The phone blared out shaking me from the depths of my sleep and reaching for it I managed first to knock the alarm off the night table. Somehow I picked up the receiver and flicked the switch on the night light at the same time.
"Rog?" a small frightened feminine voice asked from across the continent.
"Yes honey, did you make it all right?"
"Yes," she answered but I could tell from her tone that it was bad.
"How is she?" I asked, expecting the worst.
"Still alive. That's about all I can say. The doctor ... the doctor thinks she's got an even chance."
"Uh huh."
"Rog. I think I'd better stay here till-"
"Of course you had."
"The doctor thinks it might be weeks before we can tell," she added. I knew she was asking whether it would be all right with me if she delayed her return until she had definite word.
"Honey, stay with her until you know. You can't do anything else."
"Oh Rog!"
"I'm going to miss you too," I said looking around the empty bedroom, empty except for me and the furniture. I was going to miss her.
"I'll call you every night," she said softly.
"Too expensive."
"Well look, I'll call every night at midnight to tell you how she is and...."
"O.K. Look you've had a hard trip, you'd better get some rest. Where will you be sleeping, your old room?"
"Uh huh."
"Well go on, try to get some rest. Goodnight love."
"Goodnight Rog. Goodnight."
I hung up after she'd clicked off and swung my legs out of the bed. At first I was surprised that I had slept at all but that passed and I began to think about how it was going to be without her for weeks, maybe a month. I also thought about her mother and cursed silently in the empty bedroom because the old woman had chosen such a perfect time to get sick. Kate and I had been married less than three months and I couldn't possibly return to the coast myself because my new assignment at Jefferson High was about to begin. It was a good assignment too. I was head of the mathematics department at an age when most teachers are still complete novices at the trade.
I cursed silently again and wondered whether the old lady hadn't planned it all. Then I was ashamed of myself for thinking that when she was probably deathly ill and went out to the kitchen for a glass of water.
It was early fall but the weather was much more like summer and the windows had been left open to let the air circulate. I poured myself a glass from the refrigerated bottle and walked over to the window to look out at die night.
Our apartment was in a large building built on a hill and from the fourth floor I could see almost all of Pleasantville, even out to the United Farm Plant on the old road. It was a quiet little city and most of the lights were out, most of the inhabitants in bed. I downed the water, hiked up the waist of my pajamas and turned to go back to bed.
I had never realized how easy it was to become accustomed to a woman, to having her share your bed every night, to having her be there every morning when you awoke, just in case you felt like pulling her to you and running your hand down the length of her curled leg or up over her flat stomach. Kate was a wench that responded well in the morning and life with her had been a constant joy. I was going to miss her indeed.
I hit the sack again and sprawled out all over it trying to get comfortable. Finally, with an image of Kate's nude body in my mind, with a fine picture of her naked, heavy breasts and her black hair spilling down over her shoulders to her wasp-like waist, I fell off again. I forgot to pick the alarm clock up off the floor and of course the plunger had been pushed back when it had hit.
It was for that reason that I was a half hour late the first day the students were due. Mr. Hanes, the principal, was right there to wish me a cheery good-morning and I smiled broadly at him and dashed toward my office. I was to find out that Hanes had a bad habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It wasn't my first day at Jefferson, I had been there a week getting ready for the students and dealing with the teachers in my department. I had my own courses to outline and my home room class to become familiar with. I had never seen any of my students but I was already familiar with their records and had a general idea of what most of them looked like.
So I felt pretty much at home as I strode toward my office along the wide corridor, my shoes echoing along, my arms swinging freely. I turned the corner into the long corridor on which my classroom and office were located and opened the door of my office briskly. Although I was late I still had some fifteen minutes before I was scheduled to call my home room class to order.
I stopped in my tracks when I looked into my office. A girl was in there, sitting comfortably, or rather half-sitting, on my desk. Her skirt was hiked up well along her thigh so that her legs had a certain amount of freedom despite her body-tight skirt. One of her legs was up, her foot resting on the chair which stood beside the desk, her other leg was straight in a long line toward the floor so that I was offered a full view up her skirt of her inside thigh. She was wearing a tight white sweater through which her breasts were entirely too visible, her nakedness beneath her sweater apparent. Her hair was yellow her eyes blue her lips wet with red lipstick and her complexion smooth and clear. She was holding a notebook to her waist and smiling at me as I stood stunned in the doorway.
I stood staring at her a good thirty seconds before I had the common sense to close the door of my office behind me and confront her. She finally straightened and stood before me, her eyes finally left mine and were lowered along my length to the floor.
"Can I help you, miss?" I asked, glad that I had found my voice and that no one had passed in the corridor outside while I had stood in the open doorway watching her.
"Are you Mr. Gold?" she asked raising her eyes again to confront me boldly.
"I am," I replied walking around to the front of my desk and sitting down at it.
"I'm Janet Moore."
"Ah, you're one of my home-room students."
"Yes, and you're also our geometry teacher."
"Yes," I said, still waiting to hear what she had to say.
"You're very young to be a chairman of a department."
"You don't say," I replied laughing. "Well what can I do for you?"
"Mmmm," she said running her eyes over me again and leaving me with a feeling of cold terror. All I needed my first day of class, besides arriving late, was this little vixen to play up to me. I had never had an off color incident in my three years at Madison, the school in which I first taught, and I hadn't been in Jefferson more than ten minutes and it looked like one was about to transpire.
"If I had known you were going to be so good looking I'd have looked you up sooner, at your home for instance."
"Look, Miss Moore, I think you'd better return to the classroom. I'll be along presently. You're the first student I've laid eyes on here at Jefferson and I want to start correctly."
She came over to the front of the desk and leaned her cute rear against it just beside me. I couldn't help but look at her legs and then at her breasts below her tight sweater and as I did I swear I saw her nipples harden to points below the cotton knit. It excited me more than I had been excited since before my marriage to Kate and worried, I'm afraid I yelled, "Just what is it, Miss Moore!"
She straightened again and stood up and, apparently cowed, walked toward the door of the office. She turned there to confront me once again, shrugged demurely and said, "I just wanted to see what our new teacher looked like. See you in class," she flipped, opened the door and disappeared into the corridor. The door swung slowly back to a closed position and I let out a long sigh of relief.
I sat still for a moment ridding my mind of her looks when someone knocked. I sat stiffly in my chair and shouted, "Come in."
It was Mark Garon, one of my associates, a teacher who had been at Jefferson for several years and stood next in line to get the chairmanship of the department, a thin man with a thin nose which came to a sharp point and a sallow complexion.
"Hi Mark, come in," I said as he stuck his head through the door.
"O.K." he answered and walked in shutting the door behind him with studied care. "Was that Janet Moore I saw come out of here?" he asked.
"Yea," I said giving him a questioning look.
He whistled softly through his teeth and said, "Man, you've really started the year off well."
"Come on Mark, she's a student."
"Sure she is, she's also a woman. Don't tell me she doesn't get to you, though. I'm just thankful she never took a liking to me. I don't think I'd be able to resist that particular student."
"Mark!" I said, acting as much like a chairman of a department as I could.
"Ha!" he laughed and made as if to leave the office.
"Wait a minute," I said stopping him in his tracks. "What's the story on that girl?"
"Ah ha!" he said, pointing a long, diabolical finger at me.
"Mark, she's a student in my home-room class."
"Sure," he said. "Well, there isn't much to tell. She's from Greensville, the section of town over by the United plant, you know, where most of the industrial workers who came to Pleasantville in the thirties settled. It's a pretty tough part of town, and she's a pretty tough little girl. No one tells her where to get off; as far as she's concerned she knows it all. And she's been getting womanlier and womanlier before our very eyes here at Jefferson. One of these days she's going to become all woman and she's going to take one of us, or two of us or ten of us with her."
"Ridiculous," I commented.
"But you smell trouble don't you? I can tell. I used to know a fellow much like yourself, as a matter-of-fact you reminded me of him the first time I saw you. Whenever he smelled trouble a peculiar look would come to his eye, much like the look you're wearing now."
"Absurd!"
"I often wonder why that girl stays in school. I don't think her parents would care one hoot if she quit and she doesn't study much, she's rather a poor student," he said changing the subject.
"How poor?"
"Oh she's got the intelligence I think, just never applied herself. Of course she's got other things to worry about I suppose."
"Like what?"
"Like herself, like keeping herself in line."
"She struck me as being quite the opposite," I said. "The kind of a girl that spends her time figuring out ways to get out of line."
"Nope," Mark said in contradiction. "I think you've got it wrong Rog. As a matter to fact if I thought for one minute that she was looking for trouble...."
"Yes," I said.
"Tell you when I know you better-he remarked cryptically, and disappeared out into the hall before I could stop him.
CHAPTER TWO
I went immediately across the hall to the classroom to which my home-room students had been assigned. When I opened the door a hush fell over the room and I walked across to the desk that was going to be mine making my way between the chairs of the students and the blackboard. The home-room class was to last for half an hour each morning. I was to take attendance, help the students with individual problems and make them feel to home. The next hour each day would be spent by all of us in the same room studying geometry; after that they left for individual classes elsewhere in the building and I wouldn't see any of them until they returned to home-room just before leaving for the day.
As I settled into my chair I looked up over my desk right into that same skirt I had seen in my office a few minutes before and right at the same thighs, placed for my benefit, as provocatively as she could manage it. She was sitting directly in front of me, in the first row, smiling into my disturbed countenance.
As a young teacher I had, of course, experienced the typical dilemma of having a student in class with a crush on you. I had always, however, succeeded in combating the problem by appearing either disinterested or paternal. It was at once clear to me that I was going to have a problem looking upon Janet as a father and disinterest was out of the question. As I looked into the blue of her eyes across the small area between my desk and the first row of seats I realized that I was going to have to take the bull by the horns and I was going to have to do it quickly.
Glancing away from the pretty sight she had set for me I looked at the waiting class. They seemed to be a generally well behaved group ranging in age from sixteen to eighteen. They were all fairly intelligent, I knew, and most of them came from good homes. I wondered for a moment whether that might have anything to do with Janet's behavior. Could it be that she made up for a feeling of inferiority because of her background by being the sexiest girl in the class?
Finally I stood up and introduced myself to the class. I asked them to consider where they would like to sit permanently and to arrange themselves so that I could make up a seating chart and after a moments delay one of the boys shouted something to someone across the room and seats were exchanged. There was a general bustle and commotion and then, finally, quiet as I placed a blank sheet of note paper on each desk in the front row. Janet, of course, had not moved. She remained seated precisely where she had been, her legs in precisely the same position so that I, and no one else in the room, could glance up her skirt any time I chose. As I handed her her blank sheet she touched my hand lightly, smiling, again, up into my face. There was no mistaking the look, either. If she was still inexperienced she certainly had instinct enough to get a message across.
"Now class," I began. "I'd like you to fill in your names on the sheet of paper as its passed to you and next to your name put the number of the row you're in. Each of you in the first row put down the letter corresponding...."
And I went on outlining a procedure for making out a seating chart letting my eyes glance off Janet's yellow hair occasionally, occasionally fixing some member of the class with my gaze to test their reaction. It was a trick I always used the first day of class. If a pupil looked away it was usually because he or she felt guilty about something they hadn't done yet and I knew where to look for trouble before it happened. Unfortunately it was I who felt guilty. Each time my glance passed over Janet I felt something inside me jump slightly and I knew I wasn't harboring the cleanest possible thoughts. And when I looked at her to test her reaction it was I who dropped my eyes.
"... and if any of you have any problem at all, scholastic or otherwise, I want you to come to me with it. I'm your home-room teacher and I want to be a friend to each of you. Anyway, in most cases, you'll find that there's no one else to go to and it's best to take your problems someplace isn't it?"
