Chapter 6

"I would have sent someone to meet you," Mrs. Mason apologized as she held the car door open for Clara, "but when we have a party we always send the servants away. Just so they won't have anything to gossip about, you know. I hope you weren't worried when you found yourself alone at the station."

"Not worried, exactly, but I was beginning to wonder if you had forgotten about me," Clara replied as she climbed into the front seat of the touring car.

Mrs. Mason put the machine in gear and they shot away.

"We're having a lot of people there," the older woman went on. "With you I believe it makes thirty. It looks as though the party will last all week. I hope so. We like long parties. They have a dream-like quality about them after a while, don't you think? As though none of it were real?"

"I don't know, Mrs. Mason," Clara smiled. "I've never been to a long party before, not even to one that lasted a weekend."

The exotic-looking woman at the wheel broke into a throaty laugh. "But you mustn't call me Mrs. Mason," she chuckled. "It's such a stuffy name-it makes me sound like a spinach packer's wife. My name is Blanca. And you say that this will be your first marathon party? Then you will stay the week, won't you? I think it's going to be lots of fun. Of course you'll meet many strange people, but you mustn't let that bother you. Just pick out the ones you like and leave the rest alone. That's what I always do. You can't expect to like everybody or to have everybody like you, can you? And when I find I'm not having fun anymore, I just pack up and go back to town. But I'm sure that you'll have a marvelous time, Clara ... your name is Clara, isn't it? I'm very stupid about names and things like that."

"Yes, Clara-Clara Morrow," said Clara, having assumed an alias for the adventure.

"Yes, of course. Anyway, as I was saying, I'm sure you'll have a good time just as long as you care to stay. You're very pretty, so a good time is practically a certainty."

"Being pretty is essential to having a good time?"

"It helps a great deal. Men are very superficial that way. That's why there's so much divorce these days."

The car turned off the highway and onto a winding private road. At the end of the road was a huge wrought-iron gate. Blanca Mason stopped the car in front of the gate, got out, unlocked the phone box on the gate post and spoke into the receiver. Almost as soon as she returned to the car, the gate rose automatically. The car spun through a lovely, wooded park. Butterflies fluttered, rabbits scampered and several deer bounded through the trees to safety as the automobile roared past. Then the house came into view. It was very large, in the Victorian manner; very imposing and dignified. It made the people in slacks and shorts, lolling on the great, shadowy, arched porch that ran around both sides of the huge manse, look strangely out of place.

"At the moment there are no noisy drunks," said Blanca as she jockeyed the car to a smooth stop. She crooked a finger at a man who was passing and pointed at Clara's overnight bag in the back of the car. Without a word, the man lifted the bag and followed the two women into the house.

"I'll show you to your room," said Blanca, "and there my pretense of being a good hostess stops. If you want to meet people you'll have to stop them and ask them who they are. That's what I do."

The man who had carried the bag now put it down at the door of Clara's room and disappeared before she could thank him. A very thorough disappear e it was, too, for she never met him again about the place.

'Is there anything you want before I leave you?" Blanca asked, throwing open die door of Clara's bathroom and indicating it with a motion of the hand.

"No, not a thing. Thank you very much. I'll be just fine."

A young man was passing through the hall, and he calmly stopped in the doorway and looked in, eyeing Clara coolly.

"Ah, Derek!" Mrs. Mason exclaimed. "I was hoping you'd turn up this week." She patted Clara's arm in farewell and left with the young man, ruffling his hair with one hand and caressing his shoulder with the other. His hand slipped familiarly over her hips as they passed out of sight.

As soon as Clara had put her things away in the scented drawers of the bureau and on the sacheted hangers in the closet, she went down the curved staircase that led to the hall and parlor. At the foot of the stairs stood a brown-skinned man in a shocking pink turban, talking to a vivacious blonde who appeared to be no older than fifteen. The blonde's breasts were very prominent under her sweater, which was several sizes too small-or just right, depending on how you felt about that sort of thing A pimply-faced youth, with a rather scraggly beard, was clutching a brandy goblet full of a dark green liqueur, and talking to a beautiful Eurasian in a slit skirt. Meanwhile, a tweedy-looking woman glowered at him over two fingers of straight Scotch. In the corner a drunk sat alone, entertaining himself by blowing a tuneless sort of a chant through a muted clarinet. The mute was obviously an impromptu one, being nothing more than a wadded-up brassiere of black lace, with one strap hanging out of the bell oi the instrument.

