Chapter 1
So this is where I'm going to live! thought Carrie Kelly, squinting through the rain spattered window of the sleek black chauffer driven limousine whose headlights looked like one more set of glowing eyes in a monster caterpillar creeping along its slow, steady path through the heavy torpor of San Francisco's rush hour traffic.
"And we thought we had traffic jams in Boston!" A firm, masculine arm slipped around the collar of her camel hair cashmere coat as classic as the beauty of the dimpled face lifting up to the man cuddled warmly beside her. My husband, thought Carrie with a shy, nervous smile. Husband . . . ? The unfamiliar word echoed strangely in her head, and in the bright yellow smear of car headlights, the curly haired woman stared with intent curiosity at the tall, distinguished man whose clean shaven neck smelled warmly of cologne.
In the year since their engagement, Edward Tarrington III bore the same noble posture that had caught Carrie's attention two years back as she sat in a Vassar classroom chewing on her Bic pen and listening to the clipped British accent of Dr. Tarrington delivering his Tuesday lecture on South African repression following the Sharpeville Riot of 1960. The natty forty year old professor, charmed by Carrie's misty green eyes haloed by a mop of chestnut curls, invited her to discuss over a cup of tea the Afrikaner defeat in the Anglo-Boer War. Their student-teacher relationship was just that for two years. Her father, a U.S. Senator had reared her in the power of rhetoric. Repression, oppression, suppression, depression . . .
Rather than lose a student, Dr. Tarrington opted to gain a wife, and he started looking at her body instead of her mind.
And Senator Kelly was relieved! The difference in their ages bothered him somewhat, and he would have preferred a Harvard law student for a son-in-law . . . but at least Dr. Tarrington wasn't one of those Marxist idiots! Of that he made certain by checking out Dr. Edward Tarrington III through Washington channels and discovering through dossiers that his future son-in-law was the heir to a Durban, South African shipping firm and owned half of the Indian Ocean seaport! The fact that he hadn't a single drop of Negroid .blood in his veins eased his mind along with documentations that Dr. Tarrington's racial policies were as bigoted as his own . . .
"How much longer do you think it'll be before we get to the city?" asked Carrie, gazing out over the horizon to the right where the misty gray-blue skies met the murky Bay waters, and an occasional flutter of white overhead marked the eternal battle of the seagulls struggling against high winds.
The middle aged professor smiled under the slim line of his manicured mustache that twitched with flattery at what he interpreted to be his new bride's eagerness to reach their apartment and get on with this business of playing husband and wife.
As the raindrops pinged on the car roof, a cold shiver like the wriggle of a snake crawled up Carrie's spine at the limousine driver's reply: "Oh, 'bout thirty minutes, I'd say . . . " To fill in the clumsy silence, he asked, "You two visiting San Francisco . . . ? "
"No . . . moving here. We've just been married." Edward gave his bride a polite little hug and rubbed his panted knee against her dimpled, stockinged one.
Even through the warmth of her coat, Carrie shuddered, right up to the puffy nipples of her creamy breasts that spiked out under her knit dress. The sexual side of their relationship had yet to rear its ugly head. Their marriage certificate had nullified all excuses at intimacy and she was a wife, not a student which made her duties more personal than handing in a term paper on time. As much as she adored Edwards mind, his body was still foreign territory, and she would have given anything to keep it that way!
At least he wasn't like those rich spoiled Harvard boys who plumped up their egos by pumping you full of booze and hauling you off to a cheap hotel to screw you silly. Nor was Edward stuck full of cheap ideology . . .
Only one other guy had tempted Carrie, though Papa never got wind of it. Like everybody with money, an education and a choice, Carrie had flirted with radical ideology in the name of Peter Goldberg. Theirs was a casual, short-lived affair. . . going to political rallies and attending lectures on Third World strife. Peter possessed an athletic body and a Marxian mind, for like many rich Jewish boys from the East whose parents had joined the Communist Party in the heat of Nazism, Peter carried a guilty complex that compelled him to hide his wealth by dressing in drab work shirts and levis. His kinky, unruly hair never looked combed and every thought and action he related to the need for radical social change.
Intriguing was this flirtation with radicalism, but hardly acceptable to the Senator's stodgy way of thinking, and Carrie dropped him like a hot potato on his first clumsy attempt to take her to bed. Well, almost that fast.. .
Lost in a world of thought, Carrie watched the windshield wipers slap beads of water in mesmerizing rhythms.
The sky was dark and hard with a few stars shining diamond-like overhead when Peter and Carrie walked back from the auditorium to Peter's one bedroom basement apartment. Their shoes slapped on the naked sidewalk and down three steps to where Peter slipped a key in the lock and yanked at a cord attached to a bare light bulb that bathed the dingy surrounds in an unholy glow.