"Yes sir, Mr. Gold," someone said softly and spinning, I had the class wise guy pinpointed within the first fifteen minutes of the first hour. That was good work. I smiled at him, a black haired boy with a faint trace of a beard and a quick glance. I grabbed the seating chart and said, "You're McNight?"
"Yes sir, Mr. Gold," he responded and his tone was such that the class laughed. I laughed along.
"Fine, fine," I said smiling and leaving it at that, with him having nothing to say in retort because I hadn't tried to outsmart him but just been friendly. I got on to the subject of geometry.
But all through the horn I could feel Janet's eyes on me and whenever I turned to her her look was so unashamed and so provocative, her skirt hiked so high on her thighs, and her arms back on the edge of the chair so far that her breasts were forced forward, beads of perspiration formed just below the surface of my brow. And each time that I looked at her white blouse-and I refused not to look because I didn't want to let her think she'd beat me down-I was ready to swear that I could see the points of her nipples stiff below the cotton knit.
When the class was finally over I watched the students file out of the door one at a time with a secret sigh of relief. There'd be no Janet in my next class, I prayed. But then I knew there couldn't be. There couldn't be another girl like that in all of Pleasantville, population 70,000.
She waited until the classroom was almost empty, of course, and then granting me a final smile which I returned with a cherubic grin she twitched out of the room, her perfect, precise rear swinging sharply from side to side, and bouncing slightly, up and down, the while.
Unable to control myself I let my mind envision what that rear must look like naked. Ashamed, I thought of Kate and her poor mother and turned my attention to the papers on my desk. I folded away the seating chart and waited the arrival of the next group of students.
I had an off hour just before lunch and I used it to make my rounds. I looked in at each of the five teachers in my department to see that everything was progressing according to plan, as it were. Mark Garon was playing with a pointer up in front of his classroom talking, I supposed, about trigonometry and I was about to move off from my position by the rear door of his room when I noticed something peculiar in his manner.
Throughout his discussion, which I suddenly wished I could hear, he kept his eyes fastened on a black haired girl in the second row. She was a beautiful creature with a fine young bust and long legs that even I, in the hall outside, could make out were perfectly curved. As he talked at her he eyed her purposefully and I shuddered at the thought that Mr. Garon might not have been joking earlier after all. He might have been deadly serious about Janet Moore. If so I was going to have to keep a sharp eye on him. Nothing is worse for a teacher than a sex scandal in his department, unless, of course, it happens to be a sex scandal of his own.
During the week before the students arrived it had become customary for the heads of departments to luncheon with Dr. Hanes, the principal, so out of habit, I made my way to his table in the faculty lunch room. We ate quietly sharing brief and casual remarks about the first morning on the front lines and then, when the head of the English department, the languages department and the social sciences department, left for the various offices Dr. Hanes brought up the subject of my lateness that morning. I explained to him about Kate's being away.
"Why you poor boy, I hope your mother-in-law gets better quickly."
"I hope so myself, sir," I said quickly. "But until she does you can be sure I'll work something out to insure my early arrival daily."
"Oh don't worry yourself about that, Roger. I don't know what I'd do every morning without my Rachel, she...."
At any rate it wasn't an unpleasant lunch and soon I found it possible to bring up the subject of Janet Moore.
"Janet Moore," Dr. Hanes said slowly, pronouncing her name as though it were a difficult chemical or unknown flower. In a way, of course, she was both.
"Yes," I replied, "Janet Moore, the blond girl in my home-room class. I couldn't help suspecting that she might require extra attention, and I mean that in all seriousness."
"I'm sure you do," the doctor replied. "I'm sure you do. What kind of attention?"
"Has her family a social worker or a psychologist would you know? I suspect they might need one."
"In all seriousness?" the principal asked.
"Yes, in all seriousness."
"Well, I tell you Roger," he began. "I suggest you forget about it. We can't take it upon ourselves to worry about the home life or mental health of every one of our students. The city is too big and Jefferson High handles too much of its population of school age people."
I could tell that he was speaking from a rehearsed speech or one that came close to being rehearsed. Probably a question of that kind had come up before. I was beginning to sense that it wouldn't be advisable to raise one like it again.
Especially from the Greensville section. Many, many of our students come from there and we can't help them all can we? Why if you find a special case the first morning on the job, Roger, I'm afraid-"
"Don't be afraid, Dr. Hanes," I said, interrupting him before I got good and angry. But I saved face by adding, "You're right, of course, and don't worry. I won't bring up the question or one like it again."
"Perfectly right, Roger, perfectly right. It's our job to see their heads are crammed with knowledge, that's all."
He reminded me of an English butler at that moment and I wanted to cut him one in the jaw. But I dropped it of course, wondering, only for a moment, what might happen if he found out that Mark Garon was misusing his position as a teacher as I had come to suspect. The good Dr. Hanes would probably disregard that too.
It was at that moment that my resolve to take on the problem of Janet Moore deepened. In a way of course, it was simply self-defense. I had to do something to get that girl to pull down her skirts.
The rest of the afternoon went well. There were no further problems from any of my students or any of my classes. When I made my rounds in the afternoon Mark Garon was sitting behind his desk talking, his eyes watching the ceiling and not the students. If I didn't approve of his teaching style at least I had nothing to note about his attitude toward the female students. And there were a lot of female students.
At three forty-five my home-room class returned and took their seats. I dismissed them immediately but told them to wait in the building until the final bell. They left-all but one.
Janet Moore, skirt as high as usual, remained seated precisely in front of me. I stood up to better prepare my first attack upon the situation and so as to be unable to see her thighs.
"Did you have something you wanted to say, Janet?" I asked.
She smiled at me and raised her shoulders slightly, letting them fall in a shrug. Her full breasts bounced provocatively and she seemed to ease into a more comfortable position in the chair.
"Want me?" she whispered.
"What did you say?!"
"You heard me Mr. Gold. You heard me all right."
"You're extremely young and extremely silly," I replied, but she didn't alter her gaze and the question was still in her eyes.
Then, as she attempted to hold my attention with her smile, one hand fell to her skirt and she lifted it up even further along her leg. I saw a perfectly white, perfectly proportioned slice of full thigh. Then I spun about and marched out of the classroom.
CHAPTER THREE
By the time I got home from school it was close to six-thirty. I had spent the time between the last bell and six in my office studying Janet's record. About all I managed to do was memorize every item on it. I knew where she lived, what her phone number was, where her parents worked and what she got in arithmetic in the second grade. But I didn't have an answer to my problem. I didn't know what to do to stop her from behaving like a slut short of having her dropped from school; and I wasn't quite ready to do that, not without talking to the girl first. Somehow, I suspected, there was a way out of the dilemna.
But that was the least of my problems just then. By six-thirty I was hot, tired, hungry and mentally exhausted. I missed Kate badly too. That damn vixen Janet had worked my blood up to a fever pitch with her damn naked breasts under her white sweater and her damn hiked up skirt. I wanted Kate. I wanted her so much it hurt.
When I got into the apartment I stripped, leaving a trail of clothes to the shower. The door to the bedroom was closed and I looked at it briefly as I passed it, wishing that Kate were home and waiting for me in there. But Kate was in California and I knew it so I shook myself out of the mood as best I could and went on into the bathroom.
I showered with freezing water, then let it on full hot until I couldn't take it any longer, than let it back to freezing again. When I stepped out I felt better but not half as good as I did after I'd shaved and washed my teeth. Then I slipped into my robe and walked toward the kitchen, picking up the clothes I had previously let drop, making a bundle of the underwear and shirt and hanging the suit up in the hall closet.
I was sitting over a cold chicken from the icebox and the water for coffee was up before it occurred to me that when I had passed the bedroom door on the way out of the bathroom it had been wide open.
I sat stunned for several seconds, a sick, fear-filled feeling creeping over me, then I spun around and reaching for a kitchen knife walked back through the hall.
There was someone in the apartment, sure as Wednesdays someone was there.
I tiptoed down the carpeted hall to the bedroom and waited at the door. My ears perked up and I stood listening for a full minute. Not a sound came from anywhere in the place. A car passed in the street outside and honked. The water rushed through the pipes from the floor above. Then I heard someone sigh in the bedroom.
I rushed in quickly, my robe flapping around my legs, my legs and feet cold in spite of the heat. There, perched quietly in bed, nude everywhere I could see her, which was from the top of her yellow hair to her waist where the blankets began, was Janet Moore, smiling like a practiced wife.
"You look so silly with that knife," she said.
"Get dressed!" I hissed.
She shrugged. I was becoming accustomed to seeing that shrug, and then she slipped out of bed. She was entirely nude and she made as pretty as sight as I'd ever seen. Her breasts jiggled slightly as she moved around but they were firm and separate, heavy and falling from her neck until they turned up near her nipples which stood, their tips erect, like the eyes of a huge cow. Her waist was willowy and smooth, her legs long and perfect and white and her rear which I could see as she spun away from me, was full and dimpled.
I spun from the sight and went to the closet where I grabbed a pair of pants and pulled them on over my nakedness. I was in the process of pulling on my socks, when she came in holding her skirt and sweater and underthings in front of her in a way that covered nothing at all. I think I had some idea of packing her up and bringing her to her parents.
"What do you think you're doing?" she said huskily.
"Dressing and you'd better do the same. I'm taking you home."
"Oh," she said and I could hear the laugh behind it. "My father will kill you."
I stopped pulling on my socks. It took me only ten seconds to realize that I was not dealing with a child. She had thought this thing out completely. It was going to be the old blackmail bit. Either I made love to her or she would say I had.
"How did you get in?" I asked looking up at her, trying to push my jaw out until it hurt to take my mind from the treasures she was offering me, to save my career in Pleasantville or anyplace else.
"The door was open," she replied. And it had been. Neither Kate or I had ever been in the habit of locking our doors. We were both from small towns.
"Look Janet, why me, why do you want to get me into trouble? You don't even know me."
"I don't want to get you into trouble. I just want to get you," she said letting first her sweater fall from in front of her, then her dress, so that she was holding only a bra and a pair of filmy panties before her. All that she succeeded in covering was her navel.
"Why?"
"Why not? Do I have to have a reason?"
She took a step foward and touched my hair. I felt a thousand needles spring up into the surface of my skin from somewhere within me. I didn't know what I was doing. Suddenly I had grabbed her and I was kissing her furiously running my hands over her back and down to her behind, running my hands over her dimples there and squeezing her to me.
She threw her head back and laughed and grabbed me and in a sudden moment of decision or strength, or perhaps it was just a lull in my passion, I pushed her away and ran for the bedroom, locking myself inside.
"You can't stay in there forever," she shouted, laughing and pounding on the door. You've got to come out sometime so it might as well be soon. I'll wait here until morning otherwise and how will you explain that?
Luckily there were clothes enough in the bedroom to dress; everything but shoes. Clad in a pair of slacks, a sweater and socks and slippers I climbed out on the fire escape and gained the street below. Cursing and wiping the sweat of unfulfilled lust from my brow I found a bar called "The Four Club," went in and downed two double scotches before my head cleared.
Then it became a question of who to call. I knew no one in town. Dr. Hanes would have been best but that would have meant one of two things. The old man would have misunderstood and fired me and ruined me or he would have understood and finished Janet off for good by throwing her out of school. Either way it wouldn't help me much because I'd be involved and he'd see me as a nuisance from then on. Anyway, I knew his type and wanted to avoid him.
But short of Hanes and one or two people in the school I was a stranger in Pleasantville. I couldn't call the police or the fire department. It was against my better judgment but I went to a phone booth in the lobby of the bar and found Mark's number.
The phone rang several times before a female voice answered, "Yes."
"Mark Garon please, Roger Gold calling," I said. It sounded terribly formal I knew but I couldn't worry about that. I wondered for a moment who the woman was but I couldn't worry about that either.
After a moment Mark picked up the phone and said, "Roger? What can I do for you?"