"May I read my poems to you?" inquired a heavily accented masculine voice in Clara's left ear. "I write them in white ink on black paper, and I read each one only once to the woman of my choice."

The owner of the voice materialized. He was handsome in an aquiline way, with a leonine mane of jet black hair. In his hand was a sheaf of black paper that was as dog-eared as an old telephone book.

"Only once?" Clara asked with a smile.

The poet bristled. "Positively. Only once to each woman of my choice." He took her by the arm and led her into a conservatory which was full of harps, potted plants and pianos. "We have to take our clothes off, of course,' he went on, whereupon Clara released her arm from his grip and hurriedly quit the room. She walked out on the terrace, where a blowsy woman promptly pounced upon her and kissed her on the mouth.

The odor of liquor was strong on the woman's breath. She offered Clara a glass of whiskey with a sprig of mint on the rim, and when the girl politely refused, she downed it herself.

"My name is Legion," she said mixing herself another drink. "Honest it is. Helen Legion. But for reasons I myself am not sure of, I call myself Jan. Have you ever been told that you are very beautiful?"

"Mrs. Mason said that I was pretty," said Clara, blushing.

"But your Mrs. Mason doesn't want to go to bed with you, dear, and I do. My, you're beautiful. Very, very beautiful. And so young! Do you like to sleep with women?"

"I-I-kick in my sleep," Clara stammered. She hastily poured "Jan" another drink. The woman accepted it, draining the glass with a single swallow.

On the lawn, not too far from the terrace, stood the poet, clasping his black poems in one hand, and the breast of a tall, heavily made-up woman in the other. The woman was laughing and the poet was saying loudly: "Let me run barefoot through your hair!" A boy and a girl of college age shared an armchair in a corner. They were kissing and embracing rather athletically. The girl's skirt was high on her legs and it appeared that the couple was-oh, but people wouldn't do that in broad daylight, under the noses of any number of other people-or would they?

Farther down on the porch a giant of a man with an enormous bald head was roaring at another giant with a beard. Everyone seemed to shout or to murmur. Nobody just talked. The baldheaded giant was saying, "But only tvelf yirs oldt! At dot aich she vill haf no hair betveen her leks!" The bearded giant stroked his beard thoughtfully and murmured so that anyone on the porch who cared to could hear-for a giant's murmur is an ordinary man's bellow-"Potzibly, potzibly . . .baht tonight! !"

Suddenly Clara saw John Webster. "There you are," he called. She appeared actually glad to see him, although on the previous afternoon she had certainly acted as though she never wanted to see him again. Her change of attitude didn't seem to surprise him in the least, and he was all smiles and charm as he took her by the arm and rescued her from the woman whose name was Legion.

"I hoped you'd turn up," he said. "How was your trip up here? Did Blanca come to meet you? Who else have you met besides 'Jan'? " As Clara answered his questions, they walked about the grounds, past towering cacti and through a rock garden with artificial streams at the edge and ridiculous little Chinese bridges spanning the streams.

There were a great many more than thirty people here. And all of them were engaged in the same sport-with variations of course. They lay under trees and bushes, on knolls and hillocks, in dales and vales. One adventurous pair even lay in the little brook beneath a Chinese bridge. And what they were doing was rather obvious.

On a padded double beach chair not far away lay a man with a woman curled between his legs. The woman, clad only in a bathing suit halter, was calmly kissing and licking the man's love instrument. Watching from a nearby bench, a young man with platinum blonde hair and false eyelashes gaily shouted bon mots. As Clara and Webster walked by, he fished an ice cube out of his drink and threw it at the woman on the beach chair. It hit her squarely between the legs and stuck there. She came up with a little scream and leaped to her feet, stamping to get the ice cube out.

"It's all very-free, isn't it?" Clara stammered.

"Hmm? Oh, that?" Webster's eyes picked up the direction of her gaze. "They're only doing what they want to do. And that's the one rule at Blanca's parties. 'Do what you want.' You know, from Rabelais."

Clara nodded in a cultured way.

"No, there are two rules, I guess," Webster went on.

"Do what you want is number one. Don't pretend that you came here to do it to your own wife or husband, is rule number two. Sensible, isn't it? If a guy is jealous, he stays home and keeps his wife there, too. If he comes here, he wants some fresh tail for a change, so why shouldn't his wife have a change, too?"

"But aren't they in love with each other?" Clara asked.

When Webster just laughed, she tried a new tack. "Do you mean that all these people come here to make love to each other's wives and husbands?"

