“You make sure Greg gives you the whole fifty, Chip. Sometimes he tries to chisel people.”
“He already tried.”
“Well, you get the whole fifty. You worked for it.”
“Yeah.”
I wanted to reach for her but I didn’t quite know how to go about it. You can’t imagine how goddamned awkward the whole thing was. I mean, here we had gotten in this wild tangle the night before, with results that I told you about in probably too much detail already, so we won’t go into that all over again, and now here it was morning and she was in the kitchen, wearing an apron and rinsing out coffee cups, and her whole attitude left me feeling that last night had never happened, that it was another dream of mine and when I woke up I would have a damp sticky sock in the bed with me. I mean, I knew it wasn’t a dream, but it might as well have been.
“Chip?”
“What?”
“Are you angry with me?”
I looked at her. “Why should I be?”
“Because I teased you last night.”
“Well, I knew what I was getting into.”
“What you weren’t getting into, you mean.”
“Well.”
“You’re not angry?”
“No.”
“I’m glad.” She grinned quickly. “Because I like you a lot, Chip.”
This time I did reach for her, and she moved her head aside, and I missed. I suppose practically any woman can make practically any man feel like an idiot, but it seemed to me that either she was particularly good at it or that I was particularly inept.
She said, “Last night was business, Chip.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“I’m not going to say I didn’t enjoy it.”
“You enjoyed it, huh?”
“Why, of course I did. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with enjoying your work, do you?”
“I guess not.”
“I should certainly hope not.” She put the dish towel on the drainboard and walked past me to the living room. There wasn’t an abundance of room in the kitchen, and she managed to brush against me pretty good on the way, giving me the full treatment with that round rear end of hers. She got to me, all right. I suppose I’m pretty easy to get to, generally speaking, but old Aileen had a real knack for it as far as I was concerned.
I followed her into the living room. She went around straightening things up and emptying ashtrays, talking as she went. “There’s nothing wrong with enjoying any kind of work,” she went on. “I wouldn’t pose for those pictures if I didn’t get a certain amount of kick out of it. I like to think of all those people looking at pictures of me and getting excited. Sometimes I stop and think that there are men all over the country looking at naked pictures of me and playing with themselves. Having sex with me in their minds. And couples looking at different pictures of me, either alone or with someone, and getting so hot and bothered that they want to make love. When I think about that sort of thing I get a very strange feeling.”
“Sure,” I said.
She put an ashtray back on a tabletop and turned to look at me. “Just think of all the people who will look at those pictures of the two of us,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Do you like the idea?”
“I don’t know. I got bothered by that before. I mean, I thought somebody might recognize me, but then I thought that I didn’t have anybody to care one way or the other. If some jerk I went to some school with saw it, well, what do I care? You know, let him envy me, let him eat his heart out. If I had any family it might be different, I guess.”
“Poor baby. All alone in the world.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“I called you that last night.”
“I know.”
She crossed to the television set, switched it on, collapsed neatly on the couch. My couch. She patted the cushion next to her, and I remembered how she had given the same invitational pat to the green couch in the studio last night. I felt lightheaded and shaky.
I pretended not to notice the invitation. “I think I’ll have another cup of coffee,” I told her. “You want one?”
“I’ll make them.”
“No, stay there,” I said. “I, uh, I need the exercise.”
She was still sitting in the same spot when I brought back the two cups of coffee. She said, “You know, Chip, that was fun last night.”
“Here’s your coffee.”
“For you, too.” She put the cup down next to mine on the coffee table. “We could have a lot of fun, you know. There are lots of times like this morning when Gregor is out and I’m home all alone. If you didn’t try to force things, we could have a real good time.”
“What kind of a real good time?”
“Like last night. Except without anybody watching or snapping pictures.”
“And without finishing what we started.”
She raised her eyebrows. “You finished, didn’t you? I spent half an hour wiping the floor. If that wasn’t what you would call finishing—”
“You know what I mean.”
She put her hand on my cheek. “Didn’t you get your kicks last night, baby?”
“I wanted to do it the right way.”
“There’s no right way, honey. Sex may be a game but there’s no yo-yo keeping score. Whatever turns you on, that’s the right way.”
“I never got laid in my life, Aileen.”
I turned away as I said this. I felt excited and happy and miserable all at the same time, and all tied in knots. She had my hand in both of hers and was petting it.
“I know that, Chip.”
“It’s pretty obvious, huh?”
“Well, reading between the lines of what you said. It’s a big thing for you, huh? Being all hung up about being a virgin.” I nodded.
“Being a virgin, you know, is something everybody is and something everybody gets over sooner or later. Even I was a virgin once. You may find that hard to believe—”
“Cut it out, will you?”
“Hey.” I turned and looked at her. She gave me the wise grin, and some of the tension went out of me. “Now listen a minute, baby,” she said. “We can have a little fun, if you want, or we can just let it stay nice and loose between us, if you’d rather have it that way, but one thing not to do is be so serious about everything, because that’s nothing but a big bring-down.”
I nodded again. “But why can’t we—”
“Because we can’t. Because that’s where I draw the line. That’s for Greg and nobody else. Look, if all you want to do is stick it in, you can go out and find a pro. You’re getting fifty dollars from Greg. You’re a rich man. If you want to just get on top of some syphilitic pig and get rid of your precious cherry, all you have to do—”
“You know what I want.”
“Uh-huh, baby, but I also know what I want. And that’s some nice tender sweetness from my baby, and you don’t have to worry, I won’t tease, I won’t leave you frustrated. You’ll come, honey, and so will I, and it’ll be very nice, just leave everything to me.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“What’s to say?” She laughed deep in her throat. “Come here,” she said. “Do something brilliant, like kissing me.”
Do you have any idea how many ways there are to do it without really doing it?
Neither did I.
There’s just no end to the possibilities. There were just three rules to the game — or one rule, actually, that closed three doors to me. What it boiled down to, really, was that I couldn’t enter her. (With what she still liked to call my hard core, that is. Other things, yes.) I guess there’s precedent for this. In the legal definitions of rape and sodomy and other nice things like that, the dividing line is that same line Aileen used. Penetration. If you don’t get in, the argument goes, then you haven’t really Done Anything Wrong.