the nude who never

THE NUDE WHO

EVER

Ted Mark

1965

THE $72.39 MISTAKE

The only thing duller than Birchville was the people who lived there. And Llona Mayper's boyfriend, George Rutherford, was the dullest of all.

The thought of marrying George and settling down in the sticks was just too much. So Llona emptied her piggy bank — $72.39 — and took off for the big town.

She wanted to be where the action was. But the action backfired — and Llona was in hilariously embarrassing hot water.

Follow her unpredictable adventures in this ribtickling new novel by Ted (The Man from O.R.G.Y.) Mark — but make sure your laughter insurance is paid up first!

From Berkeley to Boston,

hip readers are asking...

WHO IS TED MARK?

He’s the man of mystery behind the Man from O.R.G.Y. and other improbable characters — the author of the decade’s most hilarious bestsellers — the creator of a craze that’s sweeping the country! Read his books ... and you’ll ask, too!

Chapter One

“I wish I was a fascinatin’ bitch.

I'd never be poor; I'd always be rich.

I'd live in a house with a little red light.

I’d sleep all day and I'd play all night.”

LOOKING at the man’s elbow sticking out of the top of the peasant blouse she was wearing, Llona Mayper caught herself humming the song under her breath. She couldn’t have said where she first heard it; all the girls in the high school locker room had been giggling over it last year when Llona had been in the senior class. But the message meant more to her than to the others, and the words had stuck in her mind.

The picture they painted was a lot more attractive than eight hours a day behind a counter at the Birchville Five-and-Dime. And a darned sight more appealing than a life of scrubbing floors for George Rutherford, or one of the other beaus she’d be sure to marry if she didn’t get out of Birchville soon. The thought made her restless and she shifted position. This wasn‘t easy because George’s car was a Volkswagen and had never been designed for even moderate petting.

The shift caused her a sudden thrill—something which was unexpected since she knew George’s technique by heart and had long ago given up expecting any innovations in it. My, she thought to herself, George is feeling bold tonight! Then she looked down to find that the pressure between her legs had come from her unintentional straddling of the floor-shift—not from George’: hand as she had supposed.

Both his hands were where they had been: one plunged elbow-deep down her blouse, the other playing with her right ear. The right ear and the left breast, in George’s limited rural love-making experience, were the key points in arousing girls. If only once, Llona thought to herself forlornly, he’d play with my left ear and my right breast!

“George,” she said.

“Umm?” George breathed into her left ear which he’d been nibbling at. He always nibbled her left ear while playing with her right ear because he liked to keep things even. But he never played with her right breast because he just couldn’t get more than one hand down the front of her blouse at a time and the left breast, according to both local folklore and his own experience, was definitely the more sensitive one.

“George,” Llona said, “let’s go home.”

He withdrew his thin, red-skimied, rural American arm from her blouse, turned to Llona and looked at her with injured eyes. “Gee, Llona, it’s still early,” he said. “Look,” — he waved his arm to indicate the darkened cars spaced out in the clearing which sewed as the local Lovers’ Lane —“nobody’s leaving yet.”

“I don’t care. I'm tired. I want to go home.”

“Aw, all right. Just one more kiss.”

She let George kiss her again, parting her lips to the cool tang of Sen-Sen on his tongue. Once that had made her thighs clench with yearning, but now it only made her wish idly that just once George would taste of tobacco, or liquor, or even onions. It would be a change, at least.

George felt her lack of response and broke the kiss short. “I guess you’re just not in the mood tonight, huh, Llona?” he said, starting the car.

Llona readjusted her bra strap and fluffed out her hair. “I’m a working girl, George,” she said. “I have to get my beauty sleep. Besides, these passion parties two or three times a week aren’t getting us anywhere.” She took out her compact and studied the damage to her makeup in the mirror.

“You can say that again.” George backed the car carefully out of the clearing and pulled onto the road. “I mean, they’re fun, but Llona, you sure can leave a feller frustrated.”

“You bring it on yourself, George.”

“Maybe. I sure do feel like you’re just teasin’ me along, though.”

“If you don’t like it --”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like it. It’s just that I guess guys are different from girls. When a girl lets you go so far — well, then you just naturally want to go all the way.”

“So the man has his fun and the girl’s left with a bundle while Mr. Passion Operator moves on to his next conquest. No thanks!”

“Aw now, Llona, it doesn’t have to be like that. In the first place, with a drug store on every corner there’s no reason why a girl has to get into trouble. In the second place, you’re not fair. Sure I’m hot for your body, but I’m willing to pay the price.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning we should get married; that’s what.” George pulled the car to the curb in front of Llona’s house and doused the lights.

“Well, I’ll be darned!” Llona was surprised, then angry. “That’s some proposal, George,” she told him. “You’re sure the romantic one.”

“Now don’t be mad, Llona. I mean it.”

“You really do, don’t you? Well, George Rutherford, you hear this: I’d go to bed with you a lot faster than I’d marry you! Maybe you’re willing to tie yourself up for life for a roll in the hay, but I’m not. I may not be the smartest girl in Birchville, but I’m too smart for that!” She opened the door to the car and slid out.

“Hey,” George said, “aren’t you gonna kiss me good night?”

“Drop dead!” She flung it at him over her shoulder and stormed into the house.

Her mother and father were sitting in the parlor watching TV as the front door slammed behind her. “Llona?” her mother called.

“Yes, Mom.”

“You’re home early. Did you have a good time?”

“Just dandy.” Her tone was sarcastic.

“What’s the matter, dear? You sound funny.”

“Nothing.”

Llona’s father walked into the foyer as she was starting up the stairs. Rufus Mayper was a big, rawboned man who’d spent most of his life on a farm before he’d gone to work in the Birchville Mill. He didn’t understand women, and from the time Llona had been born he’d felt ill at ease with her. The feeling had increased as she grew up. Boys were easy to raise; you just whopped ’em when they were bad an’ then they behaved. But girls were a different kind of animal. They were delicate and they got woman trouble and things like that. They had to be protected and kept virgins ’til they got married. Rufus wouldn’t really breathe easy ’til Llona had a husband. ’Til then every boy she went out with was a potential despoiler in his eyes. All this lay behind his words when he spoke now.

“That George Lutherford; he get fresh with you?” he asked suspiciously.

“No, Pa,” Llona said wearily.

“He does, you tell me. I’ll pin that whippersnapper’s ears back, you hear? Your Ma and me, we raised you to be a good girl. You see you stay that way, understand?”

“Yes, Pa.” Llona sighed to herself as she continued up the stairs to her room. Maybe her father meant well, but she was getting tired of his unending suspicions. Oh, he had reason to be suspicious, all right. She giggled to herself. He’d have a fit if he knew about all the necking parties she’d been on ever since she was fourteen years old. He was real old-fashioned, Pa was. Still, she was eighteen years old and had managed to stay a virgin, and from what she knew of teenage sex in Birchville, that was no mean feat. She closed the door to her room behind her and began to undress. When she’d stripped out of her clothes she stood in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door and looked at herself. Yes, she’d managed to stay a virgin all right. The question was, why? Looking in the mirror, it seemed one heck of a waste.

Her reflection showed a taller-than-average young girl with large, firm, uptilted breasts. Her waist was small, her hips a little heavy, accenting the voluptuous sensuality of her body. They tapered to long, slender, lightly muscled legs. Swiveling before the mirror, Llona looked over her shoulder at her derriere. It was small, but plump; one of her best features. It never failed to get a whistle when she wore shorts — possibly because of the provocative way it wiggled when she walked. Llona had developed that wiggle early in her teens and by now it was automatic.

She turned again and walked up close to the mirror to study her face. It was a pretty enough face, topped with a mass of golden-brown curls. But she was vaguely dissatisfied with it. The high cheekbones, the dark brown eyes, the pert little nose and firm chin were all right, but somehow the total result lacked something. The face was too innocent. There was nothing intriguing about it, nothing exotic that would make men look and say to themselves that here was a woman worth knowing more fully. The trouble was that it was too young and clean and shiny. It lacked experience.

“Yes, that’s it,” Llona told herself. “It lacks experience. I lack experience. And if I don’t watch myself, I'm going to marry George, or some other Birchville boy, and then I’ll never get any!”

She thought about the evening with George. So he wanted to marry her. No, that wasn’t strictly true. What he wanted was to make love to her—all the way. And if the only way he could do that was to marry her, then he’d do it.

That made her stop and really think about George a minute. They'd been going out together, on and off, since she’d been a sophomore in high school. George had been the first boy she’d kissed; a few dates later he’d been the first boy she’d let soul-kiss her. He’d been the first boy she’d let squeeze her breasts and the first to slip his hand inside her bra and caress the tips. Yes, George had scored a lot of firsts with her; Llona had to admit it to herself.

She also had to admit that each one had given her a thrill at first. The trouble was that in each case the novelty had worn off and left her dissatisfied. When that happened, she went through two stages. First, she used to lie awake nights, her body feverish, tossing with desire, wishing George had enough gumption to force her to go all the way. Then she’d start feeling contemptuous toward George for not having enough gumption, and this would dull the thrill and leave her feeling merely bored.

Still, she had to admit that there was this strong physical attraction between George and herself. Did this mean that she should marry George then, just to satisfy it?

No!

She’d be darned if she would. There must be some other way. She thought of her father and his obsession with keeping her a virgin. She’d never thought to doubt it before tonight, but now she wondered if she was really right. She thought about a survey she’d seen in a magazine recently which showed that 50 percent of college girls lost their virginity before graduation. Why should college girls have all the fun? And didn’t this just prove all the more how old-fashioned her father was? If she wanted George physically, why shouldn’t she have him? Why should she tie herself up for life just to satisfy her desire? After all, suppose she married George and then discovered she didn’t like the way he made love to her. Then she’d be stuck. This way, she wouldn’t have to marry him. She could just make love with him and then go on living her life from there. Once she had this accursed virginity out of the way, she’d be able to think a lot more clearly. On that note, she went to sleep.

Her determination to follow this plan increased during the days which followed. She decided that the very next time she went out with George she’d let him have his way with her. Then she had a second thought which made her sigh — and then giggle. Suppose she let him go all the way in the Volkswagen. Good Lord, they’d need an automotive engineer to untangle them! No, that would never do. She’d have to figure something else out.

But as it turned out, circumstances worked out without her connivance. The night she had a date with George her mother announced that she was going to a meeting of the Ladies’ Auxiliary at church. Since it was her father's night to bowl, Llona knew they'd have the house to themselves. She was waiting nervously, her body doused in perfume, her dress low-cut, snug-fitting and deadly, when George came up the front steps.

He looked at her and gave a long, low whistle. “Mmm, very nice,” he said. “Where would you like to go?”

“The folks are out. I thought we might just spend a quiet night at home,” she told him, leading him into the parlor.

The hi-fi was playing softly, the music low and romantic; she’d spent a lot of time selecting the records. Only one of the lamps was turned on and the room was mostly in shadow. Llona led George to the couch and sat down very close to him.

George may have been rural, but he wasn’t stupid. He didn’t know the reason for Llona’s obviously willing attitude but he wasn’t about to take the time to find it out. He put his arms around her and kissed her.

Her lips parted anxiously at the pressure of his, and her tongue was wildfire darting to meet his. George was surprised; it was unlike Llona to react so passionately. He reached around for her right ear and began to caress it gently, running his finger around the edge. He let his other hand drop casually to the bodice of her dress and began to move it rhythmically, each circle of motion bringing his fingers deeper and deeper beneath her bra. He let his teeth close gently on her left ear.

No neck-nape nibbler he, Llona thought to herself with some irritation, but ever the ear chewer. Then she thrust the thought from her mind and conscientiously tried to let herself be aroused by the pattern of his love-making. She concentrated on the fingers playing with her flesh and felt the old thrill once again as it grew hard beneath his touch. She wriggled voluptuously beneath his hand to let him know he was getting to her.

George kept it up for quite a while, the only variation being when he periodically left off masticating her ear to kiss her. Llona was finding it difficult to hold the pitch of her passion in the face of his seeming disinclination to go any further. Finally she decided that all he needed was encouragement, so she gave him some.

She let her hand drop to his knee and began letting her finger run lightly up and down his thigh. His leg muscle tensed at the gambit and his kiss bruised her mouth in response. Well, Llona told herself, that’s more like it! She shifted position so that she was lying across his lap, took the hand which had been playing with her ear and guided it down the length of her body until it rested halfway up her leg. Then she guided it in a caress which — even though she was responsible for it—made her tremble with desire.

Her legs parted, then clenched, trapping the hand between them. It burned through the skimpy material of her dress. “Oh, George,” she moaned. “I want you!”

“I want you too, Llona.”

She relaxed her legs and gently tugged at her skirt until his hand rested on her bare flesh. Then she tightened them around the hand again, writhing slightly, trying wordlessly to urge him higher. “I want you, George,” she repeated. “I want you.” Her breath was coming quickly now through parted lips. Her face was flushed. “I want you.”

Abruptly, George straightened up and pulled his hand loose. “I want you too, Llona,” he said, “but not like this. It’s not right. You’re a good girl and you shouldn’t be acting like this. I’d feel like a heel if I took advantage of you.”

Llona shot bolt upright and looked at him angrily. “Why, George Rutherford, you big hypocrite! All these years you’ve been cornering me in parked cars, necking me and making me pet with you and now you suddenly go moral on me? Just what have you been trying to get me to do all that time, anyway? You’ve been trying to get me to go all the way, that’s what. And when I finally can’t stand up against your fatal charm any more, you pull this. I don’t get it. Have you just been playing games with me? Don’t you want me? Is that it?”

“No. No, of course not.”

“What is it, then?”

“Well, like you said the other night. We shouldn’t take chances. Suppose you got pregnant or something?”

“With a drug store on every corner? That’s what you said. Remember? What’s the matter did you forget your Boy Scout motto tonight?”

“No. I’m ready— I mean, I've got ’em right in my wallet-— That is—” George’s face was brick red, and he backed away from her in confusion.

“Well, what’s stopping you then? You’re supposed to be such a big lover boy and everything —”

“That’s just it,” George muttered.

“What’s just it?”

“I’m not.”

“Not what.”

“Not a lover boy—that’s what.”

“I don’t get it. Then how come you’ve been trying so hard?”

“Well gee, Llona,” George said with a burst of frankness, “how else can a feller get to be a big lover boy—or any kind of a lover boy for that matter-—-unless he tries and tried hard?”

“Oh!” She looked at George wonderingly, and then slowly a smile began spreading over her face. “George, let me see if I understand what you’re saying. You mean you’ve never made love to a girl—any girl?”

“That's right.” George's voice was very low and he stared steadfastly at the tops of his shoes.

“George!” Llona’s voice broke with laughter. “You’re a virgin!”

“That’s right.” It was a whisper.

“Oh, George!” Llona collapsed on the couch and let the laughter bubble forth.

George clenched his teeth and watched her for a while. Then he couldn’t stand it any longer. “It’s not that funny,” he told her, but she kept right on laughing. “All right, laugh then,” he shouted. “But I don’t have to stand here and watch you. I’m going!” He started for the door.

“George, wait!” Llona brought her giggles under control and rose from the sofa.

“Wait for what?” His voice was bitter.

“Oh, George, I’m sorry. I really shouldn’t have laughed. It was mean of me, and I am really and truly sorry. Please, George, don’t go. That’s a good boy,” she said as she let her lead him back to the sofa and they sat down. “Now, believe me, I wasn’t just laughing at you. I was laughing at me, too. I was laughing at both of us.”

“At both of us? Why?”

“Now George, don’t be mad. Just stop and think about it a minute and you’ll see that it really is funny. I mean, you’ve been trying to make me for years. And for years I’ve been fighting you off because I wanted to keep my virginity. Then I decide I want you and when the chips are down you chicken out because you’re a virgin. Don’t you see the humor of it?”

George grinned slowly. “I guess you’re right,” he said. “It really is funny.” Then the grin vanished. “The trouble is that now I guess you don’t want me at all—I mean knowing all this time I’ve just been fumbling my way and all-—-I guess you’ll want a guy who knows what he’s doing.”

Llona felt a wave of sympathy for him wash over her. “Oh, George, no,” she said. “I don’t feel that way at all.”

But his eyes were again riveted to the tops of his shoes and he wouldn’t look at her.

“I mean it, George.” To prove it, Llona slid across his lap and raised her face to be kissed.

There was a passionate desperation in the way he kissed her. It was a fiery kiss, searching and demanding at the same time. Llona felt it from the tips of her toes to the top of her head. It left her shaking, but George didn’t give her any time to analyze her feelings.

This time she didn’t have to guide him. His hands were firm and sure as he pushed down the top of her dress and freed her bosom from her bra. His lips scorched her flesh as he covered her breasts-—both breasts-—-with kisses. George wasn’t following any preconceived plan now; he was just doing what came naturally.

His hand was sure as it slid up the length of her bare leg, as he swept her skirt out of the way with a flick of his wrist. Nor was there any hesitation as it traveled up to her waist to clench the top of her panties and slide them from her body. As in a trance, Llona raised her buttocks to allow him to slide the garment free smoothly. Then he pulled himself up for a moment, his hands working furiously at his belt and the buttons on his trousers. He fairly tore the garments off, then knelt on the couch, straddling Llona. He ran his hands down her breasts and over her body and looked at her for a long moment.

She arched her boy in impatience. “Now, George, now!” she said. “Oh, hurry!”

Fiercely, George plunged to do her bidding, but-— .

“What the hell do you think --!” Rufus Mayper stood in the doorway, outrage etched in every-line of his face, shock bulging every muscle in his taut body.

Llona jerked her head up, reaching automatically to pull down her skirt with the same gesture. It was an unfortunate movement. The top of her head caught George right on the nose. He tumbled from the couch, blood streaming from the wound.

“Dad!”

“Sir, I can explain.” George was frantically trying to fumble a handkerchief from his pocket to staunch the flow of blood.

“Explain, hell!” Rufus lacked only a shotgun to make his enraged fatherhood complete.

George, the shock of seeing Rufus just beginning to abate a little, stopped groping for a handkerchief and began to hurriedly pull his pants on instead. Llona was standing now, smoothing out her clothing, patting down her hair, trying frantically to think of something to say or do. George, buckling his belt now, was also trying to think. But his mind wasn’t working too coherently, as his desperate words proved.

“I, uh, was—was trying to show Llona a new kind of-— of artificial respiration the—the lifeguard at the pool was — was showing us t’other day.” He looked at Rufus hopefully.

“Artificial respiration!” It was the snarl of a lion teased beyond endurance. “An’ I s’pose you hadda take your clothes off to show it to her?”

“Well, yes--” George began. “You see—”

“Oh, stop it. George.” Llona said wearilv. “Mv father’s .ot a fool. Pa, you saw exactly what you thought you saw- I’m sorry, but there it is. Now what?”

“Now what?” Rufus bellowed. “Now what do you think? You an’ this Romeo’s gonna get hitched, that! what!”

“Suppose George doesn’t want to marry me, Dad?"

Rufus gave her a long look, then turned and strode over to George. He grasped the collar of his shirt in both hands and hefted him from the floor. “Oh, he wants to marry you, all right,” he said over George’s shoulder to Llona. “Don’t you, Romeo?” He shook him like a terrier shakes a rat. “Answer me. Don’t you?”

“W-well, yes,” George said. “As a matter of fact, I do. But not ’cause I’m afraid of you, Mr. Mayper,” he added hastly. “I want to marry Llona ’cause I really love her.”

“Sure you do, boy,” Rufus said, setting him back on the floor and removing his hands. “Sure you do. Well, then, it’s all settled. And the faster we have the weddin’, the better.”

“But I don’t want to marry him,” Llona said quietly.

“What’s that? Whadda you mean you don’t want to many him? You gotta marry him!”

“Why?” Llona said. “Why do I ‘gotta’? Nothing really happened.”

“You expect me to believe that?” Rufus asked ominously.

