As much as possible, he ate every meal alone, excepting perhaps once a month when he would be forced into accepting an invitation from O’Neil, with some girls. All the men Raymond ever knew seemed to be able to summon up girls the way he might summon up a tomato juice from a waiter. Raymond was a theatrically handsome man, a well-informed man, and an intelligent one. He had never had a girl inside his large, comfortable apartment. He bought the sex he needed for twenty-five dollars an hour and he had never found it necessary to exceed that time period, although he filled it amply every time. Out of distaste, because she had suggested it herself the first time he had been there, and most certainly not out of any unconscious desire to be liked, he would give the maid who ran the towels a dollar-and-a-quarter tip, because she had asked for a dollar, then would stare her down coldly when she thanked him. Raymond had found the retail outlet with efficiency. He had told the Broadway columnist on the paper that he would appreciate it greatly if one of the press agents with whom the columnist did business would secure him maximum-for-minimum accommodations atop some well-disposed, handsome professional woman. Had he known that this ritual and the attendant expense were the direct result of the release conferred on him by Yen Lo in Tunghwa, he would have resented it, because although the money meant little to him and although he enjoyed the well-disposed, handsome professional woman very much, he would just as well have preferred to have remained in the psychological position of ignoring it, because it meant getting to bed on the evenings he was with her much later than he preferred to retire and it most certainly had cut into his reading.
Marco gave him no warning. He called Raymond at the paper and told him he would be in town for a while, that he would move in with Raymond, and they met at Hungarian Charlie’s fifteen minutes later, and that had been that. When Marco moved in, every one of Raymond’s time-and-motion study habits were tossed high in the air to land on their head. For ten days or so everything was turned upside down.
Marco didn’t believe in buying sex because he said it was so much more expensive the other way, and he was loaded with loot. Drunk or sober, Marco found matched sets of pretty girls, bright and entertaining girls, rich girls, poor girls, and even one very religious set of sisters who insisted on getting up for church in the mornings, whether it was Sunday or not, then raced back to Marco’s bed again. Marco had girls stashed in most of the rooms of Raymond’s apartment whenever he thought it was a good idea (day and night, night and day), severely disturbing the natural rhythm of Raymond’s life. There were too many cans of beer in the icebox and too few cans of V-8. Men kept ringing the back door bell, bringing boxes or paper bags filled with liquor or heavy paper sacks of ice cubes. Everybody seemed to be an expert on cooking spaghetti and there was a film of red sauce on every white surface in the kitchen. In the foyer, in the living room, in the dining room (which Raymond had converted into an office), brassières were strewn, and slips, and amazingly small units of transparent panties. Marco made everyone wear shoes as a precaution against athlete’s foot. He did not believe in hanging up his clothes when he was not in Army service because he said the agonizing reappraisal of the piles of clothing every morning in each room made him appreciate the neatness of Army life all the more. The positive thing to be said for Marco was that although he crowded the apartment with girls and loud music and spaghetti and booze, he never invited any other guys, so what was there was fifty per cent Raymond’s. The women were all sizes and colors, sharing with each other only Marco’s requisite of a good disposition, and he rarely hesitated to hand out a black eye if this rule were violated.
Raymond found it enjoyable. He could not have stood it as a constant diet (and he believed that there were people who could stand it as a constant diet) and it was all extremely confusing to him at first, from his doctrinaire perspective, because the properly dressed, immaculately spoken women seemed to him to be the wantons, and the naked or near-naked babes who talked like longshoremen seemed to be there as professional comics or entertainers on the piano or on the long-distance telephone. They were talking, talking, always talking, but never with the unpleasant garrulity of Johnny Iselin.
At first when Raymond allowed himself to get around to feeling like having a little action for himself he would grow flustered, be at a loss as to how to proceed, and he would close the door behind him in the converted dining room he called an office and try to forget about the whole thing, but that simply was not satisfactory. He did that the very first night Marco had guests and he sat there, nearly huddled up with misery, fearing that no one would ever come in to make him come out, but finally the door was flung open and a small but strapping redheaded girl with a figure that made him moan to himself, stood in the doorway and stared at him accusingly. “What the hell is the matter with you, honey?” she asked solicitously. “Are you queer?”
“Queer? Me?” Strapping was definitely the word for this girl. Everything she had was big in miniature and in aching proportion.
“There are four broads out there, honey,” she said, “and one man. Marco took me aside and told me that there was one more in here and although I ran right in here I’ve been worrying all the way because what the hell are you doing in here with very very ready broads out there?”
“Well—you see—” Raymond got up and took a slight step forward. “I’d like to introduce myself.” The excitement was rising and he forgot to think about himself. He was aware vaguely that this was the first time he had ever been courted and if she could keep the thing within bounds everything was going to be all right. “I’m Raymond Shaw.”
“So? I’m Winona Meighan. What has names got to do with what Marco promised I would be doing if I came here, but now I find out I may have to stand in line like at Radio City on a Sunday night?”
“I—I guess I simply didn’t know what else to say. I’m just as avidly interested as you are,” Raymond said, “but, I guess—well, I suppose you could say I am shy. Or new at all this. Shy, anyway.”
She waved her hand reassuringly. “All the men are shy today. Everything is changing right in front of our eyes. It’s become such a wonderful thing to find a man who actually is willing to go to bed with a woman that the women get all charged up and they press too much. I know it but I can’t change it.” As she talked she closed the door behind her. She couldn’t find any way to lock it so she pulled a heavy chair in front of it. “So if you’re shy we’ll put out the lights, sweetheart. Winona understands, baby. Just get out of those bulgy pants and come over here.” She unzipped the side of her dress and began to struggle out of it impatiently. “I have to get back downtown for an eleven o’clock show tonight, lover, so don’t let’s waste any more time.”
By the third night Raymond felt that he was fully adjusted to the new way of life. Winona had been extremely grateful for the extreme care he had put into his work with her and that squealing, activated gratitude, which had been coupled with an absolute insistence that he take her name and permanent address and that she write down his name and permanent address because her company was leaving in the morning for eight weeks in Las Vegas, had given him considerable confidence. After she had had to leave, both of them feeling exhausted but triste after the parting, he had moved quietly and weightlessly into the living room where Marco was playing at séance, explaining to the four girls that he understood, academically, exactly how a séance should operate because he had researched every necessary move and that if they would all cooperate by believing perhaps he could make something interesting happen the way things had happened in a fascinating textbook he had pored over all the way from San Francisco. It hadn’t worked, but everybody enjoyed themselves and when bedtime came two of the girls joined up with Raymond as though they had all been assigned to each other by a lewd housemother and, after loads of fun, they had all dropped off to sleep and had slept like lambs.