the girl from pussycat

“That’s very nice of you, Puppy,” Madame X said. “Then I’ll leave you two to get acquainted now.” She left, closing the door behind her.

“I really would appreciate any advice you can give me,” Penny said honestly. “You see, I’ve never had any experience in this line before.”

“ ’S’all right, sugah. They’s a fust time for eva’thin’. Heah comes Puppy tell how to bang-bang so them mothahs gonna come back for more. Now, start off, you’s a amateur, right?”

“I’ve never made love with a man in my whole life,” Penny confessed primly.

“Foah real? You mean nevah, right ’nuf? I be cawn-cobbed! Weah you been? End gal in a nunnery or suthin’? She-it! How you ’splain sech silliness?”

“The best planned lays of mice and men gang aft agly,” Penny misquoted deliberately.

“An’ you one mouse nevah had no tail? That so, we best start at the beginnin’. Fust off, you lie on youah motherin’ rump for fuggin’. You-all got that?”

“I always sort of assumed that was the proper position.”

“She-it! You ass-sumed right. They’s other ways, but you-all gotta l’arn to crawl ’fore you kin walk. Now, you layin’ youah rear an’ ’long come Mr. Charlie. What you-all gonna do next?”

“Umm. Separate my legs?” Penny suggested brightly.

“Wrong! She-it! Wrong! Fust thing you do is smile real pretty like at the mothah an’ hol’ up youah han’ fo’ the bread. ’Til tha’s tuckaway, you don’ fugaway. You heah? You jes’ keep youah legs crossed ’til then.”

“But then why do I lie down first? Why don’t I ask him for the money first?”

“She-it! You pretty stupid! You lie down so’s to advertise what you’s sellin’. You get him all hot and mothahed so’s he be gen’rous. You wriggle ’roun’ on youah tail make him come an’ go fas’ too. Ah does the same, on’y on my stummick. Ah wiggle right good, but Ah keep it tight ’til he pay. Once Ah got da bread, then Ah spread.”

“I see. After he pays, what do I do then?”

“You does what he want, what you-all think? You fug-fug. He go slow, you go slow. He go fas’, you-all go fas’. He make circles, you make circles. He make waves, you make waves. An’ alla time, you a-moanin’ an’ a-groanin’ an’ a-sighin’ what a great mothah-fuggha he be, like he the greates’ evah. ’Member that, they all the greates’ evah. An’ oh yeah, if he white, you tell him what a big one he got. You tell him it the bigges’ you evah did see. All ofays sorta got ’feriority complexions ’bout bein’ peewees. So you-all ac’ like he totin’ ’roun’ a ’tomic cannon in his jeans.”

“All right,” Penny said. “You know, I can hardly wait,” she confided. “At last I’m going to hear the ‘liquid sounds of love-making’. At last my body will ‘burn with passion’. At last I’ll know what it’s like when ‘the sweet aroma of animal desire dilates my nostrils’ .”

“What you-all yakkity-yak? Fug-fug don’ soun’ liquid. Lessen the mothah got a bellyfull o’ beah, it soun’ moah like when you-all get suthin’ stuck in the vacuum. An’ her body staht burnin’, you bettah see the Madame fo’ shuah; she get you some sulphah stuff, that fix you up. An’ dat ain’ no sweet ’roma you’se gonna smell. Clientele we gets heah, they smells moah like they fobgits to change theah diapahs. Dat kinda nonsense ain’ gonna git you noweah. You jes’ ’member to push when the mothah push an’ pull when he pull.”

“I’ll remember that,” Penny promised.

There was knock at the door. “Penny, it’s your trick,” a voice called.

“Heah comes Penny,” Puppy grinned. “Time foah to feed her pussy. Things get rough, you-all jes’ let that cat nip. That cool the mothah down. Fug luck, sugah. Fugalug!”

“Thank you,” Penny told Puppy. She smiled bravely and closed the door behind her, ready to meet her fate.

A moment later Penny found herself in a small cubicle, alone with a man. “How do you do?” the valiant girl said with a determined smile. “I’m Penny Candie and I’m here to serve you.” And with this, Penny stripped off her mink jacket and stretched out on the bed, being very careful to follow Puppy’s advice and keep her legs crossed.

“Greetings, Penny.” The scraggly-bearded young man blew a riffle on the trumpet he was holding. “My handle’s Bix. Bix Bittervetch. You want a stick of tea?” His eyes dilated telltalefully and bounced around in their sockets like pinballs as he took in Penny’s blushing nude beauty.

“I’m not thirsty, thank you,” Penny said. “But I’m ready if you are.” She held up her hand for the money.

“Oh, yeah. I dig. You want the bread. Sure thing, chick.” He pressed a twenty-dollar bill into her palm.

“Thank you.” Penny waited, but he just kept looking and occasionally sounding a note on the trumpet. “Shall We uhh—” she suggested after a while.

“Nah. I ain’t out for uhh tonight. I don’t feel like uhh-ing. I’m in the mood for something French.”

“Shall I have the Madame send one of the other girls? Fifi Fofum is French. Perhaps you’d prefer her?” Penny couldn’t help sounding disappointed.

“You read me wrong, Penny. I don’t want another chick. I’m ape for you all right. It’s just that after blowing this trumpet all night, I’d like the favor reciprocated. Dig?”

Penny didn’t dig until Bix explained just what sort of specialized service it was that he wanted. When he did, she was very disappointed. Once again, it seemed, her virginity was to be left intact. Still, she managed to hide her disappointment and set about obliging Bix.

Remembering Puppy’s advice, she didn’t comment on the fact that it was indeed small and limp when she fished it out of Bix’s clothing. Anyway, her little pink tongue soon changed that. It grew with amazing rapidity and to formidable proportions as Penny went about the avid sort of licking she had heretofore reserved for ice cream cones.

Finally it was quivering red and manly in the air and Penny rested a moment, wondering idly if it was possible to contract tonsillitis in this fashion. Bix took advantage of the pause to sound a few chords of Blow the Man Down on his trumpet. As Penny resumed her task, her lips gently encircling what her tongue had inspired, Bix responded with a long high note that bespoke his feelings better than any mere words could have.

Instinctively, Penny kissed and suckled like a bee drawing pollen from a flower. But no pollen came. She changed her tactics, nibbling and biting like a woodpecker seeking sap from a tree. No sap came. She tried a push-pull motion, like a farmer milking a cow. No milk came. Finally, her jaw muscles aching, she rested again.

“It’s the pot.” Bix blew a mournful note on the trumpet.

“I’m sorry I don’t satisfy you, but there’s no need to get insulting,” Penny replied stiffily—which, after the way she’s exercised her jaw, was the only way she was capable of replying.

“Insulting. What do you mean?”

“You called me a pot.”

“No, chick, you don’t dig. I didn’t mean you. I meant the pot I’ve been smoking. The tea, you know? The weed?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.” Penny pursed her love-chapped lips and prepared to resume activity.

“Never mind.” Bix pushed her gently away. “I’m just not going to make this scene. We might as well face it.”

“Oh, that’s a shame. Aren’t you frustrated?” Penny asked sympathetically.

“Like a jazzman sucked into a longhair concert. Yeah. I am frustrated. That I am. But there’s nothing we can do about it except—- Wait a minute!” Bix sounded a triumphal note on the trumpet. “There is something we can do. Down at my pad I’ve got an orgone box. That should fix me up. What do you say? Will you come down there with me?”

“I’d like to,” Penny answered honestly. “But I can’t. You see, I’m a prisoner here. They won’t let me out.”

“Huh? You mean this is some kind of white slave operation or something? Come on now, you’re putting me on. That kind of thing went out with Fu Manchu.”

“No, really. It’s the truth.”

“You mean for real? These cats are holding you against your will?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“But they can’t do that. Look, I’ll help you escape if you’ll promise to come down to my pad. Okay?”

“Okay. But how? They keep a pretty close watch on me. And I’m sure this place is guarded.”

Bix thought a minute. “I’ve got it,” he said finally. “We’ll set fire to the place and escape in the confusion.”

“I don’t know—” Penny started to say doubtfully. But it was already too late. Bix was already tossing lit matches at the draperies. Within a few moments fire was crackling all about them. Penny grabbed the mink and followed him out the door of the room.

The fire spread quickly. Soon flames were shooting all through the bordello. Standing at the top of the staircase and watching the holocaust he had wrought, Bix smiled to Penny and blew a hot note on his trumpet. “It’s times like these,” he said, watching the naked and half-naked girls and customers scampering about in panic, “when I wish I played a violin.”

He led Penny through the smoke and flames, down the staircase, through the main lounge, and out the front door. “Taxi!” Bix hailed a passing cab. He gave the driver a Greenwich Village address and a moment later he and Penny were speeding downtown.

“Go-go-go, man,” Bix urged the driver. “We’re in a sweat.”

“What’s the hurry?” Penny wanted to know.

“Dat ole debbil sex, that’s what,” Bix told her. “I can’t wait to start those colored lights spinning.”

“But-—” Penny tried to put it as delicately as possible. “But you seemed to be having some—uh—-difficulty before.”

“My orgone box ’ll take care of that, never fear, chick.”

“You mentioned that before. I hate to sound naive,” said Penny naively, “but just what is an orgone box?”

“A real cool juicer, baby, that’s what. It soaks up all the orgones floating around the air and stores them for when they’re most needed—like right now. All I have to do is slip into it and—-wham!—I’m re-charged.”

“Yes, but-—- Well, I know I’m awfully innocent,” Penny admitted innocently, “but just what is an orgone?”

“Jizzum, honey, jizzum. It’s what makes the pistons go, you know? Like, we wouldn’t any of us be here without there were orgones.”

“I guess I just don’t comprehend,” said Penny uncomprehendingly.

“It’s simple. They’re like invisible ray doohickeys, sort of. This cat Dr. Wilhelm Reich discovered them and glommed onto a way of storing them in a box. So they’re there when you need ’em, dig? Like acorns for the squirrels.”

“What have the squirrels got to do with it?”

“Nothing.” Bix sighed. “Nothing, really.”

“Then why did you mention them?”

“Skip it. Just skip it. Let’s stick to orgones—and hope they stick to me.”

They rode in silence the rest of the way. The cab pulled up in front of a wooden frame building on Perry Street. Bix paid the driver and ushered Penny down a flight of steps to the door to a basement apartment. “Home sweet home.” He blew a riffle on his trumpet as he fumbled the key in the lock. Then he guided Penny inside and switched on a light.

“This is very pleasant,” Penny said, sounding a little surprised.

“It’s not the dump it looks like from the outside, hey? Well, I put a lot of elbow grease into this pad. Look, here’s the bar. Why don’t you mix us a couple of blasts while I slip out of my clothes and into the orgone box?”

“Where is it?” Penny looked around curiously. “I’d like to see what an orgone box looks like.”

“In the john. Come on, I’ll show you.”

Bix led her into the bathroom, swept aside the shower curtain and indicated a large wooden box which filled the bathtub. “There she is,” he said proudly.

“It looks like a coffin,” Penny said bewilderedly. “What’s inside it?”

“I will be in a minute.” Bix was stripping off his clothes.

“That isn’t what I mean. What I mean is, what sort of machinery is it? And how do you plug it in?”

“There’s no machinery involved. And you don’t plug it in.”

“Does it operate on batteries then?”

“You don’t understand. It doesn’t operate at all. It just is.”

“Sounds very Existential.”

Penny hadn’t been quite sure what she meant by that remark, but Bix beamed when she said it. “Now you dig,” he told her. “Existential is just what it is. Things are what they are and that’s why they are. This orgone box is an orgone box and it collects and concentrates orgones. That’s all.”

“You mean it’s just a plain wooden box?”

“No. The inside is lined with sheet metal.”

“What’s that for?”

“So the orgones don’t leak out.”

“Oh . . . And that’s all there is to it?”

“That’s al1.” Bix was naked now. He opened the orgone box, settled himself inside it, and then closed it around his body. It covered him from toe to neck. Only his head protruded. “All We have to do now is wait,” he said.

“How long will it take?”

“Oh, not long. Ten, fifteen minutes maybe.”

“I’ll go make the drinks while we’re waiting,” Penny said.

While she was measuring out the gin and vermouth, Penny was feeling a little depressed. The things a girl has to go through to lose her virginity, she thought to herself. And even if the orgone box worked, she might not loose it. Judging from the sex direction Bix had been heading toward back at the brothel, Penny could look forward to nothing more than once again swallowing her desire.

“I’m primed.” Bix stood in the doorway, looking at her.

“So am I.” Penny held out one of the martinis to him and then shrugged her shoulders sensually until the mink floated down her body to the floor. Now, except for the riding boots she wore, she, was as naked as Bix was.

Bix looked at the boots. “Tally-ho,” he said, striding toward her with a firm step. “Are you ready for the chase?”

“You don’t have to chase me,” Penny murmured. “Just mount and we’re off and running, hey?” Bix quipped.

“Right on the bridle path.”

“The hell you say!” The remark gave Bix reason to pause. “Who said anything about marriage?”

“Certainly not me,” Penny told him. “You’re misunderstanding. Don’t be so nervous. Come on now. On to the starting gate. And-— They’re off!”

“My God! They’re not!” Bix looked down in panic. “What do you want to scare me like that for?” he asked in an injured tone when his eyes had reassured him that all was well.

“I only meant— Look, let’s just forget it. And let’s forget these, too.” Penny kicked off the riding boots. “They only seem to be confusing us.” Her willowy form floated to the couch and she looked at him hotly. “Come on, lover,” she said in a purposefully throaty voice. “What are you waiting for?”

Bix joined her on the couch. She raised her lips to be kissed. He quickly angled his body‘ and Penny found herself right back where she’d been at the bordello. Her slender pink tongue flicked between her lips and laved the sac of love beneath Bix’s manhood.

“Ahhhh!” he sighed.

Her tongue moved in little tickling circles. Then it described a long, upward arc. Her pert red lips formed a pert red circle. She sipped deeply at the staff of life. It grew more rigid, but the involuntary strokes of approaching fruition which Penny expected were not forthcoming. The darling girl took sterner measures, baring her little pearly white teeth and attacking her task with such dedication that Bix felt a momentary resurgence of his childhood castration complex.

“Careful!” he cautioned.

“Mmmm ju tryna spit thigsub,” Penny explained. “Mau mouse getty dired.”

“Come again?”

“You, dot be. Ad wudziz ’nuf!”

“I can’t understand a word you’re saying. And I wish you wouldn’t bite off your consonants. It hurts.”

“I’b so fussdaded Ig lige dadibe efl‘mor’nad.” Penny raised her head. “Oh, the hell with it,” she said. “I don’t think that orgone box of yours did a thing for you.”

“I’m afraid not,” Bix admitted ruefully. “I guess we’d better just forget it.”

“No!” Penny insisted, remembering her moral obligations, as was the nature of her character. “You rescued me from the brothel and I owe you something for that. And I’m a girl who always pays her debts.”

“But what good is it? Like you say, we’re not getting any place. I just can’t.”

“Where there’s a wile, there’s a way,” Penny said wilily. “All you need is the proper stimulation. Like in The Carpetbaggers. That’s it!” She snapped her fingers.

“What’s what? What are you talking about?”

“Did you ever read The Carpetbaggers?” Penny demanded.

“Nah. I have all I can do to get through Downbeat every week.”

“Well, in The Carpetbaggers, this fellow’s all tuckered out from too much sex and he thinks he can’t make it again. But this hustler, she teaches him better. She shows him how he can.”

“As the Indian said to the mermaid, ‘How?”’

“First she takes a razor and shaves off his whole body. Every hair. When he’s completely hairless, she gets him into a tub filled with warm water. Then she-—uh —she does to him what you wanted me to do to you before.”

“Man, I don’t know,” Bix said.

“It’s worth a try, isn’t it? After all, what have you got to lose?”

“Nothing, I guess. Except maybe a few follicles. Hell, I never used them anyway. All right. I’m game.”

