American Sextet

by Warren Adler

  "You Martins," she'd once remarked, "are one breed of angry, frustrated men. When are you going to realize you can't remake the world, Jason?" It had started out as a mere lover's quarrel when they were at Columbia together, sharing a room above a fish store on Columbus Avenue. Big Jake, his father, was a burnt-out case working on the copy rim of the New York Daily News. He wrote catchy headlines, mostly to cop the ten dollar prizes for booze money since his paycheck was sent directly to his wife.

  "Why is he so angry?" Jane would ask.

  "They screwed him over."

  Her confusion later gave way to exasperation. Jane never did understand the chemistry of pride mixed with indignation. Worse for her, it was evident in their son, Jason III, who they called Trey. Luckily, the boy was old enough to handle himself and proved a source of pride for Jason, despair for his mother. She actually thought that by separating father and son, she would be able to change that difficult mixture. Time and patience, he knew, would give him his revenge--one could never escape from the genes.

  "Just be sure to keep an eye on the boys upstairs," Big Jake had always warned him. "You're just chattel to them."

  Someday, Big Jake told everybody, he would write "the" book, a novel, one of great truth. He had died with the promise on his lips.

  "Your old man's brilliant," people told Jason, "a genius," although no one could explain in what way, except that under the influence he was remarkably articulate, a barroom performer. His tongue never slurred. Eloquence would pour out in a barrage of eclectic quotations, bits of esoteric knowledge on every conceivable subject from mathematics to botany to poetry.

  "Impotence. That's what it is," Jane had concluded finally. She had meant the whole spectrum of his father's psychology, not just his sexuality, which she could not have known. Yet in the way his parents lived in their cluttered Jackson Heights apartment there was a nagging thread of truth in what she'd said. His mother had dried up early and swollen-bellied Big Jake rarely got to bed sober.

  "It's not going to happen to me," Jason had promised her. "I'm really going to write that book."

  "Sure, Jason. Sure."

  Jane never tired of analyzing him, basing her insights on undergraduate psychology courses. It grew more relentless over the years until, near the end, it became a constant barrage.

  "You're just trying to get even," she would say. "That's what it's all about."

  "For what?" By then, the conversation had become a painful ritual that repeated itself over and over again.

  "For Big Jake, for his failure, for the injustices in the world, for everything."

  Even Jason's success in ferreting out corruption in the FDA met with Jane's stony praise.

  "Feel better?"

  "I feel great."

  She was surprisingly gentle when they finally parted, knowing that setting him adrift after a dozen years of nesting, leaving him no place to fly home to, no body to be near, no child to love, would unsettle him more than her. She had been right. Without the family anchor he drifted, just like his father. He bled for mankind, not for men. It was a journalist's minefield. Life was unjust. Power corrupted. Big people hurt little people. He knew that deep inside of him, he had the capacity to love. The problem was drawing it out of himself, showing it to others. Knowing that only made him more angry.

  "I'll change," he'd promised, another part of the ritual, knowing it lacked conviction. Secretly, he had tried. He had stretched the fuse as far as it would go. Even analysis, which she had suggested, wouldn't have saved them. He knew his own ingredients, his chemistry. He did want to get even and he could make up a thousand reasons why. Still, he reasoned, how would it have made a difference?

  Once she was gone, it was losing Trey that had hurt the most. His son! God, had he been happy to hear the doctor's announcement. A son. A lifetime of hope and aspirations had been invested in that boy from the moment of birth. All those dreams of immortality that went through his mind ... Conception and pregnancy weren't only a woman's game, he thought bitterly. And fatherhood. How could she have taken that away as well?

  He got up and reread his copy, annoyed that his professionalism demanded that he tell both sides. The fact was that the oil companies would actually make it better for the miners, whose occupation was grim at best. Their work was, quite literally, the pits--an exercise in self-flagellation. Even the towns that grew up beside the shafts reflected the bleak, joyless gloom of the underground caverns. Rows of dreary houses, bars covered with imitation stone and cheerless orange neon; the inevitable church steeples, some with odd Byzantine touches that reflected Eastern Europe's remembered influence. At least at night you couldn't see the slag heaps.

