Collected Stories

  It was he who got off the subway train first, winking at her and sniffing his fingers as he stumbled to the dividing doors of the car and saying to her, “Baby, I’m going to lick your cum off my fingers, man, I like the smell of it, so long. Babe.”

  Then he was out and the train was moving again. She had then, finally, given a little cry of protest…

  Never, never before had nearly such a shameful experience happened to her. It must have been the result of that research into the lives of those decadent poets, they must have possessed her senses and debauched them.

  Still immobilized, she’d stayed slouched on the bench till a conductor passed through the car, sleepily calling out, “Change here for Coney Island.”

  “Coney Island, I planned to take that in but not in the evening, alone,” she remarked to herself as she staggered up and called to the conductor, “How can I get back to Columbus Circle, I’m a stranger in town!”

  Well, the genial and personable waiter still in his flower of adolescence had quit the room while she was engaged in mentally divesting him of his securely zipped trousers and then she’d returned to that subway trip nine summers past and she was still seated on her breakfast balcony. She had no impulse at all to get up now and lock the door of her bedroom, in fact she almost considered calling room service again to ask for another caffe-talle con spuma d’arancia. And why not, indeed? She needed a bit more coffee to get herself going today. “Don’t think about it, just do it” was excellent self-advice. She picked up the bedside phone. After a good deal of buzzing, clicking and clacking an impatient voice said, “Pronto?” It was a female voice, not only impatient but supercilious-sounding. She’d noticed that girl on the switchboard when she checked in the pensione and hadn’t liked the look of her, oh, she was pretty all right in her commonplace fashion and would doubtless be acceptable as a sort of second-string bunny at those Playboy clubs she’d heard of, but her glance, lifting from a book of colored comics, had been disparaging when Barbara, addressing the desk clerk, had asked for a “singolo con bagno sul mare” and the girl had giggled when the impertinent clerk had replied in English, “We don’t have rooms on the sea.”

  “Of course I meant facing the sea, not floating on it,” she had retorted crisply. “I wired from Rome for a room that would face the sea.”

  “Rooms on the sea are occupied. You will have to look at the mountains.”

  The switchboard girl had giggled again and lifted her colored comics.

  “Oh, I did hope to escape comic books when I left the States. My students in junior college brought them into the classroom, till prohibited strictly.”

  The clerk’s comprehension of English hadn’t seemed to encompass remarks not related to occupied or vacant rooms facing the mountains or sea and the girl on the switchboard was back into comics too deeply to be distracted even by the insistent buzz of—

  “Pronto!”

  The girl’s voice was downright insolent, now, and Barbara had to swallow before she could ask for room service.

  “lo voglio—caffe-latte—con spuma d’arancia, per—favore!”

  She had deliberately separated the words, acquired from her phrase book, as if she were addressing a moron, which the girl probably was.

  The probable moron muttered something quite unintelligible but very harsh in sound.

  Barbara slammed down the phone receiver and turned to face the mirror over the bureau.

  Oh, my Lord, she was unfastening the two top buttons of her diaphanous dressing gown and. Oh, my Holy Saviour, she was bending painfully to slip down and step out of her support hose, why, she would be as nearly nude to the young waiter’s eyes, when he returned with the second breakfast tray, as Isadora Duncan was said to have been when posing for Genthe among the columns of the Acropolis.

  “Hah! What of it? I am a normal woman aside from my afflictions and my desire is a totally natural thing!”

  After a wait of twenty minutes there was the knock at the door.

  “Avanli, per favore.”

  And into the room entered not the enchanting youth but a stout man of middle years in a grease-stained apron.

  His eyes, as greasy as his apron, took mocking but lascivious account of her diaphanous dressing gown.

  “Where is the young man?” she blurted out before she could stop herself.

  “Non capito,” said Mr. Grease as he rolled his eyes toward the bed.

