“You’ve really got a great system,” she said to Sid, when it looked as if there were no more than five minutes of tape left.
“Yeah,” he replied, “cheap too.”
“It doesn’t look cheap.”
“We bought it hot,” shrugged Sid.
Andrea, distressed, turned to Morgie, whose friendliness, if rough, had seemed at least ungrudging and sincere.
“Is Morgie your real name?” Andrea asked, her voice cracking on the first word. “I mean,” she said huskily, “what’s it short for?”
“Morgan Memorial.”
“Your name is Morgan Memorial?” asked Andrea, astonished.
“No,” she shrugged, “my real name is Betty Page, like in the books—”
“Which books?” asked Andrea, more confused.
“Betty Page Severely Chastised, Betty Page in Bondage—you know the ones I mean.”
“Oh yes,” said Andrea softly.
“Well, before I knew about those books, I hated the name, I mean, what kind of name is Betty Page, really? So I changed it to Morgie, because Morgan Memorial’s where I buy all my clothes. Their other name is Goodwill, of course, but whoever heard of a woman called Goodwill? They know me real well over there, they all call me Morgie, and they let me in their back room, and there’s this big pile of clothes on the floor, like they were building a bonfire or something, and then I buy what I want, and I pay for it by the pound. I like your blouse, where’d you get it?”
Andrea decided she had best not say that she bought it on Newbury Street for sixty dollars. “Filene’s Basement,” she said at last.
“That place is all right,” remarked Morgie hesitantly, “but so expensive.”
Andrea, not knowing what to say next, said nothing. She wanted to ask what was keeping Jack in the kitchen, but didn’t know if, in so strange a household, that would constitute acceptable curiosity. Sid made a great commotion of turning round in his chair, and something about the way he did it left Andrea with the unmistakable impression that he was signifying his complete boredom with her, the evening, and life in general.
“Listen,” he said to Andrea, “hand me another magazine, will you?” He tossed into her lap the one he had been reading. She looked round the room, and at last made out a small stack of periodicals in a dark corner.
Glad to be of some use, she went over to it. “Which one would you like?” she asked. “Life, another Time, U.S. News and World Report, Argosy?”
“Are you a stewardess?” asked Morgie. “You sound just like a stewardess. Did you ever read Coffee Tea or Me?”
“I thought there was a True Sex Crimes over there in the pile,” said Sid. “Look for it, will you?”
Andrea flipped through the magazines. At last she held up a magazine with the headline “The Montana Rapist Who Barbecued His Victims.”
“That’s it,” said Sid, and Andrea brought it to him.
“What are you reading?” she asked Morgie no longer desirous of entering into conversation with Sid.
Morgie’s book, which she had still been holding close to her face, was suddenly thrust at arm’s length. On the gaudily illustrated cover, a young blond woman was being stalked down a city street at night by three burly men. The title, in crimson block letters, was 26 Men and a Girl. In the lower right corner, in small print, was the author’s name—Maxim Gorky.
“Oh!” cried Andrea in surprise, “Gorky is very good, I think!”
“Gorky?” said Morgie. “You know, I never could stand the taste of vodka. It always makes me throw up, no matter what I’ve had to eat before.”
Andrea’s smile faded. “No, Gorky’s not a vodka, he was a famous Russian author. He wrote the book you’re reading.”
Morgie turned the book round, and stared at the cover. “Oh, yeah. Is he really famous? I didn’t buy the book because of that, I bought it because of the cover, they’ve got great books at Morgan Memorial, and I saw this, and I thought, well a book with a cover like this has just got to be hot, but I’ve already read thirty-seven pages, and nobody’s doing anything to anybody. I’m a real sucker for a hot cover. Have you ever read The Story of O?”
“I’ve seen it, I thought it had just a plain cover.”
“It does, you’re right, it really does, and I never would have bought it, except that somebody at Goodwill had written across the front of it, ‘This is a filthy book,’ so I bought it. It cost thirty-five cents, and they hardly ever charge more than a quarter, so that’s how I knew it was going to be really dirty. It’s about this girl, they never tell her name, and she—”
Sid flung True Sex Crimes at Morgie’s head; it hit her. “She said she read it!” he shouted.
“She did not! She said she saw the book, you fucking smart-ass!”
“You’re boring! I hate your goddamn book reports!”
“I may be boring,” cried Morgie, “but at least I’m not bald!”
Frightened, Andrea drew back against the shelves. Her shoulder grazed the volume knob of the amplifier, and, at ninety decibels and out of four speakers, Bette Midler shrieked, “Red, red, gimme RED!” On the sofa, Dominic’s eyes flew open. He jumped up, and stared around, dazed.
“What the fuck?” he said—or at least his mouth formed those words. No sound could be heard above the music.
Jack appeared between the double doors. Giggling, Morgie got up, throwing her book at Sid, and lowered the volume.
“What the fuck is going on?” said Jack.
Dominic sat on the edge of the sofa and rubbed his eyes; the red-haired woman had not moved at all.
“Sorry!” blurted Andrea. “It was my fault, I knocked against the knob.”
