Chapter 8
Dan Perkins was thinner and very tense. His broad all-American recruiting poster face had grown pale and bony, so that now he looked lupine and suspicious, more like Uncle Sam of the pointing finger than the chunky blond Marine whom the Corps had built into a Man.
Some of his enemies-and he had many more now-said that his new pinched look made him the spit and image of one of the old New England fire and brimstone preachers, such as Jonathan Edwards or Cotton Mather, who had also tried to stamp out sex two centuries before.
He sank wearily down in his father's chambers and ran a trembling hand through his sandy hair.
"Are you sure?" he intoned, looking helplessly at his father.
"Yes, perfectly sure. Lorna and Atkins are thick as thieves. They're making pornographic movies in New York, and he's running one of these body painting studios. Lorna is the 'canvas'. "
The older man snorted with disgust. He rose and went to a liquor cabinet.
"I don't like to drink in here, but I've got to have one. I presume you do, too, son."
Dan took the drink and lifted it for a long pull. The judge watched him closely, frowning.
"Maybe that was a mistake. You've been drinking more than you should these days."
"Do you blame me?" Dan said bitterly.
"Yes, I do. She's not worth it, Dan. She was a cheap little nobody, and we all made a mistake about her. I should have known that a girl whose father commits suicide is bound to be unstable. Coming from a pack of flighty artists. . . . "
Dan did not bother to challenge his father, but he wondered who the 'pack' of artists were. Only Lorna's old man had been a painter.
Aloud, he said: "All right, let me have it all. I'm ready for the worst of it. I know you've been hiding things from me, you and Mother both."
The judge sighed.
"We thought it best to, Dan. It was bad enough when you were thrown out of the congressional race. I didn't have the heart to add to your misery and disappointment by telling you that your wife had become a joy girl, too."
Dan winced. Even though he knew the truth, it was hard to hear it put in such terms. He had long ago picked up most of his father's old-fashioned Yankee expressions such as "shameless, hussy, wanton" but he never realized just how effective they were until now, when they were used to describe the woman he had married.
Lorna had been gone three months now. For about one-third of that time, people had generally bought the excuse that she was away visiting relatives. During the first month of her absence, his father had private detectives hard at work, and it had not taken them long to put two and two together. She and Atkins had left town on the same day; she by car, he by bus. They had met in Bangor, where she picked him up and drove to Gloucester, Massachusetts and spent the night in a motel there.
When Atkins entered the picture, Dan and his parents gave up all hope of his getting into Congress, or even running. Still, they had hoped against hope that they would be able to get Lorna back in time, via threats, bribes, anything. But Atkins had been too slippery for them; the pair vanished for several weeks, along with the car. During that time, his Democratic opponents had smelled some kind of mysterious scandal and had done a little snooping on their own. A few anonymous phone calls and letters proved that his political career was ruined. The opposition didn't know just what Lorna was up to, but they knew enough to threaten him gleefully to back out. Then the Republican Committee, which had also received similar threats, asked him point blank: "Is there anything in your personal life, etc. etc." and he had to throw in the towel. Out of respect for him and his father the Committee had not asked for details, nor had he any idea just what they knew. But they knew Lorna had deserted him and that was enough.
Now, apparently, there was even more.
"Okay, Dad, tell me."
The judge cleared his throat and looked down at his desk.
"Lorna participated in a sex show-live-in Boston, sponsored by Atkins, who was also her partner, and some cheap gangster with a record as long as your arm. The shows took place in an out-of-the-way apartment near the airport, in the Mafia-dominated East Boston section. Because of the sub rosa arrangements between the authorities and the Cosa Nostra it went on some time before anybody knew about it. Don't ask for the details, I don't know them, but you know how big cities are," the judge said contemptuously.
"Some suburban housewife participated also, and the whole thing surfaced because her husband was having her trailed, too. There was a brief scandal and flare-up, and Lorna and Atkins escaped before their names got involved in it. They're now in New York making movies and doing this body-painting business, whatever that is. I presume you know?"
"Yes," Dan sighed. "Customers paint designs on naked women. There's supposedly no sexual contact involved."
"Hrrrump! Supposedly, eh?"
"Oh, Dad," Dan groaned. "Don't make it worse."