  She pointed furiously toward the balcony and snatched a rumpled sheet off the bed to protect her from his kitchen gaze…

  Now she was looking out not at the “veritable sea of bougainvillea,” which made her seasick, but at the menacing profile of the mountains.

  They seemed to have a personal attitude toward her, less favorable than the switchboard girl’s and the desk clerk’s.

  She snatched toward her another postcard.

  “I can’t begin to tell you what a marvelous improvement I feel on this divine coast, the early morning pale blue of the water almost exactly matches the early morning pale blue of the mountains—”

  She’d meant to say of the sea, but never mind, postcards aren’t literature.

  “How can I ever thank you for—”

  Shit!

  Did she say that very Mitford “U” word and if she hadn’t, who had?

  She shoved the postcard away.

  “How embarrassing!” she said softly, aloud, and she meant the collection of money her colleagues at the junior college had made to give her this trip abroad. Embarrassing but providential it was, since she had used up all her sick leave, taking off the fall semester, all of it, at the Atlanta Clinic and then resting at Cousin Ida’s.

  She was obliged now to assure them that their munificence had been justified; must report to them nothing of her declining vigor and the increasing complaint in her knee joints when she mounted and descended the many steps in this village between extinct volcanos and clear, cold sea.

  It was still much too early to begin the painful descent from hotel to beach for a therapeutic dip before lunch. So what to do? She had no inclination, now, to continue writing postcards, what she felt like was retreating to bed agian and studying her phrase book.

  Getting up, she noticed that she moved more freely with hardly any premonitory twinges in her knee joints.

  “You sweet, pretty thing, you, have a wonderful time!”

  Who’d said that at the farewell, the bon voyage party?

  Oh, yes, naturally Daisy, and the others had nodded brightly, embraced her and bestowed kisses on her blushing cheeks.

  Now where was the phrase book? Oh. On the natural place for it to be, on the little bedside table.

  How good to lie down again! Would it be good to get up?

  No, it wasn’t, very, but two hours later she forced herself out of bed and prepared to make her solitary appearance on the holiday-crowded beach.

  As she had arrived only a day or two before, her clothes were still a bit creased from the Val-pac which had been presented to her at the going-away party given her by the faculty of Georgia Junior College. The piece of luggage was the most prominent single gift in the shower, that is, aside from the cash endowment, and it had been presented to her by the head of the English department, the one Ph.D. on the junior college faculty, a gentleman in his early fifties with the impressive name of Dr. Horace Leigh Fisher, a collateral cousin of hers on the maternal side of her family. It had obviously not been newly purchased: in fact, that spiteful Miss Lily had whispered to her, “The doctor’s wife told me he was giving you his own Val-pac and buying himself a new one. Now isn’t that precious of him. So much more personal, huh?”

  Of course Barbara knew how to hold her own with Miss Lily and she had smiled sweetly at the spiteful prune and whispered back, “Cest en famille tu sais!”—Miss Lily taught French and resented the use of that language by other faculty members, as though she had established a proprietorship on the tongue because she taught it.

  Well, Barbara picked out
a pink frock, a sort of watermelon pink with dainty white cuffs and a Peter Pan collar, and hung it in the bathroom and turned on the hot water to steam out the creases while she completed her toilette. Since this would be her first appearance on the beach, it was momentous. She placed various beach things in an embroidered reticule that dated back fifty years, a gift from old Cousin Ida. In it she put her suntan lotion, her espadrilles, her reading glasses and a novella by Muriel Spark. There was something sad about this little colleciton: it spelled out “solitude” but then what didn’t these days, and at this reflection, she began to apply a decorous bit of makeup to her face. To each of her high cheekbones she applied an almost imperceptible dab of pale rouge, to her lips she applied first a natural lipstick, then rubbed it off and with a sort of defiant vehemence put on the tango red. That outrageous touch removed whatever was decorous from the preparations and she snatched up the little container of false eyelashes that were, God knows, intended only for after-dark occasions. Oh, the hell with it, she thought, and with trembling fingers she put them on. They were only medium length and they did set off her best feature, which was her eyes, rather large and clear and innocent-looking.

