Chapter 10
Dalliance
"So how'd the dragon bitch take it?" Delinda Humphrey asked Nora as they strolled past the two-story storefronts on Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue.
"Miss Rita Henshaw had the widest eyes in all of Christendom as Mona's parents, Lucretia Sue, and I waltzed into that living room." The Sigma pledge studied the jewelry displayed at the curb by a sidewalk artist. Grimly sardonic African sandcast faces had been strung with oblong and round beads into striking necklaces.
"Lucretia Sue told us the quainter details. It sounded like an international S&M convention." Delinda lingered by a table to finger a hand-sewn leather purse with brass and wood decorations.
"Sally Forbes has this way of just tuning out the world," Nora related, "but she came awake quick enough. Mona's cousin tried to babble about some tape and how naughty their girl had been. I thought Jack Forbes would throttle her with one of those weird leather thongs."
Delinda opened the purse clasp, a warm brass sun with a lozenge of polished redwood. She felt inside. "Satin lining?"
"Nylon and I pass the saving right along." The craftsman wore dundrearies and a midnight blue velvet Medieval cap and tunic. He quoted a price. Delinda shook her head. He quoted down. She shrugged and started away.
"Final price, and you're busting me, ma'am, but I need to get the cash flow moving." He quoted a rock bottom figure. Delinda studied the purse. She fingered a broad burgundy belt with a non-European dragon buckle.
"That's a Balinese earring I adapted-feel the weight. They used to make them of gold." He tugged at the thick silver Hammer of Thor dangling from his own right lobe. "Imagine carrying that."
"Talk about S&M ..." Delinda fiddled with the purse again, measuring it against her own bag. She abruptly twitched the corners of her mouth down and sauntered away with Nora in tow.
"I like to see how far they'll bargain," she told her sob-sister airily. "I actually wish I could afford it, but until I get my damn car fixed ..."
The woman nodded. "Anyway, thanks for the vote on the actives' council. Irene reported you all unanimously approved accepting Mona to live at the house."
"I don't know how we'd stand up to an audit by Sig-ma's National. It's a strict law that pledges can't live in house-calling her a boarder just evades the issue." Delinda had a tight, brittle smile. "Rachel and Irene appreciated the check Mr. Forbes signed for Mona's board. It certainly showed his gratitude."
"Hey, hey, classy lady!"
Delinda smothered a shriek. Heavy fingers tiptoed up her spine. She wheeled in icy anger.
"Phil . . ." The emotion evaporated. "My god!"
"In the still-living flesh." He bowed to her and then to Nora.
Conquistador and Aztec had given Felipe Navaj6n high cheekbones and deep cinnamon skin. His jet black hair flowed loose to his shoulders, a bright obsidian tide. A Spanish Main captain's goatee made him seem a prince from a buccaneer stronghold.
His turquoise shirt opened to the navel. An intricate gold chain supported the Australian fire opal burning in reds and blues on his nearly hairless chest.
"I haven't seen you at St. Cloud." Or at all, Delinda finished silently.
"I been movin'." He gave a slow wink. "Not too slow, not too fast, just right to stay free but very easy."
She hoped he knew what he. meant by that. "So how're . . . things."
"I missed you. A lotta lonely nights out on the road." He touched his shirt, baring his left nipple. "Put blues into my heart, made things work for me."
"You were on a gig!" She put it together. He parked his thumbs in the animal-patterned sash that cinched his narrow-waisted blue Levis. "Nora, Phil's got this tremendous talent. Guitar, sax, flute-he writes his own poems and works them into his music-not songs, exactly, but-"
"I kinda recite while the guys vamp behind me." His lips twitched playfully. "Sometimes that goes over outside the Bay Area.
"Mostly we worked truck stop cafes, cholo bars where women got half a pound of makeup painting their eyes, places that paid us in beans and enough gasoline to get us to the next joint.
