Chapter 7
It hadn't done Paul Moran a bit of good to stumble across Evette's school book. For one thing, it brought back a rush of jumbled, erotic longings and memories.
For another thing, Paul saw that Otto-for all of his pretended ignorance-knew exactly who Evette Warwick was. And from the look on Otto's face, Paul knew that the old German was longing for her.
Paul knew the symptoms. He had, after all, only recently recovered from the same disease.
Was he totally free of Evette? He smiled as he walked. Of course not. No man who ever knew her was. She was too hot for that-too available to flesh out a man's most erotic fantasies. No man can be free of a woman like that.
Paul remembered how it was. He had never been so sexually exhausted as he had been with Evette. She demanded sexual activity on the grand scale, sometimes four or five times a day. Paul was a strong man, but it was beginning to take its toll.
After work, walking through the park: Paul remembered the scene well. There was a chill in the air and darkness had fallen and he was hurrying home.
He heard her call him from the small stand of trees near the park's western edge. He walked over, and Evette was sitting on a blanket, lost in the darkness of the trees.
"Sit by me," she said. Paul thought for a moment that he was dreaming-the scene had that same remote quality to it.
Evette pulled him down onto the blanket and then flipped back her skirt. She was not wearing panties, and her nest seemed wide open to his eyes.
Evette was smiling. "Don't you like to do it out here like this?" she asked. She was rubbing his crotch, and then she unzipped his trousers and felt his flesh. Then she unfastened his belt and lowered his pants.
Paul felt foolish-what if someone saw them? But there was no denying his excitement. He stood his ground, and she knelt before him, eagerly ministering to his growing hardness with her wet, warm mouth.
He shivered in erotic delight and wondered how she could be so filled with sexual desire all the time. She was moaning, fingering her tender flesh as she brought him to full erection with her lips and tongue.
Then she pulled him down, made him lie on his back, and mounted him, guiding his shaft into her with one hand between her legs. She rocked in place, taking his entire length in one movement.
Then, gasping with pleasure, she opened her blouse and cupped each breast, offering them to Paul's hot and hungry mouth. He didn't care about being seen now. The thought excited him, and the wanton smile on Evette's lips excited him as well.
It was quick and brutal and then Evette buttoned her blouse and picked up the blanket and kissed him goodbye. "Got to get home," she said. "It's almost dinner time."
Paul was in a bar ten minutes later. Boilermakers would take the edge off the evening, he thought.
Paul Moran made his way home, not walking completely straight, but not staggering either. He was gentlemanly drunk and no man could ask for more than that. He enjoyed the feeling he had; the quart of ice cream would have him straight in the morning and it was a very cheap drunk, no matter what it cost you in the bar, if you didn't have to pay for it the next morning.
Paul turned down Ellsworth Street. He had to cross Thornton's skid row to get back to his boarding house. He passed this way every night. Paul had spent most of his life in San Francisco and knew something about skid rows; Thornton's wasn't especially hideous by comparison. It was only old, and not very dirty. It was a part of town that no one wanted to live in, but was still better than thirty per cent of any large city.
Paul passed men, sitting on steps, who smoked cigarettes and talked in low tones. They wore dark jackets mostly and old hats, and they usually did agricultural work when they worked at all. Most of them didn't want to work too much; just enough to keep eating and smoking and drinking. Thornton's skid row was different from a big city's because there were almost no men here who were on relief. It wasn't as easy to get indigent aid here as it was in a larger place, and the older ones who could collect Social Security liked San Francisco or Los Angeles better.
Paul walked easily and a little surer now. The booze was wearing off some and he could cut the peak right off the hangover mountain with the ice cream. He smiled to himself, as he always did when he was outlasting alcohol; it made him feel like an Irish Sweepstakes winner. It was something like a free lay with one of the prostitutes he had known in Japan during the Korean War. He had never had one them free but he knew it must be the same kind of feeling.
As he walked past a rooming house with an empty front porch he heard his name called.
"Paul," the voice hissed.
Paul stopped. He knew the voice and he looked toward the front porch that he had vaguely noticed was empty a moment ago. But it wasn't empty; there was a man there somewhere, a man whom he knew.
