Judge Me Not

Chapter Six

Teed sensed her uncertainty. “It’s — quite cozy,” she said hesitantly.

“For guests,” he said, “I have to give up the master bedroom. You will note that it also serves as the living room, dining room and rumpus room. Come here.”

He took her over, opened the door onto a bedroom so tiny that the double bed almost filled it. He said, “This is my bedroom, and I shall give it up as a dressing room as soon as I get swimming trunks on.”

“Hey, did you mean that about a moonlight swim? I saw the moon coming up but... say, isn’t that lake cold?”

“Still contains heat from the summer. It’s just the air that’s cold. I don’t suppose you have a swim suit.”

She frowned. “No. But the undies are nylon. They’ll dry fast. We going to have a fire?”

“Sure.”

“Well, go put on your trunks. And then go get in the lake. Those steps I saw when you turned on the light. They go down to the water?”

“Down to a dock. You can dive off it.”

“If I get up the nerve.”

“I’ll put you in, if you start to chicken out.”

He changed to shorts in the small bedroom, grinned at her as he went through the living room and out the door. The night wind was frigid. He trotted down the steps, wasted no time getting into the water. It took his breath at first, but it was much warmer than the air. The moon was above the southern horizon, its gold paling to silver blue. Wind ripples lapped against the oil drums on which the dock floated.

When he saw her coming down the steps, he swam in toward the dock. His eyes were used to the moonlight and he saw that she was beautifully constructed, not in a classic way, but in the way made believable only through the efforts of the dreamers who draw the women for gas station calendars. Long smooth limber legs joined sweetly to a torso so short-waisted as to barely escape being out of proportion. Breasts so high, so widely spaced, so firmly heavy that they added a measure of frailty to slim shoulders, to the slenderness of waist.

“Teed, where are you? My t-t-teeth sound like a Spanish dance.”

“Dive in and get it over with.”

“One, t-t-two, th-th-three.” She slanted off the dock, pale in the moonlight, sliding into the water as sleekly as an otter. She came up, swimming hard and fast. She grabbed his shoulder, panting. “You cheated me. It’s like ice.”

“A sissy, eh? Where’d you learn to dive like that?”

“Water show.”

He remembered his promise just in time to keep from asking the obvious question.

“Hey, it isn’t too bad, is it? Race you.”

She got a head start on him. It took a surprisingly long time to catch up with her. They were both breathless. She rolled over to float on her back. She floated high in the water, as all women do, and the soaked nylon was transparent in the bright moonlight.

He felt desire move turgidly within him, quickening the beat of his pulse.

“Teed, do you have anything I can wear after we’re through swimming?”

“Jeans and a wool shirt all right? Just take what you want out of the closet to the right of the door as you go in. Haven’t you got anything with you?”

“Yes, dammit. But what I’ve got isn’t right for — a camp, as you might well imagine. And I don’t want to put the suit back on.”

“Take a fresh shirt from one of the laundry covers. The others are maybe a little ripe. Ready to quit?”

“Or else take a bite out of my own arm. I’ve never been so hungry. I’ll go first, Teed. You come up when I turn the light off and on again.”

“Modest, eh?” he said.

Her tone turned to ice. “Let me know if it bothers you. It’s a trait I don’t get much chance to indulge.”

“Please, Barbara. That’s something I would have said to anybody.”

“I’m sorry. Maybe I’m hypersensitive. And I guess that’s a luxury too.” Something had gone out of her voice. Some necessary warmth.

“Now you take Albert. He was hypersensitive too. Used to hate to have the pigeons watching him.”

“Fool!” she said, her voice chuckling warm in her throat. She grabbed his shoulders and ducked him strongly. When he came up, she was racing toward the dock, her arms lifting slim and fleet in the moonlight.

When the light blinked he pulled himself up over the edge of the dock and ran shivering up the steps. As he came through the door she tossed a towel to him. She had built a respectable-looking fire, and it was just roaring into life.

“Dry in front of the fire. Look, I found the brandy and the ice and everything, but no mint. You out? You do want stingers?”

“Mint in the bottom cupboard in back. And the right measure is about two and a half to one. How’s the fit of those clothes?”

The shoulder seams hung halfway to her elbows. Under the rolled-up jeans she wore a pair of Teed’s wool socks. She’d used a length of clothesline as a belt.

