I had.
Joe unloaded both cameras and gave me the six rolls of film. We watched Brigid dress. Sammy went into the bathroom. He was still there when Brigid and I left.
Sitting in my pre-war 1940 DeSoto, her legs crossed and her skirt riding high on her naked thighs, Brigid smiled at me and said, “Next time we’ll shoot in a cemetery.”
“Yeah?” I could smell her perfume again in the confines of the car.
“Joe knows some gravediggers at Cypress Grove. Posing naked among the crypts, in front of a captive audience… alive and dead, will be so delicious.”
It didn’t take a fuckin’ genius to figure the one thing this woman didn’t have – was erotophobia. I still hadn’t figured her angle.
“When did Joe tell you about the gravediggers?”
She winked at me. “When I called him yesterday. That was when he told me he had his cousin lined up for today’s session.”
The rain came down hard now and the windshield was fogging as I tooled the DeSoto up Claiborne, away from the Negro section called Treme towards uptown where the rich lily-whites lived in their Victorian and Neo-Classical and Greek Revival homes. I cracked my window and felt the rain flutter my hair.
Brigid leaned against the passenger door and watched me. Her dress was so high I could almost see her ass the way she rolled her hips. She eye-fucked me all the way home, ogling me every time I looked her way.
Jesus, she was so fuckin’ pretty and so fuckin’ sexy and so fuckin’ nasty. She hired me to make sure no one raped her. That was the last thing a man would do with a woman like her. At least, that was the last thing I’d do. I’d want her to come to me, wrap those legs around me and fuck me back.
“Want to come in and meet my husband?” she asked when I pulled up in front of her white Greek Revival home on Audubon Boulevard.
“No, that’s OK.”
“He’s waiting for me to tell him what it was like.” She raised her purse and added, “And to develop the film.” Her husband had a built-in darkroom.
She pulled a white envelope from her purse and handed it to me. Cash. She always paid me in small bills. I actually got paid to watch her get naked and pose with her legs open. Tell me America isn’t a great country.
Brigid opened the door, stopped, moved across the seat and kissed me. I felt her tongue as she French kissed me in front of her big house and I thought I would come right there. I watched her hips as she walked away, barefoot up her front walk to the large front gallery with its nine white columns. Her high-heel dangling from her left hand, she turned back and waved at me and went in the front cut-glass door of her big house.
The rain came down in torrents that evening. I stood inside the French doors of my apartment balcony and watched it roll in sheets across Cabrini Playground here on Barracks Street. The oak branches waved in the torrent. The wind shook the thick rubbery leaves and white petals of the large magnolias. I looked beyond the playground at the slick, tilted roofs and red brick chimneys of the French Quarter. The old part of town always looked older in the rain.
I leaned against the glass door and looked down at my DeSoto parked against the curb. The glass felt cool against my cheek. The street wasn’t flooded yet at least. I took a sip of Scotch, felt it burn its way down to my empty belly, and closed the drapes.
I sat back on my sofa, in front of the revolving fan, and closed my eyes and remembered the first time we’d gone out to shoot pictures. It was in Cabrini Playground. It was a real turn-on watching Brigid sit in a tight red skirt, sit so Joe could see up her dress and take pictures of her white panties.
The second time was in City Park where she stripped down to her bra and panties to pose beneath an umbrella of oak branches. Two workers came across us and Brigid liked that. She liked an audience. Joe moved us to the back lagoon for some topless pictures, only some fishermen saw us and got pissed at the half-naked white girl with the black boy, so we had to bail out. My dick was a diamond-cutter again as I sat on my sofa. I finished my Scotch, readjusted my hard-on, knowing the only relief I could feel would be in a hot wash rag.
I closed my eyes and remembered the two brunette whores we came across just outside Rome, the day before I was wounded, Monte Cassino, 1944. The girls were about twenty, a little on the plump side with pale white skin. They fucked the entire platoon and got up to wave goodbye to us early the next morning, when we moved out.
My doorbell rang. I stood slowly and walked down the stairs to the door. Through the transom above the louvered front door, I saw the top of a yellow cab. I peeked out the door and Brigid was there, her hair dripping in the rain. I opened the door and she turned and waved to the cabby who drove off up Barracks.
Brigid stepped past me and stood dripping in the foyer. Wearing the same clothes she had for the photo session, she shivered and cupped her hands against her chest, her head bent forward. I closed the door. I put my hand under her chin and lifted her face and she blinked those cobalt eyes at me. They were red now with a blue semicircle bruise under her left eye.
“Pipi hit me,” she said, her lower lip quivering. “Can I come up?”
I took her right hand and brought her up and straight into my bathroom. I grabbed the box of kitchen matches from the medicine cabinet and lit the gas wall heater. Standing, I turned as Brigid dropped her bra.
“Don’t leave,” she said, bending over to run a bath. “You’ve seen it all.”
I put the lid down on the commode and sat and watched her take her clothes off. She smiled weakly at me, her lips still shaking as she climbed into the tub. The water continued running as she sank back.
“How about some coffee?”
“You have any Scotch?”
I stood and looked down at her. Her eyes were closed and the water moved dreamily over her naked body and she looked so damn sexy. I poured us each a double Johnnie Walker Red and went back in.
A silent hour and two drinks later, as well as two hard-ons, she stood up in the tub and asked me to pass her a towel. In the bright light of the bathroom, her skin looked white-pink. She dried herself and wrapped a fresh towel around her chest just above her breasts, and took my hand and led me out to the sofa where we sat.
She poured us both another Scotch, left hers on the coffee table next to the bottle and turned her back to me to lie across my lap as I sat straight up. I had to adjust my dick again and she knew and smiled at me.
“I’ll take care of that,” she said softly and closed her eyes.
With no make-up, with her hair still damp and getting frizzy, with the mouse under her eye – she was still gorgeous. Some women are like that, plain-knockdown-gorgeous.
After a while she told me that Pipi, that’s her husband, couldn’t get it up when she came in and told him about what she’d done. She even dug out the previous pictures and went down on him, but he was as limp as a Republican’s brain.
Then he hit her, punched her actually, and kicked her out, shoved her into the rain.
“At least he called a cab for me.” She opened her cobalt blues and blinked up at me. “Guess you figured he’s the one with erotophobia. Pipi’s the one afraid of erotic experiences.”
No shit.
She sat up, reached over and grabbed her drink and downed it with one gulp. I got up a second and moved to the balcony doors. I didn’t hear the rain any more, so I cracked them. It was still drizzling so I left them open and went back to the sofa. I felt the coolness immediately. It was nice.
She settled her head back in my lap and closed her eyes again. The towel had risen and I could see a hint of her bush now. I reached over and picked up my drink and finished it, then put the glass back on the coffee table. A while later, she sighed and turned her face towards me and I could see by her even breathing she was asleep. The towel opened when she turned and I looked at her body again.