Chapter 6

The real trouble was that we fell asleep. The early Swiss winter sun was already casting shadows across the new snow cover by the time that we stirred. Somehow or other we had managed to get under the covers and were warmly snuggled in the middle of the bed. Marianne was sleeping with her back to me. My loins were pressed against her homey ass, and one of my hands was underneath her naked arm, encircling her breasts. We had been lying pressed together like that for so long that we were somewhat stuck by sweat.

I awoke first. I wasn't at all certain of what awkwardness we were courting by thus foolishly sleeping through the night, but I realized that I could hardly withdraw from the school in the same unorthodox way that I had come in. For myself, I was no longer especially concerned with the reaction of the others-The Meyer and her minions-but I realized that Marianne might feel differently. Because of this apprehension, I tried to wake her slowly and with a gentleness which would make her happy for the first moments before she realized our predicament. However, no sooner had I whispered to her tangled hair that I loved her-yes, I said it-than she was wide awake and alarmed.

"But what does it matter, really?"

Naked, her body still soft with sleep, she was pulling the drapes which covered the tall windows. A dimmer light suffused the room when she was done. Absently, she stood before the mirror and combed back her hair. Her movements created the most wonderful activity of her breasts and her haunches that I had ever hoped to see. The fact that she hadn't slipped on a robe told me that it was not my presence per se which upset her, and that was gratifying. It seemed that she was distressed by the fact that she did not know how to get me out of the place without being seen.

"So what if I'm seen? I don't care."

"But you don't understand."

"What don't I understand?"

"Do you know what this place is?"

"A finishing school. What else?"

Here she walked to the bed and sat down beside me. I trailed a finger or two along the smooth slope of her thigh, but she was not interested in my manipulations. There was a great tension in her which kept her distant.

"You don't know anything about me, do you?"

I didn't, of course, but I was feeling defensive by this time. "I know enough."

"No, you don't."

There was a pause. Outside in the corridor I heard the noises of the building waking up. There was chatter from one end and the slamming of a door. Someone laughed.

"Well?" I encouraged her.

"I don't know what to say really. I never expected to have to explain it. I thought I could get away from it first."

"Marianne, come on. Have a heart. Tell me what it is, and if there's anything I can do, I'll do it."

"Don't make any bargains you don't want to keep."

"If you're trying to make me nervous, you're beginning to succeed. Whatever it is, it can't be any worse than I'm starting to fear."

I pushed myself to my feet and took up my trousers. Whatever this was all about, I felt it would be better to be dressed. Marianne, too, felt the same way. She pulled on a pair of flowered bikini panties and slipped a robe over the rest of her nakedness. The sounds from the corridor were louder now, and she quietly slid a bolt across her door and locked it. I raised an interrogative eyebrow at her, but she refused to respond.

"I left Greece," she began, pacing back and forth and gesturing to the landscapes on the wall, "with my father and with nothing else. We lived in Athens. We weren't rich, but we were comfortable, and my father was proud of the work that he did. Be took these pictures. I found them in a book in Paris, and I hung them up yesterday. Anyway, we left. It was a political thing. We weren't the only ones. Everyone left who had any character. But they wouldn't let us take anything with us, so we came from there without money, without prospects, and with very few contacts. We went to Istanbul. My uncle there put us up for a while, and he was able to get Papa started again with his photography. But then he died. My uncle, I mean. My father is still there. He didn't have much when he died, and he had a family, but he left my father a small sailboat that he owned, and he left me a bit of money. It was that money that brought me here."

Marianne sat down next to me on the bed. She looked at me with a slightly quizzical expression, and then she asked, "Does any of this make sense?"

"Yes. I can understand your predicament, but I don't see what it has to do with the ... thing which is hanging over you now."

"Just wait."

"I'm waiting," I smiled at her. I reached to press her thigh, but she was impatient.

"Well, I couldn't get any work anywhere. Eventually, I took the money that Uncle left for me, and I began traveling around. I'm not really a teacher, you know. I was training to be a lawyer when the new government came in and suddenly all the freedom that women had won vanished. Anyway, I couldn't find anything until my money was about to run out. I was in Geneva by that time. I thought there might be some paralegal work I could do. I have a background in international law, you see, and Geneva is the center of things in some ways. But I couldn't. There wasn't, and I couldn't. Instead, though, just as the year was beginning-the school year-I stumbled on this job opening as a history teacher in this place. They were looking for someone like me, and I was looking for something like anything at all by that time, and I leapt at the chance. Too bad I didn't check it out more carefully."

