Chapter 5
The party peaked and neither Fred nor Jenny were conscious of it. Like embers in a fire, glowing out one by one, the participants fell asleep anywhere they could find space. Those with enough strength staggered off to bedrooms where they collapsed, face first on the beds.
As the cold gray light of dawn began filtering through the windows, Jenny stirred, shivering in the early morning cold. She awoke slowly, wanting to rest her aching body, her eyes open and blinking for a few minutes before she actually saw the orgiastic scene around her. Naked bodies were drooped and flung every where. She herself was sleeping with her arms around a young girl she had never seen before. Her face wreathed in sudden self-loathing and she carefully pushed the girl's limp body away from her.
Sitting up on the couch, she looked around the room. She didn't know any of the faces she «ould see and she got to her feet, groaning, to look for Fred. She found she could barely walk and every single fiber of her body hurt. Her husband was nowhere to be seen.
Walking down a hall, helping herself along the wall, she looked into a bedroom and saw Fred on top of a bed, sound asleep while two naked young girls, Sigrid and Karen, were sleepily playing with his penis, trying to nurse it up into erection once again. They were languidly licking and sucking it, their heads on his stomach, sharing his cock as if it were the last piece of candy on earth.
They looked up and saw Jenny standing in the doorway and went on with their lewd sucking. Jenny helped herself into the room and closed the door and leaned on it. A wave of rage and revulsion swept through her body. What kind of animals are we, she groaned to herself. Many questions hammered through her brain, hard moral questions.
"In the cold light of day." How many times has that been said? It is useless to count the times for it is a cliche and cliches live with us daily. They become cliches because of their frequent use and because they invariably, to our eternal frustration, hold a grain of truth. Jenny, hurting all over, her buttocks and thighs cov ered with black and blue marks, tiny scratches and cuts across her back, buttocks, and breasts, stood against the door near to real tears as she watched the two wanton, marathon girls doing obscene and unnatural things to a sleeping Fred Morrison, her husband, the man who, until last night, was the only man ever to make love to her.
In an insane, depressed moment, she wished she could take it all back, erase last night as though it never happened. They had gone to dinner, danced, and gone back to the hotel for a good night's sleep.
Jenny bowed her head and shook it, the tears blurring out the room. No, no, they had come here, to this house, and, somehow, someway, they had gone too far. Once over the brink, they acted like wild, depraved animals. She had humiliated herself and her husband. She couldn't forget that half the time she didn't know where he was or what she was doing.
With a hopeless sob, she told herself that half the time, she didn't even care.
Sigrid and Karen, hearing Jenny sob, sat up on the bed and looked at her. "What's the matter?" Sigrid asked, rubbing her bleary eyes.
Jenny rubbed her eyes and then her whole face, pulling herself together. She looked at the two of them calmly, her face blank and emotionless. When she spoke, her voice was a husky whisper. "That," she said, nodding toward Fred, "is my husband. I'd like to take him home, I'd like to go."
Karen and Sigrid looked at one another, nodded and got up from the bed and watched Jenny try to arouse Fred out of his exhausted sleep. Fred only groaned and tossed an arm. Jenny, tired, couldn't move his heavy dead weight and began to cry to herself.
Karen and Sigrid, seeing this, came to her aid and the three of them managed to get Fred on his feet and walking around. Fred was out on his feet, a silly drunken grin on his face as the women propped him up in a chair and dressed him. "Boy," he said, staring off goggle-eyed, "Wait till I tell the guys back home, they'll never believe this!"
Jenny began crying again and Fred stared at her, his head bobbing around. "You know, you look like my wife. Where is Jenny? Hey, Jenny!"
They quieted him and he sang to himself and dozed as the girl's helped him out of the bedroom, down the hall, through the large living room where naked people still slept and outside. They stood shivering in the early morning light, the sun already up, and Jenny looked around her with dismay on her face.
"Where am I going to get a taxi and how will I ever get him into the hotel?" she said aloud.
"Take my car," Karen pointed at a Volvo parked nearby. She turned to Sigrid, holding an invisible cup in her hand. "Get him good hot Danish coffee."
Sigrid laughed and nodded then patted Jenny reassuringly. "Don't worry, we will fix him up."
They all piled into Karen's car and drove off in search of a place that was open and serving coffee.
A little over an hour later, Fred and Jenny were walking, arm in arm, across the lobby of the Kong Frederick Hotel, eyes wide. They walked slow because they were so stiff and they walked with arms locked because they were holding each other up. They walked, in careful, measured strides, up to the desk where Fred, glazed, bloodshot eyes, gravely said one word. "Key."
They turned, like Siamese twins and faced the elevators and set off, only staggering once before the doors closed on them.
Upstairs, in their room, they drew the blinds, pulled off as much clothing as they could and fell onto the bed and into a deep sleep. Fred managed to wake long enough to tell the cleaning woman to skip their room for the day and lock the door and help a murmuring Jenny under the blankets and fall into a deep sleep himself. They slept throught the long afternoon and through the evening, waking when it was ten o'clock at night.
It was Jenny who woke first, sitting upright despite her soreness, stifling a cry. She had been dreaming again and the dreams were no longer exciting: they were filled with horror and self-loathing. She looked at Fred next to her, still in deep sleep and longed for him to be awake, for him to hold her and comfort her. How could he ever forgive her for the things she had done? She couldn't remember half the things she had done, only carnal glimpses of her behavior, remembered like still frames from a movie. One moment, one drunken moment they were innocently kissing, watching naked people behave in a lewd, lust-inciting way, then they had gone too far. Jenny held her head in her hands and tried to remember. One moment she was naked and feeling lust and then ... then she was lost in a whirlwind of depravity. Where had she taken the one step that tipped her over into becoming a madwoman? Had it been way back, when Fred, excited, told her about the books and magazines? Had it been when she had lewdly said she wanted to see the movie? Or had it been when they entered the party?
Feeling sick to her stomach with guilt and anxiety, she stumbled to the bathroom and stood over the basin. How could she possibly explain her behavior that night? If she told anyone honestly what happened, she would seem insane. It was as if there were two different people in one body.
At that miserable sickening moment in her life, Jenny was faced with the awesome and frightening possibility of taking her own life. Their doctor had given them sleeping pills to use when traveling. She could take them. She could take Fred's razor blades and slash her wrists and hold them under water. She didn't know why she should hold them under water, but she had read somewhere that people did that* when slashing their wrists.
Jenny held on to the basin with all her might, the room tilting and reeling. She thought she was going to pass out and fought to keep her equilibrium. She knew she couldn't commit suicide, she was too afraid. Any kind of life was preferable to death. She would have to gut it through. She would face herself and Fred and whatever he wanted to do, she would abide by. She would face herself and try to understand what had happened to her and try to make some sort of decent life for herself. She couldn't think of one decent or sensible reason for her going on; just some feeling, a primitive survival sense, perhaps. Although Jenny couldn't understand it much less verbalize it, she was caught in the flow of the great life force, a force we all feel whenever our lives'are endangered. The instinct of one's soul to save itself.
With a great heaving of breath, Jenny's stomach contorted and she heaved into the basin, retching with all her might.