How shall I start-or rather, where? Shall I tell you who I am? Or who she is?
No. I can't start by telling you who she is. It's impossible to tell something like that. I'll just have to tell you about her, and let you see for yourself. If you can pull the mystery out of the telling; if you can see the magic through the words, then you will be the winner.
We are making love, just now. Her body is beneath me, tight and firm. I wallow atop her like some obscene whale, trying to communicate the lightness of my love while my body heaves around on hers like a great, sweaty marshmallow. It isn't easy to do, this communication of love. Love is so insubstantial.
I once saw a fox-a very lonely fox, I suppose-trying to communicate love to a chained hound. The vixen would come as close to the dog's chain as she dared, lifting her tail and doing her foxy dance.
But the hound couldn't see the love. He just saw a fox. He broke his chain, finally, and rushed at her. She saw him coming, and knew him for what he was, but she couldn't move to save herself. Her need for love was so strong that she just stood, in some crazy, dumb hope, waiting for him to come and love her.
But he didn't, of course. He killed her. He picked her up by the neck and shook her until she died.
But I remember that even as she died she took a small release from him, seeing, perhaps, love where there was only hate; passion where there was only fury. She died happy, willing herself to take love however it could be found-even when it wasn't there to give.
And that's what I'm doing now, flopping and gasping on her incredible body, willing love to be here, willing that she know how I feel, and why I've done what I've done.
She moves beneath in all the grace and rhythm that instinct can supply, where experience is lacking. The firmness of her flesh against mine is incredible. It astounds me even now, after so many long nights of watching, touching, tasting. Her body is an ultimate; one of those things which can only be thought or spoken of in absolute. No firmer flesh. Most perfect thighs. Final word in shape. Perfect waist. Softest hair, mounding over the geometric, achingly perfect curve of her pubis.
It was the hair that first caught me, there in the skating rink.
But no, that's getting too far, too soon.
It's the innocence. The innocence drew me, was my chain and lock. It called, "Trilby!" and I went, enraptured, thrilled to the Svengali of her newness, her ... unusedness.
I pant on her now, and she is so alive and real that she vibrates. I don't mean the motion, although her movements are the most perfect part of her. Without movement, she is just an ordinary being; with movement, she is a goddess, a power. She is Diana and Aphrodite and all the wonders of the Nile.
But I lose myself.
The vibration I'm trying to describe is a feel, a sense. A rare few have it, and an even rarer number of poor mortals can sense it.
But in her it's strong, so naturally present, that she radiates it. I've seen her walk down the shopping-center mall on her way to the skating rink, and have men stop and turn, their eyes searching a moment before finding what strange force compelled them to pause, drag their dull and drugged minds around to focus on something they couldn't possibly have seen.
She has this. She radiates it like a musk. It stops cars, makes old men weep and young ones ache, and causes fear to walk on the faces of women.
And because she is innocent of it, because it is so holy and profound a thing, she vibrates. The force of it swells to where she cannot contain it and it goes out to snare the hearts and minds of men, forcing their lusts and needs and tired dreams back into her presence. And the clash of these things-innocence and lust, desire and chastity-sets up a vibration, a wave-war so intense that it can be felt by everyone involved. Except her.
In the supreme heartlessness of total purity, she walks among the less fortunate, the lost, the cheated, and throws away a smile here, a glance there, a toss of her head. She leaves behind a trail of broken and bitter men who go home to lives even greyer for having been touched by the fire and left cold again.
She doesn't know. Even now, with my bearded, myopic, repulsive mass slithering and wheezing around on top of her, her innocence makes sacrilege of my attempts to communicate my love. That innocence is the ultimate goal of love. It must be taken, possessed, shared. Yet I know, as does every man, I think, ultimately, that once taken, all is taken. After the sweet rose of innocence is crushed, nothing remains but bitter thornage, ever pricking the heart with knowledge that it has killed the only part of love worth having, by the very act of possessing it. It is this knowledge, I believe, that is man's doom-the final vengeance of God for the mockeries man has made of himself. We are condemned to strive forever for that sweet innocence in which all is made whole and pure, knowing from the first that we can attain it only by taking it by force, and that this taking kills us in the process.
And on rare occasions, God gives in to his own bitterness and takes spite on man by setting out a very flower of innocent perfection, so that man may know that it really exists, and weep thereby.
Do you think I'm mad ? Are you sitting there, plotting this out in your mind? Are you saying, there behind your eyes; I've read this plot before. At the end, I'll find out that he's killed her and is raping the body? Or: he's imagining all this, and he's really in the nuthatch?
I'm sorry, but it's not so. I may be mad-in fact, it's probable-but I'm not trying to pull any wool over your eyes. This glorious creature beneath me is very much alive. Her hands on my back are warm, clutching. Her voice-ah, God! That voice!-is soft in my ear. The pebbled roughness of her tongue is real. It mingles the salty sweat of my jaw with the heavier flow of her saliva, coating the rough bristles of my beard and leaving an almost electric tingle behind it.
No, whatever else she is, she's real. Be patient with me. I'm not trying to trick you, or entangle you in a complex plot. I'm not going to spring some science-fiction ending on you.
What I am going to try to do is show you, as best I can, all the sides and surprises and fantastic places that comprise her.
If I just came out and gave you a list of facts about her, and a chronological series of events relating how she came to be lying beneath me, her legs open and raised, you would be disappointed. She's so much more than facts and data. It's this that I want to show you-not to beg understanding of you for what I've done, for I've made my peace with myself-but so you can share her with me. Her purity, this enormous, vibrating innocence of hers, is too rare to die beneath my flabby bulk.
So, if you will bear with me, I'll try to give you a glimpse, a touch, even the echo of something rare and beautiful, before it dies and you are alone again.
Her name is Rebecca.
That's enough for the moment. You're already building pictures of her around that name, and they're all wrong.
You don't know enough yet. Is she short ? Tall ? Old? What color is her hair?
Enough. We'll get to that. Dream of your thousands of Rebeccas. It will give me a pleasure to think of all of you doing that, later, when I will have a few pleasures.
Now I must tell you of me, somewhat.
Do you know about nicknames? About what they tell, and what they can do to you ? Did you have one, when you were young?
Naming people is a risky business at best, probably the most risky a parent undertakes. The whole of a child's future is affected by the set of noises his parents decide will represent him. People-kids-have been known to commit suicide because of their names. Some, a little more imaginative or intelligent, have murdered their parents, instead.
But nicknames, now. Nicknames are a special hell. Not only does the child become subject to this second set of noises, over which he has no control, either, but this set, this nickname, is usually picked to point up or ridicule his most awkward characteristic.
Names are given by friends, who are merely ignorant. Nicknames are given by enemies, who are malevolent as well as ignorant.
I had several.
"Lard" was the first one.
Do you know what it's like to be fat? Clothes cost more, come in fewer colors and styles. Chairs are too small. Tying your shoes is difficult. Tying your shoes! The simplest action, a thing of no thought whatsoever to a normal person, becomes a task to the very fat. Sometimes, it just isn't possible to do something.
When I was twelve years old, I weighed a hundred and sixty-five pounds I was four-foot-ten.
I remember going to a circus in Saint Louis that year. My mother took me. We went on one of those tour busses. The driver of the bus was one of the fattest men I'd ever seen. He nodded to me when we got on, bobbing his head and smiling.
When we got off the bus at the fairgrounds, another busload of people arrived-mostly school kids. I was the last one off our bus-normal procedure for me-and there was a crowd of kids outside when I waddled down the steps. Mother had gone on ahead with my sister, and, except for the bus driver, I was alone, facing this busload of strange kids.
They started as soon as they saw me, laughing and shouting. I couldn't do anything about it. Long experience had taught me that. So I just came on out, full of misery, and pretended that I didn't hear the jibes.
The bus driver shooed them off, waving his huge arms and making foghorn yells at them.
Then he came back to our bus, to where I stood, silent in my shame and agony. He laughed good-naturedly, clapped me on the shoulder. "Don't mind them, fellow," he boomed. "Why, when you're older, you'll make two of any o' them punks."
Then he waddled around in front of me. "Being hefty ain't bad, kid," he said. "Why, there's nothing them skinny kids can do a fat man can't do just as well." He cocked his head to see if I was paying attention. "Watch," he said.
He raised his hands over his head. Then, slowly and with obvious strain, the fat bus driver bent over and touched his toes.
He stayed there a moment, folded in half, his enormous belly swung between his wide-planted legs. Then he rose, beet faced from the strain, and smiled at me. "See," he nodded, wiping his forehead with a hairy arm. "Nothin' to it-an' I gotta fifty-six-inch waist."
I remember looking at him, and at the busload of kids leaping and bounding away toward the fairgrounds. I remember remembering my father-my slim father-bounding up steps three at a time.
And then I screamed. And screamed, and screamed.
It was three months before they let me out of the hospital, and a year before they'd let me back in school. That was the only time I ever let go; the only time I tried to get outside the shell.
In all my life, Rebecca is the only one who's ever really gotten past the shell. It's me inside her now-not my poor little cock. She's clutching my back, but that's only because that's as close as she can get to my heart. I love her for her body; she loves me in spite of mine.
Am I deluding myself? Is this not just me, seeing what I want to see? A great, obese blob, fantasizing around some quirk of luck that has put him near to beauty?
No. If there is any one thing that is certain, it's that she's beneath me now because she loves me. Me! She couldn't love my body.
In her vast innocence and love, she has seen past the mud of this great bulk of flesh to the jewel of my being, buried inside. She has come, soft and naked, into this bed, to be consumed in the fire of my need. To give, simply because I want.
And in the giving, her gift, her precious, vibrating, radiance, will die. She knows this, for I have taught her so. If there is sin in what
I do, it isn't in the doing, but in the teaching of its significance. I am not the bull come to rape, but the serpent come to sow the discontent of loss.
2
Did I tell you I first saw her in the skating rink?
It's an enclosed ice rink, part of a shopping center. There's a mall that runs in front of it, and a plastic-chairs-and-plastic-food restaurant along one side. There are glass walls around the rink, and you can eat while watching the skaters.
I ate there frequently.
What do I eat? Can you picture what a three-hundred-pound man eats for lunch?
Do you see piles of mashed potatoes? Three helpings of roast beef, with lots of gravy? Half a loaf of bread and half a pound of butter? A quart of milk? Maybe a gallon of ice cream afterwards, and a whole pie?
No. I usually have a hamburger and a cup of coffee.
The final irony of my life is that my obesity really is glandular. No diet on earth can help me. No diet, nor medicine, nor faith healer, nor prayer. I've tried them all. I eat between two and three thousand calories a day. That's what it takes to move me around.
I came to the skating rink to watch the motion.
Girls? That too, but not that way. I'd long since learned that the only women available for freaks were other freaks.
When I was fifteen, I had my first woman. I can't even remember her name, now. Something German, I think.
Neither of us had any control over the affair. She was the fattest girl in class, and I was ... me.
Whenever a dance or a picnic or something would come up, we were just automatically put together. No one ever asked if I wanted to go to any of those things. Lonely fat kids were invited out of charity, because everybody knew that the fat kids wanted to be part of things.
But no one ever wanted the responsibility of being the fat kid's date. It was a blessing, for the class, that there were two of us, and that we were opposite sexes.
Fat people don't really have sexes for most folks. Women will undress in front of a fat man and not even think about it. They can't imagine themselves having sex with a fat man, so they can't really imagine a fat man as a man.
There was a prom.
It was assumed that I would go, and that I would take Hilda. Yes, Hilda. Hilda Kruger, it was.
So I took her. I had already learned to behave in proper fat-boy fashion, doing those things expected of the Fat Kid so that I would be left alone. It never was a case of toadying for acceptance: they wouldn't have accepted me under any circumstances.
So, as I said, I took Hilda Kruger to the prom.
Now, you must understand about Hilda. She was plump.
I am obese, fat, obscene in appearance. People-the kinder ones-regard me as something to be pitied.
They tended to regard Hilda as "unfortunate."
She was about five-two, which put her even with me. (I had gained four inches by that time-and sixty pounds.)
She had dimples, blonde hair, and graceful ankles. She looked like a pretty doll-balloon that had been over-inflated a few pounds.
Consequently, Hilda had had dates before. She had even been out with a couple of the football players.
And fat Hilda Kruger pitied me.
There are any number of ways fat people compensate. Hilda had adopted the most common.
She had developed a medium-loud, slightly aggressive personality, and was never seen without a smile. She wore violent dresses-always just a shade too short-large hats, that sort of thing. She smoked, made pottery, and was a nurse's aid at the hospital.
But mostly, Hilda Kruger fucked.
She was the easiest make in junior high. She had been had by most of the eighth-grade seniors, a couple of the teachers, and even a few of the more desperate athletes. There was even talk that she had once been seen coming out of the Principal's office after school, pulling on her panties.
Hilda was fourteen.
I didn't know much of this, the night of the prom. I just knew that she was vastly more mature than me, even though I was a year her senior, and that she felt sorry for me.
The reason I'm telling you all this is to show you part of why it hit me so hard, the first time I saw Rebecca there in the ice rink.
At any rate, the night of the prom, Hilda's dad picked me up. We hadn't had a car since my father left, and mom couldn't afford a cab.
I sat in the back seat with Hilda, trying to be polite. Between us, we took up most of the seat.
Her father kept asking adult-to-kid questions about school and baseball and churches, and I tried to make some sort of reasonable answers, but I couldn't.
In the darkness of the back seat, Hilda had wedged herself against me and was blowing in my ear, giggling under her breath. Her enormous tits were rubbing up and down against my arm, and I didn't know what to do. It was the first time I had ever touched a girl, other than in play or accidentally.
I could hear her father rumbling on, but I couldn't tell what he was saying. Hilda dragged my head around and kissed me, her mouth wet and warm and tasting of mouthwash and perfume.
She forced my mouth open with her tongue, then pushed it inside.
I was startled-and a little frightened. I thought I would choke. In panic, I reached out to push her away, and my hand landed on the sweaty jello of the top of her bosom.
With a little moan, she heaved her bulk upward, pressing her chest into my hand. I could feel her thigh sliding over mine as she rolled onto me there in her father's car.
And then we were at the gym.
With the ease of long practice, she rolled off me, straightening hair and dress with smooth motions, so that when her father looked back he saw her demure and prim, and me, heart pounding, eyes wild, with my very first hard-on.
May I mention in passing that I didn't even know what it was? My realities were so crushing that I had never fantasized enough to create a sexual urge in myself. And mother, needless to say, had never been able to conceive of me with a sex life, so I got no education from her.
So when Mr. Kruger looked back I was sure that the terrible stiffness between my legs was waving under his nose with a flag on its tip, and that he would immediately haul me out of the car and shoot me.
I had, for a moment, forgotten that I weighed better than two hundred pounds. What erection I could muster stood no chance of showing under the folds and creases of my abdomen.
And so we went inside, Hilda bouncing gaily off to start her rounds, and I in a sweat, frightened of this new experience.
The prom was bad. We had to dance. One of the Events at a prom is watching the Fat Kid dance. It's one of those mandatory duties that you learn if you wish to survive.
After the obligatory dance, I retired to the punch bowl and let Hilda have her evening.
She would disappear outside every so often with one or another of the older boys-and sometimes with more than one. I sensed that she was doing with them what she had been doing with me in her father's car-only more so. I hadn't the experience to be able to imagine the specifics of the situation, but instinct told me that it had to do with those painful rises in the crotch.
Her father was to come for us at twelve when the prom ended. At eleven thirty, Hilda came for me.
I had spent the evening at the punchbowl, not daring to leave for fear someone would approach me, and that I would have to respond. I wasn't sure that I could respond.
She came, as I've said, and she was a little drunk. Her dress was wrinkled-as was her hair-and her bosom, where it puffed out of her formal, was red and chafed.
"Daddy's coming soon," she said.
I nodded, too dumb to speak. All I could think of was the memory of her thigh across mine. I was getting another hard-on.
"Don't you want to ... take a walk with me?" She asked.
I nodded again.
She took my hand and led me toward the gym door. There were a lot of kids hanging around the door, including some of the boys she'd been outside with earlier.
As we went by them, they grinned and whistled. Some made pointed remarks-although I didn't understand them at the time.
Hilda just laughed and made coy replies.
I kept my head down, face on fire, and prayed that no one would notice what I felt must be the Public Shame of the Century, protruding all of three or four inches out from between my thighs.
Outside in the cool night air I relaxed a bit, even venturing to offer Hilda the crook of my elbow, as I'd seen gentlemen do in the movies.
She laughed. "We've only got a few minutes. C'mon!"
She pulled me around the gym and out onto the football field. There was no moon, and none of the field's lights were on.
Still, dim figures could be seen on the grass, and I heard low, heavy sounds.
"Where are we going?" I whispered, my voice seeming to boom in the darkness.
"Right here," she answered, stopping so abruptly that I plowed into her.
We stumbled a moment, then went down in a heap on the damp grass.
She gave a giggling squeal which was answered by chuckles and muffled noises from around the field.
"I'm sorry," I whispered.
"Never mind," she answered, not whispering, but speaking fairly quietly-intimate, but not conspiratorial.
She lay back then, in the grass, and raised her knees. "Well," she said. "Come on. Daddy'll be here soon."
I couldn't move. In the weak false-light of the evening, I could see only the alabaster mass of her legs, turned skyward. The pale expanses of the bottoms of her thighs, like twin columns, rose in a vee in front of me.
And between them, glistening slightly, the vague, black patch of her sex.
I knew instinctively that it was The Goal. I knew that it had a part to play in the pulse and there, between her massive thighs, was where my own little cock belonged; that this was what it was all about.
But I had absolutely no idea of how to get it from where it was, firmly zipped inside my pants, into her hole.
She dropped her legs and sat up. Her dress stayed hiked up, and the shift of her sex downward, all but out of sight beneath her, only made it more alluring, more desirable.
"What's the matter?" she asked. Not angry, but a little impatient. "Can't get it up?"
I shook my head, not in answer, but to signify that I didn't understand.
"That's all right," she said, misinterpreting me. "I know how to fix that."
My mouth felt full of gravel, and I couldn't speak. I shook my head again, but she didn't see it. She had hunched herself around, and now crouched on her knees in front of me. "I'll just fix that little old problem," she crooned.
She reached out, gently, and pushed me backwards until I sat in the grass, facing her. Then she began to unbuckle my belt.
I was paralyzed. I had no idea what she was doing, or what I was supposed to do to help. But I did know by then that whatever it was she was up to, it was something I wanted.
Then I felt the cold night air rushing into my pants. I gasped with the shock of it, and she laughed.
"Already? Boy, it doesn't take much to set you off, does it?"
And then, her hand, groping, lifting, weighing.
I thought I would die again, but this time it was a good thing.
I closed my eyes, feeling Shockwave after Shockwave run up my body.
Can you remember the first time another person touched you between the legs? Do you recall the utterly alien feel of it; the strangeness and awkward fear of it?
That's what it was like.
Then, at the height of this new wave of experience-this literally shocking new revelation-she stopped.
It was like being dropped off a cliff. I felt as though I were falling, sailing off into space.
I opened my eyes just in time to see her blonde curls vanish below the high curve of my stomach. For just the barest moment, a primitive, atavistic fear swept through me. She was going to castrate me. I knew the fear without even knowing the term.
And then came the reality of her mouth on my cock, her hair sweeping my stomach.
Did I cry out? Did I lurch?
To this day, I couldn't tell you. The memory of her lips around my cock, her tongue pulling roughly at its underside, are as vivid now as when it happened.
But of my reactions, my own involvement, I can remember nothing. My mind is a blank slate on that point.
There is also no memory of how I came to mount her. One instant-in the eye of my remembrance-I was on my back in the wet grass, with her hands on my balls and her mouth sucking heavily at my cock; then I was on top of her, the hugeness of my body lapping over her own on every side.
I remember her hand, pulling my head down on the first nipple I'd ever seen, and I remember sucking it.
I remember the heat that rose off of her, riding up between my legs, mingling with the night airs in the area of my buttocks.
I remember the feel of-rightness, of consummation of purpose in my body as I pumped into her hairy darkness.
I remember the smell of the wet grass and the buzz of a mosquito. Even the cry of a girl nearby, in climax.
But of my own climax, I remember nothing. No ecstasy-although I remember there being ecstasy-no gush of relief.
I have only the memory of the memory of passion.
And I tell you this-I make this point because for a time, for a short time of wonder and beauty, I did remember what it was like. I did know the vast, mountainous beauty of unsullied first experience which is the only justification for losing innocence.
You must understand what happened to me, and what I lost, to understand what happened later-and what's happening now-between Rebecca and me. You must fully understand what was lost and why it is important.
I did know, I say.
When we rose from the grass of the field, I knew that I had found the purpose of life. I had found the final answer.
For this gift, this great beauty, I could forgive God his joke. I had a woman.
And we walked back to the gym to wait for her father. For the first time in my life I was grinning. I held my head up. I swaggered. All of this, of course, unconscious-done in the purity and innocence of primitive reality. I had no more awareness of why I did these things than a monkey does, but I did them for the same reason. And in the honesty of that purity, there was all the greatness of Truth.
And then we reached the gym.
Do you know how it goes from here? Were you ever at that prom ? Remember how the boy comes up to you ? He's the football player. She's been out with him, earlier tonight. Remember the look? He doesn't offer you the look-the camaraderie of two men who've had the local sport. He offers her the look-the other look. The you-and-me-against-him look. The look that people reserve for the school freak.
"Spreadin' it pretty thin, ain'cha?" he says, pointing at you with his chin, but looking at her.
"There's enough to go around," she answers, saucy.
"Well," he says, still grinning, "if it goes that far, I think I'll count myself out."
She looks at you, and everything stops.
You realize, with a wisdom far beyond your years, that this is a crux, a turning point.
She looks, and you can see that, for this instant, she sees truth. She sees herself mirrored in you. Her body less gross than yours, but gross still-her face already showing wear at fourteen.
Just for the suspended moment, she sees what she is, what she's done to buy her acceptance.
You see this, and you know that she can make a choice here. You see that she knows it.
