Chapter 4
I went back alone to Seabrook that night. Amy drove with Larrine to Columbia, the state capital. The Spo-leto Festival was about to come to Charleston. Amy and Larrine, both spirited citizens, both emotionally involved with gardens, exhibitions, sweetness and light, wanted state funds for a half-dozen or more art and culture projects. "We need more concert halls, more gallery space," Larrine had said. "We need a music library. And we need places where all the young dancers and musicians can eat, sleep, practice, and lay one another."
Amy, as I have said elsewhere, was an old hand at South Carolina politics. She and her husband were in, as it were; or, more justly, in-and-out. In politics, however, an out is frequently more in than any incumbent. An out is a free-lance, unencumbered. And Amy, as I well knew, knew well the incumbent governor, congressmen, senators-as well as a colorful slew of state assemblymen, commission chairmen, arm-twisters.
"If she'll just show enough cleavage," Larrine had said, "she can get anything she wants-anything."
(There had been another man, it occurred to me, who was to be listed in the roster of those to whom she had yielded favors: Senator Ashmead. When she had been appointed South Carolina Commissioner for
Consumer Affairs, she had once gone to bed-so it was said-with the senator, in a Washington hotel. The senator, allegedly, was not able to perform. And since the absence of an erection, at the time and place an erection is in order, tends to make a man hypercritical of the girl for whom the erection was desired, Amy, through no fault of her own, stripped herself into political disfavor.)
Amy, however, was a political animal. Her mind, when not diverted by centaurs' tricks, turned intuitively to matters of right reason and social reform. Of late she had been lobbying to get the State Legislature to repeal the 1813 law which held that sexual intercourse, when performed in any except the orthodox parallel, prone, face-to-face position, constituted a felony.
("Do you realize," she once spluttered, disengaging her lips, "we are habitual, hang-up, constitutional felons. And any day now we might be called on to instruct and entertain a grand jury?")
And this night, because of Amy's dedication to public service, possibly only because she wanted a vacation from me, I was left to entertain myself.
Spoleto? That seemed a slim excuse for leaving me. Certainly so suddenly. And with Larrine.
I meditated on these matters as I hoisted a final drink at the bar at Henry's, on Market Street. I felt much alone and sad. After great pleasure, aloneness, the forlorn feeling, is greater than at other times. The memory of glut makes us more sensitive to the awareness of loss.
Next to me a man with a double-pointed, tobacco-stained beard, a white mane, and a cascading Mark Twain necktie spat a brown wad into a waiting cuspidor, and said, "We'll stop 'em at Appomattox, that's what we'll do."
It occurred to me that those who are still fighting the War Between the States are scarcely aware that, in these parts, it is felonious to fornicate except in the missionary position. Nor, being so occupied, could they much care. States' rights came before private rights.
"It's gettin' warm," the bartender said to me, stirring a Bloody Mary. He was an amiable man with thinning gray hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He was always amiable; and he never put enough ice in his drinks.
Eventually I got back to my car.
I drove up Market Street, past dozens of shops whose scrawling, amateur-painted signs said, "Flea Market," to Meeting Street. The streets were dark, empty. I drove north to Calhoun Street, turned left past Marion Square, the old Citadel parade ground.
The statue of old John C. Calhoun, standing like St. Simeon Stylites, high up on a Doric column, high enough to be almost out of sight, towered over me, muttering musty words about secession.
I turned left on King Street, in spite of the sign that said "No left turn permitted." (It is liberating, when night falls and people vanish, to disregard signs.) On King Street I drove past Elza's, a fashionable store that had no connection with my own potential Elza, but which heartened me because it invoked her name without raising problems. (We who are cowardly, lazy, inept, find childish, vicarious pleasure in form without substance, as when a child chants, "Fee, fie, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishmun.")
In time, lonely and meandering, I wormed my way to the Ashley River Bridge. Ahead was the now-drear twenty-mile drive to Seabrook.
At Seabrook, waiting, was nothing but the empty cottage, the wind in the loblollies, the skirls of the sea-birds.
Nor was my mind at rest. Bright in my mind were the lurid stripes on Amy's bottom. They reminded me of one of the old Jesuit arguments for die existence of God: If you came across a running watch in the middle of the forest, you would not ordinarily believe that it got there by accident-or a consequence of a competition among mushrooms.
The stripes were evenly spaced-except for the errant stripe that wandered down her thigh.
Who earlier had contemplated those sensuous hillocks? And whose hand had spaced those glowing marks, each of which must have been acquired with a jump and a quiver?
Who telephoned?
And why, still earlier, had Amy been obsessed with the notion that I should want to watch while she was made love to by another man? Pythagorean. Of all those who attend the Olympic games, happiest are those who only stand and watch.
