As I walked, my thoughts quite naturally were sexual in nature. And, since I had not yet tasted the joys of union with Helen, I had no choice but to fall back on my memories of the other women in my life, those who had preceded Helen as my bedmates. They included the tall and the short, the lean and the not-so-lean, the good-looking and the better-looking. There were the slow and passive receivers of the male, the fast and furious engulfers, and a host of variations in between. There were all kinds of girls, and I thought about them all, and I thought about the act which had bound me to each of them and which had given them all something in common, and then I thought about Helen. And I looked at my watch again, and fourteen minutes had gone by.
I thought about Helen. My activities in the past with those other human females would be of the same approximate type as my activities in the to-be-hoped-for immediate future with Helen, so I combined memory with imagination with my knowledge of Helen’s appearance, and long before I ever got into Helen’s bed in actuality I had done so a gross of times in my mind. We would do thus, and then we would do so, and then we would do suchandsuch. It was fine in imagining, but it would be far far better in reality.
That’s what I thought.
At any rate, thirty minutes oozed by at last, and I streaked back to the cabin, moving like one of those cartoon characters on television; nothing but a cloud of dust and a rifle-like twang! And there I was at the cabin door.
At the locked cabin door.
I knocked on the door. “Helen,” I called. “It’s me. It’s Harvey. Unlock the door.”
“Not yet!” she cried, and there was a touch of desperation in her voice. “I’m not ready yet! Come back in half an hour!”
“I already have,” I announced. “Your half hour is up. It’s time to drop the coin in the slot, baby.”
“Not yet, not yet!”
“God damn it!” I pounded on the door with both fists, shouting, “Open up this door, Helen! Enough is enough!”
Then a muttonchops Britisher and his frau came down the hall, looking at me with ill-concealed astonishment, and I ceased and desisted from battering at the door. I offered our friends in NATO a weakish grin, and they went on by in seemly haste, not looking back.
Once they were gene, I took to kicking the door, shouting Helen’s name amid imprecations. Then a few other doors up and down the hall opened, and some irate sleepers told me where to head in. I bitched back at them, being mad enough by then to want to hit anybody within range, and it looked for a while as though a dandy Donneybrook would get going in that hallway, without even John Wayne or Victor McLaglen to give the thing the proper feeling.
Until a ship’s officer, called for by someone or other, put in an appearance and wanted to know, in clipped British monosyllables, just what the hell was going on around here. What the devil is what he actually said, if I remember it all right.
Well, of course, everybody answered him at once for a while, and it was impossible to get his attention, much less explain the situation to him. So I took the easy way out. I ignored them all, and went back to kicking the door again. That got me the officer’s attention, and when he demanded of me specifically just what the devil was going on, I replied, “You I’ll tell. These rubbernecks here can go to hell for themselves.”
“He started it all,” announced a snippy-type woman, pointing at me. I made a gesture at her involving a specific adjustment of the fingers of the right hand, and she looked shocked.
“All right,” said the officer, “all right now. Let’s just clear the hall here. I’ll take care of things. If you good people will return to your cabins now, I assure you there will be no more noise. Just move along now, please, back to your cabins, that’s it.”
They finally did all go back where they belonged, leaving the officer and I alone in the hallway. “Now, then,” he said, turning back to me. “Just what seems to be the ruckus here?”
“My wife and I,” I told him, “just got married today, just before we boarded this ship. And now she’s locked herself in our cabin, and she won’t let me in. I mean, uh, she won’t let me in the cabin. That, either. She won’t let me, in other words. Anything.”
“I see,” he said. I suddenly had the impression that this sort of thing had happened on this particular ship more than once in the past. He covered his amusement well, considering, and acted promptly and properly, as though there were a tried and true Standard Operating Procedure for this sort of situation. I could see it; Manual on Procedure when Faced with a Groom whose Bride has just Locked him out of their Connubial Cabin.
The procedure was a simple one, all in all. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a ring of keys, selected the one he wanted, and unlocked the cabin door. “If you want,” he said sotto voce, “I can have a bottle of something or other sent along to you.”
“Thank you anyway,” I said, rather grimly. “We won’t be needing anything at all. Not for quite a while.”
“Righto, sir,” he said. “Oh, and by the by. This does happen, you know. Try not to be too angry with the lady. They get skittish.”
“So do I,” I said. “Thank you, and good night.”
But it wasn’t good night to the good officer just yet. A moment later I had to chase down the hall after him and bring him back to unlock the bathroom door. Helen just wouldn’t give up.
When he left this time, I marched into the bathroom and confronted my reluctant bride. She stood cowering in a corner, fully dressed. I had already noted the fact that the luggage, still unpacked, had not been moved from the bed. Just what the hell had she been doing down here for the last half hour? Not that it mattered. She’d be doing something else for the next half hour.
My bride’s first words to her returning husband were, “Don’t you touch me! Don’t you dare touch me!”
“I’m going to do a hell of a lot more than touch you, baby,” I told her grimly. And then I told her some more. Graphically, in specific Anglo-Saxon detail, I told her exactly what I intended to do to her, what I expected her to do to me, and what we would be doing together.
She covered her ears. She squeezed her eyes shut. She cringed into the corner. She did her damnedest to squeeze through the wall and escape.
But there wasn’t any escape. I ripped her clothing off, not because I wanted to rip her clothing off but because I didn’t have any choice. She was doing her damnedest to keep her clothing on.
I’ve always wanted to punch Helen’s mother in the nose. Unfortunately, the old witch is dead, and I don’t have the energy to dig her up just to punch her posthumously. At any rate, she was one of those mothers who spends her entire life figuratively sewing her daughter up. Sex, in Helen’s household, was the second syllable of a two-syllable English name. That’s all it was. Things of the body were revolting, all and every. Family members had to apologize to one another whenever they sneezed, had to leave the room to blow their noses, had to be sure no one was looking before they scratched. Banishment was the only punishment possible for someone who broke wind. They all made believe that they didn’t excrete, and Helen still had a sneaking suspicion that the stork bit was the actual truth about her birth after all.
This shapely sack of horrors was then presented to me as marriageable, and I fell for it. I married it. And all of a sudden Helen realized that she had gotten herself into the worst horror of all. I didn’t merely intend to sneeze in front of her, oh, no. I had this plan to violate her. You’ve heard the word. Violate. Yecch.