“I’ll bet you’re starved,” I said. “I mean, nothing to eat since breakfast, and that was long ago. We ought to be able to find a decent restaurant down the road, and—”
“We will,” she said. “After.”
“After?”
“After,” she said positively. She was wearing a black dress (inappropriate as hell; whoever heard of getting married in a black dress?) and she proceeded to correct the inappropriateness of the garment by the simple expedient of removing it. The girl had not only gotten married without an unblack dress, but beneath it she wore a black bra. Lacy, and peekaboo in style, and provocative. Then she took it off, and her big boobs beamed at me, and I stopped thinking about bras and dresses and began thinking very seriously about Jodi.
“We have to consummate our marriage,” she said, her eyes a-twinkle. “If we don’t, you could get an annulment. I don’t want you to get an annulment, Harvey.”
“But our marriage is bigamous to begin with.”
“Still,” she said, “I don’t want us to get an annulment. So let’s make sure we can’t.”
We made doubly sure.
We made very doubly sure. We knocked ourselves out, and we had a wonderful time.
And afterward she said: “That was wonderful, Harvey.”
“Which?”
“Both. This what every woman should have. This is just what a wedding night ought to be.”
Which put me in mind of my own wedding night, which in turn was not all that a wedding night should be. Not by a long shot, and not by a damn sight, and not by any stretch of the imagination. I didn’t feel like being put in mind of my wedding night with Helen, but Jodi was sleeping the sleep of the just, or the just-laid, and I was somehow not sleepy. I closed my eyes, and that didn’t work either.
Now if you’ve been following this little narrative closely, and if you’ve also duly taken note of my reference to Helen Christopher, the frigid witch of the Ramapos, you may have come up with a jim-dandy question. You just may be wondering, as you sit or stand or lie there, just what in the world made me to do a stupid thing like getting married.
A good question.
It started, I suppose, after Saundra and I came to a parting of ways. Saundra, tasteful though she was in bed (and tasty though she was, and willing though she was to do tasting of her own) was too much a product of Doughboy, Nebraska and too much a case-study in belligerent bohemianism to be a lasting thing in my life.
She ran out on me, she did, ran off to Provincetown with a lunatic bearded painter who drew watercolors of ax handles and similarly startling items. They didn’t even look like ax handles, either. And, while I was a bit pained at being jilted, I was also a bit thrilled at being Saundraless. Harv Boy was free again, footloose and fancy-free.
And, although I didn’t know it, I was on the road to Helen.
There were other girls between Saundra and Helen. Their names and faces have faded from memory, but I know one thing about them all. Each was not so delightful as Saundra, and each was better than Helen. I can be very sure of the final part of that sentence. If any woman were ever worse than Helen, I am sure I would not forget her so easily.
I was living the fine life of a bachelor, and I was secure at MGSR&S, having proved my dedication to the advertising profession by planting a stiletto in Faggy Fehringer’s gray flannel back. I was living Riley’s proverbial life, and do you know what I did?
I decided I was making a mistake.
It was the old Mad-Ave hard sell, I suppose. All my colleagues were married men, most of them with children. Most of my colleagues lived in Fairfield County or Westchester county or Rockland County, and all of that group chatted amiably about crabgrass and commuting and the club car of the old 8:02.
And I was left out.
The others were also married, only they lived in cooperative apartments in Manhattan, and they chatted amiably about bomb shelters and maintenance fees and such.
So again I was left out. I was there, snug in my Barrow Street bunghole, sleeping with every passable woman who crossed my path, and envying the married ones their security and stability and stodginess. I looked out at Barrow Street and wished I had crabgrass to mow. I looked at my current paramour and wished she would have children so that we could go to PTA meetings.
The beginning of the end—
When a man shops for a car, he determines just how much money he is going to spend, and he determines where he can get the best car for his money, and then he goes out and test-drives that car. If he likes what he’s driving, he buys. If not, he keeps looking.
