“A record album.”
“Not an engagement ring?”
Erick turned and looked at him. Lynn’s face was unrewarding.
“You nuts?” he asked.
“Thumb me a female,” Lynn said.
* * * *
“Hello honey!” she said, throwing her arms around his neck.
He kissed her. “How are you?” he asked.
“Wonderful!”
They sat down on the couch and he put his arms around her. She snuggled close. “This is for you,” he said, taking the package off the table and putting it on her laps.
“Oh, thank you darling,” she said, “I didn’t want you to get me anything.”
He wondered where his present was. Then it occurred to him that maybe there wasn’t any. So what? He told himself. But he felt a little resentful.
She looked at the record album. “Oh I love that!” she said happily and kissed him.
“When do you leave?” he asked.
She seemed to hesitate a moment. Then she said, “In the morning.”
“Leo gone yet?”
She nodded.
They sat in silence. She kept leaning against him. He could feel her breath on his neck, feel the warmth of her body through his shirt. It was toast warm in the house. He felt a little drowsy. The radiators thumped gently and, a hundred miles away, a bus churned down the icy stretch of Main Street.
They sat there for about an hour, talking a little, mostly just making casual love and watching the room get dark. It seemed as if the day were a stage production and the curtain were slowly drawing shut. They were in the audience sitting in near blackness now that the performance was over. Sitting close together in warmth and darkness.
He ran his hand slowly over her arm.
“How are you going home?” he asked.
He heard her throat contract. “I don’t know,” she said, “I … train I guess.”
“Mmm-hmm. How long does it take?”
“Oh. Eight hours. Nine hours. I don’t know.”
“All packed.”
“Erick. I … packed?”
“Yes,” he said, “Are you?”
“Yes. I mean no.”
“Which is it?”
She pressed against him and drew in a ragged breath. Her arms slid around him and clamped around his chest.
“Oh,” she murmured.
“Oh?” he asked.
She seemed to shake her head a trifle, as though she were baffled. The movement of her body against him was a breathless movement in the night.
“Oh,” she said again, more plaintively.
“What is it, Sal?” he asked.
She sat up and pulled away a little. She looked at him.
“Erick,” she said.
He felt his heart begin to beat, rapidly. Suddenly he felt his hands tremble in his lap. The way she said his name …
“What?” he said, almost afraid to say it.
She drew in another heavy breath.
“I …” she started. Then she turned away. He heard her heavy breathing. He seemed to know what she wanted to say. But he couldn’t help, he was powerless.
It seemed endless.
But suddenly she got on her knees on the couch and moved close to him. She put her hands on each side of his face and kissed him with moist hot lips.
Her teeth were clenched. He could tell by the way she said,
“Come live with me,” leaning forward and breathing in his ear, “And be my love.”
He sat there with her body pressing against him. He felt as if he were frozen fast to the couch. Only his heart still moved, hammering fiercely.
Terrible silence. He trembled.
“Darling?” she said.
He tried to speak, failed. He took a deep breath and swallowed. “What?” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
He found himself start to laugh, then broke it off in sudden shock. “Why?” he asked in a thin wavering voice.
“I … I’m just … sorry.”
The penitence in her voice made him feel strong for a moment. He put his arms around her impulsively. “Don’t be,” he said. Then he twitched as she pushed close. Now you’ve done it! His mind cried.
Her arms clamped around him, tightly and suddenly, as if trapping him. Her lips were hot and moving in the darkness. Her wet tongue licked over his lips and his cheeks and ears. He was struck dumb. He felt his stomach throbbing excitedly and felt heat gushing through his system. He moaned, only half with physical excitement. But she didn’t know. She kept on.
His hands moved out automatically and dug into her breasts half to push her away. She dragged up her sweater and he felt the smoothness of her brassiere under his fingers. No! His mind shouted. “Oh,” his voice altered it.
Her flesh was burning hot. He felt it almost with horror, found himself automatically unhooking her brassiere.