"They don't know poetry on that kinda road." He shook his slick, heavy hair. "Did a little bit of business along with the fun. You still seein' that Hunt guy?"
Delinda tried to signal NO with her eyes. "He's gone on a field trip up the Amazon. In search of the giant leech. For real. It's a University of California excursion."
She turned quickly to Nora. "Uh, I think the Boy Ban rules apply here. Phil and I have some catching up to do. You have your car-"
"Shall I meet you some place?" Nora glanced at her watch.
"Um, why don't I just take BART back?"
"I got wheels." He cocked his head. "You don't need rapid transit while I'm with you. I remember that Boy Ban stuff, though-this elegant lady is one of your pledges? I figured her for faculty or somethin' special."
"Slow learner," Nora grinned. "Sigma's helping me with my social skills. Okay, let me get on to Moe's, then. I've got books to look for. See you again, I hope, Phil, after the Ban's over."
She waved and started into the crosswalk. The bookstore lay across on the shadowed side of the street.
"Damn, you soror' whores know how to recruit." He squinted at Delinda. "Some coffee or somethin' more serious, mi corazon! Papa Pierre's out on Solano got Pedro Sangre rum in its well-thick and brown and sweet."
His lean muscles locked around her arm. He piloted her down the sidewalk. An aquiline-nosed street artist with a droopy mustache smiled welcomingly over his stand of earrings, nose rings, and finger rings. A woman hawking woven skirts and shawls shook a mini-cut wraparound in front of a customer in electric blue sweats.
"Too bad about Hunt," Phil murmured as they stepped aside. A motorized wheelchair whirred down the shallow cripple dip from the sidewalk into the intersection. "He knew how to score serious designer mind candy."
"He's given up drugs and everything like that."
"Including you, the stupid bastard?" He laughed. "He won't find anyone as beautiful and good to talk to no matter how many rivers he travels."
Two guys with heavily sunburned bare torsos and mashed, idiot faces flipped a cherry-red frisbee back and forth over the moving cars.
"Scott, I'm in Berkeley and free. Delinda met a friend and they're reminiscing." Nora thought the starry look in her guardian angel's eyes wouldn't fade for a week. The visible electricity between those two had made her instantly sex-hungry.
"I've got some stuff to look for here-Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, Toni Morrison. I know it's an imposition, but if you could come out on BART somehow I could meet you . . .
"No, Delinda's headed down Solano Avenue way. I overheard them. If you meet me at the Ashby station she couldn't possibly see us . . . Okay, I can drive you back to Walnut Creek . . . Sure, we can do the Telegraph stroll. She won't be back this way for hours."
Nora hung up and pressed her head against the grey cinderblock bookstore wall. She felt so excited, so in need of Scott. The cool cement helped. The thrill of breaking the Boy Ban added to her mounting joy, but she basically just wanted him-to talk to, to dine with, to fuck, fuck, fuck out at his place while his stereo surrounded them with moonless seas of Ravel or Rachmaninoff.
"I really enjoyed that review you did of The Rake's Progress." Caledonia Roundsong hugged her husky son. "You caught Nick Shadow's character and what Stravinsky did with him. I only wish you used a less derivative pen name."
Ken Gormish patted her cheek. "I had to think up one at the last minute, when The Daily Cal printed my first article. I knew only one person who'd changed her name."
"When I went from Alicia Rae Gormish to Caledonia Muse Roundsong I thought I expressed something quite personal and me. 'Scott Madrigal' makes a cute variation, but does it reveal your secret self?"
"It keeps the family spirit alive, and it's been too many years to change, at this point." He gave an elaborate hand flourish. "An architectural drudge by day, a glamorous music columnist by night. And speaking of my secret life, could I get a ride back to Orinda so I can catch the BART to Berkeley?"
She nodded. "I'd take you all the way, but I've a class at three and notes to mull."
"Thanks for the birthday gift." He held up the compact disc. Leopold Stokowski graced the cover, looking a grey witch ready to roast Hansel and Gretel into gingerbread. "This Alexander Nevsky has never been out on black disc."
