“I don’t want you to ask her, Stella.”
She looked across the room at him, a smile on her face. “You mean you’ll be coming to the party?”
He shut his eyes. Then he opened them again, defeated. “All right,” he said. “I’ll be coming to the party.”
Chapter four
Between 9 and 9:30 that evening five men and five women opened the outer door at 69 Barrow Street. In turn they pushed the buzzer in the vestibule marked James Lambert, walked through into the hallway and waited for Stella to let them into the first-floor apartment.
At first glance they appeared to be just a normal crowd of people between the ages of twenty and thirty. They were dressed informally, but there was nothing striking about their appearances, nothing that would indicate Bohemianism or non-conformity of any sort. They looked extremely average — a nice, quiet crowd of young people getting together for a few drinks and a good time.
But Ralph knew better.
He had met them all before. All of them had been to previous parties of Stella’s. In addition, more than a few had been Stella’s sexual partners.
Ralph knew them all quite well.
Jimmy and Rhonda Henderson sat together on the couch sipping drinks from water tumblers. Jimmy’s black hair was clipped close to a large skull that teetered precariously on his small, thin frame. Small, piggish eyes stared out from his head and surveyed the room. Rhonda, who had married him when she woke up one morning and found herself pregnant, was a soft honey blonde with huge eyes and creamy skin. She stood several inches taller than Jimmy. It wasn’t hard to tell by a glance at Rhonda that she was an extremely stupid girl. Her eyes had a perpetually vacant stare and her conversation was, to say the least, uninspired. There was, in fact, only one thing Rhonda could do at all well. But she was an expert at it.
Jimmy made his living — a rather good living — peddling marijuana. A good list of steady customers left him with around $300 a week after he paid off the local patrolman. While Stella bought too little marijuana to rank as a good customer, a sale to her meant an invitation to one of her parties. And he liked Stella’s parties.
Near the window a very tall and very thin young man stood with his arm around a short, plump girl. The thin young man’s name was Roger Brann. The plump girl was Sally; nobody knew her last name. Neither of them had jobs.
They had been living together for several months on their unemployment checks.
Roger Brann was 22 years old.
Sally was almost 16.
Ralph sat alone by himself, avoiding the others. In the background weird modern jazz played on Stella’s hi-fi, filling the room with strangely erotic rhythms and harmonies.
Stella was talking earnestly with two other couples — David and Elaine Jordan and Luke and Betty Swinnerton. The Jordans started out as just an ordinary married couple, until they both decided that there was something lacking in ordinary married life. They got involved in a few minor wife-swapping deals with men who worked in the same advertising agency as David. Then they discovered the Village and Stella’s crowd and their problems were solved. They were still very happily married, very much in love with each other. They looked upon the sexual experimentation of the Village as a release, a way to let off steam and to keep their own marriage fresh and exciting.
The Swinnertons, although both under thirty, had always seemed a little older than the other people in the room. It was hard for Ralph to determine just why this was true. He decided that it was in the way they pursued their “kicks.” The others in the room approached depravity and dissipation in a madcap search for pleasure, hungrily chasing down every possible escape they could find. Luke and Betty were different. Like the Hendersons, they had married when Betty thought she was pregnant. In their case it turned out to be a fake pregnancy but they remained married when they found out it was more or less the same as living together. And when Luke and Betty looked for kicks they did it in a totally dispassionate way, as though they had already given up all hope of achieving any genuine happiness. They continued to dissipate because it was their life, the only life they had known for years. But nothing touched them and nothing moved them.
They stood talking to Stella and the Jordans, but they seemed a million miles removed from the conversation. There was a hollow stare in Luke’s eyes. Betty kept her eyes closed and shifted her weight from one foot to the other, snapping her fingers absently in time to the music, humming softly to herself.
One other couple remained — Larry Colestock and Maria Raines. The two of them shared a cold-water flat on the East Side off Third Avenue. Ralph didn’t know Larry well at all, but he would never forget Maria, with her large, brown eyes and jet-black, shoulder length hair.
He had met her at another party of Stella’s, two or three months ago. Stella had met her and invited her to the party, and when she came Stella slipped a powder into the girl’s drink.
The powder was called Spanish Fly.
Maria had been a virgin. That night Stella led the little girl to the bedroom in back and ten men, one after the other, put an end to Maria’s virginity and ripped away her self-respect as they tore her inside. Then, when the men had finished with the girl, Stella took her in her strong arms and held her close for the remainder of the night.
That had been either the beginning or the end of Maria, depending on how you looked at it. She left her family and moved permanently to the Village. Looking vaguely for love, she took whatever happened to come her way. Nothing mattered to her any more.
A wave of shame washed over Ralph.
He had been one of the ten men that night.
Stella walked to the window and pulled the shade all the way down. While she didn’t mind at all if passers-by watched Ralph make love to her, there were certain things that she didn’t want anybody to see. Then she walked to the middle of the room and held up a hand for silence.
“All right,” she said. “Okay, everybody. It’s time for us to get started. You got everything, Jimmy?”
Henderson nodded. He took a small, bulging envelope from his pocket and handed it to her. Stella ripped open the envelope and dumped the contents into the palm of her right hand.
The joints were about one-third the thickness of a regular cigarette. The ends were twisted to keep the weed from spilling out. Stella counted the joints, unable to keep the anticipation from showing on her face as she did so. Then she picked one up between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand and examined it carefully.
“Twelve of them,” she announced. “Twelve bombers. Enough to knock us out of our heads.”
There was a low murmur of approval from the others.
“C’mon,” she said. “Everybody get seated in a circle on the floor and we’ll get the ball rolling.”
The group formed a circle on the large oriental rug. Ralph found himself seated between Maria Raines and Elaine Jordan. He wished fleetingly that he was somewhere else, anywhere but here. He liked marijuana, enjoyed the effect it had on him, but he knew what it would do to the party.
Stella put the first of the cigarettes between her lips and accepted a light from Henderson. She dragged deeply on the joint with her lips slightly parted so that she would smoke it properly, taking in a mixture of air and smoke. She drew the mixture directly into her lungs in order to get the maximum effect, rather than puffing on it and then inhaling as with a regular cigarette. In this way the maximum amount of smoke was absorbed into the bloodstream and the greatest possible effect achieved.
As soon as she had finished dragging on the joint she passed it to Henderson. By keeping the cigarette moving around the circle less of the smoke was lost than if each person smoked a joint by himself. She held the smoke in her lungs as long as possible.