  Innocent-looking? Well there are several interpretations of the word “innocent.” An innocent look could be a guileful look, one that pretended to represent an ingenuousness of nature that didn’t quite exist. Oh, yes, she could remember when that innocent look had been a genuine thing, and it lingered on and on, a perennial nonstop thing, as useful now as ever, despite a touch of dissimulation in it at times.

  Oh, Lord, the watermelon pink! She rushed from the dressing table to the bathroom door and when she threw it open she was nearly bowled over by the outpouring of steam. Holding a hand to nose and mouth, she fumbled for the frock on the wire hanger and fled with it back to the bedroom and found that it was wet to the point that it would cling to her body if she wore it.

  Well, why not, let it cling! A phrase came into her mind which she’d heard the boys and girls use at the junior college, “Let it all hang out!”

  After all, when she’d put on the tango red instead of the natural lipstick, there was hardly any point in retreating to anything like decorum…

  Her knee joints ached as she passed with a soulful expression toward a row of cabanas, but she allowed nothing in her sinuous walk to betray the discomfort of it.

  She had learned the present tense of “I wish.”

  To the man in charge of the cabanas she said slowly and carefully, “lo voglio um cabana, prego!”

  His answer threw her off.

  “Tutte sono occupate oggi.”

  She guessed that “occupate” meant occupied but the rest of the answer wasn’t clear, and so she continued to wait and to smile. At last he smiled back and said;

  “Forse ce una, aspet’.”

  He rushed away and in a few moments returned saying, this time in pidgin English, “I find one for Signorina, number feefty!”

  He made a gesture that meant for her to follow and she nodded brightly and followed. To her bafflement this cabana number fifty was placed between numbers sixteen and eighteen and, seeing her puzzled look, the cabana man said, “In Italy seventeen bad luck so we call this feefty.”

  “Ah,” she murmured as he opened the door of the little cabana for her.

  Ridiculous, she thought as she entered the dim cubicle, meaning her reluctance to occupy anything thought unlucky. Then she remembered that in America the thirteenth floor of a hotel was sometimes counted as the fourteenth although it was directly above the twelfth, so she latched the door of the cabana and changed into a swimsuit that had a bare midriff and was pale blue to match her eyes, a gift from the notorious teacher of physics who, it was rumored, had enjoyed sexual relations with nearly a dozen of the younger female faculty members but despite this scandal, retained his post because he had, for political reasons, offered himself now and then to Dr. Boxer’s wife, a rather plump matron pushing forty behind her, and Dr. Boxer was President of the junior college in Macon and completely under the dominance of his wife.

  Now, then, she was ready, she guessed, and out she went into the noonday glare of the Divina Costiera with which that dog on the postcard had been so enchanted.

  She rented a beach chair with umbrella in the first row facing the sea but she didn’t sit down, she pulled on her florally decorated swim cap and waded into the smooth, clear water with an alacrity that disguised her painful joints.

  “Ouuu!” she cried aloud, for the sea felt almost icy.

  At the same moment she lost her balance and would have fallen clumsily into the water if someone hadn’t caught hold of her by the elbow.

  “Ahhh!” she exclaimed as she faced him. Of course the exclamation was involuntary but it was well justified by her rescuer’s appearance. He was obviously of a northern clime, tall, blond-balding and with a musculature that compensated for some excess weight.

  “Grazie, grazie, l’acqua!”

  “Ja, ja, das Wasser ist kalt!”

  “Oh, excuse me, you’re German!”

  Now she was in the water up to her waist and he was up to his— goodness! Crotch was the word that had almost entered her mind, and with a graceful out-spread of arms, she fell into the water and for some reason, which she didn’t explain to herself, she began to make choking sounds and floundering motions as if she had never been in water before although she was really an experienced swimmer.

  At once two hands went about her body and one of them was very close to her buttocks and the other between her breasts.

