Chapter 3
Like I said, my father was too proud to tell me that he'd been going downhill ever since I'd walked out on him after that argument we'd had about Sally Jeffries. I knew he had plenty of dough, and when I left he got a pretty snazzy-looking housekeeper, a black-haired, stocky but very screwable Mexican-Indian who was putting out some of the best chow I ever sank a fork into and whose dark eyes and full mouth told me that if my father was still as good in bed as ever, she was more than willing and able to take care of that part of her housekeeping duties, too.
Me, I wanted to be on my own, and I really didn't care much about wine. Sure, I drank it, and it was nice to see the family name on the bottle, but apart from that it didn't do a thing for me. Maybe it was because we never really had a family life, after Mom died when I was just a kid. And then there was the dreariness of Fresno, which I've already pointed out has driven away more people than it attracted. I just couldn't see myself finding any sort of decent job there, so long as I wasn't going to take over Dad's vineyards.
Well, to make a long story short, I got my real-estate broker's license, and I was doing pretty well, and I had finally scored in the bed department. Believe it or not, up to the age of twenty-three which was when I pulled out of Fresno, I had scored only once, and that was with that cute Greek bitch on the steps of the college dean of mens' house. And then the old geezer, whom we'd both felt had been out of town, had come out on the porch and caught us there just when I was about to shoot the wine of life into her greedy little snatch. So even that one experience hadn't exactly been successful.
Yes, about six months after I decided to go it on my own, I happened to be out in my Thunderbird showing a handsome widow a couple of houses she was interested in, and we'd spent a couple of hours and I could see that she was interested, but so far she hadn't earned me any commission.
Her name was Marcy Gage, and I sort of liked her style. She had honey-colored hair which she wore in a very youthful way, helmet style, which you figure only young girls will try. She had an interesting face, with a somewhat slantingly highset cheeks, firm chin, a straight little nose with very thin and widely flaring wings, and a soft rather small mouth. But there was nothing selfish or arrogant about that mouth, and I caught myself looking at it and wondering what it would feel like to kiss it.
Most of all, she had a simply gorgeous body, and maybe she was Sally Jeffries' mother's age, and maybe she was a couple of years younger, but she was sure stacked. Figure a broad about five feet five, and give her a 36 bust, 23 waist, and 37 hips. This meant that Marcy Gage had a juicy ass, and she sure did. But she had a pale white skin to go along with her blonde hair, and she had big brown eyes, and the composite total spelled out a hard-on for yours truly.
I might stop right here and mention that I've got sleek-but not greasy-black hair, I'm rangy, about six feet tall and I weigh about 170, dark brown eyes, and my name was originally Carlo, but it was a little too sissified for me, so I changed it to Carl when I got to Frisco. It was almost five-thirty and the fog \/as starting to come in from the ocean and Seal Rock, which is near the Cliff House and out along the Avenues and the end of Golden Gate Park. I didn't have any plans for the evening, except maybe to take in a movie and some chow in Chinatown (I may be a dago but I go ape over beef-subgum), and then maybe a walk down to Fisherman's Wharf. And I hadn't done too well this particular week.
My dad hadn't even bothered to telephone or write me after I'd walked out, but I didn't expect him to. I just told myself that I was going to make it on my own and I didn't want a nickel of his dough no matter what. So I felt like a hellraiser, maybe that's why I scored on my first really leisurely piece with Marcy Gage that night.
I leaned back in the driver's seat and I looked at her and I said, "Where do we go next, Mrs. Gage?"
"Oh dear," she said with a little smile, she had a nice, brisk cool voice, and she was wearing a print rayon dress and charcoal-brown nylons and a little toque hat that made her look quite sophisticated, and a cape around her shoulders. That was because Frisco always gets damp and chilly when the sun starts to go down, and I don't care what month of the year it is. "I've really taken up a lot of your time, Mr. Venturi. But I really do want to buy a house. You see, my husband and I were born in the East, but we always had a dream about coming to San Francisco. He died just a year ago, and he left me a good deal of money, and after I got over losing Ed, I told myself that the first thing I was going to do was buy a nice house just about where he would have liked it. And then maybe I'll go back to work."
