69 Barrow Street Read online

  She got quite high in a short amount of time.

  Thinking back, she couldn’t remember whether Sharon had told her she was a lesbian before or after they went to the older girl’s apartment. Probably after, because she probably would have refused to go if she had known.

  At Sharon’s apartment, a little one-room-with-kitchenette place on Bank Street, everything happened with phenomenal speed. The first part was not fresh anymore in her mind, but she remembered that almost as soon as they were inside the door Sharon was kissing her, covering her mouth with lips that were soft and tender and sweet. And what followed, followed swiftly, with Sharon pressing her down on the bed without even bothering to remove the spread, pressing her down and lying on top of her and grinding her body into hers. It had ended almost before it began.

  Then they were lying together on the bed, with Sharon’s long red hair hanging to her waist and contrasting beautifully with her pale, milky skin. Susan was in a state of shock at the time, numb with the liquor and even more numb with the realization of what she had done. And Sharon had explained to her exactly what she was and what they had done, and the sort of life she could expect to lead in the future.

  And then the second time. “I want to make it good for you,” Sharon said. “Lie down and be perfectly still and don’t move at all. Don’t even think about anything, darling. Or if you must, tell yourself that you love me.”

  She did as she was told. She lay down on her back with her head resting gently on a soft foam-rubber pillow. She closed her eyes and let her mind go completely blank, concentrating entirely on the physical sensations that came to her and letting her whole body respond to them.

  Sharon began to kiss her. Her lips touched Susan’s eyelids first, kissing them in turn. The mere touch of the other girl’s lips on her eyelids seemed to relax Susan. She breathed deeply.

  Then Sharon’s mouth fastened on her mouth and Sharon’s tongue darted out and slipped between her lips, licking and caressing the inside of her mouth. It was like no kiss she had ever experienced before. The whole inside of her mouth began to tingle and she could sense the blood coursing through her body. Sharon kissed her again. Then her lips darted to Susan’s throat and she kissed her all over her neck, little fast kisses that gave her a warm heady feeling.

  Sharon’s fingertips toyed with the younger girl’s breasts. Susan’s first impulse was to shrink away, but the touch was so pleasant, so gentle and delightful, that instead she found herself responding. Then Sharon’s lips moved to the cleft between her breasts while her hands continued their gentle caressing.

  Then Sharon put her mouth to each of Susan’s breasts in turn. She covered every square inch of the smooth, lightly tanned flesh with kisses and Susan hadn’t believed that such extraordinarily marvelous sensations existed. Sharon bathed each of her breasts completely with her hot, insistent tongue and Susan began to breathe very quickly. She couldn’t keep her feet still as the passion flooded her brain and her body began to writhe sensuously on the bed.

  Sharon continued to kiss her. Her hungry mouth moved lower.

  Lower…

  It was perfect.

  That whole night had been perfect. After they had made love that second time she drifted off to a deep sleep with her head pressed tightly to Sharon’s breast. Then, hours later, she woke up and Sharon cooked breakfast for the two of them.

  Then they went back to bed.

  The next day she explained to her parents that she had found an apartment in the Village that she was going to share with a girl from school. She moved in with Sharon.

  They made love almost constantly for the first few weeks. Sharon had been involved in lesbianism for years, ever since her French teacher had managed to seduce her during her second year in high school. She knew just about everything there was to know about the technical side of lesbianism and the mechanics of it. She told Susan a great deal and showed her even more.

  They remained together for three and a half months. Then they drifted apart. They had nothing in common, really, except for their attraction to one another. When the freshness of their love wore off, they separated and Susan found a room of her own on West Tenth Street. About the same time she managed to get work in the ceramics shop where she was still employed. At the beginning she worked behind the counter, but when the man who ran the shop saw the work she was capable of doing he put her in the workroom. At first he designed the objects she was to make; then he began to let her work out some designs on her own.

  She was a happy person, all things considered. She enjoyed her work tremendously and enjoyed living in the Village. It was sort of a small town within the larger city, and the free and easy air about it appealed to her.

  At times her lesbianism bothered her. She had always been fond of children, for example, and the knowledge that she would never have children of her own was disturbing. While she herself felt that “normal” sex was simply the name given to the sexual practice which happened to be followed by the majority of the world, and that there was no such thing as a perversion, her abnormality periodically annoyed her.

  And there were times when she wondered what would have become of her if she hadn’t met Sharon that night. Would she have drifted to lesbianism regardless? Perhaps, but there was also the possibility that it would never have occurred to her. Then what would have happened?

  She guessed that she would have lived alone by herself for a long time—several years at least. Then she would have met a man and married him in time. She could picture herself living a normal life without ever suspecting she was abnormal.

  But how unhappy she would have been!

  She never would have been able to enjoy sex with her husband. That was certain. Even if she could have managed to let him make love to her—a thought which in itself was so terrifying and so repugnant to her that it made her shake—she could never have derived any pleasure from the act. She would have completely missed the pleasure she received from Sharon, and that pleasure alone more than compensated for the occasional feelings of distress over her abnormality.

