Chapter 7
After that it was all quickly over. I had got what I had come for. Now I was stricken with the uncontrollable urge to get away.
Janet lay uncomprehending but vaguely relieved as I got up and dressed. She was too cautious to say anything, and I was too agitated. When I'd got all my clothes on and had my briefcase in my hand, I walked quickly to the side of the bed and drained one of the half full glasses of champagne that still sat there. "Well," I said, "That's it. I'm leaving town now right away. I'm going out to the Coast. This is a big world, and it shouldn't be too hard for me to make sure you've seen the last of me."
She sat up on the side of the bed and looked at me quizzically. "What's the rush? Why don't you stick around for a while and relax?"
"You're worried that I haven't got enough to satisfy me, right?"
"Maybe," she mused. "But maybe I'd just like to know some more about you."
"Why? If I were still going to be working at the office and I asked you for a date, would you accept?" I could see I'd put her on the spot, and that was all I really needed to know. "You don't have to be afraid to say no. In a way, you already have. And that means that I shouldn't tell you any more about myself." That was a rule I had adopted; my first and firmest rule. "Never let the woman know more about yourself than is absolutely necessary." It would have been stupid; and I had made up my mind to be clever.
"Fucking with you was a lot better than I thought it would be. In fact, I really got off on it."
"But," I pursued, "I'm not basically your type, right?"
"I guess I'd have to admit that's true."
"And you wouldn't exactly look forward to another time?"
"I wouldn't dread it, if that's what you mean," she laughed.
"But you wouldn't do it if you had the choice."
"I don't know. Maybe I would."
"Maybe isn't enough for me. And since I can't ever expect a woman to give me any more than maybe, women can't expect me to tell them much about myself. Anyhow, it's been fun. Goodbye." I left.
I went down to Jim Northrup's apartment and dyed my hair a few shades fighter. Except for a trip to a bank the next morning to put Bob's identification in a safe deposit box and a few trips to the grocery-store now and then, I stayed in my apartment for the better part of two weeks, letting my hair grow out. I made some more calls looking for jobs, but even such things as restaurant waiter and store clerk were out because I didn't have any references. Toward the end of the two weeks I ventured out to purchase a new wardrobe; jeans, double-knit bell bottoms, cowboy boots, loafers, work shirts and turtle necks and a few mod-dress shirts from a little shop in Chelsea. I got myself a pair of steel-rimmed glasses with clear lenses. I really looked different Then I started pounding the pavement.
It was another week, and my savings had swindled to less than three hundred dollars, when I finally found an owner of a small restaurant desperate enough for a short-order cook that he would hire me with the explanation that I'd come from a rich family and so had never had to work before, but had just had a falling out with my father and decided to leave home. Luckily the old cook, the owner's brother-in-law, was willing to stay around a few days to break me in, and soon I was tying omelets and hamburgers and pork chops and ladling out soup and browning chicken with the best of them.
The restaurant was a sort of hole-in-the-wall, with only eight tables, but it was a nicely furnished, comfortable neighborhood place where people brought in their own beer and wine and hung around talking until all hours of the night. It was a few blocks from my. place, and it had that air of respectable, artsy solidity of the West Village. I was glad it was isolated from the chaotic and often unpleasant scenes of Bleecker Street. The owner handled the cooking from ten-thirty, when the place opened, until late afternoon, when the traffic started to get heavy. Then I took over, and worked until one or two in the morning, depending on how late it was profitable to keep the place open.
For the first two weeks after my night with Janet I was numb-all but paralyzed-with conflicting recriminations and desires. It was over the stove at Hardy's that the world started to seem real to me again. It was so simple, and so mechanical, breaking those eggs and slapping those meat patties onto the griddle, throwing buns in to toast and banging pots and pans and utensils around.
It was there I found my next "subject." When it happened, and I knew that I was going to get her, I also knew better than ever that I was hooked by the blackmail game. Janet had done something nasty to me; she had given me a reason for wanting to fuck her. But Robin, the college-girl waitress who worked my shift five nights a week, didn't do anything like that. I told myself she did, but really, she didn't. I had to look for insults to justify what I did to her, and even though I never quite found enough, I did it anyway.
