Sin Hellcat Read online

  “You aren’t telling Harvey?”

  “You tell him,” Al said. “You tell him whatever you want to tell him. and tomorrow you can tell me what the hell is coming off. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Jodi said.

  “Huh,” I chimed in.

  If you can picture an orangutan stalking off in a huff, you can picture the exit of the Abominable Cameraman. He picked up his sneaky little camera, a pudgy finger smearing the baleful lens, and he hulked haughtily to the door. He opened it, and stepped outside, and the door slammed shut.

  That left me alone with Jodi, which was a marked improvement. Jodi paced the floor for a moment or two, and I sat down once again on the couch and time passed on little cat feet. Now and then Jodi turned to me, and cleared her throat, and opened her mouth as if to speak, and closed her mouth, and looked away, and resumed pacing.

  “Harvey,” she said finally, tired of parading like a caged lion, “I am very sorry.”

  “Why?”

  “That I let Al…take pictures. And try to put you on the spot.”

  “Forget it.”

  “I’m horribly sorry, Harvey.”

  “Don’t be.” I extended a hand plaintively and she put a fresh cigarette between two of my fingers. I let her light it for me. She sank down onto the couch, her rear nestled neatly on top of the long legs that she folded under herself. This pretty process made her dress ride a little higher, so that it was roughly halfway up her thighs and all bunched from hem to waist. She leaned forward, her eyes soulful, and her breasts leaped at me.

  “About the proposition—”

  “Forget the proposition,” I said.

  “You mean you’re not really interested?”

  “I’m interested, Jodi. But let’s get to it chronologically. Not too long ago I came floating through your door. You let me in, and I said something inane like Long time no see, and then Al slapped me back to the land of the living. Now, something happened in the middle.”

  She waited for me to say something more. This was awkward, because I was waiting for her to say something. Rather lamely I said: “In the middle. What happened?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Not a bit of it, woman. Fill me in.”

  “Why, you silly! We made love, Harvey. What did you think we did, you silly?”

  “That’s what I thought. It seemed painfully logical. But I don’t remember it.”

  “Well, I do. It was kind of fun.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “It’s a shame you don’t remember.”

  “More than a shame,” I said, hanging my head. “The memory is half of it. Now it’s as if we never did it at all. Of course there are pictures to prove it, but no memories to warm my later years.”

  “Poor Harvey.”

  “Did we do anything unusual?”

  She wrinkled up her forehead, thinking back. She threw her shoulders back, and this only pushed her breasts out at me a little more dramatically. I let my eyes take a guided tour of her, let myself get mesmerized by the way her perfect body was shaped and molded by the loving hand of a benevolent God. The body was magnificent.

  And yet magnificence of form was less than half the story. The sensual appeal of feminine curves cannot be measured in inches or feet, in pounds, shillings or ounces. In her own unpleasant way, my good wife Helen had a body not overwhelmingly dissimilar to Jodi’s. The breasts were smaller, but hardly miniscule. The thighs were not so plump, not so well-muscled, but they were by no means bad. There was something else—an aura of excitement, an artistic quality to the twists and turns, the curves and planes. Something that told you at a glance (provided you knew what to look for) that Jodi was a potential source of delight, while Helen could set ice floating in the Caribbean.

  “Nothing too unusual,” she said, dragging me back to our conversation. “Nothing we hadn’t done years ago. In college.”

  “That doesn’t rule much out.”

  “I know.”

  “And it was good?”

  “Kind of, Harvey. Except you were pretty stoned, weren’t you? You didn’t exactly know what you were doing. And then I knew Al was there, snapping his silly camera. That took some of the fun out of it. Poor Harvey.”

  “Poor Jodi,” I said.

  She uncoiled like a striking serpent, came to her feet and stretched her arms to the skies, or at least to the ceiling. She stood high on the tips of her toes and my eyes were with her every glorious inch of the way. This had been mine once, I remembered. This had brightened college days, this had taught me what my manhood was. And now, because in those long-lost days I had confused success with happiness, Jodi was a whore who loved her work and I was an ad man who hated mine. Now, when I did make love to her, I could not even remember it.

