Chapter 5
"There's Bill."
"It's Bill," I heard June say. Her voice, with piccolo overtones, overrode the wind, in girlish obbligato.
"Hey, Bill." Both voices in concert.
I turned, as any man would, hearing his name so enthusiastically sounded.
The twins were sitting at a table on the terrace of the Seabrook Club, sipping drinks. Their untamed hair streamed, with blonde jubilation, in the wind. With them was a staid couple, of an age which would have justified parenthood.
I went over to the table.
"This is Bill," Elza said.
"The writer." June, as I was to learn, looked on herself as Elza's translator. She had an urge for exactness. Elza attributed it to the size of her breasts.
It was thus that I met Mr. and Mrs. Simmons Pol-tergrue.
Mr. Poltergrue was wispy, steel-eyed, and wore rimless glasses. I took him to be a doctor, a bank president, or a used-car salesman. It was Mrs. Poltergrue, apparently, who had given the girls their good looks. She was a symmetrical blonde, like girls in cigarette ads, or the girls in TV commercials who tell their daughters what to do for occasional irregularity.
Mrs. Poltergrue, it must be conceded, was a trifle plump-a controlled voluptuousness, you might say, as in the case of Mrs. John Dean (who was then more or less in the headlines). Her hair was tucked in a bun; and her bosom, as generous as Amy's, now in brazen decollete, lazily toasted itself in the Seabrook sun.
"You are a writer?" Mrs. Poltergrue graced me with a listless smile.
I nodded, and returned the smile. "What do you write?"
"Biographies." There was little point in telling her that I was now planning an account of the erotic gambols of her two ebullient daughters.
"How nice."
"Usually biographies. Right now I'm doing a book on Charleston. You might call it the biography of a city." All of which, I thought, was as good a half-truth as any. Inanimate objects are entitled to biographies; they have a lifetime, a history. The canon pointing toward Fort Sumter, for example, would change somehow, once the two naked Poltergrue girls were astride them. The statue of John C. Calhoun, at Marion Square, would perhaps show some muscle movement-like the statue of the Commendatore in Don Giovanni-once the naked Elza embraced his peristyle.
"We're going to work for Bill all summer," June announced to her parents.
"And make scads and scads of money." Elza had a practical turn of mind.
"Scads," said her sister.
"Youngsters nowadays are so independent," Mr. Poltergrue informed me.
My eye by then had had time to rove over the girls. Once again they were in identical light blue shorts, laced, along a wide, open space, up the thighs. And once again there was displayed, through the fretted margin, a broad spread of golden flesh.
In front of us was the early-afternoon ocean, light blue, like the shorts, and fretful.
"So you really write." Mrs. Poltergrue sipped her long drink thoughtfully; too thoughtfully, I was afraid. It was only the unstirrable emptiness of her face that assured me that her mind, as yet, had not combed mine.
"Usually in Italy. This summer is an exception."
"I've never met a writer before."
"He knows 'Miss Amy' Dellmore," Elza volunteered, presenting my credentials, and, as a well-brought-up Charlestonian, referring to a woman a half-generation older as "Miss."
From one end of the horizon arc to the other hung a single cloud, jaggedly serrated on top, like mountains in a Chinese scroll. Immediately in front of us and parallel to the lower edge of the cloud was a line of pelicans, black, scoop-beaked, floating single file. There were exactly twenty-one birds-I counted them-each, except for the first, following its predecessor gracefully, passively, wheeling and dipping.
"Ah, Amy," Mrs. Poltergrue beamed.
"What a woman!" Mr. Poltergrue also beamed.
My eye followed the lead pelican and wondered what precisely a pelican needed to do to win his place at the head of his line. I suggested to myself that the operation probably followed procedure by which one became a grand duke. (On the other hand, was the same pelican always at the head of the same line? With pelicans, as with chipmunks, it is not easy to establish personal identity.)
"So good to look at, so charming," Mrs. Poltergrue went on. "An intuitive political animal."
"She's that all right." Poltergrue was positive. He smirked almost imperceptibly, as if recalling one of the published pictures of Amy in a slim swimsuit.
I returned my eye from the pelicans to Mrs. Poltergrue and asked myself how she would look in a slim swimsuit. Not that I was concerned. The mental activity was no more than a reflex, a consequence of habit. (A trifle overripe, I concluded, a bit too round here and there; but she was still young enough, as was Lillian Russell in her prime, to make plumpness prurient.)
"She could be our first congressman-if she could ever be persuaded to run." She looked at me with what I took to be an appraising, half-calculating look. Perhaps I might have some influence. "Or should I say congresspersonl"
"They say she's having an affair with Senator Ash-mead," Poltergrue said, giving no thought to me.
"Ssh." Mrs. Poltergrue put her finger to her lips. The gesture was apparently intended, by retroactive black magic, to keep such hearsay from my ears.
"Such an aristocratic family." Poltergrue was prepared to make amends for his lack of gallantry. "Her great-grandfather hung somebody or other."
"Hanged, dear." She looked to me for understanding. What do bankers know about preterits?
"Stede Bonnet." June, like many Charleston girls, was expert in the history of piracy.
"Blackbeard," said her sister, a more precise historian.
"Everything tastes better with Stede Bonnet on it."
"How udderly udder." Elza, I was to learn, regarded sibling rivalry as mammary competition. "Balls," said June.
"It's so nice of you to use the girls in your book," Mrs. Poltergrue said to me blithely, happy to change the subject. "They have so much talent. Really! But they need experience."
I agreed. On all counts, I agreed. I visualized myself exploiting the first, providing the other. There was now clear evidence, I thought, Panglossian proof, that this was the best of all possible worlds.
Mrs. Poltergrue gave me a brief resume of their scholastic achievements. Straight A's in dramatics, gymnastics, drawing. At least a C in everything else. June, last year, was second runner-up in the Miss Cotton Boll Contest. Elza's class voted her the Girl Most-likely to Succeed.
Mr. Poltergrue was glad that his daughters were working. Work, he felt, built character. It also diminished the need for a perpetual allowance.
They-the elder Poltergrues-wanted to know more about my book, the book featuring their talented daughters, not the one, obviously, featuring Amy (and now also their talented daughters). When would it come out? What was it about?
