the amount of sex I was getting I was in the class of a man on a honeymoon with a nymphomaniac, for Pete’s sake.
So in that sense it was really great. The more I got the more I wanted, and the more I wanted the more I got, and it looked as though it could just go on that way forever and it would keep getting better all the time.
Here’s a comparison that you might want to pass up if you’re very heavy on religion. Not to offend anybody, but I think it fits. It was like being Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, with Paradise there, just everything you could want all spread out for you, except for these two trees
that you couldn’t go near. You could eat anything else in the world but the fruit of the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, so naturally what did you want? Right the first time. Well, so did I. The fruit was a cherry instead of an apple, and I wanted to get rid of it, not take a bite out of it, but otherwise it added up to about the same thing.
(Incidentally, suppose Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Life instead of the Tree of Knowledge. Or from both of them. They’d still be alive, and the earth would be up to its neck in people. That doesn’t have anything to do with anything else, but it’s been bothering me ever since I was a little kid so I thought I would put it in. I’m supposed to be writing this straightforward, keeping to the subject and everything, but I was also told that the book ought to let the reader know how I feel about things and the kind of person I am, and frankly I think if I have to just tell everything absolutely cold and straight without putting down other things that come into my head while I’m sitting here, then the book might as well have been written by a machine. When I read a book, I like to have the feeling that a real human being actually sat down and wrote it, and that reading it will let me know something about him. Some books give you the feeling that the sheets of paper came out of the paper mill with the words already on them, for Pete’s sake. Untouched by human hands, like the plastic food in turnpike restaurants.)
Well, to get back to what I was saying, if you’re still with me, I sort of wish I could have rearranged my schedule so that I could have met Aileen five years later in life. That would have been perfect, I think. By then I would be twenty-two and years past being a virgin, but still young enough so that she would be the older woman showing me new ways to be the happiest kid on the block.
As it was, maybe I should have gone out and spent my fifty dollars (Gregor paid off in full, although he did make a halfhearted effort to make me settle for forty) on some professional prostitute. If I just could have crossed that barrier I would have stopped brooding about it. Or maybe I wouldn’t. I guess not, really. I guess it would be impossible for anyone in his right or wrong mind not to want to ball that woman in every way there was.
I got to Chicago in late February, I was at the Eagle Hotel for about two weeks, I moved in with Gregor and Aileen about three weeks before we had the picture-taking session, and it was Memorial Day weekend when I got out of there. I just worked it all out with paper and pencil to save you the trouble, assuming you’re interested, and the way I figure it there was a stretch of about six weeks between the night we took the pictures and the morning I left Chicago.
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