Chapter 3
Marcus Jerome Ferris liked women. This one fact by itself would hardly distinguish him from about fifty million other males, or even a hundred million. Yet, all things considered, there was a distinguishing factor connected with this predilection. Unlike fifty or a hundred million other males, Marc Ferris had made women his life.
Of course there are other fortunate males who have managed to do likewise, in one way or another, but few could be said to have been as successful at it as he.
Very few.
To begin with, Marc Ferris had begun with nothing. No money, no family, no background-nothing, in a manner of speaking, except a very handsome face.
But a handsome face is not enough. He could just as well have turned out to be an actor, if you want to consider it from the standpoint of face alone. Looks.
Beauty is, as the saying has it, as beauty does.
Marc Ferris had done well. He had never turned a hand to any kind of serious labor since the age of fifteen. Unless you wanted to call women "serious labor"-which is a matter of point-of-view. For some they can be serious and for some they can be labor, and for some both. For Marcus Jerome Ferris they were both and not quite either at the same time. They had become, early in his life, when he started reflecting a bit on what he was doing, partly a way of life, partly an art, and somewhat of a religion.
But that statement, too, might be misleading. Marc Ferris did not worship women. On the contrary-women usually worshipped him.
Almost always.
But perhaps that is saying the same thing after all. You can be involved in a religion whether you worship or are worshiped.
A god is a religious being, to be sure.
At the age of fourteen he, Marcus Ferris, was a Bronx orphan scrounging for nickels and dimes on street corners, selling papers or shining shoes or simply scrounging nickels or dimes without selling anything. He was ambitious but he didn't like work. That much could be said of many people, fourteen or forty. At the age of fifteen he left school and decided to carve himself a career as a con man. He had read about confidence men in paper back novels, the biographies of the real ones, like the Yellow Kid and Sam the Trimmer, and he had a great admiration for them. They had brains and they had style. They dressed nicely-the way he tried to, spending whatever money he came by on the best articles of clothing within his limited price range. He had an aunt and a cousin he sometimes lived with who constantly scolded him for his wastrel ways and the fact that a "smart boy" like him had quit school. He was smart enough to avoid run-ins with the law by staying away from the local street gangs, at least. Getting busted, getting a record, didn't figure into his life plans. That was for dumb kids.
He practiced conning on his uncles and aunts and cousins. He found he could always talk them into giving him money. All you had to do was come on right, smile a little, look and dress as though you were on the verge of some big success and all you needed was a little something to tide you over until your deal came through.
A tall, well-dressed, good-looking kid, he spent his days shooting pool and studying racing forms and making a touch when he could.
Naturally this kind of life couldn't last indefinitely. For one thing, he was restless and bored, and for another, he was getting too well-known in the neighborhood. You couldn't con the same people over and over. He had a string of girls who would do anything for him, but they were just kids like him, albeit some of the best looking skirts in school-nickel and dime stuff. He never worried about having money for a date because the girl would always be glad to pay.
Naturally.
When he wasn't shooting pool or studying racing forms or tickling some high school cutie in the vestibule of her Bronx apartment house, he read. Whatever he read fired his imagination, stimulated his ambition, and increased his desire to get the hell out of the old neighborhood.
Which he did.
He moved to Manhattan, where the action was, to a hole-in-the-wall room on the West Side, midtown, practically on top of the West Side Highway. But Manhattan was a tough proposition, especially for a sixteen year old kid, and he damn near starved himself to death inside a month. He learned that the wolf may live by his wits, but starvation is poor food for thought.
That was when he discovered the existence of a magic ingredient in the world that had somehow previously escaped his attention:
Older Women.