"I thought you'd enjoy it." Caledonia pulled her keys out of a broad pocket in her ecclesiastical-style robe. "I'm glad you could go to lunch. You never come to Orinda."
He lifted an arm. "I've just got things to do and people to be ... I love you just the same, mom."
"So how're you and the girls taking it?" He pushed open the Dutch door of The Blue Nile Restaurant. Nora preceded him into the warm, spicy atmosphere.
"The paddlings or the Boy Ban?" she asked as a small, delicately formed chocolate-brown woman appeared. She wore a snowy, flowing dress sparsely embroidered with bright red and blue. Nora felt like an ungainly tourist by comparison.
"Both." They passed through a rattling wood-bead curtain and were seated. "Have you had Ethiopian food before?"
Nora studied the menu. "Never. I think Sarah's cane-crazy. She whipped Renee Chandon's bottom for sneaking off with some walking gland on the tennis team. The Bad Word board-whackings are bad enough. Renee hasn't that much meat on her behind."
The waitress returned. "Can I get you something to drink? A Nile Smoothie, right?" She gave him a merry-cheeked look. An early bulge of pregnancy showed.
"Mimi's got a good memory," he explained as Nora raised her face. "Try the Nile Eggnog, it's nice and creamy. Also some tej, please. That's honey wine, something like mead, but lighter."
The exquisite, smiling woman vanished back to the kitchen area.
"How long have you lived around here?" Nora realized how hazy her knowledge of his background actually was after a year of keeping company.
"My mother used to be a campus character in the early Sixties, before Mario Savio and Jefferson Fuck Pollard-no kidding, this guy legally changed his middle name to Fuck and started the Sexual Freedom League."
She shook her head. "The Bay Area. They'd have put a torch to his beard in Riverside."
"I don't remember him having one. Anyway, I think Julia Vinograd has my mom in a poem-but it could be another Telegraph crazy she wrote about."
"Is she still around?"
"Vinograd? Definitely, she's got a new book out. She's Berkeley's foremost street poet." He grinned like a big, sandy-haired imp. "You may meet mom, but she's definitely got her own agenda."
A different Ethiopian woman arrived with a tray. Two small glasses held golden liquid. A tall, handled mug carried something orange juice colored; another had white contents with a foaming head.
He picked up the sun-colored wine. "To the two lady loves of my life."
His devoted eyes made her blush as she lifted her glass and drank. Something pure, sweet, and exciting rolled along her tongue.
"A van ... ? The back of a van?" Delinda felt blissfully afloat on warm, wide tides. Hot coffee had mainlined caffein and rum into her blood. She giggled incredulously. "I haven't fucked in a van since . . . since high school."
"Hey, querida, not in some teenage traveling sex wagon!" Felipe leaned against the gold-flaked gun barrel-blue back door. "I had a pro fix this up. I tour in here. I live in this mobile space."
"A whorehouse on wheels, we called them back in Bloomington." She tried to control her giggly bubblings. "We had this bozo ... he had his van lined . . . just like Jane Fonda's spaceship in Barbarella ... all fuzzy fake fur on the inside ..."
She sat on the barely protruding black plastic-coated bumper, trying to stop her erupting laughter. "We'd just roll around ... all of us, in this big, wet tangle ... we thought we were having an orgy . . . God knows he couldn't keep it clean ... it got all matted down and smelled like hell ..."
Felipe popped the side door open. "Well, I cured that, azucar de mi alma. Replaceable rugs."
She stepped around and stared at the great white polar bear fur interior. Delinda felt the laughter burning her eyes. "Jesus . . . don't get me hiccuping!"
His hands moved gently over her as he bundled her into the van. Its closed curtains kept the interior a mysterious twilight.
She felt her blood surge as he gently stripped her baby-seal naked. Warmed by her booze-charged body heat, the long synthetic fur felt good matted under her. She jacked her hips down into the thick foam padding beneath as he mounted her body.
