Chapter 5
Luckily, the Jensen's hadn't waited up and Jeanni was able to get to her room under the eaves on the third floor without an interrogation or a bedtime chat about Lewis. It was all going to be over soon. She was relieved. Probably she would be back in Chicago before the week was run, and all this pressure would disappear and she could be herself again.
Jeanni the pro was who she was, not Jeanni, the blushing soprano of high school graduation. Pretending was a strain, but the jig was nearly up.
Boy-O Carter would do her in. Anyone who believed in his manhood as much as he did was sure to get back at her for having him like that. She smiled, remembering the way his strong lean body had crumpled in disbelief when she had finished him like that. Well, what the hell, that was a degree cum laude from her college.
"Doctorate from Hades," she said to herself and smothered her laughter in her pillow.
But later when the lights were out and she anxiously waited to fall asleep, she thought of him again, and it wasn't that moment of triumph that she remembered. It was the way he had looked when she first saw him. The way he had looked before he saw her and got his ideas. He had been smiling, and his eyes had carried their own light. Boy-O Carter certainly carried an aura around with him, and his hair looked like, he hadn't had time to comb it after bed. There weren't many like him around.
She sighed and watched the moonlight carry on over the ceiling, turning the leaves from the tree outside her window into the faces of everyone she knew, or had known.
Chicago. There was the outline of the North Shore.
And Claudia, there was her face-and her smile-and there in the corner of the room in one of the shadows was her body shimmering. Funny, that she should think of Claudia now.
Jeanni had been working for Manelli for two months or more when he had sprung his first big surprise on her. She had been taught how to dress and how to cater to her customers' desires for a dinner companion or for a willing ear to hear their troubles, for all the fringe benefits that the Club Hades didn't mind offering them, if they were willing to pay the price. Surprisingly, most of them were willing to pay almost anything for what they wanted.
And the way a girl listened to men was a large part of how high-class a price she could get. Bed counted of course, counted a lot and a girl's looks were her living, but the fine touches of her personality lifted her into the thousand a night category, those touches and almost nothing else. Except maybe her ingenuity. That counted too. How many different things she knew and her skill at making them all seem new.
Jeanni had been learning and she was very conscientious about her job. Her initial reservations had been few, and one month on the kind of expense account Manelli provided for his top girls had taken care of whatever regrets were left.
So when he'd called her into his office that day, he'd had a pretty good idea how she would react.
"I've got a date for you, sweetheart."
"Okay, what room number?"
"This is not here in the club. This is a house call."
She'd shrugged. "That's fine too."
"Sure, sure. I knew that would be. Here's the address." He'd handed her an envelope.
She'd opened it. The address had been printed on an index card but there were car keys in the envelope, too. "What are these?"
"Just a little bonus for you, sweetie." He'd lit a cigarette and passed it to her. "If I get a satisfied phone call from that customer I'm sending you to, the car is yours to keep. If I don't, one of the other girls will get their chance."
"Who's the customer? Some monster?"
"You're close. Get going."
"Mike, just how important is it for me to satisfy everybody?"
"Very important sweetheart. Very."
Jeanni had put on her new leopard skim coat and had walked carefully to the door, weighing the possibilities. This might be one of those old types, who had difficulties these days-but she'd had one of those already. This might be someone with habits she'd dreamed of in all those nightmares. Anything was possible.
"Don't worry, Mike. If the car is a nice one, I'll make your customer happy," she said as she opened the door. Then she'd added over her shoulder, "Don't wait up."
The address was in a neighborhood Jeanni wasn't familiar with, but the car was beautiful and a new toy, so she didn't mind driving around in circles. Oddly enough, it was not a high-class street, but one that had seen better days. The brownstones might have been expensive at one time or another but they had about them only an air of faded elegance left and the clotheslines on the fire escapes put the incomes of the natives at a low ebb. Jeanni couldn't understand what a customer of the Hades was doing in a neighborhood like this.