"Where are you, Roy?" Paul said. "Down here."
Paul glanced down to the steps in the blackness. He focused his eyes hard, fighting the darkness and the retreating effect of alcohol. Then he saw the man who had spoken to him. He saw, sitting on the bottom step with his knees almost up to his jaw, a man wearing what looked like a gleaming white shirt in the dark; but Paul knew it was not pure white but a dirty gray-white. Roy Warwick always wore a dirty white shirt. Paul often wondered why he didn't wear colored shirts that wouldn't show the dirt, but Roy never did. Perhaps he did not wish to hide the filth in which he lived.
"Where are you going, Paul?" Roy said.
"Home. Home sweet home. Had a load on about half an hour ago, but now I'm going to go home and eat my ice cream and go to bed."
"Stop and have a drink."
Paul's eyes had, become accustomed to the deeper darkness of the front steps now, and he saw that Roy Warwick had a bottle between his knees, rocking it.
"What are you drinking?"
"The cheapest port I could find. You know my drink, Paul."
"Thanks, anyway. But I've got to go to work in the morning."
"I'm lonesome tonight," Roy said. "I've been hoping you were out somewhere whooping it up and would be coming along. Why don't you sit down and just have one drink?"
Paul wanted to go home, had fully intended going home, but he couldn't turn down Roy's invitation. He didn't want any more to drink tonight but he liked Roy Warwick and could not reject his invitation. Paul understood something of the older man's loneliness and perhaps identified with him in it. Paul had known deep trouble of his own a few years earlier. Even though it was past and buried he never forgot it; and when he saw Roy he identified with the man, and he had been Roy's daughter's lover only a short time before. He had never said anything to Roy about that, but Roy had never talked about his daughter to Paul. It was a subject they never discussed because Roy wanted it that way.
"Okay," Paul said, dropping down to the steps alongside the older man. "Maybe we can eat the ice cream with our fingers."
"Ice cream?"
"Yeah. It's a quart of ice cream."
"I haven't had any ice cream since...." Roy stopped. "Since my kid and I ate ice-cream cones together."
Paul said nothing.
Paul opened the carton of ice cream slowly, feeling its softness and knowing it was melting fast. He dug in with his fingers and licked the ice cream. It tasted pretty good. For some reason or other he had not thought it would taste very good off his fingers.
"Try some," Paul said, offering the carton to Roy.
But Roy did not seem to hear and did not pay attention.
"You know, having a kid is a lot better than not having one," Roy said.
"I'm glad you have, Roy."
"Proud of her, too. She's grown into a fine woman. She really has." He tipped his bottle of port and Paul saw some of the dark red liquid run out around his mouth and trickle down over the stubble on his chin.
"Try some ice cream, Roy," Paul said.
"Oh," Roy said. "Okay." He dug his fingers of his left hand into the ice cream and plucked them into his mouth. He tasted carefully and tightened his lips hard.
"I guess it doesn't go very well with port," Paul said.
"No," the older man answered. "No, it's fine." He dropped his head and looked down into the darkness between his knees. "I just haven't tasted ice cream for a long time; that's all."
Paul sat helplessly, holding the carton of ice cream in his hands. He didn't know what to do with it now. He no longer wanted to eat the dessert and, never having had a lot of money in his lifetime, hated to throw it away. He also worried about the mess it would make.
Finally, he laid the cardboard carton down next to him on the steps as a compromise gesture.
"Try some port," Roy said, without looking up. He held the bottle out to Paul.
Paul took it and noticed for the first time that it was nearly full. It couldn't have been the first one Roy had opened today or tonight. Third? Well, it depended on when he had started. Maybe it was the fourth or fifth if he had started early enough.
Paul took a swallow from the bottle. The overpowering, heavy sweetness of the cheap port resounded through his mouth; it was far more sugary than the ice cream had been. He shook his head, but the wine hadn't cut him much, meaning he was still in the bag. That would mean some trouble for him tomorrow. Big hangover, maybe, and he didn't want that. Hangovers were a waste of time and he always felt like kicking himself in the ass whenever he fell into one. But that was part of the breaks if you weren't a teetotaler. Paul took another drink from the bottle, and even the sweetness didn't bother him now.