He had had plenty of experience with girls. He had bedded harems of them, in boiler basements, on roofs, fire escapes, back seats of borrowed jalopies, floors, couches, tables and even beds. At the age of twelve he had de-virginized his ten year old cousin, who liked that so much she began to spread herself around the whole neighborhood, whereupon he became disgusted with her and lost all his romantic illusions about girls. From then on, they were just "stuff"-jailbait, grist for the mill, game to be stalked and shot down as quickly and surely as possible, and his hunting bag was never empty. It became a game for him, a game in which he selected only the most difficult prey, doe-like creatures who wouldn't remove their pants in front of a mirror, hotshot rich girls with convertibles who thought they were too good for anybody, candidates for nunneries and potential dykes or dried-up librarians. They always gave him what he wanted in the end, because he simply never assumed that they wanted to do otherwise. Every girl he met had been walking around, saving herself for him.
He simply collected. It was fun to break them down, watch them disintegrate, the most pure and virginal of them, and end up rolling around on a linoleum floor. After that you could ask them for a buck or two from their allowance to buy a new tie or a shirt with. A stud had expenses. They always understood.
But that was all behind him, in the Bronx-which as everyone knows has nothing in it but millions of big-breasted high school girls in sweaters and slacks and bermudas.
The idea of older women didn't hit him until he was broke and damn near dizzy from walking the streets without a crumb or a bite in his stomach. He could have bummed fifteen cents for a Nedick's hot dog along Forty-second, but he was older now and had pride-he had simply given up bumming even as a last expedient.
So, desperate one day, he wandered into a cocktail lounge and sat down, mostly to rest.
"Let's see your draft card, bud," the unfriendly bartender said.
"I don't have one," Marcus said, too tired to lie.
"That's all right-give the boy a drink; I know him and he's eighteen," someone else said. A well-dressed woman in her early forties, sitting by herself at the end of the bar in mid-afternoon, the remains of a martini in front of her.
Marcus looked up at her. She had hair kept black with the aid of dye, a rather large nose, a huge set of headlights and a soft white body. Her face wasn't at all bad looking despite the nose, with just a bit of sag and line to it, enough to make it look human. She came down and sat next to him and he noticed she weaved a bit as she made it.
"Hello Jim honey," she said loud enough for the bartender to hear. "I thought they took you in the army last month."
"I flunked the physical," he smiled. He was damn near unconscious from hunger-pains, but he smiled very nicely for her, and the bartender put a shot of Seagram's in front of him and left them alone.
"I'd like to give you another physical," she said, nudging him. "Up in my apartment."
She was drunk, but he wasn't being fastidious that day.
"Let's go," he said, slamming down the shot and gagging, but holding it down. They went.
They went in a cab to an address in the West Seventies, a good address near Riverside. She couldn't keep her hands off him in the cab, and when he reached to the top of her low vee-necked black dress, he found a big soft handful that temporarily made him forget the fact that he hadn't eaten since noon the day before. The shot of Seagram's had cut his hunger anyway. And it occurred to him suddenly that he had been chaste for over a week, which was something of a record.
A woman might change his luck.
Her name was Bernice Natali, Mrs., and she was a widow with one daughter and love-starved to the point of going out of her mind. Not that she should have been, because even at forty she was a handsome if somewhat portly woman. But she had had this religious thing all her life, which had simply increased at her husband's death six years before, and hadn't tapered off till now.
She was still religious as hell, but that had changed. Somewhat. Her husband had been a successful importer and he had left her well off enough to decorate her expensively furnished apartment with solid gold crucifixes and she gave money to the church and went regularly once a week to confession and insisted that her daughter, when she was home, do the same-but there was a difference.
She had thought a lot about sin lately.
Maybe she was thinking about sin then, that day when he ran into her-the woman who changed his luck. Whatever the case, when she got him up to her apartment she exclaimed: "My God! You look just like a picture of my dear sainted husband when he was sixteen," whereupon she took out an expensive gold rosary from an expensive carved end-table drawer in the living room and got down on her knees on the expensive Bigelow and began to run through the familiar ritual.
Marcus stood in front of her, wondering what the hell he was supposed to do about this in the light of the scene she had made in the taxi. He simply waited, lighting and smoking a cigarette, until she finished.