For only a pause, a breath of time, pity and love and sympathy reach out of her to you.
Then a curtain falls, and nothing remains in her eyes but shadow.
And though it haunts her, and will haunt her, it kills you. A place in your heart turns to dust, and a piece of you falls into the grave, already dead.
And she turns back to the football player with the bloodshot eyes. Back to his leer and his whiskey and his future among the non-freaks. "Oh, Tommy," she whines. "Don't be such a grouch. He was a goddamn virgin! A virgin, Tommy. Somebody hadda do it, for Christ's sake!"
And you fold quietly up inside, your face impassive, while Christmas turns to cinders and sand fills your eyes.
3
All right: Rebecca. You know that much. How about this: Rebecca Horowitz.
What does that do to your picture, your mind's-eye Rebecca?
Jewish.
I didn't know that at the time, though. I didn't even know her name was Rebecca.
I was at the restaurant, having lunch and watching the skaters when I first saw her.
Now, you must understand the way of this first seeing, and remember my experience with Hilda, the German cow.
I had gotten up from my meal, this day, and was going to the counter to get a refill on my coffee. In so doing, I turned my back on the rink.
About halfway across the restaurant, I did a thing so unusual that it frightened me. I bumped a table. Not so big a thing? For me, yes.
I have, for all the curses that fate has laid on me, one grace: I have consummate balance.
Contrary to popular myth, most fat people aren't the least graceful. Obesity tends to carry bone and muscle diseases with it, along with nervous disorders which affect the delicate inner ear. Thus, most fat people are clumsy.
I have been fortunate. My balance is exquisite. I sail among crowded tables in restaurants like a sleek dirigible, floating along within inches of disaster with never a downward glance. I am so tuned to the fluidity of my bulk that I can feel its placement as though with radar. I can move close enough to touch an object with my shirt tail, and miss it with my body. All this without seeing the object. It's a true sixth sense-or an extension of the sense of touch which is so far beyond normal as to constitute a new sense.
But again, I wander.
I bumped a table.
For an instant I thought I was going mad. My entire grasp on reality slipped. It was as if everything had gone out of gear, out of phase for a flash.
Now, the terror of it was this: that I knew-knew, mind you-that the cause of this giddiness came from outside me. That I was not its source.
Madness ? Again, perhaps.
But nevertheless, it was so.
I turned. Drawn? Forced? I faced the rink.
Even from the back-even going away-even with nothing visible over the tables but her hair, I knew it was she who had stopped me, clutched at my senses until I turned, blinded, into her light.
Coffee, forgotten, I went back to my table against the glass wall.
And there I sat when she came around the rink, hair floating out behind her like a cloud, and looked at me.
Now, the floor of the ice rink is a few feet lower than the floor of the restaurant, and there's a wall around it. This means that a skater, passing close to the wall beside you, is only visible from about the top of the shoulders up. You must wait until he's on the opposite side of the rink, or until he skates by your side some feet out from the wall, before you can see all of him. It also means that, even with you seated, the skater's eyes are below yours.
But, somehow, this was not so with Rebecca. As she floated around the turn, I seemed to be looking up into her eyes at the same instant I was looking down on her body.
She came around, I say, in a grace so artless it was above humanity. There was absolutely no thought, no effort in her skating. She could have been asleep, or buoyed underwater, for all the pose in her posture. It was as natural as her skin, as right as breathing. Her motions were inevitable, their beauty ordained.
She had been skating fast, it seemed, and now stood in repose, sliding over the ice at rest. She came around, leaning into the turn, and brushed by the window in front of me.
And she looked at me and smiled.
Just for a heartbeat. Then she was gone, flashing by in the instant, unlocking time so that it might move us mortals again.
I remember that time, too. Better than any moment in my life. Better, perhaps, than the reality of now, the attainment of all desire; for that moment was tinged with no past, no knowledge of her. All was future-potential. There was not the hag of knowledge riding my back, of innocence doomed by need.
I remember, as she swept by, that first, silvered passing. I remember her hair blowing across her face, making a golden lattice for her eyes.
Golden, yes-the color of spun honey. Does that ruin your picture? Rebecca Horowitz, a blonde?
More: Her eyes were blue. Blue like babies. Blue like the wisest Siamese cat's. Blue like your dreams of blue.
Pale.
Huge.
Her eyes.
As she went by, she looked at me. She really looked at me. Even through the glass, concealed by a wall so that only my head and neck were visible to her, she could see me for what I am.
Have I told you about my face, yet?
I'm almost blind. I'm so myopic that my glasses weigh almost four ounces. Coke-bottle bottoms.
I'm black-haired. I wear it in a crew cut. I also wear a moustache and a goatee. I do this because with longer hair, or with no beard, I remind people of a giant four-year-old. I have enough troubles without that.
And this face, rimmed with bristle, peering through almost impenetrable slabs of polished glass, was the first piece of me that Rebecca saw.
She saw it, and she looked at it. All the long curve around, she looked at me, sitting behind the glass window.
And as she passed, she smiled.
And as she smiled, a piece of me long buried rose out of its dusty grave and went off after her, crying at the ache of her beauty.
Is this all too poetic for you? Do you flinch at things like "the ache of her beauty?"
Maybe by the time I'm done I can make you see that this is the only way you can say things about Rebecca.
She went around again, this child of light, and again. I don't know how many times she circled the rink, nor even when she left. I know that it must have been more than an hour, for an hour passed that I have no accounting for.
And in the whole of that passing, she looked at me only twice more.
The second time she came around watching her form. She glanced up and caught me, open mouthed and open souled, staring into her. For a milli-instant she seemed startled-or curious, perhaps. Then she smiled, slightly absently, as though her mind were still on her feet and form, and swept past me.
The last time she came by backwards, coasting. Just as she passed, she looked up-really looked, again-and gave me a whole smile, her entire, complete smile.
I'll tell you about the smile later. I'll tell you about it so completely that you will wake up nights remembering the description of it.
But for now, let it only be said that it congealed me. It made me as immobile as any death-ray ever could. Yet its very essence was life. Flowers were in it, and clouds in April. It froze me into a limbo where time and place had no meaning. It felt me entombed in its glory.
And when I came out of it, she was gone.
Now, the point you must comprehend here is that only twice in my life has time slipped and left me blank and barren of memory. Once when I was with Hilda, and a part of me died-and again, with this first meeting with Rebecca when something in me was born.
It is important that you understand the depth of this experience. It was so intense that it shattered my grip on reality-a grip so strong that I'm noted for it. You have to understand that this was a spiritual thing, a religious revelation. It shook the very foundations of my conservatism, my good sense.
You have to be able to see this, dear reader, because there is a further thing you must know about Rebecca Horowitz.
She's eleven years old.
4
Are you there?
I wonder how many who read that last page have turned to read this one?
What do you feel, you who have stayed? Do you hate me? Are you disgusted, sick to your stomach? Here I am a repulsive, grotesque, hairy-faced man. And you already know that I am making love to Rebecca. You know that her thighs are open, her knees drawn up almost to her breasts. You know that I am on her, and in her.
And she's eleven.
No, you're not going to find out at the end of the book that I waited patiently all these years until she was eighteen, and she went blind, and married me because I understood her.
It's now, and Rebecca is eleven years old, and I'm fucking her.
Does that word bother you? Would you feel better if I said I was making love to her?
If this were about a grown woman-or if I were telling you again about Hilda, the school whore-it would be alright for me to be fucking her.
But Rebecca is eleven.
Does that excite you ? Do you dream of some eleven-year-old you know-or have known?
If so, and if it makes you feel guilty, forget it. It's a common wish.
But the point of this thing with Rebecca is that that's not the way it was.
I never dreamed of sex fantasies with children; but then, I never had any sex fantasies.
This is why I've tried so hard to show you that this was a totally new experience for me. It was so removed from the realism of "normal" and "ordinary" that it was above any of the values we set on these things. There was no guilt attached to it, because it was beyond things like guilt.
I do not mean to imply that my feelingsthen or now-were "pure," in the sense that they were above or beyond sex. My primary drive toward Rebecca was and still is sexual. I wanted her body then, and I want it now.
Nor do I cry ignorance of the meaning of my actions. I fully understood-and understandthe impact of what I'm doing, and am aware of the consequences. I have had a sex life-even a varied one. You'd be amazed at how many people are driven to try the bizarre and grotesque, sexually.
But to Rebecca, again.
Let's leave for the moment the vision of her, spread beneath this vast, sweaty mockery of a body of mine. Let us go back to the rink and see her sailing liquidly by our window.
I have done terrible things to your vision, haven't I? I gave you a name, and left you to hang a picture on it. Then I added another name, and watched you erase and redraw, making Rebecca into a Jewess. Then I showed you her hair, her spun-honey hair, and her smoky eyes.
What happened then? A Scandinavian Jew? You re-colored her, giving her fair skin to go with her hair and eyes.
But you kept the nose, the Jewish nose?
You were right. She does have a Jewish nose.
And then I told you that this Oriental-featured, Scandinavian-toned beauty was eleven years old.
Dirty trick?
No, I think not.
If I had told you at the start that she was eleven, you wouldn't have seen the rapture of her. You would not have seen the Rebecca I saw, because you would have been looking at a child.
Is this some private madness? Is my poesy seeing that which isn't there ? Is Rebecca Horowitz just a pretty child, with the sick mind of a grotesque and lonely man filling in traits that aren't there in reality? No.
Proof?
Because it wasn't just me that sat oblivious by the skating rink. Because old men stopped in their tracks, and young boys stumbled, and executives paused, glancing guiltily around to see if they were being casual enough. Because women spoke more loudly to each other, trying hard not to see that her very existence put their powders and scents and labors to shame. Because where she walked, her presence lingered after, causing those who crossed her path to halt a moment, frowning, as though they had remembered something precious that they'd lost long ago.
Proof?
No one saw her go. She was like a sun. You couldn't look directly at her for long. And when you did, it blinded you to other sights, warped time, bent your purposes.
When I came out of my daze, I saw others, dozens, do the same. She was like that.
What do you see now? This blonde, blue-eyed eleven-year-old Jewess-what is she now, on the mirror of your mind? Is she Lolita, perhaps? Are you seeing a sex-bait, a flirty girl-woman ?
Not so.
Mark you that eleven years is child for some, woman for others.
Rebecca had the body of a woman.
She was about five feet tall, this child, and about nine-tenths of that was leg. Above the leg was a rump as fully curved, as sensual as any woman's. Her stomach was flat, with just curve enough to show that she was female. Her waist was impossibly thin, as only children's waists can be.
She held her back perfectly straight and balanced her head atop a long, slender neck. Her shoulders were wide-almost as wide as her hips. Her arms seemed to flow, rather than bend at joints. Her hands, too, were long and supple, seeming to be some strange, beautiful form of aquatic flower, waving languidly at the ends of her wrists.
Rebecca has a set of breasts that defy description. They ride out straight in front of her an impossible distance. They are huge. They are perfectly shaped, sloping gracefully down from her neck to her nipples, then tucking under for ages and ages, until they fillet smoothly into her rib cage.
She is a thirty-eight D-cup.
And because she is eleven years old, her breasts have the elasticity of fine latex. They jiggle when she moves, they don't sway. When she bends, they hold their form. When she lies down, they flatten ever so slightly, of their own weight-but they do not slide off sideways, nor droop.
No, she's no Lolita, no budding nymphet. Rebecca has a woman's body.
And therein lies part of her presence. She has an unused woman's body.
Just by way of filling in: she wore, that day in the rink, a skater's skirt and tights, and a white blouse with full sleeves that fluttered when she moved.
And the top buttons were undone.
And I left, then, and went mostly home.
But it was a long, long time before I went to sleep.
5
I came back every day for a month. Every single day, riding out from Los Angeles. And I didn't see her once. Other men came back too. I knew they were waiting for her by the look in their eyes-the hungry, desperate look.
But one by one, they fell away, convincing themselves that she wouldn't be back, or that they had only imagined her passage.
I watched them go and I smiled. I could picture similar groups of men gathering everywhere she'd passed, gradually growing faint of purpose and slipping off, bitter.
But the thought of giving up never entered my mind. I knew she'd be back. After all, she had smiled at me.
So every day-including Saturday and Sunday-I got on my bike and did the fourteen miles out into the valley.
On my bike? A three-hundred-pound man on a motorcycle? Now I'm playing games with your picture of me. Three-hundred-pounders don't ride motorcycles.
But I do. I ride a BMW R69. That's a large, sturdy touring bike. It's designed to carry a lot of weight, and to go long distances in relative comfort. I seldom travel long distances, but the comfort part is important to me.
Why a bike?
I think I mentioned that I lived in Saint Louis as a child, didn't I?
We lived-my mother and sister and I-in a suburb called Berkeley, in one of those card-board-and-lath crackerbox subdivisions. The walls of those houses were so thin, and the houses so closely packed, that you could honestly hear conversations two houses away. It drove my mother nuts.
Our house was on top of a hill, exactly one measured mile from the end of the main runway of Lambert/Saint Louis Municipal Airport. That didn't help mom's nerves, either.
But I loved it. I would sit in the yard all day, watching the jets go over-and the prop-jobs, too. That was a few years ago, when they still flew those things commercially. At night, sometimes, I would drag a blanket out on the roof, pushing it up through a fire door in the attic, and would shove myself, panting and wheezing, out after it. Then I'd lay there the entire night, waiting for the big silver monsters to fly over, seemingly low enough to touch. I wanted to be a pilot.
I was and still am exceedingly graceful. This is, I now know, due entirely to my having been born with an exceptional sense of balance. But back then, when I was young and introverted and very much an escapist, I took my grace to be a sign from God that I was meant to fly. Birds were the most graceful of creatures, my reasoning went, and they flew. Ergo, since I, too, was inordinately graceful, I was merely an incorrectly packaged bird.
Therefore, I must fly.
But, of course, I couldn't. I couldn't even get in the Civil Air Patrol. The kids hounded me out.
The doctors ruled me out of a pilot's license because of my blood pressure.
For two years I was all but inconsolable. Then I discovered motorcycles.
For a laugh, one of the local jockstraps teased me into trying to ride his one day after school. Being the Fat Kid, and being surrounded by most of my classmates, I had no choice but to accept. I'd never even been on a bicycle. There were none around with seats broad enough to hold me.
Anyway, the lout with the bike made a great show of "instructing" me in the handling of the machine, all the while making asides to the group about trained elephants, and sausage insurance and such. I smiled my Jolly Smile, bobbing up and down to show what a good sport I was, and hung on grimly. There was a cinder-block building across the football field (yes, the same field) and I was determined that he would pay for his fun. I was going to turn that machine into junk, right before his eyes. I was so mad at being chivvied into this position that it didn't matter that I would probably turn myself into scrap, too.
And then he slapped me on the back, twisted my hand on the throttle, and jumped back as the bike leapt forward across the school yard.
The surge of power and motion frightened me so badly that I didn't do anything for a moment, thereby probably saving my life. What my numb mind refused to face, my instincts took in stride. My beautiful internal gyroscope balanced the bike, leaned me away from a set of bleachers, and sent me sailing gracefully out onto the track around the football field.
I roared completely around the cindered quarter-mile before I began to realize that I had the potential of controlling and guiding the fiery monster between my legs. I made a few, cautious experiments with the throttle and brake, discovering that my sense of balance would keep me upright and moving while I figured out how to run the bike.
The result of all this was that my audience saw only that I was tearing around a loose track at breakneck speed, apparently so totally calm and controlled that I was engaging in small, casual testings of the machine, to pass the time.
About my fourth or fifth circuit, I realized that I not only could control the bike, but that I could ... feel it, could merge with it to form a competent unit capable of purpose.
Need I say that this was a turning point of my life?
I brought the machine back to the local loudmouth, halting it with a long, precise skid directly against his left boot. "Not bad," I commented, as off-handedly as a boy who's never had the occasion to be off-handed could do it. And I strode off home, never again to dream of airplanes and pilots.
Have you figured out why I've told you this? Are you wondering what it all means, and what connection it could have with eleven-year-old Rebecca Horowitz, the golden flower whose lips are at this moment sucking greedily at my left nipple? Why should you care what motivates a half-blind grotesque to ride motorcycles?
You must care, my friend, if you are to know Rebecca. For we are much the same in our motivations, she and I, and motivation was one of my weapons.
If this were a movie, and the page a screen, I could flash images at you, one atop the other. I could show you a shot of me, leaning into a freeway turn at eighty miles an hour; then cut to a big jet, leaning into a landing pattern; then to Rebecca, leaning around a figure on the ice. I could show you close-ups of my face, and hers, and the pilot's, so that you could see that the same thing was in each one-the intensity, the knowledge of your own skill, and rapport with the machine-be it bike or jet or skate.
I could show you all these things, and you would see how they were similar and how they were different faces on the same drive, the same needs.
But I couldn't show you the real part. That part can't be put on a screen, and maybe not in words.
You can see the love of accomplishment, of motion and the symmetry of that motion. You can see the need to master a machine, a technique, a tool. You can see the drive to excel.
But these things, these few things you can analyze and see and put on paper, are not the real motivating factors. As real as they are, none of them form the bond that tied me to the airline pilot, and him to me. They cannot be what lured Rebecca to me, and made her a part of me.
No, the real goal is beauty.
The ultimate end of all perfection-drives is beauty. The pilot prattles of the "freedom of the skies," when what he means is the "rightness," the beauty, of that three-dimensional side-slip that comes off perfectly, and makes his heart ache.
I have been known to speak volubly about the "freedom" of the wind in my face, the open road ahead. But the wind gets cold, and I get saddle sores.
No, I ride for those minutes when my speed and position and can't are "just so," when I am so aware of my place in the traffic pattern, and so keyed to its mood and pace, that I can sense exactly what's going to happen next.
Harmony. Balance. Beauty.
Thirty-two days later, I saw her again.
I had gotten to be such a regular that the old lady who ran the place took to putting a little, hand-made "reserved" sign on a table by the window-the same table. She would have my lunch already cooked and waiting, kept covered on the back of the grill until I arrived. I was getting slightly sick of plastic hamburgers by this time, but I hadn't the heart to tell her so.
So I sat by the window and began my daily attempts to disguise the char-broiled sawdust with mustard and other condiments.
And then, she was there.
I didn't look-I didn't have to; I could feel her presence radiating through the glass wall. She was out there on the ice, I knew, floating weightlessly around the oval.
I discovered that my hands were trembling so violently that I couldn't get my knife in the mustard jar. I forced myself to put knife and jar on the table, carefully. Maybe she won't see me, I thought. Maybe she won't remember me.
The ludicrousness of that thought hit me, and
I laughed. Who could forget me? Once seen, I stick in the mind.
And so she saw me, head thrown back, mouth split in the grimace that passes for my smile, peering at her through my all-but-opaque jug-bottom glasses.
By this time I realized that she was looking, and the image I must be projecting, she was gone, flashing by in a mist of gold and orchid light. (I'm not being poetic. She had on a sequined, gold and purple skating outfit.)
And she went by again.
She was with a boy.
I hated the little urchin instantly. He looked to be fourteen or fifteen, all feet and Adam's apple and pimples. He was smiling at her and talking excitedly. She smiled back, looking deep into his eyes and nodding her lovely head.
I wanted to kill him.
For the better part of two hours they skated. I went through four refills on my coffee, and was unaware of the comings and goings of the world. All I could do was watch and ache and worship and hate, with the lines between feelings sometimes so fine as to be invisible.
And then, around two, they left the rink. I watched this time. I was going to see what car she got into out in the lot, perhaps casually drive by it on the freeway. I would glance over, very distant and cool, look her over, perhaps a nod, then roar off ahead, a lonely knight.
I caught myself. That wouldn't do at all.
Then I froze. She was coming around the mall. I could see her through the rink's other side. She was coming into the restaurant!
How can I tell you the feelings that swept through me? I was in panic! I couldn't move. The thought of her proximity-her coming nearness-turned me to jelly. She would have to pass within two feet of me if she came into the restaurant. My table was nearest the door.
I wanted to hide. I knew that when she saw the bloated mass of my body, she would scream or run or something. Worse, absolutely soul shattering, she might give me that bright, sympathetic pity-the-freak smile that people get. That, I couldn't take.
And she came in, her skates slung over her shoulder, and she came by me.
Was the boy with her? I don't know. I didn't see anything but her.
She came by.
I must tell you that the tables were close together, and small. Squeeze as I might, a good portion of my bulk protruded into the narrow aisle. She would have to make some acknowledgment of my existence or fall over me, one or the other.
I wanted to die.
She came by, looking off to her left at the big menu above the counter. And when she reached me, she glanced down just in time to see the coming collision.
At that moment, events went into slow motion for me.
I remember watching her shoulders, rather than her legs, or her eyes.
I remember thinking that perhaps I could get hit by a truck on the freeway, if I didn't die of shame where I sat.
And then, still in subjunctive slow motion, I saw her shoulders begin to shift, in just the right amount and direction. I watched her redistribute her weight, moving her left hip high and compensating by dropping her right breast; all in just the right amounts and proportions.
I recall her inner leg, the one that would have tripped against my knee, rising at just the right pace, performing just the right parabolic curve to lift it clear (and yes, the velvet-on-velvet rub of her inner thighs sliding).
But more than all this, I remember her eyes.
For a touch, they met mine. They took in all of me, all that sagging frontage. They noted that I was crouched against the wall, leaving what room I could. They took it all in, I say, and forgave me on the spot.
Wasn't that enough? Couldn't I have basked in that for the rest of my life?
Yes! But there was more!
In that same instant, through all the flying emotional static, another wonder happened.
A less involved, and perhaps deeper part of my mind watched the ballet of balance by which Rebecca was avoiding spilling over my acreage. It watched dispassionately, and weighed her. It passed judgment. This girl had the same master as me. She, too, danced for the beauty of the step.
And here is the wonder. Her eyes saw my eyes, and understood what they were doing, and recognized the truth of it! And in that molten time, she greeted me as kin.
This all took less than a second, of course. Then she slid by me, her thigh brushing my knee, and went on.
And as she passed, she spoke. "Hello," she said. Just that, then she was off to the counter.
