“Ugh! It’s just awful…”
“You don’t have to tell me, Monica. I’ve had six babies so far. It’s just the way it is here. It’s better for the future.”
“I don’t know how you could’ve done it six times!”
Cassandra answered dreamily. “You just close your eyes and think nice things, Monica. You pretend you’re with someone else, someone handsome and strong and sweet and—”
“Someone normal!” Monica upheld her complaints. “Not all girls do it their way.”
“No, but their way keeps us in their favor, like the doctor says.”
Monica seemed to be near tears. “God, why can’t I have a real man just once? Sometimes I’m tempted to leave.”
“Shh! Don’t talk like that!” chided Cassandra. “We both know what happens to girls who try to leave…”
I couldn’t have been more bewildered as I listened to the arcane discourse…
“I better check the trap,” said Cassandra, and she hopped down into chest-deep water. She was wading out toward the makeshift buoy. Meanwhile, Monica stood up to stretch, hands behind her back. She did so turning, which afforded me a side-glance of her physique. She bore a stunning, willowy beauty in her youth, and couldn’t have been more than eighteen. Next she turned more, and was facing me as she continued to stretch. The shining black hair rose in a brief breeze off the water. She was an exotic sight, petite-breasted, long-legged, and flat-stomached. I meant to turn away, for my inadvertent glimpse of her seemed invasive, but then Cassandra returned. She climbed up the pier’s ladder to the deck, hoisting with her a small wire trap filled with crayfish. Unlike Monica, Cassandra was nine months pregnant if she was a day.
“Look, it’s full!” she enthused over the trap full of skittering things.
Monica came over. “Wow, that is a lot.” She tested the trap’s weight. “It must be ten pounds! We’ll have chowder for days!”
As I listened further, my closer attentions lapsed… and my hand slipped. I dropped my briefcase…
The sound was all too obvious; both girls snapped their inquisitive gazes in my direction. Could they see me? I didn’t move a muscle.
“I think someone’s there,” Cassandra suspected, then she brought a fretful finger to her lips. “God, I hope it’s not them…”
“Look! There!” Monica pointed directly at the stand of grass I hid behind.
“Is it…”
“No, it’s a man! A real man!” She strode naked off the pier. “Hey, wait! Come here!”
I grabbed my case, and slipped out.
“No!” wailed Monica. “Don’t go! Please! We can make you real happy! COME BACK!”
I had no intention of complying. My feet took me swiftly down the close path, and I could only hope that neither girl had seen enough of my face to recognize it later. In the distance, I heard Monica’s final grievance. “Oh, SHIT! He ran away!”
My pace did not abate until I was back at the Town Center and gratefully entering the Hilman House…
Secure in my room, I sat on the bed to regain my breath. I turned the RCA on, for music would remind me of normalcy, and I immediately relaxed to “Our Love,” by Tommy Dorsey. But this would be followed by the hourly news broadcast: a labor strike is ruled illegal by the Supreme Court, General Francisco Franco conquers Madrid with his fascist troops, a scientist named Fermi warns allied governments that a process now exists which can split atoms and thus harness a terrible destructive force. None of this news sounded hopeful; I switched it off.
The distraction I hoped for was sabotaged. What exactly HAPPENED today? I queried myself in some disillusionment. I tried with diligence to find a common logic in what I’d seen and heard but in the end failed. I could make no sense of it, but I considered that in my current expended and excited state, it would do me good to calm down to resort my thoughts. The day’s heat as well as the mad sprint had left me grimy and saturated with perspiration, so I had a cool bath in the private tub. I tried to clear my thoughts…
But a sudden fatigue left me drowsy even in the cool water. I drifted in and out of a half-sleep. Snippets of dreams harassed me: images of not only perplexity but also repugnance.
The man in the squalid house, deformed by some catastrophic arthritic symptom, unleashing wet, gushing invectives in no way intelligible, and then lashing at young Walter with that whip, or whatever it might have been.
And the two nude girls on the pier, one pregnant and then one evidently fearing pregnancy with an appalled resignation… Their cryptic words slipped in and out of my half-dreaming mind:
—it sickens me—their condition, I mean—
—so you’re not in the way yet?—
—they make me go—every night—until they’re sure!—
—sometimes they wind up like Paul… —
The words blended, then, with a razor-crisp recollection of their physical bodies, their gleaming nude beauty, their shimmering white skin, and their private feminine features so forbidden—and so wrong for me to have willingly looked upon—yet so exotic…
I may have slipped into a deep doze when these vivid images were singularly banished… by the image of Mary…
First, the loveliness of her face and simple honest manner, and even some of her remarks:
—a handsome, well-mannered gentleman like you? Never married?—
And then a devilish meld: my first captivating image of her working at Baxter’s slowly contorting itself into the image on the nefarious and wholly exploitative photograph I’d bought from the despicable Cyrus Zalen: Mary, laid out bare and pregnant and thrust-bosomed as the visual photographic fodder of degenerates…
The finality of that image shocked me from my doze, and I’m sure I audibly groaned. The sudden anxiety was one—I’m ashamed to say—of unquenched physical desire of the most sinful sort. It left me carnally evoked, and though in the past I’d always done better than a fair job of abstaining, the primal necessity, now, could not be extinguished. I need not go on in detail save to say that my frenzy forced me to do what solitary men are known to do in such moments of weakness, after which—steeped in shame—I prayed God’s forgiveness for this venal and most insolent offense to His grace…
Embarrassed after the fact, I languished in the claw-footed tub, but then my eyes shot wide—
I’d heard, with some distinction, a sudden and undeniable sound: the desperate hitching of a single breath into one’s chest. It was a lush, wanton sound, more than likely female.
I stared at the opposing wall to at once be inundated by the notion that I was being observed remotely. But if so…
From where exactly?
I jumped from the bath, donned a robe, and, like a paranoiac, actually began to examine the opposing wall and the ceiling over the tub. But no “peepholes” were chanced upon; minutes later, I frowned at myself for the foolish overreaction. The sound I thought I’d heard was most certainly a remnant from the dream-fragments and a fatigued body and mind. For goodness sake! I mocked. Who would be spying on me, of all people?
My new Pierce Chronograph wristwatch showed me my dinner appointment was fast approaching. I talced myself, brushed my teeth with a new product called Listerine Tooth-Cleaning Paste, then dressed in my evening suit. Though I was looking forward to dining with Mr. Garret, most of my thoughts focused on a different appointment: my luncheon date with Mary tomorrow. I oddly felt that I’d sullied her by my previous act of debasement and self-abusiveness, an absurd abstraction, but such was me. Nevertheless, I would not leave until I’d done one simple thing.