There were many oddities. Many quiddities. Cloris would have told me all, in lurid detail, exciting herself as she talked. Amy told nothing.
Nor did the talk about Spoleto make a great deal of sense. The fate of the festival still hung in the balance. It would come to Charleston, so it was said, if enough money were available. But Charlestonians suspected that much of the money, if raised, might be funneled to Italy. Spoleto itself needed funding. Already there had been resignations from the committee. Amy, however-and this was more to the point-had no official connection with the festival. She was not on the committee. She was not to be onstage, even in shadow, as Monna Vanna; Charleston was as yet no Cannes. Why, then, was she so involved? Gian-Carlo Menotti, I knew, had been in town these last few days, making peace with the local promoters. Had he been at Miss Wescott's that signal night? Had he, too, seen Amy bare? Would Monna Vanna make an opera-Monna Vanna in modern undress.
The bridge across Wappoo Cut, joining the mainland to James Island, was open. There was a long, depressing wait. A sailboat with a mast no higher than a camel's hump idled by.
The bridge across the Stono was open. There was a long, depressing wait while a shrimp boat sidled by.
Eventually I passed under the great Bohicket oak, bored through the tunneled moss, tunicate and sad, crossed the causeway to Seabrook Island.
There was a raw moon.
I climbed the stairs to our seaside porch, listened politely to the hiss of the foam, to the cannonading of ripened waves. Then I put the Smith's Glenlivet bottle to my lips. The night was made for drink.
All the more surprising was the scratching at the screen door, some hour or so later. All the more surprising was the sibilant girlish voice. "May I come in ... please."
Bottle in hand, I opened the door.
Standing barefoot, bare-legged, in shorts and bra, Elza, a bottle of scotch in her hand. "I brought you some whiskey."
Even astride a Trojan horse, she was welcome. What does one say to a young girl bearing gifts? Timeo the Greeks?
I kissed her. I tried, as is proper in Charleston, to kiss her on each cheek. Camaraderie without lust; affection without self-interest. She would have none of this. She planted her lips squarely on mine; the young-girl lips, soft, moist, fragrant, clinging.
We went inside.
I opened her bottle, which was the only appreciative thing to do. I poured each of us half a tumbler. (The whiskey was a biting rotgut; but it is enough for a young, tight-bottomed girl to bring anything. Her body alone was gift enough-even if not totally given.)
"Cheers," she said, looking up at me with doe-eyed frankness, clinking glasses.
"Cheers," I said, clinking glasses and stroking her bottom. (Tight, as I expected, childish, but with muscles that smiled, flirted.)
The distant surf cheered, rumbled, spluttered, spread its hiss.
"You want me?" She was adroit at rubbing against me, an atavism, I reasoned, running back to the examples of the archaic Egyptian cat.
"Obviously." I do not believe anything I had thus far said or done made my lust evident, much less obvious. But the adverb was about as parliamentary as any. And every question from a source such as this leggy, adolescent, untested-deserves a decent answer.
She downed her drink in three successive, determined swallows, then held out her glass for a refill.
I was handy with the refill; handy, quick, generous.
"You want to fuck me, don't you?" For a girl who, until now, had measured herself in monosyllables, this, I thought, was a clarion sentence. Seven words, each grammatically poised, each moving directly to a poignant end.
"Yes." It was my turn to be monosyllabic. And youth, I now well knew, is honest. The sexual revolution has made my kind of masquerade as dated as bundling.
"You've gone through a lot of trouble. Pretending you want to take our pictures. So sweet of you. And quaint." Quaint?
"You've already paid for it, so you might as well take it." She smiled sweetly, unbuckled her belt. "Where's June?"
"Necking, probably. Or watching a basketball game. How should I know?"
With the coming of the sexual revolution, the erotic fancies of girls not yet twenty have developed a rich, fertile field for Ph.D. research. The young now have a way of looking on their elders as uninspired, uninformed, incurious beings-a sentient subspecies of skimmed milk. About the fine and forbidden uses of the flesh, elders know nothing. Some over thirty, it is conceded, may have picked up interim clinical facts from Psychology Today ("Penis Envy and the Incipient Id") or in Executive Health ("Correlations Between Chromium Deficiency and Extramarital Sex"). But lusty, vicious, delicious sex, the young feel, is a discovery of their own; an exclusive, dark, dangerous, secret practice. It is the ultimate nectar of those who, like themselves, dwell among untrodden ways while green fields sleep in the sun.
I led her to the bedroom. Fortunately, Amy, always neat, had made the bed. ("Fortunately" is my guilt word. I don't think Elza gave a passing thought to the condition of the bed.)