Jack looked at her blankly, and then shrugged. She thought he was angry, but then he smiled warmly and handed her a beer. “No big deal,” he said. He handed two more beers to Morgie and Sid, and then seated himself beside Andrea on the carpet, just as the tape ran out. Andrea was half glad that she had had the accident, since it had brought Jack in; she felt better with him near, and not so much obliged to take notice of the others in the room. He touched her hand and brushed his lips against her hair. “We’ll go upstairs in a little while.”
“Is this beer,” complained Sid, “or did you piss in an empty can?”
“I stopped to roll some joints,” said Jack. “They got warm.”
“I like warm beer,” said Morgie. “I like it warm and flat.”
Dominic looked up at Andrea from the couch. “You broke my ears, goddammit,” he whined in a Spanish accent.
Andrea pretended that she didn’t hear him; she turned and leaned her head against Jack’s shoulder. What am I doing here? she thought. Who are these people?
She drank her beer quickly, scarcely noticing its taste, but hoping that it would deaden her senses. She pushed the can away from her a little and asked Jack where the phone was.
“It’s across the hall, just to the left of the door.”
She went out the double doors, crossed the hideously garish hallway, and stepped into the dining room, kicking some piece of chrome out of its careful place.
“Hey, watch it in there!” she heard Dominic scream from the next room. She peered at the telephone, and dialled Joanna Liberman’s number, but before it had begun to ring, she remembered that Joanna and Marsha were at the party on Goodwin Place.
She checked her watch; it was half past one. If the party had been bad, as Joanna had predicted, there was a chance they were already back. Andrea let the phone ring twenty-three times. She hung up, and dialled the recorded weather message. She fished in her pocket, and came up with a five-dollar bill. Even if that would take her all the way back to Beacon Hill, and with the price of Boston taxis, she knew it would not, she had no way of getting into Joanna’s apartment.
She
was almost sick at the thought of spending the night in this house. She would not consider asking Jack to drive her back to the Hill. The ride to Jamaica Plain had frightened her; there were times, when he had taken curves too quickly, that her shoes had scraped against the pavement. She told herself that she was only doing right in remaining until the subways started running, that she might be putting herself into danger by getting on that motorcycle again—especially without a helmet. But when she remembered the jeep, she admitted to herself that her excuse was only a self-deception to cover her real cowardice. She simply did not have the courage to tell Jack that she was backing out. Her only comfort was the thought that in six or seven hours it would all be over. Marsha had called her a hard woman—well, it was the hard woman who was going to have to make it through this night.
Andrea, as she still held the telephone receiver to her ear and listened to the weather report repeated, thought of what her friend had said. Marsha had been right, of course; she saw that now. Marsha had known that it would be wrong even to make the acquaintance of the man in leather.
Andrea turned, not at a noise, but at feeling another presence near by. Dominic stood between the double doors. His eyes were half-lidded, and he smiled knowingly; she wondered if he could hear Virginia with the 1:00 A.M. Boston temperature. His mouth was wide and his teeth were large, but perfectly aligned. His eyes swept up and down her body, and his hands pressed deeper into the pockets of his fatigue pants, inching the waistband so far down over his flat stomach that she could see the beginning of his pubic hair.
Andrea jerked her gaze away.
“Rain tomorrow?” he said softly, and walked away down the hall.
Andrea quickly dialled Joanna’s number once more, but hung up after ten rings—the studio apartment wasn’t that big. She returned to the living room. Sid, Morgie, and Jack were passing a joint between them, and when she seated herself again beside Jack, he handed half the burned joint to her. She inhaled deeply and passed it on to Morgie. The smoke seared her lungs, but she did not cough. If she were to be stuck here for the night, being stoned out of her mind could only make the situation less unpleasant.
Dominic appeared in the hallway, a Sylvester and Tweetie-Bird jelly glass of water in his hand.
“I’m going to bed,” he announced loudly, “you coming?”
Andrea looked quickly over to the couch, waiting for the red-haired woman to stir so that she might see her face at last. But it was Morgie that stood and followed Dominic into the hall.
“I thought—” gasped Andrea.
“Ha!” laughed Jack: “You thought Sid and Morgie were together because of the way they were going at each other. We’ve got a couple of sten guns in the kitchen for when they’re really going at it. Dominic and Morgie got married about five years ago. This house belongs to them.” Jack looked at Sid. “Sid, listen, why don’t you take Rita on upstairs, so Andrea and I can have a little time by ourselves here?”
“I haven’t finished this story.”
“Sid, just do me a favor, huh?”
Sid pulled himself out of his chair, loped slowly over to the sofa, and violently shook Rita into semiwakefulness. She turned over yawning, but did not open her eyes. She held her arms out before her, and Sid, crouching and turning himself almost spastically, maneuvered his long, slender back between them. Rita clasped her hands about his chest and wrapped her legs around his waist. Sid stood carefully, and Rita’s head lolled against his shoulder; her long hair fell over her face. Rita would have been a pretty woman, but for the purple birthmark that covered the whole of her right cheek. Sid clapped his hands under Rita’s thighs and carried her out of the room and up the stairs.
