Chapter 8
When he first woke up Sunday morning Paul had trouble remembering where he was. He'd been waking up in too many different rooms in the last week, he decided. It was time he settled down.
He was in an old residential hotel on lower Madison Avenue. He'd known about the place because he'd been shacked up there with an Easter bunny, his last Spring vacation, a girl with a real rabbity enthusiasm about fucking. Lucidly he'd remembered the place and phoned them from a booth in Scarsdale before driving into the city the night before, and they'd said, sure, they had a room. He had taken it by the week, and figured to stay there until he found an apartment.
The hotel room had other advantages beside privacy, a lock on the door and no Vickies or Mrs. Halsteds popping through it. He could ride to work in the morning on the Madison Avenue bus, and the best-looking girls in the world, he knew from his New York visits, rode the Madison Avenue bus. Not Fifth Avenue buses, or Lexington, or Third, and certainly not those West Side buses. Madison Avenue buses. He felt his morning hard-on coming back, as he pictured that vast smorgasbord of ankles and silken calves and rounded knees and shadowed inner thighs, under the miniskirts, and all those lovely, careful, composed young faces with their moist soft mouths. He got up and took a shower.
After he'd dressed he took the elevator down and bought a copy of the New York Times at the desk, and lugged it back to his room. He threw it onto the bed and went through it a layer at a time until he found the real estate section. He leafed his way to the section headed "Apartments, Furnished-One, Two Rooms," and started to read his way down the column.
He was dismayed. Some of the rents people were asking for one, two rooms were close to what he'd figured was a half month's take-home pay for him. But near the bottom of the first column he found a hopeful listing:
"Sublet, furnished, five months. Village vie. 134 rms. $150. Gentleman preferred. Call Sun. AM." And the number.
He looked at his watch. Ten-thirty, so it was still Sun. AM, he thought And he liked that Village vie, and the price. And he was certainly a preferred gentleman.
He went over to the phone, carrying the paper, and gave the switchboard the number. A female voice answered on the third ring.
"Yes?"
I'm calling about your ad in the Times."
I'm afraid I can't hold out any hope for you," the woman said. She had a pleasantly modulated voice. "I've had eight or nine calls so far this morning and I was about to take the phone off the hook. Four of the people are coming to look at the apartment this afternoon. So, as I said, I can't hold out any hope for you. I'm sorry."
She sounded so goddamn nice on the phone Paul was encouraged to make what they called in football a good second effort
"Maybe there'd be some hope for me if I came down to see the place before the other people," he said. He let himself sound faintly boyish.
The woman laughed. She had a very nice laugh.
"I'm not dressed," she said. "I'm still stumbling around the place with my hair in curlers, drinking coffee. So I'm afraid not"
"I had a mother once who wore her hair in curlers till the cocktad hour," Paul said. It was a he, but it might strike a nerve.
The woman laughed again.
"Wed," she said. "Give me an hour to straighten up a little."
She gave him the address and apartment number, and he said he'd be there, and hung up. Jesus, he thought wouldn't it be great if he got the place, even for five months. There'd be plenty of time to find something in the Spring. If he got the apartment it would mean he'd been kicked out of school, found a pretty good job, and a place to live, all in one week. His mother would be proud of him.
He tried to read the sports section of the Times, to kill half an hour before getting on a Fifth Avenue bus down to the Village vie., but he couldn't read. He kept thinking about Karen. He wished more than anything else that she could be with him, in this room, right now. He could picture what a terrible day she'd be putting in with Vickie, after last night, and was glad she had school to go back to. He could imagine her trying to live in the same house with her mother, day after day, week after week, after last night's episode. With him, Paul Beck She'd probably be forgiven if it had been anyone else-some random boyfriend, or the grocery boy, or the meter reader, or even one of her father's goat friends. But him, they'd never forgive her for.
He'd have to get his message across fast when he called her at twelve. Somebody, Vickie or Frank, would be nearby to snatch the phone right out of her hand. He rehearsed what he'd have to get across to her. The name of the hotel. Call when she could, from a phone booth. He'd wait. Two seconds, it would take. She could hang onto the phone that long. He was sure of it.
The apartment was in a well-cared-for brownstone on Tenth Street off Fifth. He pushed the vestibule beH with his thumb and the answering buzz let him in the downstairs door right away.
When he'd climbed the flight of stairs the woman was standing inside the open doorway to the right, waiting for him. The apartment was at the front of the building. He felt self-conscious, walking toward her. She was looking him over carefully, appraising him, he thought, like a cattle buyer in a Late Show Western.
