Barbary Shore

  “Oh, the hell with that.” I reached forward and kissed her once again. She closed her eyes indolently and moved her mouth against mine as if she were eating candy.

  “What Mommie done, what Mommie done.” Monina stood in the doorway and pointed an accusing finger.

  To my surprise Guinevere taunted the child. “What Mommie done,” she mimicked. “I’ll get the strap! Go to bed.”

  “Mommie bad, mommie-diggie.” It was impossible to know what the child felt. She quivered, and hot furious tears stood in her eyes. Yet suddenly she coquetted at me. “Kiss Monina, too,” she demanded.

  Guinevere patted her bottom. “Go to bed, or I’ll get the strap,” she shrieked automatically. And once again, reluctantly, the child withdrew.

  “See what you’ve done,” Guinevere grumbled. “That kid’ll have something on me now. Wait, she’ll let me know about it.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Lot of good that does,” she whipped at me. “You guys give me a pain in the ass.” She turned away to light a cigarette and laughed. “Here,” she said unexpectedly, “here, you want to feel my breasts, here, feel them,” and she took my hand and placed it. I kissed her again, and indolently she raised the arm which supported the cigarette and returned the embrace.

  She was not without response. The kiss must have lasted for over a minute, and my hands moved in a crescendo about her. When we paused, her breath was coming quickly too.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Come on.” Nothing was going to stop me now. “Come on.”

  “We cant.”

  “Right here.”

  She stiffened. “Look,” she whispered, “the kid’s around. Are you crazy?”

  I would not be thwarted. “Upstairs in my room.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve got to come upstairs.”

  She pinched me suddenly. “All right, I will.”

  “You promise?”

  “I’ll be up.” She groaned. “Oh, my God, what you guys get me into.”

  “You promise?”

  “Yes, I’ll be up in ten minutes. Now, get out of here, and let me get Monina to bed.”

  Battered, drunk with lust, I stumbled to my room.

  SEVEN

  GUINEVERE did not follow.

  I was furious. In the next miserable hour I lay on my cot under the baking heat of the roof and stared at the wall. The hot summer afternoon dragged by, carrying me with it in torpor. I tried to read, I thought of working, but neither was practicable. At last I took a walk.

  I was gone for hours and ended at the docks where I sat on a deserted quay, flipping pebbles into the oily water which swirled about the piles. Twilight came, and across the harbor, skyscrapers reflected the sun. I ate my solitary meal in a lunchroom and returned to my desk in an attempt to write.

  It was hardly productive. After several hours in which I was able to do very little, I went out again to pace through the dark streets. I was in the kind of mood where I made resolution after resolution. I was not doing enough work, I decided; then tomorrow I would begin a new schedule. I would get up early and work till evening, and I would do the same in the following days. I would leave Guinevere alone. Certainly I would not go to see her without some invitation.

  Yet perversity is not without resource. I could detect in myself beneath twenty mattresses of frustration the small hard pea bean of relief that Guinevere had not kept her word. For an image came to me of the two of us in my room. The door is locked, and I lie with my head at her breast while summer air shimmers over us. We are happy, we are content, and we are safe. Suddenly there is a knock. We start up, look desperately at one another, search for an escape. There is none. The door is the only door to the room, and the window is a hundred feet above the ground. We make no sound and draw the bedclothes to our necks. The knocking ceases, and there is silence. Then a key is inserted in the lock, turns back and forth. We wait, petrified, and the door opens, and on the threshold stands a stranger. His arm lifts in a menacing gesture, and I close my eyes and turn my head to the pillow.

  This was a conscious fantasy, but even so, walking the street on a June night, I shuddered and there was a sweat on my back. Several minutes passed before I felt calm enough to light a cigarette, and I dallied beneath a lamp-post.

  When I came back to the room, I picked up my novel, and on an impulse reread everything I had written. I intended a large ambitious work about an immense institution never defined more exactly than that, and about the people who wandered through it. The book had a hero and a heroine, but they never met while they were in the institution. It was only when they escaped, each of them in separate ways and by separate methods, that they were capable of love and so could discover each other.

  I had never stated it so baldly before, and as I put the novel down, the story seemed absurd and I was abysmally dejected. Some of the chapters I had read were good, but I knew that as a whole the concept was sentimental, and that I hardly knew where I was led. In the morning, after a miserable night, I deserted my first resolution and went for a long breakfast, read a paper slowly, and delayed coming back to work. I did a page or two, tore them up. New ideas were forming on the novel, confused and often destructive; there was nevertheless a ferment. For several days I worked steadily, alternating between excitement and depression, burrowing at a mountain whose girth I could not conceive. I thought of Guinevere frequently, but my reluctance equalled my desire, and the stalemate aided my determination to keep working.

  Finally, the white flag appeared. I came back to my room one morning and found a note from her. In a small careful hand she had written:

  Dear Friend,

  Where you been? I got something important to tell you. Come see me. This is something we got to talk about. G.

  The note decided my attitude. I changed my clothing, brushed my hair, and walked downstairs.

