Chapter 17
By the middle of August, I had settled down into a grinding but somehow satisfying routine. I spent half a day out in the fields, getting hard as nails and my lily-white skin tanned until I looked like a bracero. In the morning, I worked in the office, got out correspondence, made long-distance phone calls to potential wholesale buyers of Venturi Vino. What startled me most was that some of the best names among these outlets which every winegrower has to have on his side if he expects to make a decent living seemed to get very disinterested the minute the name Venturi crept into the conversation. I was just bold enough and stupid enough to ask why. And finally, one of them, an elderly man who sounded British as the very Dickens himself (pun intended!), an executive with the firm of Heppelthwaite and Gordon in Los Angeles, laid it on the line for me. "I can appreciate your enthusiasm, old man, seeing that you're the son and a chip off the old block, no doubt. But to be honest with you, Mr. Venturi, the last two or three bottlings we purchased from your establishment were most unsatisfactory. The corking wasn't good, and there was a good deal of sediment in your reds. Consequently, old chap, we could hardly give your father the top price, and with so many offers of better merchandise, our buyers decided to bypass you for a while."
This was a real black mark against Dad's name. It could be expunged only by future performance, by bringing out wine that was not only of superior quality as to bouquet, but also perfectly bottled and corked and identified with the Venturi label. We didn't have any money to spend on advertising, not with a bank balance such as old Charlie Karogian told me we had, so it would have to be done by word of mouth. I would have to take samplings into various buyers, satisfy them, take token orders which would necessarily be small, and hope that they would be happy enough with what they bought to place a larger order next season. If there was a next season, that is. Because if our mortgage got foreclosed, yours truly wouldn't be around any longer to care whether the Venturi name on a bottle meant anything or not.
Dora Corlani and I got along just fine. I saw that I could tease her a little bit as she gained a little more confidence and got used to my speedy dictation, and she was really very neat and efficient and almost dedicated. I gathered that she had thought tremendously of my old man, and I gave her full marks for that to start with. She told me that she heard that Maxine Lavolta, the horsey-faced long-legged brunette whose bare bottom I had spanked my first day into the office, had got herself a job behind a counter with a mail-order house near the mall. I only hoped that Maxine treated customers a little better than she had treated me, or she'd be out looking for work again. And when there isn't any more work in Fresno, she might find herself having to hang out the shingle. There are plenty of pros in town if you know where to find them. Generally they're over at the Pink Poodle, a bar that gives itself fancy airs and is right over near Fulton Street in the heart of the city. You'll see a gal there sitting on a bar stool and next to her is a purse with straps, and she generally shoves it a little ways away from her so that if a guy sits down on the next stool, he begins by asking her if that's her purse, and thus a great passion for pay is born.
I got the ten grand and I decided to turn it all over to Philip Young at the bank to pay down on that lousy mortgage. I hinted around that I'd like better terms, so that he might take out that clause of payable on demand, but he just smiled a superior smile and said he'd rather wait to see how well we did around harvest time in September.
Yes, I worked in the rows along with the sweating peons and paisanos, and it did me a world of good. The sun was brutal, but I got used to it, and fortunately I was in pretty good trim so I could take it. Just the same, there was many a night when I flung myself down on my double bed without even bothering to wash or eat. And even if Madge Fryburg had been there naked and waiting for me, I don't think I could have done her any good.
Not that I didn't see Madge, though. About a week after I'd seen the baldheaded banker and found out what was what, I phoned my auburn-haired spanking victim and asked her for a date. To my surprise, she was rather cold. She was sorry she couldn't make it, but Dr. Franklin had assigned her to a case with a very elderly man, a paralytic, and it was going to take her several weeks. It looked as if her vacation was going to have to be postponed until perhaps the end of September. I told her that I probably would try to call her every so often and see if we couldn't have a drink together downtown if nothing else, or maybe a quick drive at night, and she said rather distantly that that would be nice. And that was that.
By the middle of August, I had to give Tulio Verduga some grudging credit. He knew his job, he seemed to be able to get the most out of his crew, and we had already made about nine thousand bucks peddling our fruit and vegetables. It wasn't anything that Dad would have been proud of, except that the quality was pretty good and the market happened to be right just about then. What I really wanted to see was a damn good crop of vino. I wanted to call up that elderly British buyer in Los Angeles and tell him that I was coming down there with a couple of bottles of the best wine he'd ever tested on his ornery palate and that he'd better buy at least five hundred cases if he knew what was good for him.