  He phoned in his story, took a cold shower, dressed in jeans and T-shirt, the local uniform of summer night life, and walked along the highway toward the flashing neon of "Johnny's Roadhouse Go-Go Bar." Like all things in Hiram, it was an anachronism, maybe fifteen years behind the times.

  Squinting into the smoke, the smell of stale beer in the air, he went in. A jukebox blared a noisy rock tune. In the South, the clientele would be considered redneck. Here the necks seemed more than figuratively coated with black grime. Every male along the bar had nails filled with black half moons. He made fists to hide his odd cleanliness and ordered a brew, served up straight in cold bottles. It seemed a badge of male dishonor to drink from a glass. Even the few women present drank from bottles.

  Above the bar, standing on a precarious wooden platform, a go-go dancer in a tiny beaded skirt and bra bounced her tits and hips in time with the music, her face as bored as the customers were eager. It was late, nearly one, and the alcoholic level of the blood was high, reflected in the cacophony of high-pitched voices.

  He ordered a couple of rounds of rye doubles to go with the beer, which came in over-sized shot glasses. He rarely drank rye, but Scotch seemed almost effeminate in this atmosphere.

  As the crowd thinned, the music grew louder. The booze drew him deeper into himself, into that recessive pool of anger and self-pity.

  By two A.M. the dwindling crowd seemed to develop a strange air of expectation. He noted that the neon light had been turned off and heavy canvas coverings had been pulled over the windows. He noted, too, that those who were left bellied up to the bar, a mixed bag of all ages, including a grizzled toothless gent who could barely keep his head up.

  "Twenty bucks to stay," the bartender said. He was built like a slab of stone with bulging neck muscles and an ample belly that hung over tight-belted pants.

  Without curiosity he took a twenty from a roll of bills in his hip pocket and pushed it forward.

  Suddenly music exploded in the room and the lights went low except for one above the rickety little stage, on which a young blonde woman in a white bikini stood, feet astride. Ruffling her hair, she twitched her tight smooth full rump, swaying to the music with uncommon grace, obviously different from the girls before her.

  Bending forward, thrusting out her buttocks, she rolled down her panties, showing tight perfect globes. There seemed to be a simultaneous swallow in the crowd, the sound of a gulp, louder than the music. Naked from the waist down, the woman unloosed her bra then straightened, showing the proud posture of youth.

  When she finally turned, the men applauded. He did the same, less out of lust than admiration. The woman had the face and carriage of a junior league hostess. Her hair cascaded in a perfect ruffled line. Even her cheap makeup couldn't hide the strangely patrician aura about her. Her mouth was set in a painted smile above an upward thrust cleft chin over her long, swanlike neck.

  In the icy white light, her body had no edges. High tipped nipples jutted upward from the rosy centers of her full breasts. Her belly was flat with a button that seemed to wink like an eye in step with her gyrations. Below was a dark curly bush, the upper part of which had been shaved into a heart's shape.

  "My little valentine," he chuckled.

  The men were uncommonly silent, lost in private fantasies.

&nb
sp; "Makes a dead man hard," a hoarse voice said beside him. Jason agreed completely, feeling his own tumescence begin.

  The girl performed an exhibit more than a dance, but that seemed okay with the crew that watched, in fact anything would have been okay with them; she was like an angel that had simply descended from outer space. He wondered if he were fantasizing himself, embellishing the woman's charms with his own overheated imagination. He had been womanless for quite awhile now. Even before she'd left, Jane had withdrawn herself and occasionally he experienced a "nocturnal emission," something that hadn't happened since he was an adolescent. It always disgusted him, reminding him of his joyless existence and stimulating his self-pity.

  Watching the girl in his drunken state, he became convinced she was throwing out a special scent, sending him a personal message. He ordered two more rye doubles in quick succession.