  Guinevere opened the door with a tremulous smile. “Hello,” she said. Her voice was soft and husky. She might have been a maiden greeting her first lover, eyes downcast, body articulated in yearning. I would not have been startled if she had said demurely, “How can I look you in the face again?” She maintained the pose for several seconds, but when I failed to respond, she shed it like an overcoat. “Where the hell you been?” she demanded.

  “Upstairs. Waiting for you. Waiting for seventy-two hours.” I had prepared this speech.

  A gleam of satisfaction could have appeared in her face. Almost instantly, she began protesting. “Aw, listen, that was a mix-up the other day. Monina got sick right after you left. You know I had two doctors here, and it cost me twenty-five dollars. Honestly, what a day I had. First you getting me all upset”—she said this with great fondness, as if I were a bad boy whom she adored—“and then Monina. My husband had to give me a sedative that night.”

  “What was the matter with Monina?”

  “Nerves.” Guinevere sighed. “Come on, let’s go in the kitchen. I’m having my coffee.”

  I shook my head. “Let’s take it in the living room. I’ll have one with you.”

  So we took coffee in the parlor. Really she was like a cat who stirred at every sound, darted here and there at a footstep, and never gave herself wholly to any direction. A round table was set between us, a cloth was put upon it, and a silver service. She poured with her little finger crooked, her face set in poised, determined gaiety. Yet again she wore a bathrobe, and a loose strap from one of her voluminous undergarments slithered over her breast.

  We drank in silence for a time, and then she sat back and stared at me with her provocative grin. “You know … Michael, you shouldn’t have done that the other afternoon. I could go for you.”

  “Look, you called me Michael. What’s your first name?”

  Guinevere.

  “Well, what’s your last name?”

  “Smith, Smith’s my husband’s name.”

  I was dubious, but I nodded. She leaned forward for an instant. “I’ll te
ll you,” she said, “I was born Beverly Guinevere, but when I was on the stage, I just used to call myself Guinevere, you know one name, like Margo or Zorina. And I like it, I keep it, you know it’s not like other names.”

  “You were on the stage?”

  She nodded profoundly.

  “What plays?” I asked.

  “Oh, I was in burlesque, I was a queen. Boy, they used to go for me.” She glanced with distaste at her body. “I was a lot slimmer, not skinny, I never been skinny, I always been good to feel, but you know pleasingly plump. Svelte. They used to announce me, ‘and now presenting the svelte siren of sensation—Guinevere.’ ” She caressed her arm abstractly. “They’d all go for me. There was an old gink, sixty-two years old, and he offered me a thousand dollars to go to bed with him once.”

  Monina had appeared in the doorway, and Guinevere glanced at her. I looked about uneasily. The child was completely naked. “See Monina,” the mother said, “you see the way she’s built. That’s the way I was, but since I been married I let my figure go.” Emerging from the reverie, she shrieked suddenly, “Monina, put something on.”

  But Monina coquetted, her arms raised, the tiny hands at her neck. I found myself reluctant to look at the child, for her body was extraordinary. She was virtually a miniature of a girl of eighteen, the limbs round, slender curves flowing from shoulder to hip, her luminous blonde hair lovely against the pale flesh. “No,” Monina pouted.

  “I’ll get the strap.”

  Monina sighed. She seemed bored with the strap, and although she retreated, I could swear she was listening from the hall.

  Guinevere poured me another cup of coffee. “Someone was telling me you’re an author, Lovett,” she said.

  “He was mistaken.”

  She passed this by. “You know I been thinking there’s a way you and me could make a lot of money,” she said. “I got a story that’s worth a million bucks.”

  “Well, then why don’t you write it?”

  “I can’t. I can’t write. I haven’t got the patience. But here’s my idea. I’ll tell you the story, you write it, and we’ll split the money. I swear. When I think of the hundreds of thousands of dollars this book is worth, and it’s all in my head.”

  She was not to be halted. “Listen, you really ought to listen to this. It’s a natural. I read lots of novels, and I never seen anything to compare to this.” Her voice became matter-of-fact again. “And you know it covers a span of years, it’s a serious story.” She closed her eyes and rested her forehead against her fist, face twisted into concentration. “I’ve been trying to make up my mind which stars ought to play it, but so far I’m not sure, although I suppose they decide it all in Hollywood anyway. Just to think about it gets me excited.

  “Here,” she offered. “It takes place in this city in New York State, and the main characters are a doctor, a real good-looking guy with a mustache, big you know, and his nurse, she looks like some of those blonde stars, and then he’s got a girl-friend, a dark-haired girl, any feature player could do that part.” Guinevere lit a cigarette. “Now, this guy, the doctor, he’s a pretty good guy, good heart and so forth, and he’s a wow with the women. He’s got the biggest whang on him in the whole town, and maybe he don’t know it. He’s got dozens of girl friends, and there isn’t one of them who won’t surrender herself to him, you know. But he’s got a favorite, the blonde star one, his nurse, and she’s a good kid too, worked hard all her life, and she goes for him. You know she’s really in love, but she don’t show it, puts up a tough front.” Guinevere sighed with content. “Now the other one is a society girl, hoity-toity, and she comes to see him about something or other, woman trouble maybe, and he seduces her in his medical chambers, and they really tie a can on. You know for weeks he just goes around with her, to night clubs and to the beach, the country club, and he can’t get her out of his system, it’s chemical. Only all the time, at the same time, he still keeps the nurse on the string, and they get together once in a while, and it’s love with them, it’s just passion with the other.”