  Her thoughts returned to Ralph Lambert. Except for sex, he was the type of man she might have been able to stand being married to. She certainly didn’t dislike men, the way so many lesbians did. In fact she had always preferred the companionship of men to that of women, except that men frightened her so much.

  But she wasn’t afraid of Ralph. It had been a good idea to put it to him right from the beginning—no sex, now or later. And he didn’t seem to take offense, either. He evidently liked her for herself, as a person.

  But he appreciated her as a woman, too. She could tell that readily enough. While he never stared at her with naked hunger in his eyes, the admiration of her face and body was easy to recognize. And it was a good deal stronger than the admiration of an artist for a beautiful object. Ralph hadn’t looked at her with the eyes of a lecher, but he hadn’t gazed at her as he might have gazed at a beautiful landscape either.

  She hoped they would continue to get along. What would it be like posing for him? She could hardly imagine it. It would certainly be strange, holding a pose while a man tried to reproduce her on a canvas. And even if the man was a man she knew, even if he was Ralph, she wasn’t sure whether she would be able to pose nude for him.

  She thought back to their conversation and giggled. At any rate, it was nice to know that her head and body went well together!

  Ralph hauled one of the colonial chairs over to the front window and sat down in it. His eyes stared out the window toward Barrow Street but he wasn’t conscious of anything that he saw there.

  His mind was elsewhere.

  He wondered how much truth was contained in Stella’s last statement. You were a wreck before I ever laid eyes on you, she had said. At first it had sounded to him like a typical statement of hers, defending by attacking. She said things of that nature frequently, as if she could make herself less vile by dragging everybody down to her own level.

  But perhaps th
ere was more than a grain of truth in what she had said. Maybe he was no good from the start. Maybe he had made a mess out of his own life, and had only himself to blame for his current state of affairs. Stella was obviously a corrupting influence—hell, a woman like her would exert a corrupting influence on Satan himself. But maybe he was already pretty corrupt when she came into his life.

  What had he been like before Stella James?

  It was hard to remember. It was hard to visualize any life for himself other than the one he lived now, hard to picture himself in any surroundings other than those of the Village, hard to imagine him living anyplace beside 69 Barrow Street or with anybody but Stella James.

  But there had been times before that. What sort of life had he led then?

  He forced himself to go over his life briefly. Childhood in Xenia, Ohio—that had been uneventful enough, with nothing and nobody in that little hickish town to excite or stimulate him. The local college where he majored in art. Then two years in the army, and all he could remember about those days was that he hated them—the monotony, the drabness, the regimented life where he had to bow and scrape before authority and do the same boring tasks day after day after day. If he had been a cartoonist or an illustrator it wouldn’t have been so bad; he could have done something fairly interesting during his hitch in the service. As it was he sweated out the time as a clerk in Fort Polk, Louisiana, typing report after report and spending his nights drinking or playing cards or sacked out with one of the local prostitutes.

  And then what? Then New York—with no job and nothing to his credit but ambitions. He thought he was a painter, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe he was just a bum who was throwing paint at canvas while he ran his way through his mustering-out pay and the few bucks his folks sent from home.

  Maybe Stella had hit the nail on the head. Maybe he was a bum from the word go and living with Stella was just another step down the primrose path to hell, just another step closer to the ultimate in depravity and total and complete degradation.

  No, by God, he had been a painter! He had never sold a painting, but his work was good, damned good! For confirmation he stood up and walked to the closet. On the top shelf was the nude he had done of Stella, the only painting he had in New York. The rest he had shipped home to Xenia or destroyed.

  He took down the painting and set it up on the couch, stepping back a few paces to look at it. It was done in a mockery of the classic style much as was Manet’s Olympia, a burlesque of the standard picture of Venus. Stella was posed on the couch, the same couch that the painting was propped up on now. She was completely nude. Like Venus, one hand supported her head while the other covered her groin from sight.

  At that point the similarity between the two paintings ended. The one of Venus was seductive but pure at the same time; Ralph’s painting attempted to capture the full character of Stella on canvas and succeeded admirably. Evil oozed forth unmistakably from every dab of paint on the canvas.

  The smile on Stella’s face was Satanic. There was cruelty shining forth from her eyes, cruelty in the lines at the corners of her mouth. The way she covered herself with her hand served not to conceal the area, as it did in the original painting, but to draw attention to it. Ralph had been very careful to make the area covered by the hand the dominant spot in the picture and he had managed to highlight it perfectly. Stella seemed to be offering herself in the very act of concealment.

  Even the pose of her body was obscene. The soft flesh tones he had used to paint her were not only beautiful but tremendously sensual. By a clever use of long brushstrokes on her thighs and calves he had given the illusion of an immense amount of power, evil power, lustful power. Similarly, short and strong brushstrokes around her breasts made the breasts even more prominent than they deserved to be and accentuated the feeling of corruption and dissipation that emanated from the canvas.

