“—but how long was I—”
“In fever? Let’s see. This is Thursday, so that makes”—she tallied on her long, fine fingers: aristocratic fingers, they were—“about nine days. You were lucid some of the time, but not often.” She gave him a searching look, even as Eric reckoned the passage of time and calculated that Kristin was still at least a month out of New York.
“Tell me, did you kill a man named Johanson?” she asked abruptly.
My God! thought Eric. What dangerous secrets had he babbled from the caverns of delirium?
“Kristin is the name of the woman,” Joan was saying. “I know that beyond doubt. Even in fever, you spoke the name in a special way. But what of this Rolfson? What is he to you? When you spoke his name you”—and here Joan shuddered, in a way that was almost sexual—“you seemed to hate him enough to kill.”
Her body quivered again, as if the thought of such violence thrilled her more deeply than sex could or love might.
Exhausted by the fever, and still terribly weak, Eric tried to fashion a response. If Joan already knew these secrets, she must also have guessed…
“You’re no simple ship-jumping immigrant, are you? You’re an escaped murderer.”
The idea seemed to please her, pleased her in itself, above and beyond the fact that the knowledge extended her power over him. She looked at him a long while, then said: “Rest now. Forget about your past. All of it and everyone in it. I’m the best thing that has ever happened to you, and we’ll do splendidly together. Rest now, because I have plans for you.”
During the next weeks, as Eric slowly but steadily recovered his health and strength, he knew there must be a madness in Joan’s method, but he could not deduce what it was, or of what elements it might be composed. She had him examined regularly by the doctor, saw to his food, brought in a barber to groom him and a tailor to prepare him new clothes, fashionable in cut and expensive of cloth. Where had she gotten the money for these things?
“Liz’s creditors missed some things,” she explained. “For example, Mick’s horses were stabled on Long Island at the time of mother’s…death…”
She had difficulty with the word death. Eric reasoned that such hesitancy was natural, in the light of all that had happened to Joan recently. It was amazing that she was holding up so well.
“Anyway, I sold the horses and…certain other things. We have enough to live on until you recover fully, which, judging by your eyes and appetite, ought to be soon.”
He watched her, wondering. She was standing at one of the high windows, her back to him, looking out over the grit and sprawl of the city. Or was she studying his reflection in the window glass? He had not mentioned the Valkyrie or Kristin again, not only because he had to be genuinely grateful to Joan for what she had done for him and thus did not want to offend her, but also because he sensed that Joan, in her particular feminine way, regarded Kristin—whom she had never seen and of whom Eric had never spoken save with the greatest circumspection—as a challenge or threat. It was now mid-April, and within days the Valkyrie was due in New York Harbor. Eric had to decide how to proceed. He was bound, by gratitude as well as honor, to repay Joan in some way, or at least promise to repay her, and to bring to an end—hopefully an amicable end—his strange relationship with her. He considered his situation: his health was almost back to normal, and although he had no money of his own, two fine suits Joan had bought for him hung in the closet next to his old dock-worker’s tatters, vestiges of a past life.
Eric was just about to speak, to try and discuss things with Joan, but she turned away from the window and came to him. Dressed in a warm robe, he reclined against piled pillows on the bed. Her lips were soft with a smile; her eyes gleamed with a woman’s sudden hunger. Eric’s body read the gleam before his mind did, and the hot blood of arousal coursed within him before she did what he knew she was about to do: pull down from her shoulders and full perfect breasts another of her elegant gowns, this gown soft and rose-pink as the concavity of musk and flesh by which she meant to hold and pleasure him.
“I know we have much to discuss,” she whispered huskily, letting the gown fall about her ankles, the gown beneath which she was solid and splendid and lovely and altogether bare, “but that is for later. For now, I have another need. And so do you.”