6
Beauty is an elusive thing. People go to enormous lengths to capture and cage it, to twist and bend themselves into their concept of it. Men change their clothing styles, their manners, their methods, to be thought beautiful. They scar themselves, tattoo their skins, hide their faces behind whiskers.
Women expose and conceal, lengthen and shorten, put-it-on and take-it-off. All to be thought beautiful.
And they never learn the Great Secret: Beauty isn't put-on-able. Beauty is.
Beneath me now is beauty. Rebecca Horowitz.
I wish you could feel with me the pressure of her belly, straining upward against the slug's weight of my own stomach. I can feel every layer of muscle beneath her skin, every ripple and contraction of it. I can feel the furthermost muscles of her back, all the way through her body, so finely toned is her flesh. When she pushes up to take me further inside her, her buttocks contract, tightening to the vibrating point. The heavy muscles on the in-sides of her thighs contract also, making a springy "V" for my body to rest in as I descend on her.
She is strong-strong with the strength of youth and much exercise. She lifts even my weight in her efforts to pull more of me inside her.
I can feel the juices running out of her, channeling down through our mingled pubic hair, dripping down the tight-tight cleavage of her bottom.
My balls swing against the wetness, the taut firmness of her little butt. She moans, wiggling a little. She-likes that-the feel of my sac against her ass. She-likes the slap of it when we are in our heat and preparing to come.
She carries our weight on her shoulders and heels, her whole body held quivering, off the bed. She is holding her breath with the strain of it, and the passion. She-likes to do this, to lift us. She has great pride in her strength. It-this pride-is a large part of the elusiveness of beauty, of which I spoke a moment ago. It gives the possessor a glow, a positive radiation. Great beauty can be felt, as well as seen.
I rode home that afternoon oblivious to everything around me. I played a mad chess game down the freeway, waltzing my BMW in and out among the trucks and Volkswagens and truly stultifying heat of rush-hour traffic.
Freeways are a life-style. More and more of our culture is being warped and shaped and remolded by the freeways. People spend their entire conscious lives in the use, service, production and eventual burial of automobiles. Pimple-faced kids and grandfathers, executives and flunkies, schoolteachers and clowns. No one is free of the tyranny of the motorized wheel. It's removed our forests, wrecked our parks, and is now poisoning the very air we breathe.
People used to live for themselves. Now they live vicariously, their status, happiness and position in life determined by what they drive. The auto has become the Great Compensator.
Mousy clerks save all their lives-or go into debt all their lives-so they can buy an Aston Martin. They delude themselves into believing that people will see them in it and be reminded of James Bond.
Broken down oldsters drive rolling apartments around lighted highways to supervised camps with water in taps. Then they write letters to other friends, telling of how it is out in the wilderness.
And the real losers, the guys who can't face the sexual competition, ride around in low-slung assembly-line monsters with pressed-tin sides and giant engines. They have exotic names, these cars, and stripes. And whatever the brand, whatever the color or model, they all have one thing in common: huge, wide, drag-racing tires on a high-jacked rear end. "Look at me!" they scream. "Ain't I got a big one?"
I fully expect the day to come when our society will be divided into two distinct groups-the Mobiles and the Stabiles. Those who live and die on the freeways, and those who live and die in one place.
And me? What of me, waltzing insanely through the traffic?
We already know what I'm doing. My bike is a substitute for a plane.
Sex substitute?
No. That's where I'm different. I never substituted power for sex, nor made it impersonal enough to replace the drive with another, mechanical one.
When I was young, I had no fantasies.
When I grew older, I had a sex life.
It was that simple.
But this is important, this fact that my motor was not a sex symbol for me. It's important because this, too, was a weapon. This fact helped me get Rebecca in the position she's in now.
And so I went home that day, half-mad, and spent the hours until dark in remembering her touch and her smell as she brushed by me.
Violets. She smelled of violets and soap and clean hair.
I sat in my window far into the night, watching the street below thin of traffic, grow dark, and age into late evening. I sat with my chin in my hand, mostly and planned impossible rendezvous.
How do you meet an eleven-year-old girl? What possible way could there be to carry on an affair with a child too young to go out on dates? Or, for that matter, to even be out of her house after dark? Even a normal man is looked on with suspicion when he's seen with a very young girl-even in parks and zoos. But me! Not many people would belikely to overlook my gross and obscene form, especially in the company of so extraordinary a child as Rebecca Horowitz.
Yet, I was plotting to meet her. Somehow, somewhere, I would meet her. I would talk to her and touch her and...
No. At that time, that's as far as it went. I didn't dare even let myself dream about sex. At that time, all I was aware of was her beauty and her purity-the great, precious presence of her innocence.
7
This may not be the place to get into telling you about her face, but I think it's better now than later. Later, when I tell you about us, I don't want your attention wasted on wondering about the completed picture.
I said that she has a Jewish nose, didn't I? That gives you a blonde-haired, smoky-blue-eyed eleven year old with a big nose.
like everything else about her, that's both true and not true.
Let me say that her beauty was more in the assemblage than in the parts.
Her eyes were large, but they were just the slightest bit too close together.
Her nose is Semitic. We've come to call that a Jewish nose, but more Arabs own it than Jews. It is long rather than large; bridged highly, almost Indian in profile. It is thin through most of its length, and flares into wide, sensitive nostrils.
It precedes her, this exquisite nose, like a figurehead on the prow of a beautiful ship: more artistic than useful, but the vessel wouldn't be complete without it.
Don't go seeing Barbara Streisand. She has a quality of large-nosed beauty, to be sure, but it is a coarse and bulbous thing beside Rebecca.
The point to remember about Rebecca's nose is not its size, nor even its fine, self-contained beauty-the thing about it is that it fits her. It's absolutely the only, the pluperfect, nose for her face.
Now you have a Scandinavian child with a hooked nose and beady eyes, right?
Of course this isn't so. You've seen, somewhere I'm sure, a Semitic beauty-a girl with this ancient cast of features whose exotic assembly makes of her a vision not touchable by the paler, tamer girls of the more eroded races.
Now you have a Norwegian Daughter of the Deserts.
Stay with me. You're getting there. Rebecca has that final Semitic glory-a mouth.
Her lips are full, well defined, and of a natural carmine hue available only to girls under thirteen. After that, age and envy and lipstick destroy it.
Her teeth, now-and this is why I've held them back, as I did in showing you her breasts-must be seen, that's all.
They are large, regular to the point of distraction, and of a shade that pearls cannot match.
They protrude slightly in front, as do the teeth of most of her ethnic group.
This, together with her well-etched lip line, gives Rebecca a mouth that is at once the least noticed and most beautiful part of her face.
She is, then, a combination of features that, taken separately, are all too-this or too-that, yet put together, form a whole far greater than the sum of the parts.
Did that make sense? Did you follow that?
I'm saying that you don't notice that her eyes are too close together because you see her nose first, and you never realize that it's too big because her lips are so pretty. And you don't get around to seeing that they protrude because you've just fallen into the wells of her eyes.
Let it stand that Rebecca's face is the second most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
The first?
Her skin.
For all her woman's body, and all the glory of her curves and hollows, Rebecca is still eleven years old. A child. Her skin hasn't the spots and scars and wrinkles that time imposes on women. It has seen only eleven summers; eleven winters. Maybe two weeks of snow; twenty days of rain.
Eleven year old skin.
I cast around in my mind for images to call up-things to give you for comparison. But nothing comes. Rebecca's skin isn't "Like" anything. It simply is Rebecca's skin.
But I must try.
Not tan. There's a glow, a warmth; but it's health and youth, not sun, and it comes from deep down, beneath the surface.
Not white. Pale, yes, as her hair is pale, and her eyes. Pale because Rebecca is the incarnation of the concept of paleness. But not the pale of graves and sickness, nor of fashion and indoor lives. Pale as warm milk is pale, as camellias in the sun. Pale with warm blood flowing near, and pale as spring honey.
Once, as a child, I sat on a beach-a river-bank, actually-with another child, talking of the mysteries of the very young. I remember an instant when the sun shone through the child's ear from behind. I remember the wonder of seeing a dim tracery of veins through the flesh, of realizing that that marvelous translucence was alive and pulsing and warm.
And that's Rebecca's skin. It is pale but warm, translucent, radiant, and at least several miles deep.
Her skin, more than anything else about her, embodies that quality of purity that she broadcasts to a sad and frightened world.
All of this, and it really doesn't tell you anything. Words are a poor substitute for seeing her-or touching her.
So now you have her a little more clearly, perhaps. Not the actuality, but a good approximation.
I went back the next day, of course.
She was there. She was skating when I came into the restaurant. I could tell because every eye in the place was bent into the rink, through the glass wall. I could tell where she was on the ice by the slow shift of the eaters' eyeballs, following her. It was like watching a mime troop imitating a tennis match. Back and forth, their eyes went. But in place of the mime's caricatured look of intense concentration, there was that need, that ache that people got when they looked at her.
I went to the counter, picked up my dried-dung hamburger, and went to my table, all without a glance through the glass. I don't know why I did it. Possibly to assure myself that I still owned a piece of myself, and that I could manage to function, to breathe and move when in sight of her.
Or perhaps in guilt? Perhaps I was just then admitting to myself what my heart had known since the previous night. Perhaps I avoided looking at her because I knew that it was only a matter of time before I would snuff out the glow, and leave her no more than a pretty child.
Death is decay, the removal of life. And it isn't the final breath, the last heartbeat, that is death: it's the first heartbeat after the knowledge of the existence of death. From the moment that you admit death, you are dead.
The whole long process of aging and dying, and the culmination of it, are only the lengthened shadow of that first awareness.
Death is the rape of innocence.
And I had come to rape Rebecca of hers.
So I sat, not looking, and chewed my meal. What goodness the cruelties of life had left me fought its last battle with the needs of the blackest part of my soul. And lost.
I looked up then, knowing that I would be her apocalypse, and smiled as she swept past, all unheeding.
She didn't notice me for a while. She was practicing leaps and figures and had her entire being concentrated in the effort of achieving beauty.
She spun and whirled and glided, and occasionally she fell. Even that, she did with grace.
And it was a fall that dropped the final stone into the arch of my purpose, cementing me into a committed structure, with no qualms, no further attempts to save either of us.
She slipped coming out of a leap and sat on the ice. She came sliding over its surface almost directly toward me. Her knees were drawn up so that she scooted along on her butt, with her hands on the ice behind her and her skates scraping along before.
And for all her grace, and her youth, and her innocence, I could see nothing in that moment but the fact that her legs were spread.
Her little skirt was, of course, more decoration than coverage anyway, and it fluttered now around her waist. Her skating-pants were white, elasticized, and thoroughly opaque.
Yet nothing on earth could have been more arousing to me, just at that moment.
I didn't imagine her naked, you understand, not even with regular panties on.
No, all I saw was a pair of thick, white panties.
But it was the way they curved, the bulge of them between her thighs!
For a passage of seconds the light caught her just right and the mound of her sex was defined as clearly as though she were naked. Even to the ghost of a shadow where the lips split, there beneath the cloth.
In that moment, I felt the first surge of sexual desire toward her. In that instant of jelled time, the first sections of fiber in me surrendered, and I began to be committed.
And she looked up and saw me. She saw the mask of me revealed. She knew that I was looking between her legs.
And she smiled again. The same, totally open, innocent smile as the day before. She smiled and slid to a stop on the ice.
For a few seconds she just sat there, as though to let me enjoy the view. Then she bounced up and was away, back to her practice.
I was trembling again. Not from the shock of discovery, as I had the first time, but from the instinctual realization that the process of conquest and subjugation was underway. The hunt was up.
But I didn't know then whether I was the fox or the hound.
There is a delicious moment in the beginning of any courtship-no matter how grotesque-when you feel the first of the "agonies."
In my case, that moment came when Rebecca sat on the ice.
Thoughts raced around like shot in a barrel. Was she sitting there purposefully, I wondered? Is she teasing me? Does she even realize what she's doing? Or what it means? Is she just child enough to be unaware of the import of that gesture, or of my look?
No, I decided. With that body, she was bound to have seen my look before-on many men-and often enough to have some inkling of what it meant.
Then, what was she doing?
And so I stewed, fretting in the first serious consideration of our relationship. (Yes, it was our relationship now. Her acknowledgement of my understanding the day before had made it a shared thing. And this first mystery, now, cemented it so.
Whether either of us knew it yet, or willed it so or not so, we were tied. Our relationship.)
Then she came out of the rink, and I knew without understanding the certitude of it that she would come to the restaurant. She would come in, I knew, and nod or speak or whatever, but come she would. I knew it. She knew it.
That was our second rapport.
There are little games you play on the edges of first meetings.
When both of you know you will meet, these games take on the precision of a ballet, or a piece of surgery. However loosely woven they appear, however casual, they are as rigidly structured as a Japanese greeting. If you fail to follow prescribed formulae, the thread breaks and the meeting and its whole future flies away into the realm of might-have-been.
And so we played, Rebecca and I. We did our ritual chants and dances, there in the plastic restaurant. She a young heron, a flamingo, a thing of light and color. I ... what? An elephant? A hippo? A bearded hippo?
No.
I-with my weak eyes, in the massiveness of my body, bristled and snouted-I could only be a rhinoceros.
The dance then: heron and rhinoceros, played across a field of black needs and white innocence.
* * *
She comes through the door, very carefully not seeing me, studying the menu over the counter.
I munch my sawdust, totally absorbed in it as though it were the most precious and flavorful thing I've ever eaten.
She frowns as she walks, to indicate that she's too intent to notice that, again today, she will bump into me.
I find the ice rink suddenly irresistible and am unable to tear my eyes away long enough to notice my slab of thigh, jutting out to catch her.
And both of us, of course, straining the periphery of our vision beyond scientific credibility to see the other.
And, heart threatening paroxysm, I note that she's as intent on the dance as I; that I need do nothing more than make no sudden moves and she will come to me.
And she, seeing with eye or instinct or intuition, is aware that I am aware. She knows that she is safe, in this, the first dance.
And the heron comes to the rhinoceros.
"Oh! I'm sorry."
I smile, amused, tolerant, a little aloof, as is proper for a rhinoceros who has just had a heron bump into its knee. "Not at all, young lady. Not at all."
And she goes on, off to the counter.
The first steps in the dance are over. We have met. We can dance together. There will be more.
She comes back carrying a tray. She pauses in the middle of the room, amid the lunchers and their hunched, defensive backs. She surveys the restaurant.
Again, I find great interest in the ice skaters.
And, of course, she comes to sit at the table next to me.
Another child-any other child-would be awkward and obvious in her advances. Most women are awkward about it.
But Rebecca, now. No one in the place sees anything but a girl looking for a table. Even if they could see the game, the dance, would they believe it? Would any of those envy-and ego-ridden men allow themselves to believe that this vision, this pure song, would go eagerly and deliberately to sit near me?
No, they wouldn't. As she threads her way by them, all the frustrations and secret desires of their little lives trample across their faces. Their eyes grope at her, aware that they must take what they can and store it for future sweaty nights' visions; because they know that that's all they will ever have of her.
And then, as she nears my table, these tired little men in their suits and regimental ambitions flick their dead eyes at me, checking to see what competition, what threat I offer them.
And they register my bulk, my bristle, my lumpy exterior. They glance an instant into the shiny opacity of my lenses, seeking me, but seeing only their own hopelessness.
And then, reassured, they discount me and return to their furtive visual rape of her.
Rape. I keep coming back to that word. Are you waiting to find out that I've thrown a sack over her head, or have her chloroformed, and am raping her in a grimy room beneath the old schoolhouse?
No. Not so.
She's here awake, happy, alive.
But you can understand why the word treads on my memories of that day in the restaurant, there by the ice skating rink.-I didn't know, then, that she was eleven-I didn't even know her name. But I did know she wasn't eighteen-or even sixteen. Fantastic body aside, Rebecca was and is quite obviously still a child.
And my first truly definable emotion toward her was lust. Carnal craving.
I wanted to fuck her.
So we sat within touching distance of each other and pretended we didn't see anything but the food and the bovine lunch-counter patrons.
She was having a malt, I casually ascertained, and french fries. Her skates were worn, but obviously expensive. There were flakes of pale polish on her nails. She wore no jewelry except a small watch on a thin black band. There was a tiny scar on her left knee-an old scar.
All that without once looking directly at her. All without seeming to admit that she existed.
But she knew. She knew, and she liked it.
Now: since this is the start of it, the beginning of the two of us, it might be good to clear up a point.
When I say that Rebecca was a part of the dance, it's true. But not in the sense of sharing the same emotions and drives as me. Both of us danced to instinct's fiddle, but with this difference : I did it in full knowledge of what I was doing, and with darker purpose than the dance. She did it in the grace of complete innocence.
What? After all my implications, my insinuations, am I going to tell you that there was no ... no sex in her share of the communication ?
No, I'll not tell you that, for there was sex in it, and deliberate at that.
But it was sex abstract. Not sex physical. She felt the pull and responded to it, but she knew not where it led.
So this leaves you with the question on what did bring her to me? Why would this child pick my smile out of the thousands cast her way? What compelled her to come to sit by a man so grotesque that mothers hid their children's faces when he passed?
Ah, that's the second wonder!
She turns, inevitably, and catches my eye. (merest chance, naturally) She flashes her smile again.
I smile back, warm but still aloof, just as though I were a man and not a freak. "Hello again," I venture.
"Hello."
We continue to look and smile, but there seems to be nowhere to go, verbally. The silence stretches, and I begin to feel a twinge of panic. I feel that I must say something, although I don't know what to say. All my confidence, the veneer of savoir-faire that I've masked myself with, is vanishing.
But it doesn't seem to bother her. Her smile stays genuine. Her eyes are wide and frank, studying me with complete candor.
"You're very graceful," she says.
It takes me so completely by surprise that I can't answer. I just nod a little and continue to stare.
"I watched you leave the restaurant yesterday," she says. "You didn't touch anything."
Can you believe communication that strong? Think of all the millions of wrong ways to say that. Think of all the "that's-sure-something-for-a-fat-man" ways to say that.
There wasn't a trace of "freak" in her assessment of me. She saw me. She recognized the ugliness of me, the fact that my very being is an obscenity, the crudest of jests. She did not flinch from this.
Why?
Because it was of no importance beside the single fact of my grace of motion.
There is no ugliness in the eyes of artists and innocence. Ugliness is a contrived thing, invented by people with ugly souls. Artists see form, not surface, and the innocents see without preconception.
There is no beauty but the beauty of motion. Those things static which we label as beautiful are those which, in one way or another, remind us of motion. This is why we look to living things for our inspirations. When we were younger, and had not yet acquired the disease of sophistication, we were much more honest with this beauty thing. We strove to imitate the bird and the leopard, the brute un-stopableness of the giant beast. We worshiped the mammoth not for his size, for we banded together and slew him with contempt. No, we worshiped his vast motion, the implacable inertia of his flight.
And there is your answer, the rune of the second wonder. Rebecca, innocent and artist, worshiping with instinct and training, with beauty as both need and goal, came to me because I "didn't touch anything."
I think that in all my life, no more complete compliment has ever been given me.
So I sat there, nodding dumbly, while the glory of that moment fell on me like rain.
"You were here last month, too," she says.
"Yes." I find I still have a voice. "I've been here every day." Careful. Careful. That's way too fast.
"Do you like the food?" she asks, incredulously.
I laugh, and she laughs too. "No, I don't like it very much. It tastes like they cook it in axle grease."
She nods vigorously, grinning. "I'm always afraid that it'll turn into plastic in my stomach, and that I'll just swell up like a balloon and go sailing off into space."
"Wouldn't you like to sail off?" I ask. "Just to fly away forever?"
"Oh, yes," she replies, quite seriously. "But not all swollen up!"
Her laughter peals up into the stuffy air, making light where darkness and gloom had been before. I laugh with her.
She munches at her french fries, unconsciously wrinkling her nose at the taste. Her blouse is unbuttoned again. She is either unaware of the fact, or makes a habit of wearing it like that. If the latter is true...
She looks up, catches me staring. She smiles-shyly this time-and sits up straighter. Her hand makes a vague, abortive twitch, as though it would have gone to pull the blouse shut, if ... what? Instinct? Training? weren't stopping her.
She stands then, abruptly, finishing her malt noisily. "I skate here a lot," she says, friend-to-friend.
Then she bends to retrieve her skates. She comes up slowly. I get one swift, phantom glance at her deep-curved young breast, her dark nipple.
"My name is Rebecca," she says.
And she is gone, in a swirl of ruffled bottom and pale, slim thighs.
8
I don't remember going home after she left. I can't recall getting on my bike, nor riding through the furnace heat of that Thursday afternoon. I have absolutely no remembrance of how I got from the plastic table in the plastic restaurant by the ice-skating rink to my window, in my room, in my building, in downtown Los Angeles fourteen miles away.
But I did get there. I got there, and it was dusk, and I was in a state approaching shock-although I couldn't have defined that term just then. I sat in my window, in my shorts, and listened to the echo of her name bouncing around the inside of my head.
Rebecca/my name is Rebecca/name is Rebecca/is Rebecca/Rebecca/Rebecca/' Rebecca/becca cca/a...
It fed on itself, forming harmonics on its own passing, and drove all conscious thought from me.
Rebecca.
Instinct alone had gotten me home.
Rebecca.
I sat in the dirty window, staring unheeding at the sad street below; at the infinitely anonymous cast-off men.
Rebecca. Tiny waist, so tiny.
Sweat sheened on the doughy expanses of my body, carried in on the dirty, muggy wind. It began to form miniature riverlets down my chest.
Skin like pale gold; like melting pearls, miles deep.
The breeze ruffled the ancient curtains, set them to fluttering like tired old ladies. It began to bring in the evening darkness.
And her lips, her fine, strong lips that could...
My chair creaked as I rose. It always creaked. The floor creaked, too, as I padded through the gloom. The bed, though, didn't creak. It sighed, welcoming me.
When her hair blows; remember how it blows across her eyes as she skates. Her long, long hair, soft...
I was on my back, a gray whale-shape stranded on a beach of paler gray there in the dark. A neon sign outside painted a monotonous series of dull red blotches against the ceiling and the far wall. Blotch. Gray. Blotch. Gray.
