“I’m all rested,” she said. “I slept in the car. So I guess I’ll go shopping.”
“You do that,” he said, and fell asleep at once. He didn’t even hear her leave the room.
When he woke up it was twilight, and the clock on the table beside the bed said seven-thirty. He’d been racked out for more than twelve hours.
Saralee wasn’t there. For an awful second, Vince was afraid she’d found somebody else already, somebody who could supply his own money and who maybe didn’t need as much sleep as Vince did. Maybe she’d found that platoon.
Then he saw the note beside the clock. He picked it up and read it. It was from Saralee, and it said she was starved. He was surprised to find she hungered for other things beside sex. Anyway, it went on to say that she had gone out for something to eat, and would be back around eight o’clock.
The mention of food reminded him that he, too, was starved. It was time for that steak.
He got up, dressed, and left a note for Saralee on the back of her note. “Can’t wait,” the note read. “I’m hungry enough to eat the furniture. I’ll be back in about an hour.” He propped the note up against the clock, and turned to leave.
Then he noticed all the packages on the chairs. Saralee had said she was going shopping, and it looked as though she’d been good to her word. Vince took a second to look in the packages, saw skirts and blouses and stockings and underwear and shoes. The kid had really gone wild with her stolen loot.
Stolen loot. Better not think about that. Better to think about food.
Vince took the elevator down, then wandered around Broadway for a while, finally stopping in at a luncheonette and having a too-dry hamburger and a too-bitter cup of coffee. Then it was time to go back to the hotel room.
But he didn’t feel like it, not just yet. He knew Saralee would be there now, and he knew she would be hungry again, and this time not for food. And he didn’t feel quite ready for another fast round with Saralee. He wasn’t up to it yet, that’s all there was to it.
So he wandered around some more. He strolled down West 69th Street to Columbus Avenue, headed up Columbus, and stopped in at the first bar he saw. He ordered a beer, and the bartender didn’t give him any trouble about his age, which was a relief. He sat and sipped at his beer and tried not to think things over. That wasn’t too difficult, since his stomach was acting up a bit. As soon as he put some beer down, the stomach let him know there hadn’t been enough food put in yet. The old hunger pains were coming back. So he’d just finish this one beer, find someplace better than the greasy spoon where he’d had the hamburger and coffee, and this time really have a meal.
It was a goofy introduction to New York. A lousy hamburger, and living on Saralee Jenkins’ money. No, not Saralee Jenkins’ money. Saralee Jenkins’ husband’s money.
That thought was enough to drive Vince from the bar.
Vince went back to Broadway, and this time found a halfway decent restaurant, where he had his steak, blood rare, and a side order of poached eggs, and a couple glasses of milk. He finished it all off with two beers. He’d had some idea of filling himself with protein, so he could go back and at least have an even chance in the coming battle with Saralee, but instead he ate too much and wound up logey and stuffed and half-asleep. So he had to go out and walk around some more, and smoke lots of cigarettes until he felt like braving the hotel.
Saralee was coming out the door of the hotel just as he was going in. They both stopped on the sidewalk, and she said, “Where’ve you been? I’ve been going frantic. I was just going looking for you.”
“I was pretty hungry,” he said. “I’ve spent all this time eating.”
“It’s nine o’clock, Vince,” she said.
“I was pretty hungry,” he repeated.
“Well,” she said, twining her arm with his and leading him back inside the hotel, “you’re here now, at any rate.” She pressed her hip against him as they walked. “And you know what we’ve got upstairs, don’t you?”
“No,” he said. “What?”
“A real bed,” she whispered.
He took a deep breath. Saralee had told him, that first time they’d been together, that once a night with a normal guy was enough for her. But apparently she’d been wrong. No wonder Bradley Jenkins hadn’t been able to keep her at home. Vince was beginning to doubt that anybody could keep Saralee Jenkins at home.
A stray ironic thought hit him. He’d started all this looking for a virgin. Instead, he’d found a nymphomaniac. How far a miss could you make?
Saralee wasn’t a miss, but he could make her. He winced at that pun, and allowed Saralee to lead him into the self-service elevator.
She was a busy little girl in the elevator, all over him like a heavy fog, and when the elevator stopped at their floor, he had to readjust himself before he could step out to the hall.
The interlude in the elevator washed away all his apprehensions. As they headed down the hall for their own room, he was almost as eager as she was. It was impossible to be as eager as she.
They got into the room, and she pirouetted in delight. “A bed!” she cried, and started pulling off clothes.
Vince joined her in the disrobing act, and then he joined her in bed. “This time,” she told him fiercely, “no warm-up. I’m ready to go right now. So you just come here.”
“Right you are,” he said.
Once was never enough for Saralee, that’s all there was to it. It had to be twice.
It was eleven o’clock before she fell asleep. Vince lay there awake a little while longer, thinking about things. He had a feeling he was going to enjoy the hell out of these four days.
But he also had the feeling that he’d be ready for a vacation by the time they were through.
Six
It was a very strange vacation.
There was only one place in New York where they spent any time, and that was the hotel. And there was only one place in the hotel where they seemed to spend any time, and that was the bed. There were the mornings, and there were the afternoons, and there were the evenings. Some girls, Vince knew, had a time clock built into a very important part of their anatomy. Some could only do it properly in the morning, and others in the afternoon, and most of them at night.
Saralee wasn’t the time clock type. She wasn’t even the time bomb type. She was built more along the lines of a hundred-gallon drum of nitroglycerine, always ready to go off.
In the past, when Vince had gotten started in the role of a dungaree Don Juan, he had learned that you could get pretty sick of the same woman. That had happened with Rhonda. It was great, even if it did leave him feeling thoroughly conned by her mock virginity. It was great, but after a while it was the same damned thing over and over, and then all of a sudden it wasn’t so great anymore.
Saralee was different. With Saralee it wasn’t the same damned thing over and over. Far from it. Saralee was imaginative, and inventive, and insatiable. They had started off in the good old way, and after a while Vince had taught her a few things that he had always considered very advanced, and then she had taught him a few things that were absolutely unbelievable. If he had heard them described he would have sworn they were biologically impossible, but they weren’t. Not with the two of them carrying through so successfully.
So he wasn’t bored with Saralee. You couldn’t be bored with Saralee, any more than you could be bored with sex in general. She just wasn’t the boring sort.
Exhausting... That was more the word for it.
Vince was exhausted. He ate eggs all the time, and plenty of nearly raw meat, and drank buckets of milk, and even bolted down a dozen raw oysters once in desperation. But it didn’t work. In fact, the more fit he was for horizontal games (or vertical games, depending upon Saralee’s particular state of mind at the moment) the more games they played.