Chapter 3
At six o'clock that evening Jim dialed the number the receptionist had scribbled on the half sheet of paper. While he waited for the ringing phone to be answered a chilling thought struck him. He didn't know her name!
What if she didn't answer the phone? Or if he didn't recognize her voice? Who would he ask for? How would he ask for her?
But the problem never materialized. For when she picked up the phone-and he did recognize her voice-she said immediately, "I've been waiting for your call."
Jim floundered for a moment, her tone and her self-assured words taking him by surprise. "Uh ... ah ... how did you know it was me?"
She laughed. "Maybe I'm a witch. Want to change your mind?"
"Not on your life," Jim said.
"Good. I like a man who likes to take chances. Got a pencil handy? I'll give you the address."
Jim wrote the address on the back of the scrap upon which she'd written the telephone number. "What time should I be there?" he asked.
"Any time after right now."
"I'll be there before you finish hanging up the phone," he told her.
She laughed again and he was just about to return the receiver to the cradle when he remembered he still had not learned her name.
"Wait a minute," he yelled into the phone, thinking that on her end the phone connection was about to be broken.
"Yes, what is it?"
"Uh ... what name will I find on the letterbox?"
"Oh, that's right, you don't know my name, do you?"
"No. No, I don't."
"It's Doreen Wynne. And I'm in apartment four C."
"Right. Got it. I'll see you in a couple of minutes."
"If I don't answer the doorbell try the knob. I'll be in the shower so I'll leave the door unlocked. Just walk right in and make yourself at home."
The address was within walking distance of the drug store from which Jim had called. His pace, as he hurried along, was fueled by the mental image she'd evoked. He saw her in a small, neatly furnished apartment, probably three rooms. She was in the bedroom and she'd just finished talking to him.
She rose from the bed and began to remove her clothes. Jim walked faster now, feeling the pull in his legs, and seeing her strip right down to the buff. He pictured her body as lean and hungry for sensation, with flat, hollowed buttocks, pendant ivory breasts with large brown nipples, and strong short legs as a foundation for her long-waisted body.
Naked, she walked into the bathroom to start her bath running, then came back to the bedroom to put up her hair and don a shower cap. She walked gracefully in her bare feet, proud of her nakedness.
From the bedroom she walked through the apartment to the front door to open the lock. Then she went back into the bathroom and prepared herself for the immersion. The water temperature was just right but there wasn't yet. enough water in the tub.
She passed the time by posing herself before the mirror and checking her assets. Yes, the legs were still firm, the waist narrow and flat. Her hands slid upward along the front of her body and gathered her breasts with their palms. They were ripe, and full, and firm, like melons on the vine.
Carefully she inspected her breasts for flaws. They weren't as big as some she'd seen, and they didn't ride up around her collarbone as though they were meant to be inhaled through the nostrils. Still and all those breasts were quite attractive. The slight sag was a sign of maturity and experience and the size was more than adequate. Better to have them a little smaller, than soft and doughy and lumpy with fat.
She shivered with the pleasure of inspecting herself and covered the flaccid dots of her nipples with the tips of her index fingers. Tiny electric currents coursed through the nerve endings in her breasts. The circuits were always there, ready and waiting. All that ever had to be done was to close the switches of her nipples to complete the circuits and the current would flow. The longer those switches were caressed the more current there would be until sweet delirium would engulf her completely.
Jim roused himself from his walking reverie to discover that he'd already passed the address. The house was a small apartment building stuck smack in the middle of a row of brownstones. There were five floors with six apartments to the floor.
There were buzzer buttons on both sides of the outer vestibule, which meant, of course, that there were two elevators, one to each side. Jim tried the first bank of buttons and name plates and didn't find any Doreen Wynn. She was on the other side.
As he pressed the button he wondered how she would hear him if she was in the tub. It was necessary for her to press a button in her apartment which would release the lock on the vestibule door.
He waited for the answering buzz and was elated when it didn't come. That meant she really was in the bathtub. And if she was letting him, a total stranger, and a man, into her apartment while she was in the tub it meant she had no false illusions about what he wanted to happen later on in the evening. That meant she wanted the same thing.