Blotch. I rubbed my palms down the sweaty frontage of my body. Almost casually, as though I were not really there, I unsnapped my shorts.
Her arms flung wide, she sweeps around the turn. Just for a second, her little skirt flips up. A curve; a curve of buttock, bulging from beneath her tights.
My hands took on a life apart. They slid beneath the folds of my paunch and began to knead it, letting its own weight mold it into odd and vaguely sensual forms. All the while carefully avoiding the painfully rigid area below.
And her eyes. And the wetness of her tongue.
They brushed it, my hands, and the touch sent a fire-shock through me.
Sliding across the ice, her legs spread.
Almost gently, the left hand reached beneath, cupping the sack. It contracted a moment, then expanded to fill the hand. My legs parted, lifted of their own accord.
Bulge, beneath the tights. Shadow of the split, the moist, red, warm slit.
The right hand firm, encircled, bringing its enfolding warmth; grasped. Forefinger rubbed under the head, triggered quick, dry spasm. Legs raised higher, spread wide. Hand began to knead, stroke.
Her legs parted, sliding. Was there hair? Hair yet, at her age? Hair, golden, on the rim of the red moistness. Legs raised, parted.
Hands stroke, squeeze. Breath comes in chunks. Sweat. Legs raised, straining. Legs raised, straining.
Heat builds, deep under the sack, deep inside. Builds intolerably. Hand strokes harder, faster. Breath comes too slowly, gulped.
Bending over. Breast: creamy. One nipple, one hard, stiff nipple in my mouth.
Hand pounds, sweat flies off of stomach.
Nipple.
Mouth cotton-dry.
In mouth. Legs spread, raised.
Legs spread, aching, straining. Fire boiling up, coming out! Coming out!
Coming out! Legs arching, body arching, hands clawing.
Hands clawing, kneading, stroking. Heat coming!
Coming!
Coming! Coming! COMING!
I lay beached on my gray bed, breathing raggedly. The night breeze, like a tired wino, gave out just inside the window. It left me entombed in a shroud of my own steam and musk. But I didn't care. I had just experienced a wonder-another wonder! And Rebecca, I realized, was the cause of this one, too.
I had masturbated.
For the very first time.
Do you find that incredible? Recall what I said about my childhood, about not being able to daydream. I was never able to escape reality long enough to envision myself doing anything romantic or heroic there in the real world. That's what most people do when they fantasize-see themselves in romantic roles, or doing brave things.
The policeman, pounding his dull and pointless beat, sees himself pulling the mayor's kid out of city park lake. He envisions himself as a hero, receiving promotions and medals because of his deeds.
Firemen dream of rescuing pretty girls.
Ward-heelers dream of being Senators.
Senators of being President.
Presidents ? Probably of being God.
The point is that most people when they dream see the real world as it is, except with themselves playing a bigger part in it. They do not see the world changing to fit them-only themselves, magically grown more potent and powerful within the real world.
But not me.
I learned very early that the world wouldn't bend to fit me and the honest cruelty of my young peers killed any possibility of my fantasizing myself as President. (I could build that picture, certainly. I could envision great catastrophes, where, by magics known only to the blurred logic of dreamers, the country came to me to save it. And I would save the country, there in my dreams.
Then the grateful people would put a crown on my head, and take me to Washington, and make me President.
And I would step out on the balcony of the
White House, while the Marine Band played in the background, and raise my arms to accept the applause of the crowds below.
And then, no matter how deep the dream, how real the fantasy, the crowd would melt and flow and become the kids in my school. And they would laugh and jeer and stick kick-me signs on my back. Just like in real life.)
So I couldn't even escape into the heroic fantasies of normal people.
But I did escape.
There is another kind of fantasy, another road out.
If you cannot sustain the illusion of you in the real world, change the world. And I did.
I told you about my thing with planes?
I built a new world, there in my mind, and moved into it.
My world was a model word-literally-and I was its master. It was a world dedicated solely to flying, and full of all the delicious anachronisms of fantasy.
World-War-One Fokkers flew side-by-side with Russian Migs from the Korean war. P-51 Mustangs fought valiant battles against Sabre jets, totally disregarding the fact that they were both American planes. (And the Mustangs won every now and then.)
Now the thing about this is that I did not insert a model me into this world-a me grown trim and tan, and with the vision of eagles. I didn't even see me reduced to scale proportions.
Instead, I saw myself as I am (or as I was at twelve).
I saw my model world not as a substitute for reality, but as an integrated part of it.
The planes were models, even in my fantasy, and I was me. But the models were capable of all the functions of full-sized planes. They fought with real bullets, ran out of gas, crashed in real flames. They stalled when pushed too steep, had to be flown just as tightly as real planes, and would react to gravity just like the jets that flew over my house in Saint Louis.
The only difference was that nobody got killed.
I built elaborate systems, there in my head, for flying and fighting those planes. The systems were designed to produce as close an approximation of actuality as my lack of technical knowledge could make them.
But they kept me-the real me-safe.
The little planes carried machine B-B guns. They carried real bombs, made from chemistry sets. They burned elaborately constructed cities, detailed-down-to-the-bricks cities.
But no one died.
I devised binocular, portable television cameras for the planes, and guided them by radar. All long before these things became actuality.
This, so that the real me could sit in an envisioned control booth, deep beneath the battle-strewn skies, and participate in the totality of really being in the planes.
Except that I could not be hurt. Or laughed at.
Do you see the significance of this?
It is this: that even in my deepest fantasies I never lost sight of the real world, nor attempted to see myself as anything other than I am. I never saw myself as being bigger than life, nor life as being other than it is. I simply picked a better set of circumstances-more beautiful, if you will-and inserted it into an imaginary hole in life.
And now a piece of reality unlike any I had experienced before inserted itself into my consciousness. Rebecca was the first beauty that had ever come voluntarily to me, and her coming set me free-free to expand the limits of the permissible in my inner world-free to dream of having her, of taking her. Free to masturbate!
I got out of bed, moved across the darkened room to the window. The breeze had gone to sleep and odor hung like molasses on the air. I didn't notice. I breathed deeply, gratefully. Tomorrow it would begin-really begin. Tomorrow I would commence the active, open, admitted seduction of pale and golden Rebecca.
For the first time in many years, I was at peace.
9
She didn't come the next day.
I didn't mind. I knew now with complete certainty that I was going to have her, that it was only a matter of time. This gave me the enormous patience of a gambler who owns the cards. It was my game; I could wait.
So I sat there like a hairy Buddha, casting my secret smile over the skaters in the rink, and basked in the euphoria of my new-found sexual awareness until six in the evening. Then, full of pleasantness and anticipation, I rode home.
When she failed to show that entire weekend, the euphoria gave way to impatience. And when Monday passed without her figure on the ice, impatience became annoyance.
But by the end of the week, the only emotion left was fear.
The month that followed was pure nightmare.
She has this trick, my Rebecca.
When we're making love-as now-she can switch from girl to woman and back again, all at will. She does this partly deliberately, partly by instinct. She does it to please me.
Of an instant, she will be all wonder and innocence, oohing and ahhing at each new thrust of mine, as if it were her first taste of cotton candy, or the first time she felt dew-covered grass between her toes.
And then, as I build into fresh excitement over this, she will reverse herself and become a tiger, a woman born, demanding more of me, clawing in great fierceness at my back and making husky whimpers deep in her throat.
It drives me mad. I feel as though no mortal deserves anything so exquisite as this.
Her legs are down now, and closed. I am making long, slow thrusts into her. My cock comes all the way out of her body, sighing forth with a damp, sucking sound. It slides as I lift and retract myself-slides along between her firm thighs and the doughy mass of my belly.
I pause at the back of the stroke. This is a magic moment for us, this pause. We play a mini-drama here.
I stop, and she holds her breath. I hang suspended, my cock just brushing the wetness on her thighs.
She trembles-ever so slightly, wiggling her bottom a moment. Her hands close on my arms, gently, imploringly.
And I come down. Cock sliding back up the slick-coated groove of her clamped legs, weight settling on her again, breath rushing out of me, coating her face and hair.
She gives a tiny moan-a thank-you-it's-so-good sound. A little girl thanking the kind man sound.
Then, just as the blind head of my cock parts the hairy lips of her sex, she gives a great laugh, a squeal of triumph, and slams her hips upward, burying herself to the hilt on me. She grabs huge handsful of flesh at my sides and pulls us together, at the same time clamping her lips on my neck like a lamprey eel.
And I, caught in this riptide of changes, explode into an absolute frenzy of heat, pounding into her as if heaven and hell both depended on my efforts.
And at this point, with her mission accomplished, Rebecca goes completely limp. She lays with her head to one side and her eyes closed, and just basks in my attack. A tiny smile curls on her face. Her hands limp beside her. Her thighs part slowly and keep parting until they lie perfectly flat, at right-angles to her body.
And like a flesh and blood rag-doll, she shivers and quakes to the shocks of my impact, while the fury of our connection turns our juices to lather between us.
I am not trying to tease you, dear reader. I have taken this moment of digression so that
I might sneak up on the memory of that month obliquely. Even now, I'm not too certain that I can face it directly without losing my grip.
But enough. On with it, then.
I haunted the rink. I was there every single day, hunched over plastic cups of stale coffee. Somehow, I knew that she wasn't coming back. I couldn't tell you how I knew it, but I knew, with gut-certainty.
Yet I came, as a drowning man clutches at a floating straw. I came hoping for salvation, looking for some random chance to intrude into the certainty of my instinct and bring her back. But it didn't.
And every day that passed without Rebecca's return took me farther and farther away from sanity.
Rebecca had opened up an entire universe to me, a universe whose very existence I had not suspected. She had given me the concept of sexual desire as a personal thing. She had awakened in me the second most basic drive man possesses, and had thereby totally upset my carefully constructed world.
Now, having made me aware of this gigantic, primitive need, she had removed the means of satisfying it.
I became a void, an aching emptiness.
Each night became a ritual. I would ride home, oblivious to the surrounding world, and retreat into my room. Then I would take my seat by the window and stare sightlessly at the street until midnight. Then I would undress, fling myself into bed, and spend an hour attempting to raise a hard-on.
But I couldn't. Rebecca had given me life, and now she had taken it away.
Then, exhausted, I would fall into uneasy sleep.
For two weeks, this was my life-the rink, coming home, and then bed. Then something gave way inside. I came home one evening and didn't sit in the window. Instead, I trimmed my beard, rummaged in the closet for my one pair of dress slacks, put on a turtleneck and a jacket, and went out again. For the first time in almost fifteen years, I went actively seeking the company of my fellow beings. And for the first time in my entire life, I was on the make.
PART TWO RUNNING
10
By habit, I turned toward the library two blocks away. My feet were taking me along the street of their own accord, because my mind couldn't handle the business of decision just then. It was numb with my first actual view of night-time Los Angeles: downtown, Spanish-Black, ghetto Los Angeles. I had lived here fifteen years and never seen it.
It was like an alien planet. Yes, that was an appropriate image-an alien planet. The air was poisonous, full of deadly hydrocarbons, and prolonged breathing of it was fatal. Water was scarce and not fit to drink. Food did not grow there. Shelter was plentiful, but was under the control of the natives. And the natives were definitely hostile. Put down naked and unarmed, a man would stand no more chance of survival in downtown Los Angeles than he would on the moon.
And it was into this strange and frightening world that I went that night.
I turned away from the library, started down Flower Street. I didn't know what I was after-not well enough to articulate it-but instinct pointed me in the right direction. I turned east on Wilshire and headed for the neon glow of Pershing Square and the city's "Spanish strip."
Everything was old. Old movies played in antiquated ex-legitimate theaters, and were watched by old men with old dreams. Sidewalk stores sold old fruit, long-dead fish. Tailor shops with worn suits in the window, some as modern as post-war. Penny arcades that charged a nickle. Iron bars on all the storefronts.
And everywhere, every other store, a hock shop. And between the hock shops, liquor stores.
And all of it is Spanish.
And at the end, Pershing Square, known among the hip as "the meat rack." Here, boys in boots, in leather jackets, cowboy hats, tight jeans. Boys with tattoos and hair a little long. Boys with muscles and boys with youth and beauty. And all with dead, haunted eyes. Leaning. They all leaned. On posts, on benches. Forever slouched, wearing whatever defense they used and staring with their dead eyes at the others, the shoppers.
In trench oats and sports jackets, shirtsleeves and sweaters, they circled the square-a slow waltz, sizing up, choosing. Picking which of the slabs of meat they could best dream around and escape with.
And they, too, wore dead men's eyes.
I came to join the waltz.
Buyer or bought, it made no difference to me. In my youth I had played both roles with equal indifference. None of it had mattered then. A freak took what was offered, and so precious little had been offered that I never had enough leeway to be able to afford the standard prejudices and taboos. Homosexuality? Perversion? Abnormality? These were just words. It is only when one can fit into a "norm," be a part of the mass, that the concepts of perversion can be learned. In my youth, I had had to accept whatever came my way, and I had done so.
But never before like this. Never in need. Always before I had participated in sex the same way I participated in life-as an observer. I had always been a watcher, a collector of experiences. I had held myself aloof, above the yearnings and thus the sorrows of other men. I never knew the joys, true, but neither did I suffer the pains.
At least, that's what I thought before Rebecca happened to me, overwhelmed me, awakened me.
Now I needed. I suffered. Now, warped and misshapen, I was stumbling out into the darkness to compete with the other lost ones. Now I hungered.
I strolled around the square, keeping my eyes scrupulously vacant, focused on inconsequential. Lean boys sized me up, wondering if they would go with me, even for money. Most of them couldn't hide their disgust.
I passed these. I also passed the ones who smiled too quickly, the ones with intent eyes. These were the freak-baiters, and I knew their look too well. They were after the new kick, the exotic experience. These were the ones who set fire to old men.
No, what I sought was the professional. The boy to whom it was a job; no more, no less. He didn't care who the customer was-or what, as long as he got paid.
I found him about halfway around the Square, on the Hill Street side. He was about twenty-five, I suppose, and on the large side. He had small hips and a flat stomach. He was just beginning to dissipate.
He wore levis and a denim shirt. He also wore all the chain-and-leather paraphernalia of the hustler clan: wide belt, engineer boots, motorcycle hat with death-oriented insignia plastered all over it.
He was totally anonymous.
"Twenty dollars," he said flatly, not bothering to look at me. A businessman.
"Fifteen," I answered, smiling a little.
He looked me over. "For you, twenty."
I nodded, conceding the point. "My place is close by."
He jerked his head behind him, pointing with his nose to the public toilets that helped make the square the busy place it was. "Over there is good enough."
"For twenty dollars, we go to my place," I said.
For a moment, he hesitated. Then he snorted good-humoredly. "O.K., Sport, your place it is."
My point.
We crossed the square, headed back toward Wilshire. The boys on the rack exchanging silent comments with my purchase. A nod here, a grin and raised eyebrow there. He answered with bored shrugs, blatant indifference. Part of the game. The boys on the rack, the fine young boys, were trapped more firmly than the buyers. They hid behind ritual more elaborate, custom regulations more strict, honor codes more demanding than the multitude of men who came to purchase their time and the use of their flesh. It's always the whore who loses, not the patron.
We walk the few blocks to my place.
"My name's David," he says.
"That's nice," I answer. He's beginning the ritual, giving me things to build fantasy around, sewing up a potential repeat customer. I have just cut a hole in the pattern. He isn't sure what to make of it.
"You live here?" he asks, as we come to the dingy little hotel.
"Yes," I answer, leading the way to the elevator. He follows behind docilely, hands jammed into his back pockets, cigarette drooping precariously from a corner of his mouth. He's seen it before, this dim and littered hall, probably in a dozen cities.
We get off on my floor, two, and cross the hall to my room.
"You the manager?" he asks, noting the sign on my door. There's a new interest in his voice now. A hotel manager is not the worst person to have as a friend when you're on the hustle. Managers rank just below restaurant owners in the eyes of street people.
"I'm the owner," I reply. I watch his face overtly as I unlock the door and let us in. He has the look of a gambler who's luck has just changed for the better. like a man who has just learned his rich uncle's will includes him.
"No shit?" he asks. "I mean, this is really your place, huh?" He is already figuring where he'll put his gear, how he'll arrange the furniture.
"Yes, it's mine. My mother bought it, years ago. She left it to me when she died."
"Oh, that's too bad, man," he says. "I mean, about your mother, an' all."
"Yes," I say. I stand in the middle of the floor, looking at him. Can I make it work ? Will I be able to hide in this boy?
I'm making him nervous. I'm a choice prize-me and my free rent-and he doesn't want to blow his chance. But he doesn't know what I want.
"Uh, you wanta get on with it? I mean, I'd dig to, uh, make it with you. I mean, you know..." He trails off into silence, half afraid he's ruined his chance, half belligerent.
"Yes," I answer softly. "I suppose we might as well."
He nods, relieved. This is familiar ground. He knows the roads here. "You want I should undress, or pose a little, or what? I'm good at posing. I used'ta do a lotta posing, back homefor th' art school, you know?"
I smile. "Yes, that would be nice, David." I sit in my chair by the window and relax. I want to put him at ease.
He stalls on such a blanket acceptance. He doesn't know which part of his proposal I'm accepting. "Uh..."
"Just the pants, David," I say. "I won't need you to get into bed."
He's alright, then. The situation is mapped, and he has only to play his part. I will stay in the chair, and he will stand before me. "Right," he says. "You wanta leave that window up, an' turn off th' light. I don' mind if you leave it up, but I'd like ta turn th' light off. You know, some cop might look up, or something."
"Turn it off, David," I say.
He goes across the room, flips the switch. The dim light from outside doesn't reach to the far wall, and he is little more than a blur in the darkness. I can hear the rustle of belt buckle and zipper, though, and the soft sounds of him stepping out of his pants. Then, quietly and unselfconsciously, he walks back over to the window and stands in front of me.
Boots, shirt, cap. Leather wristbands, a heavy chain around his neck. And from waist to ankles, flesh.
He is slab muscled, evidence of long hours in gyms and on football fields. He is hairy, but not excessively so.
And he is hung.
Even limber, David was big. Not so much long as thick. His cock must have been an inch and a half in diameter, just hanging there. Thick veins encircled it like creepers around a tree limb. His sac hung heavy and full, wrinkled deeply.
In spite of myself, I was becoming excited. It was a beautiful organ.
He stepped up close to me. "Watch," he said, his voice husky. Then he began a series of poses, twisting his torso, flexing arm and leg muscles. He rippled and swelled, strained muscle against sinew. And all in silence but for gasps of held breath, let out explosively at posture changes. He was working himself up to sex. Already, I could see that thick cock beginning to swell, the sac to tighten, draw itself up. I could feel my own breath beginning to catch, my heart to pick up its rhythm.
Sweat began to sheen on his body, turning it to velvet marble in the neon and fluorescent glow coming through the window. The diffused light had turned him into a sinuous statue, a Greek god come to life.
Did he know that? Was he aware enough, like a good professional, to sense the value of proper lighting? Was he skilled, or just possessed of good instincts?
I didn't know-nor care. The effect was what counted.
He moved in blocky, violent motions, snapping from one pose to another, whipping his muscles from strain to strain.
And all with his now-rigid cock less than a foot from my face.
I was leaning forward in the chair, my hands on my knees. I was hypnotized by the nearness, the maleness, of his organ. Its blunt snout swung like a ram directly before me, causing my jaws to ache in anticipation.
I was ready, and so was he.
He paused before me, legs wide, hips thrust forward, arms behind his head. He stopped there, breathing hard, and held his position. His massive cock hung, bobbing with the pulse of his heart, directly in front of my face. like a blind torpedo it swung, seeming to home on me.
I reached out, gently, with both hands and cupped his sack. It shrunk at my touch and I heard him gasp. Then it expanded to the warmth of my palms until it lay heavy in my fingers. I could feel both his balls contracting and shifting, building up pressure.
With a final, small hesitation, we swung together. I opened my lips and teeth, and took the head of that big cock in my mouth. It filled my lips. It was over two inches thick now, just at the head, and eight or nine inches long, at least. It tasted of heat and salt and life. And then he shoved.
I could feel myself being pushed back in the chair by the force of that thrust. I could feel my mouth stretch to impossible widths, my jaws screaming with the pain of it. And that cock just kept coming. My tongue was forced back into my throat. I could feel the pulse of his blood inside, and the strain of his own muscles. And still it came on, relentlessly jamming into my mouth. I couldn't breathe, nor move. My throat tried to constrict, but couldn't. There was a ramrod in the way. I started to retch, my throat opening involuntarily, and that cock jammed further down into me. For a moment, everything was lost in a red haze of pain and breathlessness, and ... yes, enjoyment.
And then he withdrew it, sliding smoothly out until only the head remained between my lips. I started to draw away but his hands took me by the hair, lacing behind my head. "No," he said softly. "Just hold still."
I drew a ragged breath through my nostrils, feeling myself shake all over.
Then he commenced again, more slowly. Each thrust he sent it deeper into me, until tears were leaking out of the corners of my eyes at the pain of it. Yet, somehow, I managed to draw breath, and my throat didn't split. My universe became a thing of rhythmic thrusts of warm pain and wet heat.
I began to massage his balls in time to his thrusts, and felt him moan. He renewed the earlier, frenzied beat of his attack until I was in serious danger of passing out for lack of breath.
But it didn't matter to me. Nothing mattered but the red flare in my mouth, the oneness of my body and that heavy cock. I was drowning in my own saliva, suffocating in his assaults on my windpipe, but I didn't give a damn. All that mattered now was the increasing pace and violence of him in me. Nothing counted but the coming flood. I could feel it building inside him, feel it through the quivering of his thighs, the rock-like hardness of his belly muscles.
My hands clamped viciously on his sack, squeezing each ball individually. He gave a hoarse yell, half curse, half ecstasy, and grabbed my ears.