“What do you think? Talk about bags tied in the middle.”

He toweled himself, went into the closet and grabbed a twin to her outfit, and shut himself in the bedroom. Her clothes were in there, her purse on top of them. He took five twenties from his wallet and put them in her purse.

By the time he got out she had made the drinks, set up the card table in front of the fire, found a clean sheet to serve as a tablecloth.

“Vegetables nearly thawed,” she said. “Do you cook the steaks, or do I?”

“I’ll do it. How do you like yours?”

“Rare. If you’d taken a minute more, I’d have eaten mine raw.”

Between them they got everything ready and had time for a couple of drinks while the steak sputtered. Barbara said, “A good swim. I tingle all over.”

Her hair, flattened when she had left the water, had sprung back into damp ringlets. She looked at him with nothing more in her eyes than the warm glow of friendship.

“You’re a nice guy, Teed.”

“That’s an attempt to get your steak quicker, my friend.”

“You saw through it, didn’t you? It just doesn’t pay a woman to be subtle any more.”

They ate hugely and with vast concentration. They had a leisurely cigarette, brandy in the coffee, and then they cleaned up.

Afterward the constraint came over them again and he, sensing it, said, “There’s cards around here. Ever play double solitaire?”

“Not since I was a kid.” They played three games. He won the first. She won the next two, her face flushed, her eyes dancing; squealing as they both raced to put a card on one of the ace piles.

“Enough?” he asked.

“I can’t stand the excitement. Say, can we watch the fire? I mean with another log on and the lights out?”

“Practically standard operating procedure in a camp, isn’t it? Sure.”

She sat in front of the fire, hugging her knees, staring into the flames. He lay on his stomach beside her, his chin on his fist.

“Teed, do you look into the flames and see things? Crazy things?” Her voice was almost a whisper.

“It always makes me feel sort of sad, Barbara. Remote and far away. As though I could look into flames and tell the past and the future.”

“They aren’t good things to think about. Pasts and futures. Not good at all.”

He rolled onto his side, reached out and caught her hand. “Barbara, I...”

The dreaminess left her voice. “It’s your choice, of course.”

He let go of her hand quickly. “What the hell’s the use?” he said thickly. “It’s an artificial situation and you can pretend just so long and just so far. Why don’t you stay up and watch the fire for a while? I think I’ll turn in.”

She stood up quickly. “I’ll get my things out of there.”

She brought out her clothes, purse, overnight bag, put them on the living-room bed. She turned toward him without expression. He rumpled her hair with his big hand, feeling the tender skull-shape under the crisp curl-cap. He bent and kissed her cheek. “I didn’t mean to pop off. Sleep tight.”

“What you said was right, Teed. It is an artificial situation.” She looked at him with an odd dignity, in contrast to the absurd fit of the jeans and shirt. “We shouldn’t have had the pact. We shouldn’t have tried to pretend.”

He shrugged. “Maybe not. But once you start pretending, you’re stuck with it, aren’t you?”

When he came out of the bathroom she was squatting on her heels by the fire, poking the coals with a twig. She didn’t turn as she said, “Good night, Teed.”

“ ’Night, Barbara.”

He shut the door of the tiny bedroom, stripped and slid down between the cool sheets. He swung the window open, hooked it. The night air came through the screen, touched his face with its coolness.

He picked his trousers off the floor, fished out the day’s last cigarette, lit it. He lay with his fingers laced behind his head, the cigarette sticking up from the corner of his mouth, and thought about the strangeness of the day, the strangeness of the girl out by the fire.

It’s your hundred bucks, he thought. What the hell is wrong with you, Morrow? What do you think she is? Stop thinking of her as some kind of a princess, or as a proper and untouchable young lady from Bryn Mawr. How many others have paid their hundred? One hundred? Five hundred? A thousand? What were the others like? Puffy little tired businessmen, trying to pretend they didn’t pay cash on the line. Wealthy college kids trying to be men of the world. And she’s had them all, performing her fundamental female function with all the mechanical joy of a robot with a tin smile. She’s a hundred-buck call girl, Morrow, and if you want it, open the door and call it. Then you can take a shower and go to sleep. She’s out there squatting by the fire, with her dainty little butt on her dainty little heels and smiling her dainty little smile at a sentimental slob named Morrow who let himself be smarted out of his hundred dollars. Those kittens soon get over any sentimental view of life, Morrow. She’s a nail-hard kid. You going to let her spend the next month telling her brassy blonde friends about the guy named Morrow who treated her like a friend of the family?