Not that Robin was exactly what you'd call either gorgeous or brilliant. In fact, in spite of the "educated" way she talked, I sometimes suspected she was basically dumb. For instance, she'd been working at Hardy's nearly a year, but she still got orders mixed up, got specials-of-the-day turned around, added people's checks wrong, and so on. Not often, but enough. On the other hand, she wasn't at all pretentious, as Janet had been. She was rosy-cheeked and sprightly, and was generally cheerful and polite to everyone. She was the kind of person who assumed you were all right until you proved otherwise.
Robin used to come to work in the wildest assortment of things, from grubby old jeans to long, flowing shifts of oriental print. It was a joke among the regulars to try to bet on what Robin would show up in on a given night.
Robin also had a good sense of humor. One night she came in through the back door twenty minutes early so she could eat her supper in peace, and overheard three or four guys actually making money bets on what she was going to show up in and laughing hysterically at the combinations they put together as their guesses. "Cowboy hat, pasties, and a burlap-sack shirt. Bridal gown with blue-jean bloomers and dog-bone tiara. Man's tuxedo with bathing-suit halter and six-inch cork platform shoes." She happened to have on a tie-dyed dashiki over a skirt that looked something like burlap and a pair of tennis shoes, but she didn't want the guy who'd made the first guess to win, so she decided to "pull a good one." She looked in her purse and counted her money and asked if she could borrow five dollars. I was, of course, more than happy to lend it to her. She skipped out and fifteen minutes later made a grand entrance in a rented tuxedo with a skimpy bathing-suit halter underneath and four-inch cork platform shoes. The place went wild. There were a few good-natured whistles at the brevity of her halter amid the laughter, foot-stomping and applause, so to string the game out she stripped the jacket off and sauntered around a bit, modeling the halter as though she were Gypsy Rose. Then the guys chipped in the bet money to pay for the tuxedo rental.
That little episode was what first made me notice her, or any woman since Janet, who had occupied all my fantasies as well as all my nightmares. Robin was medium height, slender, sprightly, and boyish. Her tits weren't anything to get excited about, but the casual way she slipped off that absurd tuxedo jacket and sauntered around between the oak tables with her shoulders back and a slinky turn to her gait was enough to trip my trigger.
This happened about two weeks after I'd started to work at Hardy's, around mid-September. When Robin was through with her little joke she skipped back to the kitchen on her way to the ladies' room to change her clothes. She stopped to give me back my five dollars.
"That was a good one," I said, hoping to hold her up for a while so I could look over the top end of her figure. Despite the relative flatness of her chest she made quite an appealing picture, and I couldn't help remembering Jill and Janet and imagining what she would look like without her halter. She had a sort of athletic form-not athletic in a muscular way, but athletic as in durable, graceful, and not weak. She wore her amber-blonde hair in short curls that gave her a kind of Roaring Twenties look. She had hazel eyes with mysterious gold flecks, and she had the habit of staring very hard at you when she spoke.
"Ha ha! Do you think so?" She leaned up against a counter to scrutinize me closely, the tuxedo jacket over her arm, her hands folded over the subtle young curve of her bare belly.
It was just one of those times when I didn't know what I was doing. I have a compulsion to play the fool, I guess. Maybe I just keep hoping that I can be my own inept self and people will accept me. Maybe I unconsciously like to be inept and challenge people to like me anyway. I was wiping my hands off on a towel on the refrigerator door a few feet from her. I stared pointedly at her chest and grinned. "It was a good one, all right. It looks like you've got a couple of good ones there. Bet you could put on a nice show if you wanted."
She couldn't believe it. She looked shocked, as if surely I should have known better than that-that she wasn't that kind of girl, and so on. But I'd heard her say some pretty risqu' things to a boyfriend who had stopped by a few nights before, and I knew that it was just me she was reacting to.
Well, I guess at that point I didn't look too attractive. I was in jeans and a T shirt and an apron spattered with grease. I was sweaty and now that my eyes had suddenly been opened to a living female body again I knew I had that sex-starved look in my eye. I'm sure that's what scared her.
I turned to chopping some stew meat and tried to come up with some casual banter to smooth the situation over. But before I could say a word Robin marched into the ladies' room and slammed the door. I thought to myself, "Well, what would I think, and what would I do if I were a girl her age alone in New York City?" I knew Robin lived alone, and that although she was nobody's virgin, she tended to stick to one boyfriend at a time. But then I thought, "It is just because it's you, you know. If you'd been handsomer, tougher, wittier, suaver, you could have got away with that. But you're just who you are, and who you are is someone who can only get women into bed one way."