With that she knelt upon the bed, leaned forward, and with utter naturalness, reached beneath his robe and touched him, smiling with pleasure and knowledge to find he was already in her spell. Eric groaned, both in pleasure and woe. The image of Kristin flashed through his mind, but there was no time, because, expertly, Joan had thrown open the robe, swung upon him as if mounting a horse, and slid down upon him, taking him into herself. She rocked easily upon him for a moment, leaning forward also to kiss him—a kiss he could not help but return—and then suddenly she was up and away from him, smiling wickedly, and he felt cool air tingling where he had been enclosed and voluptuously warm. He gasped in surprise and despair.
Joan knelt above him, grinning wickedly. “Whoever is the one you remember,” she said, “I shall now make you forget.”
And Joan tried. She made Eric’s brain dance, his body burn, stripping him for herself, for the pleasure of her eyes and body. Cooing sofly in anticipation of her own eventual glory and release, she prolonged everything, every glance, touch, kiss, every caress of finger or body or tongue. She sensed, from the beginning, that Eric, because of his love for the girl of his homeland, would try to hold something back, would try to keep from her some private part of himself, even though she might milk him, and milk him again and again, of every drop of his essence. Oh, yes, she wanted his essence, but she wanted his spirit more, and she advanced to have it, trailing kisses all along his body, and coming down again and again to stroke and kiss the utter length of him, only to leave him free and open and begging.
Beneath her, Eric lay quiet at first, entranced and dazzled by the sensations she gave, feeling his mind and all control flow away from him, like sweet water into the quiet earth, like sweet raindrops feeding the seed. That seed was pure passion, and soon it sprang forth. There was neither place nor time, only pleasure and need and need of pleasure. Breath left him as he felt flick and swirl of tongue, soft fingertips teasing the rise of his juice. No more, no more, no more, but then she would take away her kiss, and in the silence of his mind, Eric would cry: No, more, more!
Then for a long, long time Joan spoke only with her tongue. Finally she came up to him and stretched out long beside him, telling him to roll upon her, telling him not with words but only with that smile he would never read, would never be able to read. At that moment her power over him was virtually limitless, a witch’s brew of hunger, dark knowledge, and sex. He thought of her in bed with her brother, but that meant nothing now. She might have been to bed with God. Who cared? Now it was his turn and he took it, knowing all the while that, in the strange heart of her enigma, Joan was taking her turn with him, putting her hold upon his soul.
It was a contradiction which did not escape him: if this were a joust, he rose and she fell, but only because she chose to fall. And he knew, even as he gave up his body to itself, to shoot and shoot and shoot again, shoot deep within the belly of her pleasure and desire, that, for trackless reasons of her own, she had decided neither to give him up nor let him be.
“Did that make you forget?” she asked, much later. Eric struggled up out of a drowsy, lascivious miasma that was at least as gripping as delirium, but a trance he was loath to relinquish.
“Joan…” he began.
“Shhhhhh. Let me talk. You rest quietly. I’ve taken a lot out of you, and I don’t want you to go getting sick on me again. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
“We have?”
There in the bed she explained it to him. Pulling the covers up to their chins, snuggling next to him like the most tender of fleshly conspirators, stroking him easily now and again where he alternately waxed and waned in the subdued brilliances of ecstatic torpor
and remembered delight, she told Eric what she meant to do, and how she wanted him to help her do it.
“War is a sad time for so many people,” she began, “both for poor guys like my brother Mick, in the army, and also for everybody at home. So many people are lonely, and even more of them can’t find work. Well, you know about that. But you haven’t been out on the streets in weeks. It’s even worse out there now. It is. More darkies come north every day. More immigrants arrive by ship. Having a boardinghouse was all right—”
Eric remembered the money stolen from him there.
“—and having a tavern was also good business—”
Eric recalled how gullible he had been.
“—but now I want to do something bigger, something that will make real money.”
“Is that right?” he asked. He did not doubt her sincerity. He simply felt that her ideas of “big” money were founded on a lust for quick money, and were therefore insubstantial. “Real money in America comes from industry and commerce.”
