Chapter 1
Karen lay back in the bathtub and wished that the hot water could soak the unhappiness, the loneliness, the despondency out of her body as easily at it removed the grime of New York from its surface. It wasn't at all the way she had thought it would be when she was back in Rancho Santa Madre: exciting, cosmopolitan, sophisticated. It was dirty and scary. People were mean, not urbane and charming. Oh, there were concerts and theaters and night clubs, all right, but all of them so expensive that for her they might as well not exist.
Her long golden hair pinned up on top of her head stayed dry as she reclined, soaking the tiredness out of her lovely nineteen-year-old body. As she worked up a lather in the washcloth, her elbows created little ripples which splashed against her firm young breasts, jutting high out of the tub's water like twin reefs along a rocky shore. The ripples moved on down to break against her thighs, twin pillars of white flesh against which the water shoaled. Between them a patch of equally golden hair curled, surprisingly thick and luxurious to be found concealing the womanhood of so young a girl.
Washcloth lathered to her satisfaction, she laved her thighs, working the suds vigorously into her skin. Spreading her knees, she lathered away the soil of the day from her private femininity, soaking the golden curls and the red, young flesh between them.
For some reason, as she did so the thought of Doug Morgan popped into her mind. What a groovy guy he was. His flaming red hair curled over his head like statues of Greek gods in her school books. It was longer, of course, but not too long-just about shirt-collar length, curling over his ears and joining his sideburns.
She continued to soap her patch of womanhood as she thought of his heavy, broad shoulders and his powerful arms. He must be a lot older than she, Karen speculated-at least twenty-six or twenty-seven. He was the head of Packaging and Shipping, she knew; he must have worked at the publishing firm for some time to get so responsible a position. Doug was the first man she had met when she went to work only three days ago on her very first job.
Except for Roger DeWilde, of course, the owner of the book publishing firm and the man who had hired her. At thought of him her feeling of depression returned. A little shudder of distaste went over her and she forced her thoughts back to Doug Morgan as a sort of mental chaser.
No real reason that she should, actually. He'd never been more than polite and friendly. She'd only seen him a few times in her three days on the job. But he was there and he was groovy and certainly nothing else nice had happened to her in her many weeks in this frightening city.
A pleasant tingle spread through her body; a tightness, a warmth, began to glow in the pit of her tummy. She realized she had dropped her washcloth and had been rubbing the warm red flesh inside her cuntal opening with bare fingertips as she thought about Doug; the sensation was highly pleasurable.
An emotion of utter shock chilled her. She sat upright instantly, splashed some water over her body to remove the suds and scrambled from the tub. She swathed herself in a towel before pulling the drain plug and wiped herself vigorously as a fiery red blush spread over every inch of her bare body. What an utterly shameful, filthy, disgusting thing for her to do. She'd had no idea that if she rubbed herself there too long it would feel like that. Somehow it was Doug Morgan's fault that she had done it. She hurried into her housework clothes and went to the kitchenette to fix herself some dinner.
Just turned nineteen, alone in New York, Karen MacLean was unbelievably a virgin. Not only virginal, but utterly innocent. So innocent was her mind as well as her body that she was only vaguely aware that some girls her age had sexual intercourse.
To Karen, sex was a thing which unequivocally went with marriage, after the ceremony, for the purpose of creating babies. Perhaps somewhere deep in her subconscious was a feeling that a wife might also do it with her husband to make him happy, in between children, men being the coarse creatures that they are, but certainly one never talked about it, not even with the husband in question.
It would seem incredible that a girl, especially such a beautiful girl, could reach the age of nineteen in our modern age and be in this condition, short of having been raised in a Sultan's harem, guarded 'round the clock by a staff of eunuchs.
In a sense, that is just about the way Karen was raised: in a quiet backwater of society as remote from modern reality as a cloistered cell. She was born and brought up in Rancho Santa Madre, a tiny town tucked away in the orange and avocado ranching country in southeastern Orange County, California. The town itself was originally a land grant to some Don from the Emperor of Spain, when the Golden State was a part of the Spanish Empire; became ranching country in the 1880s; has changed very little since.