“It happens to be true.”

“That right?” His voice dripped sarcasm. “Then how do you explain that?”

Llona’s eyes followed down the length of his quivering arm. The outstretched finger at the end of it was pointed with sure logic at a spot on the floor. There, in an imtimate, compromising tangle, lay her panties and George's jockey shorts.

“I don’t care,” she said. “It’s not true. Nothing happened And I won’t marry George.”

“Oh yes you will,” Rufus said with absolute certainty. “Now you just go to your room. My future son-in-law ’n’ me’s got weddin’ plans to be makin’. Jes’ you sit right down there, son.”

George sat numbly down on the sofa while Llona ran upstairs, sobbing. She threw herself down on her bed and lay there sobbing for a long time. Finally, all cried out, she sat up and looked at herself in the mirror.

I won’t throw my life away, she told herself. I just won’t! And I won’t have some man marrying me because my father forces him to do it. It’s too humiliating! I'd rather die first!

Then Llona was struck by a sudden idea. She rummaged through her bureau for the little box where she kept the money she’d been saving from her job at the Five-and~Dime. She found the box and emptied it on the bed. Then she emptied the contents of her coin purse on top of it and counted the money. Seventy-two dollars and thirty-nine cents. It would have to be enough.

I’d rather die first, but I don’t have to. All I have to do is get away from Birchville!

Llona quickly pulled down a suitcase from the shelf of her closet. She began emptying drawers and tossing clothes into it. If she hurried, she could catch the midnight bus out of town.

Suddenly she was filled with exhilaration. She wouldn’t be doomed to just another dull life in Birchville. She wouldn’t. She was going away. Her life was just beginning. She could go where she wanted to go, do what she wanted to do, be what she wanted to be.

“I wish I was a fascinatin’ bitch . . .”

Llona began humming the words under her breath as she packed. Yes sirree, her life was just beginning! Just beginning!

Chapter Two

GERTIE MORAN was on her third circuit around the park and her feet were getting tired. It was a slow night when she hadn’t turned her first trick by eleven o’clock. Hell, she hadn’t even seen a John who might be a prospect. It was damn discouraging.

Gertie paused before turning the corner of the park. She straightened her shoulders, heaving a sigh at the twinge of arthritis that flicked her back muscles. She took a deep breath, put both hands under her bosom, and pushed it up. She knew it would slip down again, but while it was wobbling back to its more natural position, the motion just might intrigue some passing John. She twisted her too-red mouth into what was intended to be an inviting smile and turned the corner, telling herself that her first trick just had to be up this block.

Damn it! There she was again! Or, rather, still. That dame was still sitting there on the park bench. What the hell was the big idea? Didn’t the tramp know this was her territory. Yes, her territory, bought and paid for, cops, pimp, syndicate and all. So what was this little tramp trying to pull off?

The first time she’d spotted her, Gertie had thought it odd. Girls didn’t just sit around in this neighborhood. Not nice girls, anyway. It was a good place to get mugged, or raped, or who knew what. The second time around, still finding her there, Gertie had begun to get suspicious. Now that suspicion was beginning to grow into a certainty. She looked the chick over carefully as she strolled slowly toward her and then past her.

She was young, with dark blonde hair. She wasn’t made up, or dressed like a hustler, but then that didn’t always mean anything. Not when they were built like that, Gertie told herself, feeling a little envious at the big breasts straining against the material of the girl’s sweater. Yeah, she was built all right, and what the hell would she be doing here all this time if she wasn’t hustling? Gertie rounded the next corner and stopped to think about it.

After a moment she peeked cautiously back around the corner to see what the girl was doing. There was a guy walking toward her, slowly, like he was just out for a walk. A mark! Gertie spotted him. He sure might be a mark, walking along that way like he was just out for air.

Then she gasped to herself as the guy passed the girl on the bench. The girl’s head swiveled slowly as he walked past and there was a great, big, ear-to-ear smile that said “For Hire!” pasted across her face. But the guy just ignored it and kept on walking.

So the guy hadn’t been a John after all. Still, there could no longer be any doubt about it. That babe was hustling. And she was hustling her territory. Well, she’d just see about that, Gertie told herself determinedly as she crossed the street and walked briskly toward the bright lights of the row of stores two blocks away.

When she reached it, she looked down its length for a moment. Then she spotted the man she was looking for in front of a cigar store halfway down the block. She headed for him with fire in her eye.

“You, Claude,” she said, planting her feet firmly in front of him. “I want to see you.”

“Well, my goodness gracious, if it isn’t Gertie Garbage.” The effeminate young man in the tight-fitting chinos made her a mock bow.

“I’ll Gertie Garbage you, you puffed-up pansy pimp,” she told him. “Don’t you get wise with me. I pay you good money to steer me some Johns and keep the competish away from my territory, and what happens? I'll tell you what happens! You haven’t found me a live one in a month, and now there’s some young bimbo cutting in on me while you stand here batting your eyelashes and playing pocket pool with yourself. That’s what happens!”

“My heavens, you are in a tizzy. Now why don’t you just calm down, sweetie, and tell Claude what’s upsetting your tum-tum?”

“Tum-tum! Holy jumping Polly Adler! Two hundred pimps in this town and I had to pick a dishrag like you. I oughta have my cranium examined! All right! I’ll tell you what’s upsetting my tum-tum. Just what I said, that’s what. There’s some floozie down at the park lifting her skirt at every John that goes by and cutting into what little’s left of my business!”

“Is that all, sweetie?” He patted her cheek with an impeccably manicured hand. “Well, don’t you fret. Claude will just walk down there and tell the lady to move on. See? You don't have to get your ulcers all in a tizz.” He patted her again and swayed down the block toward the park.

Spotting the girl, Claude stopped mincing and adopted a more he-mannish swagger. His walk slowed as he came closer to her, and the look he gave her had none of the coyness of the flaunting fruit. It was the look of a man looking for a woman and it said “How about it, baby?” as clearly as though he’d spoken the words. The frightened half-smile she gave him by way of answer said “Okay!”

“All alone, girlie?” Claude sat down on the bench alongside her.

“As alone as you can get.” Her voice trembled.

“So am I. I guess that sorta puts us in the same boat.”

“I guess so . . . You wouldn’t think in a city like Caldwell, with so many people and all, that a person could be so lonely.”

“You don't come from Caldwell?”

“No. I come from downstate. A little town called Birchville.”

“I never heard of it.”

“Neither did anybody else. It’s so small cars sail through it before they can break the speed limit.”

“I see. Claude’s words were calculated. “You know, you don’t seem like a small-town girl.”

“What’s a small-town girl supposed to be like?”

“Well, you know, sort of rough around the edges. Unhip. Not sophisticated. You seem more like a chick that knows her way around.” Inside, Claude was laughing at the words; nothing could have been further from the truth.

But they made the girl brighten up visibly. “Gosh,” she said, “that’s the nicest thing anybody’s said to me since I got to Caldwell. I was beginning to think I had ‘hick’ written all over me in big red letters.”

“Not at all. If there’s anything written all over you, it’s ‘big time’.” Claude chuckled. “But I can’t call you that, can I? What’s your name?”

“Llona Mayper.” She held out her hand.

Claude took it. She had a strong grip, and he winced under his breath. “I’m Claude Roseberry,” he told her.

“Glad to meet you.”

“Ditto . . . Say, whadda you say to a cup of coffee, or something? A hamburger, maybe. You hungry?”

“Famished!” Llona’s eagerness punctuated the word. She took his arm and they walked up the block.

Claude’s mind was working as they headed for the diner. He’d known from her first words that this kid was no pro. On the other hand, she’d definitely been looking for a pickup. Why? That wasn’t hard to figure. She was hungry, that was why. She’d been trying to promote a free meal. But how far would she go just for a feed? Claude’s interest was purely professional. Just how desperate was this chick? Desperate enough so there might be something in it for him?

The way she wolfed down her hamburger told him she must have been pretty desperate, all right. He ordered her a second one and set about feeling her out. “How long you been in Caldwell, Llona?” he asked.

“Exactly a week.”

“You got family here or something?” If she did, Claude would be out the price of two hamburgers. Girls with families close by meant trouble, and Claude made it his business to avoid trouble.

“No. The only family I have is back in Birchville.”

“I see. So how come you come to Caldwell?”

“It was as far as my money would take me, and still leave me enough over to live on for a week while I found a job—at least, that’s what I thought.”

“But it didn’t work out, huh?” Claude’s voice was sympathetic. This chick might be a live one.

“You can say that again. I’ve been here a week and I haven’t found a job and I have no money left. I was getting awful hungry before you bought me this hamburger. I really appreciate it.”

“My pleasure . . . What sort of work do you do, Llona?”

“Well, back in Birchville I was a salesgirl. I figured on finding something like that here in Caldwell. Or maybe a job waiting tables. I didn’t know it was gonna be so tough.”

“Yeah, it’s real rugged finding work if you don’t have any connections.”

“You can say that again. You know what killed my chances? The unions, that’s what. The salesgirls got a union and the waitresses got a union. Before anybody’ll hire you, you gotta show them a union card. And it isn’t easy to get one of those cards. They told me I had to have some kind of previous experience. The union for waitresses wouldn’t even talk to me. And the one for salesgirls! I tell you, they got real high-falutin’ when I told them about my experience behind the counter at the Birchville Five-and-Dime. Said they’d take my application, but that their own people would naturally get first chance at any jobs. Seniority, they said. And then they wanted a ten-dollar fee just to join. That was three days ago, and I didn’t give it to them. Instead, I ate the last of that ten dollars for breakfast this morning.”

Claude’s mind clicked off the fact that she was flat broke. “That’s real tough,” he said. “What would you have done if I hadn’t come along?”

“Somebody else would have.” She gave him a mischievous smile.

“I guess so. To tell the truth, you looked like you were looking for somebody.”

“I was. What else could I do? A girl's gotta eat.”

“That’s right, Llona. She does. But she has to be able to pay for what she eats, too.”

“Oh, I don’t know. If a girl isn’t bad-looking, some nice feller like yourself will always come along to buy her a hamburger.” She giggled. “That’s what’s so nice about being a girl.” Then she stopped laughing and her face grew troubled. “A bigger problem is where I’m going to stay tonight. I had this cheap room I rented when I came to town, but I was only paid up through today and I had to get out. I checked my suitcase with all my things in it down to the bus depot so I wouldn’t have to lug it around. It took my last dime to do it, and I really am up a tree.”

It was an obvious pitch, and Claude picked her up on it. “You can stay at my place if you want,” he told her.

“Gee,” she said. “That’s awful nice of you.”

“I’m just a nice guy.” He laughed. “Besides, it’s a pleasure being nice to you-—and you’re gonna be nice to me too, aren’t you?”

Llona gave him a long look. There was no mistaking his meaning. When she spoke, the words came slowly, thoughtfully. “I don’t have much choice, do I?” But the sigh which followed them was only half resignation; the other half was anticipation. “You might be disappointed, though,” she added. “I—I don’t have much experience. As a matter of fact, I'm a virgin.”

“Sure you are, honey.” Claude had heard that one before.

“No, really. I am a virgin.”

“And I’m Marie of Rumania.” Claude lapsed into his natural girlishness for a moment. “But, dearie, whoever asked you?”

“I am!” Llona didn’t know why his obvious disbelief should annoy her, but it did.

“All right. All right. So you’re a virgin. There’s no premium on that these days. It’s just an annoyance. You want my advice? Forget it.”

“Okay.” Llona shrugged her shoulders. “I’ll forget it.”

“Good. Anyway, it’s only temporary. After tonight you won't have to worry about it any more.”

“I guess not.”

“That doesn’t really bother you, huh?” Claude looked at her shrewdly. He still didn’t believe she was a virgin, but it was a talking point.

“No. Why should it? Being a virgin never did me any good.”

“Now you’re making real sense.”

“Sure. Besides, I have to sleep someplace tonight.”

“You’re selling it kind of cheap, aren’t you?”'

That brought Llona up short. “I didn’t think about it that way,” she said. “But what are you complaimng about? You don’t have to put me up, you know.”

“I know . . . It's just that I can see you’re wising up to the big city real quick like. You’ll do okay in Caldwell. But you’re still not hip all the way. What you’ve got to sell is worth more than a couple of burgers and a flop for the night. You’re still not wised up to just how much it is worth.”

Llona looked at him through narrowed eyes. His words made her feel vaguely frightened, but there was something thrilling in what he was saying, too. She’d made up her mind that she’d do whatever she had to do to make it in the big city, and this fellow seemed to know just exactly what that might be. “I’m listening,” she told him.

Claude pushed back his chair to get a better view of her. His eyes went up and down her lush young figure like a butcher appraising a side of beef. “What you’ve got is marketable, sweetie,” he told her. “Highly marketable. I know, because, you see, I’m in the business.”

“What business would that be?”

“You might call me a promoter. I promote girls -- their careers, that is. I take girls like you with something to sell and show them the best way to sell it.”

“I don’t get it. How can you make a living at that?”

“Generally, I work on commission. Whatever my girls make, I get a percentage of it. But with you, it would work a little bit differently.”

“Differently how?”

“I’m not exactly sure yet myself. But if you want to put yourself in my hands, I’ll see what I can work out. What, say?”

“What have I got to lose?” The casual words belied the hollow feeling in the pit of Llona’s stomach.

“Okay, you sit here and have another burger while I make a few ’phone calls.”

All the time they’d been talking, Claude’s mind had been racing. This chick was too good-looking for him to make her just another street hustler. He thought about having her work a couple of the higher class bars in his territory, but even that seemed a waste of potentially top-grade material. No, this chick was A-one call-girl stuff if ever he’d seen it. She was really too good for his operation. He’d do better in the long run by placing her with some really posh operation. That meant going through the Syndicate, and it wouldn’t do him any harm at all to recruit a dish like this for them. They wouldn’t forget his loyalty to the larger operation.

Claude dialed a number, and a voice answered with a cultured “Hello.”

“Mr. Simmons, please,” Claude said.

There was a pause and then another voice. “Simmons here,” it said curtly.

“Mr. Simmons, this is Claude Roseberry.” Claude’s tone was respectful, but his very efforts to be ingratiating made him backslide into his usual effeminate way of speaking. “I have a really sweetie—sweet young thing I think you’ll be interested in,” he said.

“I’m listening, Roseberry.”

“She’s really a superb-looking dolly from out of town. No previous experience, but built like a jade-brick pagoda and willy-nilly willing.”

“So put her to work.”

“Mr. Simmons, she’s just too exquisite for my poor little operation. That’s why I called you. I thought maybe you could use her in one of your more posh endeavors.”

“I see. Well, that was very conscientious of you, Roseberry. Very conscientious indeed. You say this young lady is something out of the ordinary?”

“Quite. With the proper clothes and grooming, she’ll definitely-——but definitely -- be a veritable knockout.”

“And she has no ties? No family or boy friend around to make trouble?”

“Insofar as I’ve been able to determine, sir, none.”

“All right, Roseberry. I’m going to give you a number to call. Ask for Mrs. Cartwright. Tell her what you’ve told me. She’ll probably want you to bring the girl around to be interviewed. She’ll tell you the address.”

Simmons gave Claude the number and hung up. Claude dialed it, asked for Mrs. Cartwright, got her after a moment, and told her that Mr. Simmons had told him to call and explained why. The cultured female voice on the other end asked him some questions, seemed satisfied with the answers, and gave him an address to which he was to bring Llona. It was a large, respectable-looking brownstone house in an old section of town. A uniformed maid answered Claude’s ring and told them that Mrs. Cartwright would be with them directly. After a while a gray-haired woman of about forty-five, dressed in a well-tailored hostess gown, came in and introduced herself as Mrs. Cartwright.

“There’s no need for you to wait, Mr. Roseberry,” she told Claude, motioning Llona to follow her into a sitting room.

“But—” Claude began.

“Mr. Simmons will contact you about any—ah— arrangements for your services,” she told him coolly. The dismissal was final, and Claude left. Llona followed the woman into the other room.

“Please be seated,” Mrs. Cartwright said.

Llona did as she was told.

"‘Now, I’ll want to ask you some questions. Your answers will, of course, be kept confidential. Therefore, there is no need for any--ah—reticence on your part. Nor, due to the nature of our work, can I allow myself to tolerate any such reticence. If we are to establish a working relationship, it must have a foundation of utmost frankness. That way, I keep my girls from presenting me with any unpleasant surprises. I’ve found that things run much more smoothly and efficiently-and much more pleasantly for all concerned—when this is understood from the first.”

She went on to query Llona closely about her background, family, reasons for leaving home, reasons for coming to Caldwell, motives in “entering the profession”, scruples, if any, and many other things including her state of health, ambitions, and general outlook on life. Llona, intimidated by the formidably correct appearance and precise manner of this grande dame, answered everything with complete honesty.

Her replies seemed to meet with Mrs. Cartw1ight’s satisfaction. Then, during a momentary lull, Llona decided on utter frankness. “There’s something you should know,” she said. “I--I’m a virgin.”

“Now, my dear, if we are to have an arrangement, I must insist on absolute truthfulness. I will not tolerate lies from my young ladies.”

“I know. That’s why I’m telling you. I really am a virgin.”

“Now, my dear-— How old did you say you were?”

“Eighteen. Almost nineteen.”

“Ahnost nineteen . . . Now it may seem like a small thing, Llona, but I simply cannot be firm enough in my insistence that you do not prevaricate — even in unimportant matters such as this. You do want this position, don’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then we’l1 say no more about it.” Mrs. Cartwright’s tone marked the subject closed. “Now, about arrangements. Mr. Roseberry informed me over the telephone that you are temporarily embarrassed in your finances. He also told me that you have no place to stay. Therefore, first things coming first, the first thing you will need is a place to stay.”

“Why—- Yes, I guess so.”

“You sound puzzled, my dear. Is there something I can clarify?”

“Well I—-I guess I just took it for granted I’d be staying here.”

“Oh, no, my dear.” Mrs. Cartwright’s voice expressed delicate, shock. “I can see that you are laboring under a decidedly mistaken impression. This is not a—ah—-” Mrs. Cartwright groped with obvious distaste for the proper word, “--establishment. This is my home and I transact a certain amount of business from here, but my young ladies do not live on the premises. No, they most certainly do not. That would involve a different type of-—ah-—-business altogether.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to;” Llona was flustered.”

“It’s all right, my dear. Doubtless your faulty impression was only due to your innocence. And innocence has its charms. In this profession it can be decidedly appealing. Yes, indeed . . . In any case, you will need a place to stay. I have taken the liberty of marking some addresses down on this sheet of paper. Any one of them will provide you with comfortable accommodations and the privacy so necessary to our work at reasonable prices. Just tell them that Mrs. Cartwright sent you and, late as it seems to be getting, they’ll make you comfortable tonight.”

“But—?”

“Ah, yes. You’re worried about money. Here is an envelope, my dear. There is fifty dollars in it. It is an advance against your future earnings and will be deducted out of your first month’s commissions. You won’t have to pay for your room out of it. That will also be deducted. This money is so that you may purchase some clothes in keeping with the people you’ll come into contact with and so that you may have your hair done in the current fashion. I’ve written the addresses of a dress shop and a hairdresser on this slip of paper. I will call them first thing in the morning and they will outfit you properly. Be at the hairdresser’s at ten and the couturier at one tomorrow.”

“Gosh,” Llona said. “You’ve thought of everything. It’s sure nice of you to trust me this way.”

“To trust you? Ah, yes, I see what you mean. Well, my dear, there’s really no risk involved. Much as I hate to bring up the sordid side of our profession, I think I should tell you that my investment in you is completely insured by-ah--the powers that be.”

“The powers that be?”

“The Syndicate.” Mrs. Cartwright spoke in hushed tones. “They see to it that our young ladies remain scrupulous in matters of money and that they follow all the rules. It pains me to discuss it, but they can be distressingly brutal when a girl strays from our proscribed practices. I recall one sweet young thing—a little, Southern blonde girl with the most ladylike airs—-who attempted to lie about some of the fees she received. They say she’ll be able to see again in time, but she’ll never get rid of those horrible acid scars on her face. It just doesn’t pay to break our little rules. The consequences can be so distasteful.”

