by Don Elliott
It belonged to the peeper, Ellen realized.
Was he still sitting by his window, monitoring some scene on her side of the building? Was somebody still up, perhaps performing some scene of erotic fervor that kept the Peeping Tom glued to his station?
No. Apparently not. She didn't see the little man at his window. The lights were on, but he wasn't huddled down behind his blinds. Ellen shrugged. Remaining at the window, she thought she caught sight of the man, fully dressed, wandering around in his apartment. Maybe he had a bad case of insomnia, she thought. Keyed up after watching everybody undressing and unable to get to sleep himself.
She couldn't help smiling. Here am I, she thought, peeping at the peeper. Spying at the spy.
She closed her blind again. She poured herself another shot of bourbon, and gulped it down. Then Ellen got back into bed. The cold sweat that her dream had induced was all but gone. Her heart's fearful pounding had just about returned to normal. The bourbon had made her mildly tipsy, blanking out the worst fears.
Sleep came again. This time the dreams were the usual sort, fragmentary bits and pieces of visualization, nothing so sustained and terrifying as that earlier nightmare. Now she was running naked down a street, her bare breasts leaping about; now she was lying on a bed, coupling violently with some unknown man; now she was swimming nude through a lake whose waters were red as blood. But the images came and went quickly as she made her journey through the world of the night, and she did not awaken again.
In the morning, she felt shaky and tense. The nightmare still haunted her. She could not forget the blaze of the sun, nor the feel of those whips, nor the man with the wrong face.
Nor could she forget the earlier scene, the one she had not imagined but unfortunately had lived the plump hand descending on her bare quivering buttocks, and then the same hand putting a fifty-dollar bill in her palm. When she reached the office, Brubaker was already there. He gave her a pleasant, impersonal smile-he didn't believe in carrying after-hours relationships into the office at all.
"Good morning. Ellen," he said cheerily, boss-to-employee tone of voice. "Did you sleep well?"
"Very well, Mr. Brubaker," Ellen said in a low, bitter mutter, and clung tight to her self-control as she slid behind her desk.
CHAPTER TEN
Mr. Crispian had had a pretty rough night too.
The encounter with that shameless young minx, Kathryn, had left him practically devastated. After he threw her out of his apartment, he crouched shivering and stupefied, on the verge of complete collapse.
He was stunned for a whole host of reasons. One of the biggest was that for the first time in his career as a window peeper, one of the peep victims had not only detected him but had come around to visit him. That jeopardized all his security. So long as he was safe in his anonymity, there was nothing to worry about. But when the peeped-upon started letting him know that they were aware of his attentions, he was at their mercy. Whenever they chose, they could call the police and bring down on him the cataclysm that he dreaded.
He was shaken up for other reasons too, though.
There was the fact that the girl had entered his apartment and had stripped off her trench coat to reveal her naked body. All that flesh, so close to him. It blinded him. Looking at her bare body, her revealed breasts, buttocks, thighs and hips, was like looking straight into the sun. Mr. Crispian was not accustomed to such sights at close range. It suited him to see nakedness with a courtyard's distance in between. It rocked him to have a naked girl actually standing a few feet away, flaunting herself.
And he hadn't just looked. He had touched. He had put his hands right on her nude breasts, had felt those silken-smooth mounds of flesh within his fingers, her nipples like little pebbles pressing into the palms of his hands. His hands still tingled from that.
She had offered herself. She had been willing to let him have her. That terrified him. Vicarious sex, yes, that was wonderful-stare across the courtyard at the two Lesbians, fine. But to do it himself? No. No. He was afraid. The act of loving held terrors for him that he could not even give names to.
So he had chased her away. She had been angry at that. Furious. She had actually wanted to make love with him. Mr. Crispian was baffled by that. Never in his adult life had a woman showed such passionate desire for him.
Of course, he didn't deceive himself into thinking that it was he, J. Martin Crispian himself, that the girl wanted. She would take anybody. She had an itch, and he was there to scratch it for her, that was all. That was why she had come bursting into the sanctuary of his little apartment, bringing havoc into his orderly life.
And what would happen now?
Would she go to the police and report that he was a Peeping Tom? Would she spread more trouble for him?
She might. She had nothing to gain from it, of course, since she couldn't be accused of modesty, not after the way she had shown her nudity to him. She didn't give a damn whether he peeped at her or not. But she might want to stir up problems for him simply because he had refused her. It would be her sort of revenge. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and so forth.
Mr. Crispian was terrified.
He didn't know what to do or where to go. Run away, move to another house, to another city? No. He couldn't possibly do that. He had lived here for many years. He had built his whole life around this apartment. It was his shell, his hermitage. If he moved somewhere else now, how could he be sure that there would be anybody to spy on, like the blonde girl whose display of nightly nakedness was so dependable, so important to him.