If you were to walk the main street from one to the other of Rancho Santa Madre, a task which would take perhaps five minutes, it would be hard to believe you were only a two-hour drive from the bright lights of fabulous Hollywood. It is less than an hour from the cosmopolitan city of San Diego. The center of the pot-smoking, amoral, free-love, hippie culture which runs from Laguna Beach on up to Venice is only an hour or two from here by car.
For Karen, as for most of the rest of the kids in her town, these sophistications whether they be good or bad might as well have been on the moon or Venus. The closest she had ever been to Hollywood was Disneyland in Anaheim, and then with her family; the only time she had ever seen San Diego was on a school-sponsored trip to Sea World and the zoo, closely chaperoned. That her personal chaperone, a Miss Tallman, was sleeping with the vice-principal was completely unknown to her-as it was to the vice-principal's wife. It was very fortunate for Miss Tallman that this was so, because in Rancho Santa Madre had it been discovered, Miss Tallman would have been instantly discharged and possibly drummed out of town for such scandalous behavior.
Such towns, and such seemingly chaste societies, do exist in the United States today, and in far greater numbers than headlines in newspapers about delinquent youth and the widespread drug culture would lead to believe. They are most frequently not out in the boondocks, but close to major metropolitan centers as is Rancho Santa Madre. The reason is that this location permits the responsible adults of the town to practice their personal depravities in the big city but keep their own home territory clean and their families pure.
The wife of the vice-principal with whom Miss Tallman was sleeping, for example, made a shopping trip to San Diego at least once a month. On this jaunt she invariably dropped in to the bar at the El Cortez Hotel for a drink at five o'clock, met some charming businessman who would invite her to dinner, then checked into one of the city's many motels to ball the hell out of him all night. She would be back home by ten in the morning, refreshed, relaxed, and ready for another month of helping her husband administrate the town's school system.
She would have been the first to blow the whistle on Miss Tallman had she discovered that the young teacher had been going down on her husband in his office once or twice a week for more than a year, something which she refused to do with him but delighted in doing to the various men she met at the El Cortez.
The purity of the town and its young people was protected because Mr. Ekkleman, owner of the largest spread of avocados and the chairman of the city council, thus the most powerful man in town and arbiter of its morals, could get up to Hollywood every week or two. This permitted him to sneak into the Paris Theatre on Santa Monica Boulevard to view films of unparalleled raunchiness; movies of detailed sex acts shown in closeup and living color which in a small town out in the boondocks of the Midwest he would had to have gone to a stag dinner at the American Legion Post to view.
Leaving the theatre with a monstrous erection, he would invariably hurry to an apartment on St. Andrews Place where two professional call girls he knew lived together. By giving them one hundred dollars apiece he persuaded them to make Lesbian love together, an act which both thoroughly detested, while he watched. He would then finish his evening by pushing his erect penis into them alternately, one stroke for each, until he ejaculated. He was never sure in which one of them he would come, which for him was the supreme fun of the whole evening.
In a sense Mr. Ekkleman was a Sultan, and every lesser man in town was his eunuch, and the children of his community were raised in an atmosphere more pure than that of many a convent. It was simply that when you reached a suitable age, you went to one of the nearby metropolitan cities to satisfy your desires.
Miss Tallman had been raised in a remote town in Nebraska and had been sucking off her stepfather for years, which was why it seemed quite natural for her to do it to the vice-principal.
As for the drug scene, there had once, just once, been a pusher in town. It was about two years before Karen left for New York. A young chap about twenty or so had gotten ten pounds of marijuana and a few pills, uppers and downers, in across the border from Mexico, only a few miles away from the town. He parked his camper-equipped van in the local county camp grounds, made friends with a few of the high school youths and tried to introduce them to his weed-rather good grass, at that.
In less than two days his activities came to the ears of the responsible, moral adults in Rancho Santa Madre. They in turn informed the chief of police, who also happened to be Mr. Ekkleman's son-in-law. The town has no vice squad, no narcotics officer. None are needed, because the young would-be pusher was not arrested.
Instead, the chief of police and three of his best men visited him in his camper to persuade him to leave town. They broke both of his arms with clubs, smashed three ribs with their blackjacks, beat his face out of all recognizable proportions with their nightsticks, then put him in his van and drove it up an onramp onto the San Diego Freeway where they smashed in into a guard rail and left it and him.