  While she continued her spurious gasps, she. turned toward him her tango-red smile and cried out, “Donky-shane.”

  “Do not be frightened. I will not release.”

  Indeed he did not release!

  Within a few minutes the hand between her breasts was firmly cupping one of them and the other had moved to her groin, in fact one of his fingers was pressing at the lips of that orifice which had been entered only once, by the drugged Puerto Rican’s licentious—

  “Oh, my Lord, how suddenly You have provided!” she exclaimed to herself.

  Since he commanded a bit of English as well as a commanding grasp of her body, he gave her some verbal as well as physical instruction in swimming and she was an apt pupil. Her previous swimming had been at “Ladies’ Day” at the Macon, Georgia, Y.M.C.A., she had been a regular there, attending both times a week. She had learned how to immerse her head in the pool with each stroke and to expel the bit of water that entered her mouth. It had been at the “Y” pool, diving daintily off the springboard, that she had first felt the stab of pain in her spine, early last fall…

  Oh, my Lord, it was quite unmistakable now that the German’s finger was gently inserting itself between her vaginal lips, and it was also clear that he was guiding her about a protrusion of rocks toward a little cove that was clear and cold and almost deserted, a printed sign over it saying “Massi Caduti,” meaning that rocks might fall.

  Oh, well, what if rocks fell? Things more important than rocks can fall in a secluded cove of such stimulating clear, cold water…

  Then a sad thing happened.

  A loud female voice called out to him as he was about to conduct her around that outcropping of rocks into the secluded cove.

  “Klaus! Klaus!”

  “Ja, Liebchen! Ich kommen!”

  It was an outraged wife’s voice that had called him from the water. He made a quick apology to Barbara and swam ashore to where his Frau and three kinder were spreading out edibles from a wicker hamper on the dark gray pebbles, not as dark as Barbara’s disappointment.

  I must forget that incident, she thought as she settled into her beach chair beneath a spangled umbrella and put on her reading glasses.

  Miss Spark’s new novella. The Hothouse by the East River, was much better than her attention to it suggested. Her eyes kept drifting toward the cluster of Germans, all now greedily eating and shouting at each other across their paper plates.
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  Once Klaus caught her eyes and waved. His Frau shouted something to him and snatched his paper plate from him to refill it with potato salad and sausage.

  Disappointment always removes one a little from a holiday crowd, and as she started back on her aching knee joints toward the pensione, nobody seemed to notice her in the still damply clinging watermelon-pink dress.

  It was Italian lunchtime, two-thirty, but she felt a bit nauseous now and ignored the eating places she passed.

  Oh, how could she possibly lunch alone!

  Is there anything more humiliating in this world than to eat alone?

  The night before there had been the festa of San Pietro, celebrated a kilometer down the coast with such loud explosives that sleep had been impossible even after the codeine, the Valium and the Nembutal tablets.

  Tonight there was another festa, closer and still noisier. It was a local festa, observed by a village halfway up the mountain behind her hotel and it was a most peculiar type of festa. It enacted in fireworks an attempt by the devil to assault the Virgin Mary. Great booming rockets traced the gradual retreat of the Virgin before the presumably lecherous pursuit of his Satanic majesty, and of course it always concluded, finally, in the triumph of the lady’s virtue but it sure in hell took a long time for this triumph to be accomplished.

  Having been warned by the proprietor of Posa Posa pensione that this fesia was to commence at midnight and continue for about four hours, she had purchased on her way back from the beach some ear-stoppers of a gummy substance. At the pensione she took a very hot bath, as hot as she could stand it, to ease the ache in her bones, and had put out on her bedside table two tablets of codeine, four Valium tablets and three Nembutals and she had wedged the ear-stoppers very tight into her ears and gone to bed with all the windows closed on the imminent noise of battle between the Virgin and the devil.

  Nothing availed.

  The contest between the Virgin and Satan, accompanied by appreciative shrieks from onlookers on the terraces below, made sleep the last possibility in Barbara’s world of torment.