I kept careful charts of the progress of various rows. Several of them had the cuttings which Dad had grafted in his search for the perfect Pinot Chardonnay. The grapes looked wonderful, and we had a touch or two of rain at the right time, and everybody was working hard and it looked as if we might have a decent harvest.
But there was still twenty-six-thousand bucks, give or take a few thousand, to be given to the bank before I could breathe easily. I figured that if we paid half of it off by now in just a little more than two years, even Philip Young ought to be satisfied that we were a pretty good credit risk.
Jane Wilson did wonders at the switchboard. She was soft-spoken, sweet and considerate and neatly handled all the incoming phone calls, and she turned out to be a pretty good file clerk too, so we really didn't miss Maxine Lavolta.
What I did miss, though, was Sally Foster. I'd never forget that night when I screwed her for the first time. That night when I'd come home to find her waiting in my living room, telling me what a mess she'd made of her life with that pompous husband of hers who got his kicks cuffing her, talking to her as if she were a two-dollar tramp and using an ivory-handled riding crop on her. I knew that she was a masochist. The way she'd taken a spanking of mine and then consumed me with the maw of her greedy, burning cunt, leaving teeth and nail marks all over me, had been the payoff. I wanted her desperately, but I found that I didn't think of her any more as my dream girl on the pedestal, not as the unattainable olive-skinned beauty whose image had been before me all those years in San Francisco even when I was screwing around elsewhere, especially with that cute little nurse. And the nurse romance was definitely over, I happened to get a postcard from her the first week in August in care of the Venturi Vineyards, telling me that she had just got herself engaged, was going to be married in October and go on a world cruise with her husband for a long and happy honeymoon. She deserved it.
I saw nothing more of Sally Foster, however, until about the third week in August. And then when I got home to my lonely house on Broadway Avenue, I found her waiting for me again-but this time in my bedroom.
By then, all my belongings from Frisco had been shipped in, and I'd spent one weekend making up my improvised sexy wallpaper. I'd cut out pictures and line drawings from CORPORAL, a lot of other girlie magazines and some of the bondage and whipping books I'd collected over the years. All four walls were thoroughly covered, and there were also fornication poses, as many as I could clip out of the Kama Sutra and other rare erotica in my collection. I was just about ready for a trial run at my little blindfold pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey stunt, so when I saw Sally Foster lying on my bed as I trudged wearily upstairs after having stopped long enough in the kitchen to open a bottle of beer and grab a meatloaf sandwich, I told myself that tonight I was going to have some fun for a change.
"I suppose the kitchen window was open again," I said.
"Um hmm," she murmured, wriggling slowly as she turned to look at me. She was wearing just a green rayon dress, and her legs were bare, and she'd even kicked off her sandals. The magnificent pear-shaped globes of her titties thrust up against the tight cling of the dress, in such a way as to tell me that she didn't have a damn thing on beneath. She proved it a second later when she lazily arched up one dimpled knee, and I could see the dark furry triangle of pussy.
"I need you, lover," she purred.
"I'm sweaty, I haven't shaved, I've been out in the fields all afternoon, and I'm just a little tired, baby," I growled. I sat down on the chair near the door, fumbled in my tee-shirt pocket for a crumpled pack of cigarettes, found just one and lit it, and I watched her.
"That's the way I want you, Carl darling. All man, cruel and savage and sweaty and dirty. I want you to use me and have me."
"Where's Don?" I rather brutally interposed.
"Oh darling, you make me so mad sometimes. Here it's been weeks since you and I were together, and that's the first thing you could think of. For your information, Don is in Los Angeles. He's trying to merge with a big chain and get better films and prime-time shows, if you must know. We can have all the rest of this week, if you'd like to."
"I see. Why don't you divorce him, Sally? I don't see how you could take that kind of treatment all the time."
"What else would I do? Everybody knows that my mother was-well, let's face it, a whore. She got a pretty good price, but she was still a whore. I'd be done in the Valley if I left Don Foster, and I'm not especially trained for a job. It's not easy after you've been married five years and had everything you've ever wanted...money, clothes, jewelry, and trips, even to Japan. Yes, Don took me there two summers ago."
"Well, maybe we ought to sit down and figure things up just for the economic hell of it," I said sarcastically. "Let's see now, you've been married five years, which means three hundred sixty-five days a year. How many times a year do you estimate that you and Don go to bed and screw? Then all you have to do is add up the number of fuckings you had, divide that into the aggregate price of all the goodies he's piled upon you, and you know what you're worth."