Llona shuddered. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Cartwright, I’ll follow all the rules!” she said fervently.

“Of course you will. I can see that you’re an honest, obedient girl just by looking at you. Don’t you fret about it. Put it out of your mind. Such things rarely have anything to do with our calling. It’s just that it’s wise to be aware of what the consequences of greed can be. Now, about our business arrangements.

“First, whichever room you take will have a telephone. I will be notified of the number. You may give the number to friends of yours if you wish, but under no circumstances are you to give it to anybody you meet through business. None of your customers will ever contact you directly. All your assignments will come from me, and I will give you your instructions as to where to go and who to see and what to charge.

“Secondly, about payment. As a rule your fee will be twenty-five dollars for a call, one hundred dollars for the whole night. For special assignments, it may run higher; and if this is the case, I will inform you in advance. Sometimes you may answer a call and the customer may ask you to spend the entire night although the original understanding was just for a visit. It’s all right to stay the entire evening in that case, but you must report the change in assignment to me and—naturally—you must collect the nightly rate.

“Thirdly, the manner in which your fees are split. Once a week you will report here with a little book in which you will keep a record of your assignments. I will have a corresponding record. At that time, you will deliver to me sixty percent of your earnings. You keep forty percent——as well as any tips which the customers may see fit to give you. However, you are not to solicit such tips. It gives the business a bad name. If they are the expressions of gratitude, we don’t mind. But we don’t want our clientele wheedled the way a cab driver wheedles an out-of-town customer. Except for your tips, naturally, all your earnings must be reported. This includes any future appointments you may make with a client.

“Now, is everything clear?”

Llona assured her that it was.

“Then I’ll bid you good evening, my dear. Remember to keep the appointments I’ve made for you. I’ll call you sometime tomorrow.”

“Good night, Mrs. Cartwright, and thank you.” Llona closed the door to the brownstone quietly behind her. The first of the addresses Mrs. Cartwright had given her was only a few blocks away. Llona walked there and was given a neat, clean, private room with a bath and a telephone. No questions were asked. She tumbled eagerly between the crisp, white sheets and fell asleep immediately. She slept soundly and dreamlessly.

It was a little before eight o’clock when she awoke. She dressed hurriedly and went down to the bus depot to retrieve her grip. She brought it back to the room and immediately left again to keep her appointment with the hairdresser. She emerged with her hair a few shades lighter and teased into a chic Italian fashion. She just had time for a quick lunch and then went on to the dress shop. It was a little after three in the afternoon when she emerged, still dazed with the experience of having been fashionably outfitted from the skin out.

She went back to her room and lay down, feeling both tired and exhilarated. A while later she had to get up to admit the delivery boy with the packages of things she’d bought. She was just debating whether to go out to eat, or to just take another nap, when the telephone rang.

It was Mrs. Cartwright. “Llona, my dear, I have your first assignment. You are to go to Room 507 of the Marlow Hotel at eight tonight. It will just be a visit-twenty-five dollars, you remember, my dear. The gentleman’s name is Mr. Lansing. Mr. Herbert Lansing. Don’t stop at the hotel desk. Go directly to the elevator, take it to the fifth floor, and go to Room 507. Tell Mr. Lansing that Mrs. Cartwright sent you. Is everything clear?”

“Yes, thank you, Mrs. Cartwright. Everything’s clear.” Llona hung up the phone.

Well,’ this was it. Her first assignment. After tonight‘ she wouldn’t be a virgin any more. Llona felt more thrilled than apprehensive. She wondered what Herbert Lansing would be like. She hoped he wasn’t old, or fat, or anything unappetizing like that. After all, it was her first night on the job. And it was her first time.

Yes, it really was thrilling. Llona was embarking on her career. What would this first night have in store for her? If she’d known, she might not have gone!

Chapter Three

SOME DAY the headshrinkers will come up with a theory to explain the Herbert Lansings of this world. When they do, it probably won’t do the Lansings a bit of good. Identifying the cause of their condition won’t make it any more likely to be cured. It doesn’t take any great amount of research to know it’s incurable. Like those other things they’ve pinned labels on-—accident proneness, masochism and claustrophobia, to name but a few — there’s nothing much anybody can do about the Lansing condition. It’s something a few unfortunate shnooks are born with, and sooner or later they just have to learn to live with it.

Herbert Lansing hadn’t yet learned. He was aware of his condition, but he hadn’t resigned himself to it yet. As a matter of fact, he was still actively fighting it—and that was one of the reasons he was sitting on the edge of the bed in Room 507 of the Marlowe Hotel and waiting for the call girl to come.

He’d first recognized this-—well, call it a personality malfunction—when he was in his early adolescence. When he was fourteen years old—some twelve years before this night at the Marlowe-—he’d taken part in his first game of spin-the-bottle and spun smack up against it. His very first kiss was to be placed on the mouth of a little freckle-faced, red-haired girl with pigtails who Herbie thought the most beautiful creature in the world at that time. The fact that she wore braces in no way detracted from his admiration; on the contrary, it only added to her allure since it gave them something in common; Herbie wore braces himself.

And that was their downfall. When Herbie -- young, inexperienced and eager-smacked up against his true love’s orthodonture, his fervor resulted in a tangling of their respective braces which was downright traumatic for both of them. While the other kids roared with laughter and shouted fantastic suggestions for deosculating them, Herbie and his wailing light-o’-love vainly twisted this way and that in an effort to unsnarl their dental work. Finally, parents had to be called to handle the toothy situation. But maturity was no help, and in the end a local dentist had to be summoned to extricate the pair. Herbert Lansing still woke up in a cold sweat from nightmares in which this dentist’s uncontrollable chortles echoed once again.

He ventured into no more kissing games during his teens. But with the onset of manhood and the removal of the braces, there came the usual stirrings of sexual desire. And with them came the proof that this condition of his was no mere teenage clumsiness, but an active fact of his life. It showed itself in many different ways, but the result was always the same: Herbie always failed to make out with the fair sex—and he always failed in some hilariously disastrous manner that couldn’t have happened to another man in a million years of concentrated effort.

Take his latest fiasco with a female. It could only have happened to Herbert Lansing.

After years of flopping every place but in bed with females, Herbert had decided that the trouble was he’d been concentrating on the wrong kind of girl. He’d been going out with ordinary females-—secretaries, college girls and the like. But he obviously had an extraordinary problem and it obviously called for an extraordinary kind of female to help solve it. This led Herb to seek feminine companionship at a notorious coffee house in the beatnik section of Caldwell. He figured he’d find someone there who was poetic and intellectual and extraordinary. Besides, rumor had it that these chicks put out.

A So he crammed his lanky frame into a corner chair at the coffee house and seared the skin from the roof of his mouth with the bitterest brew he’d ever tasted while he studied the beat chicks present. They were typical of the species, with hair as lank as the place was dank, shiny-nosed and lipstick-less, un-girdled, un-bra’d and un-combed, as alike one another as they were different from the ordinary girls Herb knew. Herb sat there, alone and ignored, for quite a while.

But the place was filling up, and finally a girl, unable to find a seat anywhere else, asked if he minded if she sat at his table. Herb assured her that he didn’t, and she wrapped herself around the chair like an arthritic snake looking for a comfortable position. She looked at him for a long moment, took a long gulp of her coffee, smacked her lips as if she really enjoyed it, and said, “Do you agree with Mailer when he says ‘Hip’ is the true American existentialism?”

Herb opened his mouth to reply. Fortunately, since he hadn’t the foggiest idea of what she was talking about, she didn’t give him a chance to. Instead she launched into a discourse which was unintelligible to him, filled as it was with words like “determinism” and “Zen” and “Oedipal” and “semantic” and “fix” and “pad.” But Herb soon discovered that all he had to do was nod in the right places to set her off on one conversational tangent after another. After a while he became aware that each such nod was raising him in her esteem. Obviously she thought him as entranced by the sound of her words as she was herself.

Finally, she took a deep breath, looked at his wristwatch, and informed him that it was time for her to “split”. Herb asked if he might see her home and she said that would be real “cool”. Enroute they swapped names, and hers turned out to be Adrian.

Adrian asked him in for a nightcap, and Herb began to feel as if he might be about to get some place. While she was fixing the drinks, he casually looked over the books in her bookcase. It was filled with works by Kierkegaard and Ferlenghetti and Camus and Gide. There wasn’t an author there whose name he recognized.

Adrian came up behind him. “Are you interested in philosophy? I am. I really dig the nihilists. Existentialism really grew out of their work, you know, Who’s your favorite philosopher?” This time she waited for him to answer the question.

Herb groped for the name of a philosopher. He could only think of one, so he used it. “Norman Vincent Peale,” he told her.

She looked at him as if he was something that had just crawled out from under a rock and she didn’t know whether to step on it or just ignore it. “I see,” she said in a withdrawn tone.

“I like to read, though.” Herb tried lamely to retrieve their former rapport.

“Really. What?”

“I beg pardon?”

“Who are your favorite authors?”

“Oh. Well, uh, Frank Yerby. Harold Robbins. Grace Metalious. Say, did you read Peyton Place?”

“No. And I didn’t read The Carpetbaggers, or Gone With The Wind, either.”

“I really liked Peyton Place.”

“I’ll just bet you did.”

“Gee, you don’t have to be sarcastic about it. Everybody’s got different tastes.”

“Yeah. Some are born square; some achieve squareness; and some have squareness thrust upon them.’ ”

“I beg pardon?”

“Just paraphrasing Shakespeare.”

“Oh . . . You mean I’m square; is that it?”

“Geometrically perfect.”

“You’re right; I am.”

“Well, at least we agree."

“I’m square, all right, and I admit it. But that’s no reason for you to act so snobbish about it. It’s not my fault that I ’m not hip. I’ve just never had the opportunity to learn about these things. And if everybody who isn’t square, like you, is just going to sit around looking down their noses at people like me and keep on acting so superior and all, how can you expect us to ever wise up?”

She studied him for a moment. “You know, in your own primitive way, you’ve hit on a real truth there,” she told him.

“Darned right. Look, Adrian,”-—he moved closer to her on the sofa-—“I really do want to learn. I may be uninformed, but I’m not stupid. And even if I am square, you can’t deny that we had a real rapport going for a while back there in the coffee house. Like I say, I want to learn. And you can help me. What do you say?”

“Play Pygmalion to your Galatea, huh?” Adrian was intrigued by the idea. “But how does one go about it with a genuine American primitive?” She was thinking out loud. “To bring you to a point of intellectual hipness would take years. And it might not be worth it because it might fall short of the only truly worth-while ultimate goal: oneness.”

“Oneness?”

“Becoming one with the world and the universe. Sacrificing ego completely to find the larger self which is all. Divesting oneself of mind and body and immersing one’s spirit in the Life Force. There are many roads to this goal --existentialism, Zen, Confucianism, Yogi . . . That’s it!” She snapped her fingers. “There’s no need for intellectuality at all! I’ll guide you down the path of oneness by instructing you in the art of Yogi.”

“Isn’t that some kind of exercise program?”

“It is a bodily discipline designed to merge the self with the Life Force, to make the individual one with all. Come, I’ll show you, and we'll do it together.”

Adrian took the drink from his hand and led him over to the opposite wall. She seemed to crumple to the floor before his eyes, her limbs rearranging themselves in a position that Herb would have sworn was anatomically impossible. “Just relax like this and let your mind go blank. It’s simple,” she told him. “After a while, you’ll feel the waves of oneness washing over you.”

Herb tried to copy her contorted pose and found he couldn’t. She leaped lithely to her feet and helped him. Oblivious to his grunts and winces, she twisted his arms, legs and body until he was in the position she’d demonstrated. He was literally tied up in knots and couldn’t move a muscle, but to his surprise he found that it wasn’t at all uncomfortable.

Adrian assumed the same position alongside him. “Now don’t talk,” she told him. “Just concentrate your mind on utter blankness.”

Herb tried to do as he was told, but found after the first five minutes that it was impossible. So, instead, he just let his mind roam at will. This lead him into a very pleasant daydream of how this Yogi lesson would culminate in an erotic interlude with Adrian which would fulfill his idea of what “oneness” ought to be. After all, this definitely came under the heading of establishing rapport; and that, according to what he’d heard, was the one essential in bedding down a beatchick.

The image of love-making with Adrian became more and more vivid as time went by—and Herb began to be aware that quite a bit of it was going by. He looked at Adrian. She really seemed to be in a trance -- eyes closed, lips parted, completely motionless. He didn’t want to break the spell, but they couldn’t stay this way forever, could they?

“Adrian,” he said softly, “don’t you think it’s time we took a break?”

She seemed to come back from a long way away. “Oh, my,” she said, “did you feel it? Did you feel my spirit at one with yours? Oh, it’s positively orgiastic! The rapport! To be spiritually at one like that -- it does things to me. It amuses me and makes me want physical unity as well. Don’t you feel that way?”

“In spades!” Herb told her happily. This was it. He started to get up.

His scream was a gem of vocalized pain!

“What’s the matter?” Adrian unwound herself easily and went over to him.

“I can’t get up.” Herb’s voice was panicky.

“Here, let me help you.” Adrian took hold of a shoulder andl a toe.

The scream this time was supersonic, setting dogs to whining blocks away.

Adrian let go hastily and stood back to look at him. It was the kind of puzzled look one bestows upon a wet shoelace knot. “I never put you in that position,” she said positively. “You must have squirmed.”

“I did not squirm!”

“You must have! I can tell! Only a squirm could have gotten you into this fix!”

“All right! So I squirmed!" The sweat was pouring ofi Herb now. “What’s the difference? The question is, how do I get up?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, great. What am I supposed to do, spend the rest of my natural life this way?”

“Well, I don’t see what I can do about it.”

“Please! You’ve got to think of something.” Herb’s voice was pleading.

“Wait!” Adrian snapped her fingers. “I’ve got it. There's a chiropractor down the street. He’ll know what to do. I’ll be right back,” she called over her shoulder as she went out the door. “Just don’t do anything in the meantime.”

Like what, Herb wondered. Just what do pretzels do to pass the time? He couldn’t think of anything, so he just tried not to panic, and waited.

Finally, Adrian was back. With her was a husky, gray-haired man carrying a black bag. He set the bag down and walked around Herb slowly and silently. Then he shook his head and walked back around him the other way. He shook his head again and repeated the routine. Then-—

“Ahal” he said.

He poised directly over Herb and pulled back the sleeve on his right arm. The arm hovered over the center of the contorted mass and then plunged.

Glassware in the suburbs was shattered by this scream! But as its echo was dying out, Herb found that he was able to get to his feet and even move around a little bit without any pain.

“That’ll be five dollars,” the chiropractor told him.

Herb paid him gratefully.

Adrian saw him out the door and came back to Herb. “How do you feel?” she asked solicitously.

Herb moved this way and that, bent over a few times and then sat down. “I feel just fine,” he told her, a note of surprise in his voice. “I am embarrassed, though.”

“Don’t be. It’s my fault. After all, you’re still a novice. I should have watched you more carefully . . . But you did feel that oneness of your spirit and mine, didn’t you? Wasn’t it just wonderful?”

“Just wonderful,” Herb lied.

“Spiritual oneness is only complete when it’s followed by physical oneness. I mean, you’ve no idea how wonderful it can be.” Adrian’s breath was coming quickly. “Just because we’ve had a little mishap, I see no reason to deny ourselves the experience, do you?” Her fingertips danced insinuatingly over the back of his neck.

“None at all.” Herb slid his arm around her and kissed her.

It was like grabbing hold of a tigress in the mating season. Her hands ran wildly over his body, tearing at buttons, clawing at zippers. Her sharp teeth bit urgently at his ear, his neck, his shoulder. Her body undulated and arched in a frenzy of desire. She grabbed the back of his head, pressing his face to her breasts, guiding his mouth over them and moaning with passion. Then she abruptly got up and led him to the bedroom, shedding her clothes behind her like a pigeon-fancier scattering peanuts.

She threw herself to the bed, naked now, her hips rotating hungrily. Herb looked at her a moment, feeling his body respond to her need, letting desire build inside him until he was taut as a coiled spring. He sprang. Onto the bed, on top of the eagerly waiting girl.

“Now!” she panted. “Oh, yes! Now, now, now!"

Herb thrust his body to meet her demand and—-

Banshees give prizes for shrieks such as that one was; no other human voice-box could have duplicated it.

Herb collapsed in an agonized heap to the sheets.

“What is it? What is it?” Adrian was having difficulty adjusting to the turn of events.

“My back! I can’t move. I think something’s broken.”

“I’ll get the chiropractor again.” Adrian ran to the closet, threw on a coat, and was out the door.

Slowly, the pain subsided, but Herb still couldn’t move. His position was the same, his body still clothesless, when the chiropractor came through the door. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, the practitioner studied the situation. Then he reached under Herb, manipulated a spinal disc between his fingers for a moment, and said, “Try moving now.”

Herb moved. “Okay now,” he said. Then, just noticing-—“Where’s Adrian?”

“She said to tell you she wouldn’t be back. She hopes you’ll understand. Something about physical unity having to follow spiritual unity closely and she just couldn’t wait, so she was going to see a Yoga Third Class she knew. I don’t understand it, but then I don’t understand anything that’s going on around here. Just as a matter of curiosity, would you tell me how you managed to do this to your self?’

Herb told him.

The chiropractor’s laugh was suspiciously like the dentist’s laugh which had been haunting him all these years. True, he was older now, but it rang in his ears just as traumatically. He kept hearing it as he sat on the edge of the bed and wearily began to dress. It made him recall the whole series of fiascos which had marked his adult attempts to have sex with a woman.

Like the time he was on vacation and he and a local farmer’s daughter had been romping in the haymow. The girl had been a tease, but after a half-hour of passionate petting in the haystack, her teasing had made her as excited as he was. She had wriggled out of her jeans, angled her legs at 6:15, and urged him to deliver the goods. As eager as she, Herb had burrowed deep into the hay and was just about to make the final move when a field hand had plunged his pitchfork into the hay—and into Herb’s bare, poised rump. He still had the marks of the stitches . . .

Or the time some friends of his had touted him onto the neighborhood nympho. Anybody could make out with her, they’d assured Herb. She wanted her sex when she wanted it, and guys had been known to succeed with her in telephone booths, on crowded subways, in swimming pools, in the backs of cars—everywhere and anywhere. She was just a natural-born roundheels and there was nothing to it. So he went up to her apartment one night and, sure enough, they hadn’t been snowing him. She was out of her clothes before they'd finished their second drink. But the first one had gotten to her. “Say,” she said, “did you ever do it in the shower?” Herb admitted that he never had. “Let’s,” she giggled. So he’d stripped off his clothes and followed her into the stall shower, where she’d braced her legs, arched her pelvis, and told him she was ready. Herb was also ready and he lunged eagerly. It was an unfortunate move. His shoulder clipped the hot water faucet and their passion was drowned in a scalding downpour. Herb still had the sears from that one too—as well as the memory of paying her doctor bill . . .

And there was the time that gir1’s bulldog had fastened onto his left haunch at the crucial moment . . . And the time the bed-slats had broken, pitching him to the floor where he’d banged his head on the nightstand und knocked himself out . . . And the time the brake on his ear had given way just as he was about to deflower the co-ed in the back seat and he’d had to leap into the front and steer it into a tree to keep them from plunging over a cliff . . . And the time . . .

What was the use of going on? The memories were just too painful! Herb sighed, slipped into his jacket, and left Adrian’s apartment. Was it any wonder his friends whispered that Herb couldn’t make out in a Russian brothel with a suitcase full of rubles?