His hands stroked her as she embraced his firm, lean muscles. Strong, certain ... he pistoned in a sure, steadily mounting tempo. His long hair felt like a waterfall across her face as he kissed her throat and sweat-hot breasts.
He licked along her jaw and kissed her blind eyes. Passion thundered in her veins. She drummed her heels without rhythm, sounds rising unstoppably from her vitals . . . urgent, demanding noises. She had to climax soon, had to break the tension . . . too soon, for she wanted it to last, to never end as she lay there strung tight as a wire singing in the wind . . . needed that exquisite, taut torment of gratification unyieldingly deferred ... for ten minutes more, five at the least . . .
She screamed as it broke. She clawed him as she came, so soon, so terribly soon ... He hissed and held himself arched, jammed fully up her, laughing as she threshed and moaned, her violent contractions yanking and wanking his rigid pud.
His hips began short, brutal digs that made her gasp anew. Her fingers tightened over his rocking muscles as he humped her in staccato bursts.
His weight began to tire her. Her back itched. She longed to change position. Her eyes focused on the dim van ceiling beyond him as he vaulted himself further and further toward ecstasy.
She felt his gutteral moans as a vibration shivering from his chest through hers. She automatically twitched her hips faster, slapping her belly harder against his . . . letting him ride her to his grunting culmination.
The alcohol flickered steadily in her cramped muscles, warming them. She twisted restlessly under him as he continued to kiss her, whispering in Spanish.
The fake fur strands smelled of recent dry cleaning.
Caledonia Roundsong's broad bottom warmed a grey formica-topped table set in front of her classroom at St. Cloud University. Her portly blue robe blossomed about her, more Medieval coat hardy than choir garb.
Thick brown braids framed a Naga Necklace with over two dozen strands of minute green beads, lustrous as darting lizards in the flat fluorescent light. A Rajasthani medalion hung below that, the old silver worn so that the two central figures resembled androgynous Salvador Dali creations frolicing in Dionysian dance.
Her Theology 1A students listened attentively, scribbled dutifully, or studied the room clock faithfully.
"Twenty years ago," she continued, "kids still starry-eyed from the high school senior prom bounced into college and hit a royal shitstorm."
She slid to her feet, went to the green chalk board and lettered it out in bold, dusty yellow print.
"Shitstorm-that's technical jargon for a force-ten hurricane load of debris and detritis from the Eisenhower years. I know a member of the law faculty here who still sputters over his beer about how much better everything was in the Fifties.
"Sure. White male lawyers from Indiana and Iowa ran the world as groundskeepers for the people who owned it. That facade could not hold against the revolt of suppressed reality." She paced before the board.
"By the late Sixties, sexual taboos, drug no-no's, and political barriers had drooped so that Eldridge Cleaver, not June and Ward Cleaver, had a book out telling the Beaver the societal structure that had made Eldridge a rapist. Real revolutionaries and let's-pretend-Trotskys played with bombs and AK-47's.
"What replaced the world manicured by attorneys in three-piece suits and Havanna cigars? When I visited the headquarters of the Red Mountain Tribe in Berkeley, I saw the other side of the nickel, the ass-end of the buffalo." She leaned on the room's lectern.
"I saw a decaying house with people huddled in sleeping bags in big, empty rooms. I saw a hill of dirty dishes as high as Mount Tarn, with no one feeding them to the dishwasher in the middle of the kitchen floor. I saw hardcore badass radicals talking all power to the people-and no one taking care of basic business."
She nodded. "So what do all these fond tales have to do with religion, you wonder. Time Magazine had a black cover in 1965 asking Ts God Dead?' The shitstorm hit religion even more strongly than it did politics.
"Now that white male preachers from Iowa and Indiana don't run the world as gardeners for the fat asses who own it, is anyone minding the basic relationship between people and their universe?"