From that moment on I started looking for a way to get Robin. From that moment on, also, all feelings of guilt were left behind. It was always that way when I got on to the scent of a new woman. I had a one-track mind then, and my sole objective was to get what I wanted and get away. I was taking enough risks that if I got caught I'd be. punished plenty-more than I wanted or, as I thought, deserved. I guess I didn't mind building up a debt to society because I thought society already owed me more than it could ever repay. The individual girls were just marks and markers in a game. As far as sex went, we were still playing by the laws of the jungle. "Sexual welfare" was an idea that had not occurred to anybody yet
So after Janet, and the first big swing from triumph to despair, the cycles shortened. After every triumph I learned to seek another subject right away, with the knowledge that as soon as I found her, my self-torture would stop. Toward the end I started working on three or four girls at a time, so I was never out of the hunt and never out of danger. Blackmail became my obsession, the pace quickened until I was racing madly about at the far limits of sanity.
It took me a while to get what I needed on Robin. For a month or so I said very little to her, but tried to overhear as much as I could. There was an open serving window to the kitchen at the rear of the restaurant, and when the din of cooking was not too loud I caught a lot of conversations between her and the customers, many of whom were her friends. They were mostly NYU students like herself, but there seemed to be some vagabond street-types too, who were always looking for ways to make a few bucks here or there without committing themselves to anything as horrible as a steady job. She had one particularly close girlfriend like that named Shirley. They had apparently grown up together in southern California. Shirley called herself an artist, but I never saw anything she painted, and all I ever heard of her doing was setting up her easel in Washington
Square once in a while and doing portraits of passersby for a few bucks each. Shirley was more petite than Robin, and had straight black hair, close-cropped, wide cheek bones, and a smooth complexion that suggested that maybe she had a little Oriental or American Indian blood in her. Her face had that sort of proud, distant, aloof look, but her manner was just the opposite; she was loud and raucous and joked and giggled a lot. She wore the same raggedy paint-spattered jeans and work-shirt almost all the time, and though she had nice full tits and a firm, high-slung ass, she always looked a little too lean, as though she didn't quite get enough to eat. Sometimes I wondered whether she took a lot of speed.
The break on Robin came when Angie, the restaurant's owner, got behind on his books, and was too hassled to catch up again. I came in one morning in late October to hear him grousing about it. I saw a chance to make a little extra money and maybe get back into book-keeping or accounting sooner or later, and I offered to take over the job. He took me up on it.
The first night I sat down to total expenditures and receipts I began to suspect that something fishy was going on. It wasn't that the receipts were a lot lower than they should have been, but looking through the customer checks, it felt to me as though there wasn't quite enough there, especially for certain week nights. If I hadn't been the cook as well as the accountant I would never have become suspicious, but I knew every order that came through the kitchen while I was there. I had a good memory, and sometimes for fun, or just to keep myself occupied, I would keep running totals of how many dollars' worth of food I put out on a given evening. I looked at a few recent days and found that on the previous Wednesday Robin had written $234 worth of checks where I'd added up more like $250 worth of food going out the serving window.
If I hadn't had so much confidence in my memory and calculating ability, I would have dismissed the whole thing. But it was all just too logical. Robin was feeding free food to her down-and-out friends at Angie's expense. Maybe she was even getting a little kickback for it. She wasn't going overboard. Lots of nights were perfectly all right as far as I could tell, and out of a few others where I'd bothered to keep running totals the difference was only three or four dollars. But still.. .
I didn't say anything to Angie about it. The way things were set up, it was impossible to prove anything anyway; the waitress just yelled orders to the cooks, and the cooks put out the food, and the waitresses wrote up the checks and collected the money. The only record of what the cooks had put out was on the waitresses' checks, and if they were fudged to begin with, it was a pretty nifty little con. It would have been my word against Robin's.
But the very next night my suspicions were confirmed. A whole raft of Robin's friends-about eight of them-took over three tables toward the front of the place. Shirley was among them. They all ordered a lot of stuff. This time I wrote everything down myself. Toward closing time I took out the books and gathered np Robin's pile of checks and started adding and entering figures on one of the tables toward the back of the place. Robin looked a little alarmed, but she tried to hide it. She came back and spoke to me for the first time in a long while. "I didn't know Angie had you doing the books now." There were still a few customers finishing up late night snacks, and pretty soon Angie would be coming in to close the place up.
"That's right," I told her. "And I think there's something you and I better talk about." I'd found that one steak, one bowl of stew, one salad, and one order of french fries hadn't been charged for. The steak, salad and french fries had gone to Shirley.