"Not all. A lot of these people aren't married."

"But does everybody come here to make love?"

"Mainly, I suppose. Or to take drugs or eat horse-meat, or to satisfy whatever other private vices they have. This is a sort of private world where outside rules don't go. That's why the gate down the road is locked. It keeps the public out. And since 'love' is the one thing most firmly restricted out there, there's bound to be a lot of it here. Yes, the place is just lousy with 'love,' if you insist on calling it by a pretty name."

"A love-cult, in other words," said Clara, with a fine but rather awkward contempt. "Love as a fine art, and other Greenwich Village phrases."

"No, sugar-pie, Not love. Sex as a fine art. And if you stay here very long you'll find out what a fine art sex really is. One of the finest. Ask that baldheaded Russian back on the porch if you want details. He writes books about it-in Russian. The pictures are in Esperanto, though."

Clara snorted daintily. "Some way to make a living."

Webster laughed.

"How long has this been going on?" the girl asked him.

"Oh, for years, I guess. It's a kind of social experiment with Blanca and her husband ... Have you met him, by the way? He's always around somewhere.

Very quiet and very distinguished looking. Graying at the temples and all that. He and Blanca are a couple of cool customers. This experiment of theirs-they want to see if people can live the way they want to and still stay recognizably human. Even if it doesn't work out, it will have been lots of fun, and nothing worse ever happens here than happens at a Jersey City political stag party."

"Whose ring was that that I gave you?" Clara asked suddenly. "Mr. Mason's?"

"Blanca's husband isn't named Mason," Webster replied evasively. "That was her first husband's name. Some rich American creep she married in Europe to get her into the country. She comes from Trieste, you know. About that ring, if you don't know whose it is, I think the best way for you to find out is to see who's wearing it."

"It's a man's ring, isn't it? Is he around now?"

"I haven't seen him, but he will be around, I can promise you that."

"When?"

"Sooner or later. You can't miss him."

"Why are you so mysterious about him?"

"Because I love mysteries, honey-babe. But why talk about these mundanities? Let's talk about life and how to prevent it. Has anyone every told you what a luscious bottom you're waltzing around with?"

"Has anyone ever told you that the line you're waltzing around with is not only vulgar but also trite and highly unimaginative?"

Webster appeared to be both surprised and miffed by this spirited outburst, and disdained to answer it. They walked along in uncompanionable silence until they passed the green tile swimming pool and Clara observed: "Well, at least they don't swim in the nude."

"Swim naked? No, not in the daytime. This isn't a nudist camp. But you could swim naked in the daytime if you wanted to. I don't know, though. Somehow clothes are more interesting for the afternoon, especially when you think how few really handsome bodies there are, except on very young girls."

"Do you mean on or on top of?" Clara asked with an air of bawdy daring.

Webster looked amazed, and then gave a little laugh. "Well, you're coming along fine now, aren't you?" he asked, handing her a drink from an improvised bar set up on the lawn. .

"I'd prefer to have something to eat," she said. "I haven't had anything since breakfast."

"Haven't you learned yet that in this household one drinks when one is thirsty-or even when one isn't-and, in the same spirit, one finds one's own meals when one is hungry? There are no huge gourmet dinners at this party."

"Oh," said Clara, "I see." She took the drink Webster offered, and promised to call him Johnny at his insistence. "Not Jack, mind you," he cautioned, leading her back toward the house.

Once inside, he brought her into a small deserted drawing room that was out of the main stream of guest traffic. It was tastefully furnished with a radio, a couch, armchairs, a rug, a few wall hangings and an enormous bunch of cut flowers arranged artfully in Japanese style in a globular vase on the sill of the open window.

Webster seated himself next to her on the couch and asked: "How did you feel after your little lesson yesterday?"

"Must I have felt some particular way?"

"No, I suppose not. But it would be polite to pretend that you did."

His debonair ease appeared to incense her. "Well, I did feel something," she said, jumping up and stamping her little foot prettily. "I felt ashamed and miserable. I wished that I were dead-or that you were!! "

He pulled her around to face him and grabbed her thigh. Then he pulled her between his legs and pushed her down so that she was sitting on the sofa again, but this time with her legs over one of his and under the other.

"That's no way to feel," he told her. "Or maybe it is, for a girl like you. Would you like me to make you feel ashamed and miserable again today? Do you like that?" He gave her a shrewd look.

"Of course not," she said. "Don't be ridiculous!" She extricated her legs from his and took the drink he offered.

