69 Barrow Street Read online

  “I’m not embarrassed,” she said. “And it might be fun, in a way.”

  She disappeared into the bedroom. When she returned a few moments later he had to catch his breath. She was stark naked—and she was far and away the most attractive woman he had ever seen in his life.

  It took him a moment to realize that he was staring at her, and as soon as he realized it he flushed. “I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I didn’t mean to stare.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “You’re almost unbelievably beautiful,” he said. “I couldn’t help myself. It’ll be a pleasure to paint you.”

  “Thank you.”

  Suddenly he was all business. He moved the easy chair about twelve feet from the window and set up the easel midway between chair and window. He raised the shade all the way and flung the window open.

  “Good light,” he said.

  “Do you want me to sit in the chair?”

  He nodded. “For one thing, I don’t want to give you a difficult pose. It’s hard enough to remain in a comfortable position for a long stretch and there’s no sense looking for trouble.”

  “What’s the other thing?”

  He looked at her.

  “You said for one thing. What’s the other?”

  “Oh.” He walked to the chair and showed her how to sit in it, facing the easel head-on with both feet on the floor and her legs spread slightly. He had her fold her hands and rest them over her groin.

  “This is the other thing,” he explained. “This pose should be perfect for you.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “A pose is very important, Susan. It has a lot to do with the effect that the artist is trying to capture. Keep your back straight—that’s right. You see, whatever the painter is trying to get across in a portrait, that effect is either enhanced or destroyed by the way he poses his subject.”

  “What effect are you trying to put across?”

  He hesitated. “It’s an emotional thing, of course. It’s hard to translate it into a word.”

  “Can you give me some idea?”

  “Well—innocence.”

  She smiled. “Really?”

  He nodded.

  “Is that how I impress you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Sort of an inner innocence, if you know what I mean. As if nothing has ever really touched you. A knowing innocence, but an innocence nevertheless.”

  “Wow,” she said. “I feel as though I’ve taken off my skin as well as my clothes.”

  He grinned. “That’s perfect,” he said. “Hold that pose. And don’t smile like that—I don’t want to make you look too knowing.”

  Maria walked to Stella’s side. Hesitantly she reached out with one hand and touched Stella on the shoulder. Then she jerked her hand away, fearing that she had done something wrong.

  Stella woke up at once.

  For a moment she stared at Maria without recognizing her. Then she smiled.

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

  Maria nodded.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Larry threw me out,” she said. “I was a bad girl and he threw me out.”

  “What did you do that was so bad?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Stella considered. “Well, where are you going to live now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you have any money?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “How about your family?”

  “They would never let me come home,” Maria stated solemnly. “I’m a bad girl. My mother would never let me come home.”

  “I see.”

  “And I don’t have any place to go.”

  Stella closed her eyes for a second, thinking. “There’s a vacant room in this building,” she said. “It’s just a room with no place to cook, just a single room. Would you like to live in it?”

  “I would like that,” Maria said.

  “It’s not very big.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “And you’ll have to do whatever I tell you to do,” Stella went on. “I’ll be paying your rent and buying your meals, so you’ll have to obey me all the time.”

  Maria nodded.

  “Will you do that?”

  Maria nodded again.

  “You’ll have to try to be a good girl.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “And when you’re bad I’ll punish you.”

  “I’m very bad,” Maria said. “All the time I’m bad. I’m a bad little girl.”

  “If you’re bad I’ll punish you.”

  “That’s what my mother said,” Maria said dreamily. “She always punished me when I was bad.”

  “How?”

  “She spanked me. She spanked me hard.”

  “I see,” Stella said.

  “My Mummy is very strong,” Maria said. “She spanks hard.”

  “Sometimes that’s the best thing in the world for a bad little girl.”

  Maria nodded, agreeing.

  “Have you been bad lately?”

  “Yes,” Maria said. “I was very bad last night. I was horrid.”

  “Do you think I ought to give you a spanking?”

  Maria nodded again.

  “Then take off all your clothes.” Without a word Maria began to strip. She unbuttoned her blouse and removed it. She had left her bra at the apartment the night before, and Stella’s eyes fastened on the soft, beautifully formed breasts. Then she unzipped her skirt and stepped out of it. She pulled down her panties and kicked off her shoes.

  “Come here,” Stella ordered. The girl obeyed.

  Stella sat up in bed with her legs out in front of her. She, too, was nude.

  “I want you to lie across my knees,” Stella said. “And then you will get your punishment.”

  The girl did as she was told. “Can I call you Mummy?” she demanded suddenly.

  “Of course,” Stella said. “I’m your Mummy and you’re my bad little girl.”

  “That’s right,” Maria said. “That’s right, Mummy.”

  Stella breathed quickly. Then she began to rain blows on the beautiful girl’s soft little backside, slapping with the palms of her hands, using first one hand and then the other. At first the spanking was fairly soft, but as she went on she began to slap harder and harder until she was putting all the force of her powerful arms into the blows.

