I stood there working all of this out while she closed the door and turned four or five locks. Doesn’t want us to be interrupted, I thought happily. We might be here for days. Weeks. And she wants to make sure we have privacy.
“Well,” she said. “Not much, but it’s home.”
“Mary Beth,” I said.
“Hi, Chip.”
“Mary Beth.” And I put my hands on her shoulders and drew her close. Somewhere along the way her head turned to the side and I was kissing a gold hoop earring.
“Uh-uh,” she said.
“Huh?”
She rubbed her breasts against my chest and bounced her groin playfully against mine. I had this tight feeling in my chest.
“I don’t kiss on the mouth,” she said.
“Huh?”
She gave me another happy bounce, then moved away. “Just something I don’t do,” she said. “Kiss you anywheres else, kiss you like nobody ever, but not on the mouth.”
“But that’s silly.”
“Shit—”
“But—”
I remembered reading that some prostitutes refused to kiss their clients mouth-to-mouth. They would do anything else, but they reserved that intimacy for the men they loved. It had never made much sense to me at the time, because if you stop and think about it, well, it’s pretty ridiculous. Especially since I had spent the past year with a lot of girls who would kiss you mouth-to-mouth until Rome fell but wouldn’t do anything more exciting than that. It seemed as though the whores had their value system turned upside down.
But what I couldn’t understand was what this had to do with me and Mary Beth. She didn’t want money from me. She was doing this for love, so by rights she should be particularly keen on kissing me on the mouth.
And then I got it. The poor kid, I realized, had never really had any sex life to speak of outside of prostitution. So naturally that was her frame of reference. Here she wanted to ball me for the sheer unadulterated pleasure of it, but her mind was so conditioned by the life she led that she had to act with me in much the same way as she acted with her paying customers. It was weird, and sort of disheartening in a way, but there was also something sort of sweet and pathetic about it.
She has never known love, I told myself. But I shall change her. I shall fulfill her.
“Well, now,” she said. “And what have we here?”
That must have been a rhetorical question, because what she had there was something she came into contact with quite frequently in her profession, and where we had it was in her hand. She had opened my fly and taken me firmly in hand, and she was stroking me rhythmically. Her wrist did everything; the rest of her arm stayed motionless.
“You come with me,” she said. “We’ll just wash you up first.”
We stood at the bathroom sink and washed me up. The editorial we was bugging me a little. Nurses talk like that — ”How are we feeling this morning?” — but I never figured whores did, too. Anyway, she soaped me up and rinsed me off, and it was sort of pleasant and unpleasant both at once, pleasant in that it felt good, and unpleasant in that it sort of implied that I was fundamentally too dirty to deal with otherwise. But then I thought of some of the things she had in mind, and some of the things she had done with other people, and I decided I was just as glad that she tended to wash this portion of a person beforehand, and also, to tell the truth, just as pleased that she didn’t believe in mouth-to- mouth kissing.
When she was done she filled a glass with hot water and carried it into the bedroom.
“For the Waterloo,” she explained. “You’re gonna love this.”
“Uh.”
“Don’t you want to take off your clothes, Chip?”
“Uh, sure,” I said, and started undressing. I was feeling unbelievably dizzy and stupid, and it wasn’t just the excitement. That was a part of it. But another part was the feeling that none of this was really happening. It all I seemed so thoroughly unreal. I took off all my clothes and looked up and she was just standing there, with her clothes on.
“Your clothes,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Why don’t you, uh, get undressed?”
“You want me to?”
“Well, sure.”
She shrugged. A very strange girl, I decided. Maybe it wasn’t just that she hadn’t had any real sex life outside of prostitution. Maybe she was equally inexperienced in prostitution. Maybe she just read about the Waterloo in a book or something.
I stood there watching while she got undressed. She didn’t make the process particularly seductive, just shucked off her clothes and draped them over a chair. Her body was skimpy everywhere but the breasts, which were on the large size. I haven’t described her too much because I have trouble picturing her now in my mind. She was sort of mousy, really, hair somewhere between blond and brown. I suppose she was around my age, although she seemed older, maybe because she was more at home in this scene than I was.
She left on her stockings and garter belt. I asked her if she didn’t want to take them off and get comfortable, and she gave me an impatient look. “Most men like ’em on,” she said. “Don’t you think they look pretty?”
I thought they looked like something out of those whip-and-chain movies, but I said sure, they were pretty.
“Because it’s wasting time, you know, taking ’em off, putting ’em on.”
“Then leave them on,” I said, and she nodded, and I reached out for her and drew her in close. I went to kiss her again, out of habit, but she turned away automatically and I didn’t press the point. I sort of felt like apologizing but couldn’t think of an intelligent way to do that, so I kept my mouth shut and let my fingers do the walking. I felt various parts of her, and she did a little deep breathing and such, but nothing that really assured me I was driving her out of her skull.
“Let me,” she said, disengaging herself. “You just lay down, Chip, and let me do you up.”
I got on the bed. She reached for the glass of water, then stopped with it halfway to her lips. “You tell me if it’s too hot,” she said.
Then she took a mouthful of water and bent over me.
It was really very nice. She just did it for a second or so, then pulled away and looked at me. I was waiting for her to ask me whatever the hell it was she was going to ask me, and then I realized that she wasn’t going to ask me anything because she couldn’t because she had her mouth full of hot water.
“It’s not too hot,” I said. “It’s just right.”
She nodded and started doing it again. And, as before, it was really very nice indeed. It was strange, too, because I felt totally unconnected with the whole process. I decided that it was a great technique, and it was really great that she knew these great techniques, but that it would be infinitely better when I taught her how to put some love into the whole process. Or at least to make it obvious to me that she was enjoying what she was doing.
Then she stopped again.
“Believe me, it’s not too hot,” I said, and started to push her head back in place. But her head wouldn’t push. She leaned over and spat the water out onto the linoleum.
“The ticket,” she said.
“Huh?”
She looked impatient again. “The bus ticket, man. You better give it to me now. I want to make sure it’s still good.”
“The bus ticket?”
She sat up and stared at me. “Shit, the bus ticket,” she said. “What’s the matter with you? You got to give it to me and I got to make sure I can cash it before we do any more. All I need is—”
“Cash the bus ticket?”