Carrie's perky upturned nose wiggled, feeling a sneeze build from the musty dampness of the cement floored room where the stains on the painted walls testified to many damp spring nights.
"Sorry it's such a mess, but I've been working on my doctoral thesis," apologized the thirty year old, "and besides that, I'm naturally messy."
"Oh . . . ? " Carrie stood clutching her hand bag, feeling terribly uncomfortable while Peter cleared the bed of its littered papers and stacked books. The feeling of the room was one of stark deprivation and Carrie wondered how anybody could live in such a sty . . . ideology or not! Her wealthy lace curtain Irish background had never seen the likes of this and it struck her that Peter's mind must be so engulfed in his studies that creature comforts didn't exist.
Below her black beret hat, her olive eyes took in the unsightly sight of this barren room where in a corner stood a sink propped up on two pieces of wood, its eternal drip having left a rusty smudge. On a dusty window ledge sat a bar of soap, a frayed toothbrush and dishwashing liquid above which the only window in the apartment looked out onto legs scissoring back and forth on the grimy sidewalk, drunken feet kicking cans and rats rattling around in trash cans. Carrie shivered.
Other than the bed and a small table, the furnishings amounted to a poster of Lenin which hung grease-spattered above the hot plate, and above his bed Fidel Castro stared back at her. There was something strangely romantic in Peter's true denial of materialism.
"What did you think of the film, Carrie? I thought it interesting that Amin was put into office because they wanted a weak leader whom the whites could control . . . " Slap! He threw a heap of books in the corner, clearing off the bed. Marxism didn't completely negate physical contact and Peter hadn't seen the likes of this Irish lovely amidst the crew of uncomely Taoists, Marxists, and Venceremos supporters! Most of the women who shared his ideology were either ugly and/or lesbians and he wasn't about to let this Vassar coed slip away without knowing how it felt to fuck a man with guts!
Carrie had the bosom of a Jewish mother with the long, tapering legs of a French woman, and the sparkle of the witty Irish. Everything about her exuded a lust for life, and most important, a brilliant mind which, like his, was constantly searching for alternatives. Had he known she was the conservative Senator Kelly's daughter, perhaps he wouldn't have wanted to touch her with a ten foot pole, for the U.S. Senator was known for weeding out undesirables in the university system and running dossiers on them as thick as the New York telephone directory. That included, him-Peter!
Standing up straight, he turned to see Carrie perusing his bookcase, running her finger along the line of tatter paperbacks and hefty volumes. Silent as a cat, he snuck up behind her, his arm softly brushing against her sweatered bosom as he reached over her shoulder to pluck a notebook from the dusty shelf.
"Look at this," he said with pride. "Notes from my Columbia days on the riots back there in the late '60s. You're probably too young to remember that." Peter shook his head discouragedly as if something dear had been lost. "Too bad those days are past. . .
Christ, everybody wanted changes then. I remember fighting pigs and smashing windows and throwing up from tear gas . . . now college kids are wearing loafers and joining fraternities." He shook his head with true misery.
Having been reared with the idea that there are only two decent radicals: Joe McCarthy and a dead Communist, Carrie was truly awed. "Whom, you mean you remember FSM and Ann Arbor and Kent State?" her green eyes flashed against his brown ones, and suddenly all her political science courses jelled into one of moment understanding. Here was a man who had lived, politics, not just taught them.
"Honey.. . I was there. Got scars to prove it, but I won't show them to you. . . yet" Deftly, he spun her around, took the notebook out of her hands and set it on the shelf next to a Notes from Mao Tse Tung. "To know, you have to experience, and I'm about to give you an experience you won't forget.. . "
He pressed closer to her, so that he was pressing her against the book case. Carrie started a little and he felt her muscles tense against his body. Was it fear, or the rudiments of desire? She gave a little nervous laugh. "Now Peter, don't start that. You know that I talk more liberal than I am."
"Bullshit . . . " he muttered, nuzzling his shaven cheek against her head. God, her hair was fragrant and he reeled from the scent of it, musing at the contrast between her lush beauty and the dankness of his living quarters where she stood out like a rose amongst a heap of trash. Her perfumed skin, the feel of her lithe body against him . . .he had to have her!
He pressed closer still, feeling her move backwards imperceptibly, but far enough to keep him from pressing his loins against her belly. He tilted his face forward, resting his chin against her temple. She turned her face upwards to speak and suddenly they were kissing mouth to mouth.
Telling herself to loosen up, that she was kissing more than a man . . . she was kissing a man's conviction, his way of life. . . she let his tongue slip into her mouth to run over the row of her pearly white teeth. But then it happened as it always did.
