Well, maybe that’s what made Shirley so pleasant. She had this notion that women’s true happiness lay in pleasing a man, and while I’m feminist enough in principle to think this is entirely wrong, why, when it happens, it’s hard not to enjoy it.
Actually, I’ve never known anyone to enjoy every part of sex as much as Shirley does. She’ll lie on the bed, next to you, and just manage to touch hips, and wriggle and make little orgastic sounds even when it’s all over for a while—and smoke.
Well, she has bad points, too. She has to smoke afterward, and that means my undershirts pick up the odor. Maybe if she didn’t smoke, I wouldn’t ever allow six months to go between meetings.
«Did you just get here?» I asked.
«Just came! I was at my agent’s.» She had a way of dragging out the final syllable of each sentence and giving it a little singing sound that had put me off when I first met her—but it wasn’t affectation. She didn’t ever speak any other way, and after a while, I found it rather cute. It meant I could recognize her on the phone anytime without fail, however long it had been since I had heard her voice, and that pleased her. I could also tell if she were in a room even if I couldn’t see her. I could then walk right to her, and that pleased me.
She went on, «And then, when I came here, I didn’t have any cash, not seventeen and a half dollars cash, so I signed a personal check and before they would accept it I had to fill out a form that asked the details of every fragment of my autobiography.»
«Have you eaten, Shirley?»
«No-o-o, just some drinks and a few pretzels. Is there anything left to eat?»
There were still a few people lined up at the buffet tables, so I said there was, and offered to get it for her.
She said, «Oh, you wait here. You won’t know what I like.»
I’d be willing to take bets at any odds that I did, but I always believe in letting women have their way in the things that don’t count. It gives them a great deal of pleasure and makes them more amenable in the direction of the things that do count.
Shirley came back, looking good all the way. She was five feet eight inches tall and, in fact, when I described the kind of girl I liked some time back, I was thinking of Shirley. She’s just right, every part of her, even the reddish hair, which I think isn’t quite her color, because elsewhere it isn’t. She’s the kind of girl who—Well, I’ll tell you. She’s the kind of girl who doesn’t use perfume and smells good anyway, except her breath after she smokes.
I said, «No pastrami?» I knew she was big on pastrami (and that sometimes affected her breath, too).
«Was there pastrami?» Her brown eyes grew big and for a minute I thought she would allow her lower lip to tremble, but she didn’t. She just looked chagrined. «I guess it must be all gone.»
«Maybe not at the other buffets. Hold on and I’ll be right back.»
I managed to get some slices of pastrami and a few of corned beef, the last in the room, I think, and came back with them—which made me a hero in direct proportion to her love of the stuff, which was great.
«You’re a doll, Darius,» she said.
«If you play with this doll, honey, you know what will happen.»
«If anyone plays with that doll, honey.»
«Not at all,» I said, making the ritualistic protest neither believed nor meant to be believed. «No one, Shirley, except you. I padlock my zipper when you’re not around.»
«And it’s not padlocked now?»
«You better believe it isn’t.»
I let her eat undisturbed for a while. One of her good points is that she never bothers to pretend she doesn’t enjoy eating, and why should she? It’s my feeling that anyone who doesn’t enjoy something as intrinsically enjoyable as food isn’t going to enjoy any of the other good things of life—like sex. Or else, such a person would try to make sex replace food and then things would get too high-strung for me. I like sex to be relaxed and playful and I don’t want it to be a kind of horizontal fist fight.
After a while, I said, «Are you going to be autographing?»
«No-o-o-o,» she said. «Not in any big way. But my paperback people have asked me to stay in their booth for about an hour tomorrow afternoon and sign little cards announcing a boxed set of the Roswell Family series, and so of course I will. And then I thought I would come down tonight and get into the mood, you know. It was a good thing I did, because look what’s happened. You-u-u-u.»
«You’re not staying at the hotel, are you, Shirley?»
«At these prices? When I have a perfectly good apartment on the river?»
«Same place?»
«Of course, the same place.»
«Shirley?» We never asked after each other’s private lives.
What we did, when, and with whom, was out of bounds, but you had to make sure you weren’t on a collision course. I just had to say, «Shirley?» and she knew what I meant and she could easily say, «Too tired tonight.»
She might really be, or she might be at the wrong stage of her menstrual cycle, or she might be busy at her writing, or in the idealistic stage of a love affair. Who could tell?
Someone might be living with her.
But none of these things was true. She smiled her special sunshine smile (the effect on me was sunshine, anyhow) and said, «You’re welcome at the Jennifer suite.»
After a while she finished eating, and we walked about together, and she introduced me to some friends and then engaged them in animated conversation while I waited patiently.
14 SHIRLEY JENNIFER 9:00 P.M.
By nine o’clock we were ready to leave and, as far as I was concerned, I was not going to return.
Shirley was the first good thing that had happened all day and, in fact, she made up for the whole damned shooting match. I was in a wonderful humor when I left; all set to kiss the world, including the cigar-chewing taxi driver who drove us east (well, I would have asked him to remove the cigar first).
And yet, good thing or bad thing, everything pushed in the wrong direction that day—even Shirley. You wouldn’t think that Shirley, who packed more genuine desire to please people in her delicious skinny body than any two saints in the hagiology, should have laid down a big, flat flagstone of her own.
The fact was that, from the moment Shirley had walked into my field of view and arms, in that order, I had completely forgotten the ticket and key in my jacket pocket.
Giles and his errand ceased to exist for me.
I didn’t think of it during the taxi ride. I didn’t think of it when Shirley locked and double-locked the door, or when she prepared a little «drinkey-poo.» (I never said she was perfect. In addition to smoking after sex, she talks about drinkey-poos.) I had a little Bristol cream sherry, which I rather like on rare occasions—as when there’s a girl in view whose bra I know will be removed within fifteen minutes with the most delightful results.
I didn’t think of it when we sat on the couch with the lights low and no damned record-player going. (I don’t know who it was who decided that it’s romantic to keep music going at such times, but how can it help but get in the way? I remember once when a girl insisted on playing the «Camelot» album during our little romantic interlude, Richard Burton began to sing «How to Handle a Woman» at such an appropriate moment that we both burst out laughing. We had fun, but as sex it was second-rate.) I didn’t think of it when we were kissing on the sofa (kissing while standing I find a little clumsy—and once when I tried it standing on a phone book, I found it even clumsier) or undressing or getting into bed or lying next to her well over an hour later while she was smoking.