26 Nights

by 26 Nights (Memoirs of a Contemporary Gentleman) [MF] (retail) (epub)

  Thus I had good reason to resent the Reverend Jarret, aside from the fact that I strongly suspected he was less interested in Heather’s soul than in her bank account—maybe even her body. I suggested this possibility.

  “Oh, Steven, how could you!” Heather expostulated. “Why, the Reverend is a man of God!”

  “Remember Jimmy Swaggart?” I said. “Remember Jim Bakker? This guy is out to swindle you, if not worse. Take my word.”

  “Oh, how can you say that? You don’t even know him.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll meet him and find out what kind of phony he is. When’s the next sermon?”

  “You’ll come to a prayer meeting at the Temple?” Heather gushed. “Wonderful, Steven! You might even be born again yourself!”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “My mother tells me I was born quite adequately on the first occasion.”

  Which is how I came to be called brother by the Reverend Jarret Jourdemayne. I sat through the prayer meeting with some difficulty, mostly by concentrating on the two young women whom the Reverend had told me were his “acolytes.” He introduced them as Sister Blessed Soul Martha and Sister Holy Virgin Mary, and they were knockouts. Even though they both wore loose, flowing robes of pure white, I could see that they were both built like brick—ah—temples. I strongly suspected they did more for the good reverend then lead the singing and pass the collection plates.

  My plan was to find a way to expose the Reverend, not necessarily to the world, but at least to Heather, so she would forget about saving her soul (which, I was sure, was in no danger whatever) and think about pleasuring her body. And mine.

  Of course it might have been simpler just to find another H lady, but I had put so much effort into Heather. Besides, I cared enough about her not to want to see her get taken advantage of. If my suspicion about his sexual designs was correct, I could just wait until he made a pass at her; but I didn’t know how long that might take—or whether Heather might not even be flattered rather than indignant.

  I wondered if it would be possible to catch him fooling around with Sister Blessed Soul Martha and/or Sister Holy Virgin Mary …

  After the service, while Heather and a crowd of others, mostly female, clustered around the Reverend, I managed to get those two beauteous young ladies aside. “Very impressive service,” I said. Very lucrative too, judging from the full collection plates. “Tell me, how did you ladies happen to get … ah … involved with the good Reverend anyway?”

  It turned out they were sisters—real sisters—whose parents had been followers of Jourdemayne, and who had considered themselves blessed when he had suggested that their two young daughters become acolytes and devote themselves to helping him bring the word of God to mankind. Martha was nineteen; Mary was twenty. Martha had brown hair; Mary’s was auburn. Martha was sexy as hell; Mary was sexier. And I had the distinct feeling that neither of them was as sweet or as innocent as their scrubbed faces and white robes suggested.

  “It must be rewarding to be doing such important work,” I said. “You and the Reverend must be … very close.”

  Mary smiled. “As close as you can get,” she said. “The Reverend is a wonderful man.”

  “And very vigorous,” Mary said.

  “For his age,” Martha said.

  “You look vigorous too,” Mary said.

  “And younger,” Martha said.

  “But not too young,” Mary said.

  “Just about right,” Martha said.

  “Ah … thank you,” I said feebly, and made a mental note to look these girls up again (one of them, anyway) when I got to M.

  However, while I was now certain that the Reverend was doing more than praying with the M&M girls (as I began to think of them), I still had to find a way to prove it to Heather. Then I remembered Ginger. Faithful readers of this saga will recall that Ginger was a “party girl” whom I had recently met at the home of my friend Russell, and whose tempting but commercialized charms I had declined in favor of the less public (though still, as it turned out, costly) attractions of Russell’s wife Grace. Ginger, I was sure, would not be averse to participating in a little plot I had in mind—for the proper remuneration, of course.

  As soon as I had taken Heather home, I called Russell and asked him for Ginger’s number.

  Russell chuckled. “Taking my advice, eh? She’s a hot one all right.”

  “How’s Grace?” I asked wickedly.

  “Wonderful. Seems very perky lately, for some reason.”

