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It was nice.

Real nice.

But there was a price to pay.

Next morning while we were having eggs and toast, Bruce started to talk about babies.

“You didn’t get me pregnant, Bruce,” I assured him while I poured coffee. “You’ve heard about the pill haven’t you?”

“A girl shouldn’t take those things,” he frowned as he buttered his toast. “It ain’t natural. Women were made to have babies.”

In the light of morning I saw Bruce for what he really was. A handsome guy, very sweet, but too serious. One of those throwbacks who try to cling out-dated morals.

I wanted to get rid of him.

Not that I didn’t like him, because I really did. A girl could easily fall in love with a nice guy like Bruce. Yet that’s a price I wasn’t ready to pay. All that stuff about families and marriage and bills was too much for me in the early light of day. So I just let him talk while we ate breakfast, and after that I made him give me a little fuck to start the day off right, and then I told him I had things to do today.

“But I wanted you to come and meet my family!” he protested.

That was a scene I could do without. So I told him I already had plans for the day. Except Bruce wasn’t that easy to get rid of. I finally convinced him to leave and told him I’d see him at work on Monday.

“Can’t I call you tomorrow, Martha?” he asked at the door. “You could go to church with my family and me.”

“Some other time, Bruce. I was going out to Coney Island tomorrow.”

When he was gone it felt like a weight had been lifted from my heart. Sure it was swell to have a guy all hopped up over you. It was flattering and the warmth of his desire made you feel valuable and needed. Yet it was smothering. Like I couldn’t breathe.

So I went back to my friends at the office, the ones who lived in this century of freedom and pleasure.

At first that wasn’t easy. Bruce hounded me every day and he carried on in front of my desk until I was embarrassed, so I finally asked Doreen to do something. She carried a lot of weight around the office and she used it quickly. She got Bruce’s supervisor to threaten him with his job if he didn’t leave me alone. Maybe that was cruel, but I couldn’t stand his smothering devotion, and the sooner he left me alone the sooner he would find a girl who believed his sunshine and roses routine.

Yet even a bad experience sometimes brings a measure of pleasure, and that’s what happened because of Bruce. As I mentioned he worked in the mail room and there were a lot of other people in that huge place. Gossip is strong in an office building so word got around about me and Bruce. Some of the workers came to take a peek at me, like I was some kind of freak who caused their co-worker all this heartache. And that’s how I got invited to the gang-bang.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Of course they didn’t call it that, but happy people know what’s happening, so I agreed to go along. I tried to get Doreen to come with us only she had a party set for her place in the Village, and Madelaine had a date to go up to one of those Harlem nightclubs, so I asked Jenny to come with me.

“I don’t like to go to parties alone,” I told her. “And we’ll have fun.”

Jenny had pimples on her face and she wore braces on her teeth which made her look fifteen.

But she was older than me and none of the men at the office paid much attention to her, so she was eager to go to the party.

“Where’s it gonna be, Martha? You sure they’ll let me come with you?”

“They asked me to bring some extra girls, Jenny. We’re supposed to be there by ten.”

“That’s kinda late, isn’t it?”

“That’s what Harlin told me.”

Harlin McAllister was on the board of directors for the company, and he had invited me through some of the people in the mail room. I’d never really met Harlin, but I did have a lot of respect for him. He was a handsome man about fifty and he wore a Van Dyke beard, white like his hair. He was always pleasant when he came through our offices and he never looked down on the workers the way some of the other big-wheels did. We were supposed to be at his place at ten like I told Jenny, and I was all excited about it. Harlin lived on Fifth Avenue in one of those expensive apartment buildings, and I had never seen the inside of one. I’d have given Harlin a little screw just to walk in the lobby of that sumptuous place.

Jenny and I took a cab up Fifth Avenue instead of tiding the subway. We told the doorman that Mr. Harlin was expecting us, only he didn’t believe it. Until he made a call upstairs and was told to let us in.

“So there!” Jenny stuck out her tongue at the doorman.

Inside the great white building even the walls looked like they cost a fortune. Magnificent paintings, thick red drapes, and a carpet that let you sink up to your ankles.

There was a desk clerk all dressed up like a jockey, and a security man who talked to us like we were meat being delivered at the wrong entrance. Still they told us to ride up to the sixteenth floor, which we did. There were already a dozen people in the place and ten minutes after we got there some others started to arrive.

“What would you like to drink, girls?” a maid in a black dress with a little white apron asked us.

We each got a champagne cocktail, but it didn’t taste as good as gin, and I was a little put out that Harlin didn’t come over to welcome us. He was there all right, gabbing with other guests, but I suppose we were no more important than his other visitors. So Jenny and I walked around the place with our mouths open. I just couldn’t believe that such a magnificent place existed in the middle of dirty Manhattan. There must have been twelve rooms in the apartment, with stairs right in the center of the main living room, and my wages for a year wouldn’t have paid for one of the chairs. I wondered how a girl might go about staying here, but then I realized Harlin didn’t have to keep anybody as a pet. He could have a thousand women any lime he wanted, most of them by far more beautiful than I would ever be.

That’s when I really began to take notice of some of the women at the party. They wore gowns of breathtaking perfection, all shimmering with sequins, and they had enough diamonds among them to buy Central Park.

I felt like a duck in the middle of peacocks!

“Maybe we better get the hell, out of here!” I told Jenny. “We must look like oddballs to them!”

Yet Jenny was too fascinated by this display of wealth to move an inch, and to tell the truth, I was overawed myself. So we drank some more of that sour-tasting champagne, and we talked to some of the guests. They were all quite pleasant and even when they looked at our dime-store dresses they didn’t take offense. That made me feel better until the champagne started to work on me, and then I didn’t give a shit if I was in gunny sack.

Still Harlin hadn’t spoken to us. I could hear him talking with a group of guys about stocks and bonds and the price of silver. I wondered what the fuck that had to do with us.

It must have been close to midnight when they let their hair down. Come to find out these people with all that money were bored with life. They needed people like me and Jenny to keep in touch with reality. “Going slumming is what one of the women called it. I didn’t really react very, nice to her assessment of us, but she was truthful, and she was a lovely woman, so I pretended it didn’t bother me.”

Still, it was a weird way they got things going. That maid in the black dress was told something by Mr. Harlin, so she got a little hand-held gong and stood in the middle of the room.

“It’s time for peek-a-boo!” she giggled as the gong vibrated loudly.

It made me shudder. All talk of stocks and bonds stopped suddenly, lights were turned on brighter, and people began to disrobe. All those expensive gowns were dropped on the floor like so many rags while people began to paw each other in a sort of rehearsed manner. I got the feeling they had been doing this to each other for a thousand years, and maybe they had, but it left me with a feeling of disgust. There wasn’t the usual fierce sex involved here– more like a mechanical process.