The Jaded Sex

by Fletcher Bennett

  “You make another crack like that,” Lil said tightly “and you’re going to be damned sorry you ever opened your mouth.”

  “I bet you are, though. Come on—am I right? Are you?”

  Lil pivoted her head until she spotted a waitress. She motioned to the girl. The young man caught, the signal and leaned back in his chair. His expression grew wary.

  “You’re not going to make no trouble now, are you? I mean, all I did was ask you a simple question. let isn’t as if I asked you to go to bed, or anything.”

  Lil ignored him. When the waitress appeared beside the tabled the young man was tensed for flight.

  “Something else, miss?”

  “Another coffee,” said Lil. “And the check.”

  “Espresso again?”

  “No—make it a cup of American this time.” Lil thought for a moment. “Black.”

  The waitress nodded, scribbled a total on the check, and put it on the table.

  “Well, well,” said the young man. “Going to have some more coffee, huh? Maybe I’ll have a cup, too, and you and I can just sit here and talk a while. You like that?”

  Lil ignored him. The amount of the check startled her until she remembered how many hours she’d been in this place, and how many cups of coffee she’d poured down while waiting for Sam. She pulled a bill from her skirt pocket and laid it on top of the check.

  “Let’s get back to that hair,” he said. “About whether it’s red or not. You still didn’t tell me.”

  Lil looked up and saw the waitress approaching with her coffee. She forced her face to stay calm. “You really want to know?”

  “Sure,” he said eagerly. “I’m fascinated. I been fascinated since I first saw you, and that was like a half-hour ago. When I saw you weren’t with anybody, I came over to find out.”

  The waitress set down the coffee, picked up the check and the bill.

  “Keep it,” Lil said.

  “Thank you, miss.” The waitress headed back toward the rear of the place.

  “No,” Lil said, picking up her coffee.

  “No, what?” asked the young man. “No, you won’t tell me?”

  “It isn’t red all over,” said Lil.

  The fellow’s eyes bugged slightly. “Is that a fact?”

  Lil held the coffee cup carefully by the handle, feeling the heat of the liquid even through the thick porcelain. She balanced her elbow in the middle of the table. “That’s a fact,” she said.

  “Well—uh—” He waved a hand. “What color is it besides red?”

  “Brown,” she said. “Like this coffee.”

  He looked at the cup. “Hey, yeah? Is that so? What do you know about that?”

  As she got up, she deliberately upended the cup and poured the steaming coffee into his lap.

  The young man’s face went slack with shock. His eyes were blank, but there would be pain in them in a moment. Lil decided not to wait for that. She pushed her chair back, stood up, and walked quickly to the door.

  As she stepped through it into the street, she heard him begin howling. From the sound of it, she imagined he would be howling for some time to come.

  Smiling, she let the Friday crowds swallow her up.

  The smile didn’t last very long. She reached a comer, spotted a drugstore, and eased herself out of the mob into the place. There was a row of phone booths near the door, but they were all in use. She lit a cigarette, and waited.

  She watched the; faces passing by outside the glass doors. Some were attractive; some were ugly, some were distorted by drink, others by laughter, still others by lust. All of them seemed to be having a good time. None of them was Sam.

  Where could she be? Lil wondered. After spending an hour in that coffee shop, Lil had called Sam’s apartment, but there hadn’t been any answer. So she’d returned to her table and waited another hour. Then she’d called again, and an hour later a third time. There had never been any answer. And Sam hadn’t shown up.

  Maybe it was a good thing that boy had happened along and started annoying her. Lil would, probably have remained at that table until closing time at four A.M. if he hadn’t driven

  Could something have happened to Sam? Lil knew it was possible, but she couldn’t believe it. Nothing ever happened to Sam unless Sam wanted it to happen. That’s the way she was—in complete control of her own destiny at all times. That was one of the most attractive things about her.

  But Friday night was their steady night together. And the coffee-shop was their steady meeting-place. If something had come up which made it impossible for Sam to meet Lil as usual, she would have called the shop and left a message. That had happened before. On the other hand, if Sam hadn’t been feeling well, or if for some reason she simply hadn't been in the mood to get together with Lil that evening, then she would have been home to answer the phone.

  It didn’t make sense. On the other hand, it made the sort of sense Lil didn’t want to think about

  She looked at the phones, saw a girl leaving a booth, and moved in quickly. One last time, she thought as she slung the door closed. One more try. If Sam didn’t answer this time, then the hell with her.

  She reached into her skirt pocket and prodded around for a dime. The change was buried at the bottom beneath a tangle of bills, and she was forced finally to remove everything from her pocket and lay it out on the shelf under the phone. She had only one dime.

  The coin went ding-ding in the slot. The receiver went buzz. She dialed Sam’s number. A few seconds passed. The ringing began. She could picture the phone in her mind’s eye—it stood on a table in Sam’s living room, right next to that low couch where they loved to. lounge together. That’s where their evenings began, usually—on that couch. They would lie there together, fully clothed, and smoke a few cigarettes and have a drink or two, and talk. Pretty soon, they would start to touch each other. Then they would kiss, and embrace, and put their hands on each other’s bodies. Presently, they would leave the couch and go into the bedroom together, and take off all their clothing, all of it, every last stitch, right down to the bare flesh, revealing their deepest and most feminine secrets to each other. And then they would get into bed, lie side by side, touch each other, feel each other, kiss each other—their hands and lips would wander, exploring and caressing and sharing pleasure, until the pleasure was too terrible for either of them to stand, and then they would roll together . . .