I didn't like his tone. I had bothered him and he wasn't taking much trouble to conceal his annoyance. But I needed someone at that point and said, "Listen Mark. I hate to disturb you but I wonder whether you could meet me at a place called 'The Four Club' I've got a little problem-"
"The Four Club? How did you find that place? Well ... wait a minute ... you mean now? You want me to meet you now?"
"All right, forget it-"
"Well what is it damn it Rog-"
"Janet Moore," I said softly.
"Holy Jesus!" he said. "O.K. stay put, here I come. If you only knew what this meant giving up," he said before he hung up and before he hung up I heard a female giggle in the background. Well why not? He was a bachelor. I hadn't been exactly celibate as an unmarried man myself. I just hoped to high heaven it wasn't that brunette from class.
I went back to the bar and had another scotch. I felt better but I kept looking at my watch. I didn't want Janet to leave before I got back. I didn't want her to suspect that I had left the apartment.
Mark finally got there about half an hour later and as I walked with him up the hill to the house I explained the situation.
"And now, now what do you intend to do?" he asked me, giving me a strange, incredulous look, as though I were mad for not simply sleeping with Janet, maybe making it a permanent thing.
"You and I and the super and the super's wife are going in there-""
"'Why me, why not just the super and the-"
"I wanted someone from the school," I replied firmly. I was his supervisor damn it! He ought to have a little respect if not for me than for my position.
"Well not the super, just his wife. You don't need the whole town-"
"O.K." I agreed.
We got to the building and I rang the super's bell. He was a Polish gentleman who agreed to call his wife when I explained I had a problem that needed a woman's touch. Then I told the good woman, her name was Kalowski, to please stay in the background but to witness what was going to happen. I told her I might need her to save my job. Mark laughed at that. I gave him a dirty look and we took to the stairs, Mr. Kalowski standing framed in the doorway to his apartment, wondering.
I opened the door slowly and we walked down the hall. She hadn't left and when she saw the three of us her mouth opened in complete surprise. Mrs. Kalowski began to banter in Polish and Mark stood transfixed, admiring the sight before him. But suddenly I felt sorry for Janet. There was something in her eyes that begged sorrow. I threw her a tablecloth from out of the kitchen closet and told her to go into the bedroom and get dressed.
When she left, carrying her clothes, making no effort to retaliate, completely cowed, completely beaten, I saw that she had begun to cry.
I told Mrs. Kalowski that she could leave but to please leave the door open and then I asked Mark to wait for a moment in the living room.
I went to the bedroom door and knocked.
When I received no answer I went in. She had dressed and she was sitting on the side of the bed, her long yellow hair streaming down over her hands. She was holding her head and crying. Her body, although clothed, was still lovely but I felt nothing then but sympathy for her.
"You see," I said. "I have witnesses now. You'll have to go home. I'll take you if you like."
She sobbed and shook her head. "I'll go alone," she said.
I handed her a handkerchief and she blew her nose in it, stood and going to the mirror wiped her eyes and applied a fresh coat of lipstick, of my wife's lipstick I might add. It didn't suit her.
Then she looked at me straight and said. "I'm a virgin, you know." And spun on her heel and left the room.
I followed her down the hall and out past the living room where Mark joined the trail into the outside hall. Mrs. Kalowski had not gone downstairs but was standing out there, wondering, perhaps, what we intended to do to the poor girl now that we'd succeeded in embarrassing her.
Janet walked to the stairway past the super's wife and then turned just slightly to look at me again.
"You had to be the same didn't you? You couldn't be different," she sniffed and ran down the stairs. I was after her past Mrs. Kalowski in a flash but when I came to the landing all I could do was stop, my hands grasping the doorframe, I shouted down after her, "I'm married," loud enough for Mark and Mrs. Kalowski and everyone in the building to hear. "And besides that I'm your teacher," I added lamely.
CHAPTER FOUR
I turned and went back to the apartment so shaken that even Mrs. Kalowski looked good to me. I guess I needed another shot of Scotch but Mark had different ideas.
He followed me back into the apartment closing the door after him.
"Man," he said, you're shaking; you've really let that girl get under your skin haven't you?"
I didn't answer him. The truth of what he had said seemed obvious enough. No matter which way I shook my head the image of Janet's young, heavy breasts filled my mind. I kept seeing the way she had looked when I first saw her in my bed and I continued to remember, now that the threat was gone, how her skin had felt as I ran my hands over it.
"Believe me, I know how you feel Rog," Mark was saying. "Just between us that was no coffee clatch I was having when you called. I had a girl up there that was ready for some real action, really ready."
"I don't want to hear about it," I said. I was sitting on the couch trying to cool off. I thought of calling Kate but dismissed the idea-what good would a phone call do?
"She sure was a beauty, wasn't she?" Mark asked, but the question was addressed to himself. When I looked over at him he was looking up at the ceiling and I knew he was letting his mind dwell on the sight he had had of Janet in my kitchen.
His eyes came down off the ceiling and met and held mine and he said, "Listen, what we both need is a real cooling off, if you know what I mean. You're new here in Pleasantville anyway, it's time someone showed you around."
"What are you getting at?"
"What do you think? You stumbled onto the one place in town that a man can't take a date this afternoon, The Four Club; but if it's a woman you want, or a girl, a girl not much older than Janet, there's a choice supply-"
"Not interested!" I said but immediately regretted it. I was interested, too interested. I was just playing head of the department.
"Drop it!" Mark exclaimed. "We're not in school now and you don't have to be on your best behavior. This is just between you and me. I know a place, and I'm going there. If you want to come you're welcome."
"I don't know, Mark, it's just that-"
"That you've been married a few months, I know I know. But if what you say is true and Kate won't be back for weeks you're going to go out of your mind with Janet around, aren't you?"
"I already am," I confessed.
"Then what would Kate have you do eh? Jeopardize your job or grab a little something just to keep you cool. Come on off your high horse man," he said and stood up. "I'm going, coming or staying?" he queried.
I looked at him noticing how close together his eyes seemed to be at that moment, how swarthy his complexion and thin his aqualine nose and I almost said no. But I hadn't the strength; or anyway I hadn't the desire. I think I also wanted to prove to myself that although I was married I wasn't tied to my wife like some people, like two corpses instead of one within a mummy case, I wanted to prove to myself that I was just as loose as always. If the picture of Janet in my bed kept popping into my head I guess that influenced it too. Anyway I stood up. I was about five inches taller than he, and I followed him and his smile out the door. I stopped only a moment to lock the place up. I admit I turned the key with some regret. I was almost hoping that Janet would pull the same stunt again.
We walked down the hill together toward the business section and when we came to Jackson Street, which is a wide thoroughfare, we found a taxi waiting on the corner. Mark got in and I slid in next to him and he gave the driver an address on Pierce Street.
As we moved through the quiet city listening to the cab driver shatter about the state lottery that the governor had proposed the month before, about what a benefit it would be to the state, I realized I was a little drunk. Mark was keeping the conversation from being one way but he was making fun of the driver to do it and I remember feeling a surge of dislike for Mark. Then I just sat back and let myself enjoy the feeling of expectation. Obviously I was going through with whatever he had in mind. I might as well enjoy myself, I told the conscious censor inside my head.
We pulled up opposite a large office building that I was sure was closed for the night and I saw Mark had already paid and tipped the driver. I slid out and stood next to my associate on the sidewalk as we watched the cab pull away.
"In here?" I asked Mark, pointing to the office building.
"No of course not," he replied. "It's down this way. I didn't want the driver to know where we were going."
I nodded at his thoroughness and felt comfortable with him for my guide. Then I followed him down Peirce Street for about half a block (the blocks there are uneven in length) and into the lobby of a new apartment building. It was one of several that had been constructed in that area so that the businessmen of the district could walk to work within five or ten minutes. Apparently it was also so that they could take long lunches with pretty girls in complete privacy.
The doorman simply nodded at Mark who was apparently known by him and we passed through to a bank of elevators. The first car arrived, it was empty, we boarded it and took it to the seventh floor. There we turned to walk down a carpeted hall to the last door on the right.
"How about the doorman?" I asked Mark.
"He's all right."
Mark rang the bell and almost immediately the eye slot shot back and someone was looking us over like it was a speak easy in prohibition days. I heard a low laugh and the door was flung open. Almost simultaneously I heard low noises from off somewhere that were unmistakably caused by passion.
Directly before us was a huge woman dressed in black silk. Her face was so heavily made up she might have appeared completely different below the cake on her surface and her breasts were so huge and so white (her dress was cut incredibly low) I was reminded at once of the Madam in some grade D movie.
"Hello Mark," she purred and grasped his hand in her own taking it to her breast in a gesture of friendship. Mark smiled broadly and interrupted her when she started to add something to her greeting.
"I want you to meet Roger," he said. "This is Mrs. Moon, first lady of Pleasantville, Rog," he said to me and I extended my hand to her. She greeted me in the same fashion, stepping back and taking us with her so that she could close the door.
"Yes, you are new, aren't you," she said smiling at me. "Oh ho ho and you are anxious," she said. "Come in and pick a girl Roger, come in."
She was right and although I blushed at her insight into the state of my psyche I followed her into a large living room.
"This whole floor is Mrs. Moon's Rog," Mark said and it was the last he said to me while we were there. He raised his hand at one of the girls on the couch and she followed him out a door at the other end of the room. Mrs. Moon laughed and I surveyed the scene.
There were four girls left in the room. They were all quite young and I felt suddenly guilty of something, I wasn't sure what. But my lust overcame my guilt for one of the girls was blond and blue eyed and reminded me of Janet. In a way I just wanted to get out of there but I knew if I didn't satisfy my craving I'd be unhappy for a week. And the girls seemed happy. There wasn't anything sordid about the place-or anything sad. The young girls sat around in the nude or semi-nude, it was all very business-like, very sensual, very Roman, I remember thinking at the time.
I smiled at the blond girl and she rose and approached me. She was wearing a sort of see through black nightie through which I could make out the motion and size of her breasts. She had a lovely body and after I'd looked at her a moment I was suddenly afraid the price was going to be too extravagant. She was unbelievably sensuous. Her legs were large and long and perfect and as she approached me from the side I could see her rear peek through the short nightie. It was taut, perfect. There wasn't an ounce of fat on her.
"Shall we," she said coyly and I nodded dumbly. I felt a rush of noise in my head; I felt the blood racing through my veins.
"This way," she said and taking me by the hand led me down a corridor through the door Mark and his girl had used.
"How much is it going to be?" I asked hoping to heaven I had enough with me. I don't think I could have turned back at that point.
"You're with Mark. Don't worry about the price," was her cryptic answer and although I raised my eyebrows at the time I had only one real thought and that was for her.
She took me to a small bedroom and closed the door behind me. "Here," she said and stood by the large bed. I remember that I asked her name and that she told me it but I don't remember what it was. I remember clearly however the way she ran her hands over the front of her body and asked whether I were a good friend of Mark's. I said that I was. She also asked whether I was married and I told her that too.
That was pretty much the end to the talk. She undressed me completely and even when I volunteered my help she put my hands aside. When I was completely nude she led me to the wash basin and then lifted her nightie over her head. Her skin was clear and milk white and she couldn't have been more than nineteen. She was made up but not heavily and I remember noting that the make-up helped to make her look older, not younger.
She put me down upon the bed and came to me and asked me what I wanted. I had befcn with prostitutes twice before but had never encountered anything like that. I told her, I didn't question it, I just told her.
Her body was perfect, her rear was full and sensuous, her lips expert, her mouth wide. She kissed me on the legs and thighs and stomach and I think I moaned with delight. Finally I couldn't bear it any longer and I told her so. She laughed up at me and got ready. I came to her and I remember the warmth of her body and the full way she held me and worked for me. It was not like it had ever been with a prostitute before. The girls at Mrs. Moon's were apparently chosen for their expertness and kept happy enough to enjoy their work. She was not like a professional at all. She moved as much as many girls I have had and more than some.
