Chapter 5
While he slept she remembered vividly the first time she had been pulled down gently in bed with a man. He told her strange stories of love and lust to fan her desire and it worked. In the stillness of a dark, rented room she shared his bed and listened to him. He told her of Hong Kong whorehouses where straw baskets on a pulley were used to lower the girls to the waiting customers. Each girl a different price. Each girl young, lovely and fresh. Each girl undressing slowly in front of the men, tantalizingly close, yet the rules of the house forbade the men touching the merchandise until it was paid for. She was eighteen and she listened enraptured until he could feel her trembling beneath his roving hands.
"You know everything, Mike-positively eery thing?" she asked.
The man laughed. He was big and strong with quiet features and about twice her age. She had met him that night at a dance and now she was sitting up ready to go anywhere with him. When his hands touched her it was his way of saying he needed her. She had no choice. Shake loose and beat it. Stay and sop it up. So she went to him completely and yielding and somewhere in the past a dark door slammed on her virtue. Hence forth this was to be her standard. Any man she liked . ... every guy a sexual soldier at heart. And Tina the grab-bag for any guy that met her own personal requirements of approval.
She had been brought up in a religious home. That was all that mattered. Her parents were nothing but slaves to the will of God. When she left home she forgot everything. God was no longer her world-just as a far-out dream weak people indulged in ... vague ... strange ... inexplicable. To understand it you had to go up on a mountain to see what was on the other side. More dreams ... more worlds laid out end to end in futility and God was nowhere in the scrub.
Her heart was simple and the cherry touch of hope shone in her eyes. There was a short, hopeless marriage for a few months, and when it broke up she took up with a crowd of decrepit-looking girls that banded together in the slum area of Garden Street. They maintained scandalous associations with every man who had the price to pay for their pleasures-each girl a literal sexual assassin when it came to the artistry of love. They cluttered together in stale smoky rooms and for the right price they curled themselves into willing sex balls sweating incoherently in the dark.
Her memory was a gallery of unforgettable faces and sweaty bodies putting their money on the table and taking their fill. Nothing magic, nothing glittering, nothing enduring. She sifted her womanly needs to her own style and when she met a guy she liked she did it free. Like Lou. He seemed all right-a slow uptown jerk who didn't know better but who might give her giggles and squeals. Once a guy waited until she undressed. It was in his apartment at the edge of town. When she was nude he grunted and said: "You're dirty laundry. Take off before I throw you out."
When she left she kicked him in the glass-bottomed ass sending him sprawling. She banged the door behind her.
But her superiority remained. It was part of the winding pattern. As a woman she could enjoy it for what it was. She did not need a man to frame her sex and hang it on a wall and ring it with chains. She walked through life with the bounce and unfettered care of an ungirdled woman ... the lightness of detachment. The trouble with her whole life had been the late date at which she mastered her freedom. Now she ran and did and acted as she wanted and the motion of life surged about her like a seething maelstrom. This was what she wanted.
When Lou left she started to straighten out the room. Then she heard a knock on the door and called out, "Come in."
It was Leslie, the girl down the hall.
"How about a little something for breakfast?" asked Tina.
The tall red-haired girl sat down. "Just coffee," she said. Then she remembered something. "Who was the good-looking guy I noticed leaving your room before?"
"I met him the other night. He's free stuff."
"What's he like?"
"An uptown guy who works for a newspaper."
"You like his prowess?" asked Leslie.
Tina smiled. "I can't say just yet. He's got a good hard body-the rugged, ladies man type, I think. Maybe a little too Puritanical for me, though."
"Does he like you?"
"I think I disgust him. The first night I saw him he was with a well-dressed chick," Tina said, pouring the coffee. "But suddenly he's been back twice without her. So I really can't say."
"He must like you if he's been back twice?" Leslie suggested.
"Maybe. Today I really showed him the way I want my loving. I had him crawling."
Leslie drew her breath in a loud sigh. "I bet you did at that." She glanced at her watch. "I have a client in a few moments so I'll run along for now," she said.
Tina smiled. "That same Marshall girl again?"
Leslie chuckled. "The same-imagine having to pretend to a husband she enjoys making love to him and then sneaking here when he's at work." She shrugged her shoulders as she walked toward the door. "Well, Tina, that's her bag-not mine."
When Leslie was gone Tina's face remained expressionless. She glanced around the room. She smiled to herself. What a sweet set-up for a girl, living a wild and free life with good liquor, and sometimes pot, and alongside of it all, the never ending line-up of sex ... any size and any shape. She filled the wine glass and stared at her image in the glass for some time. She drained the wine. She looked at the empty glass. Now there was no image.
Her hand moved to her chin-sharp and firmly pointed. Her skin was fine-no blemishes and a fine natural glow. There were her two deep, black eyes, big and expressive, the focus of her pretty face. But the glory was in her breasts, large protrusions and ripe as watermelons. Men could run their tongue in her ears and kiss her hot open mouth but her breasts were the most trafficked and desirable part of her beautiful upper anatomy.
She was happy with herself then and she knew you can't hide happiness just as you can't still sound. Tonight she would cater to the rich out-of-town plumber with the steel-rimmed glasses and steel wool mustache. Twenty bucks to prop up a fellow traveler. She liked the way she earned her money, keeping guys like him in line. At this point there was nothing else she wanted to do with her life. Only the green of money mattered.
She looked at her life as a point of view with no return. Here it was wonderful. She went anywhere and did as she pleased and dressed as she chose and in the Garden Street section people didn't even look at you. They just passed you smugly on the street and mumbled something incoherent. Even that didn't matter. Homosexuals and lesbians were everywhere and many plied their trade openly. Garden Street belonged to the unsure ones-the insecures. The tourists came in big busses and stared and wondered and went their way. Eveyone in the area was typical to out-of-towners. Tina hardly called herself typical by any standards. She had her own clinical description of the kind of person she thought she was. And the first time anyone special she liked was curious she would explain herself-not before.