She smiled, finally.
"Come on in," she said.
She'd gotten out of the curlers, he noticed. Her hair was piled neatly on top of her head. It was bright blonde, too blonde to be real. She was in her thirties somewhere, he figured. She wore a straight housecoat that hung from her Adam's apple to her toes.
"I'm just having a health-restoring whiskey sour," she said. "Would you like to have one with me? It's supposed to be a sign of something to drink alone."
He didn't; he hadn't gotten around to having breakfast yet. But this was one woman he wanted to please.
"Sure would," he said.
"Good," she said, and went over to a sideboard in the open kitchenette at the end of the room away from the windows and poured him his whiskey sour, in an Old Fashioned glass. Must have been one hell of a big whiskey sour she made for herself, he thought Sounded as if there was plenty left in the shaker even after his drink had been poured.
When she handed him the brimming drink he had to bend down and sip it so he wouldn't spill. "You can see just about all there is to see of the place," she said. "Except for the bathroom."
She closed the slatted doors that concealed the kitchenette, to let him see how the apartment looked that way, and he surveyed the room. It was a large room, very light very pleasant with an alcove big enough to hold furnishings not particularly feminine. He wanted the apartment badly. "Bathroom's in here," the woman said, leading him the few steps down a short hall. It was large, too, large enough to accommodate a long dressing table. The shower was one of those afterthought appurtenances people installed in old apartments.
They came back into the big room.
"Please sit down," she said, and he let himself down into a flowered easy chair. She sat at one end of a sofa against the wall across from him. It had to be one of those convertible jobs, he thought, that pull out to make a bed. A double bed, at that. There was no other sign of a bed in the room.
"Why don't you tell me something about yourself?" she said, smiling. She had put on lipstick as well as taking the curlers out of her hair. Her lips were very red. "You can understand that I'd be hesitant to sublet my apartment to someone I don't know anything about."
"Sure, I understand," he said. "Well, I just finished with school." He didn't see any point in telling her why.
"This is a strange time of year to graduate, isn't it?"
"I graduated last June," he said. "I just finished up some postgraduate work." Some bullshit, he thought Sounded good.
"Oh?" she said. "What will you do now?"
"I start tomorrow with Norman, Wade and Gelder. It's an advertising agency."
"I know," she said. "I have a friend who works there."
I've met only three people in the place," he said. "Well four." He just remembered Norma and her eager asshole. "Maybe I'll look him up. Your friend."
"Her," the woman said. "I'll give you her name when you leave."
"Fine," he said. "Anyway, that'll be my virgin job, in New York. And if you let me have this place, it'll be my virgin apartment."
The woman laughed.
"What a strange word," she said. "Isn't it?" he agreed. Agreeable, that was him. "I read it in some book somewhere." She laughed again.
"Let's have another drink," she said, and got up.
"Wonderful," he said. Agreeable Paul.
They were on their fourth outsized whiskey sour when he remembered Karen, but it was too late then. It was twenty to one. He didn't care too much. All that whiskey on an empty stomach was getting to him. Karen seemed very distant, in time and in space. And the blonde woman was looking better to him every minute.
Her name was Celia Waller. Waller was the name of her latest husband, she explained. They'd been divorced a year now. She was going to Majorca for the winter, for the five months she'd be subletting the apartment. She had friends in Majorca. She also had friends in Newport, in Palm Beach, in Santa Barbara, in Naples, in Nice, in Paris, and in Scarsdale. She had friends everywhere, Celia did. It looked very much as if her drinks were sloshing around in an empty stomach, too. Her conversation took unexpected turns.
"Do you have a good imagination?" she asked suddenly.
"Usually," he said, "but I'm having trouble now."
"Why?"
"I'm having trouble imagining what you look like under that housecoat."
"I thought you were," she said. "That's why I asked." He didn't say anything.
"How do you think I'd make out as a whore?" she asked. "I've always wondered."
"You'd be a sensation," he said gallantly. "But you'd be badly miscast You just don't look the part."
"You mean I don't dress the part," she said. "But I'm going to dress the part for you. I'm a frustrated actress among other things."
"You don't look like a frustrated anything," he said still being gallant. He didn't have the apartment yet.
She shook up another drink, poured one for each o them, and started pawing through drawers in a dresser When she'd found what she wanted, she smiled at him, waved gaily, and went into the bathroom, carrying her drink.
It was a long time before she came out, and when she did, Paul would never have recognized her as the same woman.