"Work?" I echoed. I couldn't fancy this rich widow going to work in Frisco. One thing about this town, there just aren't too many white-collar jobs for anybody unless you've got pull or happen to be native-born. That's the way it is in Frisco. You make money in the real estate business, the insurance business, and in the medical profession, because it costs more to get sick and die in Frisco than anywhere else I know. But Marcy Gage looked like class to me, and a little sophisticated and maybe a socialite, and I just couldn't figure her sitting at a desk from 9 to 5 and drawing a paycheck.
"Of course, Mr. Venturi," she calmly replied. "I was a pretty good secretary until Ed married me. Fact is, I was his secretary. He was a publisher, you see."
"Well, there aren't very many publishing firms in this town, Mrs. Gage," I told her. "Now if you were to go to L.A., you'd have a better chance."
"All they publish there are sex books and magazines with lots of pictures of girls without any clothes on, Mr. Venturi," she crinkled her pretty nose at me.
I chuckled. "Well, you've hit the nail on the head. But, although it's none of my business, if you've money enough to buy a house, I should imagine you don't really have to work for a living."
"No, I don't. My husband left me almost a quarter of a million dollars," she said very calmly and without a fuss.
I looked at her in a new light. Now don't get me wrong, dear reader, I wasn't looking at her with tail light in my eyes and figuring that here was a ready-made setup where I could move in and become Marcy Gage's new gigolo. I'll be damned if I'll take a broad's money and let her tell me what I'm supposed to do around the house besides fuck. It operates on the same basis as my breaking off with Dad, because I couldn't have cared less about his vineyard and the fact that I was his only son and heir. But what I mean about Marcy Gage is that if she had all that dough, I figured she could easily buy the best house on our list and I could use the commission. So I decided to go to work on her but good.
"Look, Mrs. Gage, you've seen about five houses now, and you're not really convinced about any one of them. Why don't you let me invite you to dinner and then I've got one of two real prizes that you can take more time to check over," I suggested.
That was fine with her, so we had dinner at Cliff House, and then I drove her out in the direction of Daly City, and we finally wound up in Pacifica, which is right on that rolling Pacific Ocean with almost a kind of low mountain view, and homes that don't go for peanuts. And about nine o'clock that evening, she walked through the living room of a beautiful ranch-type house and said, "I'll take it. This is exactly what Ed would have wanted."
I felt the way a freshman might feel if the coach sent him in for the last minute of the last quarter and he catches a touchdown pass and gives his alma mater the victory over a traditional rival. I mean, this house was peddling for nearly a hundred thousand smackeroos, and my commission was just about enough for a year's salary if I lived modestly and that's the way I had been doing in San Francisco till I met Marcy Gage.
When I found out that she wasn't kidding and that she was taking out her checkbook to give me a binder on the house, I blurted out, "I feel like kissing you, Mrs. Gage. This is the first really important sale I've ever made."
She cocked her head, studying me a minute, and then a slow smile crept over those sweet red lips of hers. "I wouldn't mind, Mr. Venturi," she murmured.
The house happened to be slightly furnished, because the owner had been sent to a Federal penitentiary for mail-order fraud and it was being put up at sale to pay off some of the crook's indebtedness to his creditors, including Uncle Sam, who was after him for unpaid back taxes. There was a big low couch there, the kind a horny pussychaser dreams about. Wide enough for two people to stretch out full length and screw without falling off the edge. I sat down on it, put my hands out and took hold of hers, and drew her down towards me. She stooped accommodatingly, and our lips met. A white flame ran through my body, and the next thing I knew my hands were grabbing for her bombers, firm juicy cantaloupes that didn't need the bra I could feel through her rayon dress. The cape had fallen off her shoulders, and to this day I don't know whether she did it herself or whether I helped it.
