When it was all over but the heavy breathing, Laura smiled at me and stroked my cheek with soft hands, and lit me a cigarette. I smoked it, contented, and Laura said, “You see? Not true at all.”
“Must be the Chinese,” I said.
After a while, we put our cigarettes out, turned out the light, and prepared ourselves for sleep. Shortly before sleep came, I whispered, “I’ll get my things from the Y tomorrow.”
She murmured, “Mmmmm.” And we went to sleep...
... Only to be awakened by somebody shaking my shoulder, and a gruff male voice said, “Okay, buddy, you’ve slept it off long enough.”
I tried to say, “Go away,” but I think what actually came out was, “Gremmmfff.”
“It’s time to join the conversation, little man,” said the gruff male voice.
I opened my eyes.
That was a mistake. In the first place, I wasn’t twenty-two any more. In the second place, I wasn’t in Laura Gray’s bed anymore, I was in Jodi’s bed. In the third place, I had the kind of hangover that made Grant such a surly general. And in the fourth place, there was a man I’d never seen before leaning over me, waking me up.
I’d never seen him before. Up till that moment, I hadn’t known how lucky I was. Now my luck had changed.
This guy would scare little children. This guy would also scare mothers and Marines and Mau Maus. He looked like a boxer who’d lost a close decision to a meat-grinder.
“Time to join the party, little man,” this apparition told me. A meaty hand descended from on high and love-tapped me on the cheek. I think it loosened teeth.
“I’m awake,” I said.
“Good boy,” said the monster. He backed away, saying, “Now, sit up like a good little man.”
I sat up, like a good little man, to discover that I wasn’t in Jodi’s bed after all, I was on Jodi’s sofa in Jodi’s living room. And I was fully dressed, including my shoes. I had slept with my shoes on and now my feet felt like boiled turnips. All puffy and yellow.
I sat there, blinking miserably, and slowly it came home to me that I was in a woman’s apartment, but I had been awakened by a man.
A husband! No, that was ridiculous, Jodi was a whore. That didn’t mean she couldn’t have a husband, though I didn’t think she did have one, but it did mean that her husband — real or hypothetical — would stay away from her place of work.
A policeman?
Maybe I was being arrested. Maybe it was a vice raid. That was a charming thought.
I peered blearily at the monster again. He might have been a policeman — there are policemen who have that orangutan quality — but he didn’t seem particularly anxious to arrest me.
Then I noticed Jodi, sitting in the armchair across the room. She was still wearing the knit green dress, and still had one leg crossed over the other to reveal all that gleaming thigh, but now she was simply sitting there, her face a careful blank as she smoked a cigarette.
“Jodi,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“I’m about to tell you, little man,” said the monster.
Jodi didn’t look at me, she looked at the monster. “Al,” she said, her voice tired, as though she didn’t expect any answer at all, “why don’t we just leave him alone? Harvey’s a nice guy.”
“Am I going to hurt him?” demanded Al. I would have liked to have known the answer to that one myself.
I said, “I have to go home.”
“Not just yet,” said Al. He pulled over a chair and sat down in front of me. He offered me a cigarette, and when we had both lighted up he said, “Now you’re a married man, am I right?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And Jodi here’s a whore, right?”
“Yes,” I said.
He pointed the cigarette to the right. “And that thing over on the table there is a camera, right?”
I just stared at it. It had one eye, and that eye was baleful.
“Now, little man,” said Al cheerfully, “I got a proposition for you.”
Four
Now I have gone through something very much like thirty-four years of reacting incorrectly. Whenever confronted by the sort of situation in which my response ought to be thoroughly predictable, I cross up the experts and do something wrong. When I was twelve, and cooped up in a coatroom with an apprentice Lolita, a warm-blooded moppet with auburn tresses who kissed me with lips and tongue, with arms tight around me and budding breasts rampant, I was not excited, not shocked, not even taken back. I stepped away from her and asked her, solicitous as a student nurse, what brand of toothpaste she used.
I could cite other examples, but this should suffice. Take heed — I am not boasting. Perhaps there is something wrong with me, perhaps certain cerebral connections have been disconnected within my cranial cavity. I do not know, nor do I particularly care. What I do know, as sure as Luther Burbank made little blue apples, is that I am a perennial source of disappointment to persons who bounce supposed-to-be-shocking bits of news off me.
I disappointed Al.
There I was, disturbingly respectable, thoroughly married and gainfully employed. And there was Jodi, recently ravished. And there was this camera which had purportedly caught us in flagrante delectable. According to all the established rules, I was supposed to fall on my knees and beg, or race to heave the camera through the nearest open or shut window, or simply do a lap-dissolve into saline tears.
Perhaps it was the afterglow of a tumble with Jodi — which had obviously taken place, and which had undoubtedly been enjoyable, and which, damn it to hell and back, I could not recall. Perhaps it was the Vat 69, which left me with no hangover but with a delicious sense of well-being and security. Perhaps it was the elementary fact that the possible loss of my Spiritless Spouse did not terrify me. If a slew of pictures would send Helen flying to Reno, I would shed no tears. I would even supply transportation, in the form of a new broom.
So I did not fall to my knees in the manner of a sorrowful supplicant. Nor did I make a grab for the camera. Nor did I abandon my masculinity and weep.
What I said was: “Has anybody got a cigarette?”
Al didn’t, or didn’t care. Jodi passed me a flip-top box which I glumly recognized as an account of MGSR&S. I took one and set it aflame, sucking in smoke and expelling perfect smoke rings, wispy symbols of what Jodi meant to me. Al waited patiently, the perfect anthropoid. Jodi looked sorrowful.
Then I said: “When you print the roll, send me three copies of each shot.”
I looked at Al while Jodi laughed happily somewhere in the background. I watched animal expressions play across Al’s face. Any moment, I thought, he was going to hit me.
He didn’t. “Look,” he said. “Don’t be a stupid, huh? You know what I can do with those pictures?”
“You can’t sell them to the Daily News,” I said. “They draw the line at cheesecake. You can peddle them to school kids, I suppose, but I hear the competition is keen. When you come right down to it, what in hell can you do with them?”
“Jesus,” he said. “I can show ’em to your wife.”
“She’d blush.”
“Look—”
“She might even cry,” I went on thoughtfully. “Helen cries easily. When she needs a new dress, for example. But she wouldn’t get physically aroused, if that’s what’s on your mind. Nothing gets Helen physically aroused.”
He was nonplussed, or unplussed. Or plussed. “Listen,” he said. “You got a job, huh?”
“Huh,” I said.
“You know what happens when your boss sees these shots?”