The thought made him stop and stand on the stoop in front of Adrian's house a moment. Maybe that was the answer. Instead of trying to make out with all these different girls, why not just pay a prostitute and have done with it? But how did a fellow go about finding a prostitute? The ones he’d seen walking the streets were pretty unappetizing. But there must be some good-looking ones around—maybe more expensive, but so what? He decided to look into it.

During the weeks that followed, Herb made inquiries among his friends. He put aside some money for the fateful night. And finally, when he was ready, he called the number he’d been given, asked for Mrs. Cartwright, and made arrangements for the evening.

So now he sat on the edge of the bed in Room 507 of the Marlowe Hotel and waited for the call girl to arrive.

She came through the revolving door into the plush lobby of the Marlowe promptly at eight o’clock. She stopped for a minute to look around. She hadn’t expected the place to be so ritzy. Even the sounds of the voices in the lobby were muted by the paneled walls and the deep, plush carpeting. They were obliterated altogether when she entered the elevator. Llona couldn’t help commenting on it to the operator.

“Gee, it’s so quiet,” she said.

“Soundproofed,” he told her. “Every room in the place is soundproofed. It was a big selling point years ago when the place was first built.”

The door slid soundlessly open in mute testimony as they reached the fifth floor and Llona moved down the corridor looking for Room 507. She found it and knocked. It opened almost immediately and the gangling young man ushered her inside.

“I’m Herbert Lansing.” He introduced himself nervously.

“Howdy-do. I’m Llona Mayper . . . Uh, Mrs. Cartwright sent me.”

“Yes, I know. . . Uh, can I take your coat?”

“Why, yes, thank you.” She handed it to him.

“Would you like a drink?”

“Okay.”

“Bourbon all right?”

“I don’t know.”

“Pardon?”

“I’ve never had bourbon before. I’ve had scotch and rye, but never bourbon.”

“Oh. Well, I can order something else.”

“No, I think I'd like to try it.”

“Okay.” Herb splashed some bourbon over ice in two glasses and handed her one.

They sipped their drinks and looked at each other, neither quite knowing what to say.

Then Herb broke the silence, nervously posing the one question most asked of prostitutes—-and most loathed by them. “Been in this line of work long?” he asked.

Llona wasn’t experienced enough to know she was supposed to be insulted at the query. “This is my first time,” she answered truthfully.

“Oh, sure,” Herb said. He remembered hearing that prostitutes always said that.

“No, honest, it really is.”

“Okay; I believe you.”

“As a matter of fact,” Llona took a deep breath— “I’m a virgin.”

“Yeah? Me, too.”

“I mean it. I really am.”

“I mean it, too. I really am, too.” Herb wondered vaguely if she might actually be telling the truth. She's a virgin; I’m a virgin, he thought to himself. If it's true, at least we start out even. “Would you like another drink?” he asked.

“No, thank you.”

“Oh.”

There was another lull in the conversation.

Herb broke the silence. “Say, you know,” he said, “you’re real good-looking. I never expected you’d be so young and pretty and everything.”

The compliment reminded Llona of why she was there. She decided that if she was going to be a call girl she’d better start acting like one. “Why, thank you, honey,” she said. She moved closer to Herb and patted his cheek.

The gesture encouraged him, and he slid his arm around her waist. She nestled against him comfortably and his hand slid up to fumble open one of the buttons on her dress. His fingers slid inside to push aside the bra strap. He cupped her bare breast in the palm of his hand. Slowly, gently, he opened and closed his hand until he felt the soft, spread-out tip of her breast begin to draw together and harden. Meanwhile, his other hand played with her ear, circling the rim of it, tugging at the lobe, one finger investigating its inner part insinuatingly. He bent toward her, and she felt his teeth nibbling hungrily at the lobe of the other ear.

For a moment, that brought Llona up short. It was like repeating a bad dream -- a sexy dream that always ends in frustration. Herbert Lansing’s features blended into those of George Rutherford, and Llona had to blink her eyes to turn him back into Herbert Lansing again. All her feelings of excitement were dying out—-until she was struck by a sudden realization.

Herbert Lansing was playing with her right breast. Herbert Lansing was playing with her left ear. Herbert Lansing was nibbling at her right ear. George had always played with her left breast, toyed with her right ear and chewed on the left one! The pattern had been broken, and she felt with a sudden thrill that this time she wouldn’t be left frustrated.

As though to reassure her of this, George’s caresses grew bolder. The hand which had been playing with her ear dropped to her knee and crept under her skirt. The fingers kneaded the flesh of her inner thigh and worked their way slowly up her leg. Llona’s legs parted tantalizingly to admit them still higher. She leaned over to kiss him—still too inexperienced to know that even high- priced call girls rarely broke the prostitute’s rule of never kissing the customer. Her lips were slightly moist and burning with eagerness, her tongue a quick-darting flame whose fiery tickle made Herb want to devour her.

He responded by pulling her flush against him, the length of his body pressed against the length of hers now, the hand which had been between her soft, creamy thighs around back of her now, hard-pressed against her derriere, urging her to arch her body more so that she might feel the passion building. The muscles under the plump flesh tightened under his grip, and she edged one leg a little higher so that the heat at the core of their bodies might fuse.

They were both breathing heavily now, and their lips and tongues played furiously over each other’s bodies. Herb went wild, planting kisses on Llona’s mouth, her ears, her neck, her shoulders, and finally burying his face between her breasts, letting his tongue dip into the cleft, then sliding his mouth over to fasten on the tip of one breast, his tongue flicking it until it seemed to grow to twice its size between his teeth.

Llona cried out in ecstatic wonderment at the thrills which were possessing her body. It was more than she could stand. She pushed him away and rapidly unbuttoned his shirt, covering his shoulders and chest with burning kisses, biting passionately at the hardness of his muscles. Unthinkingly, guided by some passionate instinct, she undid the belt to his pants, pulled the zipper down, pushed aside his underwear, and buried her face in his stomach. Her tongue darting at his navel, and when his stomach muscles tensed in response, she laughed wildly and bit at them. The movement carried her searching mouth still lower, and suddenly Herb’s whole body became taut, his hands grabbed fiercely at the top of her head, pressing her mouth to him, his fingers tangling her hair, clawing at her scalp in his frenzy. Hungrily, Llona obeyed his unspoken bidding for a moment or so. Then, abruptly, she pulled away.

“We don’t want to waste it, do we?” she asked, getting to her feet.

“Well . . . No, I guess not.” Herb was still dazed with passion.

“But I think we’re ready now.” Her heart was pounding with desire, but Llona was determined to play her part right. “You look tired, honey,” she said. “You just lie there and I’ll undress you. Okay?”

“Sounds great.”

Llona bent over him and removed the shirt she’d unbuttoned before. Her fingers played over his chest for a moment, but when he tried to grab her, she danced teasingly away. “Don’t be so impatient, baby,” she told him.

She sank to her knees and wriggled sensuously back across the floor to him. When she reached him, she bent over his shoes, undid his shoelaces, pulled off his shoes and then his socks. She slid her hand all the way up between his legs, tickled him, and once again slid out of reach. She undulated back, grasped his pants firmly by the cuffs, and pulled them off. Then she strolled over to the closet, folded them neatly, and hung them up.

She returned to Herb once again. Her fingers undid the clasp of his shorts and slid down him intimately, tinglingly. Then she bent low over him for a moment, her lips pursed. They found their mark, drawing deeply, but pulling away before his wildly flailing hands could hold her there. “Naughty, naughty,” she said. “We mustn’t hurry. You just stay that way while little Llona takes off her clothes. They’re nice new clothes and she doesn’t want them to get all mussed up.”

Improvising, Llona turned the act of undressing into a tantalizing striptease. First she removed her dress and hung it in the closet, turning back toward Herb to run her hands the length of her silken slip in a caressing gesture which she punctuated sexily by rotating her hips. Next she kicked off her shoes, put one leg straight out on the edge of the bed, and began to remove her stockings. When they were both off, she whirled about the room a moment, raising and lowering her slip, letting Herb get an eyeful of her long, slender legs. Then she pulled her slip over her head, covering her face and thrusting the lower part of her body in a series of wild, suggestive gyrations. Pulling it off altogether, she held it over her head, turned her back to Herb, and did truly fantastic things with her plump little bottom. Still wriggling it provocatively, she took her slip and stockings to the closet and hung them up. Then she turned to face Herb and slid one strap of her, flimsy little bra down her shoulder. The breast she revealed was full and straining with passion. Herb got only a quick glimpse of the erect, quivering nipple before she pulled the strap up again. Laughing, Llona repeated the maneuver with the other strap. Then she reached behind her and released the clasp of the bra. But she didn't take it off. She just let it hang from her shoulders loosely, allowing her breasts to bobble against it temptingly, swiveling this way and that so that Herb could catch flashes of the firm contour of each one in profile. Finally, with a wild whirl which sent her hair flying, she tossed the bra into the closet and bared her voluptuous breasts brazenly to his eyes. She cupped them with her hands, and danced close to him to let their tips brush his eager hands and then away to jiggle them as if in happy anticipation of the love-making to come. Her hands moved down to her hips, and she moved more and more slowly as she began rolling her panties down. Except for a crucial area front and center, they were made of diaphanous material-—but Herb found the sight of her bare hips and buttocks call more exciting without even that wisp of transparent cloth to shield it. When the panties were rolled, all that was left to shield Llona was an approximation of the most teasing of G-strings. She kept this on for perhaps a moment more, standing in one place now, her body still except for this one covered area which seemed to have a pulsating life of its own. Then, slowly, delicately, she seemed to pull into herself and the panties fell to the floor at her feet. She kicked them with sure aim into the closet and seemed to melt onto the bed.

“I’m ready whenever you are.” Her voice was soft as she looked at Herb. Her eyes traveled slowly down his body and then stopped as she found what she was seeking. “And I see that you are ready,” she observed, the words an admiring whisper. “Ooh, so very, very ready.” Her body arched toward him from the bed. “Now, lover, now!”

Herb didn't need a second invitation. He fairly hurled himself across the room. Her arms opened wide, her legs curved hungrily to receive him. Then Herb was astride her, poised to bring to fruition the ecstasy which Llona had raised to such a high pitch of expectation. But --

“OPEN UP IN THERE!” The pounding on the door which accompanied the demand boomed like an all-out artillery barrage in their ears.

They froze, passion melting away like Jello in the hot sun, panic replacing it. “What's that?” Llona whispered hoarsely.

“I don’t know,” Herb whispered back. Then, with an effort, he raised his voice. “Who’s there?” he called. “What do you want?” The word “want” came out as a high-pitched squeak.

“House detective!” came the answer. “You got a woman in there?”

“Of course not!” Herb’s voice had the pitch of a recently made castrati.

“I’ll have to look around. Let me in.”

“Just a minute.” Herb looked around frantically, as though expecting some kind of help to pop out of the woodwork. “Quick,” he told Llona, “get into the bathroom. I’ll try to keep him out of there.”

Terrified, Llona did as he told her, closing the door behind her.

“Come on,” yelled the voice, “quit stalling! You gonna open this door, or do I have to break it down?”

“Co— Corning.” Herb quickly closed the closet door to hide Llona’s clothes from view and crossed over to open the door leading to the hallway. A burly man barged past him, his eyes darting about the room suspiciously.

“All right, where is she? I know you got a woman in here.”

“You’re mistaken, officer.”

“The hell I am! You know it’s against the law in this state to bring a woman to a hotel room unless you’re married. You could get five years. And if she’s a hustler—and from the way the elevator operator who spotted her described her, that’s exactly what she is -- it means the county workhouse for her. Now, where is she?”

“You can see for yourself there’s no woman here.” Herb wished his voice would stop quavering.

The detective gave him a disbelieving look, strode over to the closet, and threw the door open wide. “No woman, huh,” he said with satisfaction. He picked Llona’s panties up and twirled them about on the end of his middle finger like a streetcorner sharpie swinging a keyring. “Then how do you explain these? You in drag or something?”

While all this had been going on, Llona had been crouched in terror on the other side of the bathroom door, wondering what to do. She tried to listen through the door, but the elevator operator had been telling the truth when he said all the rooms were soundproofed, and she couldn’t hear a word. Then, while she watched in horror, the doorknob turned, and the door was pushed open a fraction of an inch and then slammed shut again.

On the other side of it, Herb was trying desperately to keep the detective out of the bathroom. “I tell you she’s not in there,” he said for perhaps the third time. “There is no woman here.”

“And I’m telling you I’m going to look for myself. Now don’t make me get rough. It’s the only place she could be, so you might as well face the fact that the jig’s up.” He reached behind Herb to grab the doorknob again, and; their hands clawed at each other for possession of it for a moment.

During that moment Llona’s mind raced furiously. Her eyes darted about for some escape, finally fastening hopefully on another door facing her from the opposite wall of the bathroom. She didn’t know it, but sometimes the room Herb was in and the one next door were rented as a suite with the bathroom between connecting them. This night they were rented as singles, the other room having its own bathroom on the other side, and so the door facing Llona was bolted.

She ran over to it and slid the bolt back. If it was bolted on the other side, she thought frantically, she was a gone goose. Behind her, the clicking of the lock on the other door made her aware of the tug-of-war going on in Herb’s room. Naked and panting with terror, she yanked at the doorknob . . .

The detective gave Herb a violent shove out of the way and plunged through the door into the bathroom. “I’ll be damned!” he said.

Herb came up behind him, visions of prison blurring his eyes. His jaw dropped, and he had to sit down weakly on the edge of the toilet. “See,” he said, unable to stop his voice from shaking, “I told you there was no woman here!” Perhaps it was just relief, but never in his life had Herbert Lansing been closer to fainting!

Chapter Four

AMOS TWEEDLEBERT was a Walter Mitty specializing in sex fantasies. He was a Caspar Milquetoast trapped in the children’s wading pool and asking futilely if anybody knew where the men’s room was. He was the most hen-pecked of husbands constantly seeking refuge in a fantasy world of Herculean lechery. He was a secret mental masturbator too afraid of his wife to even chance an occasional acting out of his imaginary and solitary lustings. The iron hand--a most apt simile—with which his wife Agatha ruled Amos Tweedlebert was cast into so solid a clench that it rendered all but his mind immobile. She was a true marital despot, tyrannical and asexual, to his cringing husbandliness. Yes, Agatha was ten times the man Amos would ever be—and she looked it.

She stood five feet eight to his five six, weighed 180 pounds to his 140, boasted broad shoulders to his narrow ones, sported a barrel chest (definitely more chest than bosom) in comparison to his caved-in ribcage, and had a voice like a foghorn where his tones were those of an asthmatic flute. Agatha was also an athletic type. She rode as if born to the saddle, played tennis with all the drive of her frustrated femininity, and exercised daily so that now, at the age of fifty-two, muscles stood out on her body like gnarled knots on a tough old oak tree. Connected as they were by prominent purple veins, they made of Agatha’s epiderm a contour map of the Rocky Mountains. Amos was afraid of horses, incapable of hitting the ball back across a tennis net, too easily winded for even the mildest exercise, and thoroughly intimidated by his wife’s boundless energy. Add that she had the sarcastic tongue of the born shrew, and that he was as slow to verbal warfare as he was to muscle coordination, and what emerges is a picture of the Tweedlebert marriage.

Why had Amos married her in the first place? It was so long ago—-more than twenty-five years--that it was a long time since he’d even had the gumption to brood about it. And, in the early days, he’d been too confused for brooding. It had all happened so fast. Amos had been like a feather caught up in the wind of determination that Agatha should have a husband.

The wind had originated not only with Agatha, but with her parents as well. Her mother was right out of Tennessee Williams, post~bellum and twittery feminine, an over-age belle who split her time between nostalgic recollections of the caresses bestowed on her by an exaggerated parade of gentlemen callers and worries over the fact that her daughter had this propensity for beating her own occasional beaus at Indian hand wrestling. As Agatha grew older, the mother became fixated with the idea of marrying her off before the dress-styles changed to reveal the incipient hair sprouting on Agatha’s chest.

In this determination, Agatha’s father backed her up. This, despite the fact that it was he whom Agatha took after and most resembled. Indeed, he was the only man able to hand-wrestle Agatha to a draw. Of course, for Ereudian reasons, it seems likely that she was particularly lenient with him.

In any case, dear old Dad slapped a dowry on his piano-legged daughter and the word went out that Agatha was up for grabs on the marital auction block. Alas, there were no takers. And this despite the fact that Pop had considerable assets in the form of the foundry he owned and ran which would someday be passed on to his only daughter. The lack of interest made Mom panicky, and the panic was passed on to Dad in the form of pressure to “for God’s sake do something”.

That’s how Amos 'I‘weedlebert was sucked into the picture. Amos worked for Agatha’s father. His position was lowly, but not without importance. He was the old man’s secretary. A male secretary had been Agatha’s mother’s idea—indeed, she had insisted upon it for wifely reasons following a hushed-up scandal involving her husband and his former secretary who had been all too feminine. But that's another story, and there's no reason to go into it here.

It's the courtship of Amos and Agatha which is of concern. That courtship really started with Agatha’s mother’s nagging Agatha’s father to bring home some suitable young men to meet their daughter. He ignored the nagging as long as he could, and finally, when he couldn’t ignore it any more, he grabbed at the handiest straw and came up with Amos. Thus Amos was plucked from his secretarial chair and plunked down at the dinner table one pot roast-y night.

The roast gave him heartburn. Agatha sprained his wrist at the very first hand-wrestle. Mom dulled his brain with talk of plantation days. And Pop shook him up with sly winks toward Agatha mingled with veiled threats about how much more secure his position at the foundry would be if he gained Agatha’s confidence since Pop set such great store by his daughter’s judgment. Amos went home in a quandary--and stayed in it.

Agatha, however, for her own perverse reasons, was smitten with this rabbit her father had brought home for dinner. Her normally sluggish heart went pitty-pat, and she confided to Pop that Amos was just the man for her. Probably it was his very weakness which most attracted her. At any rate, as of that moment his doom was sealed.

Pop courted him. He forced expensive cigars on him -- which made Amos sick—, dangled the carrot of the business under his nose with the assurance that it would someday belong to the man who married Agatha, intimidated Amos with deep grumblings and black scowls if Amos’ interest in Agatha showed the slightest signs of flagging, and found one business excuse after another to bring Amos home with him. Once there, the business reasons melted away and Amos and Agatha were thrown together to “have fun the way young people should”.

Amos had no recollection of ever proposing marriage to Agatha. All he could remember was that suddenly he found himself right smack in the middle of all those plans for a wedding. And so they were married.

The honeymoon was over before it began. After a wedding night devastated equally by Amos timidity and Agatha’s repugnance toward sex, Agatha dragged him out of bed at six the next morning to go horseback riding. His very first mount threw him, and Amos spent the next three months with his hip in a plaster cast.

Amos’ second accident set the pattern for their marriage. It occurred some three years later. Agatha had dragged him out on the tennis court despite his antipathy to all athletics. He slammed into the cement while chasing one of her choppier serves and broke his other hip. This time he was laid up for four months.

It was during this period that Agatha’s father suffered a heart attack and died. With Amos bedridden, that left it up to Agatha to step in and run the foundry. She’d been running it ever since.

Amos had long since resigned himself to being no more than her lackey. Once in the catbird seat at work, it was easy for her to tyrannize him twenty-four hours a day. Yet, despite the fact that Amos was rarely out of her sight, Agatha didn’t trust him.

She had inherited her mother’s outsize jealousy. And she had added to it her own sense of inferiority as a woman. The combination made her positive that even a worm like Amos wouldn’t hesitate to cheat on his marital vows if given the chance. So she kept up a constant vigilance to make sure that such a chance would never come his way.

In one sense, she judged Amos correctly. While he never would have dared make the slightest move in the direction of cheating on his wife, he had still managed to arrange things so that mentally he was the king of adulterers. Very early in his marriage he had discovered that a degree of sexual stimulation was available to him in the form of reading matter. Thus,. for more than twenty years, he had been sublimating with the works of such authors as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Rabelais.

