And so it came about that on the very day he felt the bee-sting of glass in the ball of his foot, he parked his old car and saw, in the gutter, a discarded pair of shoes. The uppers were worn and torn, but the bottoms of one-piece, superfirm sole and heel, had well outworn the uppers, and were in fine condition. Flip Laughlin, grinning, snapped open the Buck knife he always carried on his belt, and sliced off the ruined tops. He had in his secret hoard a three-dollar refund from a motor-oil company, and just that morning he’d noticed an advertisement for a $16 glue gun, which applied heated glue which cooled into firmness in less than a minute—and it was on sale for three days for nine dollars. He bought one, applying the rebate check to the deal, and therefore wound up with his shoes renewed sufficiently to double their already long life, and had a glue gun to boot. Judicious application of his liquid scuff polish and a touch of the hot glue to the occasionally reappearing holes and cracks in the worn uppers kept the old moccasins fitting and friendly for years.
Maud had hated them from the day she saw them, but she quickly became aware of what they meant to Flip, to whom they were a pride and a badge of thrift and ingenuity, even after he became prosperous, and he wore them often.
All of this, with a charge of affection and pride for himself and the treasured old shoes, were in his voice now as he said …“All I really want out of the box is the black moccasins.”
He lifted the pedestaled mug to his lips and sipped on the good coffee, and looked over the rim at Maud, who sat pressuring her hands, who dropped her eyes, who said, “But you didn’t put them in the box, Flip.”
“I thought I did.”
“Really you didn’t. You packed the box yourself, and you said …”
“Maud!”
Her voice dropped almost a whisper. “… you said to throw everything else out.”
“You didn’t!”
Her silence, her rounded eyes, answered him.
He put his mug down with a bang. A little brown tongue of coffee jeered up at him and collapsed back into the cup. “But you know what they meant to me!”
She said, still fearfully but with a certain asperity, “Flip Laughlin, you threw out quite a lot of things that meant a lot to you that day!”
He shook his head slowly side to side. “My mocs. My old black mocs.…” He was too shocked even to feel anger.
“Flip … I’m as sorry as I can be.” She put out a hand as if to touch him, then left it extended, as if forgotten. Speechless, he simply looked at her for a long moment, and then stood up.
She rose to, briefly flicking her gaze right and left, looking for something, looking for some way to—“Flip, wait. Wait! Don’t.…”
“Don’t what?”
“I shouldn’t ask you, I … guess. The box. It’s awful heavy. Would you …”
A twisted thing rose in Flip Laughlin at that; something like, if he did her a favor at this point it would be a punishment for her—although you certainly could not have expressed it that way. But he said, “Where is it?”
She turned and he followed her into the bedroom. The bedroom. The bedroom. The same old granny crazy-quilt. She opened the closet door and he stepped past her, backhanding a long skirt of that turquoise dress she wore that time at the.… There was the box. He bent to get his fingers under it and saw, gleaming beside it, the black moccasins. Dumbfounded, he stood up, holding them.
They were new black moccasins, glove-soft, hand-stitched, smooth as a woman’s cheek inside. He turned to stare at her.
She said with difficulty, “Just exactly your size.”
He looked from her to the moccasins. All he could say was “Years. It would take years.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “And you can wear them every single day. You can wear them wherever we go.”
Something happened to Flip Laughlin then that had never happened in all his life, and was not to happen ever again in all his years. He uttered a long bleat, and burst into terrible tears, and when he came to himself he was lying on the crazy-quilt in his wife’s arms with a shoe in each hand.
The Trick
Michaelmas was fifty-five, hale and sharp and very alive. Sounds like a song lyric, don’t it? Well, he felt like a song lyric. His business was Big Business, and he’d made it to the top. But it wasn’t always so. He was first to admit that he climbed up there on other people’s faces. He been all the names you know: miser, skinflint, robber baron, all that.
Until Apricot.
Not apricot the jam, the jelly, the little peach, the sweetmeat (sweet as her meat might be), but Apricot the girl. It was Apricot, who, way back when, took to visiting veterans’ hospitals (which damn few people ever do) and discovered how little attention was being paid to whatever personal parts they (the residents) had that had not been shot off. She’d rounded up a crew of like-minded girls to minister to these matters in bed.
