“Maybe your friends won’t like me,” she had said, a few days ago.
“They’ll like you.”
“How can you tell?”
“My friends always like a girl with breasts like these,” he had said. And then he had taken her breasts in his hands and the gesture had taken them out of the realm of serious discussion and into something else entirely.
Still, she worried. Outwardly calm, with one arm flung casually over the side of the car and a cigarette drooping from her lower lip, she was still quivering inwardly with the fear that Craig’s friends would not care for her. While they might be duly impressed by her mammary development, this was not what she wanted. She had to be accepted wholly, not just as a body that could give a man pleasure.
“We’re here,” Craig said.
Inside the house, with the hi-fi on again, she helped him to get ready for the party. When her mother had a party — which, admittedly, was rare — preparations were complex. At least a dozen different sorts of salted nuts had to be set out, each variety in a different silver nut dish. Potato chips and cheese dip were comparably important. Occasionally her mother devoted several hours to the preparation of her cheese dips and she was known far and wide for them.
“But this gang is more interested in spirits than anything else,” Craig said. “As long as the bar is well-stocked, the party’s quite likely to turn out a success. A few extras, of course. A jar or two of paté, some caviar and smoked oysters. That should do it.”
“Do you have enough liquor?”
“Plenty,” he told her. “Scotch, bourbon, rye, gin, vodka and cognac. Two bottles of each to start with, and reinforcements waiting in the cellar. There shouldn’t be any shortages. Not even Ken Rutherford can exhaust our liquor reserves.”
“Ken—”
“Rutherford,” he said. “He has a hollow leg. His old man’s a rich alcoholic who never hides the bottles after he passes out. Kenny-boy started lapping up the sauce at the ripe old age of twelve and he never did learn to quit. He has cirrhosis of the liver. Can you imagine that, April? The son of a bitch has cirrhosis at age twenty-three.”
He paused, looked away vacantly. “He’ll be dead in two years,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact. “Or maybe tomorrow, as far as that goes.”
“Shouldn’t he stop drinking?”
“He’d just as soon die, April.”
She turned away, fumbled for a cigarette. There were things Craig said to her occasionally that jarred her. This was one of them. How could a twenty-three-year-old boy accept death as a logical price to pay for drinking too much too often? The thought was terrifying. Was life that cheap?
Maybe it was. Maybe she was only showing her own lack of sophistication. But there was a thin line separating sophistication from insane dissipation and she was never quite sure where that line should be drawn.
“Will I have fun tonight, Craig?”
She saw him look at her, his eyes searching. “That’s an odd question,” he said. “Why did you ask that?”
“I don’t know.”
He put ice cubes in a pair of old-fashioned glasses and poured scotch over them. She sipped the whiskey, glad she had the drink now, knowing for the first time the meaning of definitely needing the stimulation. This was not as though she were an alcoholic, nothing like that. But she had had drinks before and she knew that they tended to relax her, to permit her to unwind. And she wanted to relax and unwind now.
She looked at Craig. The drink was not his first of the evening, and of course it would not be his last. He looked fairly drunk, she decided. His eyes were slightly glazed and his complexion was a little ruddier than usual.
He said, “You’ll have fun, April.”
“I hope so.”
“You will. You’ll be a bit lost at first, maybe, but after that you’ll relax and enjoy it.” He laughed. “When rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it — an old saying from the Jeffers book of familiar quotations. You’ll have a good time, April. You don’t have to worry about it.”
She nodded. “What will we do? At the party, I mean.”
“Huh?”
“Well,” she said, “we won’t choose up sides and play charades. What will we do?”
He looked at her far a moment, then laughed. “Talk,” he said. “Drink. Mingle. And eventually we may see some home movies. Does that sound like fun?”
“Home movies?”
“Just an attempt at humor,” he said. “You’ll see, April. We’ll have a fine old time. Don’t worry about it.”
She finished her drink in a gulp, waiting for the alcohol to take hold and loosen her a little. Then she reached for the bottle and poured fresh scotch over the half-melted cubes of ice.
They were interesting people.
She had to grant that, right from the start. She was sitting on the low-slung couch with a man about thirty and a girl around the same age, perhaps a year to two older. The man had lost most of his hair in front and was compensating for the loss with a neatly trimmed black goatee. His name was Frank Evans and he was a reporter for the Dayton Evening Star, covering the police beat and doing general assignment work. He had sharp, inquisitive eyes and a high-pitched voice. He spoke quickly and did not seem to stop for breath.
The girl — or woman, really — wore dark glasses. Her dress was extreme, April thought. She wore leotards, black, and a tunic, green, and she used no lipstick and a great deal of eyeshadow. The tunic concealed most of her figure, but April could see that she had large, almost opulent breasts and long, strong legs. She was a little on the stocky side, with too much in the belly and more than too much in the rear, but while such imperfections might have kept her off the cover of Vogue they did not detract from her generally sexy appearance.
Her name was Margo Long. April was not sure exactly what she did. She seemed to be some sort of literary luminary, reviewing books for a Dayton paper and lecturing occasionally to women’s groups. Right now she was busily engaged in the popular pastime of putting people down.
“These damned parties,” she said. “I keep swearing not to go and every time another party comes up, there I am. I sit and watch Ken Rutherford put holes in his liver while Sue Maylor tries to make every male in the room and Larry Ellis sees how many girls he can shock. Look at them, will you?”
April looked. Ken Rutherford was easy to spot — he always had a glass in his hand and he was usually drinking from it. His eyes were vacant, his hair wild, his face pallid. April could not help being fascinated by him. He was quite thoroughly dissipated, a man on his way to an alcoholic grave, and he did not seem to give a damn.
Sue Maylor was on the other side of the room, talking to Craig and practically pushing her well-padded bosom into his face. She was a large girl with flaming red hair and a siren’s body — Craig had told her once that Sue had laid almost every man she knew and that the few exceptions were homosexuals. Now the redhead was pressing against Craig, her hot little hands moving toward the front of his pants.
Get away from my man, April wanted to shout. But she knew enough to keep her mouth shut. Flirting was de rigueur at these parties, she realized, and fairly advanced petting went by the name of flirting. She would be eternally labeled gauche if she made her objections known.
“Hell of a way to spend an evening,” Margo Long said. “I’d rather stay home with a good man and wear out a set of bedsprings. But here I am, damn it. I think I’ll go find a drink.”
She got up abruptly and headed across the room to the bar. April turned to Frank Evans. “If she doesn’t like these parties—”
“Then why does she come here?” Frank smiled sadly. “Because there’s no place else for her to go, I’d say. Don’t let her fool you, April. She talks a good game but she doesn’t hate the party as much as she makes out. It’s a pose with her. She dislikes the party to a degree, and I suppose she loathes most of the people here. But she’d much rather come over to Craig’s house than sit at home alone.”