"It can't get any worse," said the judge firmly. "Now, my advice to you is to divorce this despicable creature for desertion and get yourself another wife as soon as it's decently possible. You're only twenty-eight, you know. You have years ahead of you to make a name for yourself in politics. Sad as it is to say, divorce doesn't make a damn bit of difference to voters anymore, but they still won't send a bachelor to Washington. This will blow over in time, people have short memories. Lorna will follow Atkins into obscurity. He's small-time whether he knows it or not. I never heard of a hot-blooded pimp. A man has to care nothing for women and sex before he makes a success out of either. Atkins enjoys his work far too much, apparently."
Dan said nothing, but slumped lower in the chair.
"Well?" snapped his father. "Don't look so whey-faced! You can't tell me you still care for the girl after what she's done."
There was no reply. The judge reddened and spoke more sharply.
"Well? Do you?"
Dan seemed to come out of a trance.
". . . . No. Of course not. I'd love to get my hands on her again, but only to wring her neck."
"Well, then, it's settled. You know the old saying: "Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest.' We will let it be known that you're divorcing her because she ran off with another man. Tell as much of the truth as you can whenever you can. Then nobody can call you a liar," he sighed. "Then we'll build you up as the broken-hearted husband, and cast you in a sympathetic role."
Dan looked at the judge with blank eyes.
"What about the Decent Film League? Am I supposed to stop being their counsel? Suppose somebody finds out that Lorna is starring in such films? How would that look for me?"
The judge pursed his lips.
"I don't see as how you have much choice. If you quit them now it will look as if you suddenly approved of dirty movies. But I think you'd better switch to bigger guns. Go after the real movies, the ones with big stars in them, instead of these fly-by-night home projector things. That will get you more publicity anyhow."
"They're not "home projector things, Dad. They're in full color with dialog and they have special movie houses for them." . The judge made an impatient gesture.
"Sounds like you are defending them, or at least advertising them. You know what I mean, don't split hairs. Attack the real movies."
Dan mumbled a tired agreement and got up to leave. He returned to his office in a daze. The judge was wrong this time, terribly wrong. He did love Lorna, had always loved her, but . . . I don't know how to show it!
The memory of her lush nakedness, her soft, yielding body, her eagerness to make love, all came back to him now and smote him with a yearning sadness. So many times, he had wanted her, wanted to make a real party of it, but always there had been his parents down the hall. He and Lorna had shared his old room, the one he had had as a child. When he was a teenager and just starting to jerk off regularly, he was always afraid of discovery. If he went out to the bathroom to beat his meat, his parents would certainly have heard him and wondered at the regular trips. His mother would have diagnosed it as bladder trouble and he would have ended up at the doctors. If he stayed in bed and played with his cock mere was the problem of the sheets or the disposal of kleenex or handkerchiefs.
Either was a risk; either way the specter of discovery loomed over him.
Gradually a web of terror and stealth had spun itself around Dan. When he married Lorna there had been no question of their having their own home. There just wasn't any question of it! He wasn't quite sure why, but he knew that he was expected to stay at home. His mother had deeded the house to him when he married, saying, "Well share your home, Dan" but a piece of paper meant nothing. It was still their home, not his, and as long as it was, he was still a little boy afraid to practice pulls with his pecker.
Wedding present be damned! That was just like his mother, her old way of giving him something, yet not giving him something. She had always done that, for as far back as he could remember. She had given him a bow and arrow once, and then made him promise not to shoot anything. She wanted him to lass her when he was a little boy, but carefully admonished him not to kiss her on the mouth, only on the cheek.
The gift of the huge rambling house extracted promises from him, too. A promise not to grow up, a promise not to leave her, and a promise not to fuck his wife too loudly or too often.
He put his hands over his face. Since viewing all those sexy movies Dan had learned that quiet, careful sex is no sex at all. It occurred to him very gradually that what Lorna wanted was what all women must want: lusty, vigorous, enthusiastic lovemaking of the sort he saw in the films. But by the time he had gotten it through his head she had left them.
So many times, he had wanted to cut loose and really give it to her, try some of the different positions he had seen in the movies, even do it standing up. But how could they, with his parents right down the hall?
At first, when he started working for DFL, he had been truly shocked and disgusted at the movies he saw, and he had prosecuted them with a vigor that was entirely sincere. But after awhile his vigor, no less enthusiastic, was redirected toward his wife.
By that time, it was too late. He had fallen into the pattern of his smothering home life, and so had Lorna. He did not have the nerve to approach her much at all in the last few months of their marriage. He was afraid she would make fun of him if he did anything really wild or sexy in bed; he was indeed a stock figure of fun by that time-the New England puritan lawyer fighting for decency. People were labeled and filed with such ruthless efficiency nowadays that it was hard to break out of a pigeonhole once you found yourself in it.