"You're insulting! I oughtn't to stay here!" she snapped, and she got very red in the face.
"No, you really oughtn't to. But I'm going to let you tonight. Because I think I need an emotional purge. I've been driving myself like a madman just to keep Dad's vineyards from falling into the hands of a bank and a particular baldheaded bastard I don't like. But if we're going to play tonight, Sally, you're going to play my way. Get down off that bed and come to me at once."
"Yes, Master," she said in a little-girl voice as she swung her luscious bare legs off the bed. She came slowly, in her sultry way, swiveling her hips, undulating herself like a cat. She put her arms around my neck and just brushed the tip of my nose with her lips. They were red and soft and moist, and there was a devil of lust in her eyes. It would have been so easy to fall into the trap. But I wanted to spring my own trap on her.
I reached into my pants pocket and got out a handkerchief. I bound it around her eyes, and she wanted to know what for. I said to her, "Baby, you came unbidden to my bedroom, so you're going to have to pay the penalty. We're going to play blindman's buff. It goes something like this. I'm going to turn you round and round, and then say, 'Go, girl' and then you're going to grope along and suddenly stick your finger out and point it to a particular spot. And when I get the blindfold off, you'll see what position you're going to have to take to earn your keep here for the rest of the night."
"Oh, my! I've been lying here looking at those pictures of yours. Now I begin to see why you put them up. You're wicked! You're worse than Don."
"Correction, I'm more imaginative than that overbearing, arrogant snob of a husband of yours, Sally, and you know it," I corrected. "He uses you as a whipping girl just for his own ego, not particularly for sex, unless I'm a worse judge of human nature than I think I am. When I spank a girl, it's in fun, it stirs up her voluptuous latencies, and it makes her hot for a good fucking. So both of us get a kick out of it. But not Don. He's morbid and warped, and as I say, I don't know how you judge life, but whatever you've earned from him, you've been underpaid."
"Oh darling, when you talk like that, I wish you'd never left Fresno!" She was rubbing her bottom against my crotch as she stood with her back to me, and she wanted me to pull off the blindfold, grab at her titties, and fling her down on the bed and fuck her then and there. But it wasn't going to be that easy.
"If you hadn't listened to your mother and thought that you had got yourself such a prize in Don Foster, you could have come to me in San Francisco, we could have got married, and made a go of it," I told her. "No, I wouldn't have been able to give you what Don's given you. I don't think I'll ever be able to do that for any woman. Dad left a lot of debts, and he got screwed but good and, I think, by his own help the last couple of years before I came back. I'm fighting a mortgage that ought never to have been written, because the penalty clause in it is the kind you put on a poor farmer you expect to go broke in six months, not on a reputable vintner who's only had trouble the last few years because of lousy help. But no, you and your mother wanted to get into society. You know what I think of Fresno society. Or if you don't, better not get me started on it or we'll never get to bed tonight. Now, are you ready to play the game?"
"How you must hate me," she murmured, and I felt her shoulders shake with sobs. Either she was a damn good actress, or she was really beginning to see the light after five long years. The marvel was that it had taken her that long.
"I don't hate you, Sally, because that wouldn't be right. You weren't entirely responsible for it. Your mother drove you, and then the two of you were up against the worst snobbery there is. Everybody was watching to see if daughter would turn out like mother and judging you in advance. To save yourself from that, you up and married Don, and because Don figured the only way he could ever get a woman to bed with him was to buy her, he thought you were a prize. Then when he found out that the rumors were true, he began to abuse you. Isn't that just about it?"
"Yes," she choked and bowed her head.
Yes, I felt sorry for her, but my prick was hardening and telling me that I hadn't had action in far too long a time. "Go play the game, baby," I said without any affection at all. I took her by the shoulders, turned her round and round, and then I pushed her. "Go, doll," I told her, "Find your own forfeit, because whatever position you pick, you're going to pay that forfeit or else we don't ever play any more."
I watched her. She hesitated, put out both palms and found herself up against the left-hand wall of my bedroom, quite a distance away from me. She drew back with a little gasp, and then she tapped her right middle and forefingers against first this picture and then that. Then she moved a little to the right, hesitated a moment more, and then put her finger up as high as she could and then said, "Here! What did I pick, Carl darling?"
I came over to have a look. Sally Foster had really picked out quite an ordeal for herself. There had been an eight by ten photograph from one of the newest horny magazines on the stands which I had deftly cut out and Scotchtaped in a particular section of the wall, surrounded by all the other photos and line drawings and reproductions which I had so assiduously collected.