“Good. Come on in the bathroom.” Penny led the way. “Now, get that thing out of here,” she instructed, pointing at the orgone box.

Bix hefted it and carried it into the other room. “What next?” he asked when he returned.

“Where do you keep your shaving cream?” Penny was rummaging through the medicine chest.

“I don’t have any. I use an electric razor.”

“Oh. Gee, in the book she shaved him with cream and a straight razor. But I guess it doesn’t make any difference. The result’s the same. And it’s the result that counts. So give me the electric razor.”

Penny started the water running into the tub while Bix plugged in the appliance for her. Then she took the buzzing razor and carefully ran it over his body, cutting neat, even furrows down his chest and back and arms and legs. “It’s just like mowing a lawn,” she giggled.

“Yeah. Only watch how you’re pulling some of those weeds,” Bix warned as she zero’d in on the area of his groin. “That’s fertile soil and it’s tender.”

“It’s not fertile yet, but it will be,” Penny assured him. “Tender is the right,” she observed, “but the left one doesn’t seem so touchy.”

“Just ticklish!” Bix squirmed.

“There!” Penny stood back finally and surveyed her handiwork. Bix’s naked body was completely devoid of hair. “How do you feel now?”

“Like a cue ball that’s been out in the sun too long. How do I look?”

“Like you should be hanging in the window of a butcher shop,” Penny admitted. “But that doesn’t matter. It’s the results that count. Do you feel like your orgones are stirring?”

“It’s hard to say. I’m itching so much I don’t know what I feel.”

“Well, we’ll fix that. You get into the tub now. What’s this?” Penny held up a plastic container.

“Bubble bath.” Bix blushed. “I like to use it sometimes when I take a bath. I suppose it’s effeminate, but—”

“Not at all. It’s sensual, that’s what it is,” Penny soothed him. “As a matter of fact, we should use some right now. It’ll provide just the right finishing touch.”

She dumped the contents of the container into the water as Bix immersed himself.

Ahnost immediately, he vanished in a mountain of suds. “You used too much.” His voice floated up from the froth. “That’s potent stuff.”

“And so will you be,” Penny assured him. “Now, we’re all ready. Only— Only, where are you?”

“Here I am.” Bix’s head popped up with a huge bubble balanced neatly atop it.

“Oh, yes. But that’s not the part of you I’m looking for.” Penny churned her hands around until she had dispelled the froth and located her target. “There it is.”

She grasped it in her fist and bent her head over to secure it.

“Careful! Don’t make waves!” Bix sputtered.

“Just you hold your breath and let yourself go,” Penny instructed. She pulled upward and Bix’ head disappeared beneath the froth once again.

“HepI’bgoigdrow,” Bix gurgled.

Penny’s head swooped down as her hand released him. Unknowingly, her shoulder hooked the cord of the electric razor. The razor, still plugged in, fell into the suds and vanished. There was the crackle of electricity spreading through a watery conductor and the soap bubbles began exploding rapidly in puffs of smoke. Bix shot to the surface, his body tense and quivering with voltage, his face turning blue, his teeth chattering a stricken SOS.

Penny had stopped before her lips touched either the water, or Bix. Now she drew back a little and hovered there, not knowing what to do. He seemed to be pressure-cooking before her very eyes. But the poor girl was too stunned to know what action to take. She looked into Bix’s eyes for advice, but all she saw was the spark of electricity.

It was, after all, quite a shock!

CHAPTER NINE

FINALLY, THE distraught young virgin thought to pull the plug. The electric shaver ceased its buzzing. The voltage stopped crackling. The water stopped churning. Bix stopped vibrating, and the blue color which had swept over his skin started to recede.

“Sex!” He spat the word out as he scrambled from the tub. “If that’s your idea of sex, I’d rather make love to a pile of radioactive uranium. Man, like that’s one charge without which I can do nicely.”

“I’m sorry,” Penny apologized. “It was an accident. I was only trying to turn you on.”

“And you did,” Bix shuddered. “You did.”

“That wasn’t what I meant. I meant turn you on sexually.”

“I’m not ready for that kind of sex. I don’t think I’ll ever be ready.”

“I said I was sorry,” Penny told him.

“Oh, all right. I guess you’re right. No sense crying over spilt wattage. Let’s forget it. Let’s just have a drink and forget it.”

Sitting over their martinis a little later, Penny was still feeling remorseful. “Do you really want to just forget about sex?” she asked. “Maybe we could--”

“No!” Bix said firmly. “We couldn’t! I’m not ready for any more potency-stimulating innovations. What’s the big deal about sex anyway? It’s just another means of communication. And a damned inferior one at that.”

“You just think it’s inferior because you’re hung up on the language,” Penny pointed out.

“Everybody’s hung up when it comes to communication. That’s what’s wrong with the world today. Everybody talks—yakkity-yakkity-yak—but nobody really communications.”

“Nobody communicates,” Penny mused. “You know, you’re right,” she decided.

“Right about what?” Bix asked absent-mindedly. “About nobody communicating.”

“Oh. Yeah. Sure. It’s the problem of alienation,” Bix defined, turning his back on Penny to stare out the window. “People are all the time talking, but when you come right down to it, they’re talking to themselves. Nobody knows how to listen to anybody else any more.”

“I know just what you mean. Sometimes I can see from the other person’s eyes that they’re not really hearing a word I say. It’s as though they had cotton in their ears‘?!

“What?” Bix said. “What did you say?”

“I said sometimes I can see from their eyes that they’re not really listening,” Penny explained, looking deep into Bix’s eyes. “It’s as if they were deaf.”

“Hey?” Bix cupped a hand to his ear. “Speak up, baby. I can’t hear a word you’re saying. That’s the whole trouble with people today. They’ve lost the art of communication.”

“It’s must be because they’re alienated from each other,” Penny sighed, looking right through Bix.

“It’s absurd,” Bix mused to himself. “And that’s what life is, too—absurd. When you get right down to it, life is like an enema.”

“How’s that?” Penny was puzzled.

“You only get out of it what you put into it,” Bix explained. “Plus a lot of crap besides.”

“Yish!” Penny shuddered. “Would you mind being a little less graphic?”

“Okay. Then let me put it this way. Life is like sex. In the end, everybody get screwed.”

“Why,” Penny wondered aloud, “does it always have to be in the end?”

“You’re not digging me, chick. What I mean is, it’s all existential when you get to the bottom of it.”

“Can’t we just forget about the bottom of it?”

“Now you dig! That’s exactly it. After all, What is is, isn’t it? And it all adds up to nothing, anyway, and there’s nothing you can do about nothing.”

“But don’t you think you can do something about some things sometimes?” Penny asked confusedly.

“Nope! That’s where the danger is. Once you try to take any action, you’re doomed. The only way to live is to just vegetate like the vegetables.”

“Even the vegetables pollinate some times,” Penny told him pointedly.

“Sure. But when they do they get plucked! You’re just proving my point. Whatever you do in life, you’re bound to get plucked.”

“But if you don’t do anything, what’s the point in being alive?”

“There is no point. That’s the point.”

“I don’t know. I think I’d rather get plucked than just wither on, the vine,” Penny said regretfully. “And you seemed to feel that way about things a while back too.”

“Maybe. But that was before we played Sing Sing roulette with that electric bathtub.”

“But surely you don’t mean that shocked you so that all desire for sex has left you forever.”

“Well, no-o-o,” Bix drawled, eyeing the precious girl’s lust contours. “The desire is there,” he admitted, pursing his lips as appreciatively as though he were about to try out a new trumpet. “I just don’t have any faith in my body being up to it after all the disappointments to- night.”

“You’re too anxious about it,” Penny said soothingly. “You just have to relax and be tranquil and let things happen.”

“You’re right. If I could only get myself in the proper frame of mind—tranquil, like you say—I’m sure we could make the scene.”

“Of course we could. But if we do,” Penny added delicately, “I wonder if you’d do me a favor?”

“Sure, chick. Like what?”

“Would you forget about what you wanted to do before and just make love to me the regular way. It’s very important to me.”

“Why not? But how come it’s so important?” Bix was curious.

“Because I’ve never been made love to in the ordinary way by any man before.”

“What? !”

“That’s right.” Penny hung her head. “You see,” the darling girl confessed in a whisper, “I’m a virgin.”

“You’re putting me on! Hell, I met you in a cathouse.”

“I know. But I’m only an inexperienced kitten.”

“You sure came on like you were full of catnip.”

“Maybe. But believe me, this pussy’s never really purred.”

“I’ll make it purr!” Bix vowed, bouncing up and down in his excitement. “just as soon as I get tranquil, I’ll make it purr!”

“You don’t look like you’re getting very tranquil,” Penny observed.

“No,” Bix agreed glumly. “You’re right. I guess I just don’t know how.”

“Maybe if you just didn’t pay any attention to me for a while,” Penny suggested. She walked over to an alcove where she was half-hidden from his view and perused the books stacked on the shelves there. After a moment she took one down and began thumbing through it. “Hey,” she called, “are you a Yoga?”

“No,” Bix called back. “The refrigerator’s practically empty.”

“I don’t mean that,” Penny called again. “I mean do you read Yoga?”

“Not unless I’m damn hungry. It’s too slippery for my taste.”

“Not yogurt! Yoga!” Penny came back into the room with the book in her hands and held it out to him by way of explanation.

“Oh. That.” Now Bix comprehended. “That’s just one of the books my ex-roommate left behind when he moved out. He was a real nut on the subject. He had Yoga exercises for everything he did. Before he ate and after he ate and before he hit the sack and after he got up. Hell, he even did Yoga before and after making it with a girl.”

“Did he, now?” Penny’s eyes lit up to show that she felt she was on the track of something. “And just why did he do Yoga before sex?”

“Claimed it relaxed him and put him in the properly potent frame of mind. Isn’t that a gasser?”

“Now wait a minute,” Penny said. “You’re in no condition to be narrow-minded. Maybe he had something there. Maybe Yoga works when it comes to sex. Just maybe it might be what you need to relax you right now. Anyway, why not give it a try?”

“Man, that’s the living end. I never heard of anything so ridic.”

“What have you got to lose?” Penny asked softly. Bix thought that over. “Nothing, I guess,” he admitted finally.

“Then why not try it?”

“But it’s so square!” Bix protested.

“Try it anyway. If it works, it’ll be worth it.” Penny undulated her girlish hips by way of encouragement.

“Well-—all right,” Bix gave in reluctantly. “What do I do?”

“Well, let’s see.” Penny rifiled the pages of the book and then’ held it open to examine one more closely “This looks like it should relax you. It’s called the ‘Lotus Loga Position’ and it’s recommended for First Class Gurus.”

“What’s a Guru?”

“Nothing much,” Penny quipped. “What’s a Guru with you?”

“Guru you too!” Bix snapped back. “Don’t be funny. Tell me what it is.”

“It’s an expert Yogi—one qualified to teach the art of Yoga.”

“Maybe we should start out with something simpler,” Bix suggested. “After all, I’ve never done this before.”

“I’ve never been made love to by a man before, either,” Penny pointed out. “But I don’t just want to neck, or pet, do I? Let’s face it. Yours is an extreme case and it calls for extreme measures. The ‘Lotus Loga Position’ sounds like a good bet.”

“What does ‘Loga’ mean?”

“It means ‘union’,” Penny told him, consulting a footnote. “And that’s what we’re after, isn’t it?”

“What sort of position is it?”

Penny studied the diagram. “It looks sort of like you twist your body like a pretzel,” she told Bix. “It says here that in American slang this is known as the corkscrew position and it’s recommended to relax the body for sex.”

“Okay,” Bix said resignedly. “I’m ready for corkscrewing. What do I have to do? Get a cork first?”

“Let’s be serious. The first thing you do is screw up your body.”

“Haven’t you got things a little mixed up? I thought it was your—”

“Now cut that out!” Penny ordered. “Just let me arrange your arms and legs and all the way they show you here and then relax.” She went over to Bix, pushed him to a squatting position on the floor and then began bending his limbs and twining them as the book indicated.

“Ouch! Hey, like I don’t swing that way.”

“You will when I get through with you,” Penny said grimly. She ignored his protests and arranged his arms and legs until he did indeed resemble a pretzel. “There.”

She surveyed her handiwork. “I think that’s right. How does it feel?”

“Like the inside of a boa constrictor,” Bix told her. “I can’t move a muscle.”

“Well, that’s how it’s supposed to feel. Now just relax. Close your eyes and concentrate on the inside of your eyelids. Be perfectly quiet. Soon you’ll attain Nirvana.

Bix followed her instructions. He closed his eyes and was completely still for about fifteen minutes. Then, slowly, his eyes opened and stared unseeingly. Good, Penny thought to herself, he’s in a trance. He’s reached Nirvana. I’ll just let him stay there for a while and then snap him out of it. She sat back and waited. After another fifteen minutes, she approached Bix, held her fingers under his nose and snapped them. Immediately, his eyes took on a look of awareness.

“How do you feel now?” Penny asked.

“Great!” he said in a tone filled with awe. “I really feel great. You know, there’s something to this scene after all.”

“That’s wonderful,” Penny said. “Do you feel relaxed? Tranquil?”

“Man, do I ever!”

“And do you feel the urge for sex?”

Bix’ eyes bulged out of their sockets and devoured her delicious young body. “Yes-yes-yes! Let’s go-go-go”!

“Well, come on then,” Penny purred. “What are you waiting for?”

“Yes-yes-yes!” Bix strained his muscles, but he didn’t succeed in moving an inch.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m stuck! I can’t get out of this blasted position. You’ll have to help me.”

Penny walked over to him and looked down, studying him the way a sailor contemplates a particularly intricate knot. Finally, she reached down and grasped the ankle looped through one of his armpits.

Bix screamed in agony. Somewhere outside, a dog howled back.

“I guess that’s the wrong place to start,” Penny said. She dropped the ankle and picked up his hand, trying to untangle it from his crotch.

This time Bix screamed so loud that a wine glass shattered in the kitchen.

Hastily, Penny again released him. “If you keep screaming every time I touch you,” she pointed out, “I’ll never get you untangled.”

“I can’t help it. It’s agony.”

“Let me try it again.” Penny started at the top, trying to manipulate his neck to free it from between his knees. This time Bix’s howl was answered by a covey of fire engines rushing to answer what their drivers had mistaken for an emergency alarm. ‘

“It’s no use,” he moaned. “No matter where you touch me it feels like you’re ripping the flesh right off my body.”

“But what’ll we do?” Penny asked. “You can’t just stay this way forever.”

“I don’t know,” Bix said in a voice filled with panic. “I just don’t know. But do something. You’ve got to do something.”

“But I don’t-——Wait a minute!” Penny had an inspiration. “A chiropractor. That’s it! I’ll call a chiropractor. He’ll be able to untangle you.” Penny found a Manhattan classified telephone directory and called the first name listed under “Chiropractors”.

“Tell him to hurry,” Bix yelled to her.

“He’s on his way over,” Penny soothed him as she hung up the phone. “Just be patient.”

“As if I had a choice,” Bix moaned.

A little while later the doorbell rang. Penny put on the mink to cover her nudity and went to answer it. A moment later she returned, followed by a middle-aged Chinese man carrying a medical-type satchel.

“This is Dr. Kim Asutra,” she told Bix. “He’s the chiropractor who’s come to help you.”

“Yes. I am the chiropractor who has come to help you,” Dr. Kim Asutra said helpfully. He stared down at Bix’s contorted body and shook his head in amazement. “How, dear sir, how did you ever manage to get into such a position?” he asked.

“It wasn’t easy,” Bix groaned. “I had help.”

“You certainly are all tied up in knots,” said the Oriental impassively. “Did the lady help you?”

“Why, yes,” Penny admitted. “How did you guess?”

“Confucius say whenever a man is tied up in knots, look for the beautiful woman in the picture,” Dr. Kim Asutra said, bowing low to Penny.

“Why thank you. Tell me, did Confucius really say that?”