A little while later the California Highway Patrol who police the freeways found him, arrested him for fleeing the scene of an accident-it didn't matter which one because they had plenty of them-and somewhat later found the grass. The young man is now doing ten years to life in Soledad although he coughs a lot and can't use his hands very well.
No one else has ever tried to peddle narcotics in Rancho Santa Madre.
So, no, it is not unbelievable that Karen should be a virgin, and an innocent virgin, at nineteen, if you take into consideration the feudalistic society in which she was raised. No wonder she flushed when, by accident, she found herself indulging in erotic self-stimulation in the bathtub. She had never even heard of masturbation until three days earlier.
Karen flushed again as she seated herself behind her desk at the Garden Books Publishing house the next morning and stared at the pile of manuscripts on it. Hateful things. She had to read every one of those awful things and decide if it should be rejected or sent on to the editorial board for further consideration. Her job carried the title of First Reader, an important-sounding name but really the lowest person on the editorial totem pole. She was the rock upon whom many a would-be novelist's ship would founder.
Karen could say no, but she couldn't say yes. That is, she could reject a book after reading it if she felt it had no merit, but she couldn't tell the author yes and buy it if she thought it was good. She could only send it to another office for editorial consideration.
Not that she found anything in the preceding three days in this awful stack of wordage she felt was worth publishing. Her cheeks flushed again at the thought of what she would read today. She had an urge to tell Roger DeWilde that she was quitting and stalk out of the office. Her thoughts brought his face to mind and she felt disgust.
She hadn't liked him from the first, even if he had been the one to hire her and give her the first job she had ever had. She should have been overjoyed. She was three weeks behind in her rent and Mrs. Martino had told her pay up by Friday or get out. She had just five dollars left in all the world when DeWilde had smiled at her in his unctuous way and told her he'd give her a chance at the job of First Reader.
Oh, he had been gracious and charming enough; smooth-pleasant, actually. But she hadn't liked his pudgy figure that might have once been athletic but now merely flabby; his straight-across dangerous eyes; the bluish color of his face from having a heavy black beard which he had shaved so closely as to almost remove the surface skin. He was a one-eyebrow man; that is, his heavy black brows had no hairless separation in the middle.
But he had been polite, and he had offered her fifty dollars more a month that she had expected to get. With the grim face of Mrs. Martino in the back of her mind, she had accepted gratefully, in spite of his conservative dark blue suit fitting him just a little too tightly and too well; that his loosened necktie and unbuttoned collar revealed a wedge of coarse black hair unavoidably sticking up from the opening, like the tuft of hair which hangs down from the neck of a plucked turkey gobbler.
She didn't really have any cause to worry about him, she told herself as she settled down to her task of reading for the day. She'd only seen him once since he hired her. That was the first morning of her first day on the job; actually, she had been at work at her reading desk about fifteen minutes. She had started in on page one, chapter one, of the manuscript on top of the pile, determined to be the fastest and best reader the firm ever had. She became engrossed with the lead characters, a little intrigued by the author's editorial hook, a little involved with the protagonist.
And then all of a sudden there it was-a dirty word, and then several of them, and then the author was describing a terrible act that shouldn't be thought of, let alone printed. The manuscript fell from her hands onto the desk, and then she was picking it up again to study the words on the paper carefully to make sure she wasn't mistaken; that these were actually the words she thought they were. She had seen them just once before in her life; on the walls of a women's rest room in a gasoline station where she and her parents had stopped. Somehow she had guessed at their meaning and was as appalled by them then as she was now.
Determined to do her duty, she had clutched the offending manuscript and hurried into DeWilde's office. Trembling, she blurted out her accusation to him as she held out the pages.
He seemed very concerned as he took the script. "Bad, huh? Hell, this is from Barney Jones." He had flipped to the title page. "He knows we don't buy junk and I didn't think he wrote any. Let's see-" He quickly scanned the paragraphs she had indicated.
He seemed puzzled as he read them; turned the page to read what came after it, then back to read the page before. He looked up at her and shook his head.
"Sorry, Peaches, I just don't get it. What's wrong with it?" Her pointing finger shook. "That."
His tone was apologetic as he replied: "Oh, for Christ's sake, Karen, it's only the word 'fuck.' It's perfectly legitimate; the boy has dated this girl several times and he asks her if she'd like to fuck. She says yes but she's not on the Pill, so they go down on each other. Now, what the hell is wrong with that?" Then he added morosely: "Except that it's not very original."