“Let me!” she gasped. She pulled it open in a quick ruthless movement and pulled it off. Her large swelling breasts kept moving over him. He felt like a driven thing. No! screamed his mind. Baby, Baby!
Futile.
He was shivering. Writhing. He wanted to scream out in the blackness. He wanted suddenly to leap up and run away into the night. It was much worse than the other time. There had been some control in them that time. Now there was nothing but wildness and helpless excitement. Trapped.
God help me! The words exploded ridiculously in his mind. Then he knew he had to do it because it was a test. It was a trial to prove him a man or not a man.
And he was suddenly in the barracks and listening to men tell about their amorous activities. In cars and taxis and rooms and on the ground and against trees and alleys. And suddenly, completely, the whole thing seemed to balloon up as something impossibly dirty and vile. He caught his breath and heard her panting and thought she sounded like an animal. He felt her breasts like swollen flesh under his hands. He wanted to push her away with a disgusted snarl. But his body kept dragging him on, the heat swelled up like a mounting fire, enveloping him despite the mental struggle. Sex, sex! Cried his mind, dirty thing!
“Erick. Baby. Baby!” she kept moaning.
The tenderness was gone. The love was gone. Stripped away. She was only a hot-breathed hungry animal. He pulled back.
“I’ll take them off!” she gasped.
No! God no! yelled his mind.
“Sally,” he muttered as if trying to appeal. She was against him again. Like a dead weight that kept returning. He tried to drain out every last vestige of his desire, of the raging heat in his system.
“Oh, Erick” Like the groan of a feeble old woman, repelling him.
I have to go to the bathroom, he thought. He almost said it. His throat caught.
“Say, wait a minute will you!” he said, hysterically. He jerked forward and struggled to his feet.
He felt the coffee table against his shins. He flailed for balance, then toppled forward, his hands reaching out for support. He crashed across the table and his outstretched hands struck the floor. Pain shot up his arms. He cried out involuntarily and his arms gave way.
His face struck the floor then and he felt pain drive a sharp wedge into his brain.
“Aaaah!” he cried and slumped down in a heap, rolling over then in agony, pressing shaking hands to his face. He lay there sobbing and groaning and whimpering with pain. It seemed familiar for some reason, the darkness and the pain in his head.
“Honey!” she cried.
The light blinded him for a moment. Then he saw her leaning over him, her large breasts hanging down from her body, the dark erect nipples pointing at him. He felt blood gushing from his nose, running over his mouth and chin and onto his shirt. She put a hand to her cheek and gaped at him in horror. He cried out through a gaping mouth.
“Get out of here! Leave me alone! Get out of here!”
Cold water. Compresses. Lying down. Sally in her bathrobe. Silent and sober faced, tending him. Blood stopping. Bandaging t
he scrape on his forehead, the abrasions on his hands. The sound of her door being locked. The sound of her feet moving in her room. Silence. Sleeping. And, in the morning, him awakening on the couch in the empty house. On the dining room table, a key to the front door, a gift and a note,
Merry Christmas, read the note, Take care of your nose.
* * * *
Lynn looked up at the ceiling, his lips turned in. “Are you telling me you never laid the girl?” he said. Erick didn’t look at him.
“That’s right,” he said.
“You mean you haven’t had the chance?”
Erick swallowed, shook his head.
“What?” Lynn asked.
“No,” he answered.
Lynn sniffed. Then he took a long drink from the bottle of wine. He passed it over. “Here, get drunk,” he said, “You can use it.”
Erick drank a big mouthful of the red wine. He blinked as it ran down his throat like a thin line of liquid flame. It settled in his chest, his stomach like a pool of heat. He felt it spreading through his body.
“I want to,” he said, “I should.”
“Get drunk?” Lynn asked amusedly.
“Get Sally,” said Erick bitterly almost succeeding in sounding like a man driven to the end of patience.
Lynn blew out a heavy breath. Erick heard his throat move.
“So do I,” Lynn said coldly.
