“I’m waiting, lover.”
“Isn’t there any light here?” I asked.
“The electricity has been turned off.”
“How about a candle?”
“There are none.”
“Well, wait a minute. I’ll light a match.”
“Please don’t!” Her voice came quickly. “I’m shy,” she explained, “embarrassed. I’ve never done anything like this before.”
“Now don’t you worry,” I soothed her. “Everything will be all right”.
“But no lights! Please!” she insisted.
“All right,” I agreed. “But listen, Denise, is there some place I could wash up? I’m awfully grimy from that climb.”
“Through that doorway. To your right. There’s a shower.”
There was no hot water. There was no soap. I shivered under a dribble of ice water and scraped the mud off my carcass with my fingernails. Then, ever mindful of the etiquette of lovemaking, I bit off my fingernails.
“Is there a towel?” Dripping, I stood in the doorway to the bedroom and peered vainly into the darkness.
“Oh, dear me, I’m afraid not.”
Grumbling to myself, I went back into the bathroom. I found a box of kleenex there. It took the whole box, but I finally managed to pat myself fairly dry. I took a look at the toilet where I’d dumped the used kleenex and decided against flushing it. Then I went back into the bedroom again.
“Where are you?” I crooned into the darkness.
“I’m right here, lover,” came the singsong reply.
I groped my way to the bed. My hands closed over a pile of sheet. I lowered myself and crawled under it. Tenderly, I kissed her. My tooth snagged on one of her toenails. She could have cut them!
“You’re upside-down.” The words came with a giggle from the other end of the bed.
“Then I’ll just have to work my way up.” One of the things my years with O. R. G. Y. have taught me is that no matter what happens, a lover must never lose his savoir-faire.
I kissed her ankle, and then her calf. Surprise! A patch of unexpected hair tickled my lips. I would have expected more in the way of personal hygiene from a noblewoman.
She was wearing a shorty nightgown. Now my hand slid under it and up her thigh. It was a very cold thigh, and a lot thicker than what I’d seen of her legs earlier would have led me to expect.
“Ahh!” She sighed and wiggled. “You excite me!”
Well, I supposed that was good to know. I slid my hands up the sides of her legs and kneaded her hips. They needed kneading. There was a lot more flab there than the dress she’d been wearing that afternoon had betrayed.
I slid upwards and bestowed a kiss on her belly. It was so ample and soft that for a moment I thought I’d stuck my head in the pillow by mistake. Hastily, I pushed onward and upward, my lips seeking the tip of her breast. I found it much lower than I’d expected. I groped for the other breast with my hand. Somehow I got under it, and when I raised my hand, it flopped over and rested on her shoulder.
I groped to return it to its former position. But it wasn’t easy to relocate. It was pitch-black in the room. There wasn’t the slightest bit of night light coming through the window. Heavy clouds had obscured the moon and stars. And now there was the rumbling of thunder and the first sounds of rain falling outside.
Going by my sense of touch, I continued up the tricky escarpment of her body. Like a bloodhound, I nuzzled from navel to cleavage to neck to ear. She certainly had large ears! I supposed I hadn’t noticed before because her hair had hidden them.
Her hair! Where was it? Kissing her on the lips, my hands holding either side of her head, I suddenly realized that my touch had encountered no sign of the long tresses. Then the kiss itself distracted me from the consideration. My tongue was fighting a losing battle with teeth that seemed cemented together. Testing, I probed a bit higher. Ahh! There was a space here for the dip of passion.
As I took advantage of it, however, another realization dawned on me. My tongue had not penetrated between two sets of teeth; it had dipped between an upper plate and her gum! The teeth were false! She was wearing a plate! And the upper denture had fallen down!
That did it! Something was definitely limburger in the State of Denmark. Nothing added up to the picture of the Countess which my eyes had committed to memory before. I hopped out of bed and headed back to the bathroom where I’d left my clothes.
“Where are you going?”
“Call of nature,” I lied. “I’ll be right back.”
And I did come right back. With me I brought a pack of matches from my pants pocket. I stood directly over her and lit one. The light flared up, and before it was extinguished, I got a good look at her face.
It was not the Countess Denise La Roche! It was not the face of anyone that any man, except the most deprived and undiscriminating satyr, would willingly take to pillow and mattress. It was a face to drive a man to everlasting continence!
With my second match I lit a candle on the nightstand beside the bed. I confronted the scabrous old crone revealed by the candlelight. “Now what the hell’s the big idea?” I demanded. “Who are you?”
“A lady of the night,” she told me in a geriatric voice.
“You’ve got to be kidding!”
“Come on, chéri. Get back into bed.” She batted her rheumy eyes at me.
I ignored the suggestion. “What are you doing here?” I asked angrily.
“Plying my trade.” She held up one breast and waved it at me. It looked like a dead, one-eyed fish.
“At your age?” Man from O. R. G. Y. or no, I was shocked.
“That’s no way to talk,” she whined. “Haven’t we had enough of employment discrimination against those over forty?”
“Over forty!” I exploded. “Over sixty would be more like it!”
“So what? Is that any reason why I should be kept from working? A person isn’t an orange. You can’t eat the fruit and throw the rind away!”
“Maybe.” I tried my best to be placating. “But when fruit is overripe—”
“How do you know until you taste it?” She arched a varicose leg at me and wriggled.
“And if there’s blight?” I had noticed certain suspicious scabs on her body.
“Don’t be nervous, boy. In these days of sulfa drugs, it’s no worse than a bad cold.”
“I’m allergic to sulfa drugs,” I told her. “And I always avoid catching colds when I can. Now tell me, who put you up to this?”
“I don’t know his name,” she shrugged. “But he was a real gentleman and he paid very well for your pleasure. He must be a very good friend of yours.”
“Yeah,” I told her drily. “There isn’t anything he wouldn’t do for me --including undermining the whole local campaign to stamp out VD. Was he a tall, sunburned fellow with a face like moon craters and an Australian accent?”
“Australian, or English, or American—I couldn’t tell for sure. But that sounds like him.”
Snoopleigh! That bastard! I might have known! I headed back to the bathroom and scrambled into my clothes.
“Where are you going?” she whined. “You can’t just leave me here like this! Don’t you have any consideration for age?”
“Too much to desecrate it with lust,” I told her, closing the door behind me.
Snoopleigh! Who else but he would have pulled a stunt like this! A venereal old whore! It was dirty pool, all right. I cursed him all the way down that muddy hill to the road where I’d left my car.
That climb down was even worse than the trip up had been. It was raining buckets by now, and when I wasn’t knee-deep in slime, it was because I’d tripped and buried my nostrils in it. Even so, it wasn’t until I reached the road itself that I appreciated the full extent of Snoopleigh’s perfidy. The air had been let out of all four tires on the car I’d rented!
I had no choice but to start slogging down the road on foot. If wishes were horses, then Snoopleigh would have spent the rest of his days riding on one mangled testicle. Even the hitch I eventually caught didn’t diminish the tortures I vowed to inflict upon him if I ever got the chance.