“No. I believe I really heard it in an old Charlie Chan movie. Yes, I can still see Warner Oland smiling inscrutably and waving around the rewo1awah.”

“Never mind being inscrutable,” Bix protested. “Can you unscrew me? I’m beginning to feel like a Chinese puzzle.”

“Ancestors frown on such stereotyped remarks,” Dr. Asutra said coldly. “Just have faith that this humble practitioner will do his unworthy best to solve your difficulty.”

“Then stop being so damn unworthy,” Bix said. “It makes me nervous. Stop being so humble and get to work.”

“Our day will come,” Dr. Asutra murmured to himself, reacting to Bix’s rudeness. But outwardly, he retained his Oriental calm. “I am here to serve you,” he said, bowing to Bix. “Cantonese style,” he couldn’t help adding to himself. “Now, let me see—” He scrutinized the tangled mass of humanity before him. “Ahh, so-o-o,” he said finally. “Here is the key.” He reached down behind Bix and twisted a vertebra in the center of the trumpeter’s back.

Bix reacted like a Chinese torture victim. This time his scream of agony set the dogs of Greenwich Village bolting for Houston Street in a flight of sheer panic; his howl was unworldly and the canines knew it. Inwardly, Dr. Asutra smiled with pleasure.

“You fiend!” Bix said when he was able to speak. “You did that deliberately!”

“Of course.”

“But why?” Bix asked, almost in tears just from the memory of the pain. “Why?”

“Try to move and you will see.”

Gingerly, Bix wiggled a finger. For the first time since going into his Yoga trance, he was able to do so. He moved his arm and it slid smoothly free of the mass of tangled flesh. “Hey!” he grinned. “What do you know?” He twisted slightly and his arms and legs became identifiable once again. He got to his feet, beaming. “Gee, Doc, I don’t know how to thank you,” he said.

“It was my pleasure. Now, if you don’t mind, do you have the yen, good sir?”

“Do I ever!” Bix looked at Penny and licked his chops. “I am sorry. You misunderstand, dear sir,” Dr. Asutra told him. “It is my fault. One of my grandfathers was Nipponese.”

“Nipponese?” Penny said curiously, happening to stretch as she said it so that her coat fell open and revealed her full shimmering white breasts with their shimmering red tips shimmering in the shimmering breeze of the shimmering night air.

“I’d be delighted,” Kim Asutra replied somewhat less than inscrutability.

“No,” Penny blushed. “I meant-—”

“Ah, so-o-o! I believe I perceive what you meant, dear girl. Yes, one of my grandfathers was Japanese and occasionally I fall into the use of Japanese words. As when I mentioned yen before; I really meant to humbly request my fee ”

“Sure enough,” Bix told him. “You’ve earned it. What do I owe you?”

“Ten dollars.”

Bix paid him and Dr. Kim Asutra bowed his way out the door.

When they were alone, Bix turned to Penny with the look of a vegetarian about to pounce on a head of lettuce. She looked back at him like mayonnaise—soft and white and quivery—all atremble to be spread on bed. She dropped her mink and stood there naked and eager. A moment later he embraced her and they fell to the floor, a passionate sandwich stuck together by their passion.

Bix kissed her ears, her shoulders, her neck, her breasts. Bix kissed her breasts, her neck, her shoulders, her ears. Bix kissed her neck, her breasts, her shoulders, her ears. Bix kissed her shoulders, her ears, her breasts, her neck.

“Don’t stop!” Penny told him. “Go on. Kiss my ears, my neck, my breasts, my shoulders!”

“You mean kiss your breasts, your ears, your shoulders, your neck?” Bix murmured meaningfully. “Like this?” he asked insinuatingly, etcetera-ing the process.

“Yes,” Penny sighed. “Oh, yes-yes-yes.” She grasped him by the neck to pull his questing lips to hers.

He pulled away.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“That’s so bourgeois!” he explained. “Only middle-class husbands making love to their middle-class wives in their middle-class beds kiss on the lips. Dig?”

“I’m sorry I tried it,” Penny said contritely. “Please go back to what you were doing. I’ll try not to be square again.”

“It’s okay.” Bix was magnanimous. He went back to kissing her ears, her neck, her shoulders, her breasts.

After a while this began to bore Penny. Her precious little cream tube was all afroth with eagerness and the little red jellybean perched atop it was stretching avidly for the nip of love. She wished Bix would knock off his pre-coital lipping and get down to the business which wasn’t as yet even at hand. Penny stretched and accidentally raked his back with her nails. That proved to be the goad he needed.

He picked her up and carried her into the bedroom. He tossed her down on the bed and she lay there twitching, naked and hot. Now his hand stroked her delicately curved white belly. It reached lower and the fingers tangled in the dew-tipped softness of the golden down framing her jelly-jar. It made contact with her tiny, rigid peppermint stick and Penny writhed briefly. Then, quickly, her body rose, her hips arched and her buttocks heaved and spasm after spasm of joy swept over her. Bix experimented and found that his merest touch was enough to set her off again. He paused a moment to consider it coolly, clitorally and decided that his wrist muscles would undoubtedly give out before she grew weary of multiplying her orgasms.

The time, Bix decided, was now. The matter at hand was ready for the attention of an even more energetic member. He stretched out beside Penny on the bed. He removed his hand from the entrance to her gyrating jam-jug. He swung his body over her lush, young, palpitating torso. A gentleman at heart, he poised a moment to distribute his weight on his elbows.

This slight pause gave Penny an instant to appreciate that at last she was about to hear the “liquid sounds of love-making.” Finally, her body was about to “burn with passion.” She sniffed, anticipating “the sweet aroma of animal desire,” hoping her nostrils wouldn’t let her down, hoping they would indeed dilate at the proper moment.

And now that moment was here! Bix, pure animal, determined as a ram this lamb beneath him, drew back, upward, tensed a moment, and then plunged to- wards Penny’s lanolin tube with all his might.

His ramrod never reached its mark. And the scream marking his failure sent the dogs huddled on Houston Street baying like lemmings toward the sweet surcease of terror to be found at the bottom of the East River.

Penny had anticipated pain, but hers, not his. Now she was appalled and frightened at the agonized mass of flesh her lover had so suddenly—and inopportunely— become. “What it is?” she asked. “What’s the matter? What happened?”

“I don’t know,” he managed to answer through clenched teeth. “I must have thrown something out of whack in my spine.” He tried to move and the sudden pain made him bite through his lip. “I can’t budge!” he groaned. “It must be from something that damn chiropractor did to me.”

“I’d better get him back,” Penny decided. “I’ll call him.” She went into the other room to telephone. “He’s coming right over,” she told Bix when she returned. “Do you think you could manage to shift to a less revealing position before he gets here?”

“What do you mean?” he moaned.

“Well, with your posterior stuck up in the’ air that way and your pelvis thrusting downward with that tell-tale stiffness and being on your elbows and all, he’s sure to know what we were doing. It’s embarrassing.”

“Sorry. I can’t budge,” Bix groaned.

“Well, could you at least manage to lose your—umm —you-know-what.”

“What do you mean lose my you-know-what? I’ve had my you-know-what all my life. I admit it hasn’t been much use to me tonight. But you never can tell. There’s always the chance that a man’s you-know-what might come in handy. I certainly don’t want to lose it!”

“I didn’t mean lose it that way. I meant calm it down —uhh, maybe shrink it or something. Just so it isn’t so obscenely prominent.”

“It doesn’t seem to want to cooperate,” Bix observed. “And the pain I’m in, I really couldn’t be less concerned about it. Hell, I’m stiff all over. Why not there?”

Before Penny could answer, the doorbell rang. She answered it and returned once again with Dr. Kim Asutra, the chiropractor, following behind. “Greetings, Mr. Bittervetch,” the Chinese said. “Have your bones been acting up?”

“The shape I’m in, that remark is a boner,” Bix told the Chinese bone-checker. “The slightest attempt to get out of this ridiculous position brings on the most indescribable agony.”

“I see. And tell me, however did you manage to get into such a peculiar position?”

Penny blushed and turned away.

“I was doing pushups.” Such was Bix’s inspired answer.

“I see.” Dr. Asutra inscrutably scrutinized him. “Are you sure,” he asked in his best Sidney Toler deadpan manner, “that you weren’t attempting to pole-vault?”

“Thanks for the compliment, Doctor, but would you please cut the jabber and do something for me. My elbows are getting tired.”

“There’s not much I can do,” Dr. Kim Asutra admitted upon examining Bix more closely. “You’ve slipped a disc in your spine in a most unusual manner. All I can do is get you into a more comfortable position. After that, you’ll have to lie absolutely still for at least a week.” He maneuvered Bix over on his back. “Now, dear sir, stay that way. You will find that if you try to move the pain will be most severe.”

Bix tried to move. The pain was most severe.

“You tried to move,” Dr. Asutra said with the injured air of a practitioner whose advice has been willfully disregarded.

“I know,” Bix sobbed. “The pain was most severe.”

“Precisely.” Dr. Asutra felt vindicated. “Don’t do it again. Just go to sleep.”

Penny escorted him to the door. “I guess I’d better stay here and take care of him,” the tender-hearted girl said.

“Not at all. He needs no care. Just sleep. As a matter of fact, I suspect that your presence here might well aggravate his condition. The noticeable swelling of that noticeable protuberance will subside, but if you are present, it may recur and this would indeed be painful to him. The kindest thing you can do now is leave him alone.”

“Then I’ll go,” Penny decided.

“Can I give you a lift?” Dr. Kim Asutra offered smoothly.

“Which way are you going?”

“Downtown. Chinatown. And you, my dear?”

“I’m not sure. You see, I have this problem.”

“What problem is that?”

“Well, I’m locked out of my apartment and I have no place to go and all I’ve got to wear is this mink jacket which is not merely short, but at times really too short — like when I bend over.” Penny bent over to demonstrate what she meant.

“I see.” Dr. Kim Asutra saw. “As lovely as carved jade,” he added.

“Thank you. But I really can’t go on walking around with my bare tushy hanging out. And I feel so ridiculous in these riding boots.”

“Your tush brings much delight to these tired old eyes,” Kim Asutra told her gallantly. “Indeed, as a dedicated chiropractor, I must say that your entire skeletal structure, with its truly enchanting covering, makes my fingers itch with the urge to manipulate your delicate bones.” He bowed. “However, to be more practical, allow me to suggest that if you would accompany me to my unworthy abode, it would be my pleasure to present you with some clothes better suited to the covering of your delightful—umm—tushy.”

“Only if it’s understood that it’s a loan,” Penny insisted.

“I am mortified that you will not accept such poor trappings as a gift, but I bow to your wishes.”

“Just let me say good-bye to Bix,” Penny told him.

“Of course. I will wait outside for you. In my unworthy car.”

“I’m sure your car isn’t unworthy at all,” Penny protested .

“That’s what you think. It’s a real lemon! If I ever get my hands on that honorable used car salesman who sold me this honorable rattle trap, I’ll tear his honorable head right off his honorable neck.”

“I thought Orientals were supposed to be tranquil,” Penny said. “You know, like flowers. Tranquil like jonquils.”

“So sorry. But this jonquil doesn’t like being pruned. This automotive lemon makes me bitter. However, no matter. I shall wait for you in its confines while you say good night to Mr. Bittervetch.” He bowed his way out the front door.

“I’m leaving now, Bix,” Penny announced from the bedroom door. “Thanks for everything you’ve done for me. I mean, setting fire to the brothel and rescuing me and all. Any time I can return the favor, let me know. I’m in the book.”

“Then I’ll tear up the book,” Bittervetch said bitterly. “The only favor you can do for me is to please not do me any more favors.”

“Gosh, Bix, don’t blame me. It’s not my fault things turned out the way they did. It’s just the way the pretzel crumbles.”

“Ouch! Leave. Please. Just leave.”

“I don’t know why you can’t be more philosophical about it, Bix. We just got our wires crossed. That’s all.”

“And how!” Bix managed a shudder of reminiscence without moving a muscle. “I’ve been fried, tied and pried apart and enough is enough. I should have realized when I met you in that Harlem brothel that you were one of them. A white Mau Mau, that’s what you are: a Caucasian Muslim dedicated to destroying the white man.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way about me, Bix, but still I wish you’d remember one thing when things are looking blackest to you.”

“What’s that?”

“ ‘We Shall Overcome’ ,” Penny crooned.

“Go to hell!”

Those parting words echoed in Penny’s shell-like ear as she closed the door behind her and walked over to Dr. Dim Asutra’s car. He moved agilely to hold the door open for her. When they were both inside, he wrestled with the ignition and cursed to himself in Chinese when the car refused to start.

It was while he was so occupied that Penny glanced casually out the window and saw something that filled her heart with fear. A giant Chinese with a long pigtail was gunning a motorcyle straight toward the car with the throttle wide open. At first Penny thought he had lost control because neither or his hands was on the handlebars of the motorcycle. Then she saw that one of his hands was clutching a filled laundry-sack hanging over one shoulder. His other hand was waving in wild circles over his head. In this hand was clutched a wicked-looking hatchet.

As the scream began to tear from Penny’s throat, the hatchet was flung. With deadly precision, blade first, it flew straight toward Penny’s head! Behind it the motorcycle veered at the last minute and avoided the parked car. In its wake, a Chinese war cry sounded, the smoke from the ’cycle’s exhaust spelling it out in the sort of Oriental hieroglyphics seen on laundry tickets, the kind of markings which invariably result in the customer’s getting somebody else’s hand-washed shirts in place of his last six pair of BVDs.

Then the horrible instant split into shattering windshield glass. The blade was about to separate Penny’s sculpted head from her swanlike neck. The instant of terror hung in time while the unfortunate darling’s eyes bulged like twin portions of Egg Foo Wung.

Was this the end for Penny? She’d been born a virgin. Was she now to die a virgin? Was she only to be laid in the grave? Oh, woe! Alas! Alack! Was this succulent piece, this Penny Candie to be laid in the grave in pieces? Even in death, was this piece to know no peace, but only pieces? Oh, cruel fate! And yet —

Pax vobiscum, Penny Candie! Pax vobiscum, while the pitiful piece is still in one piece. Pax vobiscum to her in this frozen instant before she goes to pieces. Aye, pax vobiscum to this virgin victim of a slice of life!

CHAPTER TEN

THE END of the terrible instant was averted, the cruel cut avoided, Penny’s life saved when the hurtling hatchet was deflected by a quick karate blow from the hand of the fast-thinking Kim Asutra. The blade whizzed past Penny’s ear, splitting a stray hair as it went, and embedded itself in the upholstery of the rear seat of the car. Penny dived to the floor and lay there trembling. Kim Asutra was leaning out the side window now, a .45 in his hand, but he didn’t fire it. The motorcyclist was out of range and showed no signs of reversing his flight.

“What was that?” the terrified girl asked when she was able to bring herself to speak.

“ ’Cycle Tong,” was the succinct answer.

“I don’t understand. Why did they want to kill me?”

“Not you. Me. Hatchet man not very good at job. Chop stinks.”

“But why did he want to kill you?”

“I’m a marked man. I’ve known it for some time now. Ever since the day my shirts came back from the laundry with a red star where the laundry mark should have been.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“I shall explain. But if you don’t mind, let us talk while we drive. That Tong cookie might decide to return.”

Kim fiddled with the ignition, and this time the car started. He pulled away from the curb fast and headed downtown.

“Do you think he has another hatchet?” Penny asked, now peering out the back window anxiously as they drove.

“Of course.” Kim chuckled at her innocence. “Didn’t you notice the laundry bag he was carrying, dear girl?”

“Yes. You mean —”

“Precisely. It was filled with spare hatchets. Which might explain,” Kim added, musing to himself, “why so often one’s shirts are returned from the laundry with the buttons missing.”

“But you still haven’t explained why he wanted to kill you.”

“He was a Tong tool. You see, dear lady, I am the head of the Trotsky Tong in Chinatown.”

“What’s that?”