The noises in the corridor were dying down again, now that all the women had left for the morning meal. "Don't you have to go anywhere?" I asked.

"No. I don't teach until ten this morning. It's okay."

"Well, go on."

"Yeah. So I took the job." She stood up again and paced. "I took the job, and I didn't know what was going on until about a month ago. I had sensed that there was something somewhat strange about it all. I'm not dumb, you know. Just unprepared to believe what this place is all about."

She turned to me and there was a mixture of anger and amusement in her face, as though she didn't quite credit what she was about to say but even the thought of it infuriated her. "This so called finishing school is nothing but a militant lesbian training camp?"

"Really?"

"What do you think about that?"

"I don't know. What am I supposed to think?"

She threw up her hands. "You could at least react."

"Okay. I'm surprised. How do you know?"

"You don't believe me?"

"You said yourself that you found it hard to believe."

"Well, that's true. But I'm right. Hell, I'm not inexperienced. I know when there are lesbian overtones in a conversation. And, if you want the truth, I had a few trysts with Sappho myself when I was younger. But that was all on a private basis. This entire school is run by and for lesbians! It's like the educational policy here. I knew there was some fooling around that went on between girls of this age, especially in isolated communities like this, and that's why I didn't spot the extent of it earlier. But everything was so weird that I began to take notice of things. All the instructors, all the staff, the kids, everyone, they're all lesbians. And their mothers! You should see their mothers."

Now again she sat down. "And that's not the worst of it. There is another woman here like me, an innocent, Claudette Simon. She lives right down the hall. Well, she was the one who told me about this. She had tried to quit, and that bitch Meyer wouldn't let her do it."

"What do you mean? Anyone can-"

"Not here you can't. I can't either. They have us trapped."

"Marianne, come now. Isn't that a bit melodramatic? Sure, you need the money, but-"

"It's not the money, Alex, it's ... something else."

"What?"

"Well ... "

"Tell me. I can't help unless you tell me."

"Well, I mentioned my father, didn't I?"

"Yes."

"He's an old man. He has very, well, rigid ideas about some things, about sex. He has a bad heart. Meyer's idea is to let my father know, in some way, some sneaky way, that I am teaching at this lesbian school-he's so proud of me and of this job-and it would shatter him."

"She's blackmailing you?"

"Yes."

"And this other woman, this ... "

"Claudette."

"Claudette?"

"Yes. She has a fiance, you see."

"But what's the purpose? What can she possibly expect to gain? I'd have thought she would like to keep people like you and Claudette out of here completely. You can't be kept here forever, and the madder you get, the worse for her eventually."

"She's more devious than that. She's been in this position before. I told you it was a militant lesbian school. She expects to change us, Claudette and me, to turn us on to her way of thinking, so that we'll want to stay."

We were silent for a moment. "Wow," I said finally. "Incredible."

"I know. It sounds like the plot for a B-minus movie."

"C, I'd say, at the most."

She grinned at me. "So there you have it, buster."

"And you want out?"

"Damn right."

"And you can't go without protecting yourself against her."

"That's the picture."

"What do we do?"

"You were the one offered his services, friend."

"You're right. Damned hasty of me, I think"

"True." She laughed a rueful laugh. "And there's the other problem."

"What's that?"

"What do we do with you right now?"

"Hard to say," I said, and I moved along the bedside until I was able to kiss her.

At first, she didn't want to be kissed, but after I nuzzled her ear a bit and made her giggle, I felt that she grew more responsive. We played around a bit, kissing and giggling like kids, until I began opening her robe. As her wonderful, full breasts fell free, her nipples already aroused, I cupped them in my palms like the delicious fruits they were. "What cantaloupes," I whispered.

"Pears."

"Too big for pears."

"Eggplants, then."

"Well, they have the same dark veins ... "

"Eggplants don't have veins, idiot."

"But they look like they're hanging and bursting."