She gave a little whimper, and then she sort of sank down on the couch, and the next thing I knew, we were lying side by side, and she had her right arm crooked around my neck, and my left hand was on her juicy bottom, and my right hand was cupping one of those gorgeous titties of hers, and we were exchanging kisses. Quick little wine-sipping kinds of kisses, the kind lovers take when they're leading up to long deep draughts of passion's liqueur.
What happened after that gave me back my male ego and also officially lost me my virginity, which I felt I still technically had because that fuck with the Greek girl had been interrupted at the crucial moment. And yet throughout it all, Marcy Gage acted like a perfect lady. Not like a whore at all, nothing vulgar or cheap. It all seemed so natural and beautiful, that we hardly knew what we were doing. Somehow her pantie-girdle got pulled down, somehow my zipper got tugged down and my cock liberated to find the way to that darkblonde lovethatch of hers and then I was on her, and sinking down into infinity and eternity and bliss.
I didn't hurry it. I didn't know when I was ever going to get as juicy a piece of cunt as Marcy Gage again, so I tried to make it last. I rose and sank slowly, and I felt her hungry hot moist sheath grabbing my prick and holding onto it for dear life as her soft little hands cupped my cheeks and now her lips began to take more demanding, stinging kisses from my lips. Her eyes were huge as saucers, humid and glowing. She wouldn't strip naked, but she didn't mind when my hands squeezed her titties or reached under her to grab hold of her jouncy bottom and hold on for dear life while I impaled her with my commendable manhood. I think I owe a candle to Venus for giving me enough staying power not to shoot off the first minute or so that I was inside that hot draining chasm of Marcy Gage's.
Not that I wasn't tempted, not that it didn't take every ounce of self-control I didn't even know I had. The way she was nibbling at my prick with those sweet vaginal walls of hers, I thought I was going to explode any second. But somehow I managed to grit my teeth and hold it back until she began to buck and weave and wriggle her ass and finally fling her legs around me and sob out, "Oh my God, Carl darling, don't hold back now, I need it so, oh please give it to me, please!"
And then there was an earthquake which had nothing to do with the San Andreas Fault, and we actually did roll off that big wide couch. And after it was all over, she opened her eyes and stared at me, and she broke into a slow smile and she whispered, "My gracious, I was a naughty girl. But I don't think Ed would have minded. He always said to me, 'Marcy, if anything should happen to me, you're the sort of woman who needs the loving of a good strong man, so don't stint on it.' That's what he said, Carl darling."
Well, everything seemed to run pretty well for me then after that. The sale went through, I got my commission, and I invited Marcy Gage out to a house-warming party by first taking her to dinner at Ernie's, which is just about San Francisco's finest gourmet restaurant, and then I took her for a drive in my Thunderbird all through San Rafael, and we wound up not warming her house or my apartment but a motel cabin on the edge of that delightful little town and we stayed the night.
For about a year, I was Marcy Gage's official boyfriend, and she kept me humping-and I mean that literally. She was insatiable. I guess her late husband Ed had been quite a cocksmith in his day, and after a year without prick, lovely wealthy beautiful widow Marcy saw no reason why she shouldn't go back to the thing she did best. She didn't say any more about going back to work, and I didn't encourage her at all. I Wanted her free for afternoons or nights or even mornings when I had a little free time, and I used to pop in on her unexpectedly, especially after I'd made a sale that made the boss happy.
After about a year, there was a letter from my dad, simply enclosing some papers for me to sign which he was going to give to his lawyer, Charlie Karogian. Charlie Karogian was an honest Armenian, almost sixty, and he had fathered eight little Karogians and two of them had already made him a grandfather several times over. I hardly even looked at the papers, but there was a short letter which Charlie Karogian had apparently drawn up himself, requesting me to give my consent to converting part of Dad's acreage to fruits and vegetables. Apparently Dad had willed me everything he had, but of course he maintained a life interest, and he figured that he just wanted my official approval to do what he was going to do anyway. I signed it, and I added a P.S. to the effect that I hoped he was doing all right, and then forgot all about it. If I had used my brain at all, I might have got a little worried. Dad was a vintner from start to finish, and the fact that he was about to change half his acres of grapes into maybe tomatoes and melons or lettuce and berries indicated that something was drastically wrong with his operation. But then, I was the guy who didn't give a damn whether I ever saw those vineyards again or not.