A cloud of attractive dizziness built up around Erick as he kept drinking. They lay like four extremitied growths on the bed. The bottle was almost empty. It was the third.
“You’re gonna get it,” Lynn said thickly, “I’ll see to it.”
“Get what, rabies?”
“Babies. You’re gonna fill Sally with a brat.”
“By God, I’d like to. By God. Never get the chance. Damn thing. Anyway.
“You’ll get it. Seduce her. I’ll teach you.”
“Yeah. Seduce her.” Erick’s fingers clutched his pillow vengefully.
Lynn rolled on his side. He wrapped one arm under his head to pillow it. He looked at Erick dizzily.
“I’ll tell you what to do,” he said, “I’ll give you everything to do. You do it.” His eyes were staring and thick. He breathed heavily. His shirt was open.
“Sure,” Erick muttered, “You tell me.”
“I’m gonna give you blow by blow how to do it,” Lynn said. He took off his glasses and put them on the floor under his bed.
“Yeah?” Erick lay there stolidly staring up. He twisted a little with the rising heat in him.
Lynn stood up and plopped down on Erick’s bed.
“First you gotta kiss her,” he said.
He smiled drunkenly but Erick got the sudden chilling sensation that Lynn wasn’t drunk and that the smile was just a disguise. He turned his back to Lynn.
“I have kissed her,” he said.
“Well, I’ll show you how.”
“What for?”
His heart was pounding. To his own confused alarm, pounding with excitement. He sent out a million hooks for support in his mind. His mind gave back unreflective deadness.
He felt Lynn’s hand on his back. He twitched under it.
“Get outta here,” he said, drunk enough to be convincingly surly.
“I gotta show you, don’t I?” Lynn slurred.
He isn’t drunk, Erick thought, he’s acting. Every thickened syllable is executed deliberately. Every hiccup is a performance, every body weave a pretense.
“Let’s go to a movie,” he said.
Lynn said, “They’re all closed on New Year’s Eve.”
“Aah, you’re drunk, I’ll kick ‘em open!”
“I’ll teach you.”
Erick turned.
“You will, eh?” he said, effecting belligerence. He grabbed Lynn’s arms and pushed, hearing himself giggle foolishly. He turned it to laughter as they were suddenly wrestling. His chest shook with laughter.
“The landlady will object,” he gasped.
“Fuck her,” Lynn gasped back.
“Think we have time?” he gasped back, surprised at how strong Lynn was in his hands and arms.
But he was stronger. His hands clamped on Lynn’s forearms and pinned them. Lynn kept grabbing onto Erick’s legs. Once his hands seemed to accidentally rub over Erick’s stomach and groin. It made Erick’s body lurch spasmodically. With a violent move he shoved Lynn up and over onto his own bed. He lurched up and started for the door.
“Gotta go to the head,” he said shakily.
“I’ll go with you.”
“Shit you will.”
He almost rushed down the hallway. He sat on the toilet staring at the tiled wall, his chest heaving. Fear, fear, said his mind, fear of this way and fear of that way. Is there no end?
After a while he stood up and threw cold water in his face. His stomach felt as if it were filled with hot dust. He felt dried up and sick. There were coils of dirty rug in his stomach.
Lynn looked up as he came in. Lynn was in his pajamas.
“Sick?” he asked.
“That’s lousy wine,” Erick said.
“Not bad,” Lynn said. And Erick saw that he really wasn’t drunk.
“Oh, yeah,” he said.
Erick lay down on bed and felt himself drift into a half slumber. Later he woke up to feel Lynn taking off his clothes. Lynn’s hands on his body were gentle. He didn’t open his eyes but pretended to be asleep. He was curious. He lay there half submerged and didn’t move. He pretended not to notice what was happening to his body. He sensed Lynn standing over him and looking down at his naked body for a long time. He didn’t care. And he was almost disappointed when Lynn put his pajamas on him.
Later he woke up under the blankets and the room was black. He looked over groggily and saw a tip of orange light moving like a firefly in the darkness. And heard Lynn blowing out harsh breaths of smoke.