Robin's face went pasty white and she leaned down over me shaking. "What do you mean? What would we have to talk about?"
"I think we'd better go back into the kitchen."
She followed me numbly. When we got there I hit her with it straight out. "You've been, shall we say, neglecting to charge some of your friends, Shirley for instance, for their meals. like tonight, for instance. I made $25.50 worth of food for that table. It's all recorded right here. And you only charged them $17.30. You realize that if Angie found out about this you'd lose your job in two seconds and you'd have a hell of a hard time getting another one."
"I.. . I can't afford that! I was just trying to help out some friends down on their luck! But if I lost my job, it'll cost me everything! I couldn't afford to stay in school, or keep my apartment, or...." She looked up pleadingly at me and I knew I had her. "What are you going to do? You're not going to tell him, are you?"
"I haven't made up my mind yet. It's really my duty to tell him, you know. If I don't, I'm involved too."
"But I won't ever do it again!" She was really frantic now. "I promise I won't!" She was half sobbing. "Please don't tell him. I'll make it up somehow. I just don't know what to do. Please don't tell him! I'll do anything!"
I sat down on a stool and shook my head. "I doubt that you'll do anything."
The light of comprehension dawned in her eyes. She took a step back and stared at me and her face went blank with outraged horror. "You . . . you . . . " She couldn't finish telling me what I was. I had her trapped but good.
"All I said was, I doubted that you would do anything. I didn't make any suggestions as to. what you might do."
"But I do know what I can do, don't I?" I could see her thoughts racing like a rat on an exercise wheel, and I could see her realizing there was only one way out-and even that it was, all things considered, a pretty cheap way. "I know you're a goddamned sex freak," she said. "I could feel you staring at me with your damned x-ray vision from the day you came to work here."
"Yes?" I smiled. "Well to put your mind at ease, I happen to be a pretty tame sex freak. You probably think I have all kinds of weird perversions floating around in my mind. Whips and spurs and ropes and things like that." I shook my head. "Not so. My sexual desires happen to be very normal. They're just a little frustrated and upfront, that's all. But of course you can understand how a man like me might be frustrated?"
Just then Angie came in the front door and stopped to chatter with some customers. Robin seized up with sudden dread and her voice fell to a low, hissing whisper. "I don't know. I just don't know. Are you going to tell him now? Please don't tell him now. At least give me some time."
I sat on my stool with my arms folded regarding her stonily.
She took a few steps toward me, out of the frame of the serving window. Her jaw tightened and her eyes blazed. She was wearing a blue sweat shirt, inside out, with no bra underneath, and bell-bottom jeans.
She yanked the sweat shirt up and her tits popped out at me like a pair of fried eggs. Not that she was really that flat chested. In fact her breasts rose in nice, neat, separate swellings, taut and firmly rounded, that raised her nipples well off her chest and pointed them up and out. But the nipples themselves, puffy and raised with that slightly swollen look, were just about the size and shape of egg yolks. "Here's a first installment to keep you quiet for the night!" She shook her shoulders and made her nipples dance before my eyes. "Is that enough, or would you like to grab them too?"
"Not at the moment" I grabbed the bottom of her sweatshirt and yanked it down. Then I turned to cleaning the griddle. "All right. I won't mention anything to him tonight. But you and I are going to have to get a few things straight. Understand?" I gave her a side-glance that withered her to trembling once more. "I don't know what we can work out and what we can't, but with your present attitude it doesn't look like it's going to be much. You're the one who wants to do something about it, not me, and you're the one who brought up sex in the first place." Naturally I was getting this all down on tape. But I wasn't going to tell her that. This tape was for plugging holes in an emergency. "If you expect me to wink at your cheating, to cover it up, to become an accomplice to it, really, in return for the favors of your body, you'd better make the favors look a little more favorable. Otherwise you'd better retract your suggestion before you get in even more trouble for trying to bribe me."
She was silent. Angie stopped in and said hello and asked how the books were going. "Okay," I told him. "There are a few things that have to be adjusted, but I should have them up to date by the weekend." He said that would be good and went about putting chairs up on tables and sweeping the floor.
"Why don't you go home now?" I said to Robin. "And simmer down." I looked up at her with a bland smile. "There really is an easy way for this to turn out all right, you know. If you figure out what it is, let me know. You've got until Friday morning."
She left and immediately I was caught up in a stream of fantasies of how it would be.