He lived vicariously the thrills of the gamekeeper making the earthiest of love to Constance Chatterly. He reveled in the womanly flesh of the Tropics. He panted after Fanny Hill, flayed along with DeSade, and became a connoisseur of the joys of the Kama Sutra. And he managed to do it without Agatha’s ever finding him out.

The book he held in his hands this night as he lay alone in the big double bed in the room at the Marlowe Hotel was a typical example of his duplicity. The lettering on the cover, in the most staid Bodoni Bold, proclaimed it to be A Study of Accounting Methods and Procedures for the Small Businessman. The book under the cover was actually the current sizzling best-seller, Candy. Amos was avidly reading the part where the heroine seduces the hunchback.

Agatha had gone downstairs to the hotel drug store. Indigestion, stemming from her propensity to over-eat, was so constantly with her that by now it had become a part of her personality. It fit in well with the other components of her aggressive nature. However, this evening her distress was even more pronounced than usual.

This was probably because the business trip which had brought her and Amos to Caldwell involved the negotiation of certain contracts. Ostensibly, Amos was the head of the firm and it was up to him to bicker over the terms of the contracts. Agatha, of course, would never allow him to conclude any such deals unsupervised, but she was a good enough businesswoman so that she’d kept her mouth shut while the negotiations were going on. She’d briefed Amos carefully in advance, but nevertheless her frustration had been great at what she considered to be his ineptness during the talks. Even the subsequent tongue-lashing she’d given him hadn’t helped soothe her gaseousness. And so she’d left him alone while she went to dicker with the drug clerk over the price of Pepto-Bismol.

That’s how Amos got the opportunity to read a few pages of his book. Those. few pages were like a permissive balm spread over his frightened libido. He read them over again and shut his eyes. He was trying to form a mental image of the inimitable Candy. But the image he formed was more his than the author’s, and it looked suspiciously like the images he’d formed in the past of such heroines as Amber St. Clair, Moll Flanders, and Allison of Peyton Place.

It was an image of a naked girl, tall, large-busted, and a trifle heavy around the hips. The girl had a high, tight derriere that undoubtedly wiggled when she walked, and her legs were the long, slender legs of a dancer. Her hair was golden brown, her eyes seductively dark, her cheekbones high, and her lips formed in a permanently sexy pout. It was the image of Amos’ ideal, and it couldn’t have been more unlike his wife. Now he kept his eyes lightly closed and concentrated on the vision of the girl.

There was a slight clicking sound, as of a doorlatch closing. It wasn’t much of a noise, but it was enough to make Amos Tweedlebert open his eyes. The vision was still there. He blinked. It remained. He blinked again. Hard. Still there. Now he simply stared.

Naked, and exactly to specifications-—how often does a man’s ideal appear in the flesh with not so much as a mole to flaw it? Not often. So Amos Tweedlebert just kept staring. He was afraid to move. He was afraid that if he did it would dissolve.

Llona, having stepped through the bathroom door and closed it silently behind her, was likewise afraid to move. She was afraid of what the little, frightened-looking, middle-aged man in the bed might do once he got over his initial shock at having her materialize naked in his bedroom. So she just stood absolutely still until, a moment or two after her entrance, there came the sound of the hotel detective trying the door from the bathroom side. Llona had already latched it from her side, and when it didn't give the detective discreetly stopped trying to open it. However, the sound made her start and this in turn prodded Amos Tweedlebert so speak.

“Are you real?” he asked. Somehow the question seemed uppermost in his mind.

Llona nodded.

Amos thought about the nod a moment. “Flesh and blood?” he asked finally, still doubtful.

She nodded again.

“Then who are you?” he asked, beginning to be convinced that he wasn’t dreaming.

“Llona Mayper.” She took the question literally and answered it that way.

“How do you do?” Amos said politely. “I’m Amos Tweedlebert.”

“I’m fine. I’m glad to know you.”

“I'm glad to know you,” Amos answered honestly, his eyes beginning to dance over her nudity.

There was a long pause.

Amos finally broke it. “Aren’t you cold?” he asked.

“No. It’s really quite warm tonight.”

“Yes, isn’t it? Somewhere in the eighties, I should think.”

“Eighty-eight at noon, according to the weather report I heard on the radio,” Llona told him.

“But of course it’s not that warm any more. It always gets a little cooler at night.”

“That’s true. It’s prob’ly down in the seventies by now.”

“At least. Are you sure you’re not cold?”

“No. I’m fine.”

“Oh.”

Another long pause.

“Wouldn’t you like to sit down?” Amos asked finally. He’d been wanting to ask her for a long time, but he'd been afraid that any suggestion that she change her position might prod her into leaving.

Such was not the case. “Yeah,” Llona replied. “Thanks.”

She sat down.

“Ummm . . . Would you like a drink of water?”

“No thanks.”

“Uhh . . . Is there anything I can get you? I could call room service.”

“No thanks.”

“Oh. Well, is there anything I can do for you?”

Llona thought about that for a few minutes. “If I could just stay here for a little bit,” she said. “That would be a real favor.” She was thinking to herself that if she could stay put until the coast was clear she might go back through the bathroom into Herbert Lansing’s room and get her clothes.

“Why, sure,” Amos started to reply enthusiastically. “Stay as long as you—Ohmigosh!” He had just remembered his wife. “Oh, golly! I'm sorry. But you can’t stay here. You see, my wife —”

Llona reacted to his change in attitude quickly. It was a defensive reaction, but it took an aggressive form. Experience had taught Llona that when you wanted something from a man and he didn’t want to give it to you, the best way to change his mind was to act as if you were prepared to swap him something he obviously wanted. And Amos’ eyes had told her what it was he wanted from the moment he opened them.

“Forget about your wife,” she purred now, moving from the armchair in which she’d seated herself to the edge of the bed in which Amos was lying.

“I wish I could,” Amos moaned, “but—”

“You can!” Llona interrupted. “Believe me, Sugar, you can.” Her breasts were swaying enticingly only a few inches from his eyes now.

“You don't understand. She-—-” Amos was trying to push her away, but he slipped and his hand closed inadvertently over one of her breasts for support.

“Oh, I understand,” Llona murmured. “Believe me, I understand.” Her face moved down now, the lips hovering and pursed to meet his. Is this timid soul going to be my first lover? she thought to herself with a sigh. Well, if that’s the way it has to be, then so be it! She kissed him.

Momentarily, the kiss blotted out Amos’ fears. With a handful of Llona-bosom and a mouth being neatly crimsoned with Revlon’s finest, he forgot all about his wife and allowed himself to be carried away. A small tent began to take shape under the blankets, and he squirmed as his fondest fantasies took shape in his mind. However, with the end of the kiss reality intruded, and he began to be afraid once again that his wife might return before he got rid of Llona. He tried to frame this fear in words that Llona would understand. But they came out as an incoherent expression of his mounting panic.

“You’ve got to go,” he stammered. “Y-you’ve got to g-get out of here before-— I can’t afford—”

“No charge for you, lover-boy,” Llona assured him. She was still desperately playing for time. “Just for love. Because you’re so irresistible. Did anybody ever tell you that you were irresistible before?”

“No. But— Do you really think--? What am I--? N- now, you’ve-got to go before-——ummppf!”

The grunt cutting off his words was the result of Llona’s kissing him again. “The only thing is that you talk too much, lover,” she said when this kiss had ended. “Less talk and more action, hey?” She wrapped her arms around his neck and tried to tug him toward her.

At the same moment, Amos made another effort to push her away. The result was that they both lost their balance and fell to the floor in a tangle of bedsheets and blankets. Amos landed atop her with his pajama pants half pulled off in the scuffle.’

“Well!”

The voice sounded from the doorway like the blast of a trumpet sounding the call to arms. “Well!” There was a note of imminent retribution in it as well. “Well!” It was Agatha Tweedlebert standing in the doorway and looking down at them like some avenging angel of doom. “Well!”

“Hello Agatha,” Amos said stupidly, experiencing difficulty in angling his eyes past Llona’s naked derriere to focus on his wife.

“Well!”

“I can explain!’

“Who is that woman!” An arm shot out with a finger like a bayonet at the end of it. The point of the bayonet aimed straight at Llona’s bare rump.

“Lona Mayper. She—- Llona, this is my wife, Agatha. My wife, Mrs. Tweedlebert. Uhh, Agatha, this is Llona Mayper. Llona, this is my—”

“You already said that,” Llona observed. “You’re repeating yourself.”

“Uhh, quite. You see, Agatha, Llona just dropped by from next door—” Desperation provided Amos with inspiration. “To borrow something. That’s it. She wanted to borrow—”

“A husband!” Agatha’s voice boomed. “That’s what she wanted to borrow. A husband. My husband! And you, you insignificant little worm, you were all too eager to be borrowed!” her rage was mounting. “You hotel-room Casanova, you! I turn my back for a minute——! You spineless Romeo! How long has this been going on? How long have you been carrying on with this hussy?‘ How did you get word to her what room you’d be in? Don't just sit there with your mouth hanging open, you miserable litfle nincompoop! I want to know everything! I want the truth.”

“The truth is,” Llona interjected, “that your husband and I never met before tonight.” .

“Shut up, you Jezebel! I want to hear about his adulteries from his own lips. I've guessed about them for years, of course. But now I want to hear him tell it. Come on, Amos, invent some more lies for me!”

“My dear,” Amos began, “things aren’t what they appear to be. All that happened was—”

“Shut up! Did I give you permission to speak, you spineless philanderer? You’ll speak when I tell you to, and not before!”

“Look,” Llona said, “you’re jumping to a bunch of wrong conclusions.”

“Wrong conclusions! You sit there with your naked mammaries hanging out and have the effrontery to say I’m jumping to wrong conclusions? I find my husband sprawled all over you with his pajama pants off and I’m jumping to conclusions? I find the two of you rolling around on the floor like a pair of sex-mad hound dogs and you try to imply that I’m too suspicious? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? What do you take me for, anyway?”

“Not much,” Llona muttered.

“What! What did you say?”

“Nothing. I’m just trying to explain that it was all perfectly innocent.”

“Yes! Yes,” Amos chimed in. “Perfectly innocent.”

“Shut up and button up your pajama pants, you bedroom Romeo. I haven’t even begun to make you pay for this yet. And speaking of pay, just how much did he give you to come here tonight?” she asked Llona.

“Just what doyou think I am?” Llona snapped indignantly, forgetting what she was.

“I think you’re a whore. And I think you must want plenty to let a miserable specimen like Amos here sleep with you.”

“The hell you say!” Llona was angry now. “I did it out of sympathy. I took one look at you and I never felt so sorry for any man before in my life.”

“What? What did you say to me? Amos, did you hear that?”

“She’s got a point,” Amos couldn’t help saying to himself. Bu-t he said it too loudly and Agatha heard the words.

“That’s too much!” she exploded. She grabbed up the water glass from the nightstand and flung it at Amos.

It just missed his ear, and that seemed to infuriate her even more. She flung the pitcher after the glass, and it bounced off his shoulder. An ashtray followed, then a picture torn from the wall, then a lamp. The barrage grew more furious without showing any signs of abating. Llona and Amos crouched behind the bed together, dodging the flying objects.

“Your wife seems to be in a bad mood,” Llona observed.

“She has a terrible temper,” Amos said morosely. “But I’ve never seen her quite as upset as this before.”

“Her aim isn’t bad, either,” Llona remarked as an ashtray bounced off Amos’ head.

“Agatha, stop it!” Amos yelped. “That hurt!” Another ashtray whizzed past his nose by way of answer.

“I think it might be best,” Llona said, “if I left.” She started crawling toward the door.

“But you can’t go now!” Amos objected. “You have to stay and explain to her!” .

“Some other time, perhaps. When she’s in a more receptive frame of mind.”

“But you can’t just leave me here alone with her!”

“That’s right, you slut!” Agatha screamed. “Get out of here before I kill you! Husband stealer!” She fired a vanity case at Llona’s retreating rump.

It connected. “Oh, yes I can!” Llona yelled to Amos. And then she was through the door. Another object bounced off it as she closed it behind her.

She found herself in the hotel corridor. She saw a pair of figures rounding the corner of the hallway and starting toward her. Desperately, she turned the knob of the door behind her and edged the door open a bit.

“. . . do you think you are? Richard Burton? Rubirosa? Taking my money and spending it on a . . .”

“But, Agatha . . .”

Crash! It sounded like a vase shattering against the door. Llona shut it hastily.

The approaching couple was closer now. Frantically, Llona darted across the hall to the opposite door. She turned the knob. It was locked. She turned around just in time to meet the eyes of the people walking toward her.

They were a man and a woman, middle-aged, well-dressed. They froze, their mouths hanging open, their eyes staring at Llona’s nudity.

“Excuse me,” she said politely, elbowing past them.

“Excuse me,” they chanted automatically in return.

Their eyes followed her as she walked sedately down the corridor.

“It must be some kind of advertising gimmick,” the man said finally as she turned the corner and vanished from sight.

“Probably. But what could they be advertising?”

“Search me. But whatever it is, let’s buy a couple of dozen.”

Once out of view, Llona sprinted for the first door and pulled it open. It turned out to be the door to the stairwell. Confusedly, she raced down the stairs and emerged in the hallway of the floor below. Cautiously, she tried another door. It was locked. She tried a second and it opened. But she could hear the murmur of voices from inside, so she quietly slid it shut again. Then she tried a third. It also opened. No voices. She slipped into the room and closed the door behind her.

The room was empty. It looked as if it wasn’t being occupied at all that night. The bed was made and the windows were shut tight. Llona turned on the light and then quickly switched it off, afraid that it might reveal her presence. Then she sat down on the edge of the bed in the dark and tried to think.

What was she going to do? Somehow she had to get back up to Lansing’s room and retrieve her clothing. But was it safe to go back there? And dare she run the risk of going through the halls nude again? Suppose somebody called the house detective? Or suppose she got back to Lansing’s room and he was still there?

No, the best thing to do, she decided, was to just stay put for as long as possible. Let things die down. Maybe spend the night in this empty room. Then, in the morning, she could sneak back up to Lansing’s room. They wouldn’t be looking for her any more by then and it would be much easier to get her clothes and get out of the hotel.

So Llona settled back and decided to relax and maybe even grab a cat-nap until morning. In the privacy of the empty room, she was beginning to feel more confident that she’d get out of this mess. She was even smiling to herself as she remembered the look on poor Mr. Tweedleberfs face when he looked up and saw his wife.

But Llona’s ease was short-lived. There was the muted sound of voices outside the door of the room. There was the sound of the doorknob being tried, but Llona had locked the door behind her when she entered. Then there was the sound of a key being inserted in the lock.

Llona’s eyes grew very large. She trembled. It looked like she’d been caught. She tried to steel herself to face the music.

Chapter Five

PEOPLE get married for the damnedest reasons. And the reasons aren’t always the same for the two people involved. So it was with Joe and Alice Barker.

When the bellboy let them into Room 401 of the Marlowe Hotel that night, Alice Barker had been Mrs. Barker for exactly three hours and forty-seven minutes. Before then she had been Alice Murgatroyd, deflowered spinster, age twenty-one. Before then she had been consumed by one aim in life -- to get married --, and now that goal had been fulfilled. Marriage had wiped clean the slate, a slate which, after all, had only been adolescently sullied, and so ineptly by the half-dozen boys involved since her sixteenth year that it was certainly a girl's prerogative to consider it erasable.

The last of the half-dozen had been Joe Barker. On his head had fallen the stored-up tears engendered by his five predecessors. Onto his shoulders had been shifted the total weight of the guilt shared by all. Alice had confronted him with his responsibility for her de-virginization as though her five previous lovers had never even existed.

At first Joe reacted in the usual masculine fashion by raising a valid technical objection.

“I was very active as a young girl,” Alice told him demurely. “I did a lot of horseback riding. The doctor says-—”

And who was Joe Barker to argue with a medical opinion? It wasn't so much that he was naive as that he was emdly intimidated by Alice. This was a tribute to her, for In terms of experience, Joe had come to their marriage far more devirginized than Alice had.

Yet all his experience hadn’t prepared him for the ambivalent emotions Alice stirred in him from the first. Yes, the very first time he besmirched her honor, he unknowingly put himself in the position of a fish nibbling at the marital bait. The site of this initial floundering was a lakefront beach to the south of the city of Caldwell.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Alice Murgatroyd said when he kissed her for the first time under the stars. And then she giggled, for the line was a bit of dialogue right out of the Doris Day movie they’d just come from seeing.

“Why not? Didn’t you like it?” Joe Barker didn’t even faintly resemble Rock Hudson, but years of cinema-going left no doubt in his mind as to what his answer should be.

“Well, yes, but—”

“But nothing!” He kissed her again. Masterfully.

Alice returned the kiss and melted-—as the saying goes —into his arms. She felt every bit as good there as she looked. And, from Joe’s point of view, she looked very nice indeed.

Alice Murgatroyd wasn’t a beautiful girl. Nor was she an overly sexy one in the way that a Brigitte Bardot or a Sophia Loren might be considered sexy. She had a vivacious, freckle-nosed quality and the slender kind of figure that’s often described as “boyish”, but just as often turns out to be surprisingly voluptuous when freed of the tailored suits or sack dresses favored by its owner. Red hair and green eyes added a certain sexiness to the modest bosom and hips. And the way the moon over the beach made both hair and eyes sparkle lent an air of intrigue rather than concealment to the sack dress which covered her from shoulder to knee.

With the second kiss, Joe Barker’s hand slid to the bodice of the sack dress. “You shouldn’t do that,” Alice murmured, making a feeble effort to brush the hand away. Joe squeezed gently, but didn’t reply.

Alice caught her breath and the breast under Joe’s hand inflated. She stopped trying to push the hand away. Encouraged, Joe slid his other hand around her back and fumbled with the zipper of her dress. When he’d ‘slid it down to the waist, he unclasped her bra and reached around under her arms to caress her bare breasts.

It was hard to tell much about those breasts from that angle. Nevertheless, his continued caressing had its effect. Alice moaned low in her throat and her little teeth nipped passionately at his lower lip.

Joe started pushing the top of the dress down off her shoulders. Alice sat bolt upright immediately and pushed him way. “No!” she said firmly.

“No?” Joe echoed. “Why not?”

“Because.” And that’s all that Alice would say.

It took Joe half an hour to get back to the point at which she’d stopped him. When he did, he carefully refrained from trying to remove her dress. He didn’t want to make her balk again.

Instead, he allowed his hand to slip under her dress and edge up the silken length of her stockinged leg. Alice writhed under this new intimacy. Her body arched slightly. Her hips moved in a series of little, spasmodic jerks. Her bare thigh-flesh quivered under his hands.

His arm growing stiff from crooking his elbow, Joe started to push the dress up over her legs to make things easier for himself. Again Alice sat up sharply and pushed him away. The dialogue was repeated. “No!” she said firmly.

“No? Why not?”

“Because.”

This time it only took Joe fifteen minutes“ to restore the intimacy. Alice’s body seemed to welcome each new caress—-just as long as he didn’t try to remove her dress. Indeed, although Joe half-expected another rebuff when his hand slipped under the silken panties she was wearing, not only did it fail to materialize, but on the contrary Alice clenched her thighs to draw the questing hand closer to the eagerly moist flesh awaiting it. As the hand pressed the trembling heart of her passion, her body was thrown into a frenzy and she threw all caution to the winds.

With one motion, she tossed her skirt up and under her, tugged down her panties, and pulled Joe over on top of her. It happened so fast that he had only the barest glance at her milk-white thighs and the little triangle of red curls above them. Then her nails were digging into his buttocks in her hurry to get his pants and underwear out of the way.

“Now!” she cried out, and her body thrust upward to meet the stab of his plunging lust. And they thrashed about until the stars whirled in the sky and their mutual desire exploded, leaving them drained.