“It started as a Trotskyite Chinese cell. But we have grown to a full-fledged Tong. The impetus for growth came from the martyrdom of Leon Trotsky in Mexico. You may remember that he is sometimes referred to as ‘the man with the axe in his head in Mexico’. It is commonly thought that he was murdered by agents of Stalin, which is to say agents of that faction of Russian Communism which opposed Trotsky’s faction and drove him out of Russia. But we Chinese know better. It wasn’t an axe, but a hatchet which killed him. And it wasn’t the Russians who arranged his murder, but the Viet Tong, a group financed by the Chinese Reds. So, naturally, the Viet Tong are the mortal enemies of the Trotsky Tong. I, being the commissar of the latter, am frequently the target of their attacks.”

“You mean this has happened before?” Penny was horrified.

“Yes. But lately it has grown worse. You see, the Viet Tong has merged with the Mao Tse Tong under the leadership of one Yegg Foo Dung. This coalition is known in Chinatown as the King Tong. They wage merciless guerilla warfare and are trying to wrest the fortune cookie business from us in an effort to spread their propaganda. Still unable to do that, they have adopted other means, some of them quite spectacular.”

“For instance?” Penny asked.

“Well, just the other day the King Tong guerillas burned a monk in the street to draw attention to their cause.”

“A religious man? How awful!”

“No, you misunderstand. This was an orang-utang. The SPCA was quite upset and is threatening all sorts of retaliation. There was even resentment within their own organization. Fai Rhee, head of the King Tong Woman’s Auxiliary, was particularly upset.”

“I don’t blame her!” Penny said indignantly. “I can’t stand cruelty to animals myself!”

“Then you are on our side. Why, just the other day they slaughtered a dog so that they might have a weapon with which to attempt to garotte me.”

“I don’t understand. What was the weapon?”

“Chow mane.”

“I am a little hungry,” Penny confessed.

“I mean orange dog neck fur,” Kim tried to explain.

“I’ve never tried it. It really doesn’t sound very appetizing. But then Chinese food never does from the name. When I taste one of those dishes, though, I always find that I’m pleasantly surprised.”

“Skip it,” Kim told her, realizing that things had gone beyond explanation.

“Is it like orange duck sauce?”

“Please! Just put it out of your mind! Anyway, we are here,” Kim announced, braking as he pulled the car to the curb of one of the narrow streets of Chinatown.

Penny followed him from the car. She paused on the sidewalk to look curiously at a building across the street. It was a tall, thin edifice of six stories. Two neat, parallel rows of windows ran vertically down its facade. Each window was lit from inside and each framed a different erotic scene. Down one row, starting from the top, the windows featured a large, naked bosom, a vibrating belly, a hand making lewd motions, a beautifully shaped pair of bare legs, pursed, ruby-red lips sucking insinuatingly, and a plump plum of a derriere enhanced by the sheerest of harem pants and wriggling provocatively. The second row of windows featured a longer view of things. It presented such sights as a girl dressed in black stockings and leather jacket wielding a strip-teaser doing a bump-and-grind on a runway, a tethered sheep bumping its rump against a pair of hip-boots, a masseuse wielding a vibrator over a massage table, an obscene tableau of dancing nymphets framed by a series of stills from old Errol Flynn films, and a movie screen over which flashed a series of pornographic movie sequences. Atop the first row of windows, on the roof, a giant electric sign flashed the letter “A”. Over the second row a matching sign flashed “B”.

“What sort of place is that?” Penny asked naively.

“A Chinese house of ill repute,” Kim Asutra explained. “When we get rid of the imperialist capitalist system, such decadent establishments will be the first to go.”

“But then you’ll put all those poor girls out of work,” Penny objected.

“Every revolution has its human sacrifices. Why should the Chinese Communist revolution be different?”

“Are there many Chinese Communists?” Penny asked as she followed Kim Asutra into his house.

“In China everybody is a Communist. Unless they are dead, of course, which is the inevitable fate of those who are not Communists.”

“I didn’t mean in China. I meant here. In the United States. In New York. Here, in Chinatown.”

“No. Not many here are Communists,” Kim admitted reluctantly. “They have been duped into the capitalist system. All they care about is their laundries and their restaurants and sending their sons to Harvard. But that’s all right! In the end we will bury them!” He took off his shoes as he entered the house and pounded one of them on a table in the foyer to drive home his point. “And it is we Trotskyites who will lead the way to the workers’ Paradise,” he added, still shouting.

“But if you bury them all, where will you get more Chinese Communists from ?” Penny asked innocently.

“Ahh, will you Westerners never come to understand our Oriental philosophy?” Kim sighed. “But no matter. For now, let us concentrate on more immediate concerns. First some garments for you, then some food at my humble table, and then —”

“And then?”

Kim gazed at the twin mounds of flesh peeping out from below the hem of the mink jacket Penny wore. “The end,” he said not too cryptically, but quite hungrily and quite communistically, “justifies the means.”

He clapped his hands. A servant appeared. Kim instructed him to bring Penny something to wear. A few moment later the servant returned with an embroidered silk kimono. Penny turned her back, slipped out of the mink and into the garment.

“Ah, yes,” Kim repeated, catching a glimpse of the lush bottom revealed in the process, “the end justifies the means.” He led Penny into a small dining room. When they were seated, he spoke quite loudly: “Shrimp!”

“Oh, yes!” Penny clapped her hands. “In lobster sauce. Mmmm. It’s practically my favorite Chinese dish.”

“No. No,” Kim told her. “Your capacity for misunderstanding is truly superb. It is only exceeded by your beauty. ‘Shrimp’ is the servant here. We call him that because he is rather small in stature. Ahh, here he is.” A short Chinese man entered and Kim rattled off some orders to him that sounded rather like the dialogue from an old war movie—the sort of thing the Japanese warlord shouts just before the brave American pilot is tortured to death because he will only reveal his name and rank, but is unable to remember his serial number. “I have taken the liberty of ordering our repast,” Kim told Penny.

“I’m sure it will be delicious,” she said politely. “And I think your man ‘Shrimp’ is cute as a bug,” she added. “Where did you ever find him?”

“He comes from Florida. One of the keys. I think it was called Luke. He was sort of beachcombing there when I met him. You see, he used to play Number One Son in the Charlie Chan movies until he outgrew the part. Then he went to Florida to try to forget how fleeting is such glory. Actually, he isn’t too efficient a servant. I really keep him around more for nostalgic reasons. But I much preferred his predeccessor.”

“Who was that?”

“A Japanese girl. Most able. Her name was Mata Hari Kari. I had to dispose of her when I learned she was really a suicidal Japanese spy planted in my service by the CIA.”

Kim fell silent as Shrimp returned with the food. Quite hungry herself, Penny was happy to devote her full attention to the viands. Finally, both of them had eaten their fill.

Kim broke the silence. “Tell me,” he said in a voice fraught with erotic implications, “is it true what they say about Occidental women ”

“I don’t know. What do they say?”

“That an hour after you’ve had one, you’re hungry again.”

“Why not try and find out?” Penny murmured, beginning to hope for a chink in the armor of her virginity —and then immediately ashamed of herself for the unintentional racial slur implicit in the Freudian thought. She decided that the slip was Occidental rather than on purpose.

“An excellent suggestion,” Kim Asutra agreed. He pushed back his chair and moved around the table to where Penny was seated. He took her hand, held the chair for her to rise, and then led her over to a low divan set against one of the walls of the dining room. “Allow me,” he said smoothly and parted the folds of the kimona Penny was wearing. Then he stood back and surveyed the perfect figure of the now naked girl before him. “Ahh, so-o-o!” he exclaimed appreciatively.

“So?” Penny echoed impatiently.

“I shall be with you in a moment, my lotus blossom.” Kim Asutra crossed to a small table across the room, opened the drawer, and took out a small box. Then he returned to Penny and opened the box.

“What’s that?” the innocent girl asked innocently.

“You might term this device the Oriental equivalent of Serutan,” Kim explained. He held up the stout, pencil-shaped, stiff piece of rubber so that she might have a better view of it. “I have reached the age where the spirit is willing, but the flesh is all too weak. I’m sure you find this an adequate substitute.”

“I’m not so sure,” Penny said doubtfully. “But even if I do find it adequate, what about you? What will you get out of it?”

“The end,” Kim repeated himself, taking time out to return to the table and lick his chopsticks over Penny’s precious nude body, “justifies the means.”

“Well, all right,” Penny agreed reluctantly, deciding that any sacrifice was worthwhile if it would relieve her of the burden of her virtue. “The end awaits.”

“Just one more moment.” Kim turned his back courteously, searched strenuously within his own kimono, finally located what he’d been seeking, and strapped the dildo in place. Then he turned back to Penny. “I am coming, my little passion bird. I am coming.”

“So quickly? But I thought you had trouble—-?”

“Oh, why is English such a confusing language? Never mind.” Kim embraced the darling young virgin. His hand stroked her dovelike breasts expertly. His lips traveled over the ivory curve of her belly. He watched carefully as the light of passion grew in the jade of her eyes. The contrivance he wore began to duel lightly, teasingly, with the red-coated sentinel at the entrance to her palace of pleasure. He rose up, ready now to invade that palace. But—

“Dessert.”

The word, sounding stoically from the doorway to the dining room, made Kim break his rhythm. It also made him lose his customary Oriental inscrutability. The words he now addressed to the servant Shrimp in Chinese poured out in a torrent of anger worthy of a Chiang Kai-shek refusing American aid funds.

Shrimp backed off and Kim returned his attention to Penny. His lips swooped down like a hummingbird to sip at her steaming passion-kettle. “How can the fool speak of dessert,” he muttered, “when such ducky sauce as this awaits me?”

“Fortune cookies and tea.” Shrimp was back and his voice was insistent.

“We’d better humor him.” Penny restrained Kim’s anger. “You know how these Chinese waiters are.” She turned to Shrimp. “Do you have any kumquats?” she asked pleasantly.

“No. Just fortune cookies,” he replied.

“Well, I had one!” Kim punned indignantly. “Or at least I would have if you hadn’t interrupted, you imbecile.”

“A thousand pardons, Master. But I must respectfully insist you eat the fortune cookies.”

“Come on,” Penny urged. “It’s the only way to make him go away.”

“Oh, very well,” Kim sighed.

They returned to the table and Shrimp set the tea and fortune cookies out before them. Penny immediately broke her cookie open and read the little slip of paper inside it. “CONFUCIUS SAY GIRL WHO IS CHASTE EVENTUALLY GET CAUGHT.” Penny read it aloud. “My,” she sighed, “I hope that’s prophetic Now you read yours,” she told Kim.

“Don’t be silly. These things are all a fraud.”

“Please. I think they’re so exciting. Do it for me.”

“Oh, very well.” Kim broke his fortune cookie open petulantly and rattled off the words on the slip of paper inside: “HELP! I’M A PRISONER IN A CHINESE BAKERY!”

“Oh, that’s a funny joke,” Penny giggled.

“That’s no joke,” Kim said. “This is serious. No wonder Shrimp insisted I have dessert. This message is signed by my Number Two Son. The King Tong must have captured the bakery. I must leave immediately to rescue him.”

“But what about me?” Penny wailed.

“So sorry. But that’s the way the fortune cookie crumbles.”

“But you can’t just go and leave me like this when I’m so sexually stimulated and all!”

“A thousand pardons. But this is a matter of family honor.”

“So am I!” Penny insisted. “And it certainly doesn’t say much for the honor of your family when you leave a girl all hung up this way.”

“Hmm. There is justification in your argument. I have a responsibility to my Number Two Son, but there is also responsibility to you. Under this roof, under these circumstances, you are Kim quim. Family honor demands that Kim satisfy you. Ahh!” He snapped his fingers. “I have the solution. I must rescue Number Two Son, but Number One Son shall remain behind to fulfill Kim obligation to you. I shall summon him.”

A moment later a tall, handsome, well-built Chinese man is his early twenties appeared in answer to his father’s summons. “Kindly present lady with joss-stick fulfill family obligation,” Kim instructed him.

“My humble pleasure.” Number One Son bowed low.

“And mine,” Penny purred. “He is quite an improve — I mean, he will do very nicely. Very nicely indeed.”

“You are welcome,” Kim told her. “It is really nothing. It is family tradition for eldest son to take woman discarded by father.”

“Then I’m glad to be a reject,” Penny sighed.

“I go now to rescue number two son,” Kim Asutra said. He bowed even lower than his son had and departed.

“We will be more comfortable upstairs,” Number One Son told Penny, leading the way.

In the bedroom, he divested himself of his robes and stood before Penny in the altogether as she lay down on the bed. His muscles rippled and his skin shone like bronze. His over-large joss-stick pointed like a sword toward the ceiling.

Penny gasped at the size of it. “Boy,” she murmured, “they don’t call you number one for nothing.”

“I but honor my father’s wishes,” Number One Son intoned.

“That’s not very complimentary, but under the circumstances, I don’t care. Just call me Anna May Wong and do right by me.” She held up her arms to him, arched her trembling thighs in a wide V, and closed her eyes.

It was at that moment that a small lit stick of dynamite was tossed through the open window of the bedroom. It landed neatly in the juncture of the V and lodged there. “Hurry up,” Penny whispered. “I’m really sizzling.”

Number One Son snatched up the dynamite before the dynamite could blow up the snatch. He tossed it back out the window. A moment later there came the sound of a dull explosion from the street below.

Penny, her eyes still closed, was unaware of what had transpired. “Why do you delay, my lover,” she asked, wriggling her hips primitively. “Why do you make me Wait?”

“Tong delay you,” Number One Son explained tersely.

“Who is she and what has she got to do with it?” Penny wanted to know.

As Number One Son puzzled over Penny’s puzzlement, the breakdown in communications was kept from expanding on that particular level by the sudden arrival on the scene of a shrieking Oriental bearing a live hand grenade in each hand. He’d leaped through the window from the house next door and his arms were stretched out like a dive-bombing Zero. Number One Son quickly grabbed him by the cockpit and rudder and sent him flying out the way he’d come.

“What the dickens was that?” Penny’s eyes were open now—wide open!

“Kamikaze,” Number One Son told her as he leaned out the window and nodded to himself with satisfaction as the hand grenades went off in mid-air. He wiped off bits of diced assassin from his chin and added, “King Tong,” as if that should make everything clear to Penny.

“King Tong? But what’s he doing here? What does he think this is? The Empire State Building, or something?”

“My father attacking fortune cookie bakery to rescue honorable brother. So now King Tong counter-attacking my father’s house. The day is at hand. The Communist struggle begin.”

“But aren’t you going to finish what you started with me?” Penny asked plaintively.

“So sorry. No time for sex now. Communism come first.”

“Ooohhh!” Penny yelled her frustration. “Screw Communism!”

“No time even for that.” Number One Son strode to the bureau, opened a drawer, and took out a sharp hatchet. “Must join fray,” he told Penny, pausing in the doorway to the bedroom on his way out. “Must make sure Chinese junk carefully guarded.”

“You mean some dumpy boat is more important to you than I am?”

“Not boat. Junk. Opium. Very important. Must go now.” He turned and left.

“Rotsa ruck!” Penny called out after him bitterly. And for once the usually fair-minded darling girl didn’t care if she did sound chauvinistic.

Alone now, she became more aware of the holocaust bursting. A laundry truck converted into a tank rumbled down the street. And everywhere hatchets flew through the air.

Penny began to realize that it might be very dangerous indeed to stay around the house of Kim Asutra. As a matter of fact, she decided, it might be wisest to get out of Chinatown altogether. So the darling girl went downstairs and searched until she found the closet containing the mink she’d borrowed from Scarlett Amber. She was impelled by her innate honesty to take off the Chinese kimono Kim had loaned her and to fold it neatly and leave it where she was sure it would be found. Then, dressed as she was when she’d come, in the too-short mink coat and riding boots, she slipped out the front door into the night of Oriental violence.