Whereupon he took off his pants.
It seemed the natural thing to do.
That was a strange scene and one he would never forget. Charge that to superstition, maybe. He had always believed in luck, at least to the extent that he felt he was lucky; he had a personal star that always managed to shine when the night grew darkest-as indeed it had that bright sunny afternoon when he walked into the cocktail lounge on lower Broadway-and it was shining now in full glory, as bright and twinkly as the concaved and convexed curves of the hundred dollar crucifix on the far wall. It was a strange scene and it seemed to hold for him something portentous, portentous for his future as well as his present. This fleshy woman in a black dress kneeling before him, launching into another chant that could have been Gregorian, for all he knew. Like the plainsong they used to chant in Latin during the Middle Ages he had read about in the Forty-second Street Public Library.
It was a very plain song at that, he thought.
She was soon singing like a bird.
Whatever it was, she enjoyed herself, and she chanted on, a littany of desire whose notes seemed to be formed somewhere in the warm denseness of her fleshy breasts which pressed tremblingly against him.
The song wasn't wasted on him, either. Something began to awaken in him-maybe just the first realization of how truly good an older woman, a warm fruit ripened on the vine, could be-and such easy pickings!
Yeah.
She was warm indeed, and not at all hard to look at-at least not from that position-and he began to get ideas as fast as she gave him the strange kind of love. The rugs, the furniture, the pictures on the wall-she looked to be loaded.
Why not?
"Why not stay for supper?" she said when she had finished. "I'm alone all day and my daughter won't be back this evening, she's with an aunt in Canarsie."
"I could use something to eat now," he said as politely as he could. "I haven't had a bit since yesterday, Mrs. Natali. Could you spare?"
She could and she did. "Call me Bernice," she said in the kitchen, pink-faced as she sliced a fine ham and made sandwiches for him. Her embarassment at what she had done in the living room was obvious, in the pinkness of her face and in the way her eyes avoided him as she busied herself in the gleaming stainless steel kitchen-but it somehow served to make him all the more attracted to her.
She looked almost like a peasant in her severe black dress, except for the gold rings. He was still fresh with the memory of how good she had been in the living room, and watching the round curve of her buttock as she bent over the table, he began wondering if she would be as good another way in the bedroom.
"Oh!" she exclaimed at the slither of his hand over that part of her dress. "You shouldn't do that!"
But she didn't move away. He ended up eating his sandwich with one and and occupying the other with Bernice.
She went crazy. She groaned and she wept and her face got red as a tomato-but she didn't move.
"God! God, no, this isn't right, this is sin, oh, oh! Forgive me, please forgive me-oh that's right, that's right! Oh! Oh!"
It was a damn good sandwich and Marcus forgave her easily, feeling in a well-fed, expansive mood now.
He got up and moved around behind her. She leaned forward and gripped the far end of the table for support, as though she were embracing it.
She was crazy, he figured. She was muttering religious things again and talking about sin and this and that, he couldn't really pay attention because he was too busy pulling the skirt of her dress over her and getting her panty girdle down where it belonged over her shapely white legs.
He pushed and the legs of the table moved screechingly over the vinyl tile.
"Oh God!" she screamed.
Later, in the bedroom, she screamed a lot of other crazy things. All afternoon she jabbered crazy stuff at him, but she left fingernail marks in his back.
Hell.
When he got up to go she was damn near hysterical.
"I got to go," he growled. "I'm broke and I have to find a job. God, let go of me Bernice!"
But she wouldn't. Instead she hauled him over to the ornate Renaissance style antique dresser, on top of which sat her black patent-leather handbag, and from it she hauled a bunch of bills and thrust them in his already outstretched hand.
He didn't bother to count them. He cornered at least one twenty in his eye, and with that he began to unbutton his shirt again.
They made an arrangement the afternoon. He would come up weekdays to visit her while her daughter was in school, and she would give him twenty bucks a throw. That figured out at a hundred bucks a week, which was doing pretty well for a sixteen-year-old kid, he figured.