When she saw the house she stopped wondering, but she'd felt less inclined to get out of her new car and risk entering. It was an old Victorian house cut out of a horror movie. It stood alone on a corner lot and was set back from the street a good twenty-five yards or more. All around it was a wrought iron fence. Four turreted towers haunted each corner of the house and the gables were a mixture from other styles of architecture in other centuries. It had fewer windows than walls and the brick was covered with soot.
Tremulously Jeanni passed through the heavy gate that creaked and swung shut of its own accord behind her. She'd advanced slowly up the tree-lined drive, waiting for a witch to fly over her head on a broomstick or at the very least for two or three bats to circle her head. When nothing like that happened to her, she relaxed a little and walked up the front steps to ring the brass doorbell. The doors were carved oak, about twenty feet high and thick as tree trunks.
It was all too much to take. When a butler opened the door, Jeanni knew she'd had it. She wondered if any of Mike's customers were necrophiliacs. If so, he'd have his car back by breakfast.
"Mike wouldn't want me dead," she told herself. "I'm one of his top girls. He wouldn't want me to cop out either."
"I'm expected," she said severely to the butler.
"Yes, of course, miss." The butler was nearly sixty years old and bent in half with twisted aching. "This way."
He led her through a poorly lit hall which held family portraits in oil on both sides. It was a singularly ugly family.
Jeanni sang an unpublished sang under her breath to reinforce her courage. Tentatively she said every foul word in her vocabulary, but repeating them failed to make the hallway less imposing or the portraits less ugly.
She was led into a parlor that was furnished in the style of the turn of the century. It was all very clean and well kept and lived in and all, but that did not alleviate her feeling of walking into a museum or into the past. Ostrich feather cushions and hard-backed chairs, lamps with cut glass and colored shades and a chandelier that was made for candles, Oriental carpets on the floor, and bric-a-brac, antimacassars and distorted looking glasses-it was all too eerie, all too aged, all too frightening.
She'd had it.
Mike could have it.
She turned to go, and saw her client, her pretty feminine client, standing in the doorway, watching her. She was a girl of thirty or so whose brilliant black hair was cropped close and combed like a boy's. She wore Levis and a checkered work shirt and she was slouching against the doorjamb.
"Don't go," she said. "It's easy to get used to my ancestors, and their ancestral acreage. Just ignore k all, and it's rather fun."
"Well, now that I'm not alone, it's not frightening." Would wonders never cease. Jeanni had never imagined that Lesbians would want to hire companions.
Tonight would be a new experience, but she didn't think she'd mind. Especially if that girl was as handsome at close quarters.
"Do you want to drink before dinner?"
"Dinner?"
"Didn't he tell you? You are hired for the night, the whole night. Frankly I'd rather sleep alone than pay for a quickie."
Whoever she was, she had certainly made her peace with the kind of life she liked. Jeanni dug in her bag for a cigarette and watched with the amusement the way the girl leaped across the room to furnish a light.
"What's your name?"
"Butch."
Jeanni laughed.
"You're getting paid. Don't forget that. I don't like to be laughed at." Her voice was controlled, but the fury came through. Jeanni apologized. Butch paced the room. Her strides were wide and boyish. If her breasts had been smaller the masquerade would have been complete. "I want dinner!" She screamed it at the top of her voice. In a moment the door opened, and the butler stuck his head in.
"Did you call, Miss Claudia?"
"Yes, damn it, I called. Where is my dinner, George? Don't you know what time it is?"
"I believe it is eight-thirty, Miss Claudia."
"Well, hell's bells man. That's late, isn't it? Get the food on the table."
Jeanni had all she could do to restrain herself from laughing. Her client was doing a very labored imitation of an English country gentleman, but it wasn't working-she didn't have the age for it, or the build. There was no doubt in Jeanni's mind that half of this dyke's problems came from seeing too many movies.
"I always like to eat on time," she was saying. "A man's-" she looked to see if Jeanni smiled "-a man's got a right to his dinner. Hell's bells."
"Especially after working hard all day." Jeanni would have to pretend that indeed, Miss Claudia Butch was a hard-working businessman.
"Especially you've got a point. Would you care for some sherry? Brandy? Scotch?"
