She put her hand back on his penis. “Take my ear in your mouth,” he said. She took his ear in her mouth. “Don’t suck it, for Christ’s sake — you’ll break the eardrum.” She became gentler.
“Can you now, Leo?” she asked in a little while. “Will you try?”
“All right,” he said, “I’ll try.” He rolled on top of her. “It doesn’t fit.”
“Here,” she said.
“I’m not in.”
“Sure you are.”
He moved back and forth a few times. “I’m slipping out.”
“Ahh. Ahh. Oh, Leo.”
“You’re too dry.”
“Ahhgghhrr,” she shuddered.
“Play with my back,” he said.
“Leo, come back. Leo? All right,” she said, “I know. Let’s stand up.” They stood up.
“Stop. You’re breaking it off.”
“Let’s sit on the side of the bed.”
“No. The color television.”
“Leo, we’ll break it — and the tubes get too hot. Let’s stand on the dresser.”
“Let’s sit in the chest of drawers.”
“Leo, what are you doing?”
“Where’s the air-conditioning vent?”
“The air-conditioning vent?”
“Where is it?”
“There, on the floor. Near the chair. What are you doing?”
“I’m sitting down. Ohh,” he said. “Oh boy, Arghhrr.”
“Let me try.”
“Wait till I’m through. Ahhghh. Wow.”
“Leo, you’ll catch cold. Nothing’s worse than a summer cold. Leo?”
“Oh boy.”
“Leo, please, let’s get in bed.” She pulled him up and they got into bed. Feldman turned onto his stomach. “Leo,” she said after playing with his back for a few minutes, “try to catch me.”
“All right.”
“Close your eyes.” He heard her get out of the bed. “Count to fifty.”
“All right.”
“Don’t start counting until I tell you.” Her voice came from across the room; she was sitting on the air conditioning. “You can start counting now, Leo. Leo? Are you counting?”
“What?”
“Are you counting?”
“You woke me up.”
“Oh, Leo!”
She got back into bed. “You’re hard now, Leo. Come in me.”
“All right.”
“Oh, Leo, you’re so hard now.”
“I have to pee.”
“Oh, Leo. Oh. Oh. Oh, that’s wonderful, Leo. Oh.”
“Where’s the Kleenex?”
“Oh. Oh.”
“There’s only three left. How can you let the Kleenex get so low?”
“Oh, I love you, Leo. I love you.”
“All right.”
“I did something, Leo. It’s the first time. It was wonderful.”
“Been quite a night for you. First your own program on the TV and now this.”
“You do something too, Leo. You do something now too.”
He flipped out of her and rolled off. “Can’t cut the mustard,” he said philosophically, putting his hands behind his head.
“I’m sorry, dear,” Lilly said. “It’s been wonderful these last months. You’ve been marvelous to us. To Billy and me. So relaxed.”
“Yes.”
“Things must be going well at the store.”
“Very nicely.”
“See? It doesn’t do any good to worry.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“Leo?”
“Yes?”
“Did you know that I’ve been worried lately?”
“No. I didn’t know that.”
“I tried not to show it.”
“Well, it worked.”
“But it’s all right. I found out today it’s all right.”
“That’s good.”
“It’s my callus. I went to see Freedman about it.”
“Best not to play around with these things — Freedman?”
“Yes, and do you know, Leo, that man looked at me in the queerest way.”
“You took your callus to Freedman?”
“It was absolutely embarrassing, Leo. He tested me for syphilis.”
“He tested you for — oh no — he t-test — tee hee — tested you for syph-ha-ha-lis?”
“You’d think he never saw a callus before.”
“She saw Freedman. She took her callus to Freedman.” Feldman laughed. He roared. He threw his right hand up in the air and laughed harder.
“Leo, what is it?”
“F-F-Freedman,” he sputtered. “Freedman,” he guffawed. “Freeeeeedman,” he sniggered. He tittered and giggled and snickered and chuckled and cackled and chortled. “F-F-Freeeedman!” He couldn’t stop laughing, and as he laughed his erection grew. It became enormous. It was the biggest hard-on he had ever had. Lilly, astonished, pulled him on top of her greedily. Laughing, he rocked and shook himself into an orgasm.
The next morning he still had to laugh every time he thought about it. His eyes teared and his nose ran. Once, during a sales conference, he actually slapped his knee in his mirth like a vaudeville farmer. It was the best laugh of his life, persistent as the symptom of a cold. When he tried to work, the thought of Freedman and Lilly kept getting in the way and he had to lay aside whatever he was doing. The people around him, Miss Lane and some of the executives and buyers, had never seen him this way, but his laughter was so infectious that they had to join him, laughing the harder because they didn’t know the joke. Possessed by his laughter, he made a decision — he would remember this laughter and try always to be happy.
Then, riding the escalator up to the third floor when he returned from lunch, he saw something that made him stop laughing. A girl he had sent to the abortionist was mulling over some handkerchiefs at a counter. And as he peered through the crowd he recognized others he had seen in his basement.
“Oh, hi,” a young man said to him on the fourth floor. It was the lad for whom he had obtained the prescription.
On a sofa in the furniture department, sitting there as if the thing already belonged to her, was a lady for whom he had obtained a black-market baby. She nodded to him as he went by and fumbled with her pocketbook as if she meant to show him a picture of the child. He hurried to an elevator to take him the rest of the way up to his regular office. How had they come up? He wondered. Why weren’t they in the basement? What were they doing this high in his store?
Sure enough, when he stepped into the elevator, there was the man he had sent to the queers.
17
What would you do if a hole opened up in that wall?” Bisch asked.
“That couldn’t happen,” Feldman said warily. “How could that happen?”
“No, I mean it. Suppose a hole, big enough for a man to go through, suddenly opened up in our cell wall. What would you do?”
“The exercise yard’s right outside, Bisch.”
“Yes, but suppose it wasn’t? Suppose the cell wall was the only thing between you and the outside. Suppose it was light shift and all the guards had rushed to the other side of the prison to put out a fire, and the heat traveling in waves along the wall made this cell so hot you couldn’t stand it, so hot in fact that a hole was melted in the wall. What would you do?”
“What would you do, Bisch?”
“I’d try to save my life.”
“You’d go through the hole?”
“Self-defense,” Bisch said.
“Then what would you do?”
“I’d go around to the other side of the prison and turn myself in,” Bisch said. “And you?”
“So would I.”
“Yes, but suppose the guards are so busy fighting the fire that no one can get to the main gate to let you back in? And suppose it turns cold, below freezing, and you know that all you have to do to get warm is just go down the mountain a few thousand feet? What would you do?”