Chapter 15
Her car was so dangerously close to the bog of water I had to get it back up on the road for her, and I barely made it Then we drove back to the gully, left her car, and she directed me to a bar on the edge of town where she said none of the girls would ever go.
"A really raunchy place," she had said. "With cheap little waitresses-the only person we might run into there would be my father, but hell be busy somewhere else."
The place was a dive, with loud guitar and saxophone music rocking from a gaudy jukebox, low lights, a haze of cigarette smoke and men in jeans and khaki outfits dancing and feeling girls in tight jeans and short, buttocks-hugging dresses, girls whose excessive makeup showed even in the dim, smoke-hazed light
We found an empty booth in the back, near one of the three tall fans that kept the close, smokey air in circulation but provided little relief from the heat and humidity.
A short, stacked redhead with a bucket of makeup on her bland face took our orders for double vodka and tonics. As she wiggled her body away, the buttocks shoving against a tight red dress, Jamie caught me staring at her.
"For all I know, maybe you like that type, too," she said, and I wasn't sure she was joking.
"Even if I liked the type, and I definitely don't, I wouldn't go for that one," I said. "I'm afraid my type is the blonde, blue-eyed Jamie."
"Well, you indeed went for other types while I was away," she said, and she was deadly serious. "Certainly seemed to enjoy Peggy Sue and Kerry and Emily Ann and Millie, my dear."
I had known this would be brought up sooner or later, in this way. I was ready.
"Yes, I enjoyed what happened with three of them, but hardly with Millie," I said. "I'm only human, Jamie. In all honesty, at first, I thought I could find out something from them, and it seemed silly to alienate them. But I did do it for the sex. I wouldn't do it again, and I didn't like them, or even sex that way, in a sense. Had you been here, I wouldn't have touched any of them."
She nodded. "I can't blame you, I guess," she said, very softly. "When I left, I knew they'd play their games with you. And, well, you see I thought we were finished, and that you weren't mine any longer, that I could never face you after what I'd become, so letting them have you was a kind of punishment I inflicted on myself.. . "
She was nearly babbling, and pulling nervously at the stained red and white squared tablecloth. I put a finger under her chin and tilted her head up and smiled.
"Enough of that kind of talk," I said.
Fortunately, the waitress returned with our drinks, and Jamie grabbed hers and took a couple of deep swallows that seemed to calm her. We settled back in the booth, accustomed now to the slamming music, dense smoke-filled air and rumble of loud, drunken talk, and I put my arm around Jamie. I let her finish the drink, and start on another, before I proded her to continue her story.
She seemed eager to talk again, stopping occasionally to take a sip of her tall drink, or to glance eagerly at me, and seem reassured by my smile, or the squeeze of my hand.
She told me that she was physically exhausted and emotionally torn up when she got back to the University, and for days drifted around in a kind of daze, avoiding people, and sleeping far more than usual.
Gradually, she drifted back somewhat to normal, and overrationalized the situation by convincing herself at least he wasn't physically sick, didn't have cancer or something, that he was only human and the affair would pass. Of course, she knew from what the girl had said her father had been going through the same routine for many weeks.
And she knew-and this raised her compassion somewhat-that it was tearing her father up, that his own self-image of total independence and control wouldn't allow him to accept this apparently new-found weakness without having his insides wrenched out.
She hesitated about going home, and only after she had stayed away nearly a month and finally had a call from her father did she go home one weekend, hoping desperately her father world be back to normal.
But he actually seemed worse. Yet, while he had obviously deteriorated physically and emotionally, he was still the same confident, ruthless businessman. At times, he seemed even more ruthless, as though he had to make up for his sexual affairs and prove to himself nothing had really changed in his ability to handle anything.
"I never mentioned what I knew," Jamie said, as she started her third drink. "I wouldn't have known how. And a couple more times I sneaked out to the camp and saw him with the girls, sometimes nearly groveling, promising, sometimes using his mouth on them."