But, try as he might, he couldn’t merge the two images — the image of Barbara the call girl just wouldn’t merge with the image of the Barbara who had swum with him, laughed with him, eaten steak with him.

He couldn’t call her. He butted the cigarette, punched the pillow and tried to find a position in which he could sleep. Wind rattled the juiceless leaves of autumn. A chipmunk trotted across the roof. He tried to think of Felice, of the danger he was in, of the wet dark look of Raval’s eyes. But each time Barbara slid back into his mind.

The door swung slowly open, and she was silhouetted in the doorframe in the red light of the dying fire. The baggy shirt and jeans made her look childlike.

“Teed,” she said in a choked voice, “Teed, I...” And she stumbled to the bed, to his arms, kneeling beside the bed with her face in the hollow of his throat and shoulder as she wept. He held her, his left arm tight around her shoulders, smoothing her crisp hair with his right hand, making small sounds of comfort as she wept heavily, dully, hopelessly. For a time she vocalized her sobs, as a child will. And then the sobs became dry, thick gasps that came further and further apart.

She straightened up, still kneeling, and knuckled her eyes. “Sorry, Teed,” she said huskily.

“Everybody has times when being alone is no good.”

“I shouldn’t have used you for a wailing wall.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“It isn’t important. You just remind me of somebody, Teed. When you walked up to the booth my heart nearly stopped. And all evening. Little habits you have. The way you use your hands, hold your head. You think something is nicely scarred over and then it gets opened up again. And you bleed some more.”

“I’ll be a crying towel any time.”

She stood up slowly. “I wanted to be held. Like a kid, I guess. There’s too much night out there. And looking into fires is a sad business at best.”

He reached out and caught her wrist, pulled her toward the bed. She resisted at first, then came to him, slackly. He whipped the covers aside, slid her down beside him, tossed the covers back over them.

Her lips were dead under his. “I’ll stick with the pact, Teed. I mean that.”

“I don’t want a production,” he said harshly.

The baggy garments could not disguise the long clean lines of her. He unbuttoned the shirt, starting at the throat. She sat up with numb docility and let him take the shirt off, toss it aside. It lit with a click of buttons against the bare board floor. She started to untie the knot in the length of clothesline. He pushed her hands aside, untied the knot, undid the buttons, pulled the harsh fabric of the dungarees down from the rounded silk of her hips. He tossed them after the shirt.

She lay limp in his arms, his left arm under her head, his right arm around her so that his hand was almost under her body. The fire made dying sounds. The red glow had faded a great deal. He held her tenderly, kissed her eyes, her throat. Whenever he kissed her lips, he seemed to taste resignation, a chronic despair. He brought his left hand around so that his fingertips rested, as though by accident, against the pulse in the side of her throat. Her pulse remained slow, steady, heavy. And after a very long time, when he kissed her eyes again, and then her lips, he felt a tiny quiver of her mouth, felt the pulse increase its tempo. Only then did he bring his right hand around her body, slowly enfold the heaviness of her breast, a globe of warmth, a cup from which honey could be drunk.

As he kissed her again, he felt the stir of her lips, felt, against his palm, the subtle tautening, stiffening.

All at once she stopped breathing. And then she took a vast shuddering breath. Her arms, which had been limp at her sides, slid up and around his neck, and she found his lips with an open, savage hunger.

He was a man who had picked patiently, gingerly, at the stones at the base of a dam. And suddenly the whole structure had collapsed, overwhelming him in the torrent.

She was torrent, and tempest, and whirlwind.

Broken bits of meaningless words glittered in the darkness.

On a dusty shelf in the back of his mind he found a distant childhood memory. They had been a gift — a lot of curiously shaped little wooden bits. The directions were on the box. He had worked at the puzzle until he had grown angry. And suddenly, when he was close to tears, the little wooden parts had fitted together perfectly. You knew at once that all the time they had been made to fit that way. You wondered how you could possibly have gone on that long without recognizing the essential and pure perfection of this part going here, and that part going there. It was such locked, perfect precision that it had taken him much longer to tire of that toy than the others that had arrived on the same birthday.

And now, again, here was a co-ordinated rightness, a fitted precision.