As I reached the top of my passion I encircled her with my arms and I remember the way her skin felt the way it gave slightly under the pressure of my extended hands. Then she moved hard at me and set me off by touching me lightly on my back and below and I'll always remember her for that. I went mad. I screamed. I set myself completely at my task. I ended it completely so that there was no desire left in me.
When we were finished she asked me if I'd had enough. At the time I remember I thought that she was kidding and just said "Yes, I had." I realized later that she had been serious. I was not an ordinary customer; I'd come with Mark Garon and that made me special. I was to be treated with special care.
I dressed automatically and she smiled at me and came with me back out to the living room where Mrs. Moon had established herself in a huge chair. I was forced to sit there for almost another half hour waiting for Mark. When another man came in, I went into a small anteroom and waited until he'd gone off with a girl.
While I waited the girls chatted with me and made eyes at me, which I enjoyed. Although a half hour was expended before Mark came out again I didn't want to take any of the other girls nor did I want the one I had had again. I waited there, half enjoying their company, half annoyed by it. I was surrounded by naked, young girls and I guess the teacher in me was perplexed. But when we left I felt real relief. I knew I would miss Kate but that I would sleep well. I knew that Janet Moore or the thought of her in my bed wouldn't bother me. I was glad I had done it and I never got around to asking Mark who had paid and why he was treated with such attention and care. I let the whole evening slip out of my mind in a single stroke, cherishing only the way the girl had been, so warm and willing and friendly through it all.
It wasn't really until later that I realized that I hadn't eaten anything but a few bites of cold chicken and that the scotch I'd had at The Four Club had certainly helped to free my inhibitions that evening.
CHAPTER FIVE
After Mark dropped me at home (I realized that he was paying for the cab again only after it had pulled away with him in it) I went upstairs and let myself in my apartment. I finished the chicken I had started earlier which helped to sober me and then I went into the bathroom to shower again.
My mind was relatively clear but I didn't bother myself with any of the events of the evening. I felt good and I spent the hours until twelve with a book on educational dynamics. When the phone finally rang I walked toward the bedroom smiling, sat down on the bed and lifted the receiver.
"Kate?"
"Hello Rog, how are you?" She said with a good deal of feeling. "Fine hon. You?"
"O.K."
"How's Mother?" I asked. I really didn't expect there was a change. If there had been she would have said that first and asked me how I was second.
"The same."
"Mmm, I miss you Kate," I said. It was the truth. I could feel it across the continent.
"How was school today?" she asked then and I was taken aback for a moment. Of course the first thing I thought of was Janet. I think Kate heard the hesitation in my voice before I answered.
"Fine. School was fine, as expected."
"I miss you too, hon," she said finally. Then we spent several moments saying goodnight and we hung up. Just before I dropped off to sleep I calculated what the nightly calls were going to cost us, added it to the cost of Kate's trip home and my eating out for a couple of weeks and whistled. I was curious to know how Mark Garon could afford so much luxury, how he could pick up the tab of two taxis without a thought or a qualm, and all on the tiny salary he was getting as a regular staff teacher. He must be moonlighting, I thought before I gave up to a restless sleep.
In the morning the bedroom was chilly. When I slipped out of bed I shivered and I went immediately to shut the windows. Summer had stayed late but there was a trace of winter in the air then. It appeared that fall was going to slip right by without giving us a decent fight. I was sorry because autumn is my favorite season and I had never experienced one in that part of the country before.
I was a half hour early for school but Dr. Hanes was standing in precisely the same place when I walked into the building as he had been standing the morning before. It was probably part of his vigil and began to dislike him for it. If it had been some other principal, almost any other principal, I'm sure I would have found it reasonable enough.
I said good-morning to the man and went straight down the hall to my office. I thought that perhaps in the future I would find another entrance to use so that I could pass through the halls undetected by Hanes. Seeing him first thing did not strike me as being the best way to start the day.
I threw open my door half expecting to find Janet in the room again and entirely prepared to lecture her for her stupid behavior the previous evening but the office was empty. I shrugged, realizing a moment later that it was the kind of shrug Janet would make, and sat down behind my desk.
I had the days lesson in four classes to prepare but since two of them were plane geometry and two algebra the process went quickly enough. By the time I was expected in my home-room class I was completely prepared and feeling fine.
As I walked in the room I saw that the class wise guy, McNight, was standing in front of the class giving a lecture. Janet was in her seat, her dress demurely at knee length, her head down, and I thought it was only because McNight was up there instead of me.
A hush fell as I entered and McNight started back to his seat.
"No! That's all right. Carry on. I'd like to hear it and I can take the attendence while you talk."
The boy looked at me, shook his head, and returned to his seat. I shrugged, the class laughed, and I went to my own chair behind my desk.
I took the attendance with the seat chart and told the class to keep themselves busy before the geometry lesson and to keep the noise down and fell to working a problem I wanted to give to them at my desk. They were slightly more advanced than the other class, or they were supposed to be anyhow, and I wanted to try them on something a little difficult.
Every once in a while I would raise my eyes to look at the class, but really to see if Janet had changed her position, but she hadn't. Her dress was still pulled down (it was a blue dress that matched her eyes) and she refused to look in my direction. I was tempted to be silly and call on her to do something but didn't let myself. I planned to talk to her in good time. I started the lesson at the appointed hour and gave the class the special problem. It was an easy enough thing to solve if they had the correct and relevant propositions but they hadn't received those as yet. It was just possible to do it with what they had been taught the day before. Five of the class were successful, McNight included, in doing it but Janet had failed to do anything other than write her name on the paper that she handed in.
I dismissed them at the bell and returned to my office. Janet had been among the first students to leave the room.
During my rounds in the next period I noticed that Mark was once again concentrating his attention on the brunette girl I had noticed the day before. I took another look at her and found her to be as striking as I had previously. Her long limbs were notable, as was the clear outline of his silhouette. She was certainly a lovely creature. By her dress and demeanor I sensed that she was probably from the Greensville section. She didn't have the air the richer children had. Instead she seemed to be conscious of her superb sexuality. In a way she was a lot like Janet.
I avoided the principal's table for lunch. Instead I sought out Mark and we took a small table to the rear of the faculty lunch room where we could talk without being overheard. I remember our conversation well because it gave me another clue to what was going on. It also gave me further evidence of Mark's character. If I had only been able to detect earlier what a double dealing sort he really was!
At one point, when it seemed to me that there was no one near enough to read my lips, I leaned over toward Mark so that I was looking him straight in the eye and whispered, "How in the world did we get away without paying last night or do I owe you-"
"You don't owe me anything, Rog," Mark interrupted. "I want to be thought of as a good host. This is my town after all and I owe it to a fellow worker, not to mention my supervisor-"
"Ach," I interrupted, deprecatingly.
"To show a good time," he continued passing over my weak gesture. There was a sense in which I didn't mean it and I suppose he realized that. He was a good deal smarter than he appeared.
"Well you did that," I said. "Maybe now, however, it would be a good idea to forget what happened."
"Oh come Rog, let's not get stuffy. Look there's nothing to worry about. Hanes is an ass, you've seen that for yourself already. No one else in the entire faculty has the intelligence or interest to look into our private lives."
"But-"
"But nothing," he continued half in anger and half with that strange light way he had, one eyebrow lifted like a con man, "we do what we please. Face it, no one cares. They don't care about the students once they're out of here, you've seen that, and they don't care about us.
"Roger baby," he said leaning back and nodding lightly, "You and I may be the only ones around who take an interest in our students; Janet for instance," he concluded and winked. At first I thought he was going to make reference to the students real problems not his sexual appetite. I guess I'd been wrong. I also guessed he was referring to the brunette in his second period class as well.
"Still, I think a scandal-"
"Ach," he broke in stealing my own sound and gesture, "If you want to have some fun this evening come around to my place. Anytime. While your wife's out on die coast you ought to keep busy. Just call first," he said smiling.
We ate the rest of our lunch in silence and I contemplated Mark. He was a strange man, a strange person. I hadn't anyone with whom to compare him, in life or literature. There was something evil about him, I'd noticed that right off, but I liked him too. And I still felt good about having been to Mrs. Moon's and having been treated with such care. No matter how much of a business affair it was it still boosts a man's ego-every time.
After lunch we went our separate ways and Mark repeated his invitation at our parting. I begged off, then said I'd consider it, then went back to the office. My thoughts returned to Janet and then to Kate. I tried to concentrate on my work, on filling out forms for the students and making up the next few lessons but I couldn't seem to do it. Janet's unhappiness, it seemed, was the main thing that bothered me-or so I told myself. I kept thinking of the difference in the girl. It had been only thirty hours or so since I'd first seen her but she had already succeeded in capturing most of my thoughts.
After I thought about her for a moment I suppose I began to feel guilty and then I thought about Kate. This happened three or four times that afternoon before I realized there was a pattern to it and shook it off. Two things were clear: I wasn't thinking about Janet as a student but as a woman, and my attitudes had changed considerably since the day before owing to Mark's insistence that I see the town, as it were. I felt like a Republican who had switched to the Democrats.
Finally it was time for the home-room classes to return and I waited behind the desk in my classroom like a boy on his first date. When Janet came in my breath tightened and I felt nervous. I watched her sit down and wait for the signal to leave. I gave it early on the hope that she'd stay but she was gone with the first of the students still looking as sad as she had that morning, she still refused to look in my direction.
And as she left I noticed something else: her coat, a white one with black verticle stripes that may once have looked very smart, was worn and frayed along the hem. It was not the coat she'd worn the day before-that, I supposed was due to the change in weather, and it gave her a totally different appearance.
Although she was still lovely, still the most voluptuous, womanly girl in the class, or the entire school for that matter, there was something sullen about her in that coat, something tasting of the slums, of the section of the town she'd grown up in. She was not a happy girl and just then I felt a wave of remorse for having helped, in my own small way, to make her no happier.
Then she was gone and McNight was sitting on the window ledge near my desk swinging his legs. He was about to make his first attempt to get in good with the new swinging math instructor. I suffered him for ten minutes and then left him alone in the classroom with a smile and a nod and the distinct impression, unless he was completely stupid, that his attempt had failed.
I went back to my office and closed the door behind me. It seemed as cold and as empty as my bedroom at home and I soon began to pace the floor in an attempt to straighten out my thinking.
I went to the window and stared obliquely out at the student stragglers who had still not left the steps or the corner candy store. I wasn't paying much attention until I noticed that some of the teachers were leaving as well and I asked myself why I was waiting around. I didn't seem capable of accomplishing anything anyway.
I was just about to leave the window and the office when I spotted, or thought I spotted Mark Garon walking away on the next block.
I watched him for a moment and then, when he approached a heavy oak far from the corner on which Jefferson High is located, a womanly figure clad in a white coat with vertical black stripes emerged from behind the tree and fell into step with him. Even at that distance I could see him turn to her and my ears burned to hear what he was saying.
CHAPTER SIX
I left the office in so much of a hurry I forgot to lock it behind me. I didn't retreat when the thought came to me however because I still felt I had a chance to catch them. I hurried past the oak tree behind which she'd waited and turned up the next block in the direction I'd seen them take from the window.
There was no one in sight. A taxi was pulling away from the traffic light a few streets ahead and a batch of fall leaves had been swept into a circle by the increasing wind in the middle of an empty lot. There was no Mr. Mark Garon and no Miss Janet Moore. I cursed, kicked at a curled leaf on the sidewalk ineffectually and turned to walk toward home. I planned to call Mark as soon as I got there and invite him out for dinner.
Then I cursed myself for being so stupid. If I wanted to prevent him from doing to Janet that which I'd turned down the night before I'd have to be more effective than that. I found a phone booth on a corner, looked up Garon's name again, made a note of the address this time and found a taxi at a stand by the road to the United plant.