"Scotch will be fine thanks."
"Do you take it neat?"
"Yes."
"That's wrong." She cocked her head and regarded Jeanni through squinted eyes. "Ladies ought to take their Scotch with water. Nothing too strong is good for the feminine digestion."
It was a rebuke. Jeanni gathered that she was to play the shrinking violet all evening. She wondered if she could dredge up a southern accent. She was sure Butch would love one.
Butch gave her her Scotch. Then she lit a cigar, again watching Jeanni carefully for her reaction, but Jeanni was hip. Nothing could surprise her for the rest of the evening anyway. She kept her expression blank. She thought of saying that she loved a man who smoked a cigar, but she decided that would be carrying things too far.
"What do you do, Butch?" Jeanni added, "If you don't mind my asking."
"Not at all. I would have told you anyway. I am a writer of yarns."
"Yarns."
"You know, cowboy and Indian yarns, sea yarns, spy yarns. All that kind of adventure stuff. I specialize in those four types but I'm not averse to doing private eye stuff for a change of pace. I'm pretty popular with the public. Of course I don't make that much. Just enough to support the ancestral acres, here, and pay for some of my-ah-pleasures."
"Well, huh, do you write here at home?"
"Oh sure, I do. I have a wild West room, and a sea room, a Lewis-and-Clark-shooting-the-rapids room, and a Gestapo interrogation room. That's what my stories are famous for-atmosphere."
"I'd love to see them sometime."
"Sorry. I can't give away all of my trade secrets now can I?"
"Oh."
"Well, I mean I can talk about the source of my inspiration but I can't share it. That's one thing that's personal, damn it. I mean if a fellow gives up his inspirations he doesn't have an inch to call his own. Right? Women have got to keep their places."
Jeanni saw by the shift in her client's accent that she was mentally in her wild West room. And so it went all evening. Dinner, which was steak and potatoes, evoked from Batch a string of anecdotes about the settling of Illinois; Jeanni supposed a fish dinner would have made her talk about the capture of Moby Dick. When dessert turned out to be chocolate mousse, Jeanni was deluged with a score of true-to-life escape stories from "The Great War" without being told which war that was supposed to be.
Brandy and cigars were served in the living room. It began to look like she had been hired to be a companion to this strange creature. Frankly that was just as well, Jeanni figured. She couldn't imagine which one of the four personalities Butch would turn on in bed and she didn't think she'd be able to cope whh all of them, even one at a time.
"May I show you the rest of the house?" Butch had relapsed into her English country gentleman routine.
"Please." Jeanni knew that this was the end of act two. The goods were scheduled for delivery. She took a deep breath and accepted the arm Butch offered.
"We won't need you any more, George. Go to bed."
"Yes, Miss Claudia. Thank you."
"Good old George. He came to the family with his father when he was three years old. I haven't been able to pay him a salary for the last five years but he refused to go. So if you're not paying a man how can you call him down for not calling you by your chosen name? It's annoying, if you know what I mean." Butch led the way into the hall, reciting an anecdote about each portraited ancestor as she led Jeanni to the staircase. The last portrait was of a youngish man, who was very thin and frail looking. His eyes were set close together and his lips were full. Nothing in his face had any strength at all, Jeanni thought to herself.
She stopped Butch, interested to know who he was.
"That's my brother, Isaac, the last male in our family. Dear Ikey. He wanted so bad to have his portrait done and that was before I started selling my stuff and we couldn't afford it. So I painted it for him. That's why it's such a bad painting. I didn't capture him at all-he was much handsomer than that. But oh, what a time he had sitting for it. He'd deck himself out in all his favorite clothes, see. Notice how his waistcoat is checked and his tie polka-dotted? That's not because he didn't know that polka dots and checks don't look good together. Ike had much more clothes sense than most people. No! That happened because he wanted to be immortalized in all his favorite things. We'd sit there for hours, me and him. Me in my painting costume painting away, and him on that old chair, not moving a hair, except for his mouth when he talked. Oh, we had a fine time. Too bad there's not anybody around to do my portrait."