Very well indeed.
He collected that amount from her for three weeks running. He was in the chips again, and laying by the bread and looking around for the next big opportunity, in case one day religion should get the best of his present meal ticket. One thing he knew now for sure: he would never have the taste of hunger in his mouth again.
Monday, the beginning of the fourth week of his life as a professional gigolo, he made a switch.
He came up to her place in the evening instead. His motive was very simple: he had seen a picture of the daughter on the same dresser whence came his first fee, and she was a beautiful, dark-haired and dark-eyed oval-faced beauty of thirteen. He saw that picture every day for three weeks running while satisfying the increasing demands of his mistress, and it finally got to him.
Naturally.
You might say it was bound to. Tactfully, he brought a bottle of wine and a present for the old lady, who was very angry over his switch in schedule.
Naturally.
But she had no control over him now and she knew it. His intimacies with her had covered the route, so to speak. He stayed late, and each time she opened her mouth to suggest he leave, he closed it with the kind of look that turned her face on.
The daughter didn't fail to notice this. She turned out to be fourteen instead of thirteen, the picture having been taken over a year ago-but the year had only done a lot to improve on the original photo. She was a sophomore in high school and had had no love experience whatsoever, but then young men didn't come visiting forty-four-year-old women and make themselves at home as a matter of course.
The three of them ended up sitting on the divan in front of the expensive TV console, whose blaring voices helped fill the gaping holes in the conversation. Marcus poured the wine and then slipped his arm around the mother, his face turned away while he distracted the daughter with idle conversation about school and movies and rock-and-roll music.
The skirt of the mother's dress had somehow slipped way up over her plump white knees in front, and quite a bit further in back. In a few minutes, she couldn't have gotten up if she had wanted to. All she could do was rivet her eyes on the TV screen and gulp wine like it was going out of fashion.
"I like jazz, too," the daughter, whose name he couldn't remember, was saying. "Do you, Jimmy?"
"Sure. Lots of soul stuff; that's the way I like it. You heard the group down at the Metronome?"
They went on that way for awhile, the daughter opening up to him as he talked, putting her more or less at ease by explaining that her mother's husband had given his old man a job once and now he was sick and dying but he wanted his son to visit the widow to remember the kindness. It was a quick lie and the first one that had occurred to him, but it worked well enough. As long as he was a friend of the family, it didn't seem too wrong to hold his hand.
The free one.
A couple of times Bernice made funny little noises, which she turned into a cough or an exclamation of surprises over something happening on the TV. She grew very excited over one soap commercial in particular.
"Mom, you're getting potted," the daughter laughed.
"So am I," Marcus laughed. "Why don't you have some, honey?
"I think it's time for her to go to bed," the mother said in a thick voice.
"Well, just one won't hurt her. Make her sleep better."
He poured, and the daughter drank.
She wasn't used to drinking and she had no resistance to alcohol. One tall glass of wine, drunk too fast, and she was getting giggly.
"I keep thinking I feel the couch moving," she said.
The couch was moving.
Really.
"For God's sake, go to bed!" the mother near-screamed.
"She's tired," Marcus said. He slipped his arm around the daughter and explored with satisfaction the small fine curve of her buttock.
"You better not do that!" she whispered urgently in his ear.
"Sorry," he whispered back. "Maybe she's right-you ought to go to bed, if you've got school tomorrow."
"I do feel sleepy," she said, leaning her head against her shoulder. "Verrry sssleeepy...."
He couldn't believe his luck. She fell asleep against his shoulder.
He carried her to the master bedroom and undressed her quickly on the large bed. She mumbled something and pushed his hands away, but the wine had made her too drunk to know what she was doing.
"I'm dying," the mother said when he returned to the living room. "God, I'm dying!"
"Come into the bedroom, Bernice."
"No, no you can't do this Jimmy; you can't do this!"