But if I stay here, he thought, the girl may make trouble for me.
He paced around the apartment, hands locked behind his back, shoulders hunched forward in an old man's slump. His throat was dry with fear.
Maybe I ought to go back to the girl, he wondered. Sleep with her after all. Give her what she wants, and then I won't have to worry about her telling the cops. I'll apologize to her for throwing her down on the floor, for tossing her out of the apartment. I'll tell her that any time she likes, she can come here and go to bed with me, just so long as she doesn't make trouble. She's a beautiful girl. I could do a lot worse in bed.
No. No.
What am I saying?
The girl's under age. Fifteen, sixteen-how could I touch her? They'd put me away for a million years if they found out a man my age was sleeping with a teen-ager.
Anyway, she'd laugh in my face. She doesn't really want to sleep with me. It was just her mood, her whim this one night. If I went back to her, she'd spit at me and tell me what she thinks of me. And then she'd likely call the cops on me for molesting her.
Besides-besides, he was afraid to go to bed with a woman for any reason, and that was why he was afraid to go back to the girl Kathryn and start anything.
Mr. Crispian sat down on the edge of the bed and closed his eyes. And, though he didn't want to think about such things, he found himself remembering the very last time he had actually slept with a woman.
It had been almost half his lifetime ago. More than twenty-five years back. But he could remember it as clearly as though it had happened last week.
He had been in his middle twenties, then. The pattern of his life had already been set. The thin, shy, hesitant boy had grown up into a thin, shy, hesitant man. His sisters had gotten married, all but the feebleminded one, and his mother was dead. Mr. Crispian was living by himself in a small rented room. He had a job, a dreary clerical post that brought him enough money to pay for his food and rent and clothing, with perhaps two dollars a week extra that he could put away as his savings.
His sex life had also settled into a regular pattern. After his spectacular initiation into physical pleasures by the fat woman he had ogled on the bus, Mr. Crispian had gone through most of his adolescence without any further adventures. He never dated girls. He never picked up streetwalkers. He just went through his quiet days.
One by one his sisters moved a
way, until at last he was alone, and Mr. Crispian discovered that he had a powerful need to look at women's bodies. His immodest nude sisters, flitting shamelessly around the house, had filled that need for him. But now they were no longer around.
He bought little packets of girlie pictures and stared feverishly at the breasts and thighs on the glossy prints, and sometimes, when he bought the expensive kind, he could see more than that, too. But they weren't good enough. They didn't satisfy him.
By the time he turned sixteen, Mr. Crispian was already a confirmed window peeper.
He would keep his eyes alert all the time. A flash of flesh at a window, a breast that poked momentarily out of a housecoat, a bit of thigh, a passing buttock; everything was exciting to him.
He walked through quiet neighborhoods late at night, crouching behind parked cars or peering around trees. He saw lissome adolescent girls, pale and slender, standing nude before mirrors as they wondered worriedly if their breasts were developing fast enough. He saw sloppy fat women with jiggling buttocks stepping from their baths. He saw dark-skinned housemaids slipping out of their uniforms.
He saw a lot. He remembered it all, and lay awake in the dark hours, reliving his vicarious thrills.
However, he still hadn't closed the door on real life entirely, not quite yet.
Though he didn't actively go looking, for sexual adventures, Mr. Crispian didn't turn away from an opportunity when it knocked at his door. For example, when he was in high school he found himself working on a project to sell savings bonds, and he and a girl named Margie became a subcommittee within the subcommittee to draw posters.
And he and Margie had to have a subcommittee meeting somewhere. So they had it at Margie's house, and it turned out that there was nobody home but him and Margie.
Margie was a short, full-blown girl with mousycolored hair and a fondness for orange lipstick. She had a chunky build, with heavy globular breasts that were always encased in a sweater a couple of sizes too small. Mr. Crispian didn't know it, but Margie was regarded by most of the other fellows as a dog, and she had trouble getting dates.
Margie took advantage of him.
They drew posters for a while in her quiet apartment. Then she put her crayon down and said, "You're a funny fellow, Marty. Always so quiet and shy."
"Can I help it?"
"You act like you're afraid of girls." She giggled. "Have you ever done it with a girl?"
"It?"
"You know. It."
Mr. Crispian reddened. He thought of Jenny, the plump woman who had picked him up that hot summer day at the bus stop. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I have."
"You're kidding me!"
"I swear it." He hesitated. "It was a long time ago. A few years. But I did it."
He wished she would change the subject. Instead, she came dangerously close to him and said, "If you're such a lady-killer, how come you're afraid of me?"
"Who says I am."
"Here we are all alone, and you haven't tried to do anything," she said.
"We're here to draw posters," he reminded her. "The posters can wait."