She dropped her pants, stepped clear of them. Then she unhooked her halter, threw it over Amy's rocker. Nothing more obscured her lithe, sunburnt body. There was the minuscule cornstalk wisp of pubic hair, as on June. There were breasts struggling to assert themselves on a flat, golden plane. There was the golden hair that tumbled to her shoulders.
"You like me?" She stood up straight, waiting to be admired. "I like you."
"Really."
"Really."
"I'm awfully different from Amy, aren't I?"
"In a way. A very nice way." Naked girls are a challenge to tact.
She looked at herself in the mirror on Amy's dresser. Then she picked up one of Amy's perfume bottles-Prince Matchabelli. Nonchalantly she put a dab behind each ear, a dab on either latent pale pink nipple. Then, with what I considered a dash of audacity, old-fashioned as I am, she poured some drops into the cup of her hand and rubbed them into and around the pubic wisp. ("Careful," I wanted to warn her. "Not inside.")
"You'll have to teach me everything," she said impishly, falling back with studied grace, her and Amy's fragrance rising.
I lay down next to her and kissed her. "Don't frighten her," I advised myself, almost audibly. "Be thoughtful. Be gentle." Thus had the redoubtable Humbert Humbert advised himself as he slipped a sleeping pill into Lolita's avid little hand. ("The science of nympholepsy is a precise science.")
My kisses were accepted, improved on, returned. Elza pulled me down to her. Her tongue located, stroked, slithered about mine. A hand, eventually freed, sought out, closed about, tested my erection. The hand seemed practiced, as if it had often entertained itself on the gearshift levers of foreign cars.
"Wow," she said politely. (My rigidity, I felt, was deserving of a passing "oh," a friendly "ah."
"Wow," I thought, was a trifle excessive.)
The portal was passed. Victory was mine.
"Wow," she said a second time. With more eloquence, more heart, more suggestion of surprise and fulfillment than the first.
Then it happened.
I could not hold back. I, the veteran of a thousand jousts, bravura lover of Amy and Cloris, was undone by a slip of a girl.
"Do I excite you?" Her voice, to mix a metaphor, was wide-eyed, sibilant, and sly. What now hath God wrought? How, now, brown cow?
I still hear the words. The "ci" in excite slithered a long time, like an actual sigh.
I got up, wiped my hands on my handkerchief, took my clothes off.
"You don't have to be so timid with me." Pleased with herself, Elza had noted my pulling out, at the ultimate moment, noted my care and waste. "I'm on the pill."
This from a girl who, in the hard sun of Seabrook, had made much of virginity.
"Believe nothing that you hear ... and only half what you feel."
I looked down at her, and she looked up at me and smiled in a proud, cherubic way. She seemed indelibly innocent. She had, however, spread her slim legs wide apart, a stance of abandon that was anticherubic.
"Come back," she said, in proper time.
I got back. The bed squeaked a joyful welcome. The small slit smiled. Now was the time for the great Casanova to make a show of his might, to lunge with bright, swift skill into the maw of innocence.
It was then, precisely then, that my trusty friend deserted me. He retreated like a bored snail. No wonders did he see, smiling and supine, on the loving bed. He celebrated the glories of gristle. "You go your way," he said in his limp, obstinate way, "you go your way, and I'll go mine." No man yet lives who owns a penis.
I retreated from the bed to let time and tact operate. I walked to the bar and poured myself more whiskey.
"Me, too." Elza held out her glass, a Houdon nymph posing, poised, quite pleased with herself. I poured whiskey in her glass-straight. "Thanks."
"How long have you been on the pill."
"You don't have to be careful with me."
"How long?"
She looked down to the space where her breasts would be, were they risen, pneumatic. Young slyness blossomed on her face, the slyness that passes for shyness. "Since yesterday."
"One day."
"I thought I'd seduce you."
"Nice of you."
"If I was going to pose naked for you ... and I was ... I took the money..."
"So?"
"If I was going to pose for you, I figured I might just as well go all the way. So I took my mother's pills."
"So." The new generation is full of surprises. Not talkative, as is ours. Not searching, questioning, peeking, probing. No Peeping Toms here-Peeping Toms are the Uncle Toms of the Sexual Revolution. Nor Lady Godwas, whose side-saddle rides generate Peeping Toms, as thesis generates antithesis; yang, yin.
"She'll never know."
"How about June?"
"If you screw June ... and I guess sooner or later you'll get around to it ... you must be careful."
"I will."
"You don't mind?"
Minding was not now the issue. To be careful, one must first be equipped to perform the act for which care is requested.
"I don't mind." To dramatize my sincerity I gave my dejected friend a vigorous thwack. He swung aside sadly, uncomplaining, then swung back in a limpid arc, pendulant and slack.