When I got to Garon's place I was surprised. I had already noted that he was free with a buck but I had never suspected that he could afford one of the new apartments in a high rise building. His address however corresponded to just that; the numbers shouted out from the canopy in big red figures that this was the place. A doorman who resembled the doorman at Mrs. Moon's held the cab door ajar for me and smiled politely when I asked for Mr. Garon.
"I'll check, sir," he said and closing the cab door, went to the intercom system in the lobby and pressed one of the tiny grey buttons in the third line of seven.
"Who shall I say?"
"Roger Gold," I said and he repeated it into the intercom.
"Go right up sir," he said smiling and opened the large inner glass door for me.
The elevator took me to the seventh floor where I found Mark's apartment without any trouble. I knocked and he let me in. He was wearing a robe and the pants to his suit but he'd already changed into slippers and he looked fresh and neat. I thought he was preparing to have Janet and I looked around the place expectantly.
"Nice place," I said.
"Thanks, Didn't expect you so early."
"Decided to take you up on your offer, buy you dinner," I answered, and we had exchanged our words so quickly and it had come so close to being an argument despite the social tenor of the words that we then stood facing each other for a minute before Mark suggested I sit.
I took a low, red-brown arm chair and he fixed me a manhattan. The living room was tastefully and expensively furnished. The curtains over the large bay window were open, the bookcases full of interesting stuff and the high-fi open and the records sported about the room. Janet wasn't there and I looked at the closed door to the bedroom.
"I half expected there'd be someone here," I said and tried to smile. If I found Janet there I was going to fight him and I think he sensed that.
"Drink up," he said handing me my glass and I did. I needed it too. It calmed me quickly, too quickly, but I didn't notice that.
"Who's in there, Mark?" I said nodding toward the bedroom.
"No one Roger, but-"
That was all I heard. Suddenly the room was spinning. I remember Mark reaching out and taking the empty glass from my hand and I saw his lips moving and supposed he was asking me what was wrong but I couldn't answer either. I woke up flat on my back on a bed nude to the skin and someone, a girl was with me.
As I came to I wasn't frightened. I heard myself moaning with pleasure before I opened my eyes and I felt the pressure of a girl's lips, of someone's lips, on my skin. Then, after I opened my eyes and my vision cleared, I saw a brunette below me on the bed, her hair spread over my stomach, her nude, exquisite form stretched out near me, her buttocks dimpled and curved close enough for me to kiss.
Her legs were long and tan her skin smooth to the eye, and before I knew it, smooth too to the touch for I was running my hands over her skin to feel the length of her curved thighs.
She didn't bother to stop and as I looked around I gathered that I was in Mark's bedroom and that I was with one of his women. A huge circular mirror above the bed came into focus and I saw the woman's breasts, firm and full and reached for them by sitting up.
It was then that I recognized the girl but I couldn't stop her. She'd carried me too far too fast with that strange and disarming way of awakening me for as I saw her I felt a surge of heat begin below me and shoot through me forward and I grasped her as I began to moan. And that was it, of course. As I screamed and she finished what she had begun I realized that I had been drugged and then I saw Mark come in the room smiling, naked to his skin as well, looking like a Greek satyr, like a goat.
The brunette, she was the girl from his class of course, leaned back on the bed next to me and winked at me. I was shocked and dreadfully surprised, not just at what had happened and what was happening but at what the drug had done to me. I wondered what he had given me to knock me out so effectively.
Then I felt the weight of Mark on the bed and saw him descend toward the girl and take her. She gasped and smiled and, even as I lay there, began to work furiously against Mark's body. I realized at once that she had become excited while she had woken me and that Mark had taken it upon himself to relieve her.
But as I watched I discarded any ideas I may have had about becoming angry or indignant. When Mark finished I was ready for her myself.
She was a delight. She rolled like the waves of a beautiful ocean and she seemed never to have enough. When I first began I heard her cry out and heard Mark's satisfied laugh and heard him say, "Give it to her, Rog."
I don't know what came over me. I began to work as I had never worked for Kate or for anyone before her. The brunette, whose name I did not even know, was transported. She locked herself and began to drive in a steady rhythm groaning each time she reached a peak and breathing fiery breath upon my mouth as we battled.
Again I felt a force of hot passion build behind me and begin to move forward through my body. I shook with the tremor that was building within me and as she looked up and caught my soul with her eyes I was lost and heard her scream before I became like a machine gone mad, a machine fed with three times the power and speed it is built for, and ended it completely spent and completely exhausted, my head pounding with the now dead rhythm of our bodies.
I rolled over and looked up at the mirror. She was watching me through it, smiling, then she turned her head away to look at Mark who had been sitting on a chair near the bed.
"More baby," he asked her and I felt a wave of revulsion sweep over me. Whatever he'd given me was wearing off.
She shook her head and whispered, "Enough."
"Roger," Mark said, "I hope you'll forgive me for this but I couldn't handle her alone. She's a mad woman as you see. Oh yes. Roger, I want you to meet Linda, Linda, Roger."
Linda rolled over and pressed herself against me, rubbed her toes against my foot and up and down my calf so that I could feel her breasts, the tips of which were flat where they had been peaked, and her belly and thighs. "Hello Mr. Gold," she said hotly and touched me with her hand.
Somehow I managed to get away from her, I was still wobbly. As I stood I heard her say. "Maybe I will have more from Roger. Roger?" And I was asking, "Where are my clothes, Mark?"
"Oh relax man, no one will ever know."
"She's a student in one of your classes, isn't she?"
"Yes. So what?"
My head began to clear further and spotting my underthings on a chair I got into them. My pants were in a heap by the bed.
As I put them on I looked again at Linda. When she saw me look at her she opened her mouth and raised herself off the bed and waved her torso about at me in an attempt to bring me down again. Suddenly everything was clear to me. I knew how Mark got his extra money. He did some recruiting for Mrs. Moon as well as teaching at Jefferson High.
"This a new one for Peirce street?" I asked throwing my thumb at the writhing form on the bed.
"That's right Roger."
"And I'm right in the middle of it now, right?"
"Right. I can use you Rog. You're a good looking fellow. Just the sort these teen-agers go for. By my standards you're somewhat fatuous of course."
This was not the Mark I'd met the previous week and had gone out with the night before and lunched with....Mark had changed, or come out of hiding.
"She's going to love it there, aren't you Linda?" he was saying and Linda writhed for an answer. She was beautiful and the whole thing was revolting.
"Linda's going to make us both a good piece of change," he was saying as I put on my shirt and found my shoes. Then I stood there holding my shoes, staring at him while he continued. His smile was gone then but the fierceness was still behind his eyes. "She'll lead a more comfortable life than she could ever had with an ordinary job, why she'll be able to retire in five or ten years, and so will I. In somewhat better style of course."
"You're a pig," I said.
"Careful Rog-everything's on film of course, and tape," he said his smile returning for an instant. "Perhaps we'll five together then, in ten years, what do you say Linda. You and me in ten years?"
"Will Roger be there?" she purred. She was pretending then, I could feel it. All my senses were suddenly clear and sharp.
"Where's Janet?" I asked.
"Miss Moore couldn't make it this evening. I believe, as a matter-of-fact that she's to be your first conquest. It'll be easy Roger, you have only to convince her of the leisure of her new profession and the social status-"
I interrupted him then with words that cannot be printed.
"Yes," Linda said.
"Better face it Rog. You're in a ticklish position. There's not just tonight, there's last night as well. I could break you, Rog, I don't want to."
I repeated myself, still standing there like a fool, holding my shoes. But I knew he was right. I could curse him out or beat him up but he had me dead to rights.
"Come back to bed," Linda said raising herself even further off the bed to offer herself to me. "I'll do it again," she said.
"Do it for me," Mark told her. "Think it over, Rog, lock the door on your way out-no don't even think of force now, I'm afraid I've taken that into consideration. There's still Mrs. Moon and you can't get to her."
I heard the girl begin to whimper as I left closing the door behind me and testing it to see whether it was locked.
CHAPTER SEVEN
My first meeting with the district attorney was at twelve midnight that same night so I missed Kate's call. But as soon as I was through there I asked whether I could use his phone for a long distance call and he assented, waving off my attempts to suggest I repay him and turning to the ceiling deep in thought. I kept my fingers crossed behind my back like a school boy that the man was not corrupt, that he was not, for the love of all heaven and earth, in on it too.
Across the continent the phone rang only once before Kate lifted the receiver.
When I replaced it on my side again I was reassured. Her mother was improving and might last the year after all and Kate might return within the week. But Kate was not reassured. The story I told her about being at a teacher's home must have sounded as weak to her as it did to me.
I turned to the grey-haired man and smiled tentatively.
"Did she believe you?" he asked. "Afraid not."
He just shrugged and turned his eyes back to the ceiling, saying softly, "It's a good thing you came to me with this story Mr. Gold, and not someone else."
"What do you mean."
He turned his eyes back toward me, eyes that had an intensity not unlike Garon's but eyes that were also piercing blue like cold stream water and said, "You've a friend here, you might have found an enemy elsewhere. Of course it's impossible for a thing like that to exist in a town unless some part of that town is corrupt. What is lucky for you is that you found a part of it that isn't."
I smiled and returned the strength of his look. I believed him. He was the first man I'd met in Pleasantville that inspired my respect and I was grateful to him for being there.
"Well, what am I to do?" I asked.
"Go home, leave the back way. Let me think it out. Come, I'll show you out."
He did and I walked quietly through the city toward the hill and our house. I hadn't had any choice, I knew. Unless I wanted to be blackmailed all my life and spend part of it seducing Janet and girls like her for the use of Mrs. Moon and fat, foul-breathing men I had to go straight to the D.A. It made me feel good to have done it. It wasn't something I wanted to carry around on my chest alone for even one night. The only thing that really bothered me as I made my way up the hill was the last thing the D.A. had told me. He had held my arm and looked at me and said, "Play along for the meanwhile," and then slapped me on the back and closed the door behind me leaving me on his back porch. I had cut across an empty field to find the sidewalk and the street home.
I believe I dreamed that evening. At least in looking back I remember a dream and it seems to fit here. It involved all the women that had recently come into my fife. It involved Linda and Janet and Kate and it was not the sort of dream I like to relate; it makes me out to be more a beast than a man.
At any rate when I awoke the apartment was freezing. Winter had come as I'd predicted it would, cutting Fall off without a word. The mother disinheriting the daughter. The whore giving up a chance to lead a sane, realistic fife.
I found my other entrance to school and I walked with a quick step. It was a pleasure to avoid our dear principal. It was also a pleasure to think of myself as working on the side of good and law and morality. I sincerely hoped to see Mark Garon behind bars by the end of the month. I hoped to see Mrs. Moon's place closed down for good and Mrs. Moon run out of town on a rail. And I hoped to see Janet happy, in love with some reliable young man, married and settled down. I also hoped to see Janet when I opened the door to my office.
Unfortunately she was not there. I wanted so much to have a talk with her, to apologize for my weakness, to apologize for not making love to her, to apologize for my associates scandalous proposition. I wanted also, very desperately, to know precisely to what extent Mark had already spelled out his proposition; I wanted to know what the bastard was going to require of me besides a seduction.
I closed the door behind me and breathed deeply. On my desk was the work I had so casually left the evening before when I woke up in such a spectacular manner. I fell to it but was interrupted by the ringing of the phone. I lifted the receiver and heard a familiar, deep, masculine voice which I knew belonged to the grey-haired gentleman I had made the acquaintance of the evening before, late the evening before.
"Mr. Gold, do you know who this is?"
"Yes," I answered feeling perfectly safe to let him say whatever he wanted to over the phone. It was ludicrous to suppose that it was tapped. Of course there was always the switchboard.
"Do you think you'll be able to meet me for lunch today, Mr. Gold?" the voice queried.
