He was saying that he thought we were all entitled to a drink. He tended to think of alcohol as a reward. I didn’t know if I could hack the taste of that crud just then.
Aileen said, “Honey, I think just a short one, unless you’re out of film.”
“There’s plenty,” he said. “Why?”
“I thought like one more roll, that’s all. I didn’t do anything oral.”
“I didn’t know you were going to do that,” he said warily. “I didn’t even think of it.”
“Well, it would be a case of faking it, really.”
“I suppose,” he said. “Son of a bitch, if they don’t go for that stuff. You sure you want to?”
“Oh, I don’t mind.”
I went over and sat on the couch while he took a quick pull on the brandy bottle and then disappeared beneath the black cloth and went to work loading the camera with a fresh roll. Aileen finished her cigarette and came over and sat down next to me.
I reached for her.
“Not just yet,” Gregor called out cheerfully. “I’ll be set in a sec, keed.”
“Aileen,” I whispered, “you’ll drive me up the walls.”
“Poor baby.”
“Look, I—”
She ran her tongue over her lips. This was a little trick of hers that didn’t exactly leave me cold when she did it first thing in the morning over instant coffee and cold cornflakes. Now it was absolutely criminal.
“You’ll like this,” she said.
“Ready to roll,” Gregor said.
“God in Heaven,” I said.
“Lie down, baby.” Her mouth was inches from my ear, blowing into it as she whispered. “Poor baby has had a mean night, huh? Mama will fix.” Her hand moved over my chest and belly. My stomach contracted violently. “Ticklish,” she murmured, blowing into my ear some more. The hand went on its merry way and grabbed. “Got small again,” she said. “But Mama’s gonna fix that, too.”
Click!
I really felt like a baby, too. I lay there like a lump and felt so small and weak and helpless and so goddamned young I wanted to curl up and die. She kissed me on the mouth, and then on the throat, and then her mouth moved downward so that her long blond hair brushed over my face and chest and stomach.
Click!
I had my eyes closed, and my body was sort of stretched out the way you do when you float on your back in a swimming pool. I had that same kind of buoyant feeling, too.
She kissed it, and her hands did things, and the camera made stupid clicking noises, and the hard core was harder than ever. I could feel the blood in my head and I thought I was going to have a brain hemorrhage and die.
She did a million teasing things with her mouth. But there wasn’t any contact to speak of. Just her warm breath.
Click!
Breathing in and out, in and out.
Moistly.
Oh God, I thought, oh God, don’t stop, for Christ’s sake don’t stop, whatever you do, don’t stop, just another minute, just another second, God, don’t stop—
Click!
And she stopped.
Since then I must have tried a thousand times to figure out why she bothered getting started if she wasn’t going to finish it. I mean, face it, it’s not as though she was some drippy virgin who didn’t realize that a man had to finish what he started or get horribly frustrated. Everybody knows this; anybody old enough to read Ann Landers’ column can figure it out. And Aileen was a long ways from a virgin. She may not have slept with anybody but Gregor since they were married, but I’m sure she must have had a few hundred men before he came around.
So she obviously knew what she was doing, but then why do it? She wasn’t a cruel person. She was nice, really, and she seemed to like me.
I mean, I could understand why she felt compelled to perform the act without any actual contact. That is, I could understand it about as well as I could understand why it was all right for us to pet like crazy but not all right for me to get into her. Which is to say that I didn’t understand and it didn’t make any sense but at least I knew the basic rules of the game.
But if she was going to leave me high and dry, why start anything in the first place? What was the point? Gregor had been ready to pack up and go. So had I. And she hadn’t wanted to have anything done to her. I was just supposed to lie there and leave everything to her, and I did, and it hadn’t ended quite the way I had hoped.
I lay there like an overwound watch, going ping ping ping inside and staying drawn hellishly tight. I couldn’t talk or think or breathe or see. I didn’t know where she was, but I knew where she belonged. In Hell, with a hot poker rammed up her behind.
And then I heard her voice, talking, not to me, but beyond me, to Gregor:
“Honey, baby, I have to give him some relief. He’s a kid, you know, and I guess it was all too much for him. The excitement. Being with me, and in front of the camera and all, and going through the motions, and the different positions, and then this last thing. I think it stopped being just an act for him, and he got very excited, and if you look at him now, you can see how tense he is.”
“So?”
“I have to do something.”
“Well, I don’t—”
“I wouldn’t be unfaithful.”
“Because I wouldn’t like that, keed.”
“And I wouldn’t do it.”
“I should hope not. I should just sonofabitching hope you wouldn’t.”
Her hand on my leg.
“But this would be just like a massage. I knew a girl who was a nurse in a hospital—”
“That’s the best place to be a nurse.”
“—and she told me how they used to give the patients rubdowns all the time, and if they got excited they would give that a rubdown, too, and that isn’t wrong, do you think?”
“I suppose not.”
Her hand gripped me.
“Of course it isn’t,” she said, her voice softer than ever now, and now she was talking less to him than to me, and her words moved in a jerky rhythm as her soft sure hand moved up and down, up and down, pumping up and down.
“Of course... it isn’t... wrong... baby... baby... it’s all right... all right...”
Not like this, I thought. Not with your hand, and not in the middle of the air, not like this.
“It’s all right... it’s all right... it’s all right... it’s all right...”
Oh, yeah, I thought. Okay. Sure, sure, oh.
“It’s all RIGHT!”
It was all right, all right.
Chapter five
The next day Gregor didn’t bother doing his sidewalk photographer number. He went off to see Mark Somebody to turn a suitcase full of dirty pictures into as much money as possible.
“Soon as I get back, keed,” he said, “you get your twenty-five smackers.”
“Fifty,” I reminded him.
“Oh, sure. My mistake.”
“Sure.”
As soon as he was out the door, I went into the kitchen and cornered Aileen. She asked me how come I wasn’t working that morning. I said that a photographer’s assistant didn’t have much to do when the photographer wasn’t on the job. There wasn’t much point in me handing out the little yellow cards if there was nobody on hand to take the pictures.
“I meant one of your other jobs,” she said.
“Well, I didn’t think I’d bother today. I earned fifty bucks last night.”