  When I called Ginger, she too thought at first that I had changed my mind about becoming one of her clients. But when I had explained my true purpose, not only was she perfectly willing to help me with my scheme, she even improved on it. It turned out that a former roommate had installed a pane of two-way glass in the connecting door between the two bedrooms in her apartment, so clients who were into voyeurism could watch activities in the next room without being seen. It was perfect. Ginger thought seducing the Reverend might be fun—as long as we could agree on the financial terms to her satisfaction. Which we did.

  My next step was to pay another call on the Reverend Jourdemayne. I found him at his temple. I explained to him that I knew a young lady who was spiritually unhappy and who I believed could benefit from his ministry.

  “Hallelujah, brother!” the Reverend intoned. “Another soul to be brought to the light. Praise God!”

  “Yes indeed,” I said. “The thing is, Reverend, this poor girl is very shy, very withdrawn. She’s afraid to seek the very light which, as you say, would be her salvation. But perhaps the light could be brought to her. I was wondering if you might possibly visit her, so she could experience the power of your … faith.”

  As the Reverend looked somewhat dubious about this suggestion, I went on. “She’s an orphan, you see, and though her parents left her a substantial fortune, she doesn’t—”

  That did it. “Why certainly, brother!” the Reverend boomed. “No exertion is too great for the chance to rescue a lost soul from the wilderness. Just point me the way, brother!”

  But the best laid schemes of mice and men are often undone by women. Though I didn’t want to go into detail with Heather about what I was planning, in order to get her to accompany me to Ginger’s apartment I explained, putting it as delicately as possible, that I wanted to show her some aspects of the Reverend’s character of which she was presently unaware. She flatly refused.

  “I don’t know why you are trying to discredit Reverend Jourdemayne in my eyes, Steven. A fine godly man like that! If it’s some kind of petty jealousy, it seems unworthy of you. I can assure you I have the uttermost faith in the Reverend’s probity and character, and nothing will shake it. No, I have no intention of going anywhere for such a purpose. Really, I’m surprised at you, Steven! I thought you were a man of character also. Perhaps I was wrong.”

  So much for that. But I had already paid Ginger her money, and I doubted that she would be very amenable to the idea of giving it back. So at the appointed time I showed up at her apartment, without Heather—but with a camcorder. Which Ginger at first objected to, until we did a certain amount of renegotiation. Compared to what this scheme was costing me, Grace had been a bargain.

  Ginger had no trouble at all. She told the Reverend that she was a miserable sinner, and then she proceeded to demonstrate. Fully.

  The Reverend did his best to drive her sins away. He called upon God, and upon Jesus Christ. In fact he did that quite a bit while Ginger was practicing some of her most accomplished sins on him. He inadvertently baptized her at one point; and it may have had some effect, for Ginger began to speak to him in tongues, as it were, until his rod and his staff were ready to comfort her. The Reverend was quite vigorous in his attempts to drive out the devil inside her. He must have succeeded in his task, for he ended by shouting his joy to the heavens …

  I called Heather. “I have a tape,” I said, “that I’d like you to look at. I think you’ll find it very interesting indeed.”<
br />
  “Is this about Reverend Jourdemayne again?” she asked suspiciously. “Steven, I’ve already told you, I have no—”

  “Just look at it,” I pleaded. “Heather, the man is not what you think. This tape will prove it. It shows him—”

  “I don’t care!” Heather wailed. “I don’t want to know! Oh, Steven, why couldn’t you just let things alone? I thought you were—oh God. I don’t want to see you any more, Steven. Not ever. Good-bye!”

  “But—” I said, but I was talking to a dial tone.

  Now I was angry. I had probably lost my chance with Heather for good, there was no other H lady in sight at the moment, and I had spent all that money for nothing. But I still had the tape, and one thing I could do was to put the Reverend Jarret out of the preacher business. I headed for the temple.