She laughed. “The poor boy speaks. And how would you know?”
“I have nothing. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t observed how this country works. The great fortunes are founded in shipping, or coal, or steel, like Andrew Carnegie’s fortune. And next there is oil.”
“Oil?”
“Yes, I’ve read of it. It will be the fuel of the future. To run engines. Provide light, heat. Oil has recently been discovered in Pennsylvania, too.”
“Pennsylvania?” Joan echoed, with considerable interest. “Why, that’s not so far away.”
“What did you have in mind to make real money?” he asked her.
“Well,” Joan answered, “before you said that about all the money in oil, I was thinking of doing something that would help people.”
“Help people?” That hardly sounded like an idea coming from the Joan Leeds Eric knew. He looked at her closely. She seemed to mean it. Was it possible that he had misjudged her all along? After all, she had paid his expenses all this while, had cared for him when not another soul in all New York would have given him the time of day.
“I want to help poor young girls like myself,” Joan was saying. “That’s what I want to do.”
Eric lifted himself up upon one elbow. “That’s fine, but how?”
Beneath the covers, she squeezed him tenderly, erotically. She kissed him. “By giving them a home,” she said.
Eric knew before she told it. He knew her well enough now; he had been through varied and sufficient forms of travail and deceit, trickery and grief. Trust has its place, but wariness ought always to be sent first through the door. Joan in her fine gowns and Eric in his new suits were to meet ships in the harbor, scour the streets-of New York, walk the blocks of tenements and hovels. Looking for poor young girls to “help.”
“And New York is a bad place for them, too,” Joan was saying. “We might send some of them south, to places like Maryland and…what is it? Virginia? Where they could meet some nice army boys, and—”
“Where are you going to get the money to do this?” he asked, feigning innocence. “Living in a hotel like this one, not to mention food and clothing, must have pretty well exhausted Mick’s draft money and the proceeds from the sale of the horses.”
“You are not so innocent as you contrive to appear,” she rejoined. “The girls will trust you. You bring them to me and I’ll take care of the rest.”
Eric recalled Joan telling him once of the “house” Liz had intended to buy, a house for sailors and girls.
“We’ll live with money, and in style. You weren’t meant to be a poor but honest backbreaker. I saw that from the beginning. In addition to which,” she continued, squeezing him gently where the processes of nature were filling him again, “I will give you what I gave you before, only longer and better, whenever you have need of it. Or even for no reason at all.”
Joan moved to come down on him again, but this time he held her off. He was still weak, and she was a strong girl, but she held back, wondering.
“I owe you so much—”
“I’m glad you realize that.”
“—and I will repay it someday.”
“You don’t have to. Just join me, work with me, be mine.”
“But I simply cannot do what you are suggesting.”
Eric could see that Joan was growing angry, but she held it in check. “Then what will you do? I swear I’ve seldom—if ever—met a man who could accomplish as much as you, if you’d just use your good looks and your brains. But you don’t!”
Eric was stung by this, even from Joan, who had blithely offered him a position as a procurer of girls for whoredom.
“Your mind is still probably on that ship that’s due, isn’t it?” she went on. “Yes, your darling from the other side is coming, to whom you have been oh, so true…or is fidelity a part of being the fool you are?” Then she had another idea. “Could it be,” she demanded, wrapping a length of his hair in one hand and putting her face down next to his, “could it be that your lover is rich? Wealthy? Could it be that you are waiting for her to save you, so to speak?”
“It doesn’t matter if she is or not,” Eric blurted.
Joan laughed, genuinely amused. “What a quaint idea! What a truly quaint and noble notion. Tell me, is she beautiful?”
“Yes.”
Joan showed her breasts, posed. Lifted her chin. “As beautiful as I?”
“Look, you have been wonderful to me, taking care of me as you have, and—”
She flared again. “I don’t care how wonderful I am! Can’t you see it doesn’t matter? You look. I want you, and I always get what I want.”