"What would you wear if you could have one done?"
"I don't know. To be fair I'd have to wear a piece of everything. You know maybe it'd be fun. I could wear a coonskin hat for the explorer, and my boots for the wild West, and a pea jacket for the sea yarns and a monocle for the spy stuff. It might be fun at that. Do you think George would mind doing it?"
"If he did, you could bring a painter in from outside."
"No, I don't take to most outsiders."
"You took to me."
"Uh," she blushed. "Yes, I guess I did." Suddenly she whirled on Jeanni, "Hey, do you paint?"
"I'm afraid not."
"Shucks. That's too bad. Well, it doesn't matter. My will says the place should be burned down and the real estate given to the city. But the place and everything in it has got to be burned. It is a condition in the will. Got to be. So, when I go up, everything I love will burn too."
She waved her arms around in the air as she said this, and her excitement grew. "That's the way to do. Take everything with you. Nothing left. Not of your life, not of your heritage. That's the way to go all right. That's the clean way."
Jeanni watched her arms flailing the air. There was-she had to be mistaken-it looked like Butch was wearing a wedding ring.
"Butch."
"Yes?"
"Are you married?"
"Not any more. Was once. To my brother. It was his last wish before he died, so George got dressed up in a minister's costume and performed the ceremony. It didn't mean anything of course. He died right after. But it made him die happy, I guess. So I have kept on wearing this ring as a sign of respect. Isaac and I were real close."
Jeanni suppressed a desire to run out the door.
"This here is the master bedroom. Where I sleep."
Jeanni walked into the room. It was dark, lit only by a single lamp beside a mammoth bed. That must have been a triple bed. She didn't know what was expected of her. She supposed the first thing was to take off her clothes. She supposed she had better let "Tex" take the move first.
"Butch, this is all rather new to me."
"I know it is. I asked for a new one. You know, until I find one I like and want to keep on a regular basis, I don't want any hardened woman. You see, in my book, you're a virgin."
"Well, what do you want me to do first?"
"First I watch you get undressed." Butch clamped a cigar between her teeth, and sat on the bed leaning against the headboard. Her legs were crossed.
Jeanni turned to her and unbuttoned her dinner jacket.
"Whoopee! Whoop-whoop-whoopee!" Butch laughed and clapped her hands. "Oh, yeah, take that off. Yeah! Yeah!"
Jeanni couldn't believe her ears. For a moment she stopped and simply stared at this odd girl.
"What's the matter? Go on, go on. Get to the zipper.
It was obvious that the only way to live through the experience was to get into the spirit of things. Jeanni began to hum a song she imagined strippers would dance to. And struggling with the zipper on the back of her dress, she wiggled her haps in time to her singing. If she lived through this, she deserved the car Manelli had given her. "Whooppee!"
The clapping and shouting continued until she got down to her skin. Then suddenly, Butch was quiet. A minute passed in silence. Then the girl emitted a low whistle and said. "Ho, yeah! Most certainly yeah."
"What happens now, Butch?"
"Now you take a bath. And I'll wash you. All over."
Jeanni smiled. The fun and games were over. Butch "Tex" Claudia was turned on.
She walked up behind Jeanni and bent her lips to the back of Jeanni's neck. Jeanni shivered a little. Her touch was so light and so gently. "Through that door," she whispered. "Turn the water on and get in. I'll only be a minute."
Jeanni went into the room. It was as large as all the other rooms in the house. And the bathtub was at least twice the normal size. She hoped the tub was comfortable; she expected she'd be spending most of the night there. The water ran hot almost at once. She filled the bath almost to the top and stepped in.
"Ah, this is the way to spend an evening," she murmured to herself, feeling all her muscles yield, feeling all her tension dissolve with the warmth of the water.
Butch was standing' over her again. "You are beautiful," she said quietly. "Really, really beautiful."
She limberly climbed into the tub beside her, leaning slightly over her. Slowly smiled.
Jeanni was on comfortable ground. She supposed she knew what to do now. That would become a matter of routine.
"Kiss me Butch."