"Mine don't hang, and they aren't about to burst."

Testing the heavy weight of one of those soft globes in my hand, I replied, "It feels like it might be ripe enough to burst."

She held her hands around my own cupping palm, our fingers warm on her warmth, and teased me with: "Would you like to be showered with the juice when it does?"

"You bet."

"Succulent it would be."

"Warm."

"Full of sunshine."

"And vitamins."

"Organic."

"Just as you say."

I applied my lips to the swollen, red tip of one of her breasts in an effort to taste imaginatively some of that luscious serum, and I must have sucked hard enough to impress her, for she gently pushed my mouth away and lifted my lips to her own.

"Taste me here," she whispered, and her mouth was wide open.

Instead of tasting her immediately, I slid one of my fingers into her mouth and rubbed the surface of her wet tongue with it. I continued the caress around the edges of her tongue and down into the soft, cunt-like folds underneath. I soon had three fingers all caressing her in the mouth, dripping with her saliva, running along the ridges of her teeth. Then four, and she was sucking my hand. Her eyes were closed the while, and I nuzzled and excited the tiny hairs around her ear with my lips and soft exhalations. "You like to suck, don't you, Marianne," I whispered to her, and she nodded her head excitedly without opening her eyes. I felt her tongue smoothing over the pads of my fingers, working its pointed soft way between them so that she could lick the crotch of them. Her breathing was faster on the back of my hand.

As I was whispering to her, I spread the leaves of her robe open and away from her body, pushing the robe back so that it finally slipped off one of her arms. She shrugged out of the rest of it, and now there was nothing left except her flowery panties between me and her fine flesh. I liked to look down between her moving thighs and feast my eyes on the swelling of her cunt bone and the wide expanse of her cunt mound as it was so delightfully encased. Her thighs were working against mine, and she was at the same time rubbing them together, doubtless in the pleasure of thus manipulating the gently stirring lips of her cunt and, more subtly still, the slowly rising eminence of her clitoris.

Slowly drawing my soaked hand from her clinging mouth, I hovered above her, staring hypnotically down into her now open eyes. Her face was blank with passion, her mouth slack. "You like to suck, my darling; I know you like to suck. And I love your lips and your tongue when they suck."

Her tongue tip came from between her ripe lips and licked them as she nodded slowly and dreamily over this. Her eyelids grew heavy again. I felt her fingers move across her cunt.

"I like your lips on my body, Marianne. I like them on my cock. Would you like to have my cock right there now? You would? Yes, you would. I can see that you would. You'd like to feel my hard cock in your mouth, pressing against you, swelling in your mouth, moving back and forth, in and out, faster until it comes. You'd like to have my hot come spurting into you right now, wouldn't you? Down into your steamy throat. Down and down, gobs of thick, white come oozing all around your pretty, soft tongue, dribbling from your lips, coating your chin and your cheeks. You like the feeling of come running over your hot body, don't you? And into you. You like it pouring into you and over you and around you, until you are sticky and wet and gobbed with it, don't you?"

"I do! Oh, I love it! I love to suck?"

"Yes, my darling. You still taste my come in your throat from last night, don't you? You still have my sperm in your throat and your belly, and you can taste it."

"Yes, Alex. I can. I can."

I was lying along her side now. Her eyes were closed again, and I slipped my hand down across her soft belly and under the rim of her panties until I was able to tickle her at the edge of her pubic hair. Her own hand now lay quietly cupping the heat of her pantied cunt from the outside, but she moved it over and opened my fly so that she could begin masturbating me. The more I talked, the faster her encircling fingers flew on my erection and the more I angled my body so that she would have access to me.

"That feels so good! Oh, darling, that feels like ... I don't know what it feels like, but ... oh, don't stop! I love your fingers on my cock. I love my cock, and I love your fingers, and I love the feeling of your hand, and I'm going to come again, darling; you're making me come I"

My legs were twitching with the nearness of it. I was astounded somewhere in me-although I couldn't think about much-that it was all happening so fast. But there I was, almost there! Her hands were just right, just tickling enough, just that one spot, just one more time ah, ah, ahhhh, OHHH!