Well, I'd better get up to the present, so let me say only that my gorgeous widowed bed partner Marcy Gage gave me the bounce a few months later because she up and married some snot-nosed kid just out of Stanford, even younger than I was. He happened to be a devotee of Zen, and she was getting mystic all of a sudden. She told me that my successor had a great soul, and that thousands of years ago in history he had been some kind of guru. Remember, this was before the hippies started to move in. So I told her thanks for the memory, and I concentrated on selling houses and office buildings and putting dough in the bank and tried to find myself another piece of ass half as talented as Marcy Gage. It wasn't easy, I can tell you.
But one thing she had taught me and that was how to fuck and have confidence in my ability so that I could make a pass at even the sort of girl you put on a pedestal and don't even think she wears panties because she's so pure. That's how I happened to go to bed with Patricia Allister, who was the daughter of a sugar tycoon with offices on Montgomery Street. That was during my third year in Frisco, and our burning romance lasted about six months, and then Patricia went to Europe (I still think her dad sent her there so I wouldn't become his son-in-law); and then I met a cute little nurse at La Honda, which is a kind of old folks' home. Her name was Peggy Daniels, and she was the most delicious little piece of ass I'd ever encountered until that time. She was about four feet ten, with harlequin glasses yet, soft silky light brown hair that fell in a thick pageboy to her shoulders, a button nose, and a saucy little full red ripe mouth that made me want to kiss it every time I saw it.
She had a sweet little-girl voice, she was twenty-four, and we met quite accidentally. I almost ran her down in my Thunderbird one foggy evening. She had put on a gray raincoat and hat, and she sort of blended with the gray dreary atmosphere. I was really happy that I put my brakes on in time. I got out of the car, apologized, and I was shaking life a leaf. San Francisco is one town where the pedestrian has the right of way even if he or she is jaywalking. But when I saw what a gorgeous piece of ass Peggy Daniels was, my knees started to shake just at the thought that I might have been responsible for maiming or hurting or even killing such a luscious dish. She was the one who apologized, to my great surprise, told me it was her fault because she hadn't been paying attention and daydreaming, and hoped that I hadn't been hurt. I looked at her, then I started laughing, then we both laughed, and I wound up taking her over to Original Joe's for steaks and a bottle of good dago red and listened to the story of her life.
She'd come from Chicago, where she'd been a social worker, and she'd come to Chicago from Newark, New Jersey, because her parents were squares and owned land and didn't believe in civil rights and all that sort of stuff. So she'd quit a promising college career, jilted a pompous horse's neck her parents had wanted her to marry for social reasons, got her degree at the University of Chicago, gone into nursing at Billings, and then up and moved to San Francisco when she thought that maybe her parents had put a private eye on her tail. I could understand that, because it was a simply delicious tail. She had showgirl's calves, long and slinky and beautifully muscled, slender graceful thighs, and a very saucy and spankable bottom, and pale baby-pink skin without a flaw on it. You add up skin like that, a petite figure like that, harlequin glasses, and a little-girl voice, and you could understand why Peggy Daniels and I were constant bed companions until I got the news about two years later that my father was dying.
By then, I was almost ready to marry the girl, I had about ten grand in the bank, a brand new Thunderbird, and I even made Herb Caen's column for a real estate deal I pulled off in a single hour, and then I got a wire from Charlie Karogian that I'd better get back to Fresno fast because my father wasn't long for this world.
I kissed Peggy goodbye, though I thought it was only au revoir at the time, got into my Thunderbird and headed for the San Joaquin Valley.