And Jamie said she began to notice that her own self-confidence began to slip, that she was unsure of her own strengths and weaknesses. And that she would sink into deep depressions and wonder if her father could sup like that, and become so weak and so degraded, what could happen to her; and she also noticed that when she parked with boys, she no longer felt that absolute control of her body she had always had, and it got so bad, she finally wouldn't even let a boy kiss her goodnight
"And all this time, my damn father was pushing that debutante thing," she said, and shook her head; "I had never gotten along too well with all those girls from the old Harrisville families, particularly Peggy Sue. They resented my father's social pretensions, and were angry that in each encounter my father forced their families to back down. And the crowning point to my father's determination to power his way to everything he wanted was to be my debut at Christmas of last year."
All the old families resented Jamie's debut, but they were willing to accept it as inevitable-and even with some grace-but Peggy Sue and her friends were livid, and as nasty as possible. And Jamie admitted she was nasty, also, more than was probably necessary.
"Well, you've seen me," she said. "I can be pompous little bitch, and really get up on my high horse, and I did everything I could to strike out at that bunch of girls. And of course, each unpleasant incident I blamed on my father. We started having a few bitter scenes ourselves, and I got furious when he would stand there and lecture me as though nothing had happened, and I would think of him out there humiliating himself with some little whore and get livid. I started to drink more and more, and thought of wild things, like leaving home. But I knew I couldn't, knew I still loved my father and would do anything to help him."
So Jamie made her debut and got through the Christmas holidays and fled to the University. Even at this point, she began to suspect that Peggy Sue and her friends were up to some pretty wile-things, but she didn't concern herself with it because she didn't care.
I made Jamie drink a little slower, because I knew that in her physical and emotional condition she could get very drunk quickly, particularly in that stuffy bar.
"One weekend in the early spring, the blow fell," Jamie said, and sighed. "Those girls pranced into my room at school, closed the door, and proceeded to tell me that they had learned my father was involved with some teenage tramps, gave me explicit details, let me know some of the girls were under legal age, and then taunted me and joked about exposing him to Harrisville."
She paused. "Please, Carl, I've just got to have another drink. I'm so punchy if I stop drinking I'll either jump up and scream or fall asleep. If you want me to keep talking, you're going to have to keep me supplied with vodka, sir."
"Maybe we ought to get out of here, Jamie," I said. "Except for the cold drinks, it's not much of an improvement over the car."
She looked up at me. "Oh, no, please let's stay to get the whole terrible story out, as quickly as possible."
"You do look like you're about to fold up," I said. I felt her head. It was burning. "And you feel as though you have a fever. Okay, baby, you just talk, and I'll fill you full of vodka."
I ordered another round, and Jamie sighed, and started talking again.
She knew that the girls would take great delight in exposing her father to the town, and she also knew it would literally kill him. So she swallowed her self-respect and begged them not to do it, knowing they would want something from her, something terrible, to keep quiet.
"If only I had known how terrible, right away," she mumbled, and paused to attack her drink. "But you see, they had enough sense to start me slowly. I was shocked and resentful when I found out what they were up to, of course, and I thought their rationalizations about anything being all right if they kept their virginity just so much self-indulgence. But they were so spoiled, so pampered, so self-centered, they couldn't believe anything they did was wrong. And like I said, it wasn't too bad at first."
The first week, Jamie was simply forced to double date with the girls-always boys in towns far from the University-and pet heavily and do things like masturbate a boy or let him lay on top of her or work his penis between her thighs, things that were just extensions of heavy petting.
"Tell us all about it, Jamie,' one of the girls would say. 'Every single feeling and detail so we can see you're human after all and no more an iceberg than your daddy.'"
And Jamie shuddered again and sipped her drink and said she'd tell them, all the time cursing her father and planning to get home the next weekend and have it out with him. But then when she got home, she backed down.
She laughed, a short, harsh laugh. "I had rehearsed all week what I was going to say," she said. "But it was so absurd when I actually confronted him in the library. I mean, how could I say something like, Okay, Daddy, out with it, what's all this stuff about your degrading yourself with teenage tramps. Do you see what I mean?"
I saw exactly what she meant, but I didn't interrupt the rapidly increasing pace of her talk.