Then he went to sleep again.
* * * *
It was almost his twenty-third birthday.
Lynn and he sat in a darkened booth at the Golden Campus.
“I said I’d plan it for you,” Lynn said, “I mean it.” He was deadly serious as though it were a point of honor, Erick thought. Or a self torture.
“Since when are you a great lover?” he dug casually.
“I’ve been around.” Lynn lit a cigarette, blew out the smoke. “I’ll blueprint this thing. Get the damn thing out of your system. You’ll see how little it adds up to.”
“What if she’s not willing?”
“Listen,” Lynn said, “No girl says no indefinitely. A girl’s objections to laying are like a wall you come up against. When you reach it, climb over it. If you can’t, drill a hole through it. If you can’t, burrow under it. If you can’t, go around it. If you can’t, prove to her that there never was a wall there in the first place.”
“How profound,” Erick said.
“Listen,” Lynn said, almost grimly, “This thing is going to come off. Otherwise you’ll go to pot dreaming about it. You need it.”
“Why don’t you major domo,” Erick said, “Lead us around, make us drinks, change records, throw back the sheets, dispose of unwanted garments, lead us in the bedroom …”
“Do you want this or not?”
Lynn’s cold eyes surveyed him. Erick grinned nervously. He wanted to say—No I don’t want it. He wanted to say—it’s none of your business. He couldn’t say that. Not to Lynn.
He covered the throat contraction behind his cup of coffee. He put down the cup and said as casually as he could, “Certainly I want it.”
Lynn looked at him carefully.
“All right then,” he said, “Then listen to me.”
It was strange listening to him. It was as though Lynn were an instructor and Erick the student. Erick couldn’t understand where Lynn had found out these things or if he was making them all up. But he listened. Feeling again that sense of rising despair, of growing entanglement. With every nod of his head with every poi
nt admittedly assimilated, he sank deeper and deeper into the necessity of going through with it. He felt as though, after while, he could do nothing but go through with it.
It was like a dream.
That night, the next day, the next. He couldn’t believe it was all actual. It was a joke. It had to be.
But Friday came and suddenly he began to feel the growing tension. The tight sense of duty, the feeling of now or never. He remembered over and over that night on the back lawn. He remembered the night before she’d left for Christmas vacation. He kicked himself mentally. Fool! Those times it would have been simple. Now it would be almost impossible he felt.
He began to make hasty plans of his own. He bought a record album for her. He told himself it was a belated birthday present for her. He had overlooked her birthday three weeks before. He knew that the album was a symbolic two dollars.
There would have to be liquor. Lynn had said it himself. And Erick knew it was essential. The edges had to cloud up before he could relax and concentrate on lovemaking. He had to fill his mind with dulling opiate before he could dispel the probing mind and say and do things that sober he could only whisper to himself late at night when he lay awake in his bed.
Throughout those hours he thought out a grand pageant of scenes, long montages, the ends of chapters in romantic novels carried out fully in detail. The rustle of silk in the darkness and then heady madness…
He gave them dialogue. He gave them thoughts. He added violent action. Every scene ended alike. It all began to assume an air of monotonousness. It was like the times with Melissa that he’d worked out completely in his mind before they ever happened or had a chance to happen. It made this new moment seem stale too, as if it were already a thing of the past.
Saturday morning after class Lynn and he sat in the Black and Gold Inn drinking coffee.
“Do you remember what I said?” Lynn asked.
Erick’s stomach sank. He felt as if he were boning up for some impossibly difficult quiz.
“I think so,” he said weakly.
“You’re taking her to the opera?”
“Yes.”
“All right. You’ll take her right home after. You’re fortunate she has a house of her own.”
The way Lynn spoke made it sound as if Sally were a commodity. She was mute, an immobile factor in the plan. She was to sit there, recline there, accept there mildly while the plan was to effect itself. That was the fallacy of it, Erick began to believe. As was the fallacy of all plans which did not take into consideration the human factor.