It takes quite a shock to leave a person truly speechless, unable to gasp out a single word in reply. Karen was literally unable to give voice to any word in the language, so stunned that she could not even croak. She looked at him a long minute, turned and went back to her office. She sat down at her desk and wondered if she could stall Mrs. Martino off for another week if she quit now; speculated on what chance there was of any other job turning up in the next seven days.
Karen was quite wrong, as she was to be about so many other things in the days to come. Whatever his personal life might be, DeWilde ran a respectable publishing house. Garden Books put out hundreds of paperback novels each year, all of them no better and no worse than you will find for sale in any drug store in a big city.
Lacking any standard of comparison, Karen sat for quite a time at her desk before timidly picking up the manuscript and going on with it. She completed her reading by noon, decided to reject it on the basis that she didn't want to be too enthusiastic about anything for fear of being labeled not a sufficiently critical reader, and picked up another. She finished that just before quitting time and returned it, too, to its author because it was late and she didn't want to take the time to go up to the next floor to the Advanced Reading office.
By the end of the day, Karen knew more about sex than any other girl in Santa Madre.
Her education continued the next day and the next. She also taught herself to skim, her eyes picking up only salient passages, and for some reason she didn't understand these always seemed to be the sexual ones. Her reading speed increased and by the end of the third day she had come across one book she felt was worth taking upstairs.
Now, on the morning of her fourth day at work, she found herself wondering if anything would be in the pile she wanted to advance one rung on the ladder of acceptance. The manuscript stack had become taller rather than shorter; a dozen new ones had been added to the bottom of the pile after the morning mail.
She flipped through the first chapter of a Western and rejected it by page twelve; the author had a tribe of Paiutes attacking a wagon train moving through the open range country of the Southwest. She decided that if he didn't know they were mountain Indians, mostly inhabiting the area where California and Nevada adjoin, and were mostly diggers rather than a warlike tribe, then the author probably hadn't done any of the rest of his homework any better.
The new one she rejected because it was typed on a machine having a script typeface and it was too difficult to read; the next because it had so many editorial corrections made by the author with a pen that it was hard to follow and she suspected that it was an off-the-top-of-the-head effort.
The next manuscript was well-typed, properly spaced and easy to read. Its author caught her with a good strong hook in the first paragraph and instead of skimming the first chapter she read it word for word. She went on to the next, still interested. She didn't even wince when she came to the first sex scene. It was well integrated into the story line, the characters referred to it as "balling" instead of "fucking," but above all, the author had created a living character instead of a plastic figure. Karen found herself identifying with the girl, even younger than herself, who was having this experience.
As she read, she wondered about this girl; what did it mean, to have a boy do this thing to you? The author described her feelings so keenly; the touch, the penetration-the horror at first and then the wild-eyed ecstasy.
Engrossed, she read on, feeling a funny little tingle in her mid-section. She was at first unaware of it enjoying its warmth at a subconscious level. As she read the feeling grew until it impinged upon her consciousness, strengthened until she recognized its similarity to the way she had felt when soaping herself in the bathtub the preceding evening.
Somehow it was more acceptable this time. She continued reading until she had finished the book.
She stood uncertainly in front of DeWilde's desk. She had forced herself to tap on his door in spite of her dislike for him, because she felt she ought to call this manuscript to his attention before sending it upstairs.
"I wanted to talk to you about this book, Mr. DeWilde," she began. "I think it's awfully good, but before I send it up to the editorial board I want to ask you something."
He looked a query at her as she hesitated.
"Well, there's this one scene where the girl-uh -makes love to a-well-a Negro," she blurted out. "It that all right for us? I mean-do we have any color taboos or anything?"
DeWilde grinned a heavy, thick-jowled leer at her. "Honey, in our books the characters can do anything except be dull. She can ball a cactus if she wants to as long as it's an interesting fuck."
Four days earlier Karen would have screamed and rushed from the room at such a coarse remark. Now she merely nodded and replied: "I understand, Mr. DeWilde. Anything goes so long as it's well-written."
She started to leave but he stopped her by asking: "How do you like your job so far?"
She considered. "Well, fine, I guess. Books of this kind take a little getting used to-they're so, uh, frank-but I'm sure they're what a lot of people want to read."