Scurrying between the rain of dropping hatchets and flying bullets and shells, she made her way through the narrow streets to the outskirts of Chinatown. The last of these twisting streets brought her out on the Bowery, and the battle was behind her. The sounds of it, however, still rumbled in the distance.

These noises were clearly audible to the occupants of the police patrol car Penny passed as she started up the Bowery. “It sounds like there’s trouble in Chinatown,” the rookie cop remarked to the wizened old sergeant. “Do you think we should check on it?”

“That I don’t, laddie,” the wise old sergeant answered. “You don’t want to be messin’ ’round with them Chinese fellers. They’ve a nasty way of carvin’ up policemen, shavin’ ’em so to speak, ’til there’s nothin’ left but chopped fuzz.”

“But it sounds like a full-scale Tong war!”

“Nonsense, me bucko. ’Tis nothin’ but the Chinese New Year. Let’s not be troublin’ ourselves about it.”

“I suppose you’re right. Gee,” the young officer sighed nostalgically, “I sure wish they hadn’t transferred us out of Central Park.”

“ ’Twas certainly a dirty shame. A few more minutes an’ I would have had that solitaire game licked for sure.”

“That’s because you cheat,” the rookie reminded him.

“Well, I used to be attached to the Vice Squad. Ahh, those were the good old days all right, all right . . .”

Penny was well past them by now, trudging up the Bowery with the air of a girl who has sampled too much of the bitterness of defeat life has to offer. Smudged with the dirt of battle from her flight, weary of a night filled with one disappointment after another, all hope of devirginization gone from her, the unfortunate lass felt that she had arrived at her fate, her empty, empty fate. To be a derelict wandering the Bowery seemed—in that bleak moment — to be all that was left for her.

But the moment passed. Penny was young and resilient. Pessimism was too foreign to her nature for her to give in to it for long. And if what replaced it had overtones of cynicism, then it should be remembered that this too was only a step on the road back to her natural optimism.

This step was taken when Penny burst into song. Plodding up this street of regrets, sliding down the razor blade of life, the darling girl still was able to pluck from her bosom a melody. She glanced upward, was struck by the fact that the Third Avenue Elevated Structure had been removed, and began to warble Noel.

It wasn’t seasonal, but it suited Penny’s mood. For her, indeed, there had been no “L”. There had been no lewdly lecherous liquefying love. There had been no lascivious, licentious lust. There had been no lessening of her libido, no loosing of the lightning in her loins. There had been no “L”, and she sounded her lament to the stars.

“Noel, Noel ” And there was hope in the song if Penny could but hear it. For this is what it might have said to her:

“Yes, virgin, there is a Santa Claus!”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THUS, A—CAROLING in the summer night, Penny’s spirits were raised. This change in mood seemed to direct her wanderings. She crossed the Bowery and walked east. Soon she found herself on Mulberry Street in the heart of the Lower East Side’s Little Italy. Turning into a side street, she spied a pitiful little park, really just a bench or two, a sparse olive tree and a drinking fountain.

Becoming aware of how grubby she must look, Penny crossed over to the park. She lifted the tail of the mink, intending to dip it in the water from the drinking fountain so that she might wash her face and hands. But, as she turned the spiggot, the diabolically timed pressure built into the convenience by the city’s Department of Public Works loosed a geyser full in her face.

Penny backed off, dripping. She approached the drinking fountain again, cautiously. She turned the handle slowly. Nothing happened. She turned it a little farther. The smallest trickle appeared. She bent low to sip at the trickle. Immediately, a torrent of water exploded over her. It drenched her golden hair, the top part of the mink, and her lovely naked breasts where the jacket had parted as she tried to leap away from the sudden Niagara.

The droplets on her precious firm breasts were particularly uncomfortable to Penny. The summer night was warm, and the mink made her feel even warmer, so that the water on her bosom felt like the dew which collects on the ceiling of a steam room. To relieve this feeling, Penny stood beside the fountain, allowed the coat to fall open, and shook her full breasts firmly with both hands in an effort to dry them. It was while she was so engaged that a souped-up Ferrari screeched to a halt at the curb alongside the little park. The driver raised his sunglasses to take a better look at Penny. Then he leaped from the sports car without troubling to open the door. Unfortunately, the tail of the polo coat tossed so casually over his shoulders caught on the floor-shift of the car and he went sprawling on his face.

“Are you all right?” the tender-hearted girl called anxiously.

“Si. Si. Do not move, Signorina.” He picked himself up hastily. “Stay exactly as you are, or we shall never recapture this moment.” He walked toward her, his arms outstretched in front of him, the hands tilting this way and that as if he were considering how to frame an in- valuable painting.

“Whatever do you mean?” Penny asked, frozen by the tone of command in his voice. As he came closer, she saw that he was a swarthy man with flashing white teeth, not too tall and somewhat roly-poly.

“You are she! This is it! We are saved!” he said excitedly. “Perfecto! Perfecto!”

“I don’t smoke,” Penny said. “And even if I did, I don’t think cigars are for ladies.”

“No-no-no-no. I mean you. The little park. The fountain. The fountain. Ah, si, the fountain! Wild, primitive, uninhibited femaleness in the fountain in the night in the city. They will call me a genius!”

“Huh?” Penny was bewildered.

“But of course! You do not understand. You do not recognize me.” This last sentence was spoken with an air of both wonderment and injury.

“I’m afraid I don’t. Should I? Who are you?”

“I am Smutti!” he announced with a dramatic sweep of the polo coat.

“I’m a little grubby myself. But I wouldn’t advise you to try this fountain.”

“No-no-no! I am Francali Smutti, the great Italian movie director. Surely you must have seen some of my films.”

“Oh, sure,” Penny said, trying to be polite. “But— uh—-just to refresh my memory, what were the names of some of them?”

“The Kiddy-Car Thief; 69^1/2; Bris, Italian Style. You have seen them, no?”

“No,” Penny had to admit, hanging her still soggy head.

“How charming! How refreshing! How sweet and naive and untouched you are. There you stand, naked in mink, dripping from your midnight dip in the fountain. That is life! Realism! In the raw! Such is the stuff of which my movies are made. Si! Beauty and the fountain! I can see it now! Photography, very low-key. You rise nude from the fountain and don your mink. Ahh, the symbolism of it! Innocence corrupted by the trappings of an acquisitive culture. It will fill the art houses. The critics will love it!”

“It really isn’t much of a fountain,” Penny observed timidly.

“To you it may be nothing. But to my trained eye — I tell you, it may not be La Trevi, this may not be Rome, and you may not be Anita Ekberg, but nevertheless, this scene shall do for me what that one did for Fellini! It will be a cinematic tour de force! And you will be as famous as Ekberg.”

“Gee, I don’t know,” Penny said.

“Do not hesitate. I want to sign you to a contract immediately. Work on the picture has already started, but now I will have to change my thinking so that you shall be the star of it. Yes, here, now, rising like some phoenix from these liquid flames, a star is born! Come.” Francali Smutti grabbed Penny by the arm and led her to the Ferrari.

“Well, all right,” the darling girl agreed, swept off her feet by his dynamic magnetism. “By the way, what’s the name of this movie?” she asked as he held the door of the car open for her.

“La Merda Vita!” Smutti’s hand spelled it out in flashing neon lights against the blackness of the sky.

“Oh. What does that mean in English?”

“ ‘Dung of the Herring.’ It will be a true commentary on the true tawdriness of true life—as captured by the semi-documentary eye of the camera inspired by my genius.”

“What’s the name of the company that’s making it?” Penny queried idly.

“Pornographic Pictures, Inc. I allow myself to work for them only because they are highly selective in the distribution of my films.”

“It sounds like your work is awfully exciting,” Penny said as the Ferrari shot down the street and carried them deeper into Little Italy. “How did you ever get to be a movie director, anyway?”

“I worked my way up. I started as a boy, hanging around the studio, going out for pizza for the big shots, many menial tasks. Finally they put me on as a grip. Slowly, arduously, painstakingly, I worked my way up until I was an assistant director to the great Lasagna himself. From him I learned the art of being spicy and filled at the same time. And then came my big chance.”

“What was that?”

“Lasagna, a true genius, was making the first Italian Western.”

“Oooh! That sounds delicious. I love omelets.”

“No-no! I mean a cowboy movie. Anyway, as his assistant, it was my task to shoot all the trick shots. One of these had the hero of the film leaping from the roof of a low window onto the back of a horse. It was to be a long shot, with the camera panning to catch all the action. Now, it was against Lasagna’s policy to do anything that wasn’t absolutely realistic. To use a stunt man for this sequence was therefore unthinkable. Our male lead had to make this leap himself.”

“How exciting!”

“Si. But, unfortunately, he missed the horse.”

“How awful.”

“Si. He broke his ankle.”

“How devastating. What did you do?”

“What could I do? I called the doctor. The ankle was set. A cast was put on it. Chaps were used to cover the cast. And I was all ready to shoot the scene again.”

“Did he land in the saddle this time?” Penny asked Freudianly.

“No. The coward simply refused to jump. Refused, mind you! Actors! Pah!”

“But what did you do?”

“My genius asserted itself. We sat him on the horse and attached wires to him. These wires were painted so that they would be invisible against the background. Then we hauled him from the horse up to the roof. After that, I sped the film up and reversed it so that it looked just as if he had jumped from the roof to the back of the horse.”

“That was ingenious,” Penny said, wide-eyed.

“Si. That’s what the critics said. And it made my reputation. Thanks to that one scene, I was given a film of my own to direct.”

“Really? The studio was that impressed?”

“Si. They were. Because, you see, the hand of fate had guided my genius. While I was busy supervising the actor, unnoticed by me, the horse was relieving himself. The result was that when the picture was released with the film reversed, the droppings of the stallion were shown being returned to their place of origin. Such symbolism! The critics raved! They even compared me to Bergman and Rosselini. And the symbolism was all unconscious on my part. But then the best symbolism always is.”

“And so your career was launched.”

“And so my career was launched,” Smutti agreed. “The very next day following the reviews, the head of Pornographic Pictures, Sam Mafia himself, called me into his office and signed me to a long-term contract to direct my own pictures. My apprenticeship was over.” Smutti braked the Ferrari to a halt. “But yours is just beginning,” he told Penny. “And now that we are here, it can truly begin.” He led her up the steps of a rundown tenement house.

Ushered through the door, on the other side of it Penny found a completely different world. All the walls had been torn out of the first two floors of the tenement to make one huge movie set. Cameras and lights were everywhere. And in the center of this cinematic confusion, occupying about two-thirds of the area, was a lavish replica of the interior of a luxurious Italian villa.

This set was replete with solid mahogany furniture. Lush velvet draperies, deep Persian carpets, ancient, hand-sewn Roman tapestries portraying scenes of the most intimate—and often quite unrealistic—nature were everywhere. There was a bar lined with champagne bottles and wine glasses. Large armchairs and small, cozy couches upholstered in silk dotted the set.

“Places everyone!” The voice sounded out like a drill sergeant as Francali Smutti entered. “The Maestro is here! Places everyone!” There was a flurry of activity as a horde of actors and extras arranged themselves about the set.

The man who had spoken put down his megaphone and came up to greet Smutti. “Welcome, Maestro. All is in readiness for the orgy sequence. We are ready to proceed whenever you are.” He bowed and looked curiously at Penny.

“This is our new star,” Smutti explained. “Arrange for a contract for her.”

“Shall we delay shooting, then?”

“Imbecile! Of course not. We shall proceed with the shooting with her while the papers are being prepared. She can sign them later.”

“Then I suppose you will wish to shift around the staging of the orgy sequence,” the assistant sighed.

“Naturally. But I shall do it. I always have to do everything myself, anyway. Come with me, my dear,” he said to Penny, “while I see what macaroni these clods have made of my beautiful orgy.” He led her onto the set.

“No-no-no!” Enraged, he loomed over two couples at the edge of the set. Each of the men was passionately kissing one of the women. Each of the women was passionately returning the kiss. “Fools!” Francali shouted frankly. “Can’t you remember anything. You have gotten your partners mixed up!” He prodded them with the cane he carried and then stood back to survey the results. Now the two men were embracing passionately. “That is as it should be,” he muttered to Penny. “These fools don’t know the meaning of an orgy!”

Now he stopped beside a half-naked man wielding a whip. Stretched out over a chair in front of him was a half-naked girl with her plump buttocks sticking out prominently from under the short skirt which was the only garment she wore. Francali Smutti stooped over her and gingerly swiped at her derriere with one fastidious finger. It came away dripping red, and Smutti delicately raised it to his lips and touched it with the tip of his tongue. “Aha!” he roared. “Just as I thought! Tomato sauce! Franco-American, if my palate doesn’t deceive me! You call this realism? Imbeciles! I want real blood. You—” He turned to the whip wielder. “You start whipping her now so that we have real blood by the time we’re ready for a take.”

He spun on his heel and walked away, Penny following. Behind them, the screams of the girl being whipped sounded satisfyingly realistic. Now Smutti paused to study a young stallion mounting an old woman. “Fools!” he howled. “Idiots! They have sent me a gelding! How can I stage an orgy with a gelding? Get rid of him! Immediately! And go out and get me a horse fit for sex!”

“But,” the old woman under the horse protested, “Maestro, an unaltered horse will tear me apart.”

“If you want to be an actress, you must suffer for your art,” Smutti told her contemptuously. The offending animal was led away.

“Ahh,” Smutti took Penny by the arm and led her over to a tall, handsome, olive-skinned, scowling young Italian man. “Here is your co-star. Allow me to introduce Marcello Pastrami.”

“I’m glad to make your acquaintance,” Penny said.

“Really? Why?” Pastrami answered sullenly. “For myself, I feel nothing.”

“Pastrami is a method actor,” Smutti explained to Penny. “He feels whatever part he does. He lives it. How do you feel, Pastrami?”

“Dead. I feel nothing. Life is nothing. I am sick of it. I feel dead.”

“Good. Good boy. That’s exactly what I want.” Smutti turned to Penny. “Now, here is the way this scene will go, Signorina. We will open with a panoramic view of the orgy. The camera will sweep over the scene, pausing for a close-up here, a close-up there to build the realistic eroticism necessary. Finally, it will zoom in to focus on you. You will be lying on a white ermine rug and doing a horizontal striptease dance which will slowly relieve you of the mink coat. When you are naked, the camera will focus for an extremely long, extremely slow, extremely close shot of your naked body. It will linger over your legs, your belly, your breasts, your tomato-sauce-pot, your twisting hips and flashing derriere, and will finally come to rest on your face. Your eyes must reflect the sexual turmoil which has seized your body. Remember that. They must shine with lust. For as we close in on them, we see Pastrami approaching dressed in nothing but a jockstrap. In his hand he has a slice of pizza. Savagely, his strong white teeth tear at it. With true earthiness, cheese and sauce dribble down his chin. A long string of mozarella escapes his sensitive lips and dangles down to where you are lying. It entangles your panting breasts. He reaches to retrieve it, grazes your erect nipples and notices you at last. He looks at you for a long moment, torn between two appetites. You look back with hot lust shining from your eyes. At last, you prevail. He tosses the pizza crust over his shoulder. The red tomato sauce splatters over the milk-white flesh of a young girl’s corpse left over from the last orgy. Pastrami picks up a pillow. His eyes never leave you as he tears at it fiercely with his teeth. Oh, by the way,” Smutti sidetracked himself, “are you sure your dentures are in firmly enough, Pastrami?”

“The dentist cemented them in place this morning. It took three hours.”

“Oh, that must have been painful!” Penny exclaimed.

“I feel nothing.”

“Si. Well,” Smutti continued, “when he’s torn the pillow open with his teeth, Pastrami will reach inside it and take a handful of feathers. These he will sprinkle over your naked, eager body. You will writhe even more, you will vibrate electrically, when he does this. You know how to vibrate electrically?”

“I’ve seen it done.” Penny thought sadly of Bix Bittervetch. “But tell me, what’s the symbolism of the feathers?” she asked Smutti.