"You'll have to have some kids," Roy said. "You ought to have at least one, anyway. Nothing like a child, your own flesh and blood. I don't think I ever got over that part of it ... the miracle of your own species recreated. It sort of...."
Paul waited for him to continue, but he did not.
"I'm afraid she's going to get into trouble," Roy said finally.
"What kind of trouble?"
"Man trouble. It happens to girls like her."
"Everything will be all right," Paul said.
"She teases men all the time. She'd rather do that than anything. She teases and teases. Didn't she do it to you when you knew her?"
"She's just a kid who wants to have fun," Paul lied. What could he say to Roy?
"When she was a little kid she wasn't that way," Roy said. "She was a bright, sharp little thing. You know. She was sweet and not touched by the world's dirtiness yet."
Paul's arm went around his friend's shoulders and he gripped the lean scrawny frame. "Don't talk that way, Roy. Everything is going to be all right."
Roy cried for a little while and Paul waited beside him. It was useless to talk; words had no value now, and they would only disturb Roy's grief. He had a right to feel the way he did, Paul knew, and he would let him have his right.
After a few minutes Roy raised his head. His face was very wet from his crying. Paul had never seen him cry before, not about anything.
They talked about local politics, trying to forget what had been said earlier. It seemed that each desperately wanted to forget; perhaps for different reasons, perhaps for almost the same reasons. Their conversation became louder and more animated as the level of the wine bottle moved down and down.
Roy told a joke that was a pun on a dirty word in Latin and Paul laughed. Roy hit him on the knee and repeated the words of the punch line, and they both laughed loudly.
But no matter how much they drank or how much they laughed, neither was able to forget what Roy had said earlier. His words dominated their mood, no matter how drunk they became or how hard they tried to obliterate them in a haze of drinking and conversation. For Paul, it was agonizing, and he shortly thereafter bid good night to Roy.
But there was no rest for Paul. His mind reeling, he walked aimlessly for thirty minutes, not knowing what to do. He did not want to go home.
Yet the ghost of Evette was all around him, and he could not shake it on the streets.
Paul entered a small workingman's bar not far from his place. It was dank and dirty and he chose the bar rather than one of the grimy booths.
Already drunk, Paul still somehow managed to slowly sip a Scotch while the jukebox blared a country-western tearjerker. He needed something.
And there she was.
She was staring at Paul, and when he finally noticed her, a big grin lit up her face. She was a tall, well-built blonde, on the far side of forty, with enormous breasts and a hard, flashy look. Her name was Greta, and she lived two doors away.
Fifteen minutes later they were in her apartment, and she was slowly lowering Paul's trousers. He was so sodden that he could barely stand, but through it all that famous Moran virility was hard at work. "Never seen one big as that," Greta drawled. "Real hard, too!"
Paul grinned but his eyes refused to focus. "Where's the bed?" he managed to say.
It was a short walk, and Paul managed it well. Of course, Greta tugged him along, her hand wrapped around his thick, hard shaft.
She stripped while he watched and he let out a low whistle when she finally stood naked before him. She was tall, built generously through the breasts and hips. Her long legs were muscular but attractive, and her tiny, pinched waist looked unreal.
"I've had my eyes on you for a long time," Greta said. "I knew you were the kind of man I'd like."
She sprawled on the bed, her legs wide apart, and fingered herself furiously while Paul watched. "Just let me get it ready for you, honey," she said, her breathing ragged. "I love you to watch me-I'll get there real fast that way!"
But Paul could watch no longer. He lunged for her and almost missed, but landed safely between her legs. She adjusted to him immediately and fed his erect penis into herself with her hand, gasping with pleasure at the moment of penetrations.
Then she rocked him gently, easing him in all the way. He almost passed out from the pleasure of it but his drugged brain kept him going automatically, and when he heard her crying out in hot, juicy pleasure he sobered a bit and began working at it.
Greta's large breasts were pillowed under his chin and he lowered himself a bit and mouthed each erect nipple in turn, feeling Greta's hands on his head, guiding the movement of his lips.
Then she was groaning with orgasmic relief and Paul felt his own coming on, hot and fast, and the last thing he remembered was wondering how he was going to get home.