It was Apricot who, upon finding the results so beneficial, widened her group’s attention to men who had paraplegia of the mind and heart (if you follow me), men like Mr. Michaelmas used to be. They kidnapped Michaelmas and other men like that, hid them, fed them, fucked them until they got their juices running again, and turned them loose on the world to use their clout for doing good things. But that’s another story.…
“I’ve got a problem,” Michaelmas said one dark-of-the-morning from his side of the bed.
“You can’t prove it by me,” Apricot said comfortably from her side of the bed. “You’re great, and you know it.”
“I said, I’ve got a problem. I didn’t say it was my problem.” He drew the sheet down away from her breast because he liked looking at it in the soft light. It wasn’t curiosity because this breast was a good friend of his. And it wasn’t lust because—for the moment—he’d happily used that up. He just liked it. “It’s Square Adam’s problem, but that makes it mine. He’s my export manager; one of the best men I’ve got—was,” he added.
Apricot was looking at the nipple too. One of the nicest things about Apricot was how openly she liked what she had. “Square Adam?”
“His name is Adam Adams—Adams squared, get it? It’s a sort of ‘in’ joke around the office because he’s, honest to Pete, about as square as they come! Anyway, we call him Square Adam. But he isn’t worth a damn right now. He mopes. He forgets. He looks you right in the eye and doesn’t hear you; so you have to say whatever it is all over. He’s even biting his fingernails.”
“Woman trouble,” Apricot nodded.
“Wife trouble.”
“How’d you find that out?”
“Nothing to it! All I had to do was lock my office door, swear I wouldn’t let him out until he told me what the trouble was, talk to him steadily for ninety minutes and feed him three double martinis—and he’s not a drinking man. No trouble.”
He leaned over and gently kissed the nipple, which responded. “I guess I leaned on him a bit. Well, hell! I’m a financier, not a shrink. And I don’t know how to do this kind of thing, except to keep on driving until I find what’s wrong.”
“Not all that many shrinks know that trick,” said Apricot, uncovering the other breast and nodding at it. They had a game they played, something about never getting lopsided. “So what’s wrong?”
Michaelmas took care of the other nipple and sighed. “Monday nights. Thursday nights. Always in the dark! Always in the same bed—hers.”
“You don’t mean twin beds?”
“I do mean twin beds. He comes. She comes.”
“She comes?!” Apricot said. “Okay, then what?”
“He washes.”
“He washes. What does she do?”
“She cries. He goes back to his bed and goes to sleep.”
Apricot turned to rest on one elbow, facing him. The low light came through her hair. This hair of hers was the color of apricots, all of it; her eyes, almost. He wondered which came first, her coloring or her name.
“All he has to do, Mr. Mike—”
“Little Ape, excuse me but
I know all he has to do. He has to make it with her in the morning, on the floor, in the kitchen, end-to-end, with mouth, teeth and eyebrows all over. He doesn’t know how. He doesn’t know her. She was brought up to believe (I’m quoting a famous psychiatrist) that ‘sex is dirty, ugly, and disgusting, and you got to save it for your husband.’ So was he, really. They were both virgins when they married.”
“He could read a book.…”
“He did read a book. His daddy gave it to him the week before the wedding. It was called The Marriage Bed. It was published in 1918. That’s where he got the Monday-and-Thursday bit.”
“And washing.”
“No, his mother told him that. Anyway, if he tried that super-jock number on her now, he’d drive her even farther away from him than she already is.
“Ape … look … we can’t put these kids down. They’re good people. He is the best piece of manpower I found in years, and she’s a pretty little thing—cute and bright. She treats him now as something between a stranger and an enemy, and it gets worse every day. They still do their thing on Mondays and Thursdays, and they both hate it, and it’s driving Adam out of his gourd.”
Being a woman, Apricot asked, “Didn’t he ever ask her why she cries?”
“Once. Two weeks ago. And she said, ‘I didn’t want to come!’ Then she cried all night.”