At random Jim selected one of the top floor apartments and pressed the button. A moment later the vestibule resounded with the raucous answering buzz and he pushed through the door into the dark, musty lobby.
In anticipation of the excitement ahead the blood in his body began to flow faster. His heartbeat quickened. He breathed more deeply. Nerve fibers were beginning to pulse with life.
The brownstones on the street were at least sixty years old and the apartment building was at least half that age. The wood panels of the elevator cab glistened with wax and rubbing oil but he could see the gouges and marks of years of use.
The elevator creaked up to the fourth floor and the door slid back. Jim stepped out into the yellow-lighted corridor and looked for the correct apartment door. When he found it he hesitated for a moment, listening for any sound of activity from within.
He knocked. But lightly, so lightly that even if she weren't in the bath she wouldn't hear him. And when there was no response he tried the doorknob,, found it unlocked, and walked into the apartment.
"Hello," he called softly, almost in a whisper, smiling as he turned from the foyer into the living room.
The place was much as he'd imagined. From what he could see it seemed to be three rooms. The living room was to the right of the foyer, the kitchen was directly across the foyer, the bathroom was right next to the kitchen on the left, and the bedroom was to the left of the bathroom.
There was a light in the bedroom and the bedroom door was open. The foyer light was out. The fluorescent fixture was lit in the kitchen but there was no light in the living room.
Jim turned on a table lamp and took a seat which afforded him a good view of the bathroom and bedroom doors. There was no way Doreen could get from the bathroom to the bedroom without his seeing her.
In the living room there were two club chairs and a sofa, a coffee table, assorted end tables and lamps, and a monstrous television-stereo-radio combination which looked out of place because the cabinet was in Danish Modern style while the rest of the living room furniture was in Colonial style. On the floor there was an area rug and the borders of floor around the edges of the rug glowed with polish. There were draperies and curtains on both the living room windows.
All in all, except for the television set, the place was quite tastefully furnished. While not lavish, the individual pieces were sturdy and well made.
Jim found an ash tray, pulled it to his side, lit a cigarette, and settled back. His ears attuned themselves to the silence of the apartment and he found he could hear the swirl of water whenever she moved in the tub. Once there was the squeaky shriek of bare flesh rubbing against the porcelain surface of the tub, and there came faint sounds from other apartments.
He took a deep drag on the cigarette and compared this pleasant though unpretentious apartment with his own miserable hovel. He was living in what would be romantically described as a garret. It was actually the attic of what had once been a four story brownstone private dwelling. Through the years the building had been divided into four separate apartments, one to each floor.
His apartment, if you could call it that, was the fifth residence in the structure. It was crowded up under the roof and had one gabled window. The ceiling slanted in half a dozen directions to conform with the pitch of the roof. He had one large room, about twenty feet square, and a bathroom. His kitchen was in a closet with the door removed and a Venetian blind hung in the doorway. As you faced into the kitchen from the doorway the sink was one pace directly in front of you, the stove was immediately to the left, forming an el arrangement, and the small refrigerator was on the right, closing the el into a TJ.
The fixtures were decrepit, useless even to antique museums. The floors were scarred and gouged, the walls were stained and chipped and the paint was flaking off.
In the main room there was an old-fashioned iron bedstead with what felt like an iron mattress; there were a metal-topped table with spring controlled extension leaves at either end and three creaking wooden chairs with uneven legs; there were an old horsehair sofa with springs nearly bursting through two of the three cushions and one club chair upon which it was impossible to sit. Placed haphazardly about the room was an assortment of tables and dressers and chests which represented every style of furniture from the beginning of time.
It was a dark, dingy, foul-smelling hole. The only saving grace was that once you completed the breathless five story climb on those treacherous stairs you were too tired to give a darn what the place looked like or smelled like.
The neighborhood was too far gone even for urban renewal. Only a small atomic bomb dropped squarely in the center of the neighborhood would have made any improvement whatsoever. The streets, alleys, and back yards were littered with garbage and trash. The darkness of the night was filled with drunken brawling, wailing police sirens, and the nerve-wrenching screams of junkies desperate for narcotics.