"I think I'll give you another lesson anyway," he told her. "I like that way of making you feel ashamed. Wouldn't you like to do what we did yesterday?" His hand was slowly creeping under her skirt

Clara moved a few inches away from him, but he moved right after her. He tried to kiss her, and she hurriedly occupied her lips with the glass.

"You were very pretty with all your clothes off," he told her. "Very pretty indeed. Especially those little pink buds of yours. And the way you acted was very pretty, too, mainly because you thought you were being so very wicked and couldn't help yourself, didn't you?"

"Yes," she said in a small voice. "What we did was terribly wicked."

"Well, that's a matter of opinion. But I'm rather glad you think so. And it would be just as wicked if we did it again, yes?"

"It would always be wicked," she replied solemnly. She sipped at her drink before saying: "You did a bad thing to me." She sounded exactly like an eight-year old who feels she has been unjustly punished.

"I'm going to do it to you again," he chuckled.

He was feeling her thigh, reaching up between her legs, with agile fingers. Suddenly his hand was between her legs, spreading open the hair and the lips of her sex. She began to pull away when his hand came out from under her dress, but only for a moment-long enough to be raised to his lips. Then it dipped back under her dress and seized again, and she gasped as his wetted finger slipped down through the lips of her tender spot. His other arm slipped around her waist, his fingers pressing into her belly.

He rolled toward her and rubbed against her. His sex pressed her thigh. She covered her face with her hands. The liquor glass rolled across the carpet and broke.

"Oh, don't," she said, "please don't. Please."

He took her limp hand and guided it into place around his member. By this time his finger was burrowing deep inside of her. "Open your legs," he murmured.

But she closed them tightly-on his hand, of course.

"Now listen," he said, "take me to your room, or otherwise, so help me, I'll make you undress right here. I swear I will." His voice was very thick-whether from lust or liquor it was impossible to determine-as he said, "I'll make you do it right here, where anyone can see us if they walk in. Come on, I'm going to take you to your room and undress you and make you play with me again."

She rose with seeming reluctance, one hand covering her face, her body drawn back. He led her by the arm towards the staircase. She followed unsteadily, protesting softly but ineffectively.

They went up the stairs and she showed him the room Mrs. Mason had given her. He pushed her in and closed the door after him.

"I don't want to!" she cried, running across the room away from him-but, unfortunately, in the direction of the bed. "I don't want to!"

He picked her up bodily and dropped her on the bed. He took her shoes off and then her stockings, pinching her thighs as he did so. He made her lift her buttocks while he pulled her skirt up past her hips, then made her sit up while he hoisted the garment over her head. He leaned toward her and reached behind her to unsnap her brassiere.

Then he pushed her back on the bed and kissed her.

She lay still while he pulled down her panties. Then, as if resigned to her fate, she kicked them off, and they hung on one ankle. She left them there and covered her face and breasts with her arms.

Curtly, Webster ordered her to uncover her eyes and to watch him while he undressed. Slowly, she lowered her hands and turned her face toward him. "All right?" she asked.

"Fine," he said, as he slipped out of his shorts and came toward her, his member standing out stiffly in front of him.

"Now play with me the way you did yesterday," he said. He closed her hand around his shaft and made her rub its skin gently up and down.

"Don't look away from it," he told her, lying back on the bed and drawing her nearer to him, closing her other hand on the rest of his sex. "I want you to see how big and wet you make it get when you do that to it. Bend closer. Don't be afraid of getting your fingers in the hair."

He made her stroke the hair of his pubis, made her take up a fold of his pouch with the little finger of the same hand that was fondling him. That caused the two storage bags to bounce up and down, which seemed to please him mightily. "Now we're going to do something new," he exclaimed, springing off the bed suddenly. He made her get up, too, and had her stand f acing him. Then he pressed his body against hers, rubbing her belly with his monstrous machine. She took the great stalk between her palms, rubbing its tip over her fair skin, up and down the line of almost invisible hair that ran from her navel to her Mount of Venus. Webster put his hands on her hips and caressed her buttocks while his member poked into her navel. Then he bent her backwards toward the bed.

"Put it between your legs now," he ordered, "rub it in your love nest."

"I won't! Oh, no, I can't." Clara appeared close to hysteria. But Webster was not impressed. Although he did not employ sheer brute force to make her do the things he wanted, his technique was hardly one of seduction.

"I like a certain amount of resistance occasionally," he said, "but this is getting tiresome. Perhaps you shouldn't have come to Blanca's party." His voice had a cold edge. "This seems to be the wrong place for you, my little Eskimo-pie."