"It is extremely difficult for me to do that sir," I replied. I have only forty-five minutes free for lunch and-"
"I've taken that into consideration. A car will be parked on the next block. On Third Street and Cedar. Do you know the corner I mean?"
"Of course, I-"
"Around what time Mr. Gold?"
"Noon even," I replied without hesitating. After all the man knew what he was doing. I heard him hang up and did the same.
Then I stared out into space. The district attorney had been up all night thinking out some plan and I couldn't imagine what it was. I wanted very much to know what was expected of me. Well I was going to find out at noon. Good enough.
I left the office and the work that cluttered my desk without touching it and made my way to my homestudy class. I think I needed to see Janet and be reassured that I was doing the wise thing. One look at her would do that I knew, one look at all that beauty and feminine charm I was trying, going to try, to save.
There were only five or six students in the room. Most, I gathered, came on the very last school bus. Janet was not among them but that was all right. I could wait. McNight, the class jerk was there and I said good-morning to him.
"Good morning, Mr. Gold," he replied and bent his head to some task at his desk. I guessed he had failed to do his homework in one of his courses and was busy copying someone else's to make it up. It didn't bother me much. I'd done pretty much the same thing when I was in high school.
By five to nine the class was full and Janet was still not there. I began to worry about her and when the bell rang and it was time to take attention I reasoned that she was not about to show up. Suddenly I had to know where Mark was. I appointed the first student in each row responsible for attendance and I left the room.
I walked down the hall quickly and looked in on Garon. He was in front of his class. Fine. Suddenly there was something else I wanted to know. I headed for the main attendance office quickly. Dr. Hanes was there and looked oddly at me but I disregarded him. In minutes I knew what Linda's last name was and where her home-room class was located. I was up on the third floor long before the first bell and established the fact that she was indeed present.
Breathing more easily I returned to my own class. Everyone was still, everyone well-behaved. It was as if they sensed my disquiet and wanted to help. Even McNight looked concerned.
I gave them a snap quiz in geometry when the bell rang and stood staring out the window while they worked. If Garon and Linda both were in school then no one was working on Janet. Probably, they had left her for me to seduce as Mark had suggested. Perhaps he knew that I had some strange power over the girl by virtue of some childish crush she had on me. In a way it made sense. Perhaps I was the only one at the moment who could persuade her to lead a life of prostitution. I sincerely hoped I was.
Of course the possibility existed that someone on the outside was working on her then, that I wasn't the only one. Perhaps Mrs. Moon or one of her associates or one of the girls from the house was with Janet. Perhaps, and I shuddered at the thought, Janet was there even then trying out the sport.
When I turned back to the class all eyes were on me. They had finished their test and were waiting for me to go ahead with the lesson. From rote memory I began to lecture, answering no questions, demanding full attention. The class was still with me, still sensing my mood, and strangely I believe they all learned a bit of geometry that day. It taught me a lesson as a teacher.
Noon didn't come soon enough. I walked straight out of the building without a backward glance. Mark had had the good sense to stay out of my way but surely he would miss me for lunch. That, however, was just as well. I would probably be instructed by the district attorney to pretend to go along with him for awhile but until I could come out in the open as an agent of the D.A.'s it at least helped my conscience a little to pretend to some independence from Garon.
The car was where he had said it would be, except it wasn't an ordinary car, it was a taxi. Good thinking on the D.A.'s part. It would be easy as pie to make up an excuse about it if anyone had seen me and was curious. I slipped into the back seat and the driver spun away from the curb and rounded the corner on the next block. There the D.A. himself got aboard and we drove through Pleasantville's environs for forty-five minutes, my stomach gnawing and registering it's hunger, the D.A. apologizing for the lack of food at first, then instructing me as to what I was to do.
It was pretty much as I'd figured it. I was to play along. I was to get as many names as possible. Pretend to bring Janet along if it was the only way to really wrap the thing up (I balked at that) and I was to be assured that the D.A. would swear that I had been working for him from the inception, from long before the films of myself and Linda were taken. That I was his personal agent, a man of intrepid courage and dispatch. It sounded very pretty and I hoped to God it would work. I hoped the school board would swallow it and I hoped Kate would swallow it. I could always tell her they had approached me the first day she had gone. I would not, if I played my cards correctly, have to admit to my weakness. In a way that was all right. I no longer felt weak, I no longer felt like a man being led around by his belt.
When the taxi delivered me in front of the school I looked up quickly at the windows and saw no one poking their head out, which relieved me. I went directly to my office and opened the door. Mark was there, behind my desk, smiling slyly and for a second I was sure he knew everything.
"Where were you for lunch, Rog?" he asked.
"Where were you?"
"Looking for you?"
"Where is Janet?"
"Why don't you let me ask the questions?" he said sarcastically, the bitter taste almost dropping from his tongue with every word.
"Where is she?" I replied. "If I'm in on this I'm not going to be half in. If you've got me right where you want me you can be damn sure I'm going to get my cut out of it all. I'm going to get what I want to," I said with as much implication in my voice as I could gather up.
"You really want that girl don't you, Rog? Well she does have soft thighs ... to look at her," he sneered. "A very comfortable addition to Mrs. Moon's she'll make," he snickered.
"Where is she."
"When she approached me yesterday and I felt I ought not to oblige her I suggested she take the day off and go to my apartment at three."
"You mean you're going to make her yourself?" I queried and I'm afraid I sounded somewhat desperate.
"I explained that Rog. She really doesn't want me, she wants you. She's willing to take me on the rebound as it were. She thinks she hates you now. But she's ripe and someones got to do it. Me or you Rog. Me or you."
"And why me," I asked exasperatedly.
"Oh she'll let me make her all right and I'll do her justice too, but I'm afraid I won't be as good a con-vincer as you'll be Rog. So you do it huh? Here's the key," he said throwing a key onto my blotter and rising from behind my desk, preparing to leave. "The doorman will let you in. Good luck Rog. Remember. Make a professional of her. Explain the merits...." he added and left, leaving the office rather cold and a certain ringing in my ears.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Long before three o'clock I gathered that there was more to what Mark had said than met the eye. He wasn't interested in Janet alone although her addition to Mrs. Moon's establishment would be invaluable. He was interested in glooming a successor. Mark had visions of retiring early and how better to do that than to find someone to do the job in Jefferson High School that he was doing, someone else just as handsome just as fast with the girls, someone whom he had a hold on and could profit from. I wasn't to be his partner, I was to be his employee and that afternoon I was to be initiated. If Janet fell for the line I was supposed to give her he'd have a lot more on me than some dirty pictures. I'd be up against a twenty-year rap, probably more. After that I'd be his to command.
And then, at three-o'clock, as my cab sped me across town to Mark's flat, I wondered if there wasn't some way in which I might be able to submit enough proof to convict Mark of enough to put him away for a long time without having to testify myself. I was sure the D.A. would go along with it if I could come up with something. The idea would be to get Mark on a charge of corrupting the morals of a minor, for instance, the same thing he'd have me for, and forget, let's say, pandering; so that he'd be somewhat hesitant to drag me into it.
I was sure the same idea had occurred to the D.A. and I wondered precisely what I might do. When the cab pulled up outside the apartment and the doorman rushed to open the door for me I thought I had an idea.
"Yes sir, go right upstairs sir," the doorman said and I looked squarely at him and went for the elevator bank. For a moment I hoped he'd be behind bars himself.
As I turned the key in the lock I thought about Janet. I wondered, for instance, whether she was already in bed in an attempt to greet Mark in the manner in which she'd surprised me. I rather thought she wasn't and my opinion was verified when, upon throwing open the door, I saw her through one of Mark's mirrors, seated demurely on his couch, sipping a drink she'd apparently mixed for herself.
At first she seemed stunned to see me and her eyes held nothing but hate. But as I met her glance she lowered hers to the floor.
I closed the door behind me and locked it and said, "Did he give you a key too?"
"No," she said after a moment, "The doorman let me in." And then she added, "It was a dirty trick of him to send you."
"I thought it was me you wanted," I answered and noticed despite myself that her legs, the part of them I could see below the hem of her dress, were long, elegant and inviting.
"I did," she answered softly. "I don't anymore. You're a coward," she said.
I had to agree with her, of course. Except I no longer felt like a coward. I felt almighty righteous for having gone to the D.A. Then I began to wonder about the tape recorder. Probably, if I knew Mark at all, it had turned on automatically at three o'clock.
"I wish you still did," I said and forcing myself to take my eyes from her I began to look behind pictures and in a vase of flowers. Then I thought I had it spotted. It was a fake book in the library. I had seen the things described in an article in Business Week and I prided myself on my luck.
I didn't shut it oft however. I just took it down off Mark's shelf and made sure. That was it all right.
"Know what this is?" I asked showing it to her.
"Yes, a book."
I looked at her when she answered. The light in the apartment gleamed in reflection from her blond hair. Her pursed lips were cute enough to devour. I wanted very badly to see her nude again, to see those huge gourd-like breasts under my gaze again.
She took a sip from her drink and asked, "Is Mark coming?" It was a clear attempt to make me jealous.
"No," I answered. "Listen Janet, this is a tape recorder, see," I said and flipped open the cover revealing the two spinning disks and the timing mechanism. "It looks like it will run for over an hour and it's very sensitive," I added.
"But why?" she said, her mouth agape.
"Don't you know?"
"No," she answered and her answer I knew was sincere. She really didn't know what she was getting into.
But my question about the tape recorder had surprised her, and her guard had dropped. I saw the light in her blue eyes and drew her to me, one hand meshing her right breast as I did so, she moaned with pleasure and swung herself over me so fast I did not know what had happened. With my last rational thought I turned off the tape recorder and began to drag her blouse from her chest.
It was really no surprise to me that she was not wearing panties and when her tongue came out and her thighs felt warm and soft to the touch and then her own hands freed her breasts from their encasing bra I went mad with passion for her. Just as I began to take her I said something about showing her love, really teaching her so that she'd be fine for someone else as my wife was fine for me, and when she smiled and understood I went ahead.
Her thighs were the most white and delightful flesh I'd ever touched and as I squeezed them and brought them around to me and she showered my neck with kisses, and at last, at long last because I could tell from her first gigantic sigh she released herself and we came together she began to wet my neck with her kisses and bounce her breasts madly until I took them both and she did most of the work below, bouncing until she'd reached her peak and then beginning slowly and building with me again.
I picked her up and brought her to the floor and there made more careful love with more feeling than I'd made to anyone with the exception of Kate in my entire life.
I ran my hands slowly and carefully along the length of her torso. I kissed the nape of her neck when she arched toward me to watch what was happening below, I kissed her eyelids closed before she found her peak again and then I lifted myself away from her and worked strongly as she shouted at me, at no one, at the entire world of her release at last.
It was thus that I made her a woman and loved her and knew I'd never forget what she was like although I'd never make love to her again. Then I felt my own peak approaching and far away from her except for the contact below, levered against the thick rug on the floor I began to show her what it was when a man surrenders himself completely.
When I finished with shouts and intense motion and finally collapsed about her, bringing her with me as I rolled away I saw the dewy thanks in her eyes and smiled.
Then I explained what was going to happen.
"Janet," I said. "I'm sorry I didn't take you that first time. This is what you wanted wasn't it?"
"When I first saw you I knew I wanted it to be you," she said softly caressing me with her flat, open hand.
"You know this was the one and only time?"
"Yes," she said, and I felt very tender toward her then.
"Now," I said, lets get dressed, there's something I want to ask you to do for me."
"No," she said, "not yet. The first time's not over yet, is it?"
"Not if you don't want it to be," I answered.
Then she stood up and tore the rest of her clothes off. She was still wearing stockings and her skirt which had been hiked above her waist. Entirely nude, a sight like the Roman Gods must have enjoyed when they watched Diana bathe, she went over to the couch and lay upon it provocatively.
At first I thought I wouldn't be able to take her again, but the sight of her there on Mark's couch, in his luxurious living room, relaxed and expectant before me, her eyes filled with the dew of satisfaction, I felt my strength return and I returned to her.