  He could not look at it without having to catch his breath. It was Stella, to be sure. More than that, it was one hell of a good picture. He had no doubt that he could sell it, but it was the one picture he had ever painted that he wanted to keep for himself, He wouldn’t even hang it on the wall; he wanted to keep it hidden in the closet and take it out from time to time to look at by himself.

  No, he hadn’t been a wreck when she met him. He certainly hadn’t arrived at the top or anywhere near the top, but he had the talent to make the grade.

  Maybe he could still make it.

  He thought about the painting he was going to do of Susan Rivers. She would make a fine model. She was certainly a lovely thing, but beauty itself had little to do with a subject’s suitability. There had to be something else. The features of the model had to reflect something inside, some inner quality which the artist could transpose into color and shadow and line. Otherwise he might just as well take her picture with a camera—a camera certainly did a better job of getting a likeness. A picture had to do more. It had to say something.

  Susan Rivers. He wondered if Stella was right and the girl was a lesbian. It was a strong possibility. Stella seldom made mistakes, and if it was true, it would explain the way she emphasized keeping things on a platonic basis. Well, that was all right with him. The girl had a right to live her own life and it was none of his business if she preferred to go to bed with girls.

  Still, he hoped to god Stella stayed away from her. Stella was poison to anybody, man or woman. And Susan was such a sweet girl, such a remarkably nice person.

  Stella would be bad for her.

  When he heard Stella coming toward the room he hastily replaced the painting on the shelf and closed the closet door. She had seen the painting before, of course, but he didn’t want her to see him looking at it. She would just make some wisecrack and they’d be arguing again.

  She came into the room and flashed him a smile.

  “I’m having a party tonight,” she said.

  “What kind of a party?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  He knew, of course. It would be the kind of party she always had, the kind of party that made a Roman orgy look like a garden party on Long Island by comparison. His stomach turned over at the thought of it.

  “Just a small get-together,” she continued. “I’m having an even dozen people. Jimmy is bringing the stuff.”

  “Jimmy who and what stuff?”

  “Jimmy is Jimmy Henderson. The stuff is marijuana.”

  He closed his eyes. “Count me out.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I said count me out. If you think I’m coming to one more of those pot-smoking scenes of yours, you’re out of your head.”

  “You’ve enjoyed them before.”

  “Only when I’ve been high. When it wore off I realized how sick the whole thing was. I’m not coming.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Positive. I’ll go out and find a bar to get quietly drunk in.”

  “All right, if that the way you want it.”

  “That’s precisely the way I want it.”

  “Fine,” she said. “But that’ll leave us one short. I’ll have to ask your little girlfriend.”

  “Who?”

  “Your girlfriend—the one you ate breakfast with. Susan Rivers, I think you said her name was.”

  “Don’t ask her, Stella.” His voice was flat and devoid of emotion.

  “But I’ll have to, darling. Otherwise we’ll be one person short. And I’m sure she’ll be delighted to come. She’ll probably have a marvelous time.”

  “I don’t want you to ask her, Stella.”

  She looked across the room at him, a smile on her face. “You mean you’ll be coming to the party?”

  He shut his eyes. Then he opened them again, defeated. “All right,” he said. “I’ll be coming to the party.”

  Chapter Four

  BETWEEN 9 AND 9:30 THAT EVENING five men and five women opened the outer door at 69 Barrow Street. In turn they pushed the buzzer in the vestibule marked James Lambert, walked through i
nto the hallway and waited for Stella to let them into the first-floor apartment.

  At first glance they appeared to be just a normal crowd of people between the ages of twenty and thirty. They were dressed informally, but there was nothing striking about their appearances, nothing that would indicate Bohemianism or non-conformity of any sort. They looked extremely average—a nice, quiet crowd of young people getting together for a few drinks and a good time.

  But Ralph knew better.

  He had met them all before. All of them had been to previous parties of Stella’s. In addition, more than a few had been Stella’s sexual partners.

  Ralph knew them all quite well.

  Jimmy and Rhonda Henderson sat together on the couch sipping drinks from water tumblers. Jimmy’s black hair was clipped close to a large skull that teetered precariously on his small, thin frame. Small, piggish eyes stared out from his head and surveyed the room. Rhonda, who had married him when she woke up one morning and found herself pregnant, was a soft honey blonde with huge eyes and creamy skin. She stood several inches taller than Jimmy. It wasn’t hard to tell by a glance at Rhonda that she was an extremely stupid girl. Her eyes had a perpetually vacant stare and her conversation was, to say the least, uninspired. There was, in fact, only one thing Rhonda could do at all well. But she was an expert at it.

  Jimmy made his living—a rather good living—peddling marijuana. A good list of steady customers left him with around $300 a week after he paid off the local patrolman. While Stella bought too little marijuana to rank as a good customer, a sale to her meant an invitation to one of her parties. And he liked Stella’s parties.

  Near the window a very tall and very thin young man stood with his arm around a short, plump girl. The thin young man’s name was Roger Brann. The plump girl was Sally; nobody knew her last name. Neither of them had jobs.