And then I was wilting ecstatically amongst my own juices against her soaked thigh and belly. She spread the come across her belly and the rising, mound of her pantied cunt, grinned at me with mischievous eyes, and kissed the tip of my nose. My sweating face dropped down upon her shoulder, her arm encircled me, and I felt myself dozing in the warmth of her embrace.

I came from my dreamy state what seemed like a few minutes later to discover my hand covering her cunt and a long, shuddering, undulating motion running through and through her body. She was very excited and she wanted release, and my hand, in its dazed state, was not doing all it could. My own excitement grew again as I pressed somewhat upon her wet panties, burrowing very slowly and in time with her motions, down through the wetness and into the interior of her, pushing the material before me. As her humping grew more erratic, I had the pleasure of watching the thick, hairy lips of her cunt from behind their flowery covering as her panties sank into her cunt.

She came, and then she was still.

Later, I ate her, sucking her hairy pussy of its thick secretions, and I made her come once more. This was the final one, though, and I saw her then rise and dress and slip away. She had a class to meet.

We had determined that the easiest thing was for me to stay in her room during the day and make my escape by the same route as before when night fell. She promised that she would smuggle me something more substantial to eat than the old crackers she had in a bureau drawer. There was a carafe of a pleasant white wine, common but good, and one of cool water available, so there would be no problems in regard to liquid. And there were books to read-Here's a new edition of Hamsun's Victoria, she said with a smile of reminiscence. Now, if you will be all right ...

I was alone.

I dressed, brushed my hair, ran a finger along my jaw and wondered whether it mightn't be a good idea to grow a beard instead of indulging in this barbaric habit of scraping my face with an edge of sharp metal every day, paced a bit, drank a glass of water, looked carefully out of the window at a view which was magnificent, thought of Greece, of Alexander, of Socrates, of Byron, wondered idly what it must have been like when she sailed with her father and uncle on the romantic, half-Asian waters of the Bosphorus, grinned at the memory of her eagerness for a man's love, wondered what the hen I was going to do about The Meyer, and then sat down. Then I stood up, paced, thought some more, poured a glass of wine but didn't drink it, began to have the glimmerings of a plan, and sat down again. And so passed several hours.

Then she was back. She had with her half a loaf, a sausage, a wedge of cheese, and three apples. It was a very respectable repast, and she helped herself to part of it along with me.

"Have you any ideas," she asked as she swallowed the dregs of her wine.

"Perhaps"

"Elucidate"

"Not until I have it all. How was teaching?"

"Okay. My mind was not entirely on the machinations of Xerxes, however."

"I imagine not."

"Those girls ... I used to like them so much, Alex, get so damned concerned about the growth of their minds. I look at them now, for about the last month, and I just feel confused."

"I shouldn't wonder."

"I've no objection to what they're doing here per se. There's nothing wrong with it in my mind, really. I told you I'd explored in the same way myself. But it's the forced nature of it, the lack of perspective, the lack of humor. Old Meyer is as humorless as they come. That's why she's always so jittery, you know. She's famous for not being able to have a conversation with anyone because she can't stop shouting her own position. It's like a record that's been scratched, the way she comes back again and again to the same breast-beating posture. She'd like you to believe that there's nothing in the least bit funny about what she's doing, no sir. It's very serious business."

Marianne was strutting around with her chin pulled in and a comical look on her face, like someone imitating Mussolini. We grinned atone another, and she continued, "Meyer's little lesbian farm. But the thing is that there's nothing really to get one's finger on. I sounded pretty paranoid about it all this morning-and everything I said was true-but, when you look at it, this is really just an ordinary finishing school, in an ordinary little village, in the ordinary Alps. There's nothing to it. Just a very subtle pressure in the direction of lesbianism, feminism, man-hating, and demagoguery. But the pressure is all underneath the smooth surface, don't you see. It took me months to discover the ... the organized nature of it. That's what's so bad. It's the organization that's behind it all. The planning. If these were isolated instances, okay. What do you expect healthy girls from fourteen to nineteen to do with their sexual pressures, especially in as publicly erotic an age as this, when they are kept continually from the company of young men? A bit of hanky-panky can be expected. But when there's a perfectly palpable, though for the most part unstated, school policy in the direction of this man-hating business ... well."