She wore high-heeled red pumps, a very short, tight red skirt, and a transparent white blouse. Under it she was wearing one of those imported bras with the middle of the cups missing. Her thumb-sized, jutting nipples were a startling crimson through the sheer blouse. He was sure she had touched them up with lipstick. She was heavily made up, smiling redly, and carrying a cigarette in a holder in one hand. In the other she held her big Old-Fashioned glass. It was almost empty.
She posed with one hand balancing the glass on her hip.
"What do you think?" she asked. She stuck out her tongue.
"Sensational," he said. "You'd be the most popular courtesan on the continent" He'd read that word somewhere, courtesan. "Any continent." Especially Greenland, he thought He'd heard that guys were very hard up in Greenland.
But her body was sensational. He'd found the right word. She was voluptuous without any hint of fat. Her hips were wide but not fleshy, curving in sharply to a teen-slim waist slanting gracefully down to her spectacular legs-long rounded thighs, neat small knees, full-swelling calves ending miraculously in tiny, slender ankles.
"Come here," he said, "please."
She came toward him slowly, with an exaggerated sway and bump of the hips, walking right out of a Mae West movie on the Late Show.
"You have gorgeous legs," he said, as she came close to him. She stood in front of him and stood still.
"You like my legs?" she asked.
"Love them," he said. He reached his hands out and ran his palms up the smooth flesh of the backs of her calves, her knees, her yielding thighs. When his hands touched the hem of her skirt, high on her thighs, he stopped and looked up. He reached up and took her by the shoulders, to pull her down to his open mouth to kiss her. She drew back.
"I guess there's something you haven't learned," she said. "They say you're not ever supposed to loss a whore."
"You're not a whore," he said. "You don't look like one at all, even in that getup."
"I don't?" She looked and sounded disappointed.
"You sure don't. But you would be a howling success in that line of work, if you really wanted to take it up. And not just because you have that great body. Partly just because you don't look like a whore."
"You're probably right," she said, looking at him quizzically. "I read somewhere that there's a very popular whorehouse in Paris, or was, where the girls all dress like nuns."
"Probably gets a big play from the hornier Protestants," Paul said. "I read that somewhere, too. Maybe Henry Miller."
"I think it was Henry Miller," she said. "But I'm very disappointed that you don't think I look like a whore. I think I'll make us another drink."
Jesus, Paul thought, what a way to do business. He might wake up tomorrow and not remember whether he had an apartment or not.
But she did have a great body. Magnificent ass. He watched her getting out more ice cubes and pouring whiskey into the shaker with free-handed abandon. She was still reasonably steady on her feet. Paul wondered if he would be. Pretty soon he'd try standing up.
"Don't feel bad about not looking like a whore," he said to her busy back. "What you look is regal."
"What?" she said, looking around. She looked pleased.
"Regal. Queenly. A sexy-as-hell-looking queen."
"Like Catherine the Great?"
"I don't think she looked like much."
"And I never laid any ponies," she said, looking across the room at him.
"There's plenty of time yet," he said, grinning. But she was thinking of something other than ponies.
"Regal, eh?" she said. She came across the room, swinging those wide, inviting hips. Like a one-woman Welcome Wagon, he thought, and reached up for the drink she was handing him.
"Regal," she said again. "Lets see, I think I have something."
She went over to her dresser, put down her drink, and bent over to open the second drawer. The back of her short skirt barely covered the full-swelling globes of her ass. She wore no pants, and half of her cunt came into view.
His cock swelled, lifted, stiffened, throbbed. She closed the middle drawer of the dresser and opened the bottom one, bending over completely. The bottom of her ass showed snowy white in the light from the windows. The long, swollen red lips of her cunt were open, exposing a moist, glistening, uneven mass of tender pink membrane.
Never, Paul thought, did a woman's snatch look so vulnerable, so inviting, as it did from the back as she bent over. He wanted to cross the room, sink to his knees, and start lapping it, just for openers, but the insistent throbbing, pounding pulse of his rock-hard cock was too demanding.
Swiftly, he slipped out of his loafers, stood up, dropped his trousers and shorts to the floor, and bounded across the room. She had no time to straighten up, even if she'd wanted to.
He slid his hands around her and held the smooth sheathed handlebars of her hips. The swollen-to-bursting, shiny-hard purple head of his ramrodding prick found the soft, wet, open lips of her cunt of its own accord. He drove it in, the entire length of his oaken shaft, with one pile-driving plunge. His lower belly smacked against the warm round swells of her ass.
She gasped, made a sound in her throat that was halfway between a groan and a scream, and shuddered all over.
"Why don't you tell a girl?" she said, in a little voice.