Then, in a great flood, he came in me. He impaled me on that huge cock. He stabbed me with it. He shoved it so far down my throat that he buried my face in the sweaty hair of his belly. Then, while his sack bounced against my throat, he held me pinned by his cock and pumped his fluid down me. I was lost in it, drowned for real. Gushes of saltiness washed into me, through me, over me. Gallons of semen, warm and thick, filled my pores.
I passed out.
11
I am walking down Broadway Street, a few blocks from Pershing Square. I walk easier now than that first night;-easier for two weeks' prowling. I'm coming to know the citizens of this dark and distorted world. I know the types. like a good hunter, I can recognize the dangerous ones-and tell them apart from those who only seem dangerous.
The big man on the corner-the one with the scars and the chewed ears-is he dangerous? Not him, he's just an ex-pug. But that thin little Chicano next to him is dangerous-very. He has a long knife and he frightens easily. And when he's frightened, he cuts.
How about the hippy squatting in the doorway, totally spaced? Aren't drug addicts dangerous ?
Yep, but not his kind. He's on acid, which is cheap and plentiful and leaves you with no craving's when you come down.
But that thin kid in front of the drug store is on "speed"-amphetamines-and he's wearing the "tracks" of a needle-habit. He's dangerous. He'll steal to get what he needs-steal or rape or kill.
And the mild old gentleman with the pipe is a pickpocket. The two Black men by the traffic light are a second-story team. The wino on the corner has three communicable diseases. The cop takes graft. The pawnshop owner is a fence; the liquor store counter man sells fake identification to wetback Chicanos; the kids steal cars; the girls sell themselves.
And all of them are telling themselves that they don't belong here-that they are just down on their luck.
Just like me.
David was disappointed when I didn't offer to give him a free room. He couldn't seem to understand that I wasn't after anything steady. He took the twenty and left, though, after much shaking of his head. I watched him go, sad that I couldn't explain it to him.
I could never have made him understand what had failed, for I couldn't put it into words for myself.
Would he have understood that he gave me great pleasure-perhaps the greatest I had ever had with another man-but that it wasn't enough? Could I have made him aware that what I sought was something on an entirely different plane? Was there any way I could have shown him that the lack was in me, not him?
No, I think not.
So I watched him go, and lay down to a bleak night of echoes and anguish. Throughout the entire passage with David, I had not managed a hard-on.
And so I had gone out again the next night, down to the Square. I had joined the waltz a second time, seeking ... another body? Freedom from torment? Relief?
The word had gotten around that I owned a hotel. Everyone smiled. Not a boy on the rack failed to throw out his lure, hoping to net me. Some even offered to come with me for free, in hopes of being taken for lovers.
And of course, that spoiled it. I took one home, alright, and another the next night. In fact, I took a different boy home every night for a week. And all with the same results: Gratification in varying degrees, and failure to find what I needed.
So I gave up on the Square.
Understand that I knew what was wrong with me. I knew that Rebecca was my problem, and that she alone would be my cure.
But such is the nature of man that he will go to unbelievable lengths to hide from an unpleasant truth. He will lie to himself, do totally irrational things, even add to his misery (like hitting himself in the jaw, because his tooth aches).
So I was out in the street, trying to cure my aching soul by beating it against the walls of other people's hurts. Not a very efficient system, I grant you, but it kept me from riding my bike into a truck.
I wandered into Rebozo's Arcade, squinting at the glare of bright lights on glass-topped game machines. Rebozo's had become part of my nightly rounds, and the crone who sat in the teller's cage had taken to nodding when she made change for me. Besides making change, she did abortions. Best on the block, she had solemnly assured me. (They never take me for police. They seem to sense that I'm not the law-type.)
I'm not particularly fond of arcades. The games are tedious, repetitious and mind dulling. But I had picked up a boy here one night, and a prostitute another; so I came again, each evening.
The boy had been sixteen, Spanish, and had tried to rob me. The prostitute was tired and singularly unskilled. I fed her, paid her and sent her home.
Neither of them had aroused me.
I played awhile, first one game, then another, but my heart wasn't in it. There was no one in the place who looked even vaguely interesting-or interested.
I fed a dime into a mechanical scoop-device, flicked the wheels at random, and watched with mild surprise as it grasped a man's watch and dropped it in the hopper that fed outside the machine. It was probably the first time in thirty years that the machine had paid off. Re-bozo would probably remove it first thing the next morning.
The manufacturers had taken the possibility of the machine's paying off into consideration, however-unlikely as that event was. The watch must have cost a whole quarter to manufacture. It appeared to be made of salvaged beer-can metal and imitation plastic. When I wound it, the knob came off in my hand. It did tick, though.
The moment's diversion wore off, and I left the arcade more restless than when I had entered. I walked a block or two, not even watching the faces. I lost myself in misery, for the multi-thousandth time. Rebecca lost.
"Nice watch."
The voice took a minute to penetrate my fog. Then I turned-and felt my heart skip.
For an instant, I thought it was her.
But it wasn't. The girl was her height, her coloring, and had her hair-or would have, if it were cleaned. But there it ended. She was coarser than Rebecca-coarser and less well defined. And older. She was at least fourteen.
"What?" I asked. I hadn't recovered from the shock of similarity.
"I said, that's a nice watch. It's pretty, man-it shines."
I looked more closely. She was wearing patched jeans and a baggy sweater with an old military jacket over it. She had nothing on her feet but dirt. There was a withered daisy in her tangled hair, and another in her hand. She was stoned. "I got it in the arcade," I explained. "You may have it, if you like. It probably won't keep time."
She smiled-grinned, rather. "You keep it, man. I got no use for time." Then she widened the grin, put a little brass in it. "But if you got a spare quarter..."
I studied her some more. She had one of those tremendous woven bags, the Mexican ones. It bulged and lumped in many places. "You on the street, girl?" I asked.
A quick look passed across her face. She reclassified me. "Yeah, sorta."
"You hungry?"
" ... Yeah."
"O.K. You get a quarter-and keep hustling till the cops pick you up on vag-or come over to my place for a bath and a meal."
She shifted me again. "Come over to your place, and...? "
"My place, and," I confirmed.
Now she spent some time at it, slipping out of her "high" long enough to weigh her needs against mine, to see if she needed a meal that badly. Finally, she smiled. "That's cool. We got it out straight, didn't we?"
"Yes," I agreed. "We did at that."
So I took her back to my place and fixed her a meal while she took a long bath. I set the table for her and took a chair at the end, to watch her eat.
She came out of the bathroom wearing one of my tee shirts. It flapped about her like a tent, reaching to the middle of her thighs. She was still a little damp and it clung to her in places. Her nipples stood out like pointy little hills beneath the fabric. She had put the wilted daisy back in her now-clean hair.
"I washed my clothes," she said. "They'll be dry by in the morning. O.K.? "
"O.K., " I nodded. "Sit down and eat."
She sat, tucking the shirt under her bottom. That action did nothing to cover her front, however, and her mound peeked from under it as she moved. For the first time since I had lost Rebecca, I was excited. I could feel my prick rising.
"This's good," she opined.
"Thank you. I cook a lot."
"You live here by yourself?"
"Yes." I watched her eat. She did so with manners. "Where are you from?"
"Around." She stiffened slightly.
"What part of around?"
She grinned at my tone, relaxed. "Ohio. Wadsworth."
"Near...? "
"Akron. They make rubber there." That seemed to hit her, somewhere in her euphoria, and she smiled interiorly.
"I know," I said "I was there once, a long time ago."
She ate silently.
"Nice town, Akron."
"Yeah, I guess so. Mind if we don't talk about it?"
"No, I don't mind." I got up and moved to my chair by the window. My room is L-shaped, with the bed and the bathroom on one leg, the kitchen and door on the other, and my working-and-living space scattered around the bend. It was on a corner of the building, so I had light over the entire area. Sitting in my window, I had an encyclopedic view of the street and of my own quarters. It made for a feeling of spacious encompassment.
She finished her meal, poured herself another glass of milk, and got up from the table. As she scooted the chair back, the tee shirt rode up her back a little, leaving the bottom curves of her ass, and a flash of her pussy exposed. I felt myself harden again.
She turned, carrying her milk, and came toward me. The night breeze blew the shirt against her as she walked, momentarily outlining her slender form. Her body had the half-girl, half-woman shape of puberty. She budded, rather than bloomed. She was like a young, fresh lilly.
Unless you looked at her eyes.
There you saw the entire ... year? Six months ? ... since she had left Akron. You saw the pot parties, and the days without food. You saw the miles of highway, and the cop who had probably stopped her one night in Alabama or somewhere. He probably hadn't been her first man, but he probably had been her first rape. It wasn't too pretty.
She sat at my work desk, glanced around.
"Nice typewriter."
"Thank you. It's an IBM."
"Yeah, a Selectric. I used to use one in typing class." She looked over the desk, noted the filing cabinets, the index systems, the postage meter. "You a writer?"
"Not really. I do research for writers. I look up things for them and correlate facts."
She nodded, satisfied. She got up and took her glass back to the kitchen, rinsed it before putting it on the shelf to drain. Then she came back over to the work desk. She rummaged in the big Mexican bag and dragged forth a small plastic pouch full of marijuana. "Mind if I smoke?" She asked, not bothering to look up.
"No," I said. "Just be cool about flinging roaches out the window."
Another quick look, this time with some surprise in it. "You blow grass?"
I shook my head.
"You seem to know it when you see it."
"I read a lot."
She nodded. "That's cool."
I watched her roll a joint and light it, taking a deep drag. She held it a good while, then expelled it slowly. The sweet, heavy odor drifted through the room, filling it with promise.
I got up. "I think I'll get ready for bed."
She nodded again, without speaking.
I watched for some further sign, got none, and moved off to the bathroom.
I took her dripping clothes off the shower rack and redistributed them around the room so that I could close the curtains. Then I turned the water as hot as I could stand it and stepped in. I didn't usually take showers, since baths were one of the very few times when my weight could be lessened.
But I needed release tonight, not relaxation. I was showering to stimulate myself, to raise my sensitivities. This one was important. This one might pass for my Rebecca-at least in my mind. This one might set me free. She had been bought, certainly, but with a different coin than that with which I had bought the boys and the prostitutes. The meal-and-bed were incidental. She had been bought with curiosity, with interest. If she hadn't been interested, there on the street, she wouldn't have come. It would not have been the first meal she had ever walked away from.
And in this, too, she was like my Rebecca. She had bargained for me, not my money.
I turned off the shower. My hands were trembling. I could feel myself rock-hard, beneath my belly. It was a good feeling.
I couldn't decide whether to put a towel around me or not. Would the actual sight of me make her back out? It had happened before.
In the end, after much nervous agony, I decided to face up to it. Stark naked, with my paunch rubbing the top of my prick, I flung open the door and stared defiantly at the desk. She wasn't there.
"Turn out the light as you come in, man," came her voice. She was in bed!
"Right," I replied. I flipped it off and padded down the room in my bare feet. I turned the corner and stopped. I stood naked, watching her and letting her see me. After being prepared for her trauma, I was perversely determined that she should have it.
She was sitting up on one side of the bed, browsing through one of my research books by the light of the bed lamp. She had discarded my tee shirt.
"I see you have one of my books," I remarked banally, all but demanding that she look at me.
She did.
"Yeah," she said, "Do you mind?"
"No, I don't mind." She was looking me over, but no more carefully than she had on the street.
"Do you think I'm ugly?" I blurted, and immediately hated myself for the remark. It put everything out of kilter. Now she would make soothing noises, and I would lie in return, and we'd just make motions at each other.
"Yeah," she said, nodding her head critically. "I guess you are pretty ugly at that."
It didn't register for a minute. Then it did. I must have looked pretty silly, because I know my jaw dropped. Then her solemnly critical face quivered and gave way to a snicker. I snapped my jaw closed, beginning to comprehend. Her snicker repeated itself and was joined by a smile that crinkled my face. Then we were both laughing, rolling helplessly in gusts and peals of humor.
"Ugly!" she shouted gleefully, pointing to my quaking abdomen, "Man, are you ever ugly! You're the world's champion ugly?"
"Who," I inquired, trying to control my laughter long enough to twist my face into a parody of puzzlement. "Who, me?"
And that set her off again. She rolled on the bed, kicking her legs in the air in mirth. I sat on the end of the bed, weak with the release of it, and watched her. My laughter subsided as I looked at her kicking her slim legs. It was replaced, now, with a re-swelling need. My eyes couldn't leave her bottom, now turned up to me so closely.
She, too, subsided, as though aware of my scrutiny. She lowered her legs, pressing them lightly together, and lay on her back. She peered down the length of her body at me, her mouth slightly open, her eyes round.
We stayed that way a time, looking at each other. Then I spoke. "Thank you, child. Thank you very much."
She was still for another moment. Then she grinned again. "Wow, man," she said chidingly, her voice tender. "What's ugly, anyhow? Hate's ugly, man, and war." She raised herself on her elbows. "But people aren't ugly. No person is ever ugly-just the way we see each other."
She raised her eyebrows, as if asking confirmation. I nodded, dumbly.
Then she parted her legs, slowly, and raised her knees again. "O.K., " she said, still softly. "Let's get it on."
Without a word, I rolled onto the foot of the bed and levered myself forward. She raised her knees further, spreading her legs yet wider. She took the insides of her thighs in her hands then threw back her head on the pillow. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was open.
I lowered my face between her legs, smelling the clean odor of soap and scent rising off of her. I kissed her fingertips, moved down and kissed her thigh.
She quivered a little.
I lowered myself further, placing my mouth over the entirety of her sex.
She expelled breath in a loud sigh.
Resting my weight on my elbows, I put my hands beneath her ass, cupping each buttock, and lifted her upward-all the time keeping my mouth over her like a suction cup, my tongue far back behind my teeth.
She whimpered. She let go of her thighs and let them close around my head. Her hands strayed to my back.
Then, with her entire lower body clamped between my mouth and my hands like a living watermelon slice, I ate her.
I thrust my tongue into her slit, jabbing it to its full length. At the same time, I increased my grip on her ass, pushing upward, and spreading her cheeks.
"Oh Jesus!" she cried. "Oh Christ! Wow!"
I withdrew my tongue, feeling her juices already beginning to flow. Then I jammed it in again, and bit down on the rim of her sex.
She gave a strangled little cry, somewhere between a scream of fright and a shout of joy. Her thighs closed convulsively, and her hands clawed at my neck.
"Oh" she moaned. "Oh fuck! That hurts, man, but it's so good! It's so fuckin' good!"
I could feel her secretion spraying me, squirting past my tongue. I knew it was running down my chin, and that excited me more.
I took my hands from beneath her, letting her ass drop back on the bed. She whimpered and tried to drop her legs to raise it again. But she couldn't. I held them up, forcing them up and back until they were resting against her breasts, and her body was bent almost in half.
"Oh, do it," she whispered. "Jesus yes, do it!"
Now I raised my face and sat up, on my knees. I held her by the shoulders, with her thighs jack-knifed against her upper torso until her pussy was almost horizontal. She was laid out like a moist sacrifice.
"Yeah, Baby," she said, rocking her head back and forth. "Yeah."
On my knees, my prick was on a level with her bottom. All I had to do was swing forward and slide into her.
But I didn't.
"Hey, wait," she said, stiffening. "Not that way, man. I'm too tight."
"No, you're not," I answered, thrusting forward. "Or at least, you won't be for long."
"No Baby," she pleaded. "Please, no."
But I ignored her. I pressed against her dark rosebud, and she instinctively tightened it. I pushed harder, feeling her trying to squirm away. I only half heard her cries of protest.
Then I was through. Her muscles surrendered, and I slid into her ass with a heavy lunge.
She cried out-in real pain, this time, and her fingers clawed down the sides of my arms.
I paused just a moment, then began to stroke. After a moment, as I knew she would, she relaxed.
"I-I've never had it like this," she said, more in wonder, now, than terror. "It's not bad, but I can't move. I can't work with you, Baby."
"Just relax," I said. "This is for you." Then I began to demonstrate to her all the range of sensation possible in that position. As she built up to a peak, I put one of my hands on her stomach and hooked my thumb in her pussy. Then, when she was on the very edge of climax, I yanked my prick out of her. She gasped at the shock, but before it could register, I shoved my thumb into her pussy as far as it would go and lifted her ass completely off the bed. It was savage, but the effort was spectacular.
She screamed-but I had my other hand over her mouth. She raked the bed with her hands, ripping at my sheet.
And she came so hard that she gushed over my hand, all the way to my elbow.
Then, with her body still in the air and still spurting fluid, I jerked my thumb out and let her fall.
The instant her ass hit the bed, I had her ankles in my hands and had yanked her legs up in the air again.
And just as she opened her mouth I fell atop her, jamming my prick into her cunt.
As my three hundred pounds slammed the air out of her, I covered her lips with my mouth, taking her fruity breath into my body. I lay on her like that for the space of several breaths, smothering motion and fear alike beneath me. Then, slowly, she relaxed and returned my kiss. Her thighs fell apart gracefully, and I began pumping her.
I was too ready. I came instantly. And came again.
And, sometime later, yet again. And then we slept.
12
Her name was Jodi, and she stayed three days. She cooked and made the bed and saw that my socks got washed. And when one or another of my tenants knocked, to pay rent or to complain about this or that, she seemed to melt into the woodwork. No item of hers was left to the casual eye of an inquisitive caller. She was altogether a fine girl.
But she left.
"Why?"
"Got to get down the road, man."
"To where, Jodi?"
"Oh, San Francisco, maybe, or Oregon. I got a girl friend who has a commune thing going up in Oregon, and I promised her I'd make it up there."
I was at breakfast, watching numbly as she methodically packed the Mexican bag. She had told me that she was leaving, right in the middle of the cornflakes. It had caught me defenseless. "But, Jodi, I don't understand. Have I done something to upset you?"
She paused in her work and flashed me a little smile. "No, you've been sweet. I wish every guy I met was as nice as you."
"Then why?" I asked, shaking my head. "I really don't understand."
She finished with the bag and put it on the floor beside the table. Then she sat down facing me and started putting her hair up. She regarded me with something close to sympathy for a minute. "What's her name?" she asked.
"What?"
"What's her name-the one you're ripped-up over?"
I stirred my cereal idly, unseeingly. "Rebecca."
She nodded. "I guess it's a little harder on a guy like you, eh?" It wasn't really a question. "You probably don't get many women."
I nodded in return.
"She leave you? Run off with some other dude?"
"No, I..." How could I tell her? Could I tell her that I was in heat over an eleven-year-old child, whom I'd never touched and whose last name I didn't know? "No, it's more complicated than that, Jodi."
Again, she nodded. "Yeah, it usually is." She got up and went to the bathroom to check her hair. She was almost ready to leave.
"Jodi," I called. "You don't have to go."
She came back into the room. "Yes I do, Baby." She bent and picked up her bag. "Yes I do. You're a beautiful cat-and I really mean that. I've never had it so good in bed. But you're not looking for me. You're looking for this Rebecca. She's got a mojo on you, man. You're not going to get your head straight again till you go get her."
Then she came over and kissed me on the forehead. She waited a minute and kissed me again on the lips. "Don't you worry about being ugly, Baby. Ugly is as ugly does. Lots of folks today are finding that out, and the old cats are passing. They're like dinosaurs, man. They're dead already, but they're too stupid to know it." Then she winked and walked out of the room. I could hear her footsteps on the stairs, not taking the elevator.
Then there was silence. I did not look out the window to watch her go.
* * *
That was the last I went out on the street. I could no longer hide behind sex-neither the lack of it, nor sex itself. Sex was not what I needed.
I needed Rebecca. Jodi had been right, and I knew it. Nothing would ever satisfy me except Rebecca.
A thought kept running through my head, a quote from Eric Hoffer's book, the True Believer.
In it, in a passage on frustration, he says that there is no one as permanently frustrated as the creative person whose flow has dried up. He says-and I think I can quote it: " ... those who after tasting the elation of creativeness feel a drying up of the creative flow within and know that never again will they produce aught worthwhile, are alike in the grip of a desperate passion. Neither fame nor power nor riches nor even monumental achievements in other fields can still their hunger."
And that's how I felt.
Rebecca was my one creative effort. She was the culmination of a life's worth of hidden wishes, made real. She was my canvas, the surface on which I had painted in a new reality.
And I had touched her, and she had gone.
Jodi had seen it. Perhaps others, as well. Perhaps all the dead-eyed men and women of this world have felt that loss. Perhaps each stud on the meat rack, and each yearning man circling the Square has felt-instinctively or articulately-that loss.
But whether it was shared or not, it was real enough. I was crushed under the knowledge of it. Damned to a life of knowing what I had lost. There is no hell deeper than that.
I was saved from total insanity by the persistent drag of the nit-picking necessities of everyday life. Each day I had to face this decision or that concerning my building. Tenants with stopped-up toilets; city inspectors telling me to fix my roof; the Fire Department demanding that I get a new furnace.
Gradually, I began to pick up my life.
My work had piled up unbelievably. There were huge stacks of unopened mail on my desk. Authors demanding material which was long past delivery date. Research papers half-finished and then forgotten. Library books overdue.
That was one place to start. I gathered up the overdue books, got out the BMW and rode off to the library.
In a way, the library had shaped my life.
When mother had bought the hotel, in a last-ditch effort to provide a future for us, I had been thrown into a world that was alien even to me. Always before we had lived in suburbs-or at least in more habitable areas. Now I found myself cast into a world of concrete and dirt and noise. I was sixteen, and a freak, and had nowhere to turn. I was still too young and too poor for a motorcycle, and couldn't stand the dingy inhabitants of our building-none of whom was under eighty, it seemed.
So I had wandered in the nightmare world of downtown Los Angeles, in the horror-filled universe known only to children and the ugly, until I had stumbled on the library.
I had come one day seeking sanctuary from a gang of Mexican children who had been following me home from school, pelting me with rocks and bottles. They had managed to get between me and the hotel, and were trying to herd me under an overpass a block or two away.
By good fortune, one of my teachers happened along and stopped to talk to me. I don't think he realized what was happening, but he did note that I was frightened. He had inquired as to my destination, mentioning that he just happened to be going to the library, around the corner. What a surprise, I had said, me too.