It would have been eminent discourtesy to explain that it was about their talented but naked daughters. And that it would never come out. (Although possibly they could read about my shameless shams in the book about Amy-as yet untitled.)
A book was in progress; the book was to have many fine photographs; the many fine photographs were presentations, in sundry poses, of the photogenic Poltergrue twins. These facts had been established. And for the time, in my purview, they were all the facts known, needed to be known. Truth is beauty, beauty truth.
Poltergrues pere, mere, seemed pleased. Sooner or later Elza and June would be interviewed on the Today show. Their pictures would be emblazoned on the i covers of Time and Newsweek. Eventually, perhaps, given a Republican administration, there might be ambassadorships.
It was, however, June, June herself, in whom he had high hopes of worldly success. Not that he loved Elza the less; but Elza was flighty, moody, more given to poetic lapses-all of which, I suppose, was his unconscious way of noting that her breasts were smaller. June, he thought, had a natural gift for business; a simple, uncluttered way of looking at the world.
He wanted her to become an insurance underwriter and be the first of his daughters to be, if not an immediate member of the Million-Dollar Club, at least self-supporting. First, of course, she would have to study, study underwriting; for underwriting, unlike ordinary writing, is not a craft acquired willy-nilly, hit or miss. It was a calling, a dedication. You studied for it the way you studied for holy orders or better golf.
Yet, now the twins, thanks to me, were about to be launched in another direction. If ambassadorships were not waiting, show business was. (As indeed it was. One of my prints, mailed to Cloris, shown to Cloris, could lead to stardom; superstardom.)
In the interim there were television commercials, high-fashion modeling, Miss Teenage America, Miss America herself-although it was highly improbable that Elza and June could simultaneously be Miss America. (There have been dual archons, dual kings, even dual popes; never dual queens.)
In any event, once the book came out, was acclaimed as inevitably it must be acclaimed, Mummy and Daddy would no longer have to support them. They would be launched. On their own. And sooner or later they would marry Prince Charles or the son of a former member of the Nixon cabinet, sequentially, simultaneously, or in concert.
"Anywhoo..." Mrs. Poltergrue beamed at me eyes that reminded me of the possibility of twin suns rising from sea. "Anywhoo, where's the book ... the action ... set?"
"Most of the action is in Charleston, or thereabouts," I said, more or less truthfully. Book or no book, my plans left room for considerable action. Perhaps even a motion picture. (The Bobbsey Twins Turn Nudist? The Girls from Syracuse? Two for the Show?) "Historic Charleston ... with its poetry, its patina, its gates and cannon ... its walled gardens in which every camellia reads Sir Walter Scott."
I waved my hands toward an imaginary Charleston, twenty miles north of the nearest laughing gull.
I improvised praise of Ruskin's Stones of Venice, suggested that my book would be ... could be ... something like Stones of Venice, given Charleston rather than Venice, given lavish photographic illustrations.
"If I had done a latter-day Stones of Venice, illustrated, as I would illustrate it, I, of course, would have used Marisa Berenson and Sophia Loren as models."
"Of course." Mrs. Poltergrue had no doubt about it.
"But in Charleston..." I did my best to look solemn, dedicated, as I imagined Edward Weston to look, while focusing on a green pepper. "In Charleston we have Elza ... and we have June." (I thought it tactful to mention first the twin with the flatter bosom.)
"Of course. Of course."
"Work their asses off," Mr. Poltergrue said prophetically, but with more enthusiasm, perhaps, than he might have expressed had he attended our rehearsals.
Nor did I approve of such blunt language in front of girls yet so tender, so unfurled.
"So far, they've had it much too easy." Mrs. Poltergrue, now in the presence of a full flesh-and-bone writer, wanted it understood (as if for the record) that, like her husband, she took virtue to be consonant with long hours and hard work.
I agreed, Elza winked, June kicked me under the table.
I felt all was well in hand. I could afford to relax, rejoice, be imprecise. The Poltergrues were realists. Every realist knows that good books gestate much longer than elephants; and this was to be a good book. Soon the summer would pass; Seabrook would be no more than an enchanted ripple long remembered. Amy and I; Amy, Cloris, and I-perhaps Amy, Cloris, Elza, June, and I-could well be in Rome, Mantua, Sirrhione, or Madrid.
"Order Bill a drink," June said.
The surf of a sudden compounded its rhythms. Low booms bowed down to sustained hisses; in running counterpoint was the pitter-patter of Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream.
The sea airhas a way of sensitizing your ear.
"And order me another bottle of my favorite wine." Mrs. Poltergrue was suddenly exuberant, as the wind seemed, when it stiffened. She informed me that she was most demanding when it came to wine. She could tolerate nothing but the best. Her favorite was called vin blanc. "Burgundy, you know."
The next afternoon at four, when the tide was beginning to ebb, waves still nibbling at the sea oats on the dunes, the girls came to work.
Both wore blue jeans and men's shirts knotted at midriff. Both were barefoot and chewing gum.
"Hi," each said in turn, running up the beachside staircase.
And there they were, standing in the place they had stood when, looking through the opened screen door, they had first seen the tattoo on Amy's naked rump. (Frustrated director that I am, I find a special pleasure in replaying scenes I have enjoyed. There is the same staging, same location, more or less the same action; only the cast is changed-or, more to the point, the leading actresses.) "Hi."
As soon as greeting ceremonies were over (a polite Continental peck on either cheek-cordial, but not ardent), I mixed drinks. Drinks were much in order if what I hoped would happen would happen much as I hoped. Pina coladas had promoted good cheer the first time around; I mixed pina coladas again-double strength.
The girls sprawled themselves comfortably in large redwood patio chairs, each puffing cigarettes in between nonchalant champings on gum. , As I served the first drink (tall glasses, very cold), I gave each a crisp, new hundred-dollar bill. "I will pay you at every modeling session," I said in a tone intended to be as crisp as the spanking-new money.
"It's really not necessary," Elza said sweetly, folding the bill and putting it in the right pocket of her jeans. "We trust you."
"Look," June said, pointing to the ocean, "a porpoise."
I explained in some detail what I apologetically call my production plans. And since I had few, if any, specific plans, over and above specific enjoyments, the explanation was not easy.