Her mother's voice shattered the glass bell jar to wag a warning finger at her. "Men . . . they take from you and give nothing but heartache." These words came from a woman who'd hated her overbearing husband for taking to the bottle when Washington's frustrations got to him and then taking it out on her hide in the bedroom. There was another side to Carrie's fear, too, but she couldn't define it.. .
Carrie closed her eyes and let the pressure of his soft lips propel her into the cradle of his muscular arms, but only for a moment. Sputtering, she pushed herself away from him with the palms of her hands.
"No . . . please . . . "
Peter let out a long sigh of defeat. "Come on, Carrie. . . for chrissakes, loosen up. It's only a kiss."
Yes, it's only a kiss, her mind repeated and she forced herself to submit, feeling the delicious, tingling touch of Peter's tongue as it skipped lightly across the sensitive underside of her lips, and then the electric shock of it as it thrust into the steamy confines of her mouth.
In the light of the naked light bulb Peter turned Carrie around and pulled her tighter against him. He could feel her response in the soft surrender of her lips, the squirming of her young, lithe body, the turgid nipples under her lamb's wool sweater.
Carrie opened one olive eye to stare into the bold dark ones of Fidel Castro who stared down at her under his black beret, looking defiantly militant on the wall. The set of his jaw and the evil glint in his eye seemed to threaten her into submission as if the machine gun he held in his hand could shoot bullets, and she surrendered, pressing her body tightly against Peter's, feeling the tingling sensations of pleasure course warmly through her responsive body. Her better senses were saying stop but her body overruled the intellectual command. She swayed, moving her stiffened nipples against his work shirt. She was relaxing into the moment, allowing her body to savor the warm, delicious contact, letting his insistent levied knee spread her thighs. Carrie was shamefully aware of the creamy wetness in the sheer panties that embraced her private parts and she shuddered involuntarily with shocks of delight as Peter's tongue lapped at her sensitive neck.
"Carrie, oh, Carrie, I want you as badly as I want to see this rotten world change," Peter whispered into her open mouth.
"Oh, yes . . . "
His agile tongue thrust itself hotly deep into the warm and salivating depths of her Irish mouth, sending sensation after sensation through the nerve ends of Carrie's body. Experimentally, she sucked on it, soft murmurs of passion mumbling from her kiss-swollen lips.
Go ahead, her body was saying.. . . here is a man who wants you for more than your body. And, as his hand rose slowly up her sweatered rib cage to embrace one of her full breasts, she found herself lifting her shoulder to tauten the creamy flesh-tantalizing them both even more.
Carrie groaned and allowed her thighs to part farther. She could feel the trembling in her buttocks as her skirt hiked higher up her thighs at the insistence of his knee thrusting deeper between her legs. Carrie was giddy with passion, more so than she had ever imagined possible . . . and with a man so wonderfully different from herself . . . a man who swore he'd give his life for the cause. She began slipping into a heady twilight zone between reason and desire and her long, trim legs tightened against his muscular thighs, the crisply laundered feel of his Levi's rubbing against her stockinged flesh. His knee was cradled up against her slowly moistening vagina.
Peter was lost in desire . . . and though his strict minded code of ethics denied him materialistic pleasures, they clearly said nothing about sex! Fleetingly, he wondered if she was on the pill and if not, did he have any condoms left? While one hand lavishly caressed the fleshy mound of her breast, he let the other slide down her back to her slender waist, then downwards along the arc of her trim ass. He paused there, fondling the ripe flesh and she leaned forward further into him in delicious approval.
She was letting go tonight . . . no denying that. Why.. . he didn't ask and didn't care. He knew only that he had to get her down on the bed before things ended up the way they always did: Carrie suddenly jerking away from him and putting space between them. Usually she would mutter something unintelligible as she bolted for the dormitory door.
"Carrie, you're a fantastic female," he breathed into her ear.
Carrie started to speak, but Peter quickly halted her reply with a fervid kiss that covered her whole mouth. Meanwhile, he had maneuvered his hand from her softly trembling buttocks down her thigh and up under the raised hem of her skirt. Like a slow-moving serpent, his hand eased upward, one finger at a time, sliding along the silken expanse of her thigh . . . upwards, slowly, skillfully.
Goosebumps rose on the dusky flesh of her thighs. If he could get his hand in her panties, it would be minutes before he had her spread out on the bed.
A gentle finger touched the edge of Carrie's filmy panties, sliding under the girlish garter belt she wore. The finger snake slithered cautiously through the softly curling forest of pubic curls. Just one thirty-second of an inch more and it would have slipped into the silky crevice, sliding along the thin, moist trench to her vagina. Gently, gently, easy, fella . . .