“It’s an ancient Roman fertility rite. And besides, Von Stroheim used it in all his arty orgies. If it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.”

“I see,” Penny said. “What happens after that?”

“Pastrami selects one long feather, kneels down beside you and begins to tickle your espresso urn.”

“Why does he do that?” .

“To arouse you, of course.”

“But I thought I’m already pretty aroused by then.”

“Maybe you are, but the audience isn’t,” Smutti explained. “It’s what’s known as dramatic license. In any case, he tickles your spaghettini strand for a long time, until you are beside yourself with passion. Then you rip the feather from his hands and embrace him, pulling him over on top of you.”

“And that’s where you cut,” Penny guessed.

“Never! This is a Smutti picture! Realism! He makes love to you—inexorably, completely, to the bitter end.”

“It doesn’t sound so bitter to me,” Penny sighed. “As a matter of fact, it sounds very pleasant.”

“No-no-no!” Smutti erupted. “You must not enjoy it! It leaves you both empty. It is meaningless. That is the whole point. The orgy is like life. Just passing sensation, but empty, meaningless. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Penny was chastened. “I’ll do my best.”

“Please do. Well, I think we are ready to start. Places everyone.” He raised his voice. “Places!” he roared.

“Just a minute, Maestro,” Pastrami said. “First I must visit the men’s room.”

“I thought you were empty!” Smutti was indignant. “And you call yourself a dedicated actor!”

“Sorry. I will be back in just a moment.”

“Just remember, don’t you dare enjoy yourself!”

Smutti cautioned Penny as he positioned her on the ermine rug. His eyes were stern. Then he strode over to his director’s chair. Pastrami returned and got into position. Smutti hefted his megaphone. “Lights!” he called. “Camera! Action!”

Penny wriggled. After a few moments, she found herself looking up at Smutti riding the boom of the camera directly over her. She wiggled out of the mink coat. The camera dipped so low over her nude body that it practically touched her writhing skin. Finally it reached her face, closed in on her eyes, and then abruptly retreated while a second camera picked up the approaching Pastrami. Now he stood over her and she felt the rnozarella twine around her breast. A moment later he had torn open the pillow and was sprinkling her with feathers. These made Penny itch so much that she didn’t even have to try to wriggle. It just came naturally. Then he was tickling her with the feather and the darling girl thought she would go out of her mind. Her little honey-hive felt as though a million bees were buzzing inside it. Penny didn’t have to act. She stood it as long as she could, and then wrenched the feather from Pastrami’s hand and pulled her torturer over on top of her.

At last, the darling girl was to be deflowered. And she didn’t care how many people were watching. It was strange that it should happen this way, but she was too aroused to even ponder the strangeness. “Now,” she breathed into Pastrami’s ear. “Give it to me now!”

“You’re too excited,” he whispered back. “Smutti will have a fit. Remember, you are empty!”

“I know I am. I want you to fill that void.”

“You are forgetting. This is to be a mechanical act. You feel nothing.”

“The hell you say! Will you please hurry up?”

“All right. All right. Control yourself.” Pastrami drew back for the all-important thrust and—

“Bianca! You stoppa dat and come home! She’sa no the way I bring you up! Bad girl! You gonna go straight to the priest now and make-a you confession!”

A large, burly, middle-aged Sicilian with flowing, handlebar moustaches had suddenly appeared like some Roman god of vengeance in the middle of the movie set.

“Cut!” Smutti’s scream was a howl of professional frustration. “Cut!”

The orgy stopped abruptly as everybody looked to see what was happening. All but one couple. The very couple over whom the intruder was standing continued performing the act of love.

“Cut! I said cut!” Smutti screamed again. Finally, he hopped down from the camera boom and marched over to the unhearing twosome. He bent over them and shouted directly into the man’s ear. “Cut!”

“Go away!” the man replied.

“Yes, go away,” the girl named Bianca echoed.

“I’ma gonna kill her she don’t stoppa dat!” the Sicilian father threatened, pulling a butcher’s cleaver from the waistband of his pants and brandishing it. “She’sa no even engage to this fella.”

“Cut!” With the help of some grips, Smutti succeeded in prying the pair apart.

“Sonomagun!” the Sicilian father exclaimed. He sa no even Italian! He’sa Jewish!”

“What’s wrong with being Jewish?”'the young man demanded in an injured tone as he hastily buttoned his fly.

“For you’sa nothing wrong. For my Bianca, isa no so good. Isa make her confession twice as hard. Things, she’sa pretty serious all right. You gonna marry her?”

“Good Lord, no!” the young man said. “You want me to give my mother a heart attack? My family is very orthodox. I could never do that to them. I am not going to marry her.”

“Thanka God!” The Sicilian father crossed himself devoutly.

“Besides, I never met her before tonight,” the young man added.

“Bianca, she’sa true? You never meet him before tonight and you make-a da bang-bang like-a dis?”

“I’m just playing a part, Papa. An actress has to do what she’s told. It’s just a role.”

“Froma rolling arounda like-a dis, lotsa girl getta theyself knock up. You stoppa to think of that?”

“Oh, Papa, you’re so old-fashioned.” Bianca turned to the group of interested spectators and spread her hands wide in a plea for understanding. “Can you imagine in this day and age having a father who objects to his daughter being an actress on moral grounds? It’s right out of East Lynn. Papa, you’ve got to stop being so square.”

“I’m square, maybe, but you play sucha parts like this, you gonna be round in da belly and I don’t mean froma eat too much ravioli.”

The argument continued, but Penny’s attention turned from it to consider her immediate situation. Pastrami still straddled her. Like her, he had been watching the real-life drama unfolding. Now Penny sought his attention.

“Say,” she said, “aren’t you ever going to lower that boom?”

“What for? The camera’s have stopped.”

“How about just for the fun of it?” Penny cooed.

“What fun? I feel nothing.”

“Then you,” Penny said, surveying his erect manhood, “are certainly the world’s greatest actor.”

“Yes, I am.” Pastrami admitted.

“Well, if you’re determined to let all that talent go to waste, would you mind getting off me? You may think you’re empty, but I feel the decided weight of too many spaghetti dinners pressing down on me.”

“I don’t care.” Pastrami got to his feet.

Penny shrugged into her mink coat and also stood up. It was just then that there was a commotion at the door to the studio. Smutti went to investigate. He opened the door a crack, and it was immediately battered down on top of him. A throng of camera-wielding young men stampeded over Smutti and invaded the studio.

“Paparazzi!” Pastrami exclaimed.

“Is that the thing they make with veal and peppers?” Penny asked.

“No. They are reporters. Scandal vultures. Somehow they must have gotten wind of what was happening here. They smell such things out. And then they twist and turn things so that they can implicate everybody present. Come on! Let’s get out of here before it’s too late.”

“But I haven’t done anything,” Penny protested, adding a silent, rueful “Damn it!” to herself.

“That doesn’t matter. Believe me. They’ll crucify you anyway. Come on. Out the back.”

Persuaded by his panic, Penny followed. They emerged in a narrow alley behind the tenement. As they came out of the mouth of the alley, a stream of photographers started for them and flashbulbs started exploding. Pastrami bolted, with Penny behind him.

But Pastrami was too fast for her, and Penny soon lost him. She kept running, aware that the paparazzi were closing the distance between her and them. As she ran across an intersection, her eye happened to catch a sign identifying the street down which she was fleeing. Veneto St. the sign said.

Penny tried to run faster. Her feet tangled as she hopped a curb. Her ankle twisted out from under her. She fell to the gutter. The pain was excruciating.

And then the vultures were upon the hapless girl.

CHAPTER TWELVE

PENNY LAY helpless in the gutter. Flashbulbs exploded in her eyes, half blinding her. A babble of voices assailed her ears: questions, insinuations, insults, orders to move this way and that. Throughout it all, her injured ankle throbbed agonizingly.

There’s no telling how long it might have gone on if one of the paparazzi hadn’t happened to spot a figure running in the distance. “Pastrami!” the newshawk shouted.

“I don’t even want any food,” Penny said, dazed. “Can’t you just leave me alone?”

“Pastrami!” The cry was picked up by the other paparazzi. “Pastrami!” They stampeded up the block, hot on the trail of the fleeting celebrity.

Now Penny found herself alone. Suddenly the street was very quiet. The unfortunate girl tried to rise from the gutter. But she couldn’t. Her injured ankle buckled under her and she sank back to the curb. She began to cry. She sat there, sobbing to herself, seeing no chance of help in the deserted street around her.

Penny was still there, still sobbing, when the prowl car turned into the street a block away. The rookie cop was the first to see her. “Look,” he said to his partner, the Wizened old veteran, “there’s a girl sitting on the curb and crying. She might be hurt.”

The older officer hit the brake abruptly and pulled the car over to the curb. He squinted myopically down the street toward Penny and scratched his chin. “Now let’s just be thinkin’ about this a minute, laddie,” he said. “Let’s not be doin’ anythin’ hasty.”

“But shouldn’t we go and help her?”

“Well now, maybe we should and maybe we shouldn’t. When you’ve been a bit longer in police work, you’ll appreciate that a good cop always looks at all the aspects of a situation before he rushes in. It doesn’t pay to be goin’ off halfcocked.” He chuckled to himself. “As the mail said while stroppin’ his razor,” he added.

“But she looks like she’s in trouble. And there’s nobody else around. I don’t think there’s any danger.”

“Well now, we can’t be sure of that, can we? After all, ’tis Cosa Nostra territory we’re in. Don’t be forgottin’ that. Some of these Eyetalians play a mite rough for my taste. Maybe ’twas them dumped her here for some reason of their own. We go a-rushin’ in, an’ first thing you know, we’re involved in the Lord knows what shenanigans. We might even end up in court tomorrow. An’ tomorrow’s the day of the PAL championship game. You wouldn’t want to be missin’ that, now would you?”

“Even so, I think we should investigate.”

“Well, all right then. But remember, the watchword, laddie, is caution.” The veteran bluecoat put the car into gear and eased it up the street towards Penny.

“Is there some trouble, miss?” the rookie called when they were abreast of her.

“Is there anything else?” Penny sobbed by way of reply.

“Sure now, an’ don’t be talkin’ flip to a member o’ New York’s finest,” the sergeant called out sternly. “Do you know you’re breakin’ the law loiterin’ on the curb like that?”

“But I can’t get up!” Penny wailed. “I’ve hurt my ankle.”

“Don’t be shoutin’ now!” The older cop grew braver. “Or I’ll be runnin’ you in for creatin’ a disturbance‘ An’ what are you doin’ runnin’ around half-naked anyway?” he asked, noticing Penny’s shapely legs stretching out from under the too-short mink.

“It’s a long story,” Penny told him. “And you wouldn’t believe it, anyway.”

“For bein’ so fresh, young lady, I think I will be runnin’ you in!”

“Wait a minute!” the rookie whispered. “You’re forgetting the PAL game.”

“Me partner has prevailed upon me to be merciful,” the sergeant told Penny. “So you just be movin’ along now an’ stay out of trouble.”

“I can’t! I told you, I hurt my ankle. I can’t walk.”

“Maybe we should call an ambulance for her,” the rookie whispered.

“That would mean makin’ out a report. Ahh, there’s no end o’ trouble.” The sergeant thought a moment. “I’ve a better idea,” he said finally. “Let’s just be drivin’ her over to the hospital ourselves an’ drop her off at the emergency ward. That way we won’t be gettin’ involved.”

So it was that some twenty minutes later Penny found herself in the antechamber of a hospital emergency room. “Just sit there,” the nurse had told her. “Dr. Quimbare’s right inside. He’ll be with you in a minute.”

“Who’s Dr. Quimbare?” Penny had asked. “An intern?”

“No, he’s the resident gynecologist,” the nurse had replied and then departed.

So now Penny sat alone and waited. The walls were very thin, and without intending to she found herself listening to the dialogue in the emergency room.

“Doctor, I’m always so out of breath after I have sex.” a woman’s voice was saying.

“Do you smoke afterwards?” a calm, professional, male voice queried.

“I don’t know; I never looked!”

“Well then, I’ll just have a look now.”

The voices subsided then, becoming indistinguishable. Penny waited patiently. The darling girl had always had the feeling that patients should be patient. Finally, the woman came out of the examining room. “Next!” the male voice called. Penny hobbled in and found herself looking at the back of the white coat the doctor wore. He was busy making some notations on a hospital record card, and when he spoke it was without turning around. “Up on the table, pull up your skirt, and put your feet in the stirrups,” he chanted automatically. “I’ll be right with you.”

“I can’t get up on the table and I can’t put my feet in the stirrups because I’ve hurt my ankle,” Penny said. “And I’m not wearing any skirt, so I can’t pull it up.”

Dr. Quimbare turned around quite quickly. His eyes took in Penny’s charms and state of dress with a fast, appreciative glance. “Well, hello there, little lady,” he said with the extreme unction doctors regard as the unwritten, but nevertheless binding, codicil to the Hippocratic Oath. “Whatever can be bothering a healthy-looking girl like you?”

“I’ve hurt my ankle,” Penny repeated.

“Well now, let’s just have a look-see. I’ll just get these boots off. And, oh yes, you’d better take off that coat.”

“But I have nothing on underneath it,” Penny protested.

“Really?” Dr. Quimbare smiled with interest. “You really shouldn’t run around that way, my dear.” He spoke paternally, although he was really quite a young man. “You might catch cold. Still, you might as well take it off. It’s a warm night and the hospital temperature is controlled to guard against drafts.”

“But why?” Penny asked. “It’s only my ankle that’s bothering me.”

“Every part of the body is related to every other part of the body,” Dr. Quimbare explained. “The ankle bone’s connected to the shin bone; the shin bone’s connected to the thigh bone; the thigh bone’s connected to the hip-bone . . .” He danced a merry little‘ jig as he completed the litany. “And so,” he summed up less rhythmically, “to examine you properly, I must be able to view the whole picture.”

“Very well,” Penny sighed, doffing the mink. “But I still feel awfully embarrassed being here naked like this with you.”

“Nonsense, my child. I’m a professional man. Just pretend I’m your family doctor.”

“But you’re not. My family doctor is old and he has a beard and he uses a stethoscope to do what you’re doing.”

“Some of these old-time GPs are pretty much behind the times,” Quimbare said amiably as he continued to squeeze her firm, girlish breast. “After all, this is the age of specialization.”

“Would you mind looking at my ankle?” Penny asked. “It hurts.”

“Oh, very well.” Dr. Quimbare examined her foot, his fingers trailing absent-mindedly up one calf. “lt’s just a sprain,” he told her. “No broken bones. We’ll just tape it up for support and inside of a few days you won’t remember it ever happened.” He suited his action to the words. As soon as he had applied the last of the tape, he grasped the inside of each of Penny’s thighs and bent close to peer.

“What are you doing?” Penny said indignantly. “What’s this got to do with my ankle?”

“Well, after all,” Dr. Quimbare replied in a hurt tone of voice, “I am a gynecologist. We might as well take advantage of that.”

“But just who,” Penny asked, squirming, “is taking advantage of whom?”

“Very interesting!” Dr. Quimbare ignored her protests. “Would you mind handing me that little flashlight on the table?” He held his hand up, groping, but his position remained unchanged and his eyes stayed riveted on the object of his examination.

Penny handed him the little flashlight.

“Forceps,” he said a moment later.

She handed him the forceps.

“Scalpel.”

She handed him the scalpel.

“Guitar.”

She handed him the guitar.

He held it between his legs and began strumming. Then he unloosed a very pleasant tenor voice and sang a rock-’n’-roll rendition of Down In The Valley. “Did you like that?” he asked Penny when the song was over, raising his head for the first time since he’d begun his examination.

“Oh, yes.” The darling girl clapped her hands. “You’re really very talented.”