"We will have a certain number of basic positions and poses. Among these are lolling, leaning, lying, loping ... sometimes singly, sometimes together ... sometimes seen from the side, sometimes frontally. Occasionally we will need a straight-on derriere shot, as when one of you is leaning over to read the inscription on a gravestone ... or to pick up a forgotten musket ball."
"Groovy," Elza said.
"You will of course be naked."
"Wow," June said.
I picked up my Nikon and looked casually through the finder, as if my mind, always on professional matters, was now directing itself to matters of aperture and focus. Meanwhile I listed some of our possible locations: the East Battery, Whitepoint Gardens, City Hall Park (which has a statue of Pitt, one arm of which was shattered by a cannonball during one of the many sieges of Charleston). I spoke glowingly of Middleton Gardens, Magnolia Gardens, Cypress Gardens, the gardens of the Villa d'Este (where I hoped to take them, at some later date)--.
"When do we start?" June arched ecstatically, crassly, a penciled brow.
Money, indeed, paces art; and art, rectitude. And how pleasant it was for me to remind myself that, come what will, all my expenditures were deductible. No empty phrase is "the writer's craft."
"After the next drink."
The next drink was triple strength.
"You're going to like June," Elza said. "I told you."
June did not look at me. She sipped her triple-strength pina colada quietly.
"You like Proust?" Again Elza aborted the "Groovy ... wow" routine.
"Yes."
"You think he ever took any nudes?"
"Plenty," June said. "All ladies with black silk stockings, long gloves, and big sailor hats. And all on daguerreotypes."
"Lewis Carroll took nudes of little girls," Elza said.
"Look." June pointed. "Another porpoise."
I let a reasonable spread of time slide by. Then, eventually, I came to the signal question: "Ready?"
June put down her drink and stood up. "Ready when you are, B.B."
She recited her lines bravely. Elza, not moving, listened, watched.
"Good." I, too, got up.
"You want me to undress?"
"Yes."
"Right here."
"Right here."
"Everything."
"Everything."
"I'm a little scared."
"I did it, didn't I?" Elza gave me a collusive wink. She, too, soon would undress. That was understood. For the moment she chose to sit back and watch June. And June, coloring slightly, was enjoying, masochistically, this otiose discussion of what she was to do. this echo serenade. Tension is heightened by talk, particularly antiphonal talk-with much repetition of identicals.
"I already saw a lot of you at Larrine's. Remember?"
She laughed a small lie. "I'd almost forgotten."
"Superb." I held up the O formed by thumb and arced pointed finger. Flattery could do no harm. "Tits," Elza said.
"Okay." She smiled with a fillip of resignation, as if to say farewell to virtue, good-bye all that. She undid the knot in her shirt. The shirt opened. Breasts swung into view. Convenient nipples, pale, subdued, looked at me with the shy nipple eyes.
Why, I wondered, did Amy insist that I wanted to see her made love to by another man?
June took off her shirt, threw it to the nearest chair.
Then she faced me, Nefertiti style, arms straight down, palms flattened against thighs. "Okay?"
"Okay." The slopes had a golden glow, like the parts of her ordinarily visible. She had done her sunbathing, most evidently, sans bra.
I went over to her. I devoted a hand to either breast, cupped, fondled, ran forefingers around each nipple. I kissed each nipple, and each, I was pleased to note, rose slightly.
"Is this usually done?"
"Always," I assured her.
"It's the in thing." Elza, I thought, was proud as a sucked stone.
"I always thought of the in thing as a little bit different." She raised, again, her linear brows. "Just a weeny, teensy weeny bit different."
"To each her own." Elza was now conspicuously comfortable with me, like an old wife.
"What now?" June, who had turned to face Elza, swung back to face me. Her breasts, gelatinous pomegranates, swung with her, but because of their gel, because of the laws of inertia, oscillated temptingly, like a baked Alaska, after the initial swing.
"Drop your jeans."
Elza interpreted. "Strip."
June looked at me, her eyes now enigmatic. "Yes?"
"Yes," I said.
"Okay."
She unbuckled her belt, unfastened the lead button, unzipped the front.
The pants fell. She extricated, gracefully, her left foot. Her right foot sent the jeans flying in the direction of Amy's and my bedroom.
"There."
And there it was. The naked June, golden, glowing, lithe, untouched, sensuous and cynical.
I ran my hands over her. The spectacle defied social gravity.
Young girls do not do such things. Young girls do not strip on demand-even at a hundred dollars per unit stripping. Chaos stalks this umbilical world.
"Stacked, isn't she?" Elza said.
"Stacked." There was no denying. Elza, however, was toying with a more simplistic, envious note. Breasts. Young girls with negative breasts think that mammary inflation alone attracts men to girls; just as young men think, once chips and bedcovers are down, nothing interests a girl, holds a girl, other than penis girth.
In the face of such illusions, it is pointless to speak about Platonic essences. The shadow is the substance. Graham Greene, I think, grasped well this sensitive point, even if in theological dress.
Was it my intention to fuck June or an essence? Or Elza? Or the two en brochette, as suggested above?
To the Many, All Too Many, all that is intended is my enjoyment of twinned sisters in the flesh, wallowing in juices, exulting in sibilancies and twitching. To the initiated, however, I preach the logos. En arche", en ho logos, as the Johannine Gospel asserts.
In the beginning was the Word.
I quoted the first sentence in the Gospel According to St. John to Elza, while fondling June's rump, numerating the countable pubic hairs.
She countered with a handsome couplet of Charleston high-school doggerel:
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Hold that girl 'till I get on.
"How lovely in the hay," June said, from the depths of her fondled nakedness.
"Wow." Elza was adroit at punctuation. "Turn around," I said.
Obediently June turned. I examined her in profile, from behind, once again frontally. What was important was not what I saw, but that she turned on request. How happy many marriages might be, how few divorces, if a wife were so concerned with pleasing a husband. (But it is only on the interior illusion that the mind hinges. This was Plato's message, calling the illusion the only reality.)
Victorian that I am, I felt the obligation to act out what I had announced. I took token pictures.
I asked June to stand in a select group of standard poses: leaning against a post, the leg nearest me bent in languid ease; the derriere toward camera stance, torso bent over like the curved arm of a bentwood rocker. I tried even the as-you-say-sir at-attention pose: the model standing stiffly erect, eyes unseeing, arms tightly pressed to her sides-a pose made more dramatic when the model wears earrings and chain bracelets.