“Rita’s not really much of a night person,” remarked Jack.
Bewildered, Andrea shook her head. “Can we smoke that other joint?” she asked.
He reached into his back jeans pocket and extracted not the joint, but a glass vial filled with white powder. From another pocket he took a three-inch silver tube, and then pointed to the record cabinet. Andrea didn’t understand.
“Hand me a record album,” he said.
“Which one?”
He shook his head in gentle exasperation. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Oh, get one with a solid-colored cover.”
Andrea picked one out, handed it to him, and wondered, with growing curiosity and some discomfort, why he placed it on the floor between them.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
Jack emptied a small pile of the white powder onto the record jacket and, with the edge of a razor blade he took from the shelving, quickly divided it into four short parallel lines.
“I want to know what you’re doing,” she demanded.
Still not bothering to reply, Jack leaned over the record album, held the slender silver tube up one nostril, and snorted up the first line, and then the second. He sat back and breathed deeply. Andrea stared astonished into his watering eyes. He handed the silver tube to Andrea. She turned it between her fingers.
“Just snort it like I did.”
“What is it?”
He sighed. “Coke.”
“Coke?” she said slowly. “I’m already stoned. How will it make me feel?”
“Like you were queen of the prom.”
Andrea snorted the cocaine, and was glad to do it again half an hour later, when Jack made four more lines. They washed the bitterness down with beer, and smoked the second joint to enhance the high. Andrea lay weightless in Jack’s arms. The double doors had been drawn together. The candles round the room had been lighted, and the stereo changed over to an all-night soft rock station. From behind the sofa Jack retrieved a thick, soft quilt and spread it in the middle of the room.
He made love to Andrea. In eager submission, she folded herself in his arms. She crossed and locked her legs behind his waist and welcomed his weight upon her. He moved slowly with her, guiding her gently, and his low-pitched groans precipitated her into a febrile excitement she could not have imagined possible. She thought of the other three men she had been to bed with—she remembered the number, but could not recall their faces in sequence. One or the other slipped from her exalted consciousness.
Andrea did all that was asked and demanded of her: Jack was tender, but he took for granted that she wanted what he did. She made no protest when the springs of the armchair cut into her buttocks, or the material of the sofa chafed her breasts and stomach. As she was nearing orgasm, she thought suddenly of her parents, imagining them witnesses to her cocaine-enhanced ecstasies in the arms of a dope dealer—and she cried out all the louder. She pulled Jack harder against her, grated the thick hair on his chest against her breasts as his tongue probed deep into her mouth. His body trembled and shook in rhythmic spasms with her own.
When Jack slid off her, she gritted her teeth; but he caught her up in his arms and held her close against him. He lolled her head back to the quilt. Their bodies were slick with perspiration and glimmered damply in the glow of the candlelight. Andrea propped herself on one elbow and brushed strands of tangled hair out of her eyes. She placed the palm of her hand flat against Jack’s chest and measured his breath and heartbeat as they grew slower and more regular. His head had fallen toward her, his filmed eyes closed, and he was asleep. Andrea kissed him gently on the mouth. She carefully withdrew her arm from beneath his head, and stood. She walked about the living room and carefully blew out the candles.
The last was a thick red column of molded paraffin in a blue saucer on the floor by the double doors. She bent down, cupped her hand about the flame—and froze. The doors were parted no more than an inch, and, through the opening, the flickering candlelight fell upon one bare foot. She picked up the saucer and slowly raised herself. Her eyes followed up the body of the naked man. The candle flame reflecting in his full-irised eyes, Dominic smiled at her from the
darkness of the hallway.
22
Andrea wrote out for Jack her address at Wenham and the number of the hall phone in the dormitory. Without comment he thrust the scrap of paper into his back pocket. In return he gave her neither his surname nor his telephone number nor his address. While she was waiting for him downstairs, she surreptitiously jotted down the number of the phone, checked his last name on the mailbox beside the front door, and noted the house number. As they were driving away, she got the name of the street from the sign at the corner.
Andrea waited two weeks for his call. When she dialled the number of the Jamaica Plain house one Wednesday afternoon, she prepared herself with the excuse, in case he was hostile, that she only wanted to purchase some grass from him. Morgie, who had forgotten her, took a message and vowed on the soul of Amber St. Clair that she would deliver it to Jack. By the following Saturday Jack had not called, and Andrea was too piqued by her own foolishness to consider telephoning again.
Marsha had made only cursory inquiries about Andrea’s evening with Jack, and Andrea, in her replies, had not been candid. “Andrea,” said Marsha one evening, as they were crossing from one corner of the campus to the other, “don’t you ever worry about getting into a situation you can’t handle?”
“You mean Jack?”
“Yes.”
Andrea glanced sharply at her friend. The autumn sun had slipped by degrees beneath the horizon and bathed the evening air with luminous gold. “What do you mean: worry? I handled that night just fine.”
Blood Rubies Page 16