Suddenly she was wriggling voluptuously and pressing herself up against him, and he realized that he was going to score whether he liked it or not; because if he turned her down he'd make an enemy and get accused of being a sissy, and besides, why not do it as long as he got the chance?
Margie stripped completely naked for him. Her squat, heavy-breasted body was not quite delightfully attractive, but it would do. He touched her breasts. He put his hand on her legs. She opened his pants.
Then he embraced her and took her. He wasn't very skillful at it, but it didn't seem to matter. Margie huffed and puffed and seemed to get her pleasure almost the moment that he slid to her, and he reached his own peak soon afterward. When he rolled away from her, he stared at her naked body with deep interest, but now she seemed embarrassed rather than wanton, and ran into the bathroom with her clothes.
She came out fully dressed, and her eyes lowered like those of an abashed virgin. "You won't tell anybody we did it, will you?" she asked. "I mean, I don't want anyone to get the idea I'm that sort of girl."
But you arc that sort of girl, Martin thought. He didn't say it. He went back to drawing posters with her, and never touched her again.
There were other encounters like that, accidental ones, where he found himself in a position where it was easier to go to bed with a girl than to avoid it. He enjoyed sex. He couldn't deny that. But what he didn't enjoy was the embarrassment of personal contact with somebody else, the emotional and psychological aspects. He hated to be involved with other people. He just wanted to be left alone. The dizzying, delicious sensations of lovemaking weren't worth the price and the effort of seducing girls and giving them the illusion that he was in love with them.
So his actual physical experiences were widely spaced. After he left high school, they were even less frequent, because now Mr. Crispian no longer was in regular day-to-day contact with girls. The women at the places where he worked were generally either married and faithful or unmarried and ugly. That was fine with Mr. Crispian. He went his quiet way, did a lot of window peeping, and every five or six months found himself slipping between the sheets for a oneshot bed encounter with some girl who had ensnared him.
He thought he would go along that way forever. But then a girl fell in love with him, which didn't figure in his calculations at all.
Her name was Joanne. She was a secretary at the place where he was working at that time. She was slim and delicately built, with trim legs, a good bosom and glossy dark hair, and she might have been an attractive girl, even a beautiful one, except that fate had dealt her a joker between the eyebrows and the chin. She had a horrid face. Her nose was flat and stubby, her lips were thick, her cheeks were pocked with the craters of old acne scars, her teeth were widely spaced and crookedly set.
What good was it to have lovely thighs and high, firm breasts if no man would ever look at you because of your face? Joanne was twenty-three years old, miserable, and unmarried. She wasn't a virgin, because m the past she had managed to find a few men desperate enough to take her to bed despite her face. And they had found that the old joke was true: you could put a sack over her face and boff her for burlap. But once they had done that, they politely bowed out of the picture so far as marriage was concerned. A girl could wear a veil at the altar, and love was made in the dark, but what about the rest of the time?
So Joanne had no prospects for a husband, and she wasn't getting any younger. She looked upon J. Martin Crispian and found him useful. He was no bargain either, in looks or in personality, but he was male, employed, and single. She set out in all possible ways to snare him.
She wore low-cut blouses and found excuses to drop things in front of his desk and then bend over from the hips to pick them up. That was fine with Mr. Crispian. He was a peeper from way back, and he enjoyed the glimpses of full white breasts that such moments provided.
She also managed to let herself be seen adjusting her garters. Her legs and thighs were fine, Mr. Crispian thought. He wondered vaguely about her buttocks. But unfortunately there was no convenient way that she could show her bare backside to him at the office.
She made a play for him outside the office. She traveled home on the same bus he took, and talked with him, and wiggled around so he could look down her blouse. She tried to get him to invite her to his home. Mr. Crispian was repelled by the plainness of her face, and frightened by the voracity of her physical needs. So he steered clear of any invitations.
Finally Joanne invited him. And trapped him.
"I'm having a party," she said. "It's my birthday. Won't you come? I'll be terribly unhappy if you don't."
Mr. Crispian didn't like parties, but he was a gentle soul and hated to hurt anybody's feelings. So he accepted. On the following Saturday night, he put on his best suit and went to Joanne's party and when he walked in he made the jarring discovery tha
t he was the only guest.
Joanne's outfit was a little startling, too. She wore a kind of negligee that swathed her in folds of black silk, and it was just gauzy enough to give the very definite impression that she was nude beneath. In his first startled glance, Mr. Crispian thought that he could see the dark circles of her nipples. Then she turned, leading him into the apartment. He looked more closely, when she had her back to him, and he saw beyond a doubt the firm white cheeks of her buttocks, dimly visible beneath her garment.
Her face was plastered with make-up. She was trying to hide the acne scars, and she more or less succeeded at that, but she couldn't hide her nose or her mouth or her teeth. Or her giddy, eager excitement.
"Have a drink," she said, practically forcing a glass into his hand.