Here was June, naked among the bow-and-arrow birds; and here was I, wallowing in deceptions.
My deceptions, I began to surmise, were slightly old-fashioned. They were deceptions that practical youngsters were happy to humor, on a career basis.
Two hundred dollars per modeling session was not a high price to pay for twinned, lithe, lissome un-draped girls-assuming that the twinned, lithe, lissome girls were to be photographed for the accepted commercial reasons ... an advertisement, say, for Doublemint gum. On a day-by-day basis, however, it was a costly way to subsidize an infantile obsession. Each week they could now afford a new Carribean cruise-without me; each month a mink coat.
I stifled at once this bourgeois complaint. Only the sad and sodden ask what pleasure costs.
Moreover, as I tried to say elsewhere, such modeling fees were, for me, deductible. (Ironic it is, how we concern ourselves about costs, even when there are no costs. Such is the spell of habit. It is given to so so few to see beauty bare.)
After, on the porch, I had used one roll of film photographing the naked June in this and that classic stance, I suggested to Elza that she take her clothes off.
"For a hundred dollars," she said graciously, "why not?"
The occasion, for Elza, was the second time around. Her clothes came off swiftly, naturally, without debate or dialogue.
In retrospect, I must say that this was a singular afternoon. Two of the most succulent, loblolly girls that lust could imagine, here, now, in the lucent ocean light, cavorting in front of me, awaiting direction. The device? Not charm. Not art. Not the arcane philosophy of essences. The device was duplicate, crisp hundred-dollar bills.
It gives pause.
My next shot was of duplicate, bare, triumphant rumps, both inclined over a fallen palmetto tree. "This," I said, "is a dry run for the shot I want of the two of you over the northernmost cannon on East Battery."
For this we went down the porch steps, climbed over the dunes. The girls walked ahead of me, their golden bodies flashing, their flat flanks undulant.
I found the appropriate prop, a tall palmetto toppled by eroding tides. Roots, still dug into the white sand, held the lower end a good three feet above the sand.
Obediently, but with suppleness and grace, both girls bent over. Their upturned bottoms smiled at me, with dash, insouciance, as if peaked in a cancan.
My en brochette idea, position now told me, was a Baron Munchausen exaggeration. More feasible was the metaphor of successive skewers.
I stroked, in turn, each of the outspread cheeks, kissed, with horizontal sweep, the crest of each moraine hill.
"Sweet of you," Elza said over her left shoulder.
I put a K2 filter over my Nikon lens. Even if I had no use for the pictures I was about to make, there was no reason not to have them rich in darkened cloud backgrounds-the end product of the K2 yellow filter.
"Rumps higher," I ordered. Rumps rose. There was no technical, artistic, social reason for the extra elevation.
It gave my work, however, a more professional cast. I was not alone titillating myself with the sight of twinned naked bottoms. I was directing a tableau, staging action, launching a career.
And it suddenly occurred to me that, in spite of the many advantages that have come to us from Relativity, the transistor, and the sexual revolution, all is not balm in this bright, brain-bent world. Many pleasantries have disappeared from our lives-like waltzing, sacerdotal harlotry, and the pert rump flick in the cancan.
Elza wiggled, improvised a bump and a grind. She was much at home.
I took six or seven pictures, entertaining myself with camera angles. From the sixty-degree vantage right, for example, I got interesting concentric curves, June's buttocks before Elza's. Sixty degrees vantage left gave me the reverse effect. The straight-on view gave me four absolutely symmetrical ovals spread out in horizontal array.
I enjoyed them enormously, even without touching them. They were so immaculately slim and trim, like the little golden conchs on the sand.
To the well-practiced eye, form, I suppose, eventually triumphs over function.
Eventually Elza straightened up. She swung around, her hair flying. "My ass is tired, do you mind?"
June jumped up, turned, her little breasts swinging.
"Let's all go skinny-dipping," Elza said.
She was, quite clearly, no longer, if ever, shy.
Behind the house, in the green swirl of pines and wax myrtle, two bobwhites sang "bobwhite" in unison. A singular sound, twinned monotones in leaping fifths. Moments later a slip in timing dispelled the union; the "bob" of Bird I overlapped the "white" of Bird 2. And suddenly, on this enchanted island, was the beginning of a fugue.
An afternoon on Seabrook, between ardent nymphs, can be eminently cultural.
"Get your clothes off," Elza ordered, she of the hard thighs and transcendent "wow."
"Off ... off ... off," said June, chewing on a sea oat.
I quickly got out of my clothes.
Our only neighbors were sea foam and birdsong. Seabrook, once sparsely settled by Kiawah Indians, ruled over by a legendary cacique of Kaiwah, is still sparsely settled. You could walk miles on this barrier island, clothed or unclothed, without thought of scanning eye.
"Look!" Elza pointed. "It's standing up."
"How rude to point," June said. "I think you've made a conquest."
"You." There was this competitive use of the second person.
"You ... you." Elza, two-gun style, used both pointer fingers. One pointed to my tumescence. The other to June's swelling breasts. She had pleasing, although naive, notions of cause, and effect.
We, chaining hands, plunged into the water; and the ocean that day was warm and balming. The ocean was once again the Great Mother. A baby porpoise surfaced about ten feet in front of us, arched and dived. Pelicans swooped overhead, gliding along the furrows of the wind.
And there they were, Houdon nymphs, but solid, palpable, quick, vocal. You would have expected them, at any moment, to mount dolphins.
I touched each in various touchable places, various sensitive places, and each laughed a young, bright laugh that blended with the lapping of the waves, and seemed part of the spray.
Eventually Elza grasped, with a pert show of pos-sessiveness, my central part, and put her lips to my ear. "You want to screw June, don't you?"
"Yes."
I looked at June. She stood a little farther out, facing us, her breasts well above water, their wetness shimmering in the afternoon sun.
"Then why don't you?"
"Is it as easy as that?"
"It's not easy at all." She yanked her indignation. "But you bought an option ... and she'll live up to her contract."
Young people have such a direct way of undermining our romantic frustrations.