So we went, the teacher and I-he to study and I to hide. And I stayed long after the kids had given up and gone home, for I had discovered the marvelous world of the printed word.
I stayed for several years, reading my way through all the spectrum of human thought and inquiry. I educated myself in that library.
And I began to write. Stories first, then, as my curiosity grew, articles and fact pieces. I began to do research on things that interested me.
Through my typewriter, I became known to a host of people scattered around the worldknown for my mind, not my features.
And thus I escaped my flesh.
But having never really lived, I couldn't really dream. And not being able to dream, I couldn't really write. I found that I was not capable of crafting a creative story. Much as I yearned to be a part of my beloved world of adventure and fantasy, I was not able to do the work.
So I became a researcher. I gathered facts, collected data. I wrote papers on obscure subjects, and gained a reputation as a thorough and dependable man. I grew in knowledge and gained a measure of self-respect.
But, again, the knowledge lurked inside that I wasn't really doing what I wanted to. Again, I was thwarted.
Old Miss Hicks, the Senior Librarian, made clucking noises when I brought the books in. I didn't make a habit of being late with books-especially research books. I had a Special Privileges card, because of my work, and was expected to be more dependable.
"This is really not like you," Miss Hicks said, reproachfully. "I'm not used to this sort of behavior from Privilege Card holders."
I did my best to look contrite. Miss Hicks was about two hundred years old and looked like a mummy. Every time I managed to displease her-a frequent occurrence-I expected her to leap up on top of her desk and place a curse on me and my heirs. So far, she had limited herself to withering looks and violent shufflings of the trivia on her desk.
I paid the fine, wincing slightly as she read me the figure in her smuggest voice. I really had kept them out awhile.
Then, note pad under my arm and shirt pocket full of pencils, I trudged off into the History section. I had about a month's work to do for an English author, and I had about two days to do it in.
I found me a table-not difficult; there were only three or four people in the room. Then I collected two or three pertinent volumes of constipated prose and settled down to wade through them.
I had been at it about half an hour when a whiff of scent crossed my nose. I looked up.
"Hi."
This time, it was Rebecca.
PART THREE REBECCA
13
"Hello," I said-softly, as though something fragile would shatter if I spoke too loudly. "It's good to see you again."
"You remember me?" She stood with her head tilted to one side, smiling shyly. She had a stack of books under her arm.
"Yes," I answered, calmly. "You're Rebecca from the skating rink."
She widened the smile, opened it up. "You do remember."
I nodded. "Yep. I never forget a future Olympic champion."
She ducked her eyes modestly, but couldn't entirely hide her pleasure. "I'm not that good."
"You will be," I said honestly, "In a few more years."
"Thank you."
I indicated the chair next to her, across from me. "Sit?"
She glanced at her wristwatch. "Uh ... O.K., but just for a little while. I've got to catch the four o'clock bus."
"Fair enough," I answered.
She took the seat, awkwardly, and we sat for a space, just looking at each other.
I was beginning to breathe a bit more naturally now. Instinct alone had gotten me through the shock of looking up and seeing her standing there. My impulse had been to leap over the table and grab her; to shout for joy and cry for release and probably rape her right there on the table.
Instead, sweet caution had smothered all emotion beneath a blanket of pseudo-calm, and had moved me through a simulation of casual adult greeting as though I were a puppet.
Now, seeing that I wasn't going to fly off in six directions at once, it was returning bits and pieces of me to my own, conscious control.
A slow elation was growing inside me. I had found her again, and this time I wouldn't let her get away.
"I'm glad I found you again," I said, echoing the thought.
"You didn't," she replied. "I found-you." She pointed with her chin to the musty tome I had been reading. "You were buried in that book and would have missed me if I hadn't come over."
"You're right," I said. "And that would have been pretty terrible." I closed the book with a snap.
The noise drew a round of hostile stares, and we both pretended to find extreme interest in the table top, the while exchanging sly glances. I found myself grinning at the situation-something I hadn't done in years. It felt as though I were wearing another person's face.
"That was dumb," she whispered, giggling.
I nodded, darting furtive glances around to see if the patrons of the library had let us off the hook. "Yep, it sure was. I might have woke some of them up."
She was grinning now, her face full of delight. "See that old man in the corner?"
"Him?"
"Yes. I'll bet you couldn't wake him up. I'll bet he's been there for a hundred years, just sitting in that chair."
"Oh, yes," I answered. "He's an ex-railroad watchman. They retired him in eighteen ninety-five, and he moved here to the library because his old-maid sister wouldn't let him smoke cigars in the house. He's been sitting there ever since, and nobody bothers him. The janitor just dusts him off once a week and winds his railroad watch for him, and nobody notices that he's been dead for ten years."
She wavered between belief and outrage, and the latter won. "You're making that up," she accused delightedly.
"Yep," I answered solemnly. "I certainly am.
For a second, it looked as though we would both break into peals of laughter, but we contained it.
Rebecca looked at me with a curious respect now. "That's pretty good. Can you do that all the time?"
"No, unfortunately. I spend a lot of time here, and so do some of these other people. I've just made up a few stories about the funnier ones, that's all."
She considered that, then gave me another of those wide, moist smiles. "O.K., " she said firmly. "That's good, too. It shows that you've got a sense of humor."
"And that's important?"
"Oh, yes." (This with great seriousness, as though lecturing on a vital issue.) "Miss Carmody says that people who don't have a sense of humor can't be trusted. She says that they don't believe in themselves."
"That's so," I said. Then, casually, "Miss, ah ... Carmody; she's one of your teachers ? "
"She's the teacher. We only have one."
I felt the beginnings of a tightness growing in my stomach. I didn't remember precisely, but it seemed to me that the multiple-teacher system started somewhere around junior high. If Rebecca was still under a single teacher, then she must still be in...
"What, uh, grade are you in, Rebecca?" I tried very hard to keep my tone conversational.
She smiled again. "Sixth."
"I see." I could feel the numbness creeping back in. "Then that makes you about ... how old?"
"Twelve next November."
Twelve next November. Eleven years old. It swarmed around my head. Young I had expected. I had never kidded myself that she was other than a child. But eleven.
I wasn't ready to face that.
"Is something wrong?"
"Uh, no ... no, Rebecca. Nothing's wrong."
"You look like you have a pain."
I managed a smile. "You're perceptive, child. I did, indeed, have a pain. But I think it will pass." I looked inside myself again. "Yes," I said, musingly, "I really think it will."
"I'm glad. Miss Carmody says that we can make pain go away by not believing in it. She says that pain is caused by our not believing in ourselves."
"Miss Carmody puts a lot of store by believing in yourself, doesn't she."
"Oh, yes. She says that if we don't believe in ourselves, nobody else will, either."
"Well," I replied. "I can't find fault with that."
She smiled again, prideful that I had approved of Miss Carmody. She had put her books directly in front of her and had encircled them with her arms, locking her fingers together on the tabletop. Now she was rocking back and forth slightly, as though she were swinging her legs under the table. The motion alternately laid her breasts on the stack of books and lifted them off. Her dress was one of those high-necked affairs that buttoned up the front, and her rocking motion was causing it to gap every time she swung forward-to gap directly over the point in her cleavage where her bra crossed it. I was getting a continuing series of peeks into the creamy valley between her mounds, and was finding it very hard to concentrate. It was so incongruous that she was eleven years old and had such magnificent tits. It was unfair somehow.
"Do you like them?" x
That floored me. "What?"
"Do you like the books?"
"Oh!" I couldn't decide whether to be relieved or disappointed. "Yes, certainly." I looked closer. She had three books on American Indians, and one on general archaeology. "That's a little advanced for an eleven-year-old girl, isn't it?"
She looked annoyed. "Miss Carmody says that nothing is too advanced if you understand it. And I understand archaeology." She took great care with the last word, rolling it off her tongue a syllable at a time as if it tasted good.
"Yes, so I see." I ransacked my memory. I had done a couple of research pieces for a writer in Tennessee, and was trying to dredge up a few facts. "Do you know anything about the Indians of the Mississippi Basin?" I inquired.
"I know about the Chickasaws," she replied.
"I did some study on the Tunicas, once," I said, lightly. I was certain that she had never heard of them; they weren't a well-known group. "In fact, I was instrumental in the founding of Chuckalissa." I expected a frown of non-comprehension, and got it. "That's a Tunica village restoration outside of Memphis."
The look on her face told me that I had just reached equality with the omnipotent Miss Carmody.
"Wow," she said.
I rested on my laurels.
Then she gave a start. "Oh! Look at the time! I've got to leave."
A wave of panic swept me. She was leaving again and I didn't know any more about her than when I lost her at the rink. "Wait!"
She paused, startled.
"Uh, I mean, let me gather my things and I'll walk you down."
"O.K., " she agreed, reluctantly. "But hurry. Mom gets awfully mad if I'm late."
"Yes," I said, heaving myself to my feet and sweeping my material together. "I've got to return this to the desk," I added, apologetically. "It's a research book and can't be left out."
"O.K., but let's go, please."
I tucked it under my arm and turned to go. Only then did I notice that she was limping. She had a bandage around her left foot and over her ankle, and was not making very good time. "That's why you quit coming to the rink?"
She nodded, hobbling along from table to chair to table. "Yeah. A kid pushed me off my bike at home, and I broke it."
"The bike?"
"No, my foot!" (This in humorous mock-exasperation.) She hobbled along a moment more, and I paced slowly beside her.
"Do you still go to the rink?" she asked suddenly, her voice wistful.
"No," I said. "Not since you stopped coming there."
I had meant it innocently enough-just an answer to the question.
But something else came out in my tonesome of the need.
She stopped and looked at me. She peered into the thick lenses of my glasses as though searching for something. For the first time since I had looked up and seen her, I was acutely aware of my ugliness. I felt naked and evil and hideous. I wanted to run.
And then she nodded, very slowly, and smiled. "Thank you." And hopped on, off toward the desk.
I trailed along behind in a daze. She couldn't have understood the implications of that tone, but neither could she have missed its urgency, its privacy. It was something adult and personal, and it was aimed at her.
And she had responded with trust and acceptance. It was her first personal commitment to me.
At the desk, Miss Hicks cast a reproving glance at Rebecca and a stiffer one at me. She did not like children on the upper floors.
"Friend of yours?" she asked, turning on the grimace that she assumed was a smile.
"No, Miss Hicks," I assured her solemnly. "This is my wife, Bertha Swartz."
For a moment, both of them shared a look of disbelief. Then Rebecca's gave way to twinkling pseudo-propriety, and Miss Hicks' face turned to cement. "Really!" she snorted. "I'd have expected less levity from so scholarly a man as you. You're liable to give that child the impression that frivolity is commonplace in the sanctums of knowledge."
"Yes," I admitted. "That certainly is possible." I handed over the book, got my receipt, and turned to Rebecca. "Well, Dear, the kids are waiting."
"Yes," she replied, taking my elbow. "And I've still got the shopping to do."
And with much dignity, we marched to the elevator and went down to the main floor.
We made it out the door and got partway down the outside stairs before we gave in to laughter.
"You're keen," she said, when we had subsided a bit. "You're not all stuffed-up."
"Thank you," I said, in turn. "You mean like Miss Hicks, up at the desk?"
She shook her head, laughing again. "No, not like her. She's a mummy."
I laughed, too, interrupting her. "Yes! Yes! Every time I go to get a book, I feel as though she's going to put a curse on me!"
She went off into fresh gusts, then sobered warmly, "No, I mean like all the people who take everything so serious."
"Serious. "
"Seriously. Everybody tries to tell themselves that they're having fun when they aren't. So they try to grouch everybody else, because they think they're having more fun."
"Grouch?"
"Yeah. They spend all their time thinking up things to tell you not to do, and they all run around looking constipated!"
"Rebecca," I said. "You have just summed up the human race. I was almost twice your age before it dawned on me, but I came to the same conclusion."
I had been helping her down the stairs to the street below, carrying her books and holding her right hand. Her left she kept on the stone rail, balancing herself on her right foot. I glanced up and noted that we were getting close to the bottom. Very shortly now, she would be gone again.
"Ah ... do you get to the library often, Rebecca ? "
"No, Mom won't let me come downtown by myself too much. She doesn't think it's safe down here."
"She's right," I agreed.
"Hey!" she exclaimed. "Maybe she would, if she knew that you were here to watch me!"
Fright lurched through my belly. "I don't think so, Rebecca. In fact, I believe that if you even mention me to her, she'll not let you come downtown at all."
She stopped on the last step, tugged at my hand. "Why?"
Now the fright turned to fear. If I blew it now, it would be all over. I thought very rapidly and spoke slowly, choosing my words with care. "Because even mothers sometimes 'grouch' people, Rebecca." I took her other hand, trying not to think of what we would look like to a passing policeman, and looked into her eyes.
"And mothers very often don't understand how two people can understand each other when they're different."
She was listening hard, and I added the clincher. "Just like nobody understands about your skating or your ... body."
That got her. I had hit her where she lived. Now she would believe me. "So we must keep our friendship to ourselves, Rebecca, or people will come and 'grouch' all over it, and we will never see each other again."
"Yes," she said, her eyes bright. "Yes, you're right."
Then and there, Miss Carmody bit the dust.
"Yikes!" she said, all dismay once more. "Look at the time. It's a quarter past!"
"Where do you live?" I asked, hit by a blast of inspiration.
"On Harvard, just off Wilshire."
"Well..." I pointed with a look to my bike, a few feet down the street.
Her mouth opened and her eyebrows went up. "Wow." she breathed it, rather than spoke. "Wow! A BMW. Is it really yours?"
"Yep," I said, moving off toward it. "I'm surprised that you recognized it."
She skipped past me and up to the bike. "Oh, yeah. A lot of kids around my house have bikes, but none this big. I like it."
I filed that away. "Ever been on one?"
"No, but I've always wanted to."
"O.K., let's put you aboard." I was parked with the bike's right side against the curb, which meant that Rebecca would have to mount from that side. My luggage rack had a built-in seat back which prevented her from swinging her leg across the back of the seat. She had to stand beside the machine and swing her left foot up and over the seat to get on. Her dress was one of those mini things that only come a touch below the private parts anyway. It was tight.
Rebecca looked around a little nervously, then looked at me, standing by the front wheel. Then she flashed me a little grin, hoisted the dress, and swung her leg across the seat.
It was all I could do just to stand there. For a time she was as exposed as she had been when she had scooted across the ice on her bottom. Her thighs were spread wide and one was flung high.
But this time, instead of skating tights, she wore almost perfectly transparent silk bikini-panties. For that instant of swing, she was naked but for gauze. Every crease and curve of her pussy was bare to me, every hair on her mound. I could even see the shadowed crack, rising up behind.
Then she was on. The fact that the dress failed to cover her with her legs spread around the seat was almost anticlimactic. I could still see the dark patch of her pussy, and even a few golden hairs peeking around the edges of the bikinis: but it was nothing after that flash of total view.
This time, my stare must have been obvious. She reached a self-conscious hand to tug at the dress, and let it rest between her thighs, shielding. I was tempted to ask, in a superior and amused tone, why it bothered her if I looked at her, but I thought better of it. I had pushed enough for one day. Instead, I smiled lightly, stared at her critically, and nodded my head. "I guess you'll stay on." Then I mounted and started the bike.
"Ooh!" She squealed. "It vibrates!"
"Yep. It sure does." I wheeled out into traffic and cut my way skillfully toward Wilshire. "Where on Harvard?"
"Five-hundred block," she answered, yelling over the traffic.
"O.K., " I yelled back. "I'll drop you off by the bus stop, so no one sees us." I waited to see how that last remark would affect her. I knew now that she would believe me when I told her something, but I wasn't sure how far she would go toward segregating our relationship from society before suspecting that something was wrong. If she once began to suspect that there was anything furtive about it, that would be the whole show.
In this case, however, she accepted it.
"O.K., " she yelled. "That'll be good. Then it'll look like I took the bus."
"Right." As long as it was a 'just-you-and-me-against-them' game, she would go along with it. All I had to worry about was what to do when she realized that it wasn't a game.
Four o'clock traffic on Wilshire has to be experienced. It cannot be described in any manner that will be believed by the reader who hasn't driven it. But I cut through it with ease, sliding the bike between the jammed lanes like a black knife through thick metal syrup. Nothing stopped me but the red lights.
"Hey," Rebecca called. "You really can tool."
"I can what?"
"Tool. You know, drive. You're good with the bike."
I nodded my thanks and out-sneaked a slant-eyed sports car for a miniscule opening between two chrome-laden battleships. "Bikes have some advantages."
Too soon, we came up to Harvard. "Uh, Rebecca?"
"Yeah?"
"If you don't get down to the library, how will I see you again?" I could have given her several answers to that-it was all I had been thinking about since we left the library.
But I wanted her to think of something. I wanted her to commit herself to an active role.
"Well, uh ... I usually go to the movies over in Westwood on the weekends. Me and my sisters."
"No good. Your sisters wouldn't understand either." I could feel her nod by the shifting pressure of her arms, which were gripped on the sides of my shirt.
"Well, how 'bout the art museum?"
"When?" I had pulled to the curb and was helping her off, not daring to take advantage of the view there in all that traffic, among all those suspicious, prying, envious eyes.
She slid off and dragged her leg after, taking the pose of a skater on one foot, her arms extended for balance and her foot behind like the tail of a bird. It was tremendously graceful.
She turned. "I don't know. I'll have to ask Mom."
"How will I know?" I asked, frantic that I was going to lose her again.
She began to hobble off, bouncing happily. "Call me," she shouted. "Horowitz, on Harvard."
Then a bus pulled in behind me and demanded his place-loudly.
I pulled out into the street, narrowly missing getting killed, and roared off for home. Horowitz, I thought. Rebecca Horowitz, on Harvard.
I was back downtown before I noticed that I still had her books.
14
"Hello, Horowitz residence."
The voice was young and female, but it wasn't Rebecca's. "Miss Horowitz?" I asked, keeping my tone as official as I could.
"Which one?"
"Pardon me?"
"Which one do you want? I'm Sarah. Do you want me?"
"No, Sarah. I'd like to speak to Rebecca."
"O.K. Who's this?"
"This is the library, Sarah."
"O.K."
From the sound, Sarah Horowitz must have dropped the phone thirty or forty feet-on a brick pavement. Through the ringing in my ear, I heard the faint sounds of someone running and of a door slamming. I heard what I took to be Sarah calling Rebecca's name, and telling her she had a phone call.
Then the door banged again and what sounded like the fifth cavalry approached the phone. There were assorted bangs, draggings of the receiver, and squeals. Then Sarah's voice, giggling.
"She'll be right th. . . " Then, finally, Rebecca.
"Give me that phone! Hello? Sarah, I'm going to give you such a hit I Hello?
Her tone was cautious, proper: the tone a child uses when reporting to the principal for some unknown reason.
"Hello, Rebecca."
"Oh! Hello! Boy, am I glad you called! I've been..."
"Rebecca. Is there an extension phone over there?"
She was silent a minute, then spoke more calmly. "Nobody can hear. There's a phone upstairs, but there's nobody home except me and Sarah, and she just went outside."
I let out a silent breath. "You know, I was really worried about calling you. What if your mother had answered?"
Again, a moment of silence. "I didn't worry. I knew you'd think of something. And you did, didn't you?" Her tone changed, grew contrite. "I'm sorry if I did it wrong. I couldn't think of anything else when you brought me home."
"No, Rebecca," I assured her. "You didn't do anything wrong. In fact, I'm flattered that you placed that much confidence in me."
I could feel her smile right through the phone.
"Hey!" She was all enthusiasm again. "You still have my books, you know."
"Yes, I do."
"Well, they're almost overdue, aren't they? They were only checked out for two weeks, and it's been almost that long."
"Not quite. Twelve days, actually.
"But I'll tell you what-I'll turn them in, and then check them out again on my privilege card. That way, you can keep them a month."
"Wow. That's neat."
We listened for a while.
"Rebecca?"
"Yes?"
"When can I see you?"
"Well, I waited for you to call, but you didn't. So we went down to the museum anyway, last Friday."
"Could you go again?"
"I guess-if Sarah and Billey went with me."
"You couldn't go alone?"
" ... No. But, maybe..."
"Maybe what?"
"Well ... If I wanted, I could probably get mom to take me to the movies."
"But that wouldn't do any good, Rebecca."
"Yes it would. When she lets me off, I can just come out again, and you can pick me up. Then we can go somewhere. You could take me back afterwards, and mom would never know."
I thought about it. It was too risky-just yet. "No, that might get you into trouble, and I won't have that. We'll have to think of something else." I licked my lips. I was going to take a gamble. "Do you have a pencil?"
"Just a minute ... yeah."
"Alright. This is my number, take it down." I gave it to her, feeling my stomach begin to churn again. This was a concrete link between us. If it ever got out, or if anything happened, I would be crucified. "Got it?"
"Yeah."
"Alright. Call me, if you think of something first-in fact, why don't you call me regularly, instead of me calling you. That might be less ... trouble." I had almost said "dangerous."
"O.K., " she said. "What time?"
"Anytime. I'm home every evening, and most mornings."
"Well, it'll probably be in the evenings. I'm going to be back in school pretty soon."
"How soon."
"Two weeks."
"O.K. Try to get away before then."
"Sure."
We were silent for a space. "Well," I said. "I'll go now. Got to get back to work."
"O.K."
"Bye-bye ... Darling."
" ... Bye."
I hung the receiver in its cradle and let out a long, heavy breath. I leaned back in my chair and let the afternoon smog drift in on my naked body like a blanket. I was sweating, and not from the heat. I also had a hard-on.
It had taken more courage to make that phone call than to do anything I had ever attempted. Not in all my years as an outcast had I been so frightened of a new situation.
I had spent twelve agonizing days trying to find a fool-proof method of calling her and had been frustrated at every turn. I had actually called, the third day, but a man answered-her father, presumably-and I had panicked and slammed the phone down.
Then I had gone through the doubt agonies. What if I was reading things in her responses that weren't there? What if she had gone straight home to tell her mother, and the police were waiting for my call? What if she were just having a huge joke at the expense of the freak?
By the second week, I was a wreck.