She waggled a finger in the air. "Good point to ponder. For next time, read the Starhawk Dreaming the Dark, Chapters Five and Six, and also carefully go over Krishna-murti's Notebook through the August 25, 1961, entry."
The clock's minute hand hit ten till the hour. Students bundled up their sketchy notes and books and began to chatter as they filed out.
A slender, curly-haired boy with granite eyes came up to the lectern.
"Could I ask you about this?" He pulled a heavy, huge paperbound book from under his arm. The cover had been creased, the pages thumbed grey along the edges.
"The Voudon Gnostic Workbook could take up an entire seminar by itself," Caledonia responded cautiously. "Michael Bertiaux has an ambitious reach. Magickal Childe Bookstore apparently printed his home study course pretty much intact."
"Yeah, I didn't understand about that becoming a Lucky Hoodoo part at first." He inhaled, his face getting even more muscle-locked. "I thought when I read it that The Satanic Bible was the most complete collection of blasphemy I'd ever read."
"I like Anton, he never forgot his origins as a carny entertainer."
"This ..." The student held up the big book. "Satan worship is kid's stuff by comparison. What I want to know ..." His voice dropped. "Does it work? Is this real?"
"What do you want to do?"
"Have power over people." The skin ran taut along his jaw and neck. "Waste them when I want to. Control their minds."
She propped up an elbow on the lectern and stroked her chin. "That's not uncommon coming out of adolescence. Could I ask you to raise that in class next week? It's very relevant to my lesson plan then."
He nodded. "But can this stuff work?" His thumb rubbed the bent cover. "How much is real?"
"I haven't practiced Bertiaux's rituals, but I would advise against you trying them without a very thorough grounding-more thorough than one book can give."
She pondered how much to tell him. "Kenneth Grant writes that Bertiaux is very into astral lycanthropy and using Voodoo to create H.P. Lovecraft manifestations. I think the man has taken Aleister Crowley and gone rather far."
"He seems to hate Crowley."
"They definitely disagree over whether certain sex magic rituals involve sodomy or simply a rear mount." She beamed encouragingly, "We'll deal with a lot of the concerns I sense you have next week."
Judy Latimer approached as the boy went out. "Seth, he's the fellow I go with-not during the Boy Ban, I mean-I went with him in high school-"
"Good." Caledonia smiled.
"He gave me this book on Hassidism, 9'h Mystics." Judy seemed bloodlessly pale. "A very informed work."
"Only I'm not Jewish and it seemed kind of . . . old-fashioned, like The Diary of Anne Frank. Anyway, Seth said that a lot of things in that . . . interfaith ritual came from Aleister Crowley."
"Crow-ley, dear, like the black bird."
"Oh. I overheard that boy just now ... is it right to want to have power over people?"
"Of course." Caledonia tried to sound reassuring. "The trick lies in coming to terms with that want. Crowley dragged a fat sack of personal quirks and outright neurosis with him-and the old fox knew it. Central to his system of magical development is direct confrontation with the horrid flaws, the petty desires, the killing weaknesses, and the hidden sins in our most fundamental selves.
"Confront and assimilate-get into a working relationship with your worst self. You can't cut your wicked nature off like a diseased Siamese twin. You have to live with the total you." She gestured broadly. "That's religion, that's magic, that's mysticism. Life consists of coming to terms with your real self in the universe as it is."
"Is everything okay, then? Do . . ." The student stumbled over the Sixties commonplace. "Do your own thing? Whatever works?"
"No." Caledonia shook her head emphatically. "You disobey the laws of the universe at your peril. I knew a young boy who tried to fly by flapping his wings. Cute kid. He did that from a rooftop while on an acid trip and died."
Judy developed a pained intensity as the minister went on, "Study aerodynamics, master the way the air really works-then you can fly. That's true religion. Some say it takes lifetimes.
"Mary, Kali, Ishtar!" Caledonia laughed. "I've just given you my entire course. Now how'll I hold your attention till the end of the semester?"