Above us were the lamb-white clouds; around us were moving fish, and the wild streaks of foam saltwater weaves when it is stroked by wind.
The three of us showered together, with considerable touching, considerable kissing, selective fondling. I reminded myself of Louis XIV, who kept himself young by rubbing himself, each day, against the fresh, lithe bodies of very young girls-the same girls later painted by Fragonard and Boucher, sculptured by Houdon, and who, most-likely, and in more or less the same way, rubbed themselves against Fragonard, Boucher, and Houdon.
Once in Amy's and my bedroom, both girls simultaneously threw themselves facedown on the bed, their identical buttocks smiling at me in collinear grace.
I retired, for a brief space, to the bathroom, preferring to forestall a confusion of genuine lust with a pedestrian pressure in the bladder. Purity of heart is one thing at a time.
Once back on the bed, I admired the relaxed spread of gluteal beauties-the four identical hillocks, the twin cupid's bows, the parallel cleavage. I began on the left, parting the sinistral roundings. There was a squeal, a squirming.
The time had come for a compliment, routine, perhaps, but one making penetration personal, intimate, tender. "Elza..." I began, groping for the mot juste.
"I'm June," June said over her left shoulder. "Remember?"
I remembered.
"Twinning," she added, with more philosophy than the moment required, "doubles opportunity, but halves insertion." She raised her head, raised her eyebrows. "Or doesn't it?"
I withdrew, made one or two meaningless sounds, for politeness' sake, then turned June over. June's breasts, jutting ceilingward, guaranteed her identity. She then, of her own accord, with special ardor, kissed me. It was all quite funny, she thought. "Right pew, wrong church."
There followed much kissing; and the kissing was full, ardent, eloquent. In my jaundiced, cynical career, I had lost sight of the seriousness of kissing, forgetting that passion is essence, an apocalypse ever so innocently at hand. Worldly girls take kissing as a matter of course, a rite of passage. To the young it is its own end, as is a Popsicle or an all-day sucker.
June was startled, however, when I kissed her breasts. She jumped.
"I want to watch," Elza said, as if watching were a privilege reserved for those dedicated to the sacred mysteries. Thus might Oedipus' sister have spoken, on Oedipus' bridal night.
"Has Amy ever watched while you made love to another woman?" Elza was interested. (Amy, now, not Miss Amy.)
"Yes."
"Did she mind?"
"No."
"Really?"
"Not at all." (Because the other woman was Cloris. Amy, I was sure, would explode if she found me making love to a girl who was younger, competitive, and whose lovemaking excluded her. If she found me making love to Elza, to June, or the two in a combination package.)
"Has anyone ever watched you make love to Amy?" June asked.
"Yes."
"Amy didn't mind?"
"No." (How could Amy mind? We were the Beast with Three Backs.) "Who watched."
"Cloris."
"Who's Cloris?" Elza wanted to know. "Lady Cholmondeley. The woman with whom I made movies. You've heard of Monna VannaT' "What's Monna VannaT
"The picture we made last year. The picture in which Amy plays ... nude."
"Not really." Elza was no easy believer. "Like we are now?" June's question. "Like we are now."
"Amy didn't mind, really didn't mind?" Elza got back to the problem of etiquette. "Being watched, I mean."
"No."
"Did Lady Cholmondeley make love to her, too."
"Yes."
I thought we talked enough. Pleasant as were these recollections to me, warming as they were to my collective cockles, there were other, more eager joys closer at hand.
I took Elza in arms. She was passive, unresisting, altogether limp. It was exciting to find her so yielding. Her arms, legs, followed mine as if in a dance. But when I felt below, she was dry as a bleached desert bone.
I felt, without protest from Elza, June's corresponding adit. This, too, was dry.
We had been talking too much.
Elza placed her hand over my hand, as my hand rested on her arid center. It was a gesture of friendship, intimacy; perhaps a substitute for smoking.
"Please screw June," she said.
Once more I kissed June's eloquent places in descending order. I kissed, kissing sea salt. I tasted the subtle change of salt to honey. June mumbled a variety of monosyllables, beginning with . "no," ending with "oh." There was a quiver, a scream.
"Now," she said. "Now ... please ... please."
It is such a luxury to be wanted.
I moved up her body. Her lips engulfed mine in pleasant frenzy, and my engorged penis slid, without guidance, into its proper, warm, wet, welcoming place.
But not yet was journey's end.
"Oh, no," June screamed, wiggling in reverse peristalsis to eject me. "First put something on."
"A conundrum, perhaps," Eliza said, lackadaisically. "Or an old raincoat." She yawned. "Not on the pill, you know."
Communication, in act one, scene one, is apt to be lax.
"A quondam," June translated. "Don't you have a quondam?"
"Or Saran Wrap?" Elza taxed her imagination. "How about a mongrammed silk handkerchief?"
"So sorry," I said, establishing polite regret.
The dialogue was now academic, rhetorical, anachronistic, because my solidity was now deep inside the sanctum.
There was time for only a final, intense, poetic thrust.
"Oh, God," and gave way to an authentic, lyrical spasm. Her legs pulled up. There was the thrashing, frenzied, maelstrom response, so rare nowadays, cathartic as Greek tragedy. The ineffable became flesh, and the flesh dissolved. There were the cosmic sounds; sudden, explosive, unexplained tears.
(I recount these details because I am totally without gallantry, making capital, like an entomologist, of mysteries the gods incline to keep veiled. I feel sometimes like that Hippasos whom the Pythagoreans drowned because he disclosed to the world the fact that, in Euclidean geometry, the square on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. This theory would obviously not hold on a Lobachevskian surface, such as the walls of a vagina; there the sum of angles would depend on the degree of constriction-and in spasm would be totally unpredictable.)
It seemed only proper to withdraw. I was not unmindful of dangers.
"Don't." In a moment of unexpected raptus, June reversed herself. "Please don't."
Coitus interruptus, unfortunately, though much abused, is seldom mastered. It has its own regimen, rhythms, rules. Nor was I any more adroit in such practices. There was the expected, awkward spurting of essence.
"Such a waste." June sighed.
Elza eyed my performance with serene detachment, her lips curled in little Mona Lisa attitudes. Premature ejaculation was a weakness of character, like wet dreams and a susceptibility to hypnosis. "You could, you know, get a vasectomy." Then, after a routine pause, during which she seemed to weigh the respective pulls of desire and propinquity, she added, "That is, if you want to see us regularly."