You would think that a man would be just as careful when choosing a wife. If nothing else, there’s the fact that you can’t trade in your wife every two years. If you do, the expense is overpowering. Your wife is most usually a lifetime acquisition, for either your lifetime or hers, and such an acquisition should be acquired intelligently. A man should be careful, finding out first just what he wants, and then finding the girl to fill those requirements to the nth degree.
I was a poor shopper. In the first place, I selected a girl whom, I thought, I had much in common with. I based this guess on the fact that she, too, was in advertising. I ignored her personality, and I ignored her background, and in short I ignored everything other than the fact that she was a minor copywriter at Stafford & Bean, a competing firm a few doors down the Avenue. She was a copywriter, a rising star with a college diploma and a pretty face. Obviously, I would always love to look at that face across the crabgrass.
Ah, indeed.
Her name, as you may well have guessed by now, was Helen. Helen Wall, to be exact, and there was never a harder wall to climb, including Hadrian’s and the Great one of China. I courted her like a goofy gallant. I took her to dinners and shows and hip cocktail lounges. I even, God save me, sent her flowers. She was asthmatic, as it turned out, and the roses I plied her with made her break out with a horrid rash. There’s something symbolic there, I’d say.
Helen Wall, an insurmountable wall, and a wall I simply could not mount. I committed a cardinal error here. I bought a car without test-driving it, and few men are so foolish. But at the time it was easy to delude myself. Every thin-blooded American male has been told from the cradle that he wants a virginal bride, and in weak moments some of us believe this pap. I managed to con myself into thinking thusly. Helen was virginal as the driven snow, I would say in odd moments to myself. She shall be a perfect helpmate, a wife I can truly respect. Why a square inch of traditionness tissue should make her worthy of respect is now outside my ken, but at the time it seemed flawlessly logical.
I proposed, on bended knee.
She accepted, with tears in her eyes. We were married, she in a white gown and I in a rented tuxedo, and we cruised Bermudaward on our honeymoon. We spent our wedding night on the ship, and quite a night it was.…
But I digress. To Hell, for the moment, with Helen. Let us get back to Jodi, my newer bride.
We awoke the next morning, arm in arm, and we greeted the day as days should be greeted. Then, an hour or so later, we got out of our big double bed, took a big double shower together, dressed, and drove to New York. I dropped her at the hotel and told her to call Al for the cargo and the airlines office for reservations to Rio de Janeiro. Meanwhile, I hurried for my passport. It was in a safe deposit box at a Fifth Avenue bank along with such invaluable documents as my life insurance policies and a few old savings bonds. I took it back to the hotel and rushed upward in the elevator to Jodi.
She had a strange light in her eyes.
“Al was already here,” she said. “He came and went, sort of.”
“Great! He leave the cargo?”
“He left the cargo,” Jodi said. “Harvey, I didn’t know about this. I honestly didn’t. If I had, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.”
“What are you talking about?”
She opened the door wider and stepped inside. I walked inside. “Our cargo,” she said, pointing.
On the bed, smiling, was a five-year old boy.
“I didn’t know about this,” Jodi was saying. “We have to take him, and I think it’s too late to back out, and I’m sorry I got you into this, Harvey. I’m awfully sorry.”
I looked at Jodi, and at the moppet. He was a cute kid, tow-headed and blue-eyed. The eyes were wide now.
He said: “Hello, mister.”
SEVEN
I’ve never been to Brazil before,” said the moppet.
“Golly,” I said.
“Harvey, I’m sorry,” said Jodi, of the furrowed brow.
“My name’s Everett,” said the urchin.
“Who asked you?” I asked him.
“Now, Harv,” said Jodi. “It isn’t his fault.”
“Everett Whittington,” said the talking albatross.
“Hail and farewell, Everett Whittington.” I told him and, to Jodi: “Remember me to the gang.”
“Harvey, please!”
My hand on the doorknob, I made the biggest mistake of my entire life. I turned about, and I looked at them. I looked into the trusting innocent saucer eyes of the five-year-old kiddie kargo, and I looked into the pleading promising deep-well eyes of Jodi, and I was lost. Lost lost losterooneyed.
