Chapter 13
Vicky looked up from her desk to watch Perry, as she had been doing at least once every fifteen minutes for the past two weeks. It was amazing how little he had changed in appearance, considering how much he had changed in attitude. Still dressed in crisply-pressed sport shirts and trousers, his shoes glisteningly polished, his handsome face freshly clean-shaven, his whole person never seeming to have been out of the shower more than a few minutes.
Poised over the battered typewriter, he looked like a college student intently sweating out a term paper.
But then, Vicky hadn't made any great change in her own appearance during the last two months, either. Perhaps for reasons very much like Perry's, she imagined. A kind of front to keep the family from knowing that her life was really like. Perry went home almost every night to his mother's apartment, and his friends in Harlem, and it would be inconvenient for him to appear any different from the way they expected him to be. His job on the Alternative, his East Village associates, and especially his ideas were facets of his life kept entirely hidden.
That wasn't the only thing kept hidden, Vicky thought. He was really no more open with his personal thoughts to any of this group, with the exception of Al. After the long weekend when his buddy, Marty, had been here, Perry had made his important decision. From that moment, he had become almost monastic. He had not had sex with any of them, either that weekend or since. And, it grew increasingly obvious he had no intention or desire for it.
He was posing for Margaret, but that was not a sexual situation. Vicky and Maryann had made a little comment to each other about his apparent lack of interest, and the twin had suggested perhaps Perry had a girl up in
Harlem. Even Olivia was surprised, finding her appraisal of him wrong. She had shifted him from the "fucker" category to the "thinker." Vicky felt that Perry's abrupt treatment of her jealous outburst had made Olivia take a new view of him and perhaps of herself, too.
Al was probably the only one who really knew anything about Perry's reasons and purposes, but he said nothing. In fact, since Perry had started writing for the paper, Al had immersed himself in an almost continuous fury of writing, telephone calls, late-hour conferences, and when there was time, private conversations with Perry.
In one sense, Vicky was jealous of the amount of time the two men spent together. It was only in the last day or so, when she began to wonder which one of them she was directing the jealousy toward. Her relationship with Al was an easy one. There were no restrictions between them, and no limitations to the pleasures and satisfaction they could provide for each other. By this time, she was sure that Al did not care how often she had sex with other men as long as it was within the protective confines of the apartment.
She wondered whether Perry had told Al about the abortive experience in the uptown apartment when the call from her mother had come. She didn't think so. Perry was not the type to carry tales. What had happened would explain why Perry plainly avoided her sexually, although it wouldn't hold true with regard to the other girls.
Somewhere along the line, she was going to try to get that business out into the open. She had acted wrong. She could have put her mother off. She had used the unexpected circumstances as an excuse, although she really had no idea why she needed one. If the phone had rung ten seconds later, she would have already been down on him, and once she had started having sex, she would never had allowed anything to stop it.
She still wanted it. The admission forced its way to her consciousness, and the knowledge of it only increased the sudden desire. More than that, she was sure he wanted her just as much. He was too much of a man, too easily aroused not to respond to her. He had to force himself not to look at her. And, it wasn't fair of him. She had made a mistake that Friday afternoon. She would admit it. But, everyone should be entitled to at least one mistake.
He was sure to respond to honesty. It showed in every word of every article he had. written. In some ways, he was a stronger writer than Al, but that might be because he was telling about experiences which had touched deeply within his being. Yet, as shocking and painful as they came across, there was a tempering of humor; an understanding of self, and others and the drives of circumstances which made the facts he had to report all the more shocking.
Maybe it was the content of his Report from Vietnam articles which helped cast this new light on the handsome black man. All of his writing came directly to her for basic editing. As far as his use of the language was concerned, there was little she could change. But, she had contributed some suggestions as to the order in which some of the stories were told, the addition of other viewpoints through remembered remarks of the men with whom he served, the inclusion of physical descriptions of the jungle, Vietnamese villages and people, battle details.