In the end, of course, I just picked up the phone and called, consequences be damned. The library routine was spur-of-the-moment. I hadn't even considered it before Sarah asked my business with her sister.
And it had worked. I now had a contact with Rebecca, and another commitment. She was going to actively look for a way to meet me-even after I stood her up on the first one.
I lay back in the chair, almost at peace. The reaction of the past weeks turmoil was setting in, and I felt fatigued beyond belief. Except for my prick, which stood like an iron rod, I was as limp as last week's fish.
Almost idly, I reached beneath my blubbery belly to caress that stiff little member. Then I stopped.
No. I would not touch it, nor would I seek any other form of release, until I had had Rebecca.
I sat in that dirty window and vowed to have her. All niceties aside, and whatever the sugar with which I was coating the truth, I was going to fuck Rebecca Horowitz or do without. In fact, if I couldn't have her by cunning, I would take her by force.
For the first time, I realized the depth of my need. It finally sunk through to me that nothing mattered to me anymore except fucking hernot even my own life. If I had to, I would take her on the steps of the police station, in full view of the world.
I would fuck her, or die trying.
15
"When?"
"Tomorrow. I'll be there at ten-thirty."
"Alone?"
"Yes."
"How are you managing this."
"I'll tell you then, O.K.. "
"Sure, Rebecca, ten-thirty it is."
"And bring my books."
"Alright." (click)
I rolled over and glanced at the clock. Two a.m. How in the world had she called me at that hour? Eleven-year-olds simply were not up that late.
But she had been, and now I was awake. The-likelihood of my being able to get back to sleep at this point was very close to nil. She had seen to that.
She would be at the art museum this morning-alone.
I stumbled into the bathroom and took a leak. Even that's a problem when you can't see your dick-or the bowl. I had solved it long ago by the simple expedient of pissing in the sink. If that bothers you, check with any doctor. The stuff that lives in the average man's mouth and throat-even when he keeps them cleaned-is enough to kill a good-sized horse. Man-bite is considered to be about five times as deadly, germ-wise, as that of any wild animal.
On the other hand, good clean piss is one of the few things that comes out of a man which isn't poisonous or harmful. And if the idea of the odor gets to you, take a good whiff of your bedmate's breath, tomorrow morning. I went to the kitchen and put on coffee, then retreated back into the bathroom to shower and scrape my face. By the time I was done, so was the coffee.
Three a.m. Seven-and-a-half more hours.
That was no good. If I started watching the clock, I'd go batty by dawn.
So I did a little work, and brought the hotel books up to date, and went down and polished the bike, and one way or another I made it into the morning.
I was at the museum by nine-thirty, riding into a cool, fresh mist-a real rarity in Los Angeles. I put the bike in the museum's open lot, which is across a big grassy field from the building proper.
Actually, the whole affair sits in Hancock park, which also houses the famous La Brea tar pits, last resting place of innumerable large, hungry prehistoric animals.
I parked the bike there because, even with the lot full, it would be visible from the museum-or the tar pits, or the field, or the streets. I wasn't taking any chances.
The museum didn't open till ten o'clock so I wandered across the field, leaving a wake of footprints in the sea of dew that carpeted the grass.
A couple of students were busy sifting mud in one of the pits, and I wandered over to watch. The area was fenced off to protect the curious from the evil effects of exposure to raw science, and a large placard had been placed inside the fence to elucidate the work in progress. This was, it declared in small words, the umpteenth dig at this pit, and the work was sponsored by: followed by an interminable list of social do-gooders who had assured their place in scientific history by contributing a few tax-losses to the museum.
Do I sound bitter? Well, I am.
Over the years, I have gathered a smattering of knowledge in almost every field of human endeavor-product of my bookworm occupation and of my retreat from my fellow man.
And in the course of, all this gathering of wisdom, I have been unable to escape a couple of basic conclusions.
One: that most scientific discovery happens in spite of science and scientists, and, Two: that ninety percent of scientific funding and sponsorship is done by total illiterates who couldn't differentiate between lepidoptera and Leopold's theorem-even with a dictionary.
Understand that I do not deride the system, per se; advances do get made, and that's what counts.
But the general level of ignorance is so high among the practitioners and patrons of science that one obtains the curious side-effect of seeing these men actually begin to believe that they, rather than chance and luck, are responsible for the advances. This produces unbelievable amounts of printed flatulence and drivel, through which the patient researcher must wade, boots high and shovel at the ready, before he can reach the facts-if any-concealed in the piece at hand.
And I had waded through too much of it to find much interest in watching a couple of would-be Dr. Leakey's picking through the three-thousandth dire-wolf mandible found in the La Brea pits.
Besides, it was almost ten, and I wanted to be where I could see her when she arrived.
I walked around the pits and across the field to the plaza in front of the museum. The gates were open, so I went up to the entrance level and wandered among the statuary.
The Los Angeles museum administration is name-conscious. They have at least several examples of the work of everybody who ever sold a painting or a statue. And they usually have the worst work the artist ever did.
They have, for examples, almost a dozen Rodins-none of them better than third-rate.
They also own what is possibly the largest single collection of Picasso's rejects on earth.
I won't even mention the Cezannes.
I glanced at my watch. Ten-fifteen. I kept walking, forcing myself to think of art-anything besides counting minutes. The night's wait, filled with busywork, had left me awake, alert and physically exhausted. I was on a thin edge, just then, and needed to divert myself.
So I strolled on, sneering at the best my adopted city could procure in the way of art.
It wouldn't have been so bad, if I hadn't known that the problem was not money, but lack of taste.
The museum in New Orleans, which I had once visited, operated on a total budget smaller than the janitorial allotment here at LA.
Yet they managed. They had only one Ernst, but it was The Eye Of Silence, his best piece.
They had but one Picasso-Girl in Blue. One Gauguin-the Tahitian Doors.
In fact, they seldom had more than one of any artist's works. But it was usually the best.
Ten-thirty.
The museum was already filled with camera-laden tourists and earnest young artists in beards and rags.
But no Rebecca.
I moved around the plaza, peering from its elevated terrace across the width of the park.
I went inside. Perhaps I had missed her when she came. Notlikely, but...
No, simply not possible. There was only one way in, and I had been in plain sight.
It was almost eleven before the obvious hit me.
With calm assurance I left the plaza, trudged across the field, and descended on the tar pits-specifically, the one under excavation.
"Hi! Did you bring my books ? "
She was perched on one of the portable bleachers that had been erected to house the anticipated throngs of people who would gather to watch grown men playing in the mud.
As advertised, she was alone.
"Yes," I answered. I clambered up beside her, and the entire bleacher creaked under my weight. "Here."
"Thank you. What took you so long?"
"I was up on the plaza. I didn't think to look for you here until just now."
She gave me a trusting smile. "I knew you'd figure it out, though."
"You like puzzles, eh?"
She nodded vigorously. "Yes. I'm very good at them, actually."
She lapsed into an absorbed silence, peering intently into the trench. I took the opportunity to enjoy the view.
She was wearing skintight bell-bottom pants and a see-through blouse, both in shades of gray that set off her honey-gold hair to perfection.
I noted absently that either she or her mother had excellent taste in clothing.
But this wasn't what held my attention. I was getting my first unobstructed view of Rebecca Horowitz' breasts, and it was making my mouth go dry.
Seen through clothing, or imagined around a glimpse of cleavage, their actual size wasn't determinable. Seen in three dimensions, unhampered save for her bra, they were truly inspiring. They must have weighed five pounds each. She was a D-cup at the very least, and even cups that size failed to contain those tits entirely, so that they flowed out around the upper edges of the bra and mounded above it in creamy slopes.
I didn't understand how she managed to walk around without falling over.
With a start, I realized that she had asked me a question. "Excuse me," I pleaded, my mouth literally dry. "My mind was elsewhere. What did you ask?"
For a moment she just looked at me, her eyes curiously bright; then she turned her head back to the trench. "I said, don't you think this is exciting?"
I could feel my fingers tighten on the bench. Something in the way she had asked that-her tone, perhaps-had alerted me. I couldn't put my finger on it, but it rang a bell somewhere. It was like an organ note that your ear has been straining to hear, even though you didn't realize you were listening. "Uh, not very," I answered, my voice neuter. "I've seen them before."
"Oh," she said. She was still staring at the dig as though totally absorbed, but a quick pulse showed at her neck. "It's not the digging that's exciting," she added, her tone still oddly strained. "It's what they might find."
I didn't answer. I was concentrating all my powers on deciphering that look and her strange tone. Something of great importance was transpiring here-or had just done so-if I had the wit to see it.
Then it hit me! She had turned to ask me that question, the first time, and had caught me looking. She couldn't possibly have missed seeing where I was staring.
I was found out! For one moment, I knew despair. I almost leapt on her, to have her before she could escape.
But a strange thought nagged at my conscious, eating its way through my agonies: something was wrong with her reaction.
I peered at her closely, analytically. Her pulse was up and she was avoiding my gaze: but the first was just a sign of quickened emotions, and the second just a displacement activity. She was frightened, perhaps, and certainly aroused emotionally, but she wasn't showing fear. She had caught me with my desires open on my face, staring at her all-but-naked breasts, and had reacted ... how?
I leaned forward unconsciously, my whole being focused on observing the minute and subtle signs by which she would betray her true feelings.
Could it be ... Pleasure? Was this child of eleven taking pleasure out of my attraction to her breasts?
My own pulse was now pounding in my ears, matching the rapid tattoo that beat in Rebecca's neck. The implications of my analysis staggered me. I couldn't let myself think about it, for fear that I might be reading something into her actions that wasn't really there.
And yet, if I were right, and didn't respond...
There was nothing for it but to try. I had to know, even though I knew that if I were wrong, I would almost certainly scare her off.
With an effort, I recalled her last statement-something about the possibility of an important find. I took a deep breath.
"Well," it came out in a croak, and I had to clear my throat to make it work. "It isn't very likely that they'll find anything new. They've dug in all these pits several times before."
She slumped almost imperceptibly. Relaxation? Loss of fright? Disappointment?
The moment was passing. I had to do it now, if I was going to. "I'm sorry if I upset you," I said softly. "Staring at your breasts like that."
She stiffened again, hunching her shoulders the merest trifle-a gesture so tiny I would have missed it if my entire being hadn't been tuned to her every nuance.
Then, ever so slowly, her chin came up a half an inch and she thrust back her shoulders, causing her breasts to jut further. "That's alright," she said, very softly. "It doesn't upset me."
She turned her head completely away, but not quickly enough to hide the beginnings of a look of ... triumph? Yes! Triumph!
Elation swelled inside me, filling me with a huge certainty. I was suddenly relaxed, completely in mastery of the situation.
"Rebecca." It was half a command. "Rebecca, look at me."
She did so, her eyes still bright. There was a flush creeping up her throat.
"You were hoping that I'd look at you, weren't you?"
She nodded, ducking her eyes modestly.
"That's why you wore that blouse, isn't it?"
Again, a nod.
"Why?" I knew, but I wanted her to get it out. I was feeling omnipotent.
"B-Because you like to look."
"You mean you did this just to please me?"
"Yes." Still low, but stronger, as though she were gaining confidence.
"Do you like having men stare at your body?"
She shook her head violently. "They make me feel dirty."
"And me?"
"You're different." She was looking away again, and the flush had crept all the way up her neck.
"How?"
"I-I don't know. You're just different, that's all. You make me feel ... I don't know." She ran her hand through her hair, brushing it back behind her neck. "You know what it's like to be stared at all the time. You're alone, too." This last had an edge of bitterness.
"Yes, I know all about being stared at, Rebecca, and about being alone."
I sensed that she'd been about as far as she could go. I reminded myself that she was only eleven, and that she had just made what must have been a traumatic commitment. I decided to break the mood. Better to leave the subject on a positive note than to push it too far and ruin it. It was still a very fragile thing.
"Come on, Rebecca. Let's go for a walk."
The tension fell away from her and she flashed me a smile like rainbows and leaped to her feet. "Yes, let's!" And she was off, bounding across the bleachers lightly as a goat.
I followed somewhat more sedately and caught up with her on the far side of the pits. We ambled lazily out onto the grassy field of the park proper.
"I see you're out of your bandage."
"Yes. I'm almost good as new. Dr. Ullman says that I can probably skate again by Thanksgiving."
"I'm glad. I know what it's like to be unable to pursue beauty."
She looked up at me curiously. "Is that what it is?"
"What what is?"
"What I feel when I skate."
"Yes. That's what keeps you practicing and practicing until you get a turn just right. You want it to be perfect, and beauty is perfection of form."
She thought about it. "Wow. That's right. It sure is." She grabbed my hand, tugging me to a standstill. "And that's what you do with your bike, isn't it? You try to do it as beautiful as possible."
"Beautiful! Yes, I do." We were approaching one of several clumps of brushes artfully arranged to provide privacy without concealing. I steered us over, and sat down in the grass. Rebecca flopped lightly down on her stomach and propped herself up on her elbows.
Even in that position, her breasts dragged the ground.
"That's why men stare at you, Rebecca. You're perfect in form, just like a good turn on the skates." I hadn't meant to let that out, but the opportunity was too good to pass up. Now I had to move the conversation on, as though it had been nothing more than an observation. "By the way, how did you manage to get away?"
"That was easy," she said with relish. This child wasn't afraid of a challenge, obviously. "My sister Billey has a boyfriend and she doesn't want mom to know, see-so she told mom she was taking me to the movies, and then gave me half a dollar to stay here at the museum while she went for a ride with Ken-that's her boyfriend."
I raised a quizzical eyebrow. "And who thought up this gem of a plot?"
Her grin was answer enough.
"How long can you stay?" I couldn't help asking. It was the same impulse that drives you to count the remaining cookies every time you eat one.
"Maybe an hour more," she said, glancing at her watch.
"Alright," I said bluffly. "Let's go see the museum." I knew that if I stayed there with her, I would do something foolish. Now that I knew I had her, I was feeling my first pangs of real fear. Not fear of losing her, but fear of discovery. Only thieves can smell policemen.
We wandered through the galleries in good humor, laughing and appreciating by turns. And if we looked a grotesque couple, what of it? We were doing nothing to arouse even the most cynical of minds. An ugly man and his niece. And at the end of the hour, as we prepared to leave, Rebecca spoke.
"Do you see me like that?" she asked, stopping before a rather heavy-handed imitation of a Renoir nude.
"No," I said. "You're much prettier than she is."
She shook her head. "No, not that." She ran her hand over the canvas in a circular motion.
"See how he's made all her ... her parts softer than they really could be? It looks like he took a girl and made her into what he wished she were. Do you see me that way?"
I stepped down the corridor to the elevator-we were on an upper floor-and waited for her to join me before answering. "No," I said, pushing the 'down' button. "I don't know how I see you, Rebecca, because I haven't actually seen you. Yet." I let it hang there until the elevator came. Then, as she stepped inside, I followed and called her name. "Rebecca?" The timing would have to be good.
The door shut behind me, Rebecca turned, and I reached out with both hands and cupped her tits.
She caught her breath, and her nostrils flared, but again, she did not flinch or move away.
All the ride down I held those heavy breasts, kneading them very softly. And as the car slowed for the main floor, Rebecca leaned forward suddenly, thrusting them against my hands. Then, almost by instinct, we parted and turned, so that when the doors opened, we were several feet apart.
But when we walked out, Rebecca's chin was conspicuously high, and she was blushing.
I hurried us out the front door and steered her over to the plaza rail, from which we could watch for her sister. She was still breathing a little fast but seemed to be under control. I wasn't so sure that I could say the same for myself. "Thank you," I said simply.
She nodded almost primly, as though she were receiving a merit badge in the brownies. "You're welcome." Then she turned her head away again-I was beginning to recognize the significance of the gesture. "D-Did you like it?"
"Very much," I answered. "Did you?"
Her answer was a moment in coming. "I think so. It felt good." Then, swiftly. "Oh! There's Billey! You better go."
I ducked back away from the railing. "Call me, Rebecca."
"Yes. I will."
"And Rebecca?"
"Yes?"
"Next time, I want to see you To see you, Rebecca. All of you."
She opened her mouth, then shut it. She looked at me, then over the railing at her sister. Her face mirrored indecision and curiosity and fear, all at once. "I-I don't know. I'll call you, O.K.? "
Then she turned and skipped down the steps to the plaza's street level, shouting here-I-am at her sister, a trifle too loudly.
I turned and strode off to the parking lot, my mind as close to blank as I could get it. So much had happened this day, so much to think about and remember and dwell on, that it might be fatal to start in on it while riding a motorcycle.
Not to mention trying to steer with a hard-on.
16
Again, weeks passed without my hearing from Rebecca. I was no longer afraid of losing her, but I was getting impatient. I became morose and given to irritated outbursts. My tenants took to shutting their doors whenever I was in the halls.
Finally, one night when I was particularly frustrated, I gave in to an urge and took a bike ride. I had been staying home almost constantly since Rebecca's promise to call, even to the extent of having my meals sent in from the Mexican restaurant on the opposite corner.
I wouldn't even allow myself to go out during school hours for fear she would call at lunch.
And the fact that school had started, with the promised call still unmade, hadn't helped my disposition any, either.
But this night I gave in to my restlessness and took off for a while, pending call or no.
I had no goal, I just rode. I followed the traffic lights, maintaining an even thirty-five miles an hour. It was a control game I played occasionally, whereby I tried to see how long or how far I could go without stopping. It involved either turning or going straight, depending on the light. Sometimes that pattern sent me around the same block several times, and once I wound up in Long Beach, many miles away.
But tonight I wasn't playing for control. Tonight I was using the game to stave off my need for release-my need for Rebecca.
Rebecca! With a sudden chill, I noticed that I was on Harvard Street, less than five blocks from her house. Had I done that deliberately? Was my subconscious leading me along without my willing it to ?
Even while I thought, I rode closer and closer to her. And made no effort to turn.
I shook myself mentally. If I was here, then I would use the opportunity. Damn the need that brought me this way.
I looked around. It was almost three in the morning, and traffic was nonexistent, especially on a residential side-street. I had nothing to fear but a random police cruiser or a stray newsboy on his rounds. (Nothing to fear? What was I planning to do, that I need fear being seen?) I could feel cotton forming in my mouth again. I told myself that all of this furtiveness was ridiculous. I was riding a motorcycle down a public street, not planning a burglary.
There! That was the house.
It was as though my body belonged to another person, and my mind were simply sitting inside it and observing, with no power to cause any change of direction in its actions.
My body's eyes scanned the house as I rode up to it. They took note of its construction, its well-kept look. They recorded the sculpted hedges, the neat flower gardens along the driveway.
And they noticed the two lighted windows on the house's rear corner. Adjoined windows: as in bedroom and bathroom.
My mind observed my body reaching down and turning the bike's ignition, shutting off both the motor and the lights. It watched while my hands deftly guided the silently coasting black machine into the driveway, and continued watching as the hands applied gentle pressure on brake lever and clutch, bringing the machine to a whispering stop directly beneath those lighted windows, deep in the shadows.
Then, still detached and unbelieving, my mind watched my gross body heave itself quietly atop the machine, balance itself on seat and gas tank, and stretch upward, ever so cautiously, to peer into the smaller of the two windows.
It was a bathroom, and there was someone in it. But it wasn't Rebecca. It was her younger sister, Sarah, the giggly child who had answered the phone when I had called.
With the realization that Rebecca wasn't in the room, sanity seemed to return. My mind took hold of itself, then of my body. Here I was playing Peeping Tom in the middle of the night, in a respectable neighborhood. I could just see the headlines.
I took a last look at young Sarah, then clambered down off the gas tank. I walked the bike in a half-circle and got it pointed down the driveway, which sloped a bit. Every piece of crunching gravel sounded like an explosion in my fear-sensitized ears. I was certain that I could be heard at least five miles away.
Finally, I pushed the bike forward enough to get a little momentum and mounted. I coasted down the driveway and out into the street before hitting the electric starter. The motor caught instantly, and I sailed down toward Wilshire, drawing in gulps of ragged breath. I was, if anything, more frustrated than when I had started out, but I turned for home. One incident like this was enough.
And the very next day, of course, she called.
"Hi."
"Rebecca! Where've you been? I've just about gone crazy waiting for you to call."
"I can't talk now," she said hurriedly. "I'll explain it later, O.K.? "
I could hear noise in the background: children, and activity. "Sure, Honey."
"Listen; do you know where Hollywood Elementary is?"
"On Highland, isn't it?"
"Yeah. Can you meet me here at four?"
"Today? Are you calling from there now?"
"Yes, today. Yes I am. I'm at lunch hour."
"Yes, I can meet you."
"Neat. I'll see you then. I gotta go; there's a line for the phone."
"Rebecca?"
(click.)
Not the most satisfying conversation I had ever had, but sufficient to restore my sagging will and all-but-nonexistent spirit. I bounced around the room doing random things and whistling tunelessly to myself. Four o'clock was only three hours away. I had waited long enough already not to give in to impatience now. I would spend the time to advantage.
I began to spruce the place up-not a habit of mine, normally. What if, just by chance, I managed to get her over here? Would she be disgusted by the shambles I lived in ? Girls were like that.
I gave myself over to daydreaming of the coming encounter and applied myself to the cleaning work in earnest.
At three-fifty-five that afternoon, I swung off Sunset and headed South on Highland. The bike was spanking clean, polished to perfection. In the saddlebags were ice, cokes, a blanket, and my Polaroid camera.
I had had a better idea than the hotel.
She was all alone, standing by the bus stop in front of the school. As I drove up, she stuck out her thumb. I thought at first that she was being humorous, then saw the wisdom of the gesture. Hitch-hiking is a common method of getting around in Los Angeles, which has the worst public transportation system on earth. Youngsters regularly thumbed their way to and from school, and if someone spotted us it would be assumed that such was the case here.
I moved her up another notch, mentally.
"Hello!" I yelled as I pulled up. "You look good enough to eat."
"Hello. Hold my books?"
I took them, then braced the bike against the curb as she got aboard. She did look good enough to eat-any way you wanted to take that. She had her hair pulled back in a pony-tail and tied with a green ribbon, and was wearing a loose mini-dress of the same shade of green. Under the dress she wore what seemed to be leotards-black, and black sandals. It was a girlish outfit, and only served to enhance her woman's body.