I undid my fingers from around the doorknob, and I sighed an all-is-lost-anyway sigh, and I went over to the nearest chair and I sat down. “All right,” I said. “All right.”
“You aren’t going to run out on me, Harvey, are you?”
“No, Jodi, I suppose I’m not.”
“You’re a funny man, mister.”
“Contraband,” I told him, “should be seen and not heard.”
That broke him up. He thought that was the funniest thing since the Three Stooges. He slapped his little knee and whooped in his little falsetto and generally overacted all over the room.
“You know,” I said into the racket, “if I’d had a child five years ago, he’d be just about your age now. And that’s the strongest argument for celibacy I’ve ever heard of.”
But I was lying. There was an even stronger argument, had he but known it. And the argument’s name was Helen.
Helen. I married her, if you recall. I recall, worse luck.
Bermuda bound we were, on one of those Technicolor cruise ships, with a crew entirely composed of gigolos, and passengers from Central Casting. The Captain was a humdrum middle-aged fag, than which there is nothing sadder, and the third night out I saw Charon pass us, smirking up his sleeve.
But I wanted to tell you about the first night out, though I hardly know why. Some masochistic desire within me for public humiliation, I suppose. Herewith, therefore, the tale of my virgin bride and I upon our wedding night, heading southward through the glistening seas o’er the turning orb toward the beauteous pearl of the Atlantic, Bermuda, tourist trap of the British Commonwealth, where wealth is common and so are the British. Very common. In more ways than one.
But I digress. Perhaps I don’t really want to tell you about my wedding night. Nevertheless, I’ve promised, and so I’ll do it. I really will.
That day, our wedding day, had been hectic from dawn to dusk, with split-second timing being the rule throughout. The wedding had started at precisely such-and-such—attended primarily by office friends from her office and my office—and had finished at exactly thus-and-so, in order for the reception to commence here and end there, so that the two of us could whisk away to the pier and board our vessel of delight specifically at then, milliseconds before the gangplank was taken away and the vessel of delight drifted away from Manhattan Island, southbound for a warmer but not really much different island, seven hundred miles away.
Honeymooners, of course, made up a large part of the passenger complement aboard the ship, intermixed with intermixers of various kinds and sexes, divorcees anxious for another try, kept boys and kept girls and kept tweeners looking for somebody to keep them, single girls and boys looking for romance (which is the ladies’ word for sex), and even a couple of fussy British retirees who’d apparently been playing tourist in New York and were now homeward bound to Bermuda. Greener pastures and all that, and their presence did make everybody else look a little silly. At least, I thought so. No one else seemed to notice the irony at all. But, after the first night, I must admit that I had an eye for irony.
After all the timetable rushing around of the wedding day, it was good at first to simply sit and relax awhile aboard the ship. Manhattan Island, that crowded three-dimensional Monopoly board fell away to the stern, and the rolling ocean rose up before us to the horizon. We wandered around on deck, hand in hand, watching the sun go down, looking at our fellow passengers, and generally breathing deeply and getting ourselves unjangled.
You could pick out the newlyweds with absolutely no trouble at all. The grooms all looked gently lustful, as though mentally practicing the line, “I won’t hurt you, I won’t hurt you, I won’t hurt you.” And the brides all looked apprehensively lustful, as though they didn’t believe it.
I don’t know for sure whether Helen and I could have been spotted as newlyweds or not. It depends, I suppose, on how much showed on my face. Nothing at all showed on hers, that much I’m sure of. At the time, I thought it was simply unusual control. I didn’t realize that it was a perfectly accurate portrayal of what was on the inside. Nothing, in other words.
As to me, my feelings weren’t precisely those reflected on the faces around me. I was lustful, certainly, but there was nothing gentle about my feelings at all. I didn’t much care at that point whether I hurt her or not. I had been biding my time for far too long, had been respecting her maidenhood and maidenhead till a few mumbled and overpriced words had been said over us, and now I was anxious to get to it, get at it, and get with it. I wouldn’t say that I was lustful; I would say I was rapacious.