Clara relaxed in his embrace. "Oh, no," she cried. 'I want to stay. It's just that ... all this is so new to me. Please be patient."

He grimaced. "Sure," he said, "I'll be patient. Just cooperate, and I'll be real patient." He placed his shaft between her legs, rubbing it in the depth of the curly black hair which surrounded her Mount of Venus. The tip of his organ slipped between the lips of her spot, and he rubbed it up and down. After awhile he guided her hands to the crucial spot, and embraced her, putting his own hands on her buttocks. "That's better," he said.

He began to rotate his hips, and pretty soon there was quite a bit of heat being generated, what with the friction caused by her hands and the rotation of his hips. He made her look down to watch what her hands were doing. "I'll teach you to really like all of this," he promised her. 'Yes, you'll like it all before we're through. You'll be begging for it, see if you're not."

"But I'll never like you," she hissed-in a delicate, lady-like way, of course.

This seemed to infuriate him. "Kneel down," he ordered her roughly.

"Kneel down? In front of you?" Clara's tone was incredulous.

"Yes, right down on your knees. Don't be bashful. This isn't going to hurt you any more than anything else has."

Almost as if in a trance, she obeyed. Her knees sank into the soft rug; her eyes were on a level with Webster's hirsute masculinity. Slowly she sank back on her haunches.

"Do you know why I made you kneel?" he asked. He brushed her hair back from her face and gazed down into her tear-filled eyes.

"No." It was almost a sob.

"Because I want you to lick me. ... Yes, there!" He caught her by the ears before she could leap to her feet. "Lick it, Clara!"

"Oh, no! Please-Johnny! Don't make me do that!"

"All right," he said mildly. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. That's the rule here. I just feel bad about having to tell Blanca Mason that you're here to spy on her."

Her voice was little more than a whisper. "What makes you think I'm spying?"

"What else? I really don't know why you're here, and I won't try to find out either, if you do what I ask you to. But I do know that you're not one of us. I think you're interested in that ring. Now are you going to do as I say?"

The girl nodded slowly.

"Will you do everything I say?" he pressed. "For as long as you're here, will you come to me whenever I tell you to, and undress and do whatever I want you to?"

"I-I guess so," she mumbled. "Is this the way the rule about doing only what you want to do works out?"

He grinned. "I'm doing what I want," he said. "If that means that you have to do things that you don't want to do ... well, this place is just an experiment, all the details haven't been worked out yet." The smile left his voice, and he bent toward her, his organ brushing her cheek. "Lick it now," he ordered.

She turned her mouth to it dutifully and....

"I can't," she whispered, "I just can't."

"You'd be surprised at what you can-and will-do. Lick!"

She brushed her lips against the member and started to pull back again, but his fingers wound in her hair. He pushed her face against his weapon. "With your tongue," he said. "Don't just kiss it."

She opened her lips and her tongue barely flicked across the tip of his shaft. She made a wry face.

"That's not enough," he said. 'You've got to lick it a good deal more than that."

She licked it several more times. Soon, under his orders, she was licking it with all of her tongue and sliding her lips up and down along the sides.

"You're licking my cock, aren't you Clara?" he said suddenly.

She nodded.

"No. Speak up," he insisted. "Yes, I'm licking it," she said softly. "What are you licking."

"Your-your-"

"Go on, say it. You're licking my prick, aren't you."

"Yes," she replied slowly. "I'm licking your prick." At last he told her that she could stop. She pulled her lips away, as from a hot iron. He seemed to resent that, and made her kiss the tip of his instrument again.

By now, her spirit seemed truly broken. This time when he said she could get up she did so only very slowly, as though she were half asleep. He laid her on the bed and straddled her chest, kneeling. He then told her to press her breasts together. When she had done so, he lay his shaft in the groove. Then he bent forward and made her lick it again-the moisture having dried while he had been getting onto the bed.

As soon as the stick-stiff penis was thoroughly wet again, he began to rub it between her breasts, faster and faster, till he began to growl under his breath and clutch at her shoulders. Suddenly his hips began to jerk wildly, and he ejaculated all over her throat and shoulder. Then he rolled off her heavily.

He lay motionless for a moment. Then wordlessly, he rose and began to dress. When he had finished, he turned to her and asked: "Are you coming downstairs again?"

"No, I think I'll just stay here for awhile," she answered.

He shrugged and walked out without another word, closing the door behind him firmly as he left.