“It’s not as you think. Kristin and I have promised one another that—”
“I don’t care what you’ve promised this Kristin, whether to buy her the Hudson Valley, or the Union army, or to do her ten times a night, I—”
Then, seeming to realize that her tone was all wrong, her manner doomed to antagonize Eric, Joan changed course.
“But enough of this,” she said soothingly, and kissed him on the cheek, as if the kiss were a signal to end a small lover’s spat. “I am sure you will come to your senses.”
Eric tried, once more, to tell her his truth. From her manner, he had no doubts that she possessed a strong vengeful nature, which she might exercise with delight if he crossed her. And she had heard God only knows what revelations while he’d babbled in fever.
“Kristin and I planned long ago to join and go away together.”
“Where?” The question was quick and cold.
“West, most likely. There are homestead lands available—”
“Farm?”
“It is what I did in the old country. Kristin was also from that life, until—”
“Until what?” Joan asked. Eric could see her eyes, see how they darkened as she concentrated, putting things together. She had a whip-and-trap mind; it missed little. “Rolfson!” Joan exclaimed. “The one you talked about with such hatred. She—Kristin—is with him, is she not?”
Eric admitted it.
Joan laughed, this time sympathetically. “What a poor fool you are. Poor and a fool, for all your big talk of oil and money! I ought to have figured it out sooner. It is unlikely a marriageable beauty would go untaken, and she has not. In fact it is my surmise that this Rolfson has money. Perhaps a great deal of money.”
“Money beats in your blood,” said Eric, not without bitterness.
“Why not?” Joan shrugged. “I shall have it, but I doubt you ever will.” And then she said something that bothered Eric very deeply, not so much at first, but more and more as the minutes crept by.
“A couple of years have gone by since you last saw this legendary sweetheart of yours. Things happen. People change. Except you. That is true; face it. You are the same as you were. A murderer on the run, without citizenship, or money, or a job, or the prospect of one. So tell me: What will your darling see, what will she think, when she comes down the ga
ngway and sees you!”
“This is only temporary,” retorted Eric. “It will not matter to her. We plan to—”
“Temporary!” she cried. “Temporary for two years. I would hate to hear your definition of permanent.”
Eric had begun to feel quite badly, under her accusatory and irrefutable words. His current plight would not matter to Kristin. He was sure of that. But it mattered to him! He began to feel a pale giddiness where his heart should have been.
“Oh, my words have finally begun to sink in, have they?” purred loan, kissing him on the lips. He did not respond. “You just tell me now, my fine strong Viking, that you will do as I say, and be mine. As friend, I’ll give you a start toward riches and power. But as enemy, I’ll leave you to flounder in the dirt, and don’t think I’ll forget, either, that you turned me down.”
But she did not give him a chance to answer. Instead, she roused him again to hard throbbing length—he, powerless to resist—and kissed him down his broad chest and flat stomach, took him into her wileful, smiling kiss. He lay there, immobilized in body by the agony of the pleasure she gave, immobilized in spirit by the plight to which his life had led him. This should not be! his spirit cried, for loan was the profane one, utterly and beyond redemption. But his spirit was weak, and Kristin, however pure, was far away. The kissing and stroking of Joan was all the world, and Eric gave himself up to her, could not help himself, and when, triumphantly, she brought him to the heights, it felt as if she had drawn all of him into herself: blood and marrow, bone and gristle, skull and brain and beating heart.
If Kristin had drunk his image from the waters of Sonnendahl Fjord, he realized suddenly, with a quickening sense of imminence, then just now, this very moment, profane Joan had drunk and swallowed his own body!
Now she slithered upward, serpentlike, and made him taste her tongue. “Did you feel that well and good?” she wanted to know.
“Yes.”
“That is for you, and always for you.”
Eric said nothing. Joan ordered them up a fine dinner of roast chicken, gravy and dumplings, baked apples, strong red wine.
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