He was running up a long flight of black velvet steps. Each step was almost impossibly high, yet he was running with the buoyant fleetness that can be remembered only from dreams. He knew he had to run with perfect cadence. There was no top to the flight of stairs. They went on forever. They went on to the stars and beyond.

And suddenly there was a group of stairs far steeper than any of the others. In spite of their steepness, he ran even faster — ran up and then out into empty space, into a high, wild, airless place full of the shrillness of a scream.

As in dreams, he did not fall. He floated slowly down to a place where he could again feel the diminuendo of spasmed warmth under his hands, taste the metallic echo of blood on his lip.

After a time she was apart from him. He said, in a slow whisper, “Oddest damn thing. Was in a school play once. Rehearsed every day for a month. You know, you make me feel as if all I’d ever done is rehearse. And now this was for real.”

“Shut up!” she said tonelessly.

He stared at her. There was just enough light left so that he could see she was on her back, with her right hand, palm upward, resting on her forehead.

“What’s the matter?”

“God, God, God,” she said in the same flat, dull tone.

He reached for her and she thrust his hand away.

“Now look! Just what have I done?”

“You couldn’t possibly understand.”

“Why don’t you try me? Try to tell me, darling.”

“And don’t use that sappy, sticky, sentimental tone on me, Teed.”

“You sound like a psycho.”

“O.K., you get your explanation. Turn on the light.”

“Why?”

“Just turn it on.”

He sat up, groped for the ceiling-light pull, found it in the dark. He squinted at the harsh impact of the light. She got lithely out of bed, turned and faced him. She stood in an ugly way, feet spraddled, belly outthrust, shoulders slumped. On her face was a hard and bitter expression, and a look of careless violence.

“Take a good look at the stock in trade of a hundred-dollar-whore, my friend.” Even that posture could not make her body ugly. “Inspect the merchandise.”

“Don’t do that to yourself, Barbara. Stop,” he said softly.

Her voice coarsened. “Poor, poor, poor little Barbara. The delicate, sensitive little thing. Don’t make me laugh! Most of the customers want a good look at what they’re buying. What’s wrong with you? Shy, or something? I’ve been able to peddle this without fear or favor because it hasn’t meant any more to me than a... a topcoat. And it has been just as devoid of feeling. It has been like renting a coat. Do you see what I mean?”

“I think I do. You mean it wasn’t like selling yourself, because Barbara wasn’t actually involved?”

“They buy the trimmings, but they don’t buy me. I hide back inside myself and laugh like hell. Once upon a time I got paid for diving into a swimming pool. This isn’t half as hard, and the pay is better. But do you see what you’ve done to me? Now I’m selling too much of myself. Nobody else bought what you just bought, Mr. Morrow. Body and soul and emotions and wanting and...”

“Please, Barbara.”

“I could go on doing this if you hadn’t come along. Now I can’t go on with it. Maybe it seems like a pretty delicate moral point to you, my friend, but it’s important to me. I hate you for it, Teed. And I hate myself worse.”

He lunged quickly, captured her wrist, got the light pull with the other hand. He pulled her roughly back into the bed. She struggled and caught him once across the throat with her nails before he pinned her arms.

“Let — me — go!”

“Stop it! I didn’t buy a damn thing, Barbara. Not a thing. I won’t give you a cent. Whatever you want to think, just keep remembering that it wasn’t a commercial transaction.”

“No matter what you say, whether you pay me or not, you’re just another customer.”

His voice was thick. “Barbara, listen to me. Can’t you remember? We’ve known each other for years. This was a date for a picnic and a moonlight swim. It just got out of control — changed into something else. It could happen to any date.”

“Crap!” she said.

“Have you forgotten old Albert so quickly? And the sleigh ride, and the barn dance?”

“Don’t try to help me. Please don’t try to help me, Teed,” she said, in an entirely different tone.

Suddenly, unaccountably, his eyes were stinging. He said, “What a load of guilt for one human being to try to carry, Barbara! You are a crazy, wonderful, damn-fool girl.”

She freed one hand gently. She said, “Teed, your voice sounds so odd. I don’t know...” He tried to turn his head away, but her fingertips brushed his cheek, just under his eye, brushed the dampness.

“Big baby,” she said huskily, tenderly. “Big baby to bawl over a thing like me.” And then her voice broke and she began to cry again. He held her as he had before. This was a different sort of weeping. After a time she said, “Help me, Teed. For God’s sake, help me.”