Jim had been living there less than a week and already he'd been propositioned by the superintendant's fat, sloppy wife, by her better-looking sister, and by her fourteen-year-old daughter. He'd refused all three offers, but it had struck him as odd that the most attractive of the three females, the fourteen-year-old, had made herself available for the least amount of money.
What a difference between his place and this apartment! An insignificant thing like quiet streets seemed unusual after one week in his own place. He knew that the same desperate struggle for existence was going on here, too. But the difference lay in the nature of the struggle. Here, in this lower-middle to middle-middle class neighborhood the struggle was on an emotional plane. Here the fight was for recognition, for peace of mind, for success measured in a thousand ways.
In the other neighborhood the people were too busy fighting for enough money to provide an absolute minimum of food and clothing to worry too much about emotional factors. Each day, those with strength enough-and each day there were fewer and fewer of them-went out to do battle with the specters of race prejudice, and lack of education. Some of the vicious circle was impersonal. A man who was not dressed presentably could not get a job, and a man who had no job and no money could not dress presentably.
Still, there always seemed to be enough money for a small bet on the numbers, for a bottle of cheap whiskey, for a couple of sticks of marijuana or a packet of heroin. A man who couldn't afford to have his shoes resoled still had to have a knife hidden somewhere on his person. Shoe soles with holes in them would not kill you, but if you were caught somewhere in the darkness of the night without a knife you were a dead man.
A splash and the gurgling rush of water roused Jim from his thoughts. He crushed out his cigarette and straightened in his seat, his eyes fixed on the closed bathroom door.
The bathroom door opened and a square of yellow light splashed out into the darkened foyer. The shadow of a figure filled that square of light. Then Doreen was standing in full view. She was naked and a towel hung from her left hand, trailing on the floor behind her.
That took a moment before she saw him sitting there. In that moment he had time to assess her naked body. She was much as he'd imagined except for a slight puffiness of the upper legs and an unexpected softness of midriff.
She gasped when she saw him and whipped the towel up to cover her front.
"I didn't hear you come in," she said.
"I knocked. When you didn't answer I tried the door."
Her moment of surprise was past and now she gave him a saucy smile. "I'll bet you sneaked in here so you could get a look at me. I'll bet you even peeked through the keyhole."
Jim gave her an answering grin. "If I took both bets we'd break even. I did knock on the door. But if you'd been standing right on the other side of it you wouldn't have heard me. But I didn't peek through the keyhole."
Doreen laughed. "You're pretty young to be a dirty old man. There's liquor in the kitchen cabinet and ice in the refrigerator. You fix yourself a drink while I get dressed."
Still holding the towel to cover the front of her body, she turned to enter the bedroom, swinging the naked white globes of her buttocks in obvious invitation.
Jim had to fight the urge to follow her into the bedroom, rip away that towel, and throw her down onto the bed. She was teasing him. She'd been teasing him from the first moment he'd entered the office She'd seen him then, looking at her legs under the desk, and she'd made no move to pull her skirt down over her knees. Now there was this blatant display of nudity. She'd wanted him to be here when she came out of the bath. She'd wanted him to see her naked body.
He managed to keep himself under control. If she was all that eager there was absolutely no doubt about the outcome. That would be better if he didn't appear too anxious.
He found the liquor, chose a bottle of bourbon, and broke out two ice cubes from the tray in the refrigerator. He splashed a couple of ounces of bourbon over the ice cubes and swirled the glass around to cool the liquor.
"Hey!" he called. "You want me to mix one for you?"
"Okay," came her shouted reply. "Make it a gin and tonic."
He took down the bottle of gin and looked in the refrigerator for the tonic but didn't find it. After putting ice and gin in a glass he called out again, "Where's the tonic?"
"In the cabinet under the sink youTl find a six-pack of small bottles. I think there's one full one there."
He found the tonic water and a bottle opener, and mixed the drink. He carried it to the bedroom door which he found ajar a couple of inches. He could hear her moving about inside the room.
"Here's your drink," he said.
"Well, don't stand out there with the glass. Come on in."