He didn't answer. He drew his cock slowly outward between her sucking, grasping twat lips, till only the head and neck remained inside her warm, wet, squeezing cunt. He saw that her fingers were clutching the far edge of the dresser, her elbows braced on the top.
He set his feet, moved his hands to get a firmer grip on her hips, and started driving his cock into her with long, swift, machine-like strokes, his belly pounding at the end of each in stroke against the cheeks of her eager responding ass. She gasped and groaned, and squirmed, but he held her tight, the slippery channel of her cunt impaled on the thick, steel shaft of his plunging cock.
He fucked her that way for a long time, with long, steady, rhythmic strokes, as if timed by a metronome. Then, when he felt her begin to shudder violently, he increased his rhythm, pounding his prick home with a kind of controlled fury, whipping it in and out with lightning strokes, until a froth began to appear around her clutching twat lips, as they clung to the slippery shaft of his life-giving prick, with all the determination of a drowning man clinging to a stick of wood.
He felt her start to explode, in a quivering, gasping, gulping orgasm, and he drove his cock deep into her and held it there as her inner ecstasy constricted and swelled and surged around it. He let himself come then, letting his gushes of juice spurt over her private fires.
She lay draped over the top of the dresser, face down, limp, as her shuddering slowly calmed. His knees ran out of strength and he lay on top of her for a long moment, the whiskey a lullaby in his veins.
This is a hell of a way to take a nap, he thought. With an effort, he stood up and stepped back, repossessing his prick as he did so. She stood then, seeming to raise herself in distinct stages, like a local-express elevator, and turning unsmiling to look at him
"You'd just finished telling me I looked regal," she said. "Like a queen."
"That's right. You do." . "That was no way to treat a queen. Fucking me from the rear."
"But you're supposed to be dressed as a whore, remember?"
"Yes," she said, "but I was going to change that." She looked down at the bottom drawer of the dresser, still partially open. She bent and took something from it
"I'll be back shortly," she said, and headed for the bathroom.
She was gone even longer, this time, and for part of that time he could hear water ruing. Douching, he thought approvingly. If there was anything he liked, it was a nice clean cunt. He lay back in the easy chair, totally relaxed, sipping his whiskey sour. Time had lost all significance. So had the urgency of getting the apartment.
He sat up and tried to clear his head. Straighten up, boy, he told himself. You're sacrificing your lily-white body for a Cause. This apartment. Before you're too drunk, or Queen Celia is too drunk, come to an agreement. Sign something, like a sublet agreement. Give her a check for the first month, while you're still able to write.
But all his good, practical intentions evaporated when she finally came back into the room. She was wearing a transparent long gown and dainty, high-heeled slippers. Her bright blonde hair had been combed out and hung down her back in long easy curls, held by some kind of tiara. The great proud V of dark bush crowning the shadowed pink of her queenly cunt showed clearly through the negligible concealment of her gown, and her nipples showed only as a subdued blush. She had wiped away the whory lipstick.
"Your highness," he said.
She smiled, and moved gracefully toward him. Her hips had disappeared. Not really. He gazed at them through the gown. They were as wide and as welcoming as ever.
"Do you still feel up to it?" she asked. There was nothing very regal about the question, he thought.
"Sure," he said. "Or down to it I didn't have any breakfast this morning."
She laughed. It was a surprised, joyful laugh.
"Wonderful," she said. "That's a subject I wanted to get around to, but I didn't know any graceful way."
"What subject?" The whiskey sour was making him dull, he knew. He shook his head back and forth a few times, and it seemed to help
"You'll see," she said, and sat down on the couch facing him.
Very slowly, deliberately, she raised one knee and tossed the skirt of her gown aside, exposing the whole spectacular length of her long, curving, snow-white legs. He had a leisurely look up past the swell of her thighs as she lazily crossed her knees. The pink pursed lips of her pussy pouted at him, dewy-fresh as a May morning.
"I love your legs," he said.
"Anything else?" she asked, lazily.
"Well, yes," he said. "Your queenly cunt."
"The reason I ask," she said, "Is that I'd like to extract a little tribute. As a queen from a subject, you understand."
"I understand," he said. "Completely." His brain wasn't that fogged up. No matter how many whiskey sours she fed him.
He stood up and crossed the room and dropped to his knees in front of her.
"You do understand," she said. "You're a very bright young man. And very obliging."
"The pleasure's all mine."
"Not all of it," she said, and uncrossed her legs and sat very still, her knees slightly apart.
He sighted down past the swell of her inner thighs to the waiting wetness above, then bent forward and kissed her inside one knee.