His answer was to tighten his arms around her.

When the tears were over, she moved away a bit. “Got a cigarette?”

“On the floor under your side.”

She found them, gave him one. The match flared briefly and he saw her cheeks go hollow as she took the first drag.

“When they’ve asked, I’ve given them a story. A lie every time. No two alike.”

“You don’t have to tell me, Barbara.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. I do. I have to tell the truth to somebody. I guess I’ve always known that someday I would have to tell the truth to somebody. I went to the right schools, lived the right way. Got engaged to a boy named Roger. A sweet boy, I thought. I told you how you remind me of him, Teed. We were going to be married. I was a virgin. We started sleeping together. It got... pretty physical. I mean we were good together. It was in my home town. Baltimore. Roger’s boss was a bachelor. We began to see a lot of him. I knew he was a sort of a wolf, but I didn’t have to worry. I was Roger’s, and we were going to be married and have a zillion kids. One night Roger told me his boss was out of town and we could use his boss’s house. I didn’t like the idea very much, but he was insistent. We went out there. Roger kept making drinks for me. The whole world got pretty fuzzy. I went to bed with Roger. When morning came, I found out that I was in bed with his boss. Roger had gone home. Roger got a promotion two days later. His boss had made the offer, obviously, and Roger had accepted, prepared the groundwork, dutifully left me there.

“I tried to kill myself. I didn’t have enough courage.”

“Or you had too much,” Teed said.

“The worst part was hearing Roger tell me that we could keep on just like we were. I told him what he had turned me into, and what that made of him. He didn’t care to be called a pimp. He slapped me. I left town. I didn’t care where I went. Maybe I was a little crazy. I came here. A man picked me up. I didn’t even care about that. It didn’t matter. I made him give me twenty dollars. The next afternoon a woman named Gonzales came to the hotel room. I don’t know how she found out. She explained things to me. I didn’t want anything to do with her. After she left I went for a walk and the police picked me up. She came to the jail and explained again. So it was either spend ninety days in jail, or do it her way. And that, Mr. Morrow, is how I got my start.”

“Roger gave you the name, so you took over the game.”

“I suppose that’s it.”

“And all this is just a process of getting even with him, getting even with life.”

“Oh, it’s very simple, Teed. I buy nice clothes, live in a nice apartment with an unlisted phone. I’m always honest with myself. I get up in the morning and look into my mirror and say, ‘Good morning, you whore.’ ”

“Maybe I’m a prude. I just don’t like the sound of that.”

“And of course I do.”

“Don’t get angry. How about your family?”

“The usual thing. They think I’m a model. Isn’t that almost standard procedure?”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I... I just don’t know. I don’t know what you’ve done to me. I feel as if I’d been sick, somehow, ever since Roger. Now I’m getting well. And that makes a problem. I just don’t know.”

“All right. I’ll rephrase the question. What are you going to do this minute?” he asked, reaching for her.

She moved joyously toward him, her laughter soft in the night. “Oh, Teed, I can answer that question. I can answer it.”

“We can answer it.”

“Teed, not fierce and... desperate, like before. Tender, this time. Slow and tender. Can you pretend tenderness?”

“I don’t have to pretend,” he said, his voice thick.

“Can I say a silly thing to you?”

“Of course.”

“Forget, Teed, that the body is shopworn. Just keep remembering that the emotions haven’t been used much. They need tenderness. Oh, so badly.”

“That isn’t silly. I can understand that.”

“And we must have a new pact. We won’t use one word. It’s verboten, that word. Love. Never say it to me, Teed. Never, never, never, my darling.”

“No love, no pasts, no tomorrows.”

“Just here and now, Teed. Right here and right now I’m your girl. My heart is your heart.”

The red glow of the fire was entirely gone. The wind had died. Far away a car droned through the hills and a dog bayed, sadly, forlornly. The night sky was vast over them, and the dark side of Earth turned slowly toward the sun. For a little time they were able to forget that the only constant in life is the utter loneliness of each individual.

Later, when she whimpered in her sleep he touched her shoulder and, without waking, she made the tiny warm sigh that is the only thing left of a fear that has suddenly gone away.

In the night he shut his fist until his knuckles ached, and thought that maybe one day he would make a trip, call on a man named Roger something.