Peter compelled all of his disciplined forces of restraint. Control now was the acid test. He wanted nothing more than to rip off Carrie's panties, unleash his swollen cock and fuck her on the spot while Castro watched from his wall perch!
Carrie gasped and shuddered and then suddenly, inexplicably, pulled back. There was a fierce look in her green eyes. Sparks seemed to fly from them like chips of fire from a blacksmith's anvil. Peter clutched her hardened breast tighter with one hand while his other finger grabbed hold of the softly curling pubic hair inside her panties. His voice was coarse with passion and emotion as he tremblingly begged, "Carrie, no, don't make me stop now. I've never wanted a woman as much as you. I want you more than my crumby, Ph.D. Oh, please.. . "
Peter tried to kiss her, but she turned her head away sharply and clutched at his biceps in a fierce, clawing, clenching way. She was becoming a wildcat. The leprechauns of guilt had seduced her before he had a chance to.
"Stop it, Peter," she screamed at him. Her beautiful face was distorted with emotion. Anger, fear, passion. Peter noticed the cords distended on Carrie's smooth, tawny throat as she fought to get away.
"You don't respect my feelings!" she blurted at him as wetly streaming tears began to fill her enormous eyes and cascade down her firm, flushed cheeks.
Peter relaxed his hold on her, taking his fingers reluctantly away from her smooth breast and from the dank cavern between her legs to envelop her in a restrained embrace. "But Carrie," he managed. "I was respecting your feelings, your response, your body language. You were ready to let loose and you know it."
At this Carrie broke away from him and stood with her back to him. Tears of outrage streamed down her beautiful Irish face. Ugly thoughts roared through her head like a rebellious train racing out of control through the night. Oh, why couldn't he let her have her secret little pleasure, take what she could allow herself to give him and be happy with that? Why did he have to assume that her response to his probing hands and fingers was an invitation to go further, to thrust his hardness up into her tender body.
They were all the same ruttish animals. No man content to just kiss and cuddle and caress-to hold her intimately, but not too intimately. Men didn't possess the sensitivity to see the beauty of restraint. No, they had to get between your legs with their hard, cruel penises and split you apart before they were satisfied. They were all just like . . .just like her father. The blinding insight suddenly split her brain. Those nights when she awakened in the dark to hear her mother's sobs following the crack of cruel hands buffeting a tender woman's face!
Night after night, she remembered now, she had heard her father's coarse gruntings, heard the squeaking mattress heave rhythmically beneath the pair, heard her mother's pitiful moans as she submitted to her drunken husband. Carrie's body shivered involuntarily as again the ghastly sounds throbbed through the ears of her mind the way they had when she had lain in her small bed as a child. Unknowingly, she had vowed to herself then as a tiny girl that she would never allow a man to take her virginity-never!
"Carrie . . . ? " Peter said tentatively, slipping his arms around her, pulling her gently against his loins. She could feel his hard, distended penis under his Levi's throbbing against her firmly fleshed buttocks. Carrie reacted with a jolt as she felt the long, stiff cylinder of flesh pulsate into the crevice of her buttocks.
"Peter . . . I've had enough!" Carrie spat the words and jerked his hands from her waist and pushed past him, striding toward the door.
"C-Carrie, I don't get it," Peter stammered. "One second you're hot to trot and the next you're an ice cube."
Carrie's eyes were burning coals. "Why don't you go pick up one of your liberal Communist girl friends . . . I'm sure they're used to hammers and sickles."
Peter spread his hands in a frustrated gesture. "Hammers and sickles . . . what the hell are you talking about?" He started towards her, the bulge in his Levi's highly apparent.
Lifting her hand from the door, Carrie pointed to his crotch. "That's what I'm talking about!" she wailed. "Go use your tools on somebody else."
A slam of the door ended Carrie Kelly's vicarious flirtation with radicalism and, except for blurred images of Peter Goldberg's face on a mimeographed handbill stapled to campus bulletin boards and light posts, Carrie never saw Peter again.
With the advent of springtime, her attention turned to the distinguished South African history professor who wore decent clothes, combed his hair and lived a respectable, if somewhat dull lifestyle.
The Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco with the East Bay marked the end of the rainstorm, and the black limousine sped along the eight-mile stretch amidst the thunder of honking horns and the lightning of car headlights. From the freeway they headed for Berkeley, driving down infamous Telegraph Avenue which, as usual, was steaming with bedraggled street people amassed together in heated revolt.
Edward's frown turned to a gasp as he grasped his bride's arm protectively. "Something's happening . . . look!"
"Somethin's always happening in Berkeley, sir," chuckled the driver amusedly. "Jes' another riot . . . "
Nothing compared to the riot that's going to be raging in our bedroom when Edward takes me to our house tonight and wants to consummate our marriage!