As if sensing his thoughts, Jane shrank closer to his side.
They turned down a street where big houses hid behind black space and trees. They crossed another street, passing a stylishly archaic lamp with a pane splintered into odd spears. Then the trees closed in again and it grew darker than ever.
She stopped in front of a high iron gate that stood open a couple of feet.
All at once he got the picture in his mind he had been fumbling for all night. It fitted Jane, her untidy expensive clothes, her arrogant manner. A rich man’s daughter, overprotected, neurotic, futilely rebellious, tyrannized by relatives or servants. Everything mixed up, futilely and irremediably, in the way only money can manage.
“It’s been so nice,” she said in a choked voice, not looking at him. “So nice to pretend.” Her small sobs (if they were that) trailed off. Still without looking at him, she squeezed his hand, standing close to him so that her side pressed his, as if gathering courage to leave him and go in. He turned fully toward her, embraced her, and as her face came up, kissed her full on the lips.
She yielded to the kiss and he became aware that he was reacting physically. The need which Marcia had aroused earlier in the evening returned with unexpected force. She made a slight effort to pull away from him. He quickly shifted his hand to the small of her back and pressed her to him, while his other hand dropped hers and caressed the back of her neck while the kiss kept on.
She did pull back then with a gasping chuckle and looked at him, almost comically, a startled question. He nodded ruefully, looked down, and gave a little shrug, as if to say, “I didn’t plan on it happening.”
“Oh Lord,” she said in consternation that was again more comic than not. “Look, Carr, it’s much too cold out here and I simply can’t ask you in, but I can’t leave you like that.” A mischievous look came into he eyes and something of her earlier merriment retuned as she grabbed his hand. “But first let’s get into a little shadow.”
And as she tugged him through the gate and toward one of its big pillars, she told him swiftly and eagerly, “When I was twelve years old there was an older boy cousing staying with us and we became great chums. He was going out on his first dates and as you can image, I became very interested in his erotic experience, you might say, his amatory progress. When he was on a date I’d stay awake and afterward sneak over to his room to hear how it had gone, whether he’d scored or not, and how. Now wait a minute—”
She had him backed against the side pillar, next to some shrubbery. She searched her small handbag, said, “Damn,” under her breath, looked up, he glimpsed something pale slip down into the shrubbery, her eyes widened, “Just the thing!” she said with a grin as she impudently snatched his handkerchief from his breast pocket and clipped its corner between his little and ring fingers, then went down with it.
She resumed, “Now when he hadn’t scored, which was quite often, and was suffering form it, was all ‘het up,’ he’d say, he taught me how to fix that up for him, give him a helping hand, as you might say.”
Carr chose that moment to begin unbuttoning the top buttons of her cardigan and of the blouse beneath. He felt his own zipper being loosened and the cold, cold tips of her first two fingers and her thumb creep to the root of his phallus and walk round it knowingly, sometimes caressing, sometimes probing deeply, sometimes feather-touching. Carr reversed the hand, palm for back, that had done unbuttoning, and thrust it gently down into the warm space between her small, small breasts, then worked out either way to the surprisingly large nipples. Time passed, with more activities. Their cold noses and warm mouths nuzzles each other’s face. He feather-touched and felt the aureoles life and roughen. Her still-cool fingertips moved to his glans and pushed his stretched foreskin all the way back so they could trace the groove around its base. His fingertips darted from nipple to large nipple, patting and pressing each all the way around, while his other hand belatedly slipped down inside her skirt, across her indrawn belly and surprisingly close-shaven skin below, found her cleft, her clitoris, and caressed it. She drew his foreskin down, then pushed it back. Time raced, more things happened, the pain was exquisite. She gasped, he came and she embraced his coming through his handkerchief. She chuckled and he whinnied just a little.
Some moment passed and she drew back from him.
“Please don’t come in with me,” she whispered. “And please don’t stay and watch.”
Carr knew why. She didn’t want him to see the lights wink agitatedly on, perhaps hear the beginning of an accusing, rackingly solicitous tirade. It was her last crumb of freedom—to leave him with the illusion that she was free.
He whimsically kissed her helping hand, then took her lightly in his arms. He felt in the darkness the tears on her cold cheek wetting his.
Then she had broken away. There were footsteps running up a gravel drive. He turned and walked swiftly away.
In the sky, through the black trees, shined the first paleness of dawn.
Ecstasy, or the shadow of it, throbbed and undulated in the lightening night.
Chapter Four
The Big Blonde
Through slitted, sleep-heavy eyes Carr saw the black hands of the clock stiffly invoking the wrath of heaving on all slugabeds. The room was drenched with sunshine.
But he did not hurl himself up, tear into his clothes, rush downtown, just because it was ten minutes past ten.
Nor did he start brooding about how he was going to make his peace with Marcia.
Instead he yawned and closed his eyes, savoring the feeling of independence and self-confidence, the freedom from anxiety, that pervaded him.
Odd that a queer, neurotic girl could give you so much.
Leisurely he pushed his legs out of bed and sat up, rubbing his eyes. Whatever it was she’d given him, he’d certainly needed it. Lord, he’d been getting into a state lately. Not enough sleep, nerves on edge, fighting his job, straining too had to keep up with the world—until trifles made him tremble, a balmy magnetic inspector reduced him to cowardice, and Marcia’s wrangling of a magnificent opportunity for him made him run away from her. All that seemed ridiculous now. He had a profound sensation of being back on the right track.
Despite what he owed to it, last night was already becoming hazy in his mind, as if it were an episode that hadn’t rightly belonged in his life—a cozy but detached bit of experience framed like a picture.
People ought to have more experiences like that. Helped to break the “rhythm.”
Grinning, he got up and leisurely bathed and shaved.
He’d have breakfast downtown, he decided. Something a little special. Then amble over to the office about the time his regular lunch hour ended.
Sun-warmed, lake-cooled air drifted through the open windows. He rediscovered forgotten pleasures in the stale business of selecting shirt and necktie.
He jogged downstairs. This time the Carr Mackay in the mirror was just a jauntily reassuring counterpart, despite the circled eyes and the gray hairs here and there. He nodded casually.
He’d half thought of permitting himself the luxury of taking a cab to the Loop. But as soon as he got outside he changed his mind. The sun and air, and the soft brown of the buildings, and the blue of lake and sky, and the general feel of muscle-stretching spring, when even old people crawl out of their holes, were too enticing. He felt fresh. Plenty of time. He’d walk.
The city showed him her best profile. He found pleasure in sensing his own leisurely yet springy bodily movements, in inspecting, as if he were a god briefly sojourning on earth, the shifting scene and the passing people.