  “The proposition,” I reminded her.

  Slowly she pirouetted, turning her back to me. Slowly her arms descended from the ceiling and she leaned three miles over and touched her toes. I let my eyes focus on her rear. This they did of their own accord.

  “The proposition,” I managed to say. “With Al.”

  She straightened up again, slowly, and she turned around, slowly, and her cheeks were roses in bloom, her eyes huge and shining, her lips parted and moist.

  “I’ve got another proposition in mind,” she said. “And we can leave Al out of this one.”

  Her green knit second-skin buttoned down the back. I would have gladly unbuttoned it for her but she did not require my help. Her hands stole behind her back and toyed expertly with buttons. This did more things with her breasts. They leaped across the room at me.

  “One button at a time,” she said. “There are a lot of buttons. You’ll have to be patient, Harvey. You don’t look patient at all.”

  The room was a steambath. After four years she finished with the buttons. She stepped back, suddenly, and the dress fell off. That’s precisely what happened—the dress fell off. One moment she was clothed, and the next moment the dress was a green pile upon the carpet, and all that had been under it was my Jodi.

  I’ve mentioned her body, haven’t I? Her body of college days, and how perfect that body was, and how the breasts jutted and the waist tucked itself in and the hips flared and the buttocks quivered? How the thighs reached up to the universal V, V for vigor, for vitality, for vim, for voom? I’ve mentioned all this, haven’t I?

  I have; I’m sure I have. And I’ve mentioned, too, how that body had filled out with time, how time did not wither nor custom stale her infinite variety I had seen the old Jodi nude, and I had seen the new Jodi with clothes on, and now I was seeing the new Jodi nude, a flawless combination of old and new retaining the finest features of each.

  She did not walk to me. She flowed to me, her body a symphony of fleshy poetry in motion. She came in like the tide, and her voice was a panther’s purr.

  “Harvey,” she said. “You don’t remember the last time, do you?”

  “Don’t you even move,” she said now. “I undressed you before. Did you know that? And then dressed you again when we were done. Now you just sit there without moving and I’ll undress you again, honey.”

  I sat there, as motionless as possible, and she did just that. Her hands were cold as Dexter’s Frozen Dinners. I was not. She took off my shoes and my socks and my slacks and my shirt and my underwear. She ran those soft hands over my body and I reached for her.

  “Not here,” she breathed. “Not on the couch. The bedroom is right this way. A bed is more comfortable than a couch, don’t you think?”

  “Sure,” I gulped. My mouth was dry. Now why on earth should my mouth be dry?

  “This way, Harvey.”

  Then we were in her bedroom. I could describe her bedroom—the kind of furniture, the type of carpet, the prints on the wall. But why describe her bedroom? It had a bed in it. Enough? More than enough.

  “This is my office,” she said. And she giggled then, and we were both naked, and I needed her now far more than I needed her years ago. Ou
r arms went around each other, and her big breasts bundled themselves up against my chest.

  “Harvey—”

  “Jodi—”

  Uninspired dialogue at that. My mouth was dry again, and then my mouth was no longer dry because we were kissing and her wet tongue was a long drink. Breasts and belly and thighs, and all there, and all close, and all warm.

  As Dempsey hit Firpo, so did we hit the bed. As Cortez explored Mexico, so did we explore each other. I filled my hands with her breasts. I kissed those breasts, and I touched those buttocks, and my hands shouted Open Sesame, and the command was heeded.

  Well, it had been a long time. A good many years (or a bad many years) since college and Jodi. A bad many years of Helen, whose hips had sunk a thousand ships. In that length of time a man can forget excellence and accept mediocrity as the normal course of events. Then, if you are very, very fortunate, the spectacular happens upon you.