Surprisingly, Apricot said, “That’s a helpful sign,” she lay for a while, musing. Michaelmas stayed quiet, watching her. He did like watching her. “And she won’t go out and get laid? Guess not. That would destroy Adam. And her too, probably. H-m-m …” A moment later she sat up briskly. “I’ll call O’Toole!”
With “I knew you’d think of something!” Michaelmas said happily. “Who’s O’Toole?”
“I’ll tell you,” she said, “but not now. You’ve done something to my nipples, and they’re downright noisy.”
“Oh,” Michaelmas said, “I can fix that.” And surprisingly, he ducked under the covers. Apricot wasn’t able to see his hand snake down the side of the bed and snatch something up from the refreshment tray on the floor. He feather-fingered the insides of her thighs until they parted, and he began to gently massage the burnished thicket where they joined.
“M-m-m …” she crooned, and lay back, completely relaxed.
Turning his palm upward, he stroked the warm cleft over and over, gently, gently—until it too parted, and he felt the swelling, the beginning of the wetness, the easy smoothness of her arousal. Now it was easy to slip the end of his middle finger inside, to widen the aperture, to penetrate deeper … gently, gently … and to move out a little, in a lot, out a little, in a lot.… Apricot sighed.
He hooked his finger upward and, more gently than ever, found that magic spot behind the pubic bone, the one that even Masters and Johnson didn’t mention in their book. He rested the pad of his finger on it while he brought his mouth close; then all at once he withdrew the finger, placed his lips on the quivering opening and shot into her waiting vagina the ice cube he had palmed out of the silver champagne bucket on the floor.
Apricot screamed, but by the time she could draw another full breath, his tongue was generating vibratory shocks on her clitoris. She screamed again, this time a totally different kind of scream, and came with a spastic orgasm the likes of which even Michaelmas, who was very active these days, had never imagined or even hoped for. His revived, old organ was just as pleased and astonished as Apricot was—and ready. He lost no time in rearing up and plunging it into her. Oh, yes, it was cold in there—but not for long. They came together, thunderously, and for a moment lay linked, somewhere near oblivion.
When they could breathe again, which took a while, she laughed. “You devil! You’ve been reading books.”
“Not really,” Michaelmas said. “Just thinking a lot, making plans.…” He never knew if she was about to tell him who O’Toole was, because he suddenly fell asleep.
O’Toole was tall and wide, and had a muted voice that reminded Michaelmas of a fine brass wire brush wrapped in silk. He wore hundreds of dollars’ worth of gabardine and low boots, and his beautifully manicured hands were as competent as a bench vise. When he was introduced to Adam’s wife, Prue, he looked at her twice, as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. Michaelmas saw that she noticed and had colored, lightly, and that her husband had not noticed.
They trooped downstairs to a ground-floor restaurant that served everything Michaelmas liked (he owned it). O’Toole sat beside him, across from the Adamses. They were a handsome, unhappy couple: Adam the very picture of the young executive on the rise; and Prue … ah, Prue, flawless ivory skin, compact figure with tiny wrists, huge blue eyes and a helmet of blue-black hair falling away to a dark cape over her shoulders. She looked as if she had been taken out of a box, and the cellophane crackled away.
Cocktails and lunch passed pleasantly. O’Toole, obviously well briefed, said business things to Adam and Michaelmas, and gentle social things to Prue from time to time. Over the coffee, Michaelmas asked Prue if she could spare her husband the next day, a Wednesday; he wouldn’t be back until Thursday at noon, and then he’d have to come straight to the office.
“I don’t mind,” she said, and she didn’t.
“I was so sure you would say yes that I had Adam booked for a 9 AM flight tomorrow. Can you handle it, Adam?”
“Anything you say, Mr. Michaelmas.”
“Good. Sue Benson will have the tickets and car and hotel reservations on desk before four o’clock. I want you to go to Abingdon, to a firm called Fleming Educational. Mr. Fleming himself will see you. And I’d like you to take a careful look at everything he’ll want to show you, and come back on Thursday and give me your opinion about acquiring the company.”
“Thursday,” said Adam agreeably.