Now, were I Proust, I said to myself, T would here have a host of irrelevant, invigorating memories. I would recall how, in youth, in my bed at Balbec, an enterprising rtiaid had dandled my penis in her hot, honeyed hand; how the scent of heliotrope was then heavy in the air.
For Beauregard Benton there was no such richness of reverie. No counterthrust.
"You are or are not a virgin?" T asked, passing off my weakness as a charade. Should she say "virgin," it was to be understood that my limpness was mere gallantry.
"Yes and no," she informed me, by which I was to understand (as she later explained) that last winter she spent the night in bed with an inexperienced boy; and, at this late date, she did not know whether to classify her state as intact, indented, or interrupted.
I got back on the bed. I kissed her once more, was enlaced as before. I probed the Cave of Furies and found it ready.
"Incidentally..." she began.
"Incidentally what?"
"You were just in there."
"So I was." It was well to establish this fact. A man at moments of diminished potency clings, like Homer, to reports of derring-do. I would have liked a receipt. ("Bill was just inside me. Wow! [Signed] Elza.")
Better would be the testimony of two witnesses. (One of them June.)
"So if I had been a virgin before, I'm certainly not one now. You're a bastard and you raped me."
I agreed, with gusto, chest-thumping, pride.
"Now rape me again."
There was a challenge to myingenuity, and meeting it, I suppose, is the price a man must pay for dalliance with and explorations among the very young. At any rate, Elza soon said many things in the happy jargon that goes with such practices; and there was a confabulation of sounds and heavings.
The effect on me was tonic; ultimately hypertonic. Lovemaking, indeed, occurs first in the mind, as I have variously suggested. First use the word, then the word becomes flesh, solid, extended, eloquent.
Elza, for her part, said many unexpected, imaginative things. And for an untried girl, it did seem to me that her phrasings were more apt, glib, knowledgeable, than innocence prompts. But then, all young girls are more worldly today than were the girls of a decade past. They read, as here, of the unfolding of their sisters; and they see pictures such as Monna Vanna in which women (whose perfume they wear, and whose beds they usurp) stride about in unabashed nudity.
"Come back into me ... hurry."
And there I was, once more in the conservative missionary position. And there was Elza, legs instinctively drawn back, as so often were Amy's, under-thighs offered me as caressing stanchions.
In time we showered together, as etiquette requires after brief couplings. Then she put a dab of Amy's powder in the cleft between her thighs, and I remember her saying, in response to my reflex caress, that I should respect the orifice-if not the girl.
She dressed in some seven seconds, slipping effortlessly into shorts and halter.
"I'll drive you home," I said.
"Not necessary." She stepped on my bare feet with her bare feet, raised herself to tiptoes, kissed me with a neat, cheerleader's impersonal peck. "I parked Daddy's car a little piece down the road."
"You are thoughtful."
"I'm also concupiscent." To find her vocabulary advancing so quickly from last week's budget of "groovy" and "wow" gave me renewed faith in the bed's uses as an instrument of culture.
She used a second kiss as a semicolon. "After all, this is adultery, isn't it?"
"I am contributing," I conceded, "to the delinquency of a minor."
"Anytime." A third kiss. "It all comes with the modeling fee."
The telephone rang about half an hour later. "Darling." Amy's voice, slightly tipsy. "Darling, are you screwing June?"
"No," I said with emphatic truthfulness. And I was glad she had not called a half-hour earlier. My statement would still have been true; but somehow it might have been weak in emphasis. Between June and Elza there was probably only the slightest of mammary differences-although, obviously, I could not yet speak from experience. And experience alone justifies judgments, as Elza had so logically observed in our discussion of the axes of inclination of Chinese girls.
"I'm glad," she said. "Although you know I wouldn't really mind. I've never been jealous, have I?"
"No." I had a twinge of guilt, not about principle. About sentiment. I could, I thought, have waited anther day or so. Perhaps (new thought) that was why
I had had that terrifying no-go, no-rise spell. The revolt of the sentimental phallus.
"But if you do, I'll ... you-know-what!" Amy had indeed been drinking. Quaint joke or no, she would never in a sober moment use quite these words. Such things are not said in Charleston by a proper lady, no matter how spurred by errant passion.
Nor would she ever, even joking, let herself voice such an unfriendly thought.
"She is joking." Larrine's voice cut in. "She would never, never, never..."
"Hardly ever," Amy added, from a distance.
I heard in the background much laughing and a clinking of glasses.
"Darling..." Amy again was on the phone. "We're running up to Washington for a few days. You won't mind, will you? Awfully important. Tell you all about it when I get back. And I was joking. Really I was."