  But by the time I got there I had cooled down a bit. “I could use this tape to pull down this whole operation,” I told the Reverend. “But what the hell, like the song says, we’re all dodging our way through the world. So I’m going to hold on to it, but I just want one thing. Leave Heather alone. Forget about her money and anything else you’re interested in, or the tape goes to Hard Copy. Okay?”

  “Whatever you say, brother,” the Reverend said. “The Lord works in mysterious ways. He giveth and He taketh away. Hallelujah, brother.”

  “I’m not your brother,” I said.

  As I was leaving the temple I met Sister Blessed Soul Martha coming up the front steps. She was wearing a skirt and blouse instead of the white robes in which I had first seen her, but her figure looked more heavenly than ever.

  “Hi,” she said, smiling angelically. “Coming to see me, by any chance?”

  “Well, no, actually I came to see the Reverend,” I said. “But it’s nice to see you again. Where’s Mary?”

  “Home,” Martha said, looking me up and down. “Did you want to see her? She’d love to have a visit from you.”

  “Well, I—”

  “Or … I could go with you, and we could all have fun. The Reverend always enjoys that.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said. “But I’m … uh … not as young as I used to be. And I’m kind of tied up right now, but if I could look you up in a week or two, then …”

  She frowned. “I thought you liked us.”

  “Oh, I do,” I said hastily. “But … well, you see, I have this unusual situation going. It’s hard to explain, but you’re an M, and I’m—”

  “An M?” she repeated quizzically. “What’s an M?”

  “I mean your name begins with M,” I said. “And—”

  “No it doesn’t,” she said.

  “It doesn’t?”

  “It begins with B. Blessed Soul Martha.”

  “Yes, but I mean your real name,” I said. “You see—”

  “That is my real name.”

  “It is?”

  “Sure. Our parents were really religious, you know? And they christened us with these damn holy names so—”

  “You mean—” I was flabbergasted. “Then your sister—she’s really—”

  “Holy Virgin Mary,” Martha said. “Sure. It’s on our birth certificates and everything.”

  “Well, hallelujah!” I said.

  I said that again—or something like it—when, after a long and pleasurable dalliance, Sister Holy Virgin Mary’s supple and voluptuous young body finally brought me to glory. I was truly grateful to her parents for their commendable piety in choosing names, but I was even more grateful to their daughter for not taking that choice too seriously.

  She had indeed been happy to see me, and though we both regretted the circumstances that kept her sister from joining us, Mary proved to be so inexhaustibly eager, inventive and athletic that she made up for it. Perhaps the skills she displayed were the result of her study under the Reverend Jourdemayne but, having seen him in action, I doubted it. More likely it was just natural talent. A gift from God, as it were. Certainly by the time we were finished I felt more like praying than I had in years.

  The Lord—as I remarked to Miss Greenglass some time later when recounting the events exactly as they occurred, and with a careful attention to detail that, I hoped, wasn’t lost on my lovely assistant—does indeed work in mysterious ways. Miss Greenglass replied dryly that she thought the Lord had better things to do with His time than assisting me in winning our wager, but I said I was not so sure. And with a look heavenward, considered, not without some pleasure, the remaining eighteen letters of the alphabet.

  Chapter 9

  IT HAD NOW BEEN NEARLY SIX WEEKS SINCE I HAD made my fateful wager with Miss Greenglass, and while I was still technically ahead of schedule (with nearly a third of the alphabet behind me and a total of six months in which to complete it), I was not really happy with my progress. Having started out with a bang (so to speak), knocking off the first three letters in nearly as many days, in spite of complications, I had expected things to continue at that merry pace. Alas, they had not. I was still confident that I would accomplish what I had set out to do and win the favors, or at least the body, of the tantalizing Miss Greenglass; but I was admittedly a bit concerned about the Q’s, X’s and Z’s that lay ahead of me, and I felt I should pick up the tempo.

  In addition, the fact that my amorous activities were restricted to those women instrumental to the wager—and even those, only once—was galling. To a man accustomed to refreshing himself with female embraces on a daily basis at least, eight erotic encounters in six weeks (well, nine if you count Betty, who had been one of the complications) was not only highly depressing, it seemed to darken the universe and drain the essential forces of life from both body and spirit.