At the same time, a kind of contented lethargy—you’ve seen that on the faces of the cows on the Carnation milk cans—had come over her. After all this waiting and all this preparation and all this buildup, at last it was mine, it was legitimately and completely and exclusively mine, and there wasn’t any particular hurry in demonstrating my proprietary control. We could relax a while from the exertions of the day, we could stroll the deck, we could take our time and take it slow, knowing that soon or late what I had come here for would be mine, all mine, mine, mine, mine.
I have the feeling, then, that the expression on my face was that of a sex maniac with a low metabolic rate. I looked, I imagine, insatiable but calm. And since Helen had no expression at all on her lovely physiogoomy. Gods knows what our combination looked like. Trilby and Svengali, maybe.
Yeah, well let me tell you something. I was Trilby.
At any rate, we roamed the deck anon and anon, and around us the ranks of newlyweds diminished. A gently lustful groom would all at once grab the hand of his apprehensively lustful bride, and the two would scuttle away toward their cabin, hips already awag. This couple so departed, and that couple, and that couple over there, and gradually the decks emptied of their panting cargo, leaving only the singletons—none of whom would be making out that well this first night out—and the returning Britishers, who wanted nothing more than to sit morosely on deck chairs and think about how they’d been taken in New York.
Until finally there wasn’t a newlywed to be seen. Except for Svengali and me, I mean. And I at last suggested that we make the retreat complete. “What do you say?” I murmured in my true love’s ear. “Shall we, ah, go below?”
“Oh, but look at the ocean,” she said, turning away from me and pointing out away from the ship. “Look at it in the moonlight.”
“Let’s look at it through our cabin porthole,” I suggested.
“I think I’m hungry,” she said.
“I know I’m hungry,” I told her. “Let’s go to our cabin.”
“I wonder if the dining room is open,” she said. “Or do they have a snack bar or something like that?”
Maidenly modesty, I thought. Virginal appre
hension. I thought it was cute, this big and lovely girl, so well-endowed for calisthenics of the kind I was envisioning, as delicate and innocent as Her Wedding Night. I really thought it was cute.
At the same time. I had to admit to myself that it was somewhat irritating. I had been patient. I had been patient through courtship and engagement, and I had been patient through an overlong ceremony, and I had been patient through the reception. I had been patient during the waning of the afternoon and evening aboard this ship, allowing us both plenty of time to be rested up for the labors ahead, and it seemed to me that the time had come when patience ought to step aside for action to take over.
These two attitudes, indulgence and impatience, combined within me to cancel one another out and leave only compromise. “All right,” I said. I even smiled, making the best of it. “As a matter of fact, I’m kind of hungry myself. Let’s see what we can get to eat, before we go down to the cabin.”
“Fine, Harvey.” She gave me that beautiful smile of hers, and linked her arm in mine, and off we went in search of edibles.
As it turned out, there was something like a snack bar, adjunct to the cocktail lounge. We had sandwiches, and I plied my darling with daiquiris, on the theory that alcohol makes the heart grow fonder, and warms the virgin blood. I wolfed my sandwich, and she hesitated over hers, and at last our dining and drinking were done, and back on deck we were, for more staring at the sea.
Another hour of this, promenading on the nearly deserted deck, and I was beginning to get just a wee impatient. Every blasted time I importuned my darling about coming down to our cabin for some fun and games, she played sightseeing guide some more, pointing at this and that, exclaiming over one sight or another, and generally changing the subject by the simple method of beating it over the head. This got to be a little strained after a while—face it, there’s a paucity of varied sights in mid-ocean—and at last I took the bull by the horns—that isn’t quite right, is it?—and said, “Listen, Helen, it’s time for us to go down to the cabin. Now, I understand, you’re nervous and all that, but the time has come. Believe me, I’ll be understanding and I’ll be gentle and I’ll be sympathetic, but we just can’t stall around any longer.”
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