Perry Turner was most surely going to be the quietest revolutionary imaginable. He was showing none of the bitterness which spoiled so many of the articles in the paper. He was telling things the way they were, the way he had seen them, letting the reader judge the errors, the weaknesses, the stupidities which create wars, deprivations and hatred and then turned all these awful situations into unending nightmares.
However, Al was guiding Perry during their long sessions. The results Vicky saw were the honest outpourings of a troubled, but intelligent human being.
It only he were able to apply the same standards of release to his personal life. Vicky was more determined than ever to help him make this part of his adjustment. She didn't need to seek Al's guidance for this project. It came directly from her heart, and she was going to let her womanly instincts point out the path.
She had finished making corrections on another of Perry's reports, stapled the sheets together, and got up from her desk. If Al were back he would want to see this new material right away. She started across the office, knowing she was going to stop at Perry's desk. Picking out this particular place for him to do his writing had been most purposeful on her part. He was directly in the path between her office and Al's, a route she had to take a dozen or more times each working day. She did not stop to talk every time she passed him, but the location increased the opportunities for casual remarks and occasional conversation.
"This last one is excellent, Perry," Vicky said, standing in front of his desk. "You're getting better all the time. I think you ought to do a book."
He looked up and smiled. The expression was more careful than warm. "Thanks, Vicky. I appreciate the encouragement. I think I'm really starting to enjoy this kind of work."
"That's because you're good at it," she said.
"Writing like this," he said, "gives me a whole new slant on everything; the past and the future. I couldn't have begun to do it without Al. I owe that guy more than anyone I've ever known. I try to tell him, but I don't think he really knows how deeply I mean it."
"He might know, Perry, but Al doesn't have the knack of taking compliments. I thinks he gets embarrassed by them."
"Al embarrassed?" Perry laughed. "It's possible, but it doesn't seem to suit him. In high school .the kids used to say you couldn't tell Al anything good about himself because he would tell you first. It wasn't so in the sense they meant it. Al was never the conceited type, no matter what people thought. He was just so damned sure of himself, it made him seen like a know-it-all."
"I've got to get this article in to him," Vicky said. "Will you be staying down to have dinner with us tonight?"
Perry looked at his watch. "I don't know. If I decide to, I have to make a phone call. Tell Al I'll let him know later. Okay?"
She nodded, but by the time she had turned away from him, she was angry. She hadn't been asking on Al's behalf, and she was sure Perry knew that. Why did he keep turning her off like that? Shit, the next time she got hold of that big thing in his pants, she was going to do things with it that would flip him right up to the ceiling. Once she had sex with Perry Turner, it would be a long time before he would consider looking for any other girl to swing with.
She was just as glad that Al was not back in his office yet, or she might have been tempted to let out some of her emotions on him. "Save it up," she told herself. A healthy helping of indignation could add even more fire to that first time with Perry. And there was sure as hell going to be a first time. Even her nice, square, respectable, middle-class mother had taught her one or two tricks about bringing a man around to a woman's point of view.
There was a large rolled-up paper on Al's desk, lying across the top. She lifted it up to put Perry's manuscript where Al would see it as soon as he returned. The rolled sheet looked like a poster. Curious, Vicky opened it with both hands.
At first, she frowned, not making any sense of it. Then, she spread it out on the top of the desk to study it.
It was a roughed-out artist's sketch of an announcement poster which she had never seen before. But, as she read it through, and began to understand what it meant, Vicky was first shocked, and then even angrier than before, although now it was not directed solely at Perry.
"There is an Alternative to the Military Establishment!" the screaming top banner read. " T won't return!' says U.S. Marine Lance Corporal Perry Turner. T Am back from Vietnam, and I won't Return to Fight and Kill Helpless Civilians! I Won't Return to Prolong a Senseless War! I won't Return to Foreign Soil! I won't Return to Active Duty!' "
The rest of the poster listed the time and place of the rally, and more than a dozen sponsoring groups, including some extreme radical outfits which she had heard Al roundly denounce. The bottom of the poster proclaimed the over-all sponsorship of The East
Village Alternative, including the identification of "Al Park, Editor-Publisher."