Already I was beginning to be aroused.
I gave her back her books and pulled out into the street, shifting my way through the traffic. "How long do I get you for this time?" I asked, over my shoulder.
"Till about nine-thirty tonight," she answered. "That is, if you want me that long."
She was happy, I could tell, and excited. Promising signs. "Oh, I think I could put up with you for that long, little girl."
She squeezed me, reaching as far around my bulk as her arms would go. "Good!" She laid her cheek against my back and tightened her thighs on my sides. "I've missed you."
"And I've missed you, Rebecca." I was beginning to feel the return of that enormous surety I had known at the tar pit, when I first realized that Rebecca was not only unafraid of me, but actually interested in exploring the strange new needs that moved in her body needs which she was neither permitted to gratify, nor encouraged to discuss by a hateful and envious adult world.
For whatever reason, and by whatever strange logic, Rebecca had chosen me as the one safe person to bring her needs to. She had taken our moment of shared awareness-not recognizing it for the mutual need of two outcasts-and translated it into trust.
In a world full of carnivora, the heron had come to the rhinoceros for protection.
But the rhinoceros had his own needs. The rhinoceros wanted to mate.
"Uh, do you have anything special that you want to do, Rebecca?"
"No. Whatever you say."
I smiled to myself, there ahead of her. "How 'bout a picnic?"
"A picnic! Where?"
I could feel her head come up, and she began to bob excitedly up and down on the seat. "Griffith Park?" I asked, making it sound like the first thing that popped into my head.
"Yeah, that would be neat. But where will we get the stuff for a picnic?"
"Well, I just happen to have a few Cokes and a blanket in the saddlebags..." I made my tone deliberately exaggerated, overly unconcerned.
She squealed in delight. "You planned it! You planned it all along!"
"I confess," I said. "I really did." And with that, I swung the bike east a block, then north again. I pointed it straight for the Hollywood Hills and the vast forests of the park; the deep, lonely, very private forests.
"How's this?" I asked casually. I had driven roads and then trails and finally easing the machine through the underbrush itself. I had maintained a generally upward course and had brought us to the crest of a pine-covered hill devoid of people, pathways, and prying eyes. We could have been on another planet.
"Ohhh! It's beautiful. She was off the bike in a bounce, flitting from tree to tree like a green and gold butterfly. "You can see the whole city from up here!"
I dismounted. "You can even see the Valley, from over on that side." She darted off to check that out, and I began unloading the saddlebags.
"You're right," she cried from behind the crest. "You really can!"
"Would I lie?" I yelled back. I spread the blanket out beside the bike, laying it on a bed of pine needles, and was opening a couple ot Cokes when she returned.
"Hey, you even brought some ice."
"I think of everything-almost."
"What do you mean?"
I handed her a cup and a Coke. "I forgot the sandwiches."
She grinned. "That's all right. I'm on a diet anyway."
I sat on the blanket and made an obvious appraisal of her figure. "Why?"
She got the bright look in her eyes for a moment, while I studied her. "Because I'm too fat."
"Oh?" I was still keeping my voice casual, slipping up on the subject, but the tone of the conversation had changed. "Where?"
"Why, all over." Her own tone was a touch too bright now.
"No," I said, shaking my head. "I can't buy that. You look just fine, to me."
"No, really. I'm way too fat." As if to demonstrate, she turned in a circle, arms held wide. "See."
She was standing in front of me, looking at me with a mixture of curiosity and excitement ill-concealed beneath a mask of innocent bewilderment.
I leaned back on my elbows and looked at her critically. "Well, it's a little hard to tell. That dress is so floppy..." I looked her in the eye. She was breathing almost as hard as I. "Why don't you take it off, Rebecca?"
She stood a moment without moving, then, abruptly, turned her back on me. "I-I can't."
"Why?" I sat up, leaning my elbows on my wide-spread knees. "Are you afraid of me, child?"
Her head shook. "No." She was silent a while longer. Then: "I'm embarrassed."
"You don't have to be, Rebecca." I could feel my body beginning to tremble now, my heart to pound. So close. So close! "Turn around, Rebecca, and come here."
She made a couple of abortive twitches. I could see that she was trembling, too.
Then she stepped away, her back still turned. She moved to a boulder a dozen feet off and stopped. "I can't." she cried. I'm trying, but I just can't!"
She meant it; I could tell. She was unable to do it, even though she wanted to.
I knew then that I was going to have to break the block myself, and that it would have to be done just right. And short of raping her, I had no weapon but my tongue.
I took a deep breath. "Rebecca?"
"Yes?" She spoke in a small voice and kept her position.
"Rebecca, you needn't be ashamed. We all fail at the tasks we set ourselves, sometimes." I let that settle. I had no way of judging the effect of my words but by the carriage of her back, and that was getting hard to see. The sun was going down, and we were on the back side of the hill from it. In another forty minutes, deep twilight would surround us.
I pushed it a little farther.
"You're not afraid of me, Rebecca. You're afraid of all the things you don't know about what's happening to you."
Her shoulders lifted just a little. This was the stuff she wanted to hear. "You're all mixed up inside because you're feeling things and going through changes, and everybody lies to you. Isn't that right?"
A nod, brief but emphatic. She still wouldn't face me.
"People have told you that the things you're feeling are 'bad' or 'dirty,' and you know it's not so, don't you?"
Another nod.
I didn't give her time to lose the thought. "You know that what you feel is good. You know that nothing can be bad about ... loving someone."
Her head was up now, and her back was straight.
Now was the time. This was when I could win it or lose it. Sweat began to soak my shirt. "And you love me, don't you, Rebecca? Just as I love you."
For the barest flicker of time, the full weight of what I was doing-and what I wascame over me. Then Rebecca turned to face me and I fled from that black vision of myself, lost to the terrible nearness of my need's fulfillment. I closed a door on that awful knowledge, and the wells of cunning washed over me completely. I had made the final commitment.
"Y-You really love me?" she asked hopefully, willing it to be so.
I nodded gravely. "Yes. I've loved you ever since I first saw you." It was no longer difficult to say that word. Truth or lie, it made no difference now. It was only valid if it served my purposes.
"I think you knew it, too, that first day. I think you could sense that I would understand about your ... urges, your body."
She nodded, entranced.
I started unbuttoning my shirt. "You see," I said, "I know what it's like to have urges that can't be satisfied." I took the shirt off and laid it on the blanket. I put my hands on my knees, palms up, in a deliberately Buddha-like gesture. "Because I never had someone who loved me to teach me."
I sat in silent calm. I had put out the final bait. Now she must bite.
For what seemed like an eternity she didn't move. She just looked at me with eyes grown huge in the gathering gloom.
Then she took a single hesitant step forward. "W-Will you ... teach me?"
I nodded once. "Yes, Rebecca." I raised both hands toward her. "Come here."
Hesitant, trembling, she came. She stepped onto the blanket and stopped, almost touching me.
I leaned forward and unbuckled her sandals.
She stepped out of them without being asked. I moved them to one side. Then I reached forward and placed a hand on each of her ankles. "People in love," I said, my voice low and personal, "express their love in many ways." I began to slide my hands up her legs, very slowly. "They say things to make the other person happy. They give little gifts."
She was trembling violently now, and her breath was coming audibly. It was as though she was standing still by willpower alone, against all her instincts. And that was the case.
I had moved my hands up the outsides of her thighs until they were under the hem of her dress. I stopped there, letting my fingers spread and lay lightly on her. "But mostly," I continued, "people in love show that love physically."
In a smooth motion, I slid my hands up and back and took both her buttocks in my palms. She gasped as I did it and thrust her hands down to clutch at my wrists. I gave no sign of noticing and continued to talk, kneading her buttocks gently. "They do this because they know it gives the other person pleasure. It makes them feel good, just as I am making you feel good now."
She made a sound of assent, somewhere between a ragged sigh and a subdued moan. She moved her hands off my wrists, cautiously, and began to rub my forearms.
"There are many ways to give pleasure physically," I continued, still kneading. It was getting harder and harder to keep my voice dispassionate. "One is to touch in sensitive places." I took one hand off her buttock and placed it on the inside of her knee. Then, before she could anticipate the move, I ran it up between her legs, full onto her crotch.
She gave a small cry. Her hands closed convulsively on my arms, and she tried to pull her body away.
I still had one hand on her buttock and I ran it up her back, holding her body against the hand between her legs. "Easy," I said soothingly. "Easy, Rebecca."
She relaxed just a little, though she maintained her death-like grip on my arms. "I-I'm afraid," she whispered. "I-I'm sorry, but I'm afraid."
"Don't be," I said. "Just do as I say." I still had her by the small of the back and crotch. I was rubbing her between her legs, rhythmically. I had laid my head against her stomach, my face turned to one side. "Just do as I say," I whispered. "Trust me, Rebecca." My head was pounding. My ears rang. "Trust me." I could feel a moistness beginning to seep through her leotards, and I began to rub harder.
Above me, Rebecca drew a great breath. Then her hands moved jerkily upward to rest on the back of my head.
"All right," she said. "I do."
And, still trembling, she relaxed her body and opened her thighs.
The time for lectures was over.
With hands that shook openly, I reached to her waist and pulled the leotards down. "Step out," I said. She wore no panties. "Are you wearing a bra?"
"Yes."
"Can you take it off under the dress."
"I-I don't think so."
I sat back, took a breath. "All right, child. Step back a little way and take the dress off slowly."
She moved backwards as though in a trance. "Here?"
"Yes, that's fine."
She paused, then took a breath herself. Then she bent, caught the dress' hem and pulled it over her head, all in one motion. She couldn't help pressing her thighs together.
"Now," I said, almost unable to form words coherently. "The bra, Angel. The bra."
And then she was naked.
I lost track of everything except her body. It was beyond belief; beyond compare. Perfection wasn't a good enough word. "Please come here, child."
She walked the few steps forward almost eagerly, as though shedding her clothing had been the release she needed. Her breasts swayed with her steps, and her stomach rippled lightly. She stopped in front of me again, standing almost totally relaxed. "Here I am," she said.
And I knew she was. Completely. Passively. Willingly.
I reached out and pulled her to me, my hands again on her buttocks. I pulled and she came with no resistance at all. I drew her forward and forward until I was but an inch from her.
And with an instinct as old as Eve, she put a hand behind my head and drew my face into her.
I licked, gently, gently. I ran my tongue forward slowly, as if I wanted to show her pussy that I was a friend. Rebecca parted her legs. I let my tongue lay on the surface of her mound, let it stroke the carpet of hair until it was wet with both our juices.
Then I tilted my head a little and parted the moist lips with my teeth. Rebecca gave a moan above me-tiny, but intense-and opened her legs even farther, leaning her weight on her arms, braced on my back, for balance.
Then I took her weight in my hands and lifted her by her ass, burying my tongue in her pussy. I lifted her almost off the ground and made her raise one leg completely clear of it. I could feel her straining to hold her balance and still keep my tongue in her at the same time.
"Ohh!" she cried. "Ohh!"
Then she did lose her balance and we fell over, both of us, on the blanket.
She was on her back with her legs wide. I rose before her, fumbling frantically with numb fingers to get my pants off. "Hurry," she pleaded. "Hurry. I'm getting scared again."
Finally, the pants came off and I got out of them. I dropped to my knees, my prick pulsing painfully, and crouched over her.
It was getting darker, and I must have been an indistinct blot against the sky to her. I could still see her because of the sunlight on the high clouds.
She reached up as I loomed above her and felt for my face. "Are you going to ... to fuck me now?" She asked. There was question in her voice, and a little wonder, but no fear.
"Yes, I am."
"Will it hurt?"
"Yes."
"Bad?"
"No. Not badly-and not long."
She felt my face a moment longer, then lowered her arms to the blanket. "Yes. Fuck me."
I positioned myself over her, and she threw her legs up, awkwardly, like a duckling in the water for the first time. "Higher, Rebecca," I said. "Higher and wider."
She obeyed. I could feel her pussy turning upward, the lips spreading.
My belly lay over her body like a coverlet, enveloping her in heat.
My prick touched the edge of her pussy with an almost electric shock, numbing us both. I moved my weight in delicate shifts, letting my cock find its own way. Rebecca moved with me, seeming to know what was wanted by the sheer fact of being female.
And then I found the spot.
My cock slid downward a measure and lodged, as though fitting into a socket. I felt Rebecca stiffen beneath me and catch her breath.
"I-Is that my ... is that the..."
"Yes, Angel. Now, take a deep breath."
She did, and I lowered my weight onto her.
My cock pressed inexorably down. Rebecca's body began to draw itself away. "Please," she whispered. "It hurts." I paid her no mind. All my consciousness was centered on the two square inches of rigid flesh that comprised the head of my dick. My entire being, my very life, was riveted in that heated flesh, pushing now so hard into Rebecca's cunt. "Oh!" she cried. "Oh, please! Don't! You're hurting me."
But I couldn't hear-wouldn't hear. My cock was on fire, burning its way through the drum-taut shield of skin that kept me out of her. I could feel it give, that piece of skin; feel it stretch and grow thin.
"Oh! Oh, God! It hurts! It hurts!"
She was clawing at my back, pushing at me, trying to get free of my weight.
But she couldn't. I was fully atop her now, pinning her to the blanket by sheer mass. I had my hands beneath her thighs, holding them off the ground so that she couldn't push from under me.
"Please! Please!"
I felt the head of my cock slip, moving into her. I felt her membrane stretch again-in a little jerk-and yet again, expanding until it formed a tight ring around my cock.
And then, with a brutal thrust, I was through it.
Rebecca screamed.
I lay quietly, my cock sheathed to the hilt in her body. I could feel the warmth of her blood running over my balls. She had subsided into sobbing, after the initial scream, and had gone limp under me. I made soft, soothing noises and told her that the pain was all over. I crooned her tears away, there on the blanket, and wrapped her arms beneath me.
"It's over, Precious," I whispered, beginning a soft rhythm inside her, a bare suggestion of movement. "All the pain is finished. Now we can make love. Now I will give you pleasure."
And as I whispered to her I lengthened my stroke, until my cock was sliding almost completely out, then s-l-o-w-l-y back in. Rebecca, quiet now, began to respond.
She began to lift her hips, shyly at first, then with more authority. She caught the rhythm and started stroking with me. "Like this?"
"Yes, Rebecca. Just like that."
"A-Are we fucking."
"Yes."
"It feels good."
"Yes."
"It feels like there's a, a ... fire inside me. A good fire."
I didn't answer because the fire was inside me, too. It was running up my belly and down my legs and through my head. But most of all, it was runing up my cock, running like a captive sun. Running in ache and joy and mindless blind speed.
"W-What's happening? Oh! Oh! OOOHHH!"
And the fire ran out of me and spilled into Rebecca's belly. It flushed through her and set her afire, too. Then, its work done, it ran out of her pussy and fell down her racked and bloody buttocks to the blanket.
And the blanket absorbed it with no thought, as the night fell on us, Rebecca and I, with no feeling.
17
It is difficult to remember, laying here with Rebecca, that less than a month has passed since that first evening, there in the forest twilight. Twenty-odd days, in fact.
That night saw the culmination of all my wishes, all my hidden desires. The entire, terrible weight of my years of loneliness and ostracism fell away with the taking of Rebecca. She represented all the beauty I had been denied, all the happiness and love and companionship I never had.
And she was mine.
She came in trust and curiosity and budding need; came to learn and share and give of herself ; came to be taken and used, simply because I desired her.
And I took her. In heat and violence, need and lust, I made her mine.
And, oddly, there was no evil in this.
Those things for which Rebecca came, I gave. She sought understanding, and I understood. She sought love, and, as far as she understood the term, I gave it.
You must understand, dear reader, the nature of evil. It is such that a person can be evil only if he accepts the concept of evil. What may be moral and just to a person from one culture may as easily be ultimate wrong to a person from another. Cannibalism is evil only to societies which do not practice it. To societies which do, the eating of human flesh is a proud and honorable thing, with no one more aware of the honor than the person who is eaten.
And the point is this: that evil exists only when a person believes in it.
And a person can only be hurt by a lie when he knows he's being lied to.
There was no evil in my taking Rebecca, because she did not know it was wrong. Further, all the things she sought and needed from our mating, I gave her.
I brought Rebecca happiness.
And in this past twenty days, her happiness has multiplied. I have taught her a world of joys-all the pleasures of the flesh. I have shown her the incredible range of emotions and feelings that can be roused by the acts of sex. And because she has had no previous prejudices pounded into her, she has no conception of perversion. Anything new, she tries eagerly. No position is too exotic, no experiment too grotesque. She is a love-goddess come to life, a primordial sex-creature. She exists, now, for love.
And all to please me. All to make me happy. She has no desire to pursue normal men; no need to take her new awareness outside, to seek out someone more suited to her age and beauty.
She is my every dream, made real.
I am lying on my back, now, and she is straddling my stomach, grinning and rubbing my chest. We are pausing a moment, between positions. Her nipples are red from my teeth and the friction of my beard. So is her stomach.
She sits up straight, letting her hands trail down my chest to my belly, then putting them on the insides of her own thighs. Her hair is damp from our sweat, and clings to her neck and forehead. Her body shines in the lamplight.
She begins to breathe more heavily again, arousing herself. She swings her leg over and slides off me to kneel on the bed beside my body. I reach out and cup her ass and she grins again. She raises her behind off her heels and lets me get my hand underneath it, into the wet heat between her legs. I slip a finger into her, then two.
She giggles at this and lays down across my abdomen, keeping her ass high. She lays her cheek on my belly and looks up my body at me, her hand stroking the inside of my thigh.
I move another finger into her pussy, pushing a little against the rubbery tightness. Her eyes widen a moment, and she draws a breath. Then she runs her hand up my thigh and grabs my balls, squeezing. I expel air in a whistle and try to convulse.
She laughs and holds me down, squeezing harder.
I jam another finger in, flex them all slightly.
She gasps, pressing backwards against my hand. Then, still squeezing, she swings her head around and takes my prick in her mouth.
I begin to stroke, shoving my cock in and flexing the fingers in her pussy simultaneously. I can feel her whimper, deep in her throat, but I know she-likes this. I keep jamming my cock against the back of her mouth, and she accepts it with little scrapes of her teeth.
I pull on her body with the hand I have in her, dragging it around toward my head. She lets it come, scooting on her knees, but never takes her mouth off my prick.
I drag her all the way around and she lifts a leg, swinging it across my head. She pauses, her abdomen directly over my head, she lowers her pussy onto my face.
I yank my hand out and her juice pours down on me. I reach around the outside of her thighs and grasp each cheek of her ass in my hands. Then I spread them and lift my face until my mouth is over her hole. Then I run my tongue deep inside her ass, working it back and forth from one side to the other.
It drives her wild. She clamps down on me, sucking as though to draw my entire body out through my prick.
I pump harder, faster, jamming my tongue in and out of her ass, licking around the outside, up through her crack. I am coming, and I mean it to be good. I work my teeth and tongue over and into her, biting her in little nibbles, until she is sobbing with ecstasy, slobbering around my dick.
Then I come. I clamp her head in my thighs, not letting her back away, and pump my hot semen down her throat. She chokes on it, there's so much. Her stomach heaves convulsively and come runs out her nose. But she doesn't try to get away. She swallows and sucks as though she can't get enough.
Then, as the last of my come spurts into her, she climaxes and buries my face in the heat of her own juice.
She has gone to the bathroom to dry off, perhaps to take a shower. She is humming happily and bounces when she walks.
I lay here, bathed in the afterheat of our love, listening to the noises coming through my window.
Rebecca is happier than she has ever been, is ever likely to be. I have had my wildest dreams fulfilled.
How can there be evil in a situation like this?
Quite easily.
There is evil here because this paradise, this universe of love, is doomed.
I do not mean that it will inevitably be found out, or that the police are going to come pound on the door at any moment. We are too cautious for that, and Rebecca is too bright to make a slip in public.
No, the doom of our little Eden is more subtle.
It will die from within. It will die by deception.
Rebecca came to me as a retreat from a hostile world. She came seeking a respite from a ceaseless round of envy and lust and hatred that her perfection brought her. She came because she could see on my face the same mask she had had to wear, the mask of self-containment. And because she could recognize my love of beauty, and see that I found beauty in her.
She came willing to give everything and all, just to be loved.
And I gave her what she wanted. No matter what my inner motivations were, I gave Rebecca what she wanted and needed. I paid in good coin for what I got.
But...
What did I get? Rebecca? Sex? Beauty?
No. Oh, I got those things, surely, but that wasn't the real goal. Rebecca, in the long run, was just a girl-beautiful, yes, but still just a girl.
Girls I had had.
Sex?
Yes. And that, Too, I had had. Beauty?
. ... Beauty also. Beauty, yes. But more.
What Rebecca had that I wanted, ultimately, was her innocence. I wanted her newness.
And I took it, and now it was gone.
And this was the evil-or one part of itthat now Rebecca was spoiled for me. She was all I could ever desire in bed, and other men would sell their souls for her. But it wasn't enough.
So I would tell her or she would sense it, now or later. And she would know death then. Her light would dim and go out, and she would join the rest of the world. Rebecca would know, first hand, evil.
But this is not the final damnation, gentle reader. This isn't enough for me.
Even as I lay here and listen to her, singing in my shower, my mind is planning, scheming. Even while my semen washes out of her now-violated body, I'm building a careful structure of incidents, possible method, probabilities.
While the heat of Rebecca's body is still on me, my mind's eye is seeing another body. A body lithe and willowy-young. A body just beginning to promise the woman to come. Breasts just budding, with nipples like brown strawberries. Just the beginnings of curve to the butt, the barest suggestion of hair on the pubis.
I see this body in my mind, but I have seen it before, in reality. I have seen it one night, peering in a bathroom window. I have watched it being manipulated, fingered, by its owner. I have watched the first experiments with masturbation. Clumsy experiments, charming in their awkwardness, their ... innocence.
Very softly, I call: "Rebecca?"
"Yes?" comes the answer, yelled over the shower noise.
