The waiter’s eyes shifted, and this time a smirk did break through his composure. Dave’s fly was wide open, the tip of his manhood clearly visible above the girl’s encircling fist. Her hand was moving like a machine, and her body was bouncing eagerly with the same rhythm.
“Can’t we take a hotel room?” the waiter heard her moan.
“Sorry, I haven’t got the money,” Dave had lied.
“I want you.”
“I want you, too.” It wasn’t quite a lie, but it wasn’t quite the truth either. “Don’t stop,” he’d added, his excitement mounting. “Here, take this.” He’d handed her his handkerchief to catch the fruits of her caresses.
When that was over. Olive had moaned that it wasn’t right acting like this in a public place, making love this way, and besides, it was frustrating.
“Next time we’ll take a room,” Dave had promised her, knowing very well that there would be no next time and that even if there had been such a prospect, he would be afraid to take advantage of it.
Yes, this was the sort of perverse pleasure to which the years of observing his parents’ brazen love-making had reduced Dave. Listening now to his mother’s contented sighs in the aftermath of the romp she’d just had with his father, Dave’s frustration and anger were greater than they had ever been. Nymphomaniac! He cursed his mother to himself. That’s what she is! A nympho! Just like that Lisa Bourbon dame in the group! A bed bunny!
Dave’s mind skidded off into remembering the group therapy session he’d attended earlier that evening. He thought about Lisa describing her whacked-up dream, and the recollection brought back the excitement he’d felt while she’d been relating it. But the feeling quickly dissipated as thinking of Lisa and the group inevitably narrowed his thoughts down to the illogical bitterness aroused in him by Brenda.
Brenda was the group’s Lesbian. She admitted it freely. And just knowing this about her was enough for Dave to center much of the hatred he felt towards his mother on her. She, a woman, could have relations with other women, and she let it be known that she often did. But Dave, a man, was unable to have relations with women. Because of this, he despised Brenda unreasoningly.
It complicated things for Dave. In the throes of a transference by which Dr. Golden was replacing his mother in his subconscious, Dave’s feeling toward his real mother became all mixed up with his jealousy of Brenda, his resentment of Lisa’s brazen sexuality and all the bottled-up aggressions he was just beginning to be able to express toward Dr. Golden. But lately there was a tendency for the three of them to merge with his mother even in his conscious mind, and Dave frequently found himself daydreaming about committing all kinds of aggressive acts against each of them. His confusion was such that in his mind their ills became part of his mother’s personality and his mother’s sins became each of theirs as well. To Dave, this four-way conception was particularly embodied in the person of Dr. Golden. It was on her that his aggressions centered.
Thus, now, as his mother began the seductive ritual of urging Dave’s father to a second sex session, it was Dr. Golden’s face which Dave envisioned atop the twisting body. His brain whirled with all kinds of feeling, and suddenly the prospect of their making love in front of him again became too much for Dave.
He threw on his clothes and slammed out of the apartment. Black with rage, he half-ran down the street to the subway. He didn’t even notice the rain pelting him. The desire for unreasoning revenge filled him completely. Blindly, he got aboard a Manhattan-bound lo cal. Vengeance pushed him off the train at 96th Street. Unseeing, he fought the rain-wind down Broadway.
Revenge!
Toward whom?
It didn’t really matter.
All was confusion except Dave’s need for—-
Revenge!
CHAPTER 5
Monkey on Her Back
“. . . I’M CORA WILLIAMS. My problems? I’m a junkie. I’m twenty-two years old and I’ve run the gamut from tea to horse. I know, I look older. It can do that to you. I’ve been at it since I was sixteen years old. I want to stop, but I can’t. Or maybe I don’t really want to kick it at all. I don’t know . . .”
When the session broke up that fateful night, Cora was the first one out the door of Dr. Golden’s office. She wanted the elevator to herself, and she got it. Alone, going down, she gave in to the cold shakes sweeping over her body.
I need a fix! I need a fix! I need a fix! It was all she’d been able to think of during the group meeting. Even Lisa Bourbon’s whacked-up dream and all the talk of murder hadn’t been able to take Cora’s mind off it. She thought that they’d never stop gabbing, that it would never end, that the time would never come when she could be alone to figure out some way of satisfying her desperate need. Only now that she was alone, her mind refused to function. It just kept repeating the desire over and over again; I need a fix! I need a fix! I need a fix!
Pausing under the awning as she came out of the building, Cora felt the first wind of the just-breaking storm. It hit her like a knife-stab, penetrating to the fragile bones under her tight-stretched skin. She stepped back into the shelter of the lobby and opened her pocket-book. Two one-dollar bills and three pennies. She stepped outside again and hailed a cab.
“Fifty-second Street between Sixth and Seventh,” she told the driver.
He threw the car into gear and pogo-sticked down West End Avenue, seeming to make an extra effort to hit every bump in the road. Three blocks later he hit a red light and braked roughly. He took advantage of the pause to case Cora in the rear-view mirror.
The cab-driver saw a small, painfully thin girl sitting hunched up as though every muscle in her body was tensed in an effort to simply hold it together. Her face was pretty, snub-nosed, probably round once, but now gaunt and hollow-cheeked and squinched up as if she was in pain. The street-light hitting her eyes bounced back blue; the eyes were sunk very deep, blank-staring pinpoints. Make-up might have relieved the paleness of her complexion, but she wasn’t wearing any. And her brown hair, a somewhat mussed-up tangle, lacked luster.
The light changed to green and the driver went back to punishing the ruts on the road. When he hit the next stoplight, he completed his inventory, concentrating on Cora’s body. It proved more interesting than her face.
Her breasts were small, but high and quite sharply pointed. Noting that she’d been careless about buttoning the top buttons of the sloppy sweater she wore, the driver angled his mirror and studied the hard-breathing curve of bare flesh which was revealed. After a while he changed the angle to look at her legs. She was sprawled uncaring on the low seat with her knees apart, and he could see the flesh where her inner thighs met over her stocking-tops. Her legs were shapely, a little on the skinny side maybe, but with a sleek sexiness about them nevertheless. She was slim-hipped and her waist was very small, and her slender appearance made her seem more bosomy than she really was.
By the time he’d barreled the cab down to Fifty-second Street and turned east, the driver had decided that Cora was sexy enough in a feverish kind of way, but probably unapproachable. He shrugged it off and pulled to a stop at her request. She paid him, tipped him, and got out.
“Showtime! Showtime! Yessirree! Step right inside. Show just starting. Step right inside for the most sizzling show in little ol’ N’Yawk! Showtime! Showtime! . . . ” The barker’s voice assailed the crowd from the theatre-break, but for the most part they ignored him.
Cora slipped between him and the four-color 32-sheet of the stripper in pasties and G-string and went down the four steps to the entrance of the club. Stepping inside, she had to pause a moment to let her eyes adjust to the darkness. The only light came from way in the back where a thirtyish stripper with size fortyish breasts was performing a desultory series of bumps and grinds with a look of complete boredom on her face that her mechanical smile didn’t begin to conceal.