"We published 172 books last year and most of 'em made money."
"It's kind of discouraging, though. I majored in journalism and creative writing because I wanted to be a novelist. That was why I came to New York- I wanted to work in a publishing house for a few years, then start writing. But now"-she stopped, helplessly-"I never in a million years could write anything like these."
He chuckled. "You read a couple hundred of them and you'll find they're not all that hard to turn out. And you're in a good position, you know-direct pipeline to the boss. Get together a synopsis of a story line, write the first twenty or thirty pages, and let me take a look at it personally." He rose from behind his desk, walked to where she was standing and slipped a fatherly arm around her waist. She tensed to pull away but his words stopped her. Looking up at his face, she asked: "You mean, if I did write something you'd look at it?"
"Honey, I'd like to look at everything you've got." The fatherly arm slipped down from her waist; in one quick movement the hand darted up under the rear of her skirt, to cup one buttock lovingly while the fingers dove into the crack between it and the other cheek. The top of her pantyhose prevented any direct contact of his flesh with hers, but the pressure was there and she gave a gasp as she jumped away from his touch.
The conditioning she had received from the manuscripts prevented her from screaming "How dare you, sir," or slapping him, or even being insulted. The man himself was revolting to her but she tried to keep it from showing in her face.
DeWilde lifted the hand and gave a general wave in the air between them. "If you're nice and cooperative with me, we'll have you between covers in no time." He winked an eye at her to punctuate his meaning. "Bed covers and book covers-I'll give you something to write about that you couldn't learn from those hick boys parked in an orange grove."
The thought of letting this man do the things to her that she had been reading about hit her with a feeling of nausea. His offer of publication of a book to be written by her was lost in the feeling of disgust he evoked. She steeled herself to give him a half-smile as she said: "I really don't think I'm ready to write anything yet, Mr. DeWilde," and slipped from his office.
She glanced at her watch. An hour until quitting time. She couldn't go back to her desk; she was too upset. Her buttocks still burned from the touch of his hand. She could hardly wait to get home and into the tub and lave away the filth of him from her body. This manuscript-she'd take it upstairs and turn in at the editorial board offices.
She did, and found herself turning down the corridor that led past Shipping. The back staircase was really more convenient, she told herself, and faster than the elevator. Besides, it led almost directly to her desk. As she walked past the bins of books with their neatly stacked titles, she saw the glow of Doug Morgan's red hair. He was checking an order invoice which the packers had readied for shipment.
"Hi, Karen," he hailed her as she came up to him. "What's the good word?"
"Nothing much, really. Read a script today that the front office might like, so I took it up to them. Now I'm just waiting until time to go home."
"What do you do for entertainment in the evenings-read?"
She smiled ruefully. "Not hardly. I think I'm going to start sitting with my eyes closed all evening to rest them."
He asked her in genuine curiosity: "Isn't it a hell of a dull job, just sitting and reading all day long? Any time you're not reading you're goofing off."
"I haven't been here long enough for it to be a drag yet. I'm sure it will be eventually, but by then maybe I'll be ready for something else."
As she spoke, she looked with pleasure at his smiling face. He certainly wasn't good-looking; he was much too rugged, even craggy, to be handsome. His nose was uneven, pushed off a little to one side, as if it might have once been broken, and the smooth line of his forehead was decorated by a couple of scars. She couldn't say he was "charming" either, she reflected; they'd really never talked about anything but the most superficial office affairs.
All she knew was that he was nice; that she liked very much chatting with him about nothing; that she felt good standing here and talking with him. That warm little glow began again in her tummy, only this time it was just fine and she did nothing to shake herself out of it. A character in any of the books she had been reading would have said she was getting "hot pants," she realized, and for some reason she did not even blush inwardly at the thought.
There was a little pause between them which Doug broke by asking: "Say, Karen, would you like to go someplace one of these evenings? Not to the movies-I know you wouldn't want to watch anything-but maybe-oh, skating, or a baseball game, or something like that?"
She hesitated just long enough to keep from sounding too anxious before replying: "Why, yes, Doug, I'd like to very much. I really haven't seen much of New York City at all." Not quite sure what to say after that, she breathed a quick: "See you tomorrow" and trotted off down the hall.
She was careful to soap herself quickly in her tub that night and not think of Doug at all while doing it.