So this was what those endless hours of conversation and conference were all aiming toward! This is what both Al and Perry were hiding behind their twin masks of indifference!
She pulled her hands away from the big sheet as though it were something poisonous, and it rolled itself up again. She walked out of Al's office, her mind in a whirl of confused and conflicting thoughts.
Why had they kept it secret, even from her? I Surely Al trusted her not to tell anyone unless he approved their knowing. Perry's silence was more understandable. He was about to do something which might well have a tremendous effect on the rest of his life, and he was the type to keep his thoughts and his counsel private.
It would be easier not to discuss his decision. Then, she recognized the basis of her anger. She did not have his confidence-he that day in the uptown apartment, it would have been nothing more. Even if he were into her every day, it would be no more than the length of his penis making contact with her. He didn't care anything about her. Everything she had ever imagined as a relationship between them had been part of her own imagination, a reflection of her own needs.
She had made the Number One Mistake. She had let her middle-class values hang around her neck, and pull her down into this ridiculous emotional situation. Personal, individual freedom had no place in its scope for romantic love. In order to allow oneself to grow toward one's full potential, one had to keep oneself free from the trap of one-to-one, mutually excluding ties.
She had no one to blame but herself. Too many times had she seen the unhappiness that possessiveness and jealousy invariably created. She was old enough and wise enough to know you don't confuse sex with love: that the overwhelming urge to get Perry out of his clothes was no more than a healthy curiosity about what it would be like to have sex with a black.
And, she knew the best way to cure herself of this childish infatuation. There was no better time to start that process than right now.
Perry watched Vicky walk away from the desk with a mixture of sadness and relief. Her blonde beauty was always stimulating to him, but her obvious sexual need to possess every man was an unhappy weakness which only served to stop any kind of relationship he might have considered, for he could take her as a fuck, but he could not bear to be possessed by her.
He had fucked last night, not with Cora, but with a slut he found on the streets, one whose breath reeked of alcohol, and whose face was long-past beautiful, but the urges in him had driven him to lay her, to follow her to the room where she stayed and strip himself naked while he waited for her to do the same.
As soon as he was beside her on the dirty sheets she kissed him. Her caresses were feminine all right, and he recognized in her touch the skills that so many women would have given their right tits to have as their own. Her tongue played with his outer lips, massaging their thin surface in easy back and forth motions.
Under the influence of her firm caresses his cock was steaming very fast. He was hard, harder than he ever thought he could be for a ten-dollar whore. Her cunt was still in good shape for someone who had been in as many rounds as she had been.
His fingers worked into her cunt, feeling the walls react to his touches the way they must have done thousands of times to other hands and other cocks. His lust for her was not diminished by that knowledge. There was in him a great need to have his come, to have it as quickly as he could get it.
He rummaged some more inside her snatch, rubbing against her walls with the delightful strokes that drove her to ecstasy from the first to the last of them. His feelings for her were worked-up the way things always went when he was with women who liked to screw, and he felt a great big soft, spot in his heart for all her worries.
But he needed his cock to be soothed, and that was the important thing for the moment.
His kisses never ceased to cover her face with their wet caresses, and the sheer glory he got when she stroked her tongue across his lips was electrifying.
He wiggled his balls closer to her hand that was stretching for his crotch. He was so much bigger than her that she had to reach out with the full length of his arm and be helped by his crooking his body before she could tantalize his balls and his cock with her fingertips.
Once she was there, however, the trouble was all worth it. Across the skin that held his balls she wiped the incessant touch of those tips that were filled with fiery pleasure, overflowing with reams of succulent delight. Her manner of caressing him was utterly incredible, and he knew she had not wasted the times she had spent in bed with so many other cocks.