It became like a orchestrated affair. We moved in slow unison and then in unison of a medium tempo. The sounds of our love filled the apartment; her sighs and mine, our bodies touching, my lips against her breasts and hers against my nipples. My yells as she bit me hard and left a mark I knew I'd be hard put to explain, but I didn't care.
We reached the limit together that time and both our screams merged in the thin, desperate air of Garon's flat.
CHAPTER NINE
When we were dressed and sitting opposite each other and I had started the tape recorder again I began to explain the entire thing, both to her and to whatever grand jury would eventually hear it.
"... and you realize there is the possibility that your name will come out but I want you to know I will do my best and I believe the District Attorney will do his best to keep your name behind the doors of the grand jury. I am also taking the chance that my name will come into this and although I am working in conjunction with the District Attorney I do not relish the thought of publicity."
"I understand," she said. "I'll answer whatever questions you have."
She was a doll, a dream to save a dying man. She implicated Garon so badly and I came off so well that any judge in the land would have sent Garon up for the limit and let me off with a medal for honorable behavior.
It was about eight o'clock in the evening that we stood up and prepared to leave. We opened the door to find Garon standing there, and with his little book recorder secreted in my pocket we walked by him smiling, and I winked but passed him.
"Call you later," was all I said and he stepped aside and watched us take the elevator arm in arm, Janet smiling up into my face.
"You'll find someone else," I said when the cab pulled up in front of her house.
"I know I will," she answered and gave me such an open, honest smile that my heart went out to her. I knew then too that I had really finished with her and I longed to return to Kate. I calculated quickly that I would be speaking to her in just over three hours.
"And thank you for the ... for the testimony," I said.
She just shrugged, said good-bye and got out.
As the cab pulled away I had a sudden intuition. I wanted to tell the driver to turn around quickly but I stopped at the last second.
"What is it, pal?" he asked.
"Nothing, go on, up the hill," I replied.
We crossed the tracks and I saw the train station in the distance. Of course, I thought to myself. It really is good-bye. I won't even be seeing her in class tomorrow or ever again. It's the only thing that makes sense. She'll be leaving Pleasantville, probably tonight. I patted the breast pocket tape recorder I'd lifted and walked inside to my house. I watched the cab pull away from the foyer where Mr. Kalowski was standing, and with just a smile for the old janitor I went up the stairs to the apartment.
The phone was ringing of course but I let it. I took my coat off, I made myself a scotch and water, I relaxed on the couch, and the phone was still ringing. Finally I reached for it and lifted the receiver.
"Roger!" Garon's voice was cold and angry.
"Yes Mark?"
"Well. What did she say."
"She said no."
"Oh she did did she. And where in the hell is my tape recorder."
"Your what?" I said.
"Listen Roger you're fooling around with something that's just a little bit bigger than you are. Practically this whole town is ready to back me up in more ways than one if-"
"Oh relax Mark, you're not going to make me paranoid. If we're going to be partners then why should you have anything on me? Any more than I have on you?"
"Security," he practically spat into the phone.
"Well I don't like it."
"What do you mean she said no."
"Look she's probably on her way to Detroit or St. Louis or Paris, France and don't try to stop her. She wasn't cut out for it. You don't expect to bat a thousand do you. We'll find someone else."
"How much does she know?"
"She doesn't know anything, by the way stop talking so much on the phone."
"Listen I haven't anything to worry about in this town, the police-"
"How about the D.A.?" I asked and I felt a certain tightening in my chest as I did so. The D.A. was my only chance still.
"He's powerless. And listen Rog, if you try to double cross me with him I've still got those pictures."
I was stunned for a moment and then I laughed. "You mean that tape I've got is the one you used last night. Oh my Mark, ha, ha!" I laughed and hung up on him. It appeared I had overestimated Mr. Garon. He was just a two-bit panderer. Nothing more.
After I'd hung up on him I went for a walk to the D.A.'s house. I knocked on the back door and the man's wife, a grey-haired woman with nice hands opened the door for me and let me in saying, "Oh yes, Mr. Gold, come in won't you. He's in the library."
I followed her to the library and entered it. The D.A. rose to greet me and after I'd explained about the tape and Janet he merely smiled.
Then he said, "Well we're pretty sure we've got them all now. There's some people in public office we can't touch but we'll sure scare them. We're going to close in tomorrow. The police can't be informed unfortunately until the last minute so I'm going to use my three men and the sheriff, happily, is on our side. I think everything is going to work out now.
I breathed a sigh of relief and asked after the photographs Mark had of Linda and myself.
"We'll get our hands on those I think," he said. "I bet Garon's got them on his premises. If so we'll just accidentally lose them. I think it'll be best if we found him in his place with that girl, what's her name, Linda?"
"Right," I told him.
"She's under age, of course. That'll fix his wagon. If you can set it up."
"I'll try," I said.
"Good. Well, you look pretty tired, why don't you go on home now and get some rest. You may have some more work to do tomorrow."
"Oh," I added as if as an afterthought. "If we keep something on Garon we don't have to use perhaps he won't be inclined to bring me into this."
"We have plenty of stuff we won't have to use, Mr. Gold. I've taken that into consideration. Without you this thing might have gone on forever. Don't worry, well get you out of it all right."
"Thanks," I said sincerely, "I'll let myself out."
After my phone call with Kate I felt elated. She was returning on the next flight, her mother had been given a clean bill of health to the amazement of the attending physicians and she, Kate, was very anxious to see me. Of course I was also somewhat frightened. Her arrival was scheduled for the afternoon of the day when the D.A. planned to wrap up the Garon-Moon ring and there was no way in the world for me to avoid that. There would also be the grand jury trial and I hadn't the faintest idea how I was to keep the sordid facts of the previous week from Kate and be as intimately involved in the whole scheme as I'd become. I spent a laborious, unsettled night and rose at dawn.
It was another cold day. A grey light filtered in through the Venetian blinds in the living room and the pipes were announcing their annoyance with the repeated flow of water from the toilets and the faucets. Apparently I wasn't the only tenant up that early.
There was something else in the air. I walked around the apartment, into the kitchen and gazed out the window in an attempt to pinpoint it. I had it then. I was afraid Garon had something else up his sleeve. That perhaps he was wise to me. That the whole affair wasn't over at all; not at all.
I sat at the kitchen table and smoked until eight. I used the formica itself as an ashtray running a wet sponge over it at last to remove all traces of the two packs of cigarettes I'd consumed. Kate was due in at three-thirty; just after school. I had to have Mark's blond, Linda, at his place before eight. I had to see to it that she was there until ten-thirty if necessary.
I wondered briefly what Dr. Hanes, my lovable boss, was going to think when the whole affair became public knowledge; when a small part of the affair that is, became public knowledge. I didn't much care, of course. Just then, that cold October morning, sitting over a kitchen formica table strewn with ashes and cigarette butts I didn't give a damn for teaching, for the teaching profession, for myself, my boss or the world at large. I cared about Kate. I wanted to see Garon and Moon interred. That was about it.
When I left the place, dressed, shaved, washed, in reverse order of course, I felt fit, just fit. I was strong as an ox. There was a quickness in my step and a crispness in my thinking. I was ready to take on the world and in a way I was about to. I knew I had a young blond girl named Janet to thank for that; and I did that; I thanked her, silently as I went on my way.
I wondered where she was, in which direction she was traveling and I wished her well whichever way it was as I allowed myself for the last time to imagine what it had been like to have her; as I pictured the fullness of her large breasts and the willowy length of the whitest thighs I'd ever seen.
Just for the hell of it I took the old entrance and wished the good Dr. Hanes a cheery good-morning as I passed him in the hall. If there was a touch of regret as I opened my office door because I knew Janet would be gone I banished it quickly and I fell to my work, clearing it off my desk expertly in record time.
When I went to the home-room class and saw the empty seat in the front row opposite my teaching desk I glanced away. I took attendance and began the lesson early. There were some points, I said, that I wanted to go over about the quiz the day before and if no one minded I would do that first. No one seemed to mind. I don't think I've ever had the attention of a class more firmly in my grasp. It was an experience, like many that were to follow, which taught me to really appreciate teaching. It was that kind of thing which taught me to really hate Garon and what he had tried, and in some cases succeeded, doing.
When I made my rounds after the class I peeked in on Mark again. He was up in front of his class, his face drawn and somewhat haggard, his expression clearly dissatisfied, his air beaten. There was something going on that I was not aware of and I could not for the life of me figure out what it was. When I noticed that Linda was not in his class I gasped. It was something on which I had not counted. It meant, in short, that I might not be able to set things up that evening, unless I took extraordinary measures.
I was surprised again after the period was over and the classes were filing out into the hall. I was waiting safely inside my office for the starting bell of the next hour to cross to my classroom, when Mark opened the glass door to my office and let himself in.
He looked so drawn that I was immediately sure it meant something awful not just for him but for me as well.
"Good morning," I said.
He said nothing to me but merely surveyed me. His eyes burned deeply into my own with what was unmistakably a strong almost toxic brew of hate and disgust.
"All right, partner," I said snidely, "what is it?"
He continued to stare, continued to attempt to kill me with his glance and then, finally, his mouth shaped in that evil smile of his and he began to speak.
"Nicely done," he said softly, his mouth still curled, his eyes still sparking.
"Very nicely done my friend. You've got us sewn up nice and neat now haven't you. Tacked down you might say."
I rose from behind my desk to meet his assault standing and as I did so he finished it, "No reason to run is there? No place to run is there? It was my miscalculation. Who'd have thought a gutless wonder like yourself would go to the D.A.? Huh? Who'd have thought it?"
"How did you-" I started to say, completely taken aback, frightened at what was to come.
"You did it out of cowardice too, didn't you Gold? Never trust a coward," he said and laughed spitefully, and then he was gone, disappearing into the hall outside like a foul wind.
CHAPTER TEN
I dialed as quickly as I could, so quickly that I made a mistake and had to dial again. I was put through immediately upon mentioning my name to the woman on the other end of the line and then I said, "Listen. He knows."
That was all I got to say, the D.A. cut me off and spoke rapidly at me, "Listen, this is the show down. We know he found out and we know how. But I've only got three men and the sheriff can spare only two. You've got to help."
"I don't understand?"
"They'll be trying to get Garon now. Frankly I don't care if they do, but when they try it I want them; is that clear."
"No," I nearly shouted, "Who is 'they'?"
"Never mind, you've just got to get that girl Linda into your office and keep her there until it's over. For all I know they'll try it in the school itself. They may try to get her too."
"She's not here, she wasn't in today," I answered quickly.
The D.A. cursed and then said, "Go to her home. Right now, drop everything and get her to your place. Clear?"
"Got it," I said and hung up. I raced down the corridor to Hanes' office and barged in. He looked up from his desk like a seal with it's mouth open and I shouted at him that I had to leave, that I'd explain to his satisfaction later, that he had to get a substitute for me and I was gone into the corridor again his mouth still hanging open.
When I finally found a cab on Cedar and Fifth Street and gave him Linda's address, I was beginning to piece the thing together. I realized of course that there were bigger shots than Garon involved and that they'd be after him for screwing up the works. I told the driver to step on it.
The thought of taking a teen-age nymphomaniac to my home the day of my wife's arrival was a little ludicrous but I was following the D.A.'s orders and I knew that somehow I'd be able to explain the whole thing to Kate even if I had to tell her all of it. When the driver pulled up outside the slum building on Eighth Avenue I wasn't surprised. It was the sort of place I thought she'd be from. I told him to wait and rushed up the stairs.
The door to her apartment was open and I knocked on it only once before I entered. There was no one in the living room but I stepped quickly into the bedroom, throwing politeness to the wind in order to save the girl's life and walked in on a scene I'd rather forget.