She leaned back, slowly, and let her legs drift wider apart. The lips of her cunt parted with them.
He kissed and licked his way up the velvet white softness of her inner thighs, lingering for a long time on the incredible softness of the last inch or two, his tongue touching hair. Then he extended the tip to touch one delicate pink petal protruding from between the lips.
"Ooooh," she said. "Wait. I have a wonderful idea."
"Wha'?" he said, licking.
"You said you didn't have any breakfast." He felt her thighs closing warmly over his ears. He slid his tongue as far as he could reach into her twat, and began licking the inner walls of her pleasure channel.
"Mmm-hmmm."
"Do you like whipped cream?"
"Mmmm." He nodded his head, letting his stiffened tongue ride up and down between the soft gunwales of her neat canoe of a cunt.
She got her feet under her and stood up abruptly,, stepping over his bobbing head, leaving him kneeling in front of the couch with his tongue out. He retrieved his tongue and turned to look at her as she stood smiling down at him, her legs apart, her wet, glistening, pink cunt looking very vulnerable and faintly inside out, "I think that's kind of rude, for a queenly person like you," he said, 'leaving me sitting here with egg on my face."
"That isn't egg," she said. "I just thought of something. I'll be right back."
She went over to the low refrigerator under the sink, and opened it. As she bent to get something from a bottom shelf, her cunt winked at him briefly. She slammed the refrigerator door, turned, and headed for the short hallway leading to the bathroom. As her delicious round, white ass flashed out of sight, he noticed that she was carrying a tall can of something in the hand without a drink in it.
When she appeared again in the doorway, he knew what had been in that can. Whipped cream, or its equivalent, the kind you squirt out over the top of strawberry shortcake. She had squirted it all over her strawberry shortcake of a cunt. And filled it up inside, too, he was sure. So she was going to feed him breakfast, after all.
She sat down again on the couch, without saying anything. She was smiling broadly as she spread her legs wide to expose the frothy white stuff between her delectable soft thighs.
"Eat," she said. "Gobble it. Lick out every last little bit."
He began to eat the foamy mass, swallowing great mouthfuls, sucking it out from the roots of her wet twat hair, licking it from the open lips of her palpitating pussy. Soon he was back where he started, licking her cunt lips clean, sliding his tongue into the creamy white softness inside. He licked her inner twat walls clean, as far as he could reach with his tongue, and came up for air, swallowing the last of the cream from the tip of his tongue.
"I can't get to the last of my breakfast," he said, looking at her in mock apology. "Not with my tongue. I'll have to ream it out."
"Wonderful," she said, and swung her feet up and lay flat on the wide couch, her flawless knees bent and elevated, her legs spread wide apart. "I'd been hoping you'd fuck me the old-fashioned way."
I'm an old-fashioned boy," he said. "A lover of whipped cream." As he got into position between her legs he leaned forward and kissed her open mouth.
"But your cunt is like whipped cream even without the whipped cream"
"Thank you," she said.
He eased his stiff raging cock into her quivering, slippery twat. The whipped cream inside felt cool, soothing the hot, swollen, inflamed head of his prick.
He drove it in deep, to the hilt, withdrew it slowly, then pounded it home again. Her hips raised to meet him, her warm thighs closed around his hips as she raised her legs and locked them behind him.
"Oh, God," she said. "What a way to cure a hangover."
Paul remembered then what he was there for, and got down to the business of giving her the fucking of her lifetime. As he drove and pounded his great stiff probing shaft into her, she squirmed and groaned and held him so tightly in the frantic embrace of her legs and thighs he almost had trouble getting enough play for the plunging strokes of his javelin.
Then, much sooner than he'd expected in a woman of experience, she came to a shuddering, moaning orgasm, making little crying sounds in her throat and seeming to choke him with the soft vise of her clutching thighs. And as she shuddered and gasped, he kept his stiff cock jammed hard inside her clutching cunt.
Slowly, the waves of her orgasm subsided, and still Paul kept his stiff, thick shaft rammed deep inside her. She opened her eyes and looked at him. There was something like wonder in her eyes.
"More?" he asked. It was a rhetorical question. Her hips responded instantly to his first long, slow strokes. She was smiling, a beatific smile.
"Do I get the apartment?" he asked, and held his cock still, deep in her warm, squirming, grateful twat. "You fucking fool," she said. "You've already got it" He pounded her into a gasping, squirming mass of ecstasy, and as she came for the second time, groaning deep in her throat he came with her, skyrocketing his hot juices in a wet blaze of glory.