  The spectacular happened upon me—or beneath me, to be more nearly precise. And bombs went off, and choirs sang, and whistles tooted, and Grant took Richmond, and Socrates took poison. I had Jodi’s breast for a cushion and Jodi’s hips for a safety belt and Jodi’s body for a fine and private place. She squirmed and tossed, the ultimate synthesis of genuine passion and the technical virtuosity only a professional can display. She moved and I moved, and she moved and I moved, and she moved, and I moved, and she moved and everything moved—

  Slowly the world came back into its own. Slowly the clouds drifted away, the fog lifted, and reality returned. I was lying on my back and Jodi’s face hovered above, inches from my own. Her mouth opened.

  “There,” she whispered. “You won’t forget this time, will you?”

  I did not have to answer. She turned away from me, her face nestled against her pillow. She fell asleep at once, the healthy sleep of the healthy animal. I lay on my back, my eyes tightly shut, but I did not sleep. I thought instead of Jodi, and I thought of just how far I had come, how I lived now with a streamlined iceberg and peddled monotonous meals and stale cigarettes to Mr. & Mrs. Middle Majority.

  It seemed to be my day for reminiscence. There had been Jodi, in the beginning, shortly after God created the heavens and the earth. Then there had been the shoeless time in the bar, and the Harv, we shouldn’t interlude with Laura Gray. Even then I had been a human being, living a human life. But somewhere, in the course of it all, things changed.…

  As it turned out, it took even longer to get out of the mailroom than it had taken to get into Laura Gray. One year longer, more or less. For the first two months of that year I lived at Laura’s humble flat. I dragged my suitcase from the Y and moved in with little ceremony, and Laura and I set sail upon the placid sea of domesticity.

  Every morning we awoke together to the farm news, furnished by a nasal-voiced announcer who held sway on her clock-radio. Every morning we turned off the farm news and played hayloft for a spell, after which we showered and brushed out teeth. Then I would shave while she applied make-up, and then she cooked either bacon and eggs or ham and eggs, each an equally valid rebellion against her ancestry. And then off to work went we, she to the secretarial pool and I to the mailroom. Then home came we, sweat-stained and weary, grabbing dinner at a luncheonette around the corner from our 69th Street home, and killing time one way or another until it was a respectable hour for mattress machinations.

  A scant two months, and then our mad and passionate affair withered and turned to dust. There were a great many reasons. On the purely physical side, I think another month of Laura would have killed me. She liked to bite, and to scratch, and to dig with her claws and to hit—in fact, I finally took to calling her Justine. This was before Lawrence Durrell, I was thinking of De Sade. The scratches and bites didn’t embarrass me too much—I probably wore them with an air of callow triumph—but the pain, in time, grew unbearable.

  Then there was our different position in the lists of commerce. She was a secretary while I was a mail clerk, and this fact remained no matter who was on top during the night. Account executives made passes at her, and copywriters made passes at her, and once in a while a partner of the firm cast a sidelong look at her. And here she was, shacking up with a clod from the mailroom, for the love of God.

  Besides, domesticity paled. I was too young for it. The delight of having a sure conquest at home failed eventually to compensate for the moral obligation to refrain from making a fresh conquest. Our affair ran its course and died and despite mutual tears at parting, I am sure we were both equally delighted to be on the loose again.

  This time the Y didn’t snare me. It was autumn. I went downtown and shared a one-room apartment with four hundred and thirty-seven cockroaches, a fourth-floor walk up on Barrow Street in the heart of Greenwich Village. It should have been romantic—I was young enough to appreciate that sort of thing. Somehow, it was only verminous.

  And so I toiled, and toiled. The months went by and the seasons changed, and I remained in the mailroom, carting correspondence from desk to free-form desk and waiting patiently for a promotion. There were five of us in the mailroom, all hungry to break into the ad game, and all of us united by one other common bond.

  We were never promoted.

  No one, it seemed, was promoted. Periodically one of us was fired, and periodically one of us quit, and the agency quickly replaced the departed one with still another young hopeful. I decided that Tom Stanton, S-sub-two, was the most hilarious practical joker since Guy Fawkes. I was doomed to a lifetime in the mailroom, a lifetime of $40-a-week minus deductions.