  “That hurts, Mummy!”

  “It’s supposed to hurt,” Stella explained. “It’s your punishment.”

  The girl accepted the explanation.

  At last, when the little girl began to cry softly and steadily, Stella decided that she had had enough. Gently she rolled Maria over onto her back and stretched out beside her.

  “It hurts,” Maria whimpered. “You hurt me, Mummy.”

  “My poor little girl,” Stella murmured. She lowered her lips to Maria’s and kissed her gently on the mouth. Then she pecked softly at her cheek.

  “I love you, Mummy.”

  Unable to restrain herself any longer, Stella let out a little sob of passion and took the girl in her arms.

  Chapter Six

  THE DAYS PASSED.

  Times goes by everywhere, and in this case Greenwich Village is not an exception. By day the sun beat down hot and bright between the buildings and at night the buildings held the heat in close. It was summer in New York, and like every summer in New York it was thoroughly unbearable.

  But Ralph didn’t find the heat too objectionable. He was settling down into what was for him a relatively comfortable routine. Every afternoon he mounted the stairs to Susan’s apartment and worked on the portrait. The work went slowly; Susan’s beauty had an elusive quality about it which was difficult to capture in oils. Every brushstroke was important and every shade lighter or darker made a tangible difference.

  He left his painting supplies in Susan’s room each day when he finished his work. The partially completed canvas he covered with a whit
e cloth, instructing the girl not to remove it to look at the painting.

  “I want you to see it all at once,” he told her. “No sneak previews.”

  She teased him, anxious for a look. But he was adamant.

  And, as the days passed, Stella demanded less and less of his time. With Maria established permanently in a tiny room on the second floor Stella had found a ready and willing outlet for her sexual abnormalities, and the two women were together almost constantly.

  More than once that week Stella had given him Maria’s key and told him to leave them alone for the evening.

  Ralph was glad to be left alone. For the first time in a long time he was completely absorbed in his work, wrapped up in it so deeply that his mind was on the painting even when he was far from Susan’s room, even when he was lying in bed and ready for sleep. After only a few days with the girl he could have painted her portrait from memory, so firmly was her appearance fixed in his mind. Every shadow and line, every perfect detail of her perfect head and body was imprinted upon his memory.

  But the thought of finishing the picture alone was a thought that he couldn’t take seriously for a moment. He enjoyed Susan’s company much too much to give up a second of it. For the first time in his life he found himself able to talk to a girl, to tell her all the things that were on his mind and to listen to everything she had to tell him. He talked to her about his childhood, about the small town in Ohio and the small local college, about his hitch in the army and the void that followed it.

  He told her about Stella—about the cruel and twisted woman he lived with. And he told her all these things without shame or fear, knowing that she was listening sympathetically and accepting all that he told her.

  For the first several days he did the bulk of the talking. She would be sitting on the chair in the pose he had selected, both feet on the floor a foot or so apart, her small hands folded over her pubic area, her back straight and her mouth unsmiling. She would sit and listen, her face never changing expression while he went over his life in detail.

  Then, after a while, she began to talk. She too started with her childhood and moved on, through the years in school to the years after school. One afternoon with no show of embarrassment she explained to him that she was a lesbian. Inwardly he flinched but he made no outward show of surprise or irritation. After all, he had been almost certain of it already.

  She told him about the women she had been with, about the fear of men that overwhelmed her. And even as she told him these things, even as she bared her soul and confessed her secret, something happened to him.

  Something that had been happening all along. Something that he had refused to see coming, but something that he was quite unable to prevent.

  He fell in love with her.

  That evening he left the building as soon as he finished the day’s painting. He walked out the door without even pausing at his own apartment, and he walked west on Barrow Street toward the Hudson River.

  He walked slowly.

  The love he felt for Susan was something new and different, something totally out of the ordinary and totally removed from emotions he had felt in the past. It was a fresh, vibrant feeling, and it was all the more beautiful for the absolute hopelessness of it all.

  Ralph had been in love before. In a way he had even been in love with Stella, although he felt less and less for her every day. But all his previous affairs had begun with a strong physical attraction that had sexual gratification as their prime objective. After that they occasionally ripened into something more, something approaching love if not love itself.

  This was different.

  He never laid a hand on Susan. From the moment he met her he was conscious of the striking beauty of the girl, but somehow he had never thought of her as a woman to take to bed, a woman to make a pass at. Instead she represented friendship to him—friendship in the classic sense, coupled with a deep exchange of ideas and a sharing of secrets. That in itself was a very valuable and rewarding sort of thing, and the ensuing relationship had turned out to be a wonderful one.

  But now—

  Now he was in love with her.

  What did it mean? How in the world could he be in love with a girl whom he would never be able to make love to? He not only could never marry her, but he could never take her in his arms, never kiss her or touch her. What kind of love was this?