"I can see what you mean about the subtlety of it all."

"Yeah. I probably made it sound like a prison. That would be too easy. It's not. It's just a school. But there's something rotten here, and it's kept under such loose wrapping that there's nothing really to touch. You thrust your hand into the thing, expecting to come up with a real core of evil, and everything just evaporates. What? Just a school for girls. Some can be found in each other's beds? Well, so what? An interest in feminism, you say? "Well, this is 1974, and these are young, international girls. Of course they're interested in feminism. You say there's a malicious quality in their politics. Okay, show me where it is. Point out to me this plot, this conspiracy of man-hating you talk so much about. Point it out to me, and then I'll do something about it. Then I'll complain. Then I'll take my daughter out of here. Then I'll call for an investigation. But you've got to show me first."

"Well, what about that blackmail threat to Claudette?"

"Threat? Did I say threat? There wasn't any threat, really. It was just the atmosphere. She got the message, she did, but there was no threat, nothing you could point to. No words. No writing. No violence. It's too subtle, and Meyer's too clever for that."

"But the kids. Don't the kids complain?"

"Them! They're too young. The first thing you have to understand about' adolescents is that they're the most conservative people on earth. They think alike, they act alike, they believe alike. The truth is that you really can't tell one of them from another."

"I know what you're saying. And it isn't just the kids. It's the whole youth-culture syndrome. I've got acquaintances back in the States who are part of what they like to call the swinging scene, and, my God, they are absolutely, appallingly, the same. Carbon copies of one another."

"Yeah. But I'm talking about the girls. Beautiful, and so many possibilities, but conservative. They find themselves doing things that they don't really believe in doing just because they don't trust themselves enough to stand up and say 'No.' You can't expect them to, of course; they don't have any personalities of their own, but you have to treat them with care during this time, not propagandize them into being lesbians!"

"True."

"There's a new girl this term, Mallory Starr. I have her in my ancient-history class, the one this morning. For some reason or other, she's really latched onto me. I don't know quite why, but she talks to me a lot between classes, and she's always trying to sit with me at meals. She's so fragile, Alex. Such an innocent child. She's sixteen, but she's been secluded for years, and my heart goes out to her now because here she is in the midst of these vultures, and she hasn't any real defenses."

"Poor kid."

"Oh, Alex, take me away from all this!"

I looked at her with a grin and found her grimacing back, alluring, hoping, and yet knowing she was being an idiot. "Well, if you put it that way ... "

"I'll make it worth your while, mister."

"Sure you can?"

"I?" she asked archly. She walked over until she was towering over me and looking down at me across the outthrust mountains of her breasts. "I?"

Waving my hand and looking away, I said, "That stuff doesn't interest me anymore."

"I'll bet."

"It's the truth." But I grabbed her around the hips and pulled her down into my lap. After kissing her soundly, I asked her hair, "Where do you want to go?"

"I don't know. I've got a little money now. Anywhere, I suppose. I don't know. I haven't made any plans because I just assumed I'd stay here for a few years, and now that I want to leave, I've not been thinking about much except that I do want to leave."

"Istanbul? I've never been there."

"I'd like to see Daddy. How long is this vacation of yours going to last though?"

"I'm not sure. I'm not certain that I'm ever going back."

She was silent for a while, looking into my face. Finally she sighed and cautioned me, "Don't do it for me. You don't know me."

"I know. It's for me. I've had it with that life. I feel as though I have been dead for the last four or five years, and that's a lousy way to feel. I'm only thirty-three!"

"How old should one be to feel dead comfortably?" she asked with a smile.

"Never, ideally."

"Yeah. Hey, I know what."

"What?"

"Let's sail around the world."

"Okay."

"Let's climb Kilimanjaro."

"Sure thing."

"Let's hunt tigers in India."

"There aren't enough tigers left."

"True. Well, then, let's hunt-"

"Why hunt anything?"

"Okay. No hunting. But let's see the sun coming up like thunder outer China 'crost the bay."

"I'm with you on that."

"And make love in a Rousseau South Sea jungle."

"Check"

"And dive on the Great Barrier Reef."

"Right-o."

"Oh, Alex."

"Yes?"

"There's so much to do!"