  And when it was over, they’d rest together, then do it again. And a third, time. They’d do it different ways, they’d invent games and variations, they’d play and fool and horse around with each other and very often they’d laugh together. But the silly moods never lasted very long, and when they’d come together the fourth or fifth or sixth furious time, it would be even more intense than the first time had been.

  They’d sleep together the whole night through, their naked limbs tangled beneath the cool sheets, and in the morning they’d wake up and do it again.

  Lil snapped her mind back to reality. The phone was still ringing on the other end of the line, and she realized it had been ringing for some time. And nobody was answering it.

  The receiver was moist with perspiration when she finally took it from her ear and hung it on the hook. She didn’t move; she simply sat in place, staring at the dial of the phone. She felt empty.

  The dime dropped into the return chute with a tinkle, but she didn’t even hear it.

  Sam wasn’t home. Something had come up to prevent Sam from meeting her tonight. But Sam hadn’t told her about it. Sam could have called her at the office that afternoon, or called the coffee-shop that evening, and she hadn’t. Sam had made no effort to contact her at all.

  The only conclusion was that Sam didn’t want to contact her, didn’t want Lil to know where she was or what she was doing.

  Sam was out with somebody else.

  Lil didn’t want to believe it, but it had to be true. There was no other explanation. Sam had found another girl—a girl she liked better
than Lil—and Sam was with that girl right now. In fact, for all Lil knew, Sam and the new girl were at the apartment, sitting on that couch together, or maybe even in bed, listening to the ringing of the phone, and laughing.

  Lil gritted her teeth and grabbed the dime out of the return chute. She stuck it in her pocket and reached out for the bills and change on the ledge.

  She saw the card.

  She picked it up and read what it said. She stared at it for a long while, her face expressionless, her body stiff, her eyes empty.

  Several minutes passed before she fetched the dime back out of her pocket, dropped it into the slot, lifted the receiver, and dialed YEoman 6-6059.

  * * *

  One night, while he was in the bathtub, something peculiar had happened to him. He’d been nine years old at the time, and a variety of changes had been taking place in his body. Most of these changes seemed to be centered at one portion of his body. That night in the tub, he had explored this sensitive phenomenon, and that’s when the peculiar thing had happened. Peculiar—but very pleasurable.

  By the time he was eleven years old, the ritual of pleasure was familiar to him.

  At age twelve, in the cellar of his home, he found a mouse caught in a trap. The animal’s hind leg was pinioned by the spring, and it struggled to get away, thrashing and squealing in pain. When he picked up the trap, the mouse tried to climb it, bending its body and seeking a hold with its tiny claws. It screamed thinly with the effort, but to no avail. After several minutes of struggling, the mouse gave up, and simply hung by its hind leg from the trap, shivering, still piping its tiny screams.

  He held the trap up, watching the mouse with total, fascination. He became very aroused. There was a connection between the tormented little animal and. his pleasure, although he was at a loss to understand it. Somehow, the sight of the mouse in pain fed his enjoyment, as if the animal’s small agonies were the earth from which the flowering of his passion sprang.

  He held the trap, for a while and watched the mouse die. Finally, the small body shuddered one last timer whistled with pain so faintly he could barely hear it, then hung limp. The bombshell of pleasure he then felt inside him was so intense he was forced to drop the trap.

  That had been the beginning.

  By age fifteen, he had graduated to larger game—cats, birds, small dogs—because he had discovered that the larger the animal, the larger the pain; and the larger their pain, the larger his pleasure. He didn’t always kill them. It wasn’t necessary for the creature to die. Just as long as it was suffering, he was in paradise.

  At age seventeen, he tried it with a girl. She hadn’t expected to be hurt. She’d gone with him into an abandoned house for the purpose of enjoying herself. She had been very surprised when he tied her up, fastened her to the floor with her limbs spread, and removed all her clothing. She kept telling him it wasn’t necessary for him to bind her-—she said she wanted to strip for him, wanted the two of them to be naked together. She couldn’t understand why he was doing it.

  And she’d had even less success understanding his motives when he started to hurt her.

  He hurt her terribly. He didn’t draw any blood, didn’t leave any tell-tale marks on her body, didn’t really damage the girl to any great extent. But he hurt her. He knew by then how to make the pain come in subtle ways, how to torture without tearing, how to make the agony come without causing the blood to come also.

  When he finished with her, she was shivering and whimpering with pain. He was twitching with the after-throbs of pleasure. As soon as it became possible to control himself, he adjusted his clothing and untied the girl. She continued to lie their unmoving, the muscles of her naked limbs jumping in spasms. She was still lying there when he left.

  She never told anybody about him. She never allowed him near her again, but she never revealed the reason. If she had spoken, things might have been different. If anyone had known, something might have been done to stop him before it was too late.