"At least at first I couldn't," she continued. "I talked about how bad he looked and how nervous he was and how upset I was about him and wouldn't he please talk to me and let me try to help him some way. Finally, after another week, I got so depressed and so desperate, I went home, got good and drunk and blundered my way into telling him I knew about the girls at the camp, but as though I had only recently found out."
He didn't even ask her how she found out, and merely shrugged and he said he'd worked hard all his life and had the right to whatever pleasure he wanted. Jamie said people in town might find out, and he said angrily no one would find out, and that he would crush anyone who did and he became nearly irrational. And then he said abruptly perhaps she was right, and that he would take care of things.
He seemed to get better and she continued to play the sex games with the girls figuring in a short time he would be free of the tramps and be safe. But to her horror, she discovered a couple of weekends later he was more involved than ever, with a seventeen-year-old carhop, who made him give her lavish gifts.
"And things with the girls got worse," Jamie said, and blushed. "Lots wilder and rougher with the boys I was forced to date. I had to let a boy have me between the breasts, then I had to let a boy give me a spanking, finally I had to use my mouth on a boy. Oh, God, that was awful, Carl. And then, I had to let a boy take me in the buttocks, and that nearly ruined me, both physically and emotionally."
Jamie paused, nibbled her lips, glanced up at me, took a swallow of her drink.
"Go on, you're almost finished," I said, and squeezed her shoulder.
"I would have stopped then," she said. "Because I realized to my horror that while I was repulsed by what I was doing, I was also irrationally excited by each sexual thing, no matter what. I was getting so aroused I couldn't control myself. I had always been so careful to damn up any sexual feeling that it was as though the floodgates had been opened. I couldn't get enough sex, and yet hated myself each time I got that tingle in my thighs or each time my nipples started hardening."
But then the very day she decided to have it out with her father, then the girls, she found out that they had carefully been hooking him, one by one. None of them made love to him, but they promised they might, later, if. . .
They didn't do their specialties, to let him finish, but just petted heavily, taunted, teased, and got great delight in making him use his mouth on them. He became obsessed with Millie and Peggy Sue.
"Now they really had him, Carl," she said. "And when I confronted him, he got angry and refused to talk to me about it. So I hit on another desperate scheme, which was to somehow get him out of town for a while."
"And I knew then my continuing to play the games was partly to save my father. But more and more it was because I enjoyed it, enjoyed each erotic minute, yet loathed it. . . " This was babbled out, then she caught herself, and calmed down.
The girls soon realized Jamie's weakness, and they quickly exploited it, she said, bitterly. They held her down once, undressed her, and teased and aroused her for over two hours, and made her confess exactly how she felt. After that,, they subjected her to various lesbian acts, oral sex, whippings.
"My God, I seemed to revel in my sexual degradation," she said. "It was sheer masochism, Carl. I just moved as though in an erotic dream of self-disgust. I knew I was going off the deep end, was on the verge of cracking up, but I just didn't care any more. It seemed I had to punish myself for what I was enjoying and had always hated before. And it seemed also as though I was punishing myself for having built my life and my values on my image of my superman father."
She finished her drink and gnawed her lip and shook her head. "I'm smothering in here, Carl. Can we go now, please? There's not much else to tell really. I still hoped in some vague way to get my father out of town. He was amazing, Carl, and how I could go on loving him, I'll never know. He refused to discuss things with me, though he surely knew I knew, and he became more and more ruthless in business, and he just continued to stagger on day to day, and just wouldn't accept the reality of what those girls could do to him, of the power they had over him. . .Oh, hell, Carl, let's go. There's just nothing else to tell."
"Let's get everything out while we're at it," I said. "First, how did you start making love? Obviously, you weren't content to just play the girls' sex games."
"No, once those flood gates opened, I wanted all the sex I could get," she said, and blushed again. "I let one boy go all the way and I knew then I wanted that more than anything. So every chance I got with a boy, I went all the way."
"Listen, that's a healthy sign," I said.
"That's Jamie," she said, and brushed her hair from her forehead. "Healthy as they come. Carl, I'll talk all night if you get me out of here, but I'm so warm and all I'm getting sick."
I nodded and called the waitress over for the check. I felt smothered, also, so I ordered a six-pack of Falstaff to take out, and we left, my arm around Jamie.