He shoved a pair of fingers into her cunt, deeper than he had been before. Her! cries of pleasure rang in his ears with each thrust that he jabbed past her triangular door. The lust in his heart grew stronger and stronger while he plunged his fingers against her snaking walls.
She was ready for him, of that he was certain. Her cunt was well oiled almost from the second that he drilled his fingers against membranes that reacted mechanically to anything that was inside them. He crawled on top of her and felt her body struggling to support his until he could get into the proper position. Once there he jammed his cock against her cunt lips, missing her cunt on the first attempt because he was in too much of a hurry.
Frustrated, he returned to the starting point and let her fingers position his tip the next time. When he again whipped his ass forward he had the luscious taste of her sex-canal walls soothing his burning cock.
With hard driving strokes he ministered to her passages, beating against her with a rhythm she scarcely could keep up to. His hunger for a come made him a wild animal instead of a man. He forgot he was with a woman who was a human being with feelings and emotions. He forgot that he was a man who could give love, and soothe hunger. All that was in his brain was the burning need for the thrills that would roll across his ass and his balls when he at last shot his wad into her naked body.
Her arms circled him as far as they could. If she could have reached far enough she would have locked her fingers together and held him in a grip so tight he could not breathe. But he was too big for her to do that, so she contented herself with keeping as firm a grasp as possible on his body.
The steaming lust that was in his cock finally erupted in the sheer delight he had wanted so badly to have, and he poured out all his gism in pleasureful spurts that pounded against the back of her passages.
At the same time she had her come, had the pleasure which arched her back and made her fingers clutch at the air about her while her arms curled with spasms of delight. Every nerve and fiber of her nude flesh scintillated with the electric jolts that her climax drove against her.
He remembered that, wondered why Vicky could not fuck with the same freedom to come and go, yet with more ability to feel for her partner. He saw her coming back from Al's office, her mind intent on something.
"Come with me," she said. "I want to be together with you and talk." It was not a command or a question, but a statement of fact. They walked around the corner to the apartment building, and entered the front idoor. After they were inside the apartment, their shoes off, they sat in the white room. Perry went suddenly to the door of the dark room and opened it, then he closed it again.
"There's no one," he said.
She locked the inside bolt on the apartment door.
"Let's go into the black room," she said, tossing her little pocketbook on one of the white wall seats.
"I thought you wanted to talk." What was she pulling?
"After we have sex." her voice was low.
"And, just suppose I don't want to have sex with you?" Perry felt the anger rushing through him. "Has that ever occurred to you?"
She let out the breath she had been holding. "Yes, Perry. It has very much occurred to me.
That's why I'm asking you to do it."
"You and your hot pants. Whenever you're ready to go, it's any man who happens to be close by."
He could see the tears coming into her eyes, and it startled him.
"I knew that's how you saw me, and I can't blame you. For all I know at the moment, you may be perfectly right. Right about all of the other men I've had sex with. Even Al. I don't know. But, it doesn't hold true for you."
Something caught at him. "What does that mean."
"I have made a mistake about you, Perry. I tried to treat you just the same as anyone else I thought was nice. I knew there was one special thing, but that didn't really set you apart in my mind. You were black. So what? You're nice-looking, healthy, sexually normal. If I could have sex with Jamie and Joe and Marty, as well as with Al, there wasn't any reason why I shouldn't have sex with you."
"Yes, there was, and there is. I don't want it."
"Listen, Perry. I'm not making any claims on you. Just the opposite, in fact. That's why I want to go into the black room with you right now. It's the only way to get the whole ridiculous business out of my system. I've fallen in love with you. For all I know, it might have happened the night we met. But, it's so. I didn't realize it fully until today. All it can do is mess up my life, and yours, too. If I thought you had any kind of the same feelings for me, I'd keep as far away from you as possible. But, I know you don't. And, the only way I can kill it is to make my relationship with you the same as it is with all the others. As silly as it may sound to a man, I'm asking you to ... screw me," she had had to force the word out, "yes, Perry, screw me the same way you would any girl who happened to be around when you were ready to go!"