  In other words, I was horny as hell.

  A related problem, as I have mentioned before, was the many women of past acquaintance who naturally were somewhat piqued at my inexplicable neglect of them. I had to devise some complicated explanations in order to keep the doors open against the time when my wager would be completed; and alas, I was not always successful.

  One such acquaintance was Phyllis, the passionate lady with the traveling husband and with whom, as it happens, I had been engaged in amorous dalliance on the very morning of the day on which Miss Greenglass and I first contracted our interesting wager. She had called me the last time her husband had gone away, and I had had to plead a fictional business trip of my own to put her off. But now, as I was strolling out of the Four Seasons after a pleasant lunch and trying to remember what had become of Inez, a Portuguese lady I once knew who had claimed to be a countess, I heard someone calling my name, and I saw Phyllis rushing up to me.

  “Steven!” she cried. “I’m so glad I ran into you. I was going to call you. Something terrible has happened!”

  I was not particularly alarmed. Phyllis is given to drama, and it is rare that twenty minutes of her life go by in which some crisis, catastrophe or ecstatic epiphany is not expressed. It’s probably part of what makes her such a pleasurable bed partner.

  “Tell me about it,” I said, smiling at her. She was worth smiling at. Phyllis was an extremely pretty woman in her early thirties, with curly blond hair and a figure that stirred memories, which in turn stirred certain parts of my anatomy. I tried to concentrate on her face.

  “Michael is going away again tomorrow!” Phyllis said tragically.

  “What’s so terrible about that?” I said, while at the same time trying to think of another excuse to avoid her. “He goes away all the time.”

  “But I’m afraid we won’t be able to get together!” Phyllis wailed. “This cousin of mine from Colorado is coming to stay with me, and I’m going to have to entertain her. I don’t know how I can get away long enough for … oh dear.”

  “Oh well,” I said, trying not to sound relieved. “There’ll be other times. Later on, you know …”

  Phyllis came closer and took my arm. “What I was thinking, Steven … What I was wondering …”

  Uh-oh.

  “See, she’s never been
to New York, she wants to see the sights. I’m going to have to take her around and all. And if you could help me, maybe we could get a chance to …”

  “Ah, I’m really busy right now, Phyllis,” I said. “Couple of big deals in the works … lots of business. You know how it is.”

  “Oh, Steven, I’m so disappointed! I was hoping we could both show Irene around, and then maybe …”

  My ears, as they say, perked up.

  “Irene?” I said. “Your cousin’s name is Irene?”

  “Of course!” Phyllis said, as though that fact should have been self-evident.

  “And … uh … is she as beautiful as you?” I said.

  “Oh, Steven!” She hit me playfully on the arm. “Actually she’s probably more attractive than me,” she said, obviously not believing it for a minute. “She’s younger, you know. Not by much,” she added hastily.

  “Well,” I said. “Well. On second thought, I could make a little time.”

  “Oh, Steven! Thank you!” Phyllis could hardly control her joy.

  “We can show her the town,” I said. “The Rainbow Room … Bobby Short at the Carlyle … lunch at Le Cirque …”

  “Oh, no, Irene says she wants to see all the touristy things. You know, the Empire State Building and all that.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You know, now that I think of it, these business deals …”

  “Steven!”

  “All right,” I said. “I just hope Irene …”

  “What?”

  “Appreciates it,” I said.

  I couldn’t see much family resemblance between Irene and Phyllis, but I had no complaint. Irene’s hair was dark, she was slightly taller than Phyllis, and her figure, while less buxom, was every bit as shapely. In my anxiety to get on with my schedule, I had determined to seduce Phyllis’s country cousin, if at all possible, regardless of what she looked like; but I was relieved to find that the task would be anything but an onerous one. The difficult part would be to find a way to pry her away from Phyllis in order to accomplish this goal, while at the same time trying to avoid Phyllis’s efforts to get me alone for the same purpose.