“You have to be if you’re going to get any place in medicine today,” Quimbare told her. “Ever since that neurosurgeon Casey started warbling, every medico worth his salt has been taking voice lessons. Why, there’s even a movement to license the Beatles to practice. And you should hear them over at Johns Hopkins since the Hall Johnson Choir joined the staff!” Dr. Quimbare went back to his examination. “I see that you’re a virgin,” he said after a moment, sounding surprised. “We sure don’t get too many cases like that these days.”

“I am.” Penny fidgeted. “I really don’t see the purpose of this examination, Doctor,” she objected again.

“You never can tell,” he said. “Sometimes we find the damnedest things. Why, just the other day, I had occasion to examine a nurse in this very hospital. The poor girl had swallowed a razor blade and it had worked its way through the bloodstream until it lodged in the very area of my specialization.”

“How awful! What did you do?”

“Oh, we finally got it out all right. Still, it’s a shame she didn’t come to me sooner. You should never let those things go, you know. They can be dangerous.”

“Oh, I know.”

“Yes, indeed. By the time I’d removed the razor blade, we’d already had to treat an attendant for a cut finger, two interns for slashed lips and a resident who’d been castrated.”

“Terrible,” Penny said. “But I haven’t swallowed a razor blade—or anything else, for that matter. I haven’t really eaten since much earlier tonight, and I’m getting hungry. So won’t you please just finish up and let me get out of here so I can snatch a bite?”

“Dr vice-versa,” Dr. Quimbare murmured, still continuing his examination.

“What?”

“Notl1ing.” He straightened up. “Look here,” he suggested, why don’t I take you out for some later supper? I get off in about ten minutes.”

“Thank you,” Penny said. “I’d like that. I’m particularly grateful, you see, because I don’t have any money with me.

“Then it’s a date.”

A while later, Penny, the mink wrapped snugly around her, holding onto Dr. Quimbare’s arm, was being escorted into a Schraft’s restaurant. It seemed very crowded, and Dr. Quimbare commented on it to the headwaiter while they were waiting for a table. “It’s a college reunion,” he was told. “See the banner.”

Penny followed Dr. Quimbare’s gaze and saw a large banner reading “VASSAR—CLASS OF 1901” hanging from the ceiling. Beneath it was a group of doddering old ladies making merry. The headwaiter escorted Penny and Dr. Quimbare to a small table right next to the group.

". .. the first time I was unfaithful to my husband,” a little old lady was saying in a high-pitched, quavery voice, “Was in nineteen-and-oh-six. We had this St. Bernard and he caught me out back of the garage attached to the $35,000 home we had in Westchester and ravished me. After that first time we used to meet every Sunday afternoon. It was idyllic. I’ll never forget it. The smell of discarded caviar wafting over us from the trash cans. The soft brown eyes looking deep into mine. The feel of the soft fur as he pinned me to the ground. And always the sound of the buzzsaw from the garage as my husband worked at his do-it-yourself hobbies. It was my first affair, and after that —”

“Not so fast, Agnes!” A gray-haired octogenarian with a shawl over her shoulders and a shorthand notebook in her lap held up a quill pen to slow the speaker down. “I’m not getting it all.”

“I’m sorry, Mary, I’ll go slower. My next lover was —”

“Now you’ve hogged the spotlight long enough, Agnes,” a third of the ladies objected, holding up a crutch by way of protest. “Let me tell you about my last affair in Hecate County.”

“How could you have an affair, Matilda? You’ve been a paraplegic for fifty years.”

“Hell, in Hecate County, that’s an asset. Where there’s a will, you know? Actually, what my lovers used to do, they used to hang me by my harness from a clothes pole. That worked out pretty good, only—”

“Only?” Mary, the lady taking notes looked up questioningly.

“Only sometimes, afterwards, they’d forget to unhook me,” Matilda admitted. “They just aren’t turning out gentlemen the way they used to when I was a girl.”

“When you were a girl, you were a Lesbian, Matilda,” a fourth old lady reminded her. “Remember? We used to share a room together at Vassar.”

“Remember?” Matilda sighed. “How could I ever forget? Lights out at ten o’clock. Candles out at ten-oh-one. Young girls knew how to enjoy themselves in those days. They knew their place. These flibbertigibbets today don’t know what they’re missing.”

“Anyway,” Agnes resumed, “about my second lover—”

“You’ll have to hold off on that,” Mary interrupted. “We’re going to have to break up now. It’s time for my Geritol and I must be getting home. And anyway, here comes the waiter with the check.” She studied the bill a moment. “Now, Agnes,” she said, “You had the gruel and the Rob Roy. With the tip that’s $1.65. And Matilda had the soft-boiled eggs with two daquiris and I had Irish coffee and a corn muffin, so—”

“I only had one daquiri!” Matilda interrupted indignantly.

“No, Matilda, you had two. I saw you,” Agnes insisted. “You ordered the second one while Euphremia was telling us about how the acrobat seduced her on the flying trapeze. Remember?”

“No, I don’t,” Matilda grumbled. “Anyway, what does the check come to?” she asked Mary.

“Seventy-three dollars and fourteen cents. Do you think a seventy-five cent tip is enough?”

“Oh, leave a dollar. Let’s be generous. After all we’re Vassar girls.”

“All right,” Mary agreed. “A dollar it is. Now, will one of you girls wheel me out so I can get a cab?”

Smiling, Penny and Dr. Quimbare watched the group go. “It’s women like that,” Quimbare mused, “that restore my faith in geriatrics.”

“Bah!” grunted the waiter behind him as he pocketed the tip.

“Shall we go?” Penny asked as she finished her coffee.

“Sure. I’ll take you home. Where do you live?”

“Not far from here; only there’s a problem.”

“What sort of problem?”

Penny explained about being locked out of her apartment and her landlady not being home.

“But surely she must be back by now. It’s almost morning,” Dr. Quimbare pointed out.

“I suppose so. But she’s such an old harridan that I hate to face her.”

“I’d invite you up to my place to spend what little’s left of the night,” Dr. Quimbare, the dedicated gynecologist, said, “but I live with my mother and I’m afraid she’d object. You see, we’re quite attached.”

“Oh, that’s all right. I understand.”

“I’ve got it. Why not let me talk to your landlady? As a professional man, I’m sure I can smooth things over.”

“Oh, would you? Gee, I’d really appreciate that.”

As it turned out, the landlady was very much impressed by Dr. Quimbare. When he mentioned his mother, that clinched it. As far as the landlady was concerned, Penny might have been running around in a half-clothed condition deserving of gossip, but that gossip would be mollified by her been escorted home by such a nice, polite doctor who was good to his mother. So she scolded Penny in an almost motherly fashion for having lost her key, provided the darling girl with a passkey and gave a cluck of farewell rapport to the nice young doctor as he escorted Penny up the stairs.

“Won’t you come in?” Penny asked politely as she unlocked her door.

“A good gynecologist,” Dr. Quimbare quipped, "never refuses entry.”

“Make yourself comfortable,” Penny told him, waving toward the couch in the living room. “I’ll just be a minute.” She closed the door to the bedroom behind her.

She took off the mink and when she rejoined Dr. Quimbare her face was scrubbed clean, her hair neatly combed, and she wore a simple black dressing gown from which her dimpled knees peeped demurely as she crossed the room to him. “Now I feel more human,” she remarked with a sigh of relaxation.

“Yes. So do I,” replied Dr. Quimbare, eyeing the way the dressing gown clung to the yummy curves of Penny’s figure.

“Would you like a drink?”

“No.”

“Something to eat?”

“No.”

“Shall I put on some records?”

“No.”

“Well, what would you like to do?”

“What I’d really like to do is resume my examination, Dr. Quimbare admitted.

“Oh, Doctor! Wouldn’t that just be a busman’s holiday for you? Remember, all work and no play makes Doc a dull boy.”

“But this is play,” Dr. Quimbare murmured, edging closer to Penny on the couch. “I want to play ’Doctor’.” He leaned over and kissed the little vein throbbing in Penny’s neck.

“ The sensitive darling couldn’t help responding. Oohh! That makes me tingle all over. That’s just the right spot. How did you know?”

“I learned it in Anatomy One.” Dr. Quimbare toyed with her ear, and Penny took a deep, sharp breath which made her breasts swell against the silk of the robe she wore. Your respiration is quickening,” Dr. Quimbare observed.

“I know.” Penny’s eyes were shut. “And I think my heartbeats becoming abnormally fast. Would you check it, Doctor?”

Quimbare slipped his hand under the robe and cupped her left breast firmly. “There are definite signs of lung dilatation, he told her as her nipple grew rigid and strained against the palm of his hand.

And I think I detect signs of tumescence,” Penny observed, sliding her hand up his thigh.

“A most acute diagnosis.” He swept aside the folds of the gown and stroked her naked thighs. His hand edged higher until it made contact with her sweet little salve decanter.

“Have you license to practice there?” Penny moaned, her body twisting to snap at his fingertips with its avid nether-mouth.

“Oh, I’m way past the practicing stage,” Dr. Quimbare assured her. He bent over to study the effects of his gentle probing. “You clitoral development is remarkable,” he told Penny.

That’s probably because my vaginal development has been so neglected,” she guessed. “But must we be so clinical about things? We’re not in your examining room now.”

“I know. But you’ll have to pardon me. I just can’t control my professional curiosity. You see, I’ve never had the opportunity to examine a virgin at my leisure before.”

“Well, you don’t have time now!” Penny squirmed. “Your examination is having a decided effect on me.” Her little sentinel strained wildly against his pinching fingers and her buttocks were twin foam-rubber pogo-sticks bouncing on the couch. “Please!” she begged. “If you’re going to make love to me. Do it now!”

“Just a minute!” Dr. Quimbare was still making mental notes of the effect his caress was having on Penny, framing the opening of the article he would write for the AMA Journal of ‘Effects of Clitoral Stimulation on the Intact Hymen of the Adult Female’.

“It’s too late!” Penny’s foaming fulcrum rose, seized with spasm after spasm, and little crys of mingled frustration and joy tore from her precious red lips. “Oh, dear!” she said when she finally subsided. “I’ve gone and done it again. And I so much wanted to wait until we were really making love.”

“Never fear. I’m sure you’re quite capable of an encore,” Dr. Quimbare assured her. “As a matter of fact, in my considered professional opinion, you should capable of several encores. You’re a multiple orgasm-er if I ever saw one.”

“Then you really are going to make love to me?”

“I am.”

“At last!” Penny flung her lovely legs wide apart. “Good-bye chastity at last!”

It was at that moment that the telephone rang.

“Damn!” Penny reached behind her and savagely tore the receiver from its cradle on the end table. “Hello.” There was a pause, then — “Yes, he’s here.” She covered the mouthpiece. “It’s the hospital for you,” she told Dr. Quimbare. “How did they know you were here?”

“I told the nurse I was seeing you home. I guess she put two and two together and looked up your number on the admittance card you filled out.” He took the phone. “Yes . . . Yes, I see . . . All right, I’ll be right there.” He hung up. “I have to get right down to the hospital,” he told Penny. “It’s an emergency.”

“But so is this!” Penny wailed.

“I’m sorry. But there simply isn’t time. You’ll just have to remain a virgin a while longer.”

“But I don’t want to wait any more,” Penny sobbed. “That’s all I’ve been doing all night long. Waiting. Expecting. And then being disappointed. It just can’t be that important, your emergency! What kind of emergency anyway?”

“One of my patients impaled herself on a Coke bottle.”

“How did she ever do a thing like that?”

“She and her husband were watching an old Fatty Arbuckle movie on the late-late-late show on TV and they decided to make love. It really isn’t so unusual. Actually, it happens fairly frequently. They really shouldn’t show those pictures.”

“You can say that again,” Penny agreed bitterly.

“They really shouldn’t show those pictures,” Dr. Quimbare repeated agreeably. “Anyway, I really have to run.” He started out the door and paused. “Oh,” he said, “I just remembered. Do you have a bottle opener I could borrow?”

“Yes.” Penny sighed with resignation, went into the kitchen and returned with a bottle opener for him.

“Thanks. They really should change the shape of those Coke bottles. They’re a gynecological hazard.” Dr. Quimbare turned and left.

Alone, Penny paced the floor of the apartment. She was exhausted to the point of being too tired to sleep. Automatically, she turned on the TV set and settled herself in front of it. The local morning news was just coming on, and she stared blankly at the screen, not really watching or listening.

Pictures of three subway riders with their throats cut were followed by shots of six teenage boys being dragged into a police station. There were photos of a Harlem riot which had evidently been triggered by a fire in a bordello run by black supremacists. Hordes of screaming Negroes fled a squadron of mounted policemen hurling tear gas bombs. Then there were pictures of people drowning on West Forty-second Street where a watermain had burst. This was followed by action shots of a Tong war in Chinatown. From there the camera zoomed in on Brooklyn where a local archeological expedition had unearthed a Canarsie burial grounds used by Murder, Inc. Next the camera crossed into Queens for films of Jamaica Avenue where eight storefronts had been blown in by dynamite and the stores thoroughly looted. After that came the Bronx for pictures of the breaking up of a narcotics ring; the police had pinpointed the ring when a local adolescent bagel burglar had confessed that his crimes were prompted by his need for money to support his habit. Finally, the broadcast covered the latest longshoremen’s strike in Staten Island with a series of truly artistic documentary films footage catching the ultra-realism of stomachs being sliced with baling hooks jaws being broken with brass knuckles and scabs’ scabs being re-opened with blackjacks. There was a brief shot of the paparazzi tearing Macello Pastrami’s limbs from his body down on Mulberry Street, and then the soft, friendly face of the announcer filled the screen and the strident, hard-sell sound of his voice blasted forth.

“Remember,” he said, “New York is a Summer Festival!”

These words were the first thing to register with Penny since she’d turned on the set. “New York is a Summer Festival!” she repeated to herself bitterly, thinking of all that had happened to her during only one night in the Empire City. Morosely, masochistically, she went over the events of the night in her mind.

In retrospect, the true awfulness of the predicament in which they’d left her was driven home to Penny. After everything that had happened, she was still a virgin! Her damnable, unwanted chastity was still intact.

She’d gone away for the weekend with Studs, lain naked in his arms, the arms of a man well-known to be a rogue, and still she was a virgin! She’d been made love to orally by a Lesbian, but that had made no real difference. She’d been threatened with rape by a gang of hoodlums in Central Park; alas, she had saved herself and not been raped. She had almost been anally assaulted by a mad Irishman with an infantile sexual orientation, but her maidenhood itself had never really been in danger. She had whipped a man and been whipped by him, yet still that one sharp pain of virtue overcome had eluded her. She had been abducted by the most virile-looking of men, tall and strong, with ebony skin, but he could not have solved Penny’s problem if he’d wanted to, for he was a eunuch. Yes, she’d even worked in a bordello without managing to lose her virginity! She’d made oral love to a man without inspiring him to relieve her of her burden; she’d done everything she could think of to stimulate him and in the end she’d left him a pain-wracked wreck. She’d sought Oriental relief without success. And then she’d even participated in a Roman orgy and emerged with her chastity unsullied. And, lastly, a gynecologist had toyed with her at length with results that were merely masturbatory, but not productive of that fulfillment which only the sex act itself can bring a girl.

In short, Penny summed up to herself, in the course of this one night in which she’d determined to end her chaste state, she’d experienced cunnilingus with a Lesbian, committed fellatio, been anally humiliated, known both masochism and sadism, played the part of a voyeur, almost been raped, worked in a brothel, participated in an an orgy, been masturbated several times, and yet was still a virgin! After such experiences, was it likely that she ever would hear “the liquid sounds of love-making?” Would she never sniff “the sweet aroma of animal desire”? Was her body never to “burn with passion”?

Was the darling girl doomed to be forever a hopeless virgin?

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

No!

Fate had decided otherwise. As the morning sun climbed up the blue steps of the sky, the unhappy girl grew drowsy and began to nod in front of the TV set. She might have slipped into a deep sleep, but she was prevented when the telephone began to ring once again.

She picked up the receiver. “Hello.”

“Hello, Penny? It’s Studs. I’ve been trying to get you all night. Where have you been?”