"My name's not Jimmy and I'm doing this." His hand reached into her dress and his fingers closed around a large, knob-like nipple.
"Ohhh!"
She came up from the divan. He took his fingers away and replaced them with his teeth.
"The bedroom, Bernice."
That was like leading a thirsty mare to water. She was out of control completely, a plastic thing in his hands. In the dark of the bedroom, brimming with desire, he impatiently ripped her dress from neckline to hem.
Shaking from head to foot, the backs of her fat knees against the edge of the bed, she announced:
"I'm going to scream for the police!"
He waited till she opened her mouth. That convinced him she was serious, completely serious about the screaming bit, so he quickly doubled his fist and planted one in her midriff so hard it knocked the wind and the voice right out of her and sent her collapsing backward over the bed.
He was at her before she could get her voice back, and by then it was too late-a soft foam rubber pillow pushed over her face made an excellent gag.
She made moans. She tried to fight him with her hands. She was the best she had ever been, which was damn fine, and he thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing.
Even when the bedlamp flashed on and the daughter sat up, looking at them and screaming.
The pillow wasn't necessary by then. The solid body quivered and moved and even against the daughter's cry he could hear her cry of fulfillment.
The daughter shut up quickly enough. One slap and she shut up, and then she lay back in a tremble and waited for him.
She didn't have to wait long.
Not long at all.
He was nice to her, warm and tender, kissing her dewy lips and caressing her hand-sized little breasts and touching her slim legs.
She began to move in a frenzy.
His hand covered her.
"I'm glad," she whispered suddenly. She laughed a little hysterically. "You're going to do that anyway, but I'm glad-hear me mom? Glad, glad, glad I"
The mother just lay there not saying a word, looking at the ceiling. But her hand slid over and closed around her daughter's and squeezed it.
"Mom!" her daugher shouted. "Mom, mom, oh mother, moth-er!"
Before he left, he found a hundred and some singles in the handbag on the dresser. Also a gold watch and some rings in the top drawer.
It had been a fun night, but he never went back.
That was merely a wild youthful fling. He never stole from women after that, for the simple reason he never had to. They gave him everything he needed, including furniture, clothes, jewelry, and often the rent on various apartments he rented about the island of Manhattan. At eighteen, he went on his first ocean liner voyage overseas, with a rich married woman he met at a bohemian East Side bar and restaurant, traveling of course, first class.
Of course.
They were not always that rich, but they always had something to give. Sometimes he played four or five of them at once, in rotation. Married women were always the best, wives of businessmen, advertising execs, whatnot. He set a standard fee of fifty bucks, but he soon found out that some of the "jealous" husbands were just as nutty as their wives, and would pay an extra twenty-five to come over and watch the show.
He traveled. Miami, California, Mexico, Europe. He spent the money as fast as he made it, because it was easy and it was tax free and there were a lot of things in the world he wanted to see and spend money on. There were a few bad times when he got stuck high and dry, but always there was something in skirts or a swim-suit to save him from disaster. Women in their thirties and forties were always the best. The younger ones gave you trouble. But he never limited himself to any one category at any one time.
At the age of twenty-six, he decided he was wasting his life.
That, of course, sounds silly. The world was full of frustrated males who would have given an arm and a leg to lead his life for just a while.
But he had a lot of energy and he wanted to channel some of it into doing something constructive. A woman could give you just so much, after all. She could give you plenty, but that didn't last, and the world was a huge feminine kingdom you could never conquer completely anyway.
So he decided to go into business.
He tried real estate in Florida, small-time at first, and then bigger and finally he made a wad in that game of wits. And lost every cent in the stock market.
He went into the importing business, remembering his first big experiences with an importer's widow, and, starting on a shoestring, almost hung himself with it.
Wholesale jobbing in dry goods turned out no better. He ran a small greasy spoon up to a chain of four restaurants before the market cleaned him once again.