As soon as it was over, Alice demurely pulled her skirt down to cover her legs. While Joe lit cigarettes for them, she reached behind her to hook her bra and zip up her dress. By the time the match was out, she was as completely dressed as when he’d picked her up for their date earlier that evening.

Despite the fact that he’d scored, despite the fact that it had been very enjoyable, Joe was left with a vague feeling of frustration. He told himself it was silly, but the fact that Alice had denied him a look at her body bugged him. It continued to bug him during the months of courtship which followed.

Gradually, she succeeded in convincing him of his responsibility in deflowering her. The fact that she encouraged him to continue deflowering her helped convince him. And the fact that she never allowed him to look on any pertinent portion of her bared anatomy added tantalization to the convincing and provided just the extra goad needed to get him to propose marriage to her.

This teasing refusal to let him see what he was getting -- indeed, what he had already gotten!—bugged Joe more and more. Even during the three-month period between their engagement and the wedding, it continued to frustrate him to the point of taking in two and three burlesque shows a week. Joe had never thought of himself as a voyeur, but now he admitted the tendency to himself. Just because he was denied it, the sight of the charms he was fondling became the most important thing to him sexually. And, in an odd way, he sometimes found the sight of the near-nude strippers even more exciting than the act of sex itself with Alice.

Also, as the date of the wedding neared, Alice seemed to grow more loathe to grant him the love-making which had come so relatively easily that first night. Womanlike, it was as if her “virtue” became more precious to her as the legal sanction to dispose of it came within grasp. The culmination of this attitude took place the night before the wedding.

Joe and Alice were alone together in the apartment which Alice’s parents had fixed up for them. They’d brought down some wedding gifts which had just arrived and unpacked them and stored them away. Then they’d relaxed on the couch in front of the TV set.

“Tomorrow this time will be our wedding night,” Alice sighed.

“Yeah. By this time we’ll be in the hotel,” Joe answered.

“. . . keep your breath kissing sweet,” the TV set advised.

“And the next day, we’ll be on our way to the Caribbean for our honeymoon.” Alice smiled.

“But before that-—” Joe’s voice was husky. “Before that comes our wedding night.”

“. . . a show the whole family can enjoy," enthused the TV set.

“Umm, ye-e-es,” Alice purred.

“I’m really looking forward to that.” Joe licked his lips.

“. . . This Telethon, to be seen coast-to-coast, will go on all night until ten 0’clock in the morning . . .”

“But why wait?” Joe kissed her.

“It’s only one more day.” She pushed him away. “Doing it the night before our wedding is just . . .”

“. . . one of the causes of muscular distrophy . . .”

“Aw, come on! Why not?”

“. . . stay tuned for a preview of coming attractions on the Late Show . . .”

“Because it gives me a headache.”

“. . . when aspirin won’t help and aspirin with buffering won’t help, then . . .”

“Let’s make love, Alice. Come on. You’re just feeling a little shy tonight. There’s no reason why it should give you a headache.”

“It always gives me a headache,” she confessed. “Ever since I was sixteen years old sex—”

“. . . will never let you down. It cures not only the headache, but relieves the nervous tension that causes the headache.”

“Since you were sixteen years old? But I thought I was the first man who—-”

“You were. You were. I’m talking about necking. Petting, things like that.”

“Oh. Gee, Alice, I’m so aroused. This is our last chance to make illicit love. What do you say? Don’t you enjoy making love with me?”

“Sure I do. I want you as much as you do me, Joe. I want to—”

"Let Hertz put you in the driver's seat!”

“Then come on. Let’s!”

“Oh, all right!”

Joe switched off the TV set and took her in his arms. Her reluctance quickly dissipated as his hands traveled over the blouse and skirt covering her body. Very quickly, she was reacting with an eagerness matching his own. As her hand slid inside the waistband of his pants and down his naked belly, Joe became so excited that he forgot the pattern of their love-making and unbuttoned her blouse and began pulling her breast free of her bra.

“Stop that!” Alice pushed him away.

“Sorry. I forgot.” At that moment Joe was too eager to make an issue of the point.

But later, after he’d finished making love to her in the dark with most of her clothes still on, Joe commented on the incident. “Why do you always insist on keeping yourself covered when we make love?” he asked, his frustration giving an edge to the words.

“I just don’t like to be looked at. You know that.”

“Yes. I know that. What I don’t know is why.”

“It just doesn’t seem right.”

“But why doesn’t it seem right?” Joe wanted to know.

“I don’t know. It just seems bad to let a man look at my naked body. Any man.”

“Even the man you’re going to marry?”

“Yes.”

“Even the man who’s making love to you?”

“Well-— Yes. I guess so.”

“How about your husband? When we’re married“ I mean. Then do I get a little look-see?”

“I never stopped to think about it,” Alice said primly.

“Then stop and think about it now. Are you still going to be so damn modest after we’re married?”

“I don’t know,” Alice said honestly. “I just don’t know.”

“Well, we’ll see,” Joe had answered grimly. “And damn soon! Tomorrow night we’ll just see!”

Now it was tomorrow night, and Mr. and Mrs. Joe Barker were following the bellhop into Room 401 of the Marlowe Hotel. Joe had been mentally undressing Alice for the past three hours and forty-seven minutes, or ever since they’d said their final “I do’s”. By now he was all primed to strip her for real. He fidgeted and his eyes danced from her small derriere to her ladylike bosom as the bellhop brought in their bags, opened the windows and drew the blinds. The room looked spic and span, but still the bellhop delayed, patting the covers on the bed, blowing an imaginary speck of dust off the night table, checking the water glasses in the bathroom. The purpose of the delay was twofold. Firstly it was intended, to intimidate Joe into overtipping him. And secondly, he’d noticed the rice grains still clinging to Alice’s hair and he was getting a small sadistic kick out of prolonging their impatience. At last it seemed there was nothing else for him to do, but just as he was turning to leave, he noticed that the door to the closet was slightly ajar and he changed direction to investigate.

“Never -mind that!” Joe exploded as the bellhop put his hand on the knob and started to pull the door open. He waved two dollar bills and the bellhop quickly closed the door and crossed over to Joe to accept them.

“Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?” he asked, maliciously stalling.

“No,” Joe said shortly.

“Then I’ll be leaving now.” But he paused in the doorway, almost leering. “If you want room service --” he started to say.

“We know all about that!” Joe almost shouted. “Good night!”

“Good night, sir. Good night, madame.” He leered openly, just once, and left.

“I. thought he’d never go,” Alice said when Joe had locked the door after him.

“You and me both.” He took her in his arms and crushed her to him.

“Ouch. Joe! Not so rough.”

“Oh. Sorry. I guess I’m just over-eager. Come on. Let me help you out of that dress and let’s go to bed.”

“Just a minute. Not so fast. There’s something else we have to do first.”

“What?”

“We have to make a list of the cash gifts.”

“Now?”

“Now. Before we forget who gave us what. After all, I have to write thank-you notes.”

“Not tonight!” Joe’s voice was aghast.

“Of course not, silly. I’ll do that tomorrow. But I want to make the list while it’s still fresh in my mind. Then you’d better take all the cash we got and take it down and put it in the hotel safe.”

Joe looked at her with the newly opened eyes of a bridegroom really seeing his bride for the first time. “Oh, all right,” he agreed reluctantly.

“Now, first there’s this money order from Uncle Max. Twenty-five dollars. The cheapskate. He’s got more money than Rockefeller, you know. Twenty-five dollars! That’s what he tips the hatcheck girl. He’s an awful runaround, you know. A man his age! It’s just disgraceful. Poor Aunt Martha! Are you writing this down, Joe?”

“Yes, dear. ‘Uncle Max, twenty-five.’ ” Joe read from the slip of paper in front of him. “Uhh, Alice, wouldn’t you be more comfortable if you got out of those clothes?”

“I’m comfortable, Joe.”

“Aren’t you warm?”

“Not at all.”

“Don’t you feel grubby then? I mean, you’ve been wearing them all day.”

“I have not, Joe. I only put this suit on after the wedding. Now stop being silly and let’s get through with this.” “Oh, all right,” Joe sighed.

“Now, your second cousin Herman. How much did he give us? I saw him hand you an envelope.”

“It was cash. I forgot. I just put it with the rest of the cash.”

“Oh, Joe, how could you? Now I’ll never get it straightened out.”

“What difference does it make?”

“Because I won’t know what kind of thank-you note to send him. I mean, if he only gave you five or ten dollars, then I’d just send him a card. But if it was twenty or more, then I should write him a personal note. And over a hundred, we should have him to dinner after we get back.”

“My second cousin Herman never saw a hundred dollars in one lump in his whole life . . . Listen, Alice, why don’t you get outta that dress? It looks like it’s strangling you.”

“The dress is fine, Joe. Come on, let’s get on with it.”

Joe listed all the gifts as Alice called them off. When that was done, they put all the checks and money orders in one envelope and the cash in a second. Alice took the list, put it in her purse, and sent Joe down to the lobby to put the money in the hotel safe.

He made the trip quickly and let himself back into the room silently, hoping to catch Alice in the act of undressing. But she was still sitting in the armchair, still dressed just as she’d been when he left. She hadn’t even taken off the jacket of her traveling suit.

“Aren’t you going to get undressed?” Joe asked. “I mean, get ready for bed?”

“Sure,” Alice said. “But what’s the hurry?” she added coyly.

“I’m tired.” Joe stretched desperately to lend the words conviction.

“Tired? On your wedding night?” Alice was teasing him.

“I didn’t mean—”

“All right. Relax. I guess last night must have tired you out, huh?”

“Now, Alice—” Joe was tugging at his necktie, hoping that she’d get the idea and start to take off her clothes.

“Now, Alice—-” she mimicked him.

“Damn it!” he exploded. “Aren’t you ever going to get undressed?”

“Of course I am, darling.” Leisurely, she crossed over to her suitcase, opened it, withdrew a nightie and a robe, and started toward the door leading to the bathroom.

“Where are you going?”

“Into the bathroom.”

“What for?”

“Why, to undress of course, silly.”

“Why can’t you get undressed in here?” Joe asked, really exasperated now.

“On my wedding night?” Alice lowered her eyes demurely.

“Hell!” Joe said angrily, “at least that would be something new! We’ve had the rest of it before. Just in case you don’t remember.”

“Oh, Joe!” Alice wailed, bursting into tears.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. I’m sorry. Forgive me.”

It took a while before she did, but finally Alice snuffled her way to forgiveness. “I’m going to go into the bathroom and get ready now,” she said at last. “Is that all right with you?”

“Of course, darling. Of course.” Joe was still chagrined. “And I’ll get ready for bed here. Okay?”

“Okay,” She took her nightgown and robe, went into the bathroom, and closed the door behind her.

Joe stripped off his clothes quickly and tossed them on a chair. Then he got his pajamas out of the suitcase and donned them. He ran a comb through his hair and sat back in the armchair to wait for Alice to reappear.

It seemed like an awfully long wait, but finally the bathroom door opened and Alice came out. Joe looked at her and was disappointed. She was covered from neck to ankle by the bathrobe she wore. “Hey,” he said, trying to make the best of it, “don’t I get a look at that very special nightie you bought for our wedding night?”

“Maybe,” Alice said noncommittally. “We’ll see.”

She crossed over to the bed, got under the covers and only then did she wriggle free of the bathrobe. “Joe,” she said, modestly holding the sheet up in front of her to conceal her bosom, “do me a favor and hang this up, will you?”

“Yeah. Sure.” Brooding, Joe took the robe from her outstretched hand and crossed over to the closet. He opened the closet door, peered inside for a hook, found one, hung up the bathrobe, closed the door behind him -—and suddenly froze.

“What’s the matter, Joe?”

Slowly, he turned around again, inched the door open and peered inside. There she was! It hadn’t been an optical illusion. There was a naked girl in the closet. And what a girl!

“Joe,” Alice called. “What are you doing?”

Joe kept staring into the closet. He didn’t answer.

“Joe? Aren’t you coming to bed, honey?”

Still no answer.

“Joe! What is it?”

Joe just kept looking. The nude in his closet looked back. Neither of them seemed able to think of anything to say.

“Joe!” Alice’s voice went up a few octaves in a demand for attention.

Dazed, he turned toward the bed. Shock was still written on his face. But there was also a certain amount of interest and appreciation there for what he’d been looking at.

“What is it, Joe? What’s in the closet that’s so fascinating?”

Dazed, Joe simply threw the door open wider by way of answer. Alice saw her then.

“Eek!” she screamed. “There’s a naked woman in our closet!”

“I know,” Joe replied.

“Well, don’t just stand there! Do something about it!”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know! Just do something!”

“I know what I’d like to do,” Joe reflected, staring at Llona’s naked breasts.

“Joe! You stop talking like that!”

“All right! I’ll be quiet.” And he was, but he still kept looking.

“And you stop looking like that, too!”

“Like what?”

“Like you were sorry you’re a married man, that’s what! Joe, do you hear me?”

“I hear you. I hear you.”

“Joe! You make that woman leave.”

“I can’t leave,” Llona interjected. “I don’t have any clothes.”

“She can't leave," Joe pointed out to Alice. “She doesn’t have any clothes.”

“Then call the manager!” Alice shrilled.

“Why should I‘? What did the manager ever do for me?”

“Call the house detective!”

“No!” Llona pleaded. “Please don’t do that.”

“She doesn’t want us to do that,” Joe told Alice.

“I don’t care what she wants. You’ve got to get rid of her. If there’s one thing I don’t need around on my wedding night, it’s a naked woman who looks like that!”

“Oh, I don’t know. I sort of like having a naked woman around on my wedding night. Particularly when she looks like that.”

“Joe!” Alice wailed.

“All right. All right. I’m sorry.” He turned to Llona. “I think my wife wants you to leave,” he said politely.

“But how can I?” She spread her arms to display the totality of her nudeness. “Like this?”

“Oh, boy,” Joe groaned. “Why is it things like this never happened to me when I was single?”

“Joe!” Alice cried. “You sound like you’re sorry you got married.”

“And how!” Joe said under his breath, but loudly enough for Llona to hear.

“That’s life,” she told him softly, batting her eyelids at him.

“It’s my life, all right. This couldn’t have happened two days ago, or even one. Oh, no! Only to me could it happen on my wedding night.”

“Joe! What are you whispering about to that naked hussy?”

“I’m telling her the story of my life.” He didn’t even bother turning around to answer Alice. “The only thing I ever found in a hotel closet before I was married,” he continued to Llona, “was bedbugs. And now, at the worst possible time, something sensational like you turns up. If it was raining money, I’d be out with a fork!”

“I’ve had enough of this!” Alice hopped out of bed, no longer caring that her nightgown was transparent and revealed the most intimate parts of her body. She ran over to the closet and shook Joe by the shoulder. “You tell this woman to go away and come on back to bed!” she sobbed.

“In a minute, Alice. In a minute.” He didn’t give her a glance.

“Maybe you’d better do what your wife wants,” Llona suggested.

“Just once before I settle down to being a married man,” Joe sighed, “I’d like to do what I want.”

“It’s too late now,” Llona told him. ’

“That’s right! It is!” Alice agreed. “Now you come on back to bed where you belong.”

“I’m coming Alice. Just a second.”

“Joe?” she wheedled. “Look. Isn’t this sexy? Look, you can see my naked breasts and everything. Joe! Will you please look at me when I’m talking to you? Please, Joe! Honey, would you like me to take it off? Would you like that? Would you like me to do a little dance for you in the nude or something? Wouldn’t you like that, Joe?”

“I don’t think he heard you,” Llona said politely.

“That’s enough from you. Now you get out of here! Right now!” Alice reached around Joe and grabbed Llona. She began pulling her out of the closet.

“For gosh sake, Alice, be careful!” Joe protested as his wife yanked at Llona’s naked breasts.

“Yes!” Llona said. “Be careful. You pull any harder and I’ll end up looking like you!”

“Well of all the—! You get out of here, you-—!”

“I was just leaving,” Llona said haughtily, wrenching free of Alice’s grasp, drawing herself up to her full height and marching toward the door. “ ’Bye now, sweetie.” She chucked Joe under the chin as she passed him.

“So long for now.” He simpered.

“Joe!”

Llona closed the door quietly behind her. Once more she was naked in the hallway with no place to go. It was a hell of a predicament.

But then it had been one hell of a night for the virgin doxie!

Chapter Six

AND THE night was far from over yet. Llona stood outside the door of the room she’d just left and tried to decide what to do next. She couldn’t just stand there. Sooner or later somebody was bound to come along and spot her naked figure. She had to make a move. But where to?

She decided to take a chance on returning to Lansing’s room for her clothes. Surely the house detective would have left by now. She darted across the hallway to the stairwell and raced up the stairs to the next floor. Just as she started through the exit there, a room service waiter started for the door from the hallway side. Llona saw him before he saw her and plunged back into the stairwell. As she heard him open the door, she raced up the next flight of stairs.

She paused at the top and listened. There was the sound of slow footsteps coming up behind her. She pushed open the door to the sixth floor hallway and went through the entry before the footsteps could round the bend in the stairs.

Halfway down the hall a door opened. There was the sound of loud music and raucous laughter coming from the other side of it. A man’s head popped out of the door. He took a long look at Laura. His torso followed the head as he stepped out into the hall. The torso was encased immaculately in soup-and-fish.

The formal wear didn’t go with the face. It was a craggy visage with a flat nose, cauliflower ears and an overlay of scar tissue down both cheeks. There was a ridge of indentations—-as if from some long ago working-over with brass knuckles—down one side of the long jaw. He looked like a prizefighter; a loser, a plug-ugly past his prime and on the skids. One of his bloodshot eyes twitched drunkenly as he peered at Llona.

She stared back. She didn’t know what else to do. He took a few more lurching steps toward her, and she saw that he was very drunk.

“Hey,” he called as he approached. “Yer late.”

“Late?” Llona couldn’t make up her mind whether to bolt or not.

“Yeah. An’ whatta ya doin’ out here? Whadja, forget the room number or something?”

“No,” Llona said cautiously. “I didn’t forget the room number."

“Then come on in.” He was beside her now, and he took her arm to lead her back to the room from whence he’d come. “All the boys is waitin’ an’ they’re gettin’ impatient.” '

“Waiting for what?” Llona allowed him to pull her along toward the open door.

“Fer you. Tha’s what. Yeah. You’ll do fine. Jus’ fine. But wait a sec. Wait a sec! Where’s the cake?”

“The cake? What cake?”

“Your cake. Where is it? We paid for a cake wit’ a broad an’ whatta we get? A broad an’ no cake! What kinda service do ya call that?”

“I’m sorry,” Llona said, playing it by ear. “Nobody told me.”

“Told ya? Wha’d they have ta tell ya for? All they hadda do was stick ya in the cake an’ when ya hear the rooty-too-toot, ya jump out. Ain’t that simple enough? I tell ya, I dunno what’s come over people these days. Ya jus’ can’t get no satisfaction noplace.” He paused now and was standing in front of Llona waving his arms around with a sort of drunken petulance. “Ya order a cake wit’ a broad an’ ya get a broad wit’ no cake. Is it onna way, ya think? Or do I gotta call ’em again?”

“I’m not sure,” Llona said noncommittally.

“She’s not sure!” His voice went up as if he was informing some unseen audience of this latest inefficiency. “Jeez! Jus’ what in hell did Gertie say when she sent ya over here?”

“Not much. She didn’t say anything much.”

“She tol’ ya it was a party, didn’ she?”

“A party. Yeah. Sure. She told me that.”

“An’ did she tell you it was extra-special?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure. Extra-special.”

“All right then!” He poised in the doorway and spread his arms wide once more. “Then where’s da cake?”

“I’m sorry. I just don’t know.”

“Ahh!” He waved her inside and then turned his back on her in disgust.

Llona huddled beside the doorway and looked around. She saw the parlor of a large hotel suite with other doors leading off from it. There were about a dozen men in the room. All were dressed in tails. All had the hard-guy look of the man who had ushered her inside.