It showed a girl on a bed, lying on her head and shoulders, with her legs up in the air and her knees pulled back towards her titties. A naked man was crouching over her with his stiff cock edging towards her mouth, and his left arm was circling her calves to keep her from getting out of position while his right hand was aiming a hairbrush at her upturned naked bottom.
"Ohhhhh!" Sally Foster gasped as she stared at the illustration, then back at me. Then her pink little tongue crept out of one corner of her mouth as she whispered, "Do I have to do that, darling?"
"If you want to stay here any length of time, the answer is yes, baby."
Sally Foster shivered voluptuously. Then she sank down on her knees, wound her arms around my back, and put her cheek against my crotch, closing her eyes as she shivered again in a very seizure of sensual and masochistic ecstasy.
"If only you'd married me, lover, how happy we could have been together! I guess you've guessed what really attracted me to Don. I need a master, as well as a lover. Mother tried to dominate me so much, she even wanted us to be sort of like sisters together and work as expensive call girls. You see, we were always pressed for money-"
"I know the story, Sally, and there's no need to remind me of it. I feel bitter enough as it is over the lost years both of us could have had. Don't sully it. You're not the Sally Jeffries I once knew, and maybe I'm not the Carl Venturi you thought you liked, either. Just let's get with it. You want to be dominated and fucked, and I'm the guy wants to do it to you. Get that dress off fast." I drew back my hand and I slapped her face. She groveled there on her knees, and she hugged me, and she put her mouth against the fly of my trousers, searching for my prick. I bent down, plunged my fingers into her hair and twisted until she rose with a cry. But I ordered her again to undress, and sure enough, she had nothing on under that dress.
I took my time about undressing, and when I was naked, I took her by an earlobe and marched her over to the bed as a father might usher a naughty girl when spanking time came around. I made her clamber on the bed and assume that exact position, and I knelt behind her, and my stiff throbbing prick brushed over her nose and lips, and I told her to start sucking if she knew what was good for her. I had found a hairbrush with very stiff bristles, and as I put my left arm around her calves, I gave her a good hard whack with the bristled side of the brush right over both cheeks, so that some of the stiff bristles probably dug into her extremely sensitive asshole. She uttered a wild cry, twisted her head about, and her lips grabbed the tip of my cock and began to suck noisily.
I felt myself shuddering now, because the demon of lust had taken hold of me. This wasn't Sally Jeffries, the girl I had put on the pedestal for so long and worshiped from afar. This was a bitch, a conniving and masochistic bitch who would wallow with any man who was capable of rousing the sluttish emotions that she had always had inside of her. And I had left my father for her. What a fool was I, but it was too late to do anything about it now.
I will admit that I spanked Sally Foster partly out of revenge over those years and over the misunderstanding that my father and I had had because of her. She got a great deal more than she bargained for that night.
I thrashed her ass and thighs and even her calves, as well as the insides of her thighs, with both the flat surface and the bristles of the brush. She took me twice in her mouth as I already related, twice in her cunt, and finally I made her kneel on all fours, with her legs spread as far as she could and her head bowed to the floor and acknowledge that I was her only master. Then I ordered her to grip the swollen cheeks of her behind and open them up. I'd never buggered a girl yet, but I was going to bugger Sally Foster. I spat on my cock, I rubbed the saliva in, and I managed a final hard-on. Then pitilessly I gouged myself into that tender puckering crack of hers, and her shrieks and groans and incoherent cries told me that she wasn't suffering so much as wallowing in the glory of her debasement and defilement.
It was three in the morning when I finished my little game. And I was weary and sick of myself and of her. As she was taking a shower in my bathroom, I lit a cigarette and told myself that now Sally and I were quits, and that each of us was free to go ahead and live an independent and uninvolved life. For damn sure, I didn't want to give Don Foster the opportunity to stomp into my house with a shotgun and claim that I had cuckolded him. There was nothing to cuckold. And it wasn't poor Sally's fault. You can blame it on environment, you can blame it on her mother, you can blame it on the particular genes that went into her makeup.
Just the same, when she finally left, after I'd called a cab for her, her knowing smile and her whispered, "It was just heaven, lover! I can't wait till we get a chance to do it again. Are you sure you wouldn't like to come over to my house tomorrow and start all over again?"
"This will have to do me until harvest time, baby," I told her. I gave her a kiss on the forehead. It was the chastest thing I could do for her at the time.