  He kept walking, laughing bitterly to himself. It was a typical Ralph Lambert play, he decided. Only a guy like him could do a scatterbrained, useless thing like this. Only a guy like him could fall in love with a lesbian and get all hung up about it.

  What in the world would happen? She hadn’t had any lovers since she had moved to Barrow Street, but he knew that in time she would have to. Then what would he do? Maybe he’d be jealous of the other girl. That would be one for the books, wouldn’t it? Ralph Lambert jealous of a dyke. Pretty funny, huh? Yeah. A riot.

  Fantasies flooded his mind, fantasies of possible courses of action. He knew that she had never been with a man, and he guessed that her traumatic fear might stem as much from ignorance of sex as anything else. He remembered reading that blind, ignorant fear was a prime cause of what one author termed “the homosexual neurosis”—that a person who was afraid of sex was less likely to fear someone of the same sex than someone of the opposite sex. To Susan another woman might represent the Known, something she was familiar with because it was similar to herself. A man, on the other hand, was the Unknown—and she had to fear him more because the Unknown was so much more terrifying.

  He fancied himself for a moment as a knight on a white charger coming to rescue her from her homosexuality by showing her that she had nothing to be afraid of. Then the barriers would break down one by one until she came to him and he held her in his arms, held that sweet and beautiful body that he had studied so carefully and reproduced so faithfully.

  Then—

  Suddenly the hilarious impossibility of the situation struck him full force and a hysterical laugh shrieked forth from his lips. He stood on the sidewalk, unable to stop laughing, and was forced to grab onto a lamppost for support. Other people on the street stared at him as he laughed and laughed over something that was not funny at all.

  Finally he caught his breath and started walking again. He walked all over the west side of the Village, looking for something but not knowing what it was that he was looking for. He kept walking until he found the bar.

  It wasn’t much. It was a run-down longshoreman’s bar down by the docks where the liquor was cheap and the air foul-smelling. A jukebox in one corner blared forth with raucous rock-and-roll. A tired prostitute sat at a table in the back, a professional smile on her once-attractive face. A row of tired-looking, husky men drank shots with beer chasers at the long brown bar.

  It was a place to drink. That was all he wanted, a place where he could be alone by himself without being entirely alone, a place where he could sit and drink with nobody bothering him.

  A place that had neither Stella nor Susan around, a place where the only woman present was a cheap waterfront whore.

  He walked into the bar. One stool was vacant and he sat down on it. He ordered a shot of the bar whiskey and a glass of draft beer for a chaser.

  The shot was a quarter and the beer was a dime. It was about as cheap as you could get any place in the city.

  When he had finished pouring the shot down his throat he knew why it only cost two bits. It was rotgut—cheap moonshine brought in from Kentucky and sold with ease because the cop on the beat knew who was paying him. A steady diet of it would raise hell with the lining of a man’s stomach, but it was cheap and it would get a person stoned out of his head as quickly as the stuff that went for six bucks a fifth.

  He sipped the beer. It was a little watery but not too bad. He finished it and motioned for the bartender.

  This time he ordered a double.

  Stella dressed quickly after she finished her shower. Maria had already returned to her room on t
he second floor, and for some reason Stella felt empty and unfulfilled. She wasn’t sure why, but for one reason or another her evening with the little brunette had left her less satisfied than before.

  Why? The girl was cooperative enough. Their little game of the bad little girl being punished by her angry mother had gone along nicely for some time now, and each time the punishments themselves had been more extreme and consequently more exciting to Stella. At one time or other she had struck every surface of Maria’s shapely body with harsh blows until the little girl was black and blue all over. She had devised many different exotic methods for causing Maria to sob and quiver with pain, each method more stimulating to both of them than the last.

  Maria never called her by name any more. She referred to her always as Mummy and demanded punishment constantly. Idly Stella wondered what event deep in Maria’s childhood had brought on this unnatural craving for punishment and pain. What had the girl done?

  It didn’t matter. What mattered right now, Stella decided, was finding some way to calm herself down. Whatever the reason, Maria had been unable to still her hunger and she felt a desperate need for something more, something that would enable her to relax. Mentally she went over the men and women that she could call up for an evening’s diversion.

  There were none she could think of that interested her in the least.

  Where was Ralph? She had been seeing less and less of him lately, but what was even more aggravating was the fact that he seemed to be slipping away from her. She needed Ralph. She needed someone permanent, someone she could hold onto.

  Was there something between him and the little dyke who was posing for him? It didn’t seem likely. If any girl had impressed her as an obvious lesbian, Susan Rivers had. But Ralph was obviously interested in the girl—and he was spending plenty of time with her.

  Christ, maybe she had hit the nail on the head that time when the two of them had breakfast together! Suppose Ralph had fallen for the girl. It was just the sort of bonehead maneuver the guy was capable of, and with her posing for him every day it was more than possible.

  If that was the case—

  She smiled, her lips curling into a vicious grin. If that was the case her own course of action was clear. She could utterly crush Ralph and enjoy herself at the same time. It would all be quite perfect.