  He watched in awe, inspired by the awakening desire in himself. Still, his reporter's instinct nagged at him. How had this lovely woman come to this place? Was he investing her with a mystique that didn't exist, something dredged up from his own intense yearning? He persisted in questioning his reaction to the woman--it was the curse of the journalist. He had to hack it to the bone.

  His excitement grew and he wondered if the others felt as he did. Even the old man had ceased his nodding, a thin smile lighting up his unkempt whiskered face.

  Not only me, he told himself, his journalist's mind quickly flipping the coin of logic. The men were ready for it, conditioned. How many would rush home and finish it with their blubbery, protesting wives?

  The music's end was a signal to the bartender, who flicked the light, darkening the stage and the woman disappeared. The spectators settled up, emptied their glasses, and filed out into the night.

  "One for the road." He signaled the bartender, who hurried over and poured.

  Jason caressed the glass as the bartender mopped the bar clean. He felt his stomach tighten as he mustered the courage to say what had to be said. Emptying his glass, he felt the spur of sudden inner heat and the drunken illusion of courage.

  "She do private performances?"

  The man scowled, looked up for a moment, then went back about his mopping.

  "That's her business," he said. He looked at Jason's empty glass, an unmistakable gesture of termination.

  "I'll lay a hundred on you."

  "On me?"

  "You know what I mean," Jason said. For him, it was totally off the track, as if he was suddenly not in charge of himself. What the hell am I doing?

  "And a hundred for her." He seemed to be saying it in another language, another voice. He took out his roll and put it on the bar. Like in the movies, he thought. Choreographed machismo.

  "Hey Dot," the bartender called out in a booming voice. There was silence, then a rustle behind the walls of bottles. She came out from a doorway in tight jeans and T-shirt.

  "He wants to give you a C," the bartender said, not mentioning his own stake in the enterprise. She came closer. Such close proximity did not shatter the illusion. She inspected Jason and smiled, seeming childlike, innocent. If there was a hardness in her, it didn't show.

  "I'm Jason Martin," he said awkwardly, clearing his throat.

  "I told him it wasn't my business," the bartender said quickly, suggesting to Jason that there was nothing more between them. Jason was thankful for that.

  "My boyfriend's in the mines 'till five," she said hesitantly, betraying her interest. A part of himself was disgusted. She looked toward the bartender.

  "What's your business is your business," he said, clearly anxious to close.

  "I'm just down the road at Smart's," Jason pressed. "Leaving tomorrow. Just passing through."

  Surely it's not her first time, he told himself, but she seemed so guileless. Was she that good an actress? Or was it natural? That was too much to hope for.

  "I have to pick him up at five," she said, apologetically. A battered clock on the wall read 3 A.M. Fifty bucks an hour, he thought. More than I make. She seemed to be watching him closely.

  "Where you from?" It was the first slight crack in the illusion, the first hint that her junior league facade wasn't real. He shook off the thought. He needed her. Needed her now. But why? He was following a lead, he told himself.

  "Washington, D.C.," he said.

  "Gosh."

  This had to be the real thing, he told himself. He couldn't remember the last time he'd heard "gosh," especially from a woman.

  "You ever met the President?"

  He couldn't believe it, nodding finally.

  "Gosh," she said again.

  He slapped the bar and gathered his bills in a fist. Pausing in his mopping, the bartender winked at him.

  "I'll be a minute," she said, hurrying off. He watched her move away in her tight jeans.

  "He's a jealous bastard, her boyfriend. Better be careful."

  Jason peeled off two fifties, putting them in the man's hammy hand. His stubby fingers closed quickly and he slipped them into a side pocket.

  "I don't know from nothin'. I'm supposed to be watching out for her."

  "I won't hurt her," he muttered. Man's greed could not be overestimated, he thought. And his ability to corrupt.

  She came back looking neat and freshly scrubbed, a tiny hint of lipstick, like a kid ready for her first date.

  "I walked," Jason said.