There were also three girls in the room. All three were stunners. They wore evening gowns. But the gowns were just a little too daring, just a little too revealing of the fact that none of the three wore any underwear beneath them. The three girls were respectively blonde, redheaded and brunette. The men pawed them freely as they passed among them.

The party had the look of having been in progress for a while. Empty champagne bottles and whiskey bottles were strewn about on the tables. Some were on the floor. Half-empty glasses perched on chair arms and windowsills. The ashtrays overflowed with cigarette and cigar butts. Still the room was thick with smoke. There were plates with the remnants of food scattered about. And, in general, the atmosphere was that of a drunken stag brawl.

There was a large, bright red banner strung across one wall. The letters “P.D.V.S.B.A.” were lettered on it in bold gold. Llona was trying to figure out what they might stand for when the little man sidled up alongside of her.

He was a skinny little fellow with a face like a weasel. He stared at Llona’s nude figure as if it represented a mouthful of carrion. “Hello-hello-hello,” he said.

“Hello,” Llona replied.

“You ain’t wearing any clothes,” he said.

“No, I’m not.”

“Yer naked.” He cackled to himself as if he’d made a great discovery.

“Yes. I am.”

“You come in ‘wit’ Rooney before. I saw ya.”

Surmising that Rooney was the man she’d met in the hall, Llona nodded.

“How come?” the skinny little man asked.

Llona thought fast. “Gertie sent me,” she told him.

“Yeah? Den where’s yer cake?”

“It’s coming. It’s on the way.”

“She hadn’t oughta sent you wit’out da cake.”

“I know. I’ve been all through that with Rooney.”

“Yeah? I’ll bet he was mad. Rooney likes everythin' to go off right. Dat’s why dey sent him down here to run dis shindig fer us. Dey wanna be sure we’re happy Wit’ everythin’, so dey send Rooney.”

“I see,” Llona said, not seeing at all. “What do those letters stand for?” She pointed at the banner.

“Dem letters? Don’cha know?”

“No. This is my first time here,” Llona said as if that should explain everything.

“Di’n’t Gertie fill ya in?”

“No. She was busy.”

“Oh. Well, dem letters stand for da Police Department Vice Squad’s Benevolent Association.”

“Police Department!” Llona shrank back.

“Yeah. Sure.”

“You mean all you guys are cops?”

“Detectives. Yeah.”

“Vice cops?”

“Dat’s right, sugar. But what you gettin’ so shook up for? We ain’t workin’ tonight. Dis here’s the annual wingding dey throw fer us.”

“They? Who’s they?" Llona wanted to know.

“Ahh, come on now. Yer wise, ain’tcha?”

“Oh, sure.” Llona did her best to look wise. “You mean--”

“Da organization. Da Syndicate. Dat’s right. It’s their way a showin’ their appreciation for the favors us guys downtown do for ’em. Every year dey send Rooney down wit’ da cream a da crop to put on a stag for the boys. Dis year dey done real good.” He patted Llona’s fanny approvingly.

“I’m glad you like it,” Llona said, flinching in spite of herself.

“Dat I do.” He reached out and squeezed one of her naked breasts the way a housewife squeezes a tomato to see if it’s ripe. A look spread over his face that said it was quite ripe enough for his satisfaction. “Yeah. Dat I do. What’s yer name, honey?”

“Llona. What’s yours?”

“Archie Flannery. You remember dat. You ever have any trouble down da Tenth Precinct, you jus’ ask fer me. I swing a lotta weight aroun’ dere. They never pinch a hooker wit’out I say so.”

“Archie Flannery. I’ll remember. Thanks.”

“Hey, whadda ya say you an’ me settle down on da couch over dere. Raven’s gonna go inta her act while dey’re waitin’ for da cake to get here. You ever seen it?”

“No. I haven’t.”

“It’s a gasser. Come on. We’ll have a front-row seat.” He led her over to a couch and sat down very close beside her. A moment later Rooney’s voice boomed out over the room. “Awrigh’, ya creeps, let’s quiet down now. Raven’s ready ta do her stuff. So grab ya-selves some chairs and settle down.”

There was a murmur as the men followed his suggestion. It died down as the brunette danced into the center of the room. Somebody killed the lights. The beam of a small spotlight appeared, focussed on Raven, and followed her.

She was tall, with thick, blue-black hair which hung to her waist. She was built big, with wide, bouncy hips, a firm but generous derriere, and a large bosom shaped like twin watermelons. She was exotic, with a sensual, Slavic face and deep-set, smouldering black eyes. She moved with all the sexuality of a girl who knows exactly what’s going through the minds of the men who are always staring at her.

They were staring now. Every eye in the room was on her. Apart from her natural assets, the bright red evening gown she was wearing provided a natural focal point.

The gown was cut very low and only two slender straps enabled it to loosely conceal her bosom. It was much tighter at the waist, hugging her ample hips and derriere and clinging to the length of her long, shapely legs. And it was slit all the way up one side, revealing one of the legs and a goodly portion of hip besides.

As Raven undulated into her performance, it became obvious that she wasn’t much of a dancer. But what she lacked in talent, she more than made up for in calculated sexiness. The initial part of her dance was pure teasing, with one hip and part of her rear seeming to pulsate its way into view as her gyrating flesh widened the slit in the gown.

The teasing continued as she turned her back to the audience and continued to manipulate the slit until one fleshy nether-cheek was completely visible. She rotated and bounced this wildly for a moment and then turned to face the viewers.

She slowed her tempo. She was moving in time with a cha-cha someone had put on the stereo, and Llona noticed that she was off the beat. But nobody seemed to mind. Their eyes were glued to her bosom as she moved one shoulder in a series of small jerks.

The strap of the gown slid down the shoulder. The flimsy material of the dress bodice fell slowly away from one breast until it barely concealed the tip. The deep tunnel of her bosom cleft writhed like the shadow of a snake as the breast itself rotated under the material. Finally the tip of her breast brushed the material away altogether and the impressive orb sprang fully into view.

An audible sigh of appreciation went around the room. Distracted by it, Llona glanced quickly about. The blonde was seated between two men. Her hands were busy in the laps of both of them. The redhead was lying face down across the knees of three men on the other couch. One of them had pushed up. her skirt and was stroking her bare bottom. The second had his hands under her and was squeezing her breasts. Her face was burrowed deeply in the lap of the third. He was biting the knuckles of one hand and staring at Raven.

Beside her, Llona felt Archie’s hands caressing her thighs. He was none too gentle about it, and every so often he’d pinch her as if to mark off his upward progress. But he too was staring at Raven’s bared breast. Llona followed his glance and looked back at the brunette.

Raven’s bared breast was still the center of attention. And rightly so. It was a Booby Supreme, a breast to stand out among the finest breasts of the ages, a bra manufacturer’s ideal, a mammarian masterpiece, the acme of bosomy beauty. A large, perfect globe tapering off to a sharp nipple which curved upward in the exact center of the breast, it was truly sculpted perfection. The deep shadow marking the cleft to the left of it shaded into off-white ivory which covered the expanse of quivering roundness. The ivory gave way to a delicate pink where the roseate encircled the nipple. And the nipple itself was a bright red, over half an inch long, rigid and dagger-like as it tapered to a sharp point.

Now Raven manipulated her long black tresses so that the breast played hide-and-seek with them. The creamy flesh was hidden by the ebony hair. Then the redness of the nipple peeped between two strands and moved as if with a life of its own to widen the gap. Slowly, the roseate came into view. Then Raven tossed her curls and once again the whole magnificent breast came into view.

She took a strand of hair in her hand and twirled it in front of the naked breast while she wriggled free of the other shoulder strap. She did it teasingly, but not as slowly as she had when releasing the first breast. Now both breasts were naked and playing peekaboo with her mantle of hair.

Raven turned away for a moment, and when she turned back the top of her gownhad been completely removed. She began to move very fast now, her breasts gyrating so wildly that they seemed to blur before Llona’s eyes. She moved in toward the men watching her and let the tips flick against their cheeks and brush their outstretched hands. But when they tried to grab for the bobbling bosom, Raven danced quickly and tantalizingly out of range.

The response to this playfulness caused Llona to look around again. The blonde was straddled across one of the men’s laps, facing him, her dress tossed up over her jutting hips, bouncing up and down frenziedly. The redhead was kneeling in front of the man in the center of the couch, her hair tumbling over his knees, her face hidden, her outstretched hands clenched into loose fists manipulating the rigid excitement of the men on either side of her. Beside Llona, Archie was flicking a sharp fingernail against the lip of her womanhood. The sensation was exquisitely painful.

Llona pushed his hand away, clenched her thighs and focussed on Raven again. The exotic brunette had settled to the floor. She lay on her back with her legs stretched straight up in the air. Even in this position her large, spread-out breasts jutted up imposingly. As she moved her legs, the tight red gown inched its way down her legs.

She swung over on one hip as it reached the juncture of her thighs. By pivoting on it and rubbing against the floor, she inched the gown still higher. Slowly, her plump, oscillating derriere was brought into view. Then she turned over on her back and there was the sound of another sharp intake of breath from the onlookers as her pulsating femininity was seen.

Raven closed her eyes. Her body was perfectly still now except for the slow, grinding movements of the fulcrum of her sex. Her breathing grew heavy as her lower lips opened and closed rhythmically. So too did the breathing of those watching her.

The room was thick with an aroma of perfume and perspiration and passion now. The atmosphere itself seemed steeped in it. It was as though the very air itself was rippling with the erotic rhythms of Raven’s flesh.

Someone handed her a lit cigarette. She inserted the tip delicately between the lips of her sex. The cigarette glowed brightly as if it was being inhaled. A thin cloud of smoke swirled around the clean-shaven area. The fact of its hairlessness lent it an added eroticism.

Then, finally, came the piece de resistance. A medium-sized, sable and white cocker spaniel was brought in. Raven snapped her fingers and the dog stretched out between her thighs. Its tongue flicked at her. Raven’s lower body rose into the air and a cry escaped her lips. The dog repeated the caress and her reaction was the same. Again and again it was repeated until finally Raven heaved up wildly and screamed as the dog plunged its snout against her flesh.

Raven turned over and crouched. The dog was ready for her. After a moment its yelp mingled with Raven’s ecstatic cry as both attained satisfaction. And then the show was over.

The lights went on, and Rooney stood over the prostrate figure of the brunette. He casually dropped the pants of the formal outfit he was wearing and sprawled over the girl. Behind him two or three other men lined up to wait their turn.

Llona looked around and saw that the blonde and the redhead were similarly engaged. Beside her, Archie was trying to wedge his hand under her with a series of small pinches. She winced at a particularly painful one, and a smile of perverse pleasure crossed his face. He removed his hand then and tried to force Llona’s legs apart, bruising her flesh with his roughness.

“What—?” Llona started to say.

“Come on now, baby-baby-baby. You know what you’re here for.”

“But I’m not-—” Llona thought better of it. The fact was, after all, that she was. She had set out to lose her virginity, and even with the profit motive made questionable, her aim remained the same. “Does it have to be so public?” she asked Archie instead.

“Well, da boys might get miffed, but da hell wit’ ’em. No reason we shouldn’t go inside for a little private party.” He led the way toward one of the doors leading off the main room.

Llona found herself in a small bedroom. Archie closed the door behind them and turned to her. As he walked toward her, he looked more aggressive than passionate. For a little man, he looked very aggressive indeed.

Llona, on the other hand, was doing her best to look tantalizing and sexy. She posed beside the bed with her breasts thrust out and wriggled her hips slightly. “I’m ready and waiting, lover,” she cooed.

Archie came right up to her and took a long look at her lushly naked body. He raised his hand as though to stroke her breast. But the hand came up higher and cracked her hard across the face.

Llona fell back across the bed. “Why—-?”

“Shaddup!” He leaned over her and slapped her again. “No talk. All action. That’s your cue, sister.” He got his arm under her and wrenched hard so that she flipped over on the bed in a breathless instant. He stood back for a moment and pulled his belt free of the loops of his pants. Then he slapped the leather against the palm of one hand as he gazed down at Llona’s trembling derriere.

“I don’t like to be hurt.” Her voice quavered as she looked at him pleadingly over one shoulder.

“Whaddaya mean you don’t like? Yer not here to like or not like. Yer here to do what I say. An’ besides, ya hadn’t oughta knock nothin’ ’til ya try it.” With that Archie cracked the belt across the twin mounds of her flesh.

Llona squealed at the blow. A red welt appeared immediately across the delicate curvature of her derriere. The muscles tensed automatically in preparation for the next blow.

It came. The leather whooshed and slapped down hard, raising another welt which made a neat X crisscrossing her bottom. She tried to scramble out of range, but Archie grabbed her by the hair and flung her down on the bed again. This time she landed on her back.

Her attempt to flee seemed to increase his fury. This time he brought the belt down across her breasts. The buckle slashed into their plumpness and left an arrow of blood pointing to her taut nipple. Immediately, it sliced in again, making a similar mark on the other breast.

“Please—” Llona begged. It was the look on Archie’s face more than the pain itself which she found particularly terrifying.

“Shaddup! An’ keep shut!” He reached over and grabbed one of the breasts in his hand, smearing the trickle of blood which had appeared there. Then he squeezed it with a slow pressure of increasing savagery until Llona screamed aloud.

“Don’t you want to make love?” she pleaded when he released the pressure.

“Whaddaya think we’re doin’, baby?” The belt slapped down on her thighs, making them part. “Whaddaya think were doin’?”

“But you’re hurting me!”

“Yeah. I know.” He grinned from ear to ear and struck her across the face with his open hand again.

“Hey, Archie!” The door was pushed open, and Rooney stood there. “Ain’t you comin’ out? Da cake wit’ da girl’s here.”

“Ahh, so what? I got s-omethin’ goin’ right here. I seen broads poppin’ outa cakes lotsa times. I’ll pass it up this time.”

“Ya can’t do dat,” Rooney said sternly. “It’s a tradition."

“Screw tradition!”

“Come on now, Archie.” Rooney was positively menacing now. “Ya don’t mean dat. Ain’t ya got no sentiment?”

“Oh, all right,” Archie said intimidated. “Dis broad here was givin’ me a rough time anyway.”

“Whaddaya mean, a rough time?” Rooney wanted to know.

“She’s too damn hoity-toity. Don’t like my playin’ rough. Like she bruises too easy an’ complains too much. An’ I wasn’t even hardly started. I don’ know what gives wit’ da kinda broads ya get dese days. Dey ain’t like dey useta be.”

“Ya jus’ can’t get decent help no more,” Rooney agreed. “Amachoors is ruinin’ da bizness.” He turned to Llona. “Whatcha got to say fer yerself, chick? Why ha given da client a hard time?”

“He was beating me,” Llona sobbed. “I don’t mind sex, but —“

“But me no buts!” Rooney said sternly. “He gets his kicks dat way, dat’s what yer here for. Da customer’s alweez right. Didn’ Gertie tell ya dat?”

“No, I didn’t——”

“Whatzis? You a rookie or somethin’?” Rooney wanted to know.

“Yes. This is my first night and——”

“Yer first night! Wait’ll I get my hands on dat Gertie. I tol’ her pros, an’ look what she sends me. It’s a insult, tha’s what it is!”

“I guess I’m not too professional,” Llona admitted. “You see, this is my first night and—-” She hung her head. “And I’m a virgin,” she said.

“Now don’t be puttin’ me on, girlie,” Rooney warned.

“I’m not. It’s true.”

“Yeah. Sure. Well, if it is, I’m gonna really let that Gertie have it. I didn’ order no virgins. Dis gang don’ swing dat way. What the hell ’d she send you for anyway?”

“Gertie didn’t send me,” Llona confessed. All she wanted to do now was get out of here before Archie started beating her again. She figured that if she told Rooney the truth, he’d let her go. “I work for Mrs. Cartwright.”

“Mrs. Cartwright!” Now Rooney really looked mad. “What da hell’s dat ol’ bag tryin’ to pull? She send you down here to muscle in on our operation?” He had Llona by the arm now and he was twisting it-hard. “Come on, sister! What’s da big idea?”

“Mrs. Cartwright didn’t send me here,” Llona panted, even more frightened now.

“Den whatta ya doin’ here?”

“Well, when I met you in the hallway—-”

“Yeah! An’ dat’s another thing. What was you doin’ runnin’ around da halls wit’out no clothes on?”

“It’s a long story--” Llona began.

“Yeah? Well, I ain’t got time to hear it. All I know is it’s pretty damn fishy. So you jus’ scram now an’ tell Old Lady Cartwright dat whatever da game is, it didn’ work.”

Still holding her by the arm, Rooney propelled Llona through the doorway and across the main room outside. “Out!” he said when they reached the door to the hall- way. “An’ stay out!” He gave her a hard shove, and the door slammed behind her.

Llona sprawled on the hallway carpet a moment, trying to pull herself together. When she finally got to her feet, it was to find herself confronted by an officious-looking man in a cutaway. The man’s moustache was bristling with disapproval. “Now, we can’t have this,” he said, wagging his finger in her face. “The other guests will complain. You’ll simply have to confine your party to your suite. Do you understand me, young lady?”

“Yes.” Llona didn’t know what else to say.

“Then get back inside there. Come now. Back-back-back,” he clucked.

For a split second, it crossed Llona’s mind to wonder at the inconsistencies of hotel management. Here she was, one poor little call girl on the lam from the house detective because of being in a man’s room, and yet they seemingly countenanced an out-and-out orgy, finding it cause for no more than a verbal hand-slap and a warning to keep it within the confines of the suite rented. It hardly seemed fair.

She hung her head and started for the doorway from which she’d just been ejected. But as soon as the hotel man turned his back on her, she darted back across the hall and through the entrance to the stairwell. She ran down the stairs and out into the hallway of the floor below. She started for Lansing’s room.

“Hey, you!”

Llona didn’t have to turn around to know it was the hotel detective. She recognized his voice from having heard it before when she was hiding in Lansing’s bath- room. So she didn’t stop. She just fled toward the bend in the hallway as fast as her bare feet would carry her. As soon as she rounded it and was out of his sight, she dived for the first door and tried the knob. lt was open. Quickly, she entered the room and shut the door silently behind her. The room was pitch black.

Llona stood there with her back to the door and tried to pierce the darkness with her eyes. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t see a thing. No matter how she strained her eyes she couldn’t tell what might be waiting for her in the dark void of the room.

But she’d soon find out.

Chapter Seven.

WHEN Richie Munroe tooted his licorice stick, the sounds were like melting candy, sweet, but sad. He was young to the reed, but the music he made was age-old, and nostalgic, and wailing, and it touched something deep inside people. They didn’t always like what it touched-—-probably because of some instinctive recognition that it stemmed from Richie’s homosexuality-—but few remained unmoved when he really spooked the improvs. Richie got inside people with his clarinet and that’s exactly what he meant to do—with the obvious symbolism all too true.

He didn’t need tea or booze to inspire him. His music was Mama-and-Poppa music and his own Mama and Poppa provided all the inspiration he needed. It was all there in the sounds, man, the whole familiar sick-sick-sick story most fruits might tell—if only they could tootle the stick like Richie.

It was the story of a frail baby, born premature and scrawny, wailing the sadness even then, from the first, albeit without the reed. Yeah, blue eyes popping before they could even see; and the howl for a teat to be shoved in his mouth to turn the music sweet. But Mama dried up early and synthetic rubber only made Baby Richie wail the more.

The screeching made Mama feel awful guilty, but it only served to annoy the hell out of Poppa. From the first, Poppa’s opinion of his son was thin and hostile-—yeah, hostile, man, hostile. For one thing the little bugger, skinny nothing as he was, had worked some changes on Mama by getting born, and little Poppa felt as lost as if he’d dipped it into the Grand Canyon when he made love to Mama after Richie popped onto the scene. For another thing, the little bugger was Oedipally uninhibited from the first, and every time Poppa watched him grabbing for Mama’s breast, it would bug him. Still, a man’s supposed to love his son, so Poppa tried to pretend he did and only despised him way deep down where the Freuds nibble.