It was all very annoying, to say the least. Highly annoying, in fact. He felt a lot of talent within himself, but he was never able to finish anything he had starter in the way of business. He became bored and careless about bookkeeping, let shyster lawyers drain off the profits, took unnecessary risks just to see what would happen, if he could run a few thou up into a million in a year-and always he ended up the same.
Broke.
A woman.
It injured his pride and made him disgusted with the world. Not that there wasn't a lot of pleasure in the art of satisfying a woman, but this was a business world and he wanted to prove he could make it that way too-a success as a businessman.
It was at the tail-end of his last big business flop that he met Cynthia Lockhart, a forty year old businesswoman. She was the second woman to cause a big change in his life.
Cynthia Lockhart was not quite like any other woman he had ever met. For one thing, she had never married. That fact, at the age of forty, might be enough to make anyone classify her as a spinster-but anyone who knew Cynthia Lockhart would definitely hesitate to classify her as a spinster. There was nothing dried-up and spinsterish about this ash blonde businesswoman, who could wear a mannishly-cut business suit and still draw whistle from an elevator boy or sidewalk voyeur.
But she was definitely different from most women. Her cold Nordic beauty was one thing-she was beautiful the way an iceberg can be beautiful; a naturalistic sort of beauty, a beauty as remote as nature.
A beauty you couldn't trust. Like the iceberg, three-quarters of Cynthia Lockhart was submerged. And, as with the iceberg, that was the dangerous part. The part that sank a thousand ships, to paraphrase a very old bit of poetry. She was not exactly a Helen of Troy.
But then Marc Ferris wasn't exactly the Paris type either. They met each other at a fashionable West Side cocktail party. He was between women and she was between business ventures. He had never met her before, but he had heard of the legend surrounding her name-how she had built a publishing business out of a fly-by-night little magazine; how she had sold that at an astounding profit and gone into advertising; how, bored with that, she had dumped the whole thing for a song and started a small cosmetics concern which was now doing very well. Stories of how she had outwitted the sharpest male competitors in the business world, wheeling and dealing with the finesse of a professional poker player.
There were other stories connected with the Lock-hart legend too. Naturally, the people she knew were curious about the fact that she had rejected offers from some of the world's most eligible bachelors from Houston to the Riviera. They were curious about her hidden three-quarters, that is. In short, her love life. And where curiosity goes unsatisfied, imagination will have a heyday.
She was suspected of being a dyke. Rumor also had it that she was a wildly oversexed nymphomaniac whom no one man could ever satisfy, which was why she didn't bother marrying any man. Others had it that she was completely frigid, a real iceburg in the flesh. Nobody seemed to really know much at all about her past, and even less about her present.
Marcus Jerome Ferris was intrigued.
Naturally.
He was intrigued by the fact that a woman had succeeded in all the areas in which he had failed. And he was curious about what kind of woman that could be. And the stories-he was very curious about them also.
Naturally.
He came to the party alone that day, and so did she. They met over a frozen daiquiri, her eyes almost the color and substance of the drink, a lemony green that met his own keen gray-eyed gaze unflinchingly. He smiled with all his charm as he introduced himself, but the ice never melted a bit.
"Ferris? Yes, I think I've heard of you. Aren't yon a professional stud or something?" The voice matched the eyes.
He was deeply stung by the remark; he thought of himself at this period, despite his repeated failures, as a business enterpriser. He almost hated her for that, and he came near to showing it in his face. But some sixth sense told him that this was a pregnant moment, a crossroads, and he kept the smile.
"Yes," he said smoothly, "I am indeed."
"How interesting," she purred. "Are you good at that?"
"So I've been told."
"Well, here's my card. Drop by some day and we might see."
She moved away into the crush, and his eyes followed the ample, neatly tailored figure with new interest. She had given him one on the chin and he had taken it, for the first time in his life from a female. It shook him somehow. But he tucked the card in his pocket, laughed silently at himself, and left the party, determined to give her a call the very next day.
It was only the first round after all.