He got up and paced the floor. He would take her back if he could convince her of his real feelings, but now she wanted Atkins, not him: He remembered Atkins well; a swarthy, romantic, sexy-looking guy that women go for. He was no match for that kind of appeal, he thought with despair.
Besides, if he took her back it would mean a break with, his parents, a permanent break. Part of his mind cried out that it wouldn't matter, it would be good riddance, but even as he thought these things he was aware of his weakness, a weakness that had been instilled in him too long ago to be changed now. Sudden seh-loathing attacked him.
Lorna! Where was she? He had to have her! Now that he had lost her, he wanted her desperately. As long as she had been in the house with him, his helpless feeling of eternal boyishness had been held at bay. He had been a man in a way, he had had a wife there with him in his old room even if he hadn't screwed her very often. Now that he slept there alone, without the feel of her warm curves and the peculiar scent of womanliness beside him, he was thrust back into helpless, frightened childhood.
He had to have his Loma!
A brief madness spread through him and he thought of driving now, to New York, going to every body-painting studio in town until he found her. It was like a drunken vow that sounds incredibly stupid in the sober light of morning and it quickly vanished. He knew he would never have the initiative and the guts to do such a thing; he was no Rhett Butler to kick down a door and throw a woman over his shoulder.
What then?
The idea that grew in him was even more mad than his fantasy of forced rescue. There was small hope of reaching Lorna this way, except symbolically, but even that was enough for him at this point. Perhaps it was all he could manage anyhow, as weak as he was.
He walked hurriedly out of his office, not bothering to answer the surprised flutter of questions that his secretary asked. He got into his car, ignoring the waves of townspeople who so admired him, and sped off out of the business district. He drove steadily until he reached Portland. It was dark when he arrived, and he drove to the garish movie house to which he had gone so many times as a member of the DFL delegation. Now he would go as a customer, as a man, at least as much of a man as he could manage to be at this point. He did not know what the odds of seeing one of Lorna's films were, but he doubted they were very favorable. It did not matter; there might be a girl with red hair in it, and even if there were not, whatever woman it was up on the screen would do because they were all adult and full of sex. He could be with them in the darkness, the way he used to be with Lorna in his room. He had to have a woman with him in the darkness so that he would feel a little like a man instead of a stunted boy.
Fortunately, no one recognized him. It was cold enough in Maine now to wear a hat and bundled scarf, and he did not stand out in the crowd of similarly disguised businessmen. When he found his seat in the orchestra he cautiously removed his wraps and looked straight ahead until the feature started.
A gasp of delight rose from the assembled viewers when the film began with a scene of a naked woman lying on her back on a bed, alone. She was blonde, with a rich brown pussy and a faint hairline that grew up to her tasty little navel. She moaned and tossed her head and ran her hands over her nudity in obvious frustrated longing.
Her nightgown was on the floor. She twisted her hips sinuously and breathed in excited gasps. She looked lovingly down at her bare tits and tweaked their stiff nipples, then cupped her palms around the generous globes and sighed.
"I love to fuck," she said softly, her eyes looking straight into the camera. "I get so hot sometimes I could die, and there's nothing to do but play with my pussy. Right now I'd give anything for a nice hard juicy cock but I'm all alone, so.. . . "
She lay back and spread her legs so wide that the muscles in her thighs stood out like ropes, and hooked her heels over the sides of the mattress. The camera came zooming down into her crotch and the entire screen was filled with a giant cunt. Dan felt his cock swell and inch along his thigh as he stared hungrily into the runny pink folds. He didn't know whether it was lubrication or egg white, but it was real enough to drive his pecker straight up through his pants. Little droplets of moisture clung to the kinky brown hairs that grew abundantly over her sex-engorged outer lips. The spongy flanges were stiffly separated into two turgid, horny-looking edges and inside them her firm, juicy inner lips seemed to flutter with need. The entrance to her vagina gaped open and was filled with jismy goo. Underneath, her buttocks came together in a plump succulence, with stiff wiry hairs sprouting out from the soft cheeks.
Her clitoris was sticking out like an impudent tongue, all red and irritated-looking. She kept her hips still for a long moment, then she wriggled her crotch, her taut, plump buttocks beginning to dig into the bed in a rolling circular motion. A glob of. lubricious fluid seeped slowly out of her stretched-out cunt hole and dribbled down into her crack.
