They wound up at La Tete de Nuite, an expensive French restaurant in the east Sixties. Provencal murals decorated the walls and the waitresses wore abbreviated gamine costumes that stayed in good taste while revealing as much as possible of the girls, whose charms were definitely worth revealing.
The menu was entirely in French, which didn’t bother Johnny at all. He read it easily and ordered a shrimp cocktail, onion soup, and duck with orange sauce.
This was the result of another facet of his studying. Most evenings before he went to make the rounds of the pick-up bars he found a good restaurant which he’d never been to before. He had no more shame there over his ignorance than he had had at Brinsley’s with the clothing salesman. He asked the waiter the name of each entree, what it was, how it was pronounced. By now he could read menus in French, Spanish, German and Italian. He knew what each dish was and what it tasted like and how to order it — and he knew what wines went with what food.
Moira ordered lobster thermidor and he selected a dry chablis to go with their meal.
The meal was excellent. While they ate their chocolate eclairs and drank their steaming demitasse, Moira passed him a twenty under the table. He paid the waiter, left a good tip and pocketed the change. This, too, was standard operating procedure. He would just as happily have paid the tab himself, since he was able to afford it and knew he would get the money back from her. But she liked to pass him the money; it was another barely subtle reminder of their relationship. By giving him money she reinforced her position in the affair.
They left the restaurant and taxied back to her apartment. He put his arm around her in the back seat of the cab and she relaxed against him. He guessed that she would want to make love when they were inside the apartment. White wine almost always had an aphrodisiacal effect upon women.
He was right.
“Kiss me,” she said. He took her in his arms. She was tall but not as tall as he was, and she stood on the tips of her toes, pressing her mouth to his. Her mouth opened quickly and his tongue shot into it. Her mouth was warm, sweet from the wine and as he kissed her she ground her hips gently but sensually into his.
Now we switch, he thought.
That was more of the pattern. As soon as their relationship turned sexual their roles were reversed. He was supposed to be the aggressive male, she the submissive eternal female. It was an obvious reversal — he was not supposed to be the cave man, batting his mate over the head and dragging her off to his lair by her hair. Not quite.
Instead he took her and led her to the couch, where he kissed her some more and began the preliminary fondling of her breasts. She lay relatively passive in his arms, enjoying his kisses and caresses, and he told her how beautiful she was, how fine she was. The words came automatically from his lips and he wondered whether she heard them or whether they served solely as a kind of verbal background music for their activity. A little of both, he decided. A little of both.
Finally he raised her in his arms, stood up and carried her to the bedroom, stopping to kiss her passionately on the way. He was glad that she wasn’t heavy — as it was, it wasn’t much trouble at all to carry her to the bedroom. But some of the women he’d had would have given him a hernia.
He set her down in the bedroom and closed the door. Then they went into the next part of their ritual. She raised her arms high over her head and stood as motionless as a statue. She closed her eyes.
He stood before her. Briefly he ran his hands over her body. His hands lingered at her breasts and buttocks. She had large breasts, firm and pointed, but her buttocks were taut without an ounce of extra flesh.
Then he dropped his hands. For a moment he, too, stood motionless. Then he began to undress her.
He pulled the dress slowly over her head and folded it over the arm of a chair. He removed her half-slip, her bra, her garter belt and stockings, her panties. When he took off her shoes and stockings and panties she stood poised on first one foot and then the other, so that he could get the clothing off. When she was naked he stood and looked at her, then removed his own clothing as well.
Then he moved close to her again and began to caress her nude body. His hands took hold of her breasts and squeezed gently. He touched her thighs. He kissed her throat.
C’mon, he thought. Get going. It’s your cue.
She knew her cue. Her eyes opened and she gave a little sigh as she fell into his arms. She pressed her mouth to his while her hands amused themselves. She began to breathe very hard and very fast all at once, and he bent over to scoop her up easily in his arms and deposit her gently on top of the bed. He held her with one hand while he pushed the covers away. Then he laid her down and stretched out beside her.
There was one good thing, he thought. The ritual was pure baloney phoney from start to finish, but it had one definite point in its favor. For some odd reason the little game the two of them played made him responsive as a Texas steer. The simple act of undressing her while she stood like a statue got him excited. He didn’t need to work at it.
He took her breast to his lips and kissed hard. He ran his hand down over her flat stomach. She was all smooth and clean and she smelled of a pleasantly subtle perfume. He fondled her to heighten the flow of excitement that was coursing through her.
At first, he thought, he’d been a little in awe of Moira. More than a little. She was a new type of woman for him, something a little bit special, and he’d been fascinated by her.
That was changed now.
She was still exciting, but now he could see through her and that changed a lot of things. When you could see the uncertainty and foolishness in a woman you couldn’t set too great a prize on her. She had clay feet just like all the other statues. She was more fun than most, but she was still just a client, just a field to be plowed.
Now it was time to plow.
Hang on, he thought. This one will knock your hat off.
And then it began. She was violently excited now and she wasn’t making any attempt to contain the fury of her passion. Her nails raked his back and her teeth were active on his shoulder.
And then things began to happen faster and faster, and she thrashed violently on the expensive bed, and even the expensive bed groaned in metallic protest at the fury of their violent love-making.
Faster.
The world began to dip and sway, and the dominant woman submitted to violent male activity, and he was on top now, he was the boss, he was the king, and it was happening, happening.
They crested and the whole world went crazy.
They were sitting up in bed, smoking cigarettes and reading. He was reading a copy of Partisan Review. She was leafing through House Beautiful and making sarcastic comments.
Suddenly she put down the magazine.
“I can’t take it,” she said. “The pace. I’m going to tell that Sutter bitch to cool her heels for a while. I’m going to get out of this damned town for a week. No, make that two weeks.”
“Where are you going?”
“On a vacation,” she said. “I don’t know where. Vegas, maybe. I was there once for a weekend. I got my divorce in Reno but I drove to Vegas once. It’s a good town. You throw your money away and relax and enjoy it.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Two weeks,” she said. “And maybe I’ll run it to three if I feel like it. Ever been there?”
He shook his head.
“Want to come along?”
Chapter Six
He played it cool but not too cool. He knew that if he acted as enthusiastic as he felt he’d be weakening his position. She valued articles in accordance with her difficulty in obtaining them. So he played hard to get — but not too hard.