  "I'll take Jim's pickup."

  "You crazy, Dot," the bartender said.

  "Better not," she replied, after a hesitant frown.

  On the road, he walked beside her, listening to the sounds their shoes made on the gravel. Her high heels gave her walk an uncommon stiffness. They seemed like ordinary lovers on a warm summer night.

  "You do this much?" he asked.

  "Do what?"

  She hadn't even broken stride. It was a novice's inevitable question, as if he had to be genuinely attracted in order to make the transaction palatable. He let it pass.

  A canopy of stars was overhead, the road deserted, the air heavy with the scent of wild honeysuckle. He was thankful that Art Smart's neon was turned off. Silently she walked beside him, like a trained puppy. He reached out and took her hand; her fingers returned the pressure. He felt wanted. The tide of anger receded as he unlocked the door and let her into the room.

  "Don't," he said as she flicked on the overhead light revealing the disarray. The bed was mussed and dirty underwear was strewn on the floor. A chair in the corner was piled with sweat-stained shirts and stray socks. He felt embarrassed by his untidiness until she turned off the light.

  "You a writer?" she asked, having noticed his typewriter.

  "Newspaperman."

  The "gosh" again.

  He lit a cigarette and sat cross-legged on the bed, kicking off his shoes.

  "I write for the Washington Post. Doing a story on the mines."

  "The mines? That's boring."

  She started to undress, unzipping the fly of her jeans and stepping out of them. The tumescence was instantly triggered again. She lifted her T-shirt.

  "You're a remarkably beautiful woman," he said, feeling the pulse in his throat.

  "You want to see me dance?" she asked.

  "I saw that."

  "It's fun," she said. "Feels good, too."

  "You like showing ... yourself?"

  "Sure. Men like to look at me," she said proudly, rolling down her panties and turning to exhibit herself.

  "Come here." He could barely speak; his breath was short in his excitement.

  She moved forward, standing close to the bed, until he was a hairsbreadth away from her breasts. Reaching with his tongue, he licked her nipples, first one, then the other. They hardened instantly.

  "I wish I could gobble you up." He had never said that to anyone before. Against his cheek, as he caressed her, he felt her heart beating rapidly. At least she wasn't indifferent, he thought.

  "Undress me," he said. He was surprised at his tone. It was a comma
nd. She obeyed, tugging at his pants. When he was free of them, she bent over him, caressing his throbbing erection with her breasts.

  "You feel good?" she asked.

  He nodded his head appreciatively.

  "What about you?" It would simply be too much to ask for.

  "Love it," she said. "The best..."

  Is this what joy means? He was sure it was.

  She was tucked in the crook of his arm, fitted there as if her body were clay. Along with his explosive pleasure his anger had dissipated, leaving him tranquil. It was an uncommon sensation for him and he felt transformed--almost happy. He breathed in the sweetness of her flesh while his fingers caressed her smooth haunches.

  "6.7 on the Richter scale," he told her when they lay quietly together. Her passion had surprised him as well. Jane hadn't given him much mutuality, especially not after the first few years. Before Jane, other women had offered quick pit-stops. But this was different.

  "Who?" she responded, confused.

  He let it pass.

  "What do you want?" he said suddenly. It had been there all along, the quintessential question. It bothered him to want to know.

  "Want?"

  She was alert, not drowsing. During their lovemaking, a rim of perspiration had burst on her skin. It had cooled now, a delicious cool. Against his flesh, hers was like a compress to a bruise.

  "I mean what do you want to do with your life?"

  "Gosh."

  "You always say that," he teased. It was not meant to hurt, nor did it. She seemed awed by life. Was she a true innocent or an outstanding dissimulator? This wasn't just a woman. She was like a dream materialized.

  "Dress up. Look pretty. Be happy. Make other people happy," she said. She was silent for awhile, then lovingly patted his sex again. Why was he asking "big" questions, expecting "big" answers. She was just a pretty wildflower growing in the slag heaps. Why was he romanticizing her?