Linda was between two boys, both of them were making love to her, both in different ways. I was so angry I threw them apart and they landed against separate walls. Linda didn't know what was happening. She had been lost in the throes of passion and now stood completely naked halfway to nowhere. I yelled at her to get dressed as the boys, who I thought I recognized from school, grabbed their pants and made a bee-line for the door.
Linda dressed on command her mouth open, tears of frustration running down her face but she dressed. She realized, apparently, that I was deadly serious and when I grabbed her by the elbow she came with me to the waiting taxi below. I gave the man my address and we shot away from the curb.
While we drove Linda seemed to relax. She turned to me just once, looked me in the eye through tears, her blackbrown long hair in disarray over her shoulders as I remembered it on my stomach and she asked me what was going on. She didn't try to conceal her disgust for what I'd stopped; or rather, her disgust for me for stopping it.
I told her what was going on and she turned to the window on her side of the taxi and stared out of it for the duration of the drive. I thought I saw her hand shake once and realized that she was frightened.
Mr. and Mrs. Kalowski were standing in the hall as I brought in the disheveled girl and they gaped at me like a Siamese twin vaudeville act as I urged Linda up the stairs. When I got her inside she ran to the couch in the living room and fell across it, her dress, buttoned hastily and incorrectly, rode up over half her thighs.
Suddenly she turned at me and shouted, "Damn it, damn it, you did this didn't you, you turned Mark in didn't you."
I just looked at her as her glance began to soften. I think she felt relieved then, relieved to be out of the clutches of Garon. At any rate her glance did soften after a moment.
"Well the least you can do is finish it for me," she said.
"Whatr
"I said the least you can do is finish it for me."
She moved her hand to her breast then and undid the three buttons of her blue dress that covered her breasts.
Her winsome breasts fell into view and she clasped them. I saw at once that she was still excited, her nipples were distended, her eyes watery, her legs began to move beneath her clothes and she began to wiggle out of everything, throwing her shoes to the ground.
I thought of telling her that sex wasn't the answer but I realized that that would do no good. She was already nude, already writhing for me on the couch, her small red tongue slipping in and out of her mouth, her hands grasping her breasts and toying with her nipples in anticipation.
I shrugged. Honest Injun I just shrugged and then I stepped out of my clothes. I realized as I did it that in a way I was becoming a man. I know it sounds mad, it felt mad. But right then I knew that there was no reason not to, that Kate would understand, that marriage is not a binding of bodies but of something else, something more important.
When I was nude I came to Linda and lifted her up and did what she wanted me to do. I arched forward to meet her own arching body and all the time I fixed a cold glance on her eyes.
She tried to look away but each time she did I brought her face back to look at mine and once pulled her eyelids up to stare into her scared eyes.
I worked furiously with her, without feeling, grasping her breasts hard, without feeling, feeling her meaty thighs without feeling, clasping my paws around her buttocks, all without feeling and every second registering that lack of feeling with my eyes glaring into hers, telling her that there was no sense, no meaning, nothing beautiful but only ugliness in sex without love. There has to be love I was telling her and I guess I was telling myself as I finished it and left her alone as calmly as if I were lighting a cigarette.
She fell away from me onto the couch and whispered something I could not hear. "What?" I said harshly. "That's the first time," she said. "The first time what?"
"The first time ... the first time I didn't have a climax. I usually have...."
"Oh hundreds I'll bet," I said coldly. "Lots," she said.
"Well? Do you see what I was trying to tell you?" I asked her, my voice still cold, still distant.
"Yes," she said. "I see." And then she began to cry.
I let her. I let her cry, watched her cry until her sobs were louder than the cries of passion she had made that night at Mark's apartment when she had woken me up in a manner that I then found stimulating. When she got up from the couch and dressed, she came over to me where I was sitting, still nude on the armchair and asked me the most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard anyone say. She asked me to please get dressed.
When I started to laugh so did she and I did dress as she kept her back turned. Then I made her some coffee and sent her to the bathroom to straighten herself up. She came out looking lovely and I felt fine. I smiled at her and got a smile back.
"Can I leave soon?" she asked.
"As soon as the D.A. calls," I told her.
She sipped her coffee and I felt that I'd really done something worthwhile. I might have been instrumental in driving Janet away from Pleasantville and perhaps, I wasn't sure, that was not a good thing. But I'd done something for Linda. It was one of the nicest feelings I ever had.
After her second cup of coffee I looked at my watch. It was two o'clock and I prayed to heaven that the phone ring. If Kate arrived before I could leave the apartment....
I called the airport to check on the flight and found it was on schedule. Luck.
I wanted to speak to Linda but played it smart and kept my mouth shut. I wanted to make sure she understood but I knew instinctively that she did so I just grinned when her back was turned and thought about Kate and the D.A. and Mark some more.
I think for a moment I was actually worried about Mark. That was probably the effect of letting myself like myself just then. I liked everyone else too. I thought about Mrs. Moon for a moment as a friendly, cheerful old lady.
I paced the floor and watched my watch. Finally at two-thirty-five the phone jangled and I crossed the room in two bounds to pick it up. Linda ran with me and grasped the edge of the arm chair as I said hello into the mouthpiece.
I watched her as I got the news. It was the D.A. and he told me everything. I let my eyes run over her dress than, like a parent, to make sure she looked all right. I knew she'd be going out into the street in a few minutes.
I hung up and sighed.
"What is it?" she asked expectantly. "What happened?"
"Everything's O.K. They got Mark but not seriously. He's been shot in the arm. They got all the gunmen and they've already got one talking so loud city hall's shaking. It's O.K. to go out now."
"How about...."
"Mrs. Moon?" I finished it for her.
"Uh huh."
"I didn't know you knew about her," I said seriously.
"Well, I never met her. I was going to meet her tonight. I never met her."
"She's on her way to the woman's prison in South Markum," I said.
"Oh," Linda said and I thought I saw a bit of sadness cross her face. After all she'd almost been in the same profession as the dear Madam Moon.
"Listen girl you'd better go now. You'll be all right. The D.A. says there isn't a reason in the world for them to come after you now, those that are left to do so that is," I told her smiling.
"I suppose they don't know who I am really," she said.
I didn't know but I said, "I suppose not."
"Then I'll go," she said softly and she made for the door. "I feel so silly without a pocket book," she said.
"Wait a minute," I told her and went into the next room. I emptied one of Kate's and gave it to her and then she said she couldn't take it.
"You have to, it's a present. In honor of your growing up," I said and smiled so broadly that she had to smile also.
She took the present and went out the door without a word, her smile still burned across my consciousness like a good glass of brandy on a cold night on the way down your throat.
I waited about two minutes then raced out of the apartment for the cab stand on Eagle Street.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Kate looked beautiful. She came down the stairs of the airport building like an angel descending heaven. She was wearing her green dress; the one we'd bought together on a trip we took to New York just after we were married. It was my favorite.
"I thought you weren't coming," she said as she fell into my arms and we embraced. I led her to a taxi taking her suitcase from a porter and slipping him fifty cents.
"I got held up. There's quite a few things I've got to tell you," I admitted.
"You know I thought something strange was going on," she said cocking her head to one side in a way she had.
"I'll say," I said, "Come on."
"O.K.," she replied.
I began to explain it in the cab. It was difficult at first and I had to use a code we had developed for special occasions, that is when other people are close enough to listen in, people like cab drivers. We'd been using it since we'd met.
But I got almost half of it out before we arrived home. Unfortunately it was all the bad half. I know I had made all kinds of trouble out of disguising the week that had passed in order to keep the truth from Kate but when I saw how I had to tell her everything. It didn't seem right to have any secrets from her. Somehow I knew she understood.
Mr. and Mrs. Kalowski were in the foyer as we entered. I think they had made a habit of waiting there for me since that first day with Janet. This time they weren't disappointed either. It was the first time in a week I'd come home with my own wife and not some High school kid.
At any rate I had told all the bad parts of the story and I knew Kate was holding back a good deal of emotion. She was holding it back out of politeness in order to let me finish and because she thought that in some strange way I might have been pulling her leg.
Not that that wasn't such a bad idea. Kate had two of the loveliest legs....
When we were settled in the living room I suggested I make a drink for her while I finished and by then I was up to the part about the district attorney.
Of course I kept the most sordid details from her but I gave her to understand that I had slept with at least two women since she'd gone. I was beginning to wonder whether I had taken the right tack.
"You mean you actually ... actually...." she said at one point.
"Yes, I didn't ... yes I actually," I said. I told her the truth about Mrs. Moon's place too. Kate was a good sport and laughed about that one. She said she could just picture me drunk as a member of the wedding and trying to pretend I was sober.
She had finished her drink and I'd mixed her another when I finished the story right up until that afternoon. I must admit that she just sat there for a moment taking it in. I think she was deciding just then whether to divorce me or not. But she looked so good under her dress and I had been missing her so much that I hoped to God she'd decide to stick it out with me. I did love her after all.
Finally I asked, "Well that's how it was. How was your week?" and she cracked a large smile and started to laugh. "So," she said. "It doesn't make any sense to make love to someone unless you love them, eh? Well, well," she mimicked the last thing I'd said before my question. "Shall we try it?" she added and gave me the nicest look a wife ever gave a husband.
I think I was against her in record time, slipping her dress off carefully over her head and then attacking her half naked body like a mad man. She was rushing at me too, tearing the clothes from my body, freeing me from my pants and caressing me carefully.
We rolled about the floor as I unhooked her bra and freed her giant breasts, breasts I'd been missing so much, and I spent at least five minutes on each, kissing it and bringing it to moist attention.
Kate's breasts were so firm and beautiful that I could have spent days with them, I even planned it, to spend a full day with her alone the next weekend just toying with her breasts, but she guided my hand to her thighs and there my hand stayed for awhile.
When she was moaning and tossing on the floor and asking me to make love to her, to please make love to her, I stripped off her panties and rolled down her stockings. I tossed everything to the other side of the room and finished undressing myself. Then I came to her there on the floor.
I cupped my hands behind her buttocks as I started to move with her and although our first few minutes were frantic we soon found a rhythm and slowed down trying to prolong each minute miracle of the sensation as long as possible.
I ran my hands across her buttocks and squeezed her thighs and then ran my hands over her smooth back and around to the front again to cup her breasts.
All the while she worked lovingly against me and I felt the trail of moisture her tongue left across my throat and face and chest. Then she began to kick the air steadily and I felt the thing build in me until I knew I could not turn back.
Even then we tried to prolong it. We cried together, cried each other's name at the same instant and then went off. I felt as though I were being swallowed whole, as though I were being emptied and filled at the same time, as though the earth were shaking with our titanic love as I was drained completely by her last pulsating gasps.
Later, as we lay in each other's arms, she said, "And I forgive you for fooling around if it really means what I think it does. That you're mine now, really more mine than you were before."
I ran my hands down her breasts onto the flat of her stomach to show her I was hers. I dipped my head and kissed her there to show her.
Then she did the same for me and soon there was life in my body again and we got up and went to the bedroom. We made love again and I satisfied her repeatedly until she was too exhausted to make any dinner.
So we called down for some and about an hour later a boy dressed in a grey uniform delivered some fried chicken. I greeted him and paid him in a robe that barely concealed the fact that I was nude beneath it and he kept trying to get a look behind me into the living room where Kate was sitting in her birthday suit on the couch. He didn't get to see anything however as I kept between him and the view as I heard Kate laughing.
Well, she deserved a little sport too, I supposed.
We sat on the floor and ate at the coffee table and when we finished supper we rolled back and held each other until the apartment became too cold and we went back to bed.
The last thing I remember before dropping off was that I didn't have to wait up for Kate's call that night because she was home and safe in my arms and then I heard her whisper, "The next time Mother gets sick you'll go and I'll watch the store."
Then I thought of Dr. Hanes who probably still had his mouth open and dropped off to sleep with a laugh on my lips.