"Not yet. There's time for that later. Later." Butch let her leg lean against Jeanni's lightly. That felt so funny under water, so light and yet, in a way so tempting.
"Talk to me, Jeanni. Tell me about yourself. While I wash your body, your pretty, pretty body."
"There's not much to tell." Jeanni watched the girl lather her hands with soap. She forced herself to keep talking. "I come from a town not terribly far from here." Butch's hands moved slowly toward her shoulders. Jeanni didn't know why she couldn't think of anything to say, couldn't think why she was waiting, almost holding her breath waiting to be touched. "Nothing too much to tell, really. Normal childhood and-ah!" Her mouth was dry as Butch laid her hands lightly on her shoulders and rubbed gently with the scent soap leaving soft white tracks on her flesh. Lightly as Butch ran her hands over her, that felt to Jeanni as if hot coals were raking her. Jeanni's neck and shoulders, and as lightly as she touched
"Tell me about the boys you loved back home," Butch prompted.
Jeanni watched the other girl's eyes devour her body. She looked down at herself, saw how the water made her breasts large and how the light made the water glitter over her body. "Go on, tell me. About your boy friends."
"One was named Johnnie," she heard herself begin. "I bet he was a football player," Butch murmured, catching Jeanni's hand and kissing her on the palm. "Yes he was."
"Describe him to me, tell me what he did for you."
"He was big. He had broad shoulders and his hands were rough with work."
"Did he touch you-here?" Butch laid her hands on Jeanni's bosom and stroked softly. "What did that feel like?"
"That felt good." Jeanni swallowed. Without knowing what she wanted, she raised her body toward Butch's and begged with her mouth for her kiss. The girl caught her in her arms and whispered to her ear. "Tell me. Tell me more."
"He would try to undress me, but I didn't want to let him. Oh, please...."
Butch sent her lips around-the other girl's ear and her breath raced warm in Jeanni's hearing. Lips kissed their way down Jeanni's throat and her pulse pounder' her temples. She swallowed roughly and forced herself to go on talking.
About the men she'd known.
"He would pull my clothes off, even though I would ... I-I...." Lips dancing across her, moving like a hundred fingers across every inch of her. "Even though T begged him, his mouth was hard and he would kiss me, kiss and his lips...."
Lips, a thousand pairs of lips on her, on her legs, on her ripe breasts, lips and hands.
"And he wanted, he tried, he-he...."
Butch threw herself against the other girl and Jeanni groaned and moved against the pressure. Then Butch lay down and the sensations of breasts rubbing against hers sent Jeanni's mouth and hands working.
Their lips met and roughly pressed and moved against each other. Butch caught Jeanni's lower lip with her teeth and bit down; Jeanni's kiss moved to the other girl's throat and then to her shoulder, biting with desire as they worked with each other.
Then that was all hands on her, under the warm water, and more as the pounding in her ears multiplied.
Jeanni raised her body out of the water and pulled Butch to her knees too. She pressed against the other girl and, leaning against the tiled wall, explored with her hands a familiar body.
Butch laughed hoarsely and stopped her talking with her mouth. Until the mounting tension burst into a thousand quivering sensations and Jeanni screamed with that, and bound her body closer to the other girl's.
Butch lit a cigar and settled down on the bed. Her bright wrapper caught the light from the' only lamp in the room and sent that back flowing into Jeanni's eyes. She exhaled a great quantity of smoke through circled lips and said, "You I think I'll keep on a regular basis."
Jeanni smiled. She found herself reaching out to smooth the other girl's glistening hair. "Funny, somehow I feel like I ought to pay you."
Butch burst into laughter. "That's a good one. That's real good. Oh, yeah!"
Jeanni leaned forward and caught the other girl in her arms. She leaned her head alongside hers and kissed her throat playfully. "Don't you want money?"
"I want everything," Butch growled. "And I'm going to get that too." She pushed Jeanni down onto the bed and said, "You're mine for eight more hours and you ain't about to sleep any on my time."
"Are you going to work me, cowboy?"
"Yes, ma'am. On a regular basis."