  Then came August. And somewhere, I suppose, someone died, because a man named John Fehringer came up to me, tapped me on the shoulder, and said See you a min, keed.

  I translated this mentally—I had learned, in my year with MGSR&S branch of the post office, how to translate Newspeak into English automatically. I went off with Fehringer, and he gave me a filtered cigarette and a filtered smile, in that order. I accepted both.

  “I hear good things about you,” he said. “The word from up high has it that you should be given room to grow. Like to try a stint of copywriting, Harv Boy?”

  “Well,” I said, “sure.”

  He took me to another huge room, into which I had occasionally delivered pieces of copy and mysterious manila envelopes. He showed me a desk and told me that it was going to be my desk. It was old and wobbly, the kind they sell for ten dollars, but, by God, it was all mine. There were drawers in it, and I could fill those drawers with my things. There was a top on that desk, and when no one was looking I could put my feet on it. It was my desk, my first desk, and I shelved it in my mind next to my first love affair.

  Fehringer brought me some artwork for a magazine ad, with the key copy penciled in and with catchwords scrawled on a batch of file cards. “This is the ad,” he said. “Like?”

  The artwork showed a half-naked girl drawing the string on a sixty-pound bow. It was an advertisement for Bull’s-Eye Spaghetti.

  “Like,” I said.

  “In here,” he said, pointing at the white space at the bottom of the layout, “is where we tell them that if they buy this cruddy spaghetti they can grow boobs like the broad in the picture. Or whatever we’re telling ’em this week. It’s all on the file cards. You turn it into English and put it in there.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “It’s a pipe,” he told me. “Easy-do does it, Harv Boy. If it sails smoothly you can keep this desk.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “Then you’re fired,” he said sweetly. “Have fun, keed. Just take your time and hurry. Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.”

  He left. I sat in my desk for a minute, getting the feel of it, and then I started to turn Bull’s-Eye Spaghetti into English. It was a pipe, and easy-do did it. I got a head-swelling collection of compliments from the goof I turned the gunk over to, and I celebrated that night by picking up a Bohemian girl in Greenwich Village.

  Her name was Saundra. She had l
ong black hair and purple eye shadow, and she was not quite as bad as she sounds. Or maybe she was. She seemed all right at the time. I found her over a cup of cappuccino in something called Le Cul de Sac, where she was telling a group of bearded young men just how horrible Madison Avenue was. It was amusing, because I was certain she got nosebleeds every time she went north of Fourteenth Street. But I kept a straight face.

  “You have some interesting ideas,” I butted in, “but I don’t think you have a straight line on the ad game. It’s a little more complex than all that.”

  “Oh?” She favored me with a look. “Are you in advertising?”

  “I handle the Bull’s-Eye Spaghetti account over at MGSR&S.” It was a more-than-slight exaggeration, but I could have told her I was a Third Assistant Skyhook at TWA&T. She was duly impressed.

  “I’ve had too much coffee,” I said. “Let’s get a drink.”

  We got a drink. She was terribly young, and terribly naive, and, when you came right down to it, stupid as the whole Jukes family, I cried on her shoulder about the Ulcer Gulch rat race, told her how I ached to get away from it and write the Great American Novel in a humble garret. Midway through the fourth drink she was deciding to be my constant inspiration in the wars against crass commercialism. Midway through the fifth drink I had my hand in her leotards. We had the sixth drink in my Barrow Street roach farm, where she took off all her clothes so that she wouldn’t feel inhibited.

  As it turned out, she did not feel inhibited, not in the least. She was thin, with cute if bite-sized breasts. I could have counted her ribs, if I had been so inclined. A lean horse for a long ride, say the Arabs knowingly, and Saundra proved them right.

  I snacked on her little bite-sized breasts while she warbled about the meeting of true minds. I dined on her body with hungry hands while she told me how I was selling my soul to the devil of commerce.