Penny ignored the question. “What do you want?” she asked sullenly.

“First of all to apologize. Really. I started thinking as soon as you’d stormed out of the bungalow and I realized what an absolute jerk I’d acted like. And then I began to worry. You’d gone off without your clothes, without your pocketbook, without any money. I went out to look for you, but you were nowhere to be found. Finally, I came back to the city, to my place. That’s where I am now. And I’ve been trying to reach you all night so I could return your things and tell you how sorry I am. Not just about the argument, Penny. About the way things turned out and how square I acted, too. Honest, I’ve been kicking myself all night. Please, can’t I come up and bring back your stuff and maybe try to make it up to you?”

“Well, all right.” Penny tried to make her voice sound as if she couldn’t care less, but her heart was beating like a triphammer in high gear. “Come on over.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” Studs hung up.

Penny bounded from the couch into the bathroom. She let her housecoat fall to the floor and dived into the stall shower. She put on a shower cap, turned the spiggot and immediately was enveloped in a cloud of steam. She scrubbed her beautiful young body until the skin was ivory clean and tinged with the color of rose petals. Then she stepped out of the shower, wrapped herself in a large Turkish towel, and rubbed herself dry. Her flesh was tingling now, and she looked with approval at her naked reflection in the mirror on the back of the bathroom door. She kept looking as she combed out her golden hair and tied it with a ribbon in a nest ponytail. Her breasts, so firm, the tips rigid with anticipation, looked back at her like crimson dotted eyes. Her full, round hips swayed impatiently, provocatively. The arch of her milk-white thighs quivered with the eagerness of the soft, blonde-curled womanhood over it. And, turning around, she saw that her plump, high derriere was likewise atremble with new hope that this, at last, would be it.

Penny selected a dark green peekaboo negligee and put it on. It wasn’t quite transparent, but it didn’t quite cover her charms, either. Depending on how she moved, the tips of her ice-cream-cone breasts and the triangle of blonde down appeared and disappeared behind open net and close-knit embroidery. She was still pirouetting and admiring herself when the doorbell sounded.

“Wow!” Studs stood there for a moment and stared at her.

“Close your mouth and come on in,” she told him.

“Oh. Sure.” He moved into the living room, his eyes still riveted to Penny. “I brought your things.” He held out the package to her.

“Thanks. Well, aren’t you going to kiss me hello?” she said in a deep throaty voice.

“I sure am.” Studs put his arms around her and kissed her hungrily.

Penny’s lips parted to his kiss, and their tongues were live flames flicking at each other. She bit his lip gently and was rewarded by the sharp thrust of his manhood against her. “My,” she said breathlessly when the kiss was over, “that doesn’t feel like a man who’s determined not to deflower a girl.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Studs said, pressing against her even more firmly. “It was just a momentary aberration. I hope I’ll be able to make it up to you.”

“Just keep on with what you’re doing and I suspect you will.”

Studs kissed her again and they sank to the couch together. His hand found her breast and caressed the eager, straining, scarlet peak. His lips followed and bestowed loving, laving kisses on the delicate pink roseate. Then her buried his face in the deep cleft between the perfect orbs and his hot breath made the darling girl’s skin tingle.

Her precious red tongue darted at his ear lobe and he heard her making low, moaning, incoherent sounds deep in her precious throat. Her slender, delicate fingers sent intimate little shock waves down his neck, down his spine-billet-doux of building ardor.

Studs’ hands investigated the creamy velvety smoothness of her lightly curved belly. Again, his mouth followed. His lips fastened over her deep-cleft navel and he inhaled deeply. A bit of belly-button lint snagged in his teeth and he paused briefly to remove it. Then he returned to the oscillating pit with his deep-tickling tongue.

Again his hands moved lower. His fingers pushed aside the green net fabric and tangled in the golden down. Their tips grazed the entrance to Penny’s love-filled piggy-bank and came away balmed with the dew of amour. His lips swooped down to sip the nectar, but Penny stopped him.

“Wait!” she said. “Let’s get you undressed first. And then let’s go into the bedroom and get into bed and do it right. Come on.” She stripped off Studs’ jacket. Then her fingers were working at the buttons of his shirt, and her hands were hot and moist and eager on the bare flesh of his manly chest.

She unbuckled his belt and tugged at his pants. When they were off, she covered his legs with a series of quick, nibbling kisses that drove Studs wild. She knelt to take off his shoes and socks, and her bare breasts pressed against his thighs, arousing him even more, so that now his excitement was not only obvious, but truly throbbing and amazingly large. As impatient as he, Penny pulled off his BVDs to free it.

“Come on,” she said, still lusting, but almost fearful at this monster serpent she had aroused. “Let's go in the bedroom.”

By the time they’d settled themselves in the bedroom, Studs’ ardor had waned just a trifle. But Penny knew what to do about that. She may have been short on one specific area of actual experience, but she was a reader, this girl. “Just a minute,” she told Studs.

She sat down at her dressing table, in front of the mirror. One particularly stirring sequence from Vivien Connell’s The Chinese Room kept capturing her mind. She picked up her lipstick and began rouging the roseates of her breasts with small, deft strokes. This done, she took the lipstick and followed the lines of the lips of her nether-mouth until it too was outlined in shocking red.

“Isn’t that sort of gilding the lily?” Studs asked, breathing hard.

“If it is, then the petals will be all the more appealing,” she promised him, her voice husky with desire. She stood up, crossed over to a tall bureau, and climbed up on top of it.

“At a time like this, you want to play Tarzan? You’re meshuginah,” Studs told her, reverting to his ethnic background.

“Never mind. You just do as I say. Stand in the middle of the floor. Right there.”

Studs shrugged and stood where she’d indicated.

“Now, look at me.” Penny, perched atop the bureau, began to writhe so that her lipsticked breasts and red-etched marmalade-jar moved so erotically that they seemed to have a life of their own.

Studs stared. Slowly, he licked his lips. Slowly, his erect manhood regained its former proportions and swelled beyond them. Slowly, he started to move toward the hot, squirming girl.

“No! Don’t move! Stay right where you are! Brace yourself!” Penny tensed for a moment atop the bureau, and then she leaped.

Her aim was true. Her thighs fastened like a vise around Studs’ hips. Her legs twined; her ankles locked behind him. Her hands clasped his neck. and her liquid love-jar at last impaled itself on his thrusting harpoon.

She knew a moment of quick, sharp pain, and then ecstasy as they fell to the floor together in a mutual explosion of their passion. But that was only the start. Grasping her beneath her pillow-soft white buttocks, Studs lifted her to the bed without spilling a drop. And then he was on top of her, a brutal, primeval animal, a machine dispensing joy, a man—-yes, above all a man —tearing her flesh and making of her a woman at long last.

With it all, with the hurtling waves of desire carrying her to crest after crest of supreme happiness, with the kaleidoscope of colors exploding in her brain, with the searing heat turning her body into a human torch, Penny still found time to determine the answer to those questions which had been bothering her throughout the long night.

“The liquid sounds of love-making?”

Slurp-slurp!

Not very romantic, but Penny was much too happy to care.

“The sweet aroma of animal desire?”

The only odor Penny could detect reminded her of the smell of the locker room adjoining the girls’ gym back in high school.

She put it out of her mind.

“Bodies burning with passion?”

There was certainly truth to that.

Only when you came right down to it, sex really was awfully sweaty, and Penny wished her body would burn a little less lest her deodorant let her down.

But all these were only minor disappointments in the face of a major accomplishment. At last Penny was really being devirginized—and with a vengeance. And in the main, she wasn’t disappointed at all, at all.

Still, it had to end sometime, and it did. Studs ran out of breath and jizzum at just about the same time. One final thrust, they both saw stars, and it was time for the inevitable after-sex cigarette.

“That was wonderful,” Penny sighed, tired, but ecstatically happy.

“Uh-huh.” Studs was still trying to get his wind back.

“Ohhh!” Penny hugged him. “I love you!”

“Sure, babe,” he wheezed a trifle asthmatically. “I love you, too.”

“No. I mean it. I really do. I’m in love with you, Studs. No man ever made me feel this way before. You know, those romance stories I edit always say a girl just knows the real thing when it comes along. Well, they’re right. She does. I do. This is the real thing. This is love. I just know it. I love you, Studs! Do you love me?”

“Oh, sure,” he yawned. “Just wild about you, babe.” He stretched wearily.

“Do you really mean that, Studs?”

“Def, sweetie; in spades.”

“Oh, I’m so happy to hear that, Studs. Because, you know, I’ve been thinking. I was talking like an idiot back there in the bungalow. I was being absolutely sophomoric. I see that now. So you see, my darling, I’ve changed my mind.”

“About what, babe?” Studs’ voice was heavy with drowsiness.

Penny took a deep breath. “About marriage, Studs,” she told him. “I’ve decided. I will marry you.”

“Huh!” Studs shot bolt upright in the bed. He was wide awake now. “Who said anything about marriage?”

“You did. Back at the bungalow. You asked me to marry you. Remember?”

“I did? Oh, yeah. Yeah, sure. I remember now. But I apologized for that, sugar.”

“But I don’t want you to apologize. You don’t understand, my sweet darling. It’s I who am apologizing to you for acting like a foolish girl, for pretending to be so sophisticated and all. You were right. We’re meant for marriage. I love you. You love me. I want us to be married.”

“Now, just a cotton-pickin’ minute,” Studs said slowly.

“Why, darling, what’s the matter?”

“Well, let’s not go rushing into marriage. After all, we hardly know each other. Let’s not do anything hasty.”

“Hasty! But you said you loved me!” Penny wailed.

‘Well, sure, but what did you want me to say under the circumstances? That I hate you?”

“Then you don’t love me! Don’t bother denying it! You don’t! But why did you say you did then?”

“Well—uhh—it seemed polite at the time.”

“Polite! Well of all the—” Penny made an effort to bring her emotions under control. “Then why did you ask me to marry you when we were out at the beach?” she demanded. “Answer me that!”

“Things were different then,” Studs said evasively.

“Different how?”

“Just different.”

“I think I deserve an explanation of that, and I insist on having it.”

“All right. You asked for it. You were a virgin then.”

“What? You mean—? But that’s ridiculous. After all, you’re the man who destroyed my virginity. You’ve got no cause to be jealous, or to feel like this. If you marry me, you’ll still be the only man to have carnal knowledge of me.”

“I’m sorry,” Studs said. “I could never marry you, Penny.”

“Why not?”

Studs was silent for a long moment, searching for the words to frame his answer. In the silence, he fancied he could almost hear his dead father’s voice. My boy! A goy? Oi! A tramp who hops into bed with you the first chance she gets? Run! Run before it’s too late! Run and find yourself a nice Jewish girl to marry! “I’m sorry,” Studs said aloud. “I can’t marry you because you’re not a virgin any more. I just couldn’t marry a girl who treats her virtue so lightly. And now, I guess I’d better be going.”

“I just guess you had,” Penny said. “And fast! Before I forget I used to be a lady!”

Studs pulled on his clothes hurriedly. “Good-bye then,” he said, starting for the door. He paused for just a moment to look at Penny with a sympathy that summed up their relationship to a T. “When you talk about this-—and you will,” he said in a voice that was both wise and resigned, “be kind.”

He was gone then and Penny was once again alone. Looking pitifully forlorn, the forlorn girl sighed to herself forlornly. She had given her all, and for what?

Sadder and wiser, she reflected sadly and wisely on how sadly and unwisely she’d acted. Still, she had after all, done what she’d set out to do. Despite her night of travail, despite her rejection by Studs, despite having sacrificed her chastity to a man whose attitude could at best be described as cavalier, Penny had gained the experience she’d been seeking.

She was no longer a virgin. As editor of Lovelights, as a byal Pussycat girl, she would now be able to bring to her task a certain authenticity. She had acquired the knowledge of sex, the knowledge of how it feels to give up one’s virtue, the knowledge of how a girl goes bad and how it feels to be discarded by a man once he's gotten what he wanted from a girl. These things would surely stand her in good stead career-wise. Thus, there was a certain amount of satisfaction to Penny in the face of her heartaches.

This satisfaction, however, was dispelled by a sudden thought taking possession of the darling girl’s mind. Tired as she was, it made her open her wise eyes wider and sit bolt upright in bed. Indeed, the thought all but overwhelmed her with its implications.

For Penny had remembered that in all the excitement of the long night, in the anticipation of sex and the fulfillment of it which marked the morning, she had forgotten something of vital importance. The darling girl had forgotten to take her birth-control pill!

For three years, Penny had taken the all-important pill religiously every morning. For three years she had taken the pill with her first cup of coffee and hoped for something to happen which would justify the talking of it. For three years, she had hoped in vain. For three years she had never done anything to get her money’s worth from the tablets.

And now, the first time that the pills would have served their purpose, Penny had neglected to take one!

The rueful girl remembered all the romance stories she’d edited. They all said the same thing. They all told her that a woman could tell when sex resulted in the beginnings of life inside her. Rabbit tests and such were mere formalities. A woman’s intuition was the telling factor. When a woman became pregnant, she just knew. Immediately, she just knew! Wed or unwed, it didn’t matter, she just knew! And now, Penny knew!

There was no doubt about it. She was carrying Studs’ child. She was pregnant! Her hand on her little tum-tum, Penny fancied she could even feel life stirring. Of course, she knew that was foolish. It was much too early for that. But it didn’t matter. She was pregnant. There was no doubt about that at all. Penny was pregnant!

Ahh, she would have no trouble in the future when it came to stories about the shameful plight of the unwed mother. Penny would be able to empathize from real-life experience. She would know what suffering was, just as she had learned what sex was.

Penny held her head high and looked toward the future bravely. She was prepared to bear her shame valiantly. She had sinned, and now she would pay the price. Like all the heroines in Lovelights, she would both repent and learn from her experience.

Penny would bring her child into the world, into the cruel, cruel world. She would lavish love and affection on it. She would hope it wouldn’t grow up to be ashamed of its mother, but if such were the case, Penny would understand and bear her cross stoically.

If the child was a boy, she would raise him to always respect women and their virtue. If it was a girl, she would see to it that she never made the same mistake her mother had. If it was a girl, Penny decided, she’d name it Candy. Yes, Candy Candie, sweet and loving and innocent. Penny could hardly wait for her to grow up so that she could write her story!

A girl. A boy. It didn’t really matter. Whatever it was, Penny would learn to love the little bastard!

Notes

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Hattie McDaniel (June 10, 1893 or 1895 – October 26, 1952) was an American stage actress, professional singer-songwriter, and comedian. She is best known for her role as "Mammy" in Gone with the Wind (1939), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the first Academy Award won by an African American entertainer. Bill "Bojangles" Robinson (May 25, 1877 – November 25, 1949) was an American tap dancer and actor, the best known and most highly paid African-American entertainer in the first half of the twentieth century. His long career mirrored changes in American entertainment tastes and technology. He started in the age of minstrel shows and moved to vaudeville, Broadway, the recording industry, Hollywood, radio, and television. Edmund Lincoln Anderson (September 18, 1905 – February 28, 1977) was an American comedian and actor. To a generation of early radio and television comedy he was known as "Rochester." Anderson got his start in show business as a teenager on the vaudeville circuit. In the early 1930s, he transitioned into films and radio. In 1937, he began his most famous role of Rochester van Jones, usually known simply as "Rochester", the valet of Jack Benny, on his NBC radio show The Jack Benny Program. Anderson became the first Black American to have a regular role on a nationwide radio program. Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry (May 30, 1902 – November 19, 1985), better known by the stage name Stepin Fetchit, was an American vaudevillian, comedian and film actor, of Jamaican descent, considered to be the first black actor to have a successful film career. His greatest fame was throughout the 1930s. In films and on stage, the persona of Stepin Fetchit was billed as "the Laziest Man in the World". Perry parlayed the Fetchit persona into a successful film career, becoming the first black actor to earn a million dollars. He was also the first black actor to receive featured screen credit in a film.

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