They parted politely, O’Toole and Prue going their separate ways, Michaelmas and Adam sharing an elevator. With an immense effort of will Michaelmas waited until he was alone in the office before he let himself chuckle and rub his hands in glee at the way Prue tried so hard all during lunch not to look at O’Toole. And her flicker of a smile every time he said anything amusing, or maybe “Pass the salt, please.” Hooked, thought Michaelmas, happily. Or anyway, following the bait with her mouth wide open.
Friday morning Michaelmas stirred in the big bed in the large bedroom behind the private office and opened his eyes. Apricot was on her elbows, smiling at him.
“Well, good morning!” she said. “Really knocked yourself out, didn’t you? I no sooner got here, all eager to tell you all about it, when you suddenly had my mouth full. What turned you so way on?”
Michaelmas laughed and yawned at the same time. “Thinking about the doin’s at the Adams residence, I guess. I talked to Fleming yesterday.”
“And I talked to O’Toole.”
“Really sump’n, ain’t he? Are you going to tell me what his trick is? That’s all you’d say, ‘He has this trick he does.’ ”
Apricot laughed. “No, I won’t. He will. I made so bold as to ask Sue to call him and get him over here this morning.”
“What I get for trusting you,” he said with mock grumpiness. “Suspense, that’s what.”
“Well, tell me all about Fleming Educational.”
Michaelmas laughed. “It was educational, all right. Square Adam was gulping like a goldfish when he came in after lunch. He typed up a list of the first films Fleming showed him. I saved it for you.
Here.”
She read aloud: “Dancing With and Embracing Husband While Fully Clothed. What is this?”
“Read on.”
“Being Kissed on Cheeks and Forehead. Being Kissed on Lips. Sitting on Husband’s Lap, Both Fully Dressed. Why the hussy! Husband Kisses Neck and Ears. Husband Caresses Neck and Ears. Husband Caresses Neck and Face. Raunchy stuff, this, Mr. Mike. Good thing they’re married.”
“Go on, Apricot.”
“Having Coitus in the Nude in a Living or Dining Room. Well, it’s about time. Changing Po
sitions During Intercourse. Having Intercourse With Husband in the Nude While Sitting on Husband’s Lap. Very advanced, that.”
Laughing, Michaelmas took the paper and dropped it on the floor. “ ‘There were no stories or anything,’ Adam says to me. He looked anxious, like a little kid who had to go to the bathroom. ‘Just those titles and then little movies showing all those things. Showing, I mean, everything,’ he says. ‘There were a lot more,’ he says. ‘I’ll bring over the rest of the notes after I’ve typed them. I wouldn’t want my secretary to do it,’ he says. ‘Mr. Michaelmas, I thought I was going to see educational material.’ ” Michaelmas had to wait until Apricot’s peal of laughter rang down. “ ‘Mr. Michaelmas,’ he says, more anxious than ever, ‘what kind of people need this kind of education?’ I had some kind of choking fit.
“He told me there were lots more films, men and women, men and men, people tied up, two women and a man, two men and a woman. He said Fleming just sat there as if nothing unusual was happening. He said he guessed a person could get hardened to that kind of thing.”
“That part’s not all bad,” Apricot said, and fell back, putting the pillow over her face so she could shriek.
“But you know,” Michaelmas said, “Fleming told me that Adam put on a stoneface and never twitched all day. He must have been blown away but never showed it.”
“What kind of place is it you sent that poor lamb to?”
“Oh, it’s for real. Shrinks use those films in therapy, for people with various behavior problems. I bet he recommends that we not involve the firm in that kind of thing. Wonder what he’ll think when he finds out I already own it … but tell me what happened with O’Toole.”
“Oh, yes!” Apricot sprang up and went into a lotus position in the middle of the huge bed. Beautiful. “Well, he called her about ten in the morning, when they could both be sure Square Adam was airborne. Invited her to lunch. She twittered a bit and tried to make up some appointments or something to cop out with. But she didn’t try very hard, and he just had to breathe into the phone until she persuaded herself. I bet it took her about twelve minutes to get dressed and ready; then she had an hour to wait. He called for her, and they had a lo-o-ong lunch, and talked to her in—that voice.…”
Case and the Dreamer Page 34