"Ummmmm, you know I've never creamed like this in my life! I can feel it running out of my twat. I'm really juiced up tonight. I could take the biggest dick in the world and still have room for more!"
She bent her arms into stiff wings and drubbed and pinched her thrusting nipples, arching her back until her quivering round boobs spilled every which way. Her nipples poked out like fingertips in their aroused state, dark with sex, almost maroon. The big pasties of flesh around the points had gathered into rigid wrinkles, pushing the red tips up and out in a way that made Dan want to leap open-mouthed at the screen.
"I love to have my titties played with," she crooned. "That's something all us girls love. Mine are big enough that I can even lick them. See?"
She lifted one heavy, enormous milker and lowered her head to it. Her tongue was long and darting, and its tip touched the swollen nipple. She grunted in ecstasy and rolled her eyes as she tongued herself, then lay back with a tortured groan.
Her thumb and forefingers plucked rapidly as she pulled her nipples up into long spouts, then released them. Her mountainous orbs quivered and shook, their solid, slightly perspiring weight looked delicious and womanly.
"Lick them, tickle them with your tongue, rub your big hard rod on them, fuck it into my cleavage. Ahhhhh, suck those titties, lover! Take them in your mouth, pull on them, bite them harrrrrd!"
She screamed in ecstasy and Dan's stomach tightened in longing and desire. He saw his own tongue moving rapidly, heavily, wetly across that soft bosom; he could taste those wonderful boobs with their flaky tips and their salty essence of perspiration and woman-scent.
A shimmering sigh floated out of her lips as she humped her crotch in time to her wantonly pinching fingers. She flexed and squeezed her vaginal muscles so that the audience could see the lubricious stuff pump out of her hole. Her flanges moved, her whole gash seemed to come alive and suck each viewer forward. It was like a hot little mouth drooling and clenching every prick in the house.
"See how good I am at fucking? I've got a real red snapper, don't I? I could milk your dong dry for you. I caress a man's tool for him, I don't just let him stick it in me. I fuck back, honey, and I wish you were here so I could prove it."
Gasping, she rubbed her hands down her naked torso until her fingers tangled in her stiff bushy cunt hair. She pulled at the long strands and then dipped her fingers into her throbbing slit. The molten female parts pulsated as she stroked and tickled them, digging her fingertip into the slick-ened folds. Her thighs rippled with muscles as she squirmed and pumped in wanton ecstasy.
"God, my cunt feels a mile long! I could take anything I'm so hot-a broom handle, a pipe, anything! But the best thing is a big red whang, nice and stiff and full of hot stuff."
Her fingers sluiced between her thighs, plundering in her streaming cunt valley. She tugged on her coral membranes in a way that made the fold of flesh over her clit rub against the protruding little nib. Her back arched under what must have been an electrifying thrill, so powerful that her pinched little anus suckled and clenched. Her soft white buns closed over it a second, then sprang open as she worked her buttocks in a lusty roll.
"Oooooh, I want your big fat cock everywhere! Up my asshole, in my mouth, but most of all in my hot little twat. Ummmmm, she's steaming! It's awful empty in there!"
She spread her pussy open with one hand and tickled her clit with the other, her fingers moving in a frenzied glissade. Her eyes squeezed shut and her mouth tightened into a grimacing, tortured smile of oncoming ecstasy.
"AAAAAHHHHHHHHl It's happening, and it's happening BIG!"
In the split-second before she shook with climax she twisted her little finger around into her puckered piss hole. It was a pinpoint opening, raised in a little crater, but she deftly opened it with her fingertip. She grunted sharply in pain and pleasure, then her body reared up from the bed like a wheel, going up, up, up to a wild arc of wanton completion.
"UUUUHHHHHHHHHH! Sex, sex, sex! Cock, cock, cock, how I looooove it! Fuck me forever, give it to meeeeee!"
Her body tossed violently, and her finger dug deeper into her piss slit. Suddenly she pulled it out with a pop and a jet of yellow water squirted out of it. She wiggled in ecstasy, her mouth stretched into a smile of pure joy as the stream kept coming and finally tapered into a weak dribble.
Dan suddenly stood up and plowed roughly past the knees of the men beside him. He hurried up the aisle, his cock like an iron pipe in his pants. He had to have a woman tonight! Somewhere, in some dark room in a motel full of strangers who did not care whether he fucked the whole Goddamn night. Someplace where the couple three doors down were doing the same loud, wonderful, sexy things.