June did not look happy when they left.
The wind had freshened; and the waves, in sustained crescendo, pounded the dunes.
I had dinner alone, at the Seabrook Island Club. The club has an exceptional chef, and the dinner that night had exceptional savor-possibly because of the chef, possibly because sexual excess sensitizes the taste buds. I ordered she-crab soup (the great Charleston specialty), lobster Calhoun (rock lobster, broiled, flavored, outside the shell, then served, with sauces, in the shell), a chefs salad with the chef's dressing, and a bottle of eight-year-old Bernkasteler Doktor (brought to the table in an ice bucket). The twins were sitting on the opposite side of the dining room with their parents. They waved. Mr. and Mrs. Poltergrue smiled genially; after all, I was molding a career for their daughters.
I made a mental note to buy a few dozen condoms.
Life was indeed sweet.
The Moselle, fragrant as frangipani, brought back to my lips the flavors of the afternoon, the stirring freshness of nymphs. I sipped it slowly, eyeing my girls over the rim of the glass, plotting strategies.
Sooner or later, I assured myself, I would have to exhibit a few pictures. Proper pictures. The girls were glamorous enough, even in raincoats. This was one novel theme: rain. I could take them to historic Charleston sites in a downpour. They would both wear raincoats. Under the raincoats, nothing. The raincoat pictures they could frame. Parents would see the beginning of a career, give or take a decent amount of imagination. The nudes I would take for my own amusement. Some I could send to Cloris. Possibly? The bright thought came to me. Cloris and I could use them in our next picture. I could take them to Rome. Rimini. I could write some kind of justifying story-something about Romulus and Remus, perhaps. Something about the Bobbsey Twins?
Not that any of this was possible; there were too many obstacles. Particularly Amy. It was, however, an enticing thought.
Meanwhile, time was on my side. I could take many public, conventional, dull pictures of Elza and June in swimsuits at Cypress Gardens, Magnolia Gardens, Middleton Gardens-even on Seabrook beach, or poolside at the club.
For general information, a balm for parents, I would make clear the time span of book production: at least a year, possibly two, between "writing" and release. In two years, or less, I could be with Amy or Cloris, or Amy and Cloris-with or without the Bobbsey Twins-in Rome, Rimini, or Rangoon.
Toward the end of my dinner I saw Vanderhoff standing at the door. He also saw me. He came over. "Could I join you for a cup of coffee?"
I ordered another bottle of wine.
"I read about Amy in the morning paper," he said. "Very interesting."
"What about?" The paper is not delivered to Seabrook. My only contact with news was the TV and radio coverage, sparse, national.
"She may be our next ambassador to the UN. Senator Ashmead is pushing her. And with this administration he carries clout. Southern strategist. That sort of thing."
"This is the first I heard."
"She and Ashmead had a falling-out sometime back. You know about that."
"I heard." I did not know Amy then. "Seems Larrine patched things up."
"How?"
"Seems she was posing for Larrine a couple of weeks ago ... Larrine loves to do nudes of her ... dozens and dozens. Ashmead walked in. Just so."
"Just so?"
"Maybe Larrine planned it that way. With Larrine, you never know."
"Or with Amy?"
"Fascinating personality. Not since Lady Hamilton has there been such a Lady Hamilton. Sadness-great beauty calls for sadness. Dante knew this. Leonardo.
Sadness, perversity, exhibitionism, a witch's charm, alternating fire and ice."
The waiter brought the second bottle of Bernkaste-ler, a glass for Vanderhoff. He filled the two glasses.
Vanderhoff resumed: "Isabelle may have had something to do with it."
"Isabelle?"
"Wescott. My lean, lovely, perverse hostess. Chatelaine of Berkeley Hall. Isabelle-you must have read about her-still has a power over her. You need to be a cryptologist to explain it. Amy would do anything for Isabelle."
He raised his glass for a toast. "To Amy ... and to that famous, feckless, tattooed ass."
There was much, I realized, that Amy did not tell me. Not, I think, because she did not love me; not because what she did, how she did it, was indelicate, indiscreet, fattening.
Nor had she any more Confederate notions of fidelity. I was an interim lover, on leave from Cloris. A lover is not a yoke. Nor is fidelity any more than a quondam name for an insurance company.
It was something else. This secrecy, these hidden acts, these intimacies not shared, all were part of a subterranean need to keep separate each of her several personalities. She needed veils-even if only to enjoy the embarrassment which came over when they were lifted.
"He was at Berkeley Hall the other night."
"He?"
"Ashmead. He was there when Amy was there."
Famous, feckless, tattooed ass? Vanderhoff's earlier words suddenly resounded in my ear. I was not pleased, somehow, with the notion that my love's private bottom had become ecumenical. Nor that this lovely fane should be available, for the asking, to any catch-as-catch-can politician of a conservative stripe. "Incidentally, you know Ashmead?" I did not.
"Unusual man, unusual. Aging, of course; we are all aging." He stopped to mop his face, as if this would deter time in its relentless march. "Perhaps that's why he's so interested in Amy. Young women, they say, reheat the blood."
I wanted more detail about the meeting at Miss Wescott's. What was done to Amy? What did Amy do? It did not, however, seem quite proper to ask.
One does not, for example, to a total stranger say, "Tell me, old man, about the whipping of my mistress. Was she pretty? Did she blush? Did she tremble, as once she did; then quiver and cry?"
"Extraordinary man, quite unusual. The two sides of his face don't match; they redden differently. Somebody there said something or other nice about one of the Kennedys, and Ashmead got quite uptight. But only one cheek got red. A single cheek. The left. This fact is worth noting in a time when physiology occupies so much of our attention."
The incandescence was on the left cheek. On the left cheek was Amy's lily. Life is dappled with the colors of coincidence.
I went back to the beach house and put paper in my typewriter. I was beginning, I thought, to understand Amy; I could write about more than the pleasant shapings of her body, the oceanography of her loving.