  “That is,” I interposed, “it’s the blonde star one he’s really in love with?”

  “Yeah.” Without missing a breath, she continued. “Well, all this time, there’s been a hullaballoo with the brunette society one’s parents, you know they don’t like the doctor because he’s also from lowly origin like the nurse. But there’s nothing they can do, it’s real flaming youth.” She halted, and murmured in aside, “Some of this I’m drawing from my own experiences.” Guinevere tapped the ash from her cigarette. “Well, this goes on for a while and there’s a climax. One night just for the hell of it he has one on the house with the society girl, and she gets pregnant. Only in the meantime before she finds out, he’s decided that he’s really more interested in the nurse, and they’re thinking of getting married. When the society girl comes in, you know, knocked up, he talks to her for a while and convinces her he’s not in love, and that she ought to have an operation. And so here’s the first big scene. The doctor makes an operation on this dame he’s had a hot affair with, and the nurse, the woman he’s in love with, assists him right at it. I mean you can see how this would make a movie even though they’d have trouble with such a scene. I imagine they could work it out though. She could have a brain tumor, or something of that nature. It would be a good scene the operation, you know with him giving directions to the nurse, scalpel nurse, forceps nurse, sponge, acting cold because he’s a good doctor, and he’s got lots of responsibility.” Guinevere stared at me blankly. “The operation turns out a failure. She isn’t going to have the baby any more, but at the same time he does something, he makes a mistake, and the society girl can’t make love any more. She looks perfectly okay, but she’s crippled there, a beautiful girl and yet she can’t do it any more. Well, when she finds out, she’s mad, and she’s going to expose him, but the nurse who’s a wonderful character convinces him he ought to marry the society girl, and he does even though there can’t be anything between them, and for a while they all keep living in the same town, and he keeps up his affair with the blonde nurse. They’re still in love, and it’s gotten very chemical like it used to be with the society girl, he goes down on her and everything, and she loves him. But the wife who’s now turned out a bitch is going to expose him all over again, and so the nurse takes off and goes to New York, and the doctor gets richer and richer, fooling around with a lot of dames on the side, but his heart is still with the blonde nurse. Only they don’t see each other for years.” She stopped. “Guess what the ending’s going to be?”

  I was not to hear it so quickly. Guinevere went on developing wondrous detail upon detail; my attention flagged, and I listened indifferently. For Monina stood in the hall entrance performing a dance. The child was still nude, but somewhere she had picked up a coaster for a highball glass, and now in a posture of unbelievable provocation, she held it like a fig leaf, writhing her limbs sinuously through a parody of amorous advance and retreat. She would approach a few steps, her blonde head cocked to one side in sensuous repose as if she were stirred by an exotic music, and then abruptly with a tiny pout upon her lips, she would draw back, an attitude of feigned horror in the pose of her limbs. As her mother spoke she danced silently, an interpreter. The story drew to a close, and with it the dance. Monina reclined against the doorway, her arm caressing her thigh. She never looked in my direction, yet everything was done for me. Her blonde eyelashes fluttered upon her cheek, her eyes opened to gaze boldly at the wall. And all the while, Guinevere, unheeding, continued to talk.

  “They meet again in New York, just about a year ago, the nurse and the doctor, and the doctors wife is dead, and whammo do they get together. I mean drinking and making love, nothing can stop them. And the nurse doesn’t tell him about that baby she had from him after she left cause she knows he won’t believe her; he’ll think it belongs to some other guy. And the doctor wants to get married, and she holds him off cause she doesn’t know what to do with the kid. And
then what do you think, she can’t tell him so she murders the kid, her own child, and she’s caught, and the doctor too. I forgot to say he made out the death certificate cause she brought him in on it at the end, and then in prison, which’ll be the last chapter, they’re brought together for a final hour by the warden who’s a pretty good guy, and there in the cell behind the bars they have a last one that really makes it worth while being killed.”

  And Monina, resolving the chord, ran toward me on tiptoe, nude nymph, halted within the reach of my arm, and in a child’s counterfeit of a leer raised the fig leaf above her head, exposed and triumphant.

  For the first time she stared at me as though I were real.

  In the next instant a look of confusion mounted upon her face, deepened into terror. Abruptly, her mouth crumpled, her eyebrows knotted, and she began to wail in panic. Within a minute she was hysterical.

  EIGHT

  WE made hot milk for Monina, we put her to bed. Guinevere sat beside the child and stroked her hair, crooning fragments of love ballads in an absorption so great that I am certain she was unaware of me. And the language, conventional enough—“Oh, go to sleep, baby, cause Mommie loves you, go to sleep”—was startling from Guinevere. A tear which might have been genuine coursed down her cheek. “You’re all I got,” she murmured once, and that compassion which is just one degree from self-pity shone upon her face.

  Monina quieted at last and fell asleep. Fingers held to our lips, we tiptoed from the room, closed the door, and went into the kitchen.