  But it was already too late. From that moment on, his life fell into a pattern. As he grew older, the horizons of his knowledge expanded, and he began to understand the sort of person he was, and why the pain and the pleasure blended in him to produce the furious passion he required. He read books on the subject, read biographies of famous men who had taken their pleasure just as he did, read case-histories of madmen and murderers and friends who had maimed and killed to satisfy their lusts.

  At age twenty-one, when he left home and went to New York, he knew exactly what he was.

  Ted Morton was a sadist. He wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  His apartment was in the basement of a building in upper Manhattan, only a mile or so below Harlem. Morton was the superintendent of the building. The work was easy, and the duties were mostly solitary, which was to his liking. He didn’t enjoy the company of people on any basis other than the fierce delights of his specialty.

  The people of the building thought Morton was a very nice young man. They also thought his name was Carter, since that was the name he’d chosen to put on his bell-plate. There were a lot of things about Ted Morton they didn’t know.

  He was lucky that night and found a parking space only a few doors from his building. He switched off the lights and motor, set the brake, and was about to leave the car when he spotted the card lying near him on the seat.

  Morton was a very orderly man. In order for him to safely pursue his specialty, in order to take his unique pleasures without the interference of society or the knowledge of the law, it was necessary for him to have every aspect of his life neatly catalogued, balanced, arranged. One small detail out of place could topple all the sins of his past life on his head, and result in exposure of the most painful and embarrassing kind.

  The card was out of place in the scheme of things. He knew it hadn’t been there earlier. He also knew it didn’t belong to him. His reasoning followed straight as an arrow to the conclusion that somebody must have dropped the card on the seat—maybe the girl he’d been with earlier, or maybe just some passing stranger.

  He picked it up and tipped it so the light of a nearby street lamp fell across its surface.

  A single word leaped off the card at him:

  FURY.

  Something stirred at the sight of that word, and he felt a twinge go through his intestines. Fury, he thought. It was a nice word. It was one of the special words—the red words—like pain, and blood, and torture. It reminded him of pleasure.

  The light was too dim for his eyes to make out the rest of the printing. He tucked the card into his shirt pocket, got out of the car, and locked it carefully behind him. He walked as quickly as he could to his building. He wanted very much to examine the card in the light, and in the privacy of his own apartment.

  The lobby was deserted. He went straight to the waiting elevator, pressed the down button, and dropped to the basement. For a change there were no notes demanding heat or repairs stuck under his door; apparently, the tenants were satisfied with their lot in life this night. He was thankful for that The experiences of the evening were still vivid in his mind, and he had no wish to confront the dull patterns of reality until he’d savored his private dreams to the fullest.

  The apartment consisted of a small living room, a smaller bedroom, a tiny bathroom, and a kitchenette. It wasn’t much as apartments go, but Morton didn’t care about his accommodations. As long as he could live relatively undisturbed and unobserved, and in moderate comfort, he wouldn’t have given a damn if his home had been in a packing-crate.

  He went to the bedroom and stripped off his clothing. As he removed his underwear, he felt again the nagging irritation the night’s escapades had produced. The card was waiting for his perusal in his shirt pocket, but he decided to put off looking at it until after he’d showered.

  The ritual of personal cleanliness and careful attention to his appearance was also an important part of Morton’s life. He knew he was good-looking. He knew his trim body was
attractive to women. He knew his open and friendly face was disarming, and therefore valuable.

  Looking at him, people never suspected what he was. Not a trace of it ever showed on his face, or even in his eyes. He appeared to be just another ordinary young man, normal in his appetites, average in his desires.

  Morton worked hard to maintain this imaged It was a safety precaution, of course—as long as he seemed ordinary in every way, the authorities would tend to overlook him—but it was more than just a precaution.

  It was also bait.

  His clean-cut look attracted young girls, the way honey draws bees. Or maybe it was more like the way a candle flame draws moths.

  He finished his shower and dried his body. Then he returned to the bedroom, put on a robe and slippers, and dug into the pocket of his shirt for a pack of cigarettes and the card. Taking them both into the living room and dropping them on a table near the couch, he went into the kitchenette and mixed himself a drink.

  A drink was always relaxing after an evening of his specialty.

  He seated himself on the couch, lit a cigarette,, sipped his drink, then picked up the card and settled back to examine it

  MADAME FURY, it said.

  Again, he felt the old stirring in response to that word. But, he thought, it wasn’t a word—it was a name. And that only made the sound of it more exciting to him.

  Private, said the card. He liked that word. It meant alone, undisturbed, free to follow your impulses, and that was the state of life Morton preferred above all others.

  Personal, it said. He liked that word, too. It referred to the interior of the individual’s mind, to those places where the secrets of personality were stored, to those buried compartments in the brain where all the twistings and turnings of Morton’s character were hidden.

  Private, and Personal. The two words added up to an appealing impression. Alone undisturbed, unwatched, free to follow your whims, free to take full advantage of a service that made certain of your personal satisfaction.

  His mind circled around the concept, adding here and subtracting there until the picture was clear in his mind.