Bits of the current mosaic began to fit together. The mosaic was fit for Pompeii. She had been sad that day, sad and conflicted; sad, conflicted, withdrawn. Because Amy No. I was being overwhelmed by Amy No. 2. Miss Jekyll was wrestling with Mrs. Hyde. She had left me, in the midst of lovemaking, because Miss Wescott had called Miss Jekyll, giving bed orders to Miss Jekyll already bedded.
What followed? Miss Wescott had whipped Miss Jekyll in front of Senator Ashmead. The good senator, charmed, excited, forgave all past deficiencies, observed on Amy's naked bottom the benchmarks of a bright political future. Amy (of whatever number) returned unconflicted, uninhibited, unleashed-a composite of all the heroines in Greek drama.
"Drang-drank," said the telephone, in the midst of my detective work. "Drang-drank!" (The telephone at Seabrook rang always in paired trills.) I picked it up, this instrument over which Amy, according to my theory, received her birching orders.
"Darling." Amy's voice. "Are you lonely?"
"Terribly," I said.
"I miss you terribly. I'm horny for you."
"Double ditto," I said, which was acutely true. The scenario I had just framed had worked me up, and I was writing with my typewriter perched over my stalagmite.
She followed with an affectionate description of what she would do, and how she would do it, were we at this moment in bed together, instead of exchanging chitchat over long distance. All of which was very thoughtful, chic, maternal.
Presently she came to matters less expected, more mundane. "Darling, how would you like to go to live in Liechtenstein?"
I had been in Liechtenstein only some nine months earlier, recording my-and Cloris'-plesaunce with Amy's namesake, Aimee, the Countess of Liechtenstein. (The consequence was our collaborative motion picture, The Naked Countess of Liechtenstein, currently playing in New York, Rome, London, and Paris.) "Why Liechtenstein?"
"I've been offered the ambassadorship. Interesting, no?"
"Interesting, yes."
"And by protocol, every ambassador is entitled to a lover. Come with me and be my love."
"At once."
"You do miss me, don't you?" Her voice was filled with music. "I can't tell you..."
Her smile leaped up at me through the telephone. "You don't need to."
"I'm horny for you." (Banal repetition. But in love talk, repetitions are useful, even hypnotic, as in anthems, hymns, and the war chants of the Ojibway Indians.)
"You could ... oh, I'm ashamed to say it..." (No shame at all; mock embarrassment for flirtatious effect.)
"You could think of me ... and ... and ... jerk off."
"Such a waste." (A throwaway line; filler.)
"You might even look up the twins. But that's more of a waste. You'll get nowhere."
The omnipotence of thought. In its way, quite flattering. I could get nowhere, so go ahead.
"I have a favor to ask. You must be patient with me."
"What?"
"I'm going to make a sacrifice of myself tonight ... a political sacrifice. Call it that. And don't ask with whom, how, or where. Do you mind?"
Two questions artfully intertwined: Did I mind her sacrificing-for political reasons-her moon-white, tattooed bottom? Did I, biographer, mind not asking with whom, how, where?
Artful, my love; also exhibitionistic, piquant, and teasing. I must know and not know at the same time.
"Of course not." I tried to give my triad of approval a hearty nonchalance. "If it excites you."
I minded much. I did not savor the idea of my special love opened naked to another man. Opened to Cloris, to Larrine, was another matter. Her nakedness, her secret options, opulence, like the ineffable names known to the initiate, belonged alone to me-and my cabal.
"This is politics," she announced crisply. "Strictly politics."
As novelist, biographer, voyeur, I find it easier to ask questions than to find answers. Much easier it would be to account for the strange disappearance of Dorothy Arnold near Central Park on the only day that a black trumpeter swan has been seen on the placid lakes of Central Park.
Amy was by now a power in state politics. This was another part of her mystery; why was she a power? She had never talked to me about political interests, political theory, the chicaneries of office. She had no theories, as far as I knew, about causes and cures linked to social unrest. She was, if anything, apolitical. (Except, of course, when she took up a cause, like the undiapering of horses, that expressed a love for sanity, gentleness, permissive ease.) Yet, like Alice Long-worth, in days long past, like Jacqueline Kennedy, when the Kennedys gave color to national scene, she was a power, an influence. Local politicians consulted her, respected her. Her husband rode to interim prominence chiefly, I thought, because he was a reflection of her entrenched glories, her charm, her position.
Nor were her scandals, now widespread, embellished i gossip, a drawback to her authority. Everybody by now knew of her roles in the erotic films, knew of her episode with John; many had read John's book, and mine. None of this diminished her reputation, none dimmed her luster. If anything, the reports, the gossip, the legends, enhanced her glamour.
But what, in political circles, did she actually do? What now was she doing? Why would she say, "This is politics. Strictly politics"?
I fell into a deep sleep. I had had a ripe, full day. Many promises, many problems. I dreamed I was back in Vaduz, in the Count of Liechtenstein's schloss. Aimee had slipped away from her husband, who, ardent ichthyologist that he is, was counting fish. She had crept through the secret passageway which connected her bedroom with mine (and which is rough on your feet, if you try to grope through it, naked and barefoot). She was scratching at the secret panel hidden under the huge Gobelin which hung on the wall. (The Giorgione Venus and Mars Surprised by Vulcan.) She was calling my name. "Bill. Bill."
The sound seemed slightly odd, as is the sound of all given names when fervidly mouthed under a Gobelin.
Then I heard, "Uncle Bill."
Never, even in jest or passion, would the Countess of Liechtenstein call me Uncle Bill. I woke.
"Uncle Bill, are you still alone?"
The question would have been highly inappropriate had I not been alone. (But such questions, framed swiftly in the groin of the night, seldom, I suppose, take account of all contingencies.)
There she was before the latched screen door of the porch; there she was, rippling soft in the spider moonlight-June, wearing nothing.
"Can I come in?" The ultimate urbane, mock-innocent query, ironic and errant. As if any man, decently schooled, would deny shelter to a naked girl, rippling soft in the groin of the night.
I unlatched the door. She came in, kissing me lightly, saying the usual interim things a girl says when she comes naked to a man's house in hours before dawn.
After various other greeting ceremonies, I allowed myself an avuncular stroking of her bottom and eased her down on the bed. She then kissed me with inexperienced enthusiasm, bashing her teeth against mine.
"I brought you a present," she said, handing me a neatly wrapped box.