Mama, on the other hand, didn’t have to pretend. She loved Richie like crazy. And, unbugged by the warning theories of the shrinks—of which she’d never heard—she demonstrated her love uninhibitedly.

Richie lapped it up and came back for more. And there was always more. Except sometimes when Poppa was around. Richie learned early to squelch his demands then, lest he fall under the whiplash of his old man’s tongue. Still, he wasn’t always successful in avoiding it.

Like when he was four or five years old and he was rubbing Mama’s back. It felt good getting his little hands under her nightie and massaging the warm flesh. And he liked the little sighs Mama made when he squeezed her tooshie. That’s what he was doing when Poppa walked in one day.

“What the hell do you call this?” Poppa wanted to know.

“Richie’s giving me a massage,” Mama told him. “And it feels so good. He really has wonderful hands.”

“I’ll just bet! Listen, Madge, you shouldn’t do that. It’s not-—healthy. I mean, him squeezing your bare behind like that and all.”

“Are you crazy, George? I’m his mother. What’s wrong with it?”

“I dunno,” Poppa said weakly, unable to put his real feelings into words. “It’s just that he’s too damn attached to you. You’re making a sissy out of him.”

“Sissy” was a word that Richie heard a lot during the years of his growing up. When he showed a preference for staying home and toodling on his kazoo over going out and playing ball with the other boys his age, Poppa would often speak the word to Mama with a worried sigh. Mama, of course, would always defend him and point out that he was much more “sensitive” and “frail” than the other boys. And she would hug him and kiss him and smother him in her big, dangly bosom.

“Sissy!” That’s what Poppa grunted when Richie took up his music in earnest and showed no interest in sports at all. “Sissy!” Poppa said it when he came upon Richie backing away from a fight with some boys who’d been taunting him one afternoon. “Sissy.” It was in the way Poppa looked at him when he reached his teens and showed no inclination to go out with girls the way the other boys did.

Mama, naturally, was delighted that Richie showed no adolescent sex impulses. “It’s all right, George,” she reassured her husband. “He’s particular, that’s all. It’s just that none of these girls can measure up to his very own mother.”

“He’s a Mama’s boy all right,” Poppa said dryly.

“Now you stop talking about him that way.” Mama hugged Richie’s head to her bosom. “I know you’re kidding, but it hurts Richie’s feelings.”

“Who’s kidding?” Poppa asked. But he said it very quietly, to himself, so Mama wouldn't hear.

But Richie read his father’s lips and winced inside. He wondered what his father would say if he knew about him and Vic. And then he forgot about his father and just enjoyed remembering what it had been like with Vic all alone in the locker room of the high school that afternoon while the other boys were out playing baseball. The memory excited Richie, and his mother, still holding him to her, felt the evidence of his excitement and denied it to herself even as she subconsciously enjoyed it and took the credit for it.

Richie didn’t notice the rapt expression on her face, but his father did. Poppa snorted disgustedly and left them. Mama continued holding Richie and he continued remembering.

His lips formed an O with the memory, for Richie had never lost the oral orientation stemming from his early weaning and it had found its outlet with Vic that afternoon. Vic hadn’t wanted to let him, but Richie had talked him into it. Later, Richie had tried to get Vic to do the same to him, but Vic had drawn the line there. “I’m no fairy,” he’d said. Now Richie winced at that part of the memory and went back to concentrating on what it had been like.

A week later Richie repeated his seduction of Vic. This time they were caught at it by a teacher with an anger so great as to mark him suspect. There was hell to pay.

Poppa was summoned to school. He came back and told Mama. Mama cried. Poppa was coldly angry. The upshot of it was that Richie was packed off to military school where they would “make a man of him”. Of course, what really happened was that he learned more homosexual refinements than he’d ever dreamed possible. He learned many of them from a drill instructor with bulging muscles, a hairy chest and a quick eye for neophyte fairies. The drill instructor was fired when he was discovered en flagrante with Richie one night.

Richie was packed off for home. But he never got there. Even with Mama waiting, he couldn’t bring himself to face Poppa again. So he ran away and got himself a job in a band as a clarinetist—that being one of the few non-homosexual skills he’d perfected at the military school.

He had a natural talent. While it didn’t make his fame and fortune, it did gain him some recognition, and he floated easily from one job to another. He wrote to his parents occasionally, but he made no effort to see them. Lately his letters had been filled with mentions of Cliff, his friend and roommate, who played drums in the band Richie had joined.

Mama thought it was fine that Richie had made a friend. But Poppa had his doubts. True, one adolescent experience didn’t make a fairy—-even two experiences didn’t-- but Poppa would have felt a helluva lot better about things if Richie were shacking up with a girl. He didn’t mention this to Mama. Let sleeping dogs lie, he told himself. And anyway, at least the little bugger wasn’t crawling all over Mama the way he used to any more.

Poppa was right. Richie was really ape over Cliff. He was mad about the boy. And now, when he wailed up a storm on the licorice stick, he was sounding a woeful mating call to the drummer as much as he was bemoaning the parental influences that had made him what he was. The call was woeful because of the kind of cat Cliff was.

For one thing, Cliff was a switch-hitter. He really preferred girls, but he’d found it profitable to let himself be seduced into the boy-boy game. He’d found it profitable long before he met Richie, and he continued to make it work for him after he and Richie embarked on their affair.

Richie bought him things. Richie took care of his laundry and lots of other annoying tasks that a man usually has to do for himself when he’s on the road; Richie played slave to Cliff’s king, and Cliff maintained the relationship by periodically throwing Richie off balance. The way he did this usually involved a girl. Richie was very jealous, and he couldn’t stand the idea of Cliff making love to a woman. It made Richie feel insecure—-which was exactly how Cliff wanted him to feel since when Richie was insecure he knocked himself out even more than usual doing things for Cliff and buying him gifts. First Richie would scream the rage of jealousy; then, after Cliff would threaten to leave him, he’d apologize and beg and plead and buy Cliff some special gift. And then Cliff would allow Richie to make love to him.

That was the pattern, and it had reached the love-making stage this night as the two of them lay in their bed in the pitch-black room at the Marlowe Hotel. They were very quiet about it because Richie took a double enjoyment in the furtiveness of silence during sex—probably because in some way of which he was unaware it made him feel subconsciously that he was putting one over on Poppa. Cliff was going along with Richie’s preference because Richie had just bought him a beautiful new vicuna sports jacket.

So the room was quiet. Standing there in the darkness, Llona heard and saw nothing. Finally, with some wild, half-formed idea of perhaps finding a balcony by which she might get to Lansing’s room and retrieve her clothes, she decided to cross the room to the window. She guessed that it must be directly across from her and started walking that way.

“BA-ROO-OOM!”

“OUCH!” Cliff’s scream was like an echo to the sudden crashing sound. “What the hell are you trying to do, Richie? Emasculate me? How many times do I have to tell you not to bite? It’s notta clarinet, for God’s sake!”

“I’m so sorry, sweetie.” Richie raised his head and peeped coyly out from under the covers. “I was just so startled‘ that I clenched my teeth. Let me kiss it and make it better.”

“All right. Just be careful.” Cliff was mollified. “Hey,” he added as an afterthought, “just what the hell was that noise, anyway? It sounded like the roof was falling in.”

“Somebody upstairs must have dropped something.” Richie’s muffled tones floated up from under the blanket.

“The hell you say. I tell you it was right here in this room. Man, the quilt must have been stopping up your ears if you think it wasn’t. I’m going to turn on the light and see.”

“Right now?” Richie protested. “Right in the middle of —”

“It’ll keep, lover-boy.” Cliff switched on the light, and Richie’s head popped out from under the covers again.

It took a moment for both of them to adjust their eyes. When they did, Richie was the first to speak.

“It’s a woman!” he said in a tone marked by disgust;

“I’ll say!” Cliff was staring at Llona’s breasts.

“She’s stark naked!’ Richie’s voice went up three octaves.”

“I’ll say.”

“She’s fallen right through your base drum!”

“I’ll say.” Cliff thought about that a moment. “Hey, chick,” he said finally, “you know that’s a hundred-buck skin you busted?”

“I’m sorry,” Llona said.

“Well, the least you could do is get out of Cliff’s drum now,” Richie told her sternly, looking at her with a great deal of hostility mixed with jealousy.

“I would if I could,” Llona told him, “but I can’t. I’m stuck.” She was jackknifed in the drum, her rear end wedged firmly and her arms and legs flailing in an effort to free herself.

“Here, chick, let me help you.” Cliff started out of the bed. "

“Clifiord!”’ Richie screeched. “Don’t you touch her. You keep your hands off her, now!”

“Come on, man, I just want to help her get unstuck.”

“Don’t you snow me, Clifford! I know that look in your eyes. I’ve seen that look before. You stay away from her. She’s no good.”

“She looks pretty good to me,” Cliff murmured.

“I tell you she’s no good. I can tell just by looking at her. Just look at the way she’s looking at you.”

“Yeah, man!”

“Look,” Llona said, “I don’t want to make any trouble. I just want to get loose from this thing.”

“What are you doing here, anyway?” Richie asked as Cliff tried to pull Llona out of the drum.

“I’m just passing through.”

“Now, chick, that’s no way,” Cliff said, managing to grab a handful of breast in his efforts to help her extricate herself. “I mean, it’s a pretty valid question. What are you doing here?”

“I got into the wrong room,” Llona said desperately.

“You can say that again,” Richie told her

“Now let’s not be inhospitable, Richie,” Cliff told him, reaching under Llona and grasping her derriere under the pretext of trying to pry her loose from underneath. “Oops, sorry,” he said to Llona as his hand deliberately slipped and one outstretched, questing finger dipped into her nectar-coated femininity.

“Oh, that’s all right,” Llona replied demurely.

“That is not all right!” Richie yelled. “You keep your hands off him.”

“It’s the other way around,” Llona corrected him.

“Clifford!”

“In a minute, Richie. In a minute.” Cliff’s crooked finger was very busy indeed now. “All it takes is a little leverage, he murmured to Llona.

“To do what?”_ she asked sweetly.

“You’re quick.” Cliff chuckled.

“Clifford!”

Cliff was breathing very hard. Llona was struggling to help him pry her loose. “I think I’m coming,” she panted.

“Clifford!”

“A-ny . . . se-cond . . . now . . .” Cliff had both arms wrapped around her and was tugging mightily now.

There was a loud popping sound as Llona’s derriere was wrenched free of the drum. It was as if she’d been fired into Cliff’s arms, and her momentum carried them both to the floor with Llona on top. They lay that way for a moment, not moving. Then they moved.

“Clifford!”

Cliff and Llona rolled over so that now they were side by side, facing each other. As their movements took on a slow, hesitant, but umnistakable rhythm, Richie leaped from the bed and marched over to them. He grabbed Cliff by the shoulder and shook him hard.

“Cliff, you stop that now! I’m warning you! You stop it!”

“Did you say something, Richie? . . . Ahh, that’s real groovy, sugar. Real groovy!”

“You like it, do you?” Llona purred. She swung her body over his and started to straddle Cliff.

“Get way from him, you slut!” Richie grabbed Llona by the shoulders and shoved hard. She grabbed at his knees in an attempt to keep her balance. The two of them sprawled to the floor, rolling a distance away from Cliff in their struggles, their arms and legs inextricably tangled. There was a knock at the door, but none of them heard it. The door opened. Richie’s Mama and Poppa stood there, staring.

Mama was the first to react. Her mind registered the fact that her son was wearing pajamas. Her mind registered that the girl was naked and voluptuous. Her mind registered that Richie was on top of her, his pajama pants pulled halfway down by the struggle. Her mind accepted the inescapable conclusion, and her emotions took over. “Oh, Richie, how could you?” Mama burst into tears.

“Well, I certainly didn’t think he could,” Poppa mused.

“My baby!” Mama wailed dramatically. “In the clutches of a fallen woman!”

“And she sure fell just right!” Papa’s eyes stroked Llona’s bare, upthrust breasts.

“Say! Who the hell are you?” Cliff had found his tongue.

“We’re his parents.” Papa pointed at Richie. For the first time since Richie had been born there was a note of pride in Poppa’s voice as he acknowledged his son. “Who are you?” he asked Cliff.

“I’m his roommate.”

“Mama. Poppa.” Richie had managed to untangle himself from Llona, and now he got to his feet. “What are you doing here?” .

“That can wait, son,” Poppa told him kindly. “We don’t want to interrupt.”

“You already did,” Llona pointed out.

“Jezebel!” Mama cried. “What have you done to my son?”

“Mama, it’s not what it looks like. We were just—”

“Hush boy,” Poppa interrupted. “You don’t have to explain. It’s none of our business. Don’t mind your mother. Women don’t understand these things. Some women, that is he amended, smiling appreciatively at Llona. He wrenched his eyes away from her and back to Richie. The look he shot his son was both impressed and congratulatory. “Have a cigar, Richie,” he said, fumbling one from the case in his breast pocket. “Have a cigar, son.”

“Poppa, you don’t understand. We weren’t— We weren’t doing what you think we were doing. We were just sort of--well--wrestling.”

“Wrestling, hey?” Poppa winked at Richie. “You in your pajamas and the lady blushing naked. Okay, so you were wrestling. Such wrestling is not a bad start. Not a bad start at all.”

“Oh, Richie,” Mama wailed again, “how could you?”

“Mama, I didn’t,” Richie shouted desperately.

“It’s his fault!” Mama pointed dramatically at Cliff. “These musicians are all no good. He led you astray!”

“Me?” Cliff drew himself up with dignity. “I was actually chaperoning. And I assure you that I would never let Richie do anything I wouldn’t do myself.”

“Ha!” Poppa laughed. “That’s a hot one.”

“You can say that again,” Llona murmured, agreeing.

“That’s a hot one,” Poppa repeated obligingly.

“George!” Mama commanded. “Don’t you talk to that woman! After what she did to our son—-"

“It should happen to me,” Poppa muttered.

“And why not?” Llona batted her eyes at him.

“This is too much!” Mama raised her handbag threateningly and started for Llona.

“Now, Mama, don’t get excited.” Richie got between them.

“My boy!” She burst into tears again and enveloped Richie’s head between her saggy breasts.

“My boy, too,” Poppa said proudly.

Richie came up for air. “But what are you two doing here?” he asked. “How did you know where to find me? And why didn’t you let me know you were coming?”

“Your Aunt Sadie had her gall bladder out,” Mama explained. “She lives only fifty miles from here, and we saw in the paper where this band you’re with was playing in Caldwell. So we decided to drive over and see you. Poppa”-- she looked at him accusingly—“didn’t want to come. But I made him.”

“I’m glad I came,” Poppa admitted, still staring at Llona. His eyes widened as she stretched wearily and the motion made her naked breasts stand out. “Yessir, I’m very glad I came.”

Mama glared at him, then turned back to Richie and continued. “When we got here we called the theatre and they told us what hotel you were staying at and the room number. We didn’t call from downstairs because I thought it would be nice to surprise you. And instead, I’m the one who’s surprised. Richie, what ever made you—?”

“Mama, I told you, nothing happened. Believe me.”

“All right. You’re my son and so I believe you.” Mama sniffled and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.

“You do?” Poppa looked at his wife in astonishment.

“Of course. I know my son. I’m his mother. Who should know him better? When he tells the truth, I know and I believe him. No matter how it looks, I’m sure there’s an explanation. Isn’t there, Richie?”

“Of course, Mama.”

“So what’s the explanation?” Poppa asked skeptically.

“I got lost and stumbled into the wrong room in the dark,” Llona began glibly.

“In the dark?” Mama interrupted. “Don’t you lie to us, you slut. It’s bright as day in here.”

“That’s because I turned on the light,” Cliff put in helpfully. “Before that it was as dark as a junkie’s soul.”

“That’s right,” Llona continued. “So I got into the wrong room in the dark and--”

“The lights in the hall outside were out, too?” Poppa asked.

Llona shot him a baleful look.

“Oops,” he said. “Sorry. There was probably a momentary power failure. Right?”

“That must have been it,” Llona said gratefully. “Anyway, I stumbled into this drum and it made a racket. I guess that woke these boys up. That one”-- she pointed at Cliff—“turned on the light while that one”-—she pointed at Richie “was jumping me in the dark. I guess he thought I was a thief. Right?"

“Absolutely,” Richie said. “I thought you were a second-story man.”

“Instead of a tall-story girl,” Poppa muttered.

“What?” Mama asked. “What did you say, George?”

“Nothing. Nothing.”

“Well don’t mutter. If you’ve got something to say, speak up.”

“So, you see how simple it is, Mama?” Richie said. “That’s all there was to it.”

“So you see how simple it is, Poppa,” Mama echoed triumphantly. “I told you there was a reasonable explanation.”

“Very reasonable.” Papa sighed with disappointment. “And somehow, knowing your son, I can believe it.” He reached out and took the unlit cigar from between Richie’s lips. He put it back in the case and put the case back in his pocket. “He,” Poppa said accurately, pointing at Cliff, “is more your son’s speed.” He fell silent, a moody resigned look on his face.

“Hey, watch those innuendos,” Cliff protested.

“Yes, George, you shouldn’t say things like that,” Mama rebuked him. “I’m sure this is a very nice boy,” she added, reversing her attitude toward Cliff. “You have a mother?” she asked, beaming at him.

“I,” Cliff told her gravely, “am a confirmed mother lover.”

“I thought so. What other kind of boy would my Richie be so friendly with? Breeding always tells.”

“My God, I hope not!” Poppa exclaimed, looking at his son with the old distaste.

“Say, Mrs. Munroe,” Cliff said earnestly, “I’ll bet you make a delicious chicken soup.”

“It’s not bad, if I do say so myself.” Mama lowered her eyes modestly.

“And she’s not even Jewish,” Cliff told Llona out of the corner of his mouth.

“What?” Mama asked. “What did you say?”

“I said you were a jewel,” Cliff told her. “Richie’s a very lucky boy to have such a mother.”

“Why, thank you.” Mama beamed. “I’ll bet your mother is very nice, too. She must be with such a sweet boy for a son. The acorn never falls very far from the tree.”

“Only as far as the umbilical apron strings will let it,” Cliff said.

“What? I don’t think I-—”

“Hey, wait a minute!” Poppa snapped his fingers. He hadn’t really been listening to the dialogue between Cliff and his wife, and now he was struck with a sudden thought. “Just how does it happen,” he asked, “that this young lady was wandering around the halls of this hotel naked in the first place?”

“I was looking for the privy,” Llona said weakly.

All four faces stared back their disbelief at her.

“I walk in my sleep.” She tried again desperately.

“Then you really shouldn’t sleep in the buff,” Poppa told her gently.

“You must have some real wild dreams,” Cliff observed.

“Clifton!” There was a warning note in Richie’s voice as he noted that the speculative gleam was back in C1ifi’s eyes.

Mama didn’t notice it. “I don’t believe you!” she told Llona firmly. “You came here deliberately to seduce my son. A young boy just isn’t safe anywhere these days. Richie, you should call the management and have her arrested.”

“Wait a minute,” Poppa said with a resurgence of hope. “Maybe Richie invited her here.”

“I did not!” Richie said indignantly.

“I knew it was too good to be true,” Poppa sighed.

“And what’s more, I think maybe Mama’s idea is a good one,” Richie said. “I don’t ‘want her here. She has no business here. This is my room. Mine and C1iff’s.”

“I’m glad you remembered that, Richie,” Cliff said. “This room is half mine. So why don’t we just say I invited her.”

“Clifton, you didn’t!” Tears of jealousy sprang to Richie’s eyes.

“Did you?” Mama demanded. “Because if you did, you should be ashamed. What would your mother say?”

“I know what his father would say,” Poppa muttered.

“And if you did,” Mama continued, “I don’t think Richie should room with you any more. Richie, this isn’t the kind of boy you should have anything to do with.”