“Well, I’m resigned to it. What do you want me to say?”
“I warn you that I’m in no mood for euphemisms.”
“Neither am I. I never am. I prefer to speak plainly, and I know very well what’s on your mind. After all, you’re quite obviously neither an innocent nor a pervert. You could hardly have taken Ivy to stay with you without learning what she is.”
“She told me in the beginning.”
“Really? How clever of Ivy. And knowing this, you allowed her to stay? You must be either an unusual man or a fool.”
“She was in trouble and had no place to go. I felt sorry for her.”
“I see. You’re compassionate. Genuine compassion is rare in this world, I think. However, don’t believe that Ivy will feel any gratitude for what you do for her, or that it will prevent her from hurting you any way she can if you offend her. You’ve let yourself get into a situation that could become pretty ugly. Or perhaps it already has. I haven’t asked you yet what happened to your face.”
“I cut it shaving.”
“All right. It’s your affair. But if you expect me to tell the truth, you should be willing to do the same.”
“The truth is, Ivy clawed me. The circumstances were probably not quite what you’re thinking, but let it go.”
“Whatever they were, she must have been disturbed by them.”
“She thought I was trying to make love to her, and how disturbing that would be is something you should know.” He thought he saw a glitter of fury in her eyes, but it was so quickly gone, if it had existed at all, that he couldn’t be sure.
“Do you think I’m that way? Did Ivy tell you I was?”
“Did she ever actually say? I don’t believe she did. Anyhow, it was implicit in your relationship.”
“Was it? Is it implicit in yours?”
“Although it’s really none of your business. I don’t mind telling you that that was the source of our trouble. It’s the reason she finally came to hate me. She hates me for rejecting her.”
“In that case, why did you let her stay?”
“Why did you take her in? After all, my responsibility is greater than yours. She’s my cousin. I knew her as a girl. She had no one else to turn to who could understand her and try to help her, and she was better off here than she would have been in some sordid place with her own kind.”
He had eaten little that day, only lunch, and the two martinis were having a strong effect. As if she knew this and approved it, or had perhaps planned it, she got up and mixed a third. When she sat down again beside him, her thigh was brushing his, and he waited for her to move out of contact, but she didn’t. She smiled and lifted her glass in a slight salute. He responded, and they drank together.
“Do you know something?” she said. “You’re a very attractive young man, and I suspect that you could be very nice if you chose to be. I’m glad you came to see me. It would be too bad if you were to have the wrong idea about me.”
“I’m not sure,” he said, “what the wrong idea is.”
He drained his glass and set it aside, as she did hers. Then, because he wanted to and because her words and expression seemed to invite it, he put his arms around her and kissed her, and her response was immediate and warm. Her body arched inward, her head fell back, and her lips parted slowly under his. When he released her and looked down into her upturned face, her eyes were open and clouded with desire, and she was breathing rapidly with excitement that could not possibly, he thought, be simulated.
“Was that a test?” she said with the slightest inflection of mockery. “Were you trying to find out?”
“Maybe.”
“If it was, it’s not enough. It proves nothing. Any man can kiss.”
“What would be enough?” he asked.
“I can show you. Would you like me to show you?”
Henry grinned. “Yes. Show me.”
A dark glint of feeling roiled up the depths of her eyes. Her red mouth curled and suddenly she slid close to him, pressing her body urgently against him. She put her moist, open mouth against his, grinding her lips back and forth in a frenzy of passion, while her hands clawed at his back and his flanks.
Somehow the zipper of her dress was down and she drew away from him long enough to clamber out of it. A twist of her hand behind her back freed her bra so that the burgeoning richness of her full, rounded breasts came free. Then she put his hand to her breast, surging against him. When his hand groped for the elastic of her panties she arched her body to help him so that all of the glowing white riches of her flesh were yielded up to him.
There was fire in her, fire in her hard-nippled breasts, her quivering loins as she pulled him down upon her. He was fumbling to get out of his own clothes now and when he was free of them she crushed her body against him, writhing in a hoarse, panting rhythm. She was all eager, yearning, devouring flesh and her hands upon his chest and thighs and belly were bold and daring, seeking to rouse him to a frenzy that matched her own.
“I’ll show you,” she breathed once, as she pulled her moist, avid mouth away from his. “This way... And this... And this...”
Her surrender was so complete and so adept that Henry did not fully understand until later that it was not surrender at all, but aggression, and that the suspiciously easy seduction of a practical stranger was hers, not his, and that its purpose was deception, not pleasure.
Chapter 9
Ivy lay very still in Henry’s bed and stared at the ceiling with bright, dry eyes. There was a large brown stain that began at one upper corner of the room and extended diagonally toward the center. The stain was long and rather narrow, with an irregular perimeter reminiscent of a rough coastline on a map, and it looked, in fact, somewhat like the Italian boot. Tracing the perimeter of the stain with meticulous attention to every salient and recession, and exercise in careful diversion which was helpful in avoiding disintegration, Ivy could hear Henry descending the stairs to the street, the heaviness of his tread being a kind of index to the degree of his anger. In Ivy there was no anger. There was only the deep and acceptant despair that comes with definitive defeat in a moment of hopefulness. She thought that it would be a great relief to cry, but crying was not possible.
She continued to lie in bed for almost another hour, and as she lay there she tried to decide where she should go, but she knew all the while that there was really nothing to decide and nowhere in particular to go, and that all she was doing, or wanted to do, was to delay doing anything decisive whatever. In time, however, the self-deception could no longer be sustained, and so she got up and took a bath and dressed slowly and began to consider what she should take with her when she left. She did not wish to carry both of the bags she had brought, and it required some time and thought to decide which of the two she should take, the larger or the smaller, but finally she chose the smaller with the qualification that she would also pack the larger and leave it here to pick up later.
Having made this decision she felt a sudden urge to hurry, to complete in all haste what must be done. Opening both bags, she gathered her possessions, deciding quickly whether each item was something she would need soon or not, and putting each in the large or small bag according to the decision. Her packing done, she left the smaller bag standing closed in the middle of the room and put the other one out of the way against a wall. Then she made Henry’s bed and folded the covers of her own, the sofa in the living room, after which she went systematically through both rooms, putting everything neatly in its place. This done, she took the twenty dollars from the chest drawer and put on her hat and coat and picked up the small bag and went downstairs to the street and walked away quickly without pausing or looking back.