Without another word, she zipped down the front of her dress, stepped out of it, and tossed it aside. She had on only a brassiere and tiny pants. She walked up to him, and before he could react in any way, put her arms hard around his neck and pulled his head down into a kiss.
For a second or two, he was motionless; stunned into a complete lack of sensation. But, only for a couple of seconds.
And, then he felt the warmth of her lips, the wetness of her tongue, the pressure of it pushing against his mouth. He relaxed, and let the kiss develop, her tongue meeting his with a sensation like tasting something unexpectedly tart, and wanting another taste almost immediately.
His arms went around her, feeling the incredibly soft skin against the inside of his forearm, and the solidity of her body under his palms. He tightened his hold, almost lifting her from the floor, and pushed her tongue back into her mouth, following it with his to explore the source of that delicious flavor.
As desire burned through him, making his heart pound noisily, his ears ring, his sex start to respond, he was as abruptly filled with fear. Something was wrong! Something she had said back there in the office. He had heard it, but it had not really registered inside his mind. Now it did.
Not too gently, he pushed her down, away from him. She looked at him questioningly, a worried frown marring her face.
"What did you mean," he asked, "when you said something about me not letting you be a part of what I was planning?"
"The rally. I know about it."
"The what?"
"Next Friday night. I saw the layout for the poster on Al's desk."
"Yes?" He felt he'd better not tell her he had no idea what she was talking about. He would just let her go on talking.
"I didn't mean to get upset over it. It's one of the things that made me realize how I feel about you. Knowing you were going to take such an important step, and not sharing any of it with me. After all, it's the sharing which is the basis of this whole way of life. The sharing of ideas, and feelings, of pleasures, and problems, too. I know this is going to mean more problems for you, and I wanted to be in on the whole of it. It's all part of this same business about not getting emotionally attached. That's what I meant."
She really hadn't told him anything. He would make one more try, then go back to the office and get the facts directly from Al.
"What do you think about the rally, and everything?"
"I think it is one of the most truly brave acts possible in a time like ours. I'm all for it, you know that. I was when Al first talked about it back in June. It's bound to be a sensation. I'll bet it will make the front pages of the square newspapers for days. You're really putting your beliefs on the line. And it may get you out of the marines. I'm already proud of you." She was almost glowing as she looked at him.
Perry could feel everything inside of him shake. The whole picture was shaping inside his head, and it was unbelievable. What did they think of him? Just a stupid black boy who could be finagled into wrecking his life to satisfy some far-out theories of theirs, and maybe help sell a few thousand more copies of their scrawny, second-rate paper?
His anger mingled with the horniness she had already built up in him.
"Okay," he said, starting to unbutton his shirt, "enough of the explanation. We have something much more immediate to take care of." He pulled the shirt off.
"Shall we go into the black room?" she said, putting one hand out to touch his chest.
"No," he said, "That's too far away." He was going to be able to see her reaction through everything that would happen. He stepped out of his pants and his undershorts in one motion.
Her eyes were fixed on him, and her hands reached out toward the enormous erection. He let her just touch it, then, avoiding the impending grasp, stepped quickly around behind her, wrapping both arms around her chest, with his wrists crossed, each hand completely enclosing a breast. Through the light material of the brassiere, he could feel her nipples hardening fast. He took each between a thumb and forefinger, pulling each into a taut protruding tube.
This was more than an action of desire. It was an act of worship. His sex organs were an idol she was paying homage to. There was a wild, perfect beauty to it: her mouth fitting itself to him with a continuous purposefulness, her hand supporting and massaging the double-sac of his testicles. This joining was meant to be; to continue; to be repeated endlessly.
Then, Marty's words repeated themselves again in his memory and Perry's mind took over once more. Of course. She was good at it because she loved doing it. But, he had no intention for her to enjoy this encounter. She was going to be the instrument of his pleasure and his anger! He would have what he wanted from life-at any cost.