"So nice of you." I kissed her a second time, this time with care, caution.
"I hope you'll like them."
How could I not like whatever she brought? It was more than enough that she brought herself, so artfully unpackaged.
"They're lubricated."
"Yes?"
"They're quondams." With this announcement she again kissed me, her lips, well-pomaded, sliding over like succulent Chap Sticks. "Supersensuous."
She had driven twenty miles, that late afternoon, to get them.
I conceded that she was very sweet, very thoughtful, also supersensuous.
"I didn't know whether to buy sensuous or supersensuous. I never bought quondams before." She rubbed against me.
The whole mission, it seemed to me, called for skill, effort, imagination, nonchalance; and I announced to her, with careful choice of an honorific, that she herself was "super."
"I love posing," she said.
She had a feeling for le mot juste.
"Posing is groovy ... once you get over the feeling that you're naked on roller skates and can't think of anything to do with your hands."
She then explained to me, as if explanation were necessary, why she had arrived naked. "I didn't think you'd mind ... since I'd be naked when I posed, anyway...."
"How logical," I conceded. "And how very practical."
She had left her clothes in her car, and her car down the road. The reason? Amy. She did not think Amy would be home; but she might come home unexpectedly. Should this happen, this traumatic return (June thought of everything), she would not have to dress. She would leave no telltale finery, no clues to the pleasures of stealth. "I'd just pittipat, like raindrops, down the back staircase."
Still rampant, I said, still eloquent, and screaming louder than a fire siren, would be the "quondams."
She laughed. The bed heaved and creaked. "A girl can't think of everything, can she? Quondams are a man's department."
She was too young to be told (nor was there any reasonas yet to tell her) that a man's time-tested betrayers are not girls slowly dressing, but earrings or hairpins left in bed, lipstick on shirtfronts or pillows-or, apage Satands, lipstick around the penis.
"Sometime you must teach me how to write," she said, embracing me, thrusting her tongue in my mouth, pulling me down on top of her.
Nothing, I am convinced, is as lyric as the first flowering of a young girl. Nor are there pleasures greater than that of the feel of her bones moving parallel to mine, of the fragrance of her breath, fresh as honeysuckle and quick with love.
In time, with change of mood, ripening heat, she insisted that she be allowed to put on, as giver, one of the barbaric devices she had given. She turned on the light. She took from a tin box a fragrant yellow rubber mollusk. She took hold of my erection with the hand sinistra, capped it with the dextral hand. She then unrolled the sensation-dulling membrane, pushed it down, smoothed out wrinkles. No child could have given more care, concern, affection, to her first Barbie doll.
The ensheathed tumescence was now all hers, an obelisk enfranchised with love and sentiment, a new toy.
She insisted on rising above it, settling down on it, the taking of me rather than the taking of her, settling on it as an egret settles on its first egg.
"I hear Amy's going to run for governor," she said, rising, settling back.
"News to me," I informed her.
She rose and sank again, enjoying her explorations, her study, her newfound relation of cylinder to piston. "I suppose legitimate lovers are the last to know." All this circumscribed with the nimbus of a mock sigh.
I raised my hands and fingered her breasts-which is the least a new lover can do to express empathy and inspire concern. Braile is the most effective of all alphabets.
"I'm really not a virgin," she went on. The word struck me as slightly dated, like womb, or phthisis.
"Really." She was insistent.
She was teetering, I gathered, on the brink of confession. Intimacy spurs confessions; confession paces intimacy. I sensed the wording to come. June would tell me, any moment now, about the scrawny, drawling, pimpled football captain to whom her virtue had been no more than a passing touchdown. The loss had occurred, no doubt, on the back seat of her father's car (Electra motif). She had invited it. ("I pretended I was drunk.") She had felt nothing, ruined her dress, missed her next period (hysterical pregnancy).
I underestimated her.
All of which is background for the simple, girlish statement: "I'm not a virgin. If I told you I was, I lied to you. If I implied I was, I misled you."
The details were immaterial to me. I am not a master of the plow, an aficionado of Rotorouter.
More, now, on the urge to confess. "I had a boyfriend in college. A drip, maybe. But a very nice drip. He knocked it off. Maidenhead-if you still believe in maidenheads. I don't. I lean toward the Loch Ness monster. And the Yeddi."
"He was good?"
"Not really. Praecox-that sort of thing. But what else is there to do in college?" She thought of glassblowing; but after Deep Throat even that seemed amiably suspect.
I thought of other things that could be done at college, but I saw nothing to be gained by listing them.
"I went to the Book Basement and bought your book about Cloris," she said.
"You liked it?"
"She's quite a girl ... Cloris."
"Quite a girl."
"Better than Amy?"
"Better in what way?"
"In bed."
"Different."
"How can girls be different in bed?"
I got up and poured us both some scotch. Straight on ice. There was a subtle disloyalty, unworthy of me, I felt, in discussing Amy's sexual habits with her juniors.
"Will you teach me?" she asked. "Teach you what?"
"Everything that Amy does that pleases you. T want to please you. Please believe me. I do ... more than anything else in my whole life."
She threw her face on mine, her breasts on my chest, groin joined to groin.
A little later she said, "Why don't you compromise me?"
"Compromise?" The word had its proper place in a dictionary. Here it did not make sense.
"Make me do something altogether unmentionable to you. Then take my picture doing it. That way you'll have power over me for the rest of my life."
She had, I thought, an inestimably sweet disposition.
"If you become a congressman..." A more venal idea. "If you became a congressman ... and I was your mistress ... you could put me on the payroll ... just to satisfy your sexual needs."
"And Amy?"
"Amy could be our den mother."
Soon she wanted me to teach her everything Amy knew, carnally speaking, carnally shouting.
She was an apt pupil; apt, inventive, flamboyant, untiring.
"Maybe," she announced ultimately, "we don't need the quondams after all."
A little later she said, "I have a title for your next book."
"What?"
"The First of June." She was piquant, jubilant, triumphant.
"On or About the First of June."
"The First Day in June" She had a gift, this stripling.
In I thought too blatant.
"But it's the truth, isn't it," she said, making the gestures that established the fact-sans quondam.
A hasty withdrawal was soon in order.
June complained that I had "no sense of adventure." She also used the word "chicken."