Violate the witch I did, too. In the bathtub. She hopped into it, and wouldn’t get out of it, so by God I hopped in after her.
Once in the tub, I grabbed her nearest knee and yanked. She flipped from a sitting position in the corner to a prone position on her back, her legs all balled up against me.
I readjusted them, and she tried to get them together again. So I reached over and smacked her open-handed across the face, and then she stopped kicking and just stared at me, unmoving.
I held her knees apart, and all at once she started fighting like a wildcat. She scratched and bit and punched and butted, she writhed around trying to keep me from finding my objective, and she generally gave me a bad time.
I gave her a worse one. Making a girl in a bathtub isn’t all that easy anyway, even if she’s willing. If she’s opposed, it’s next to impossible. And if she’s a virgin and therefore more than normally difficult to get at, it becomes totally impossible.
So I did the impossible.
I kept my weight on her, hampering her defenses, and every time she punched me I punched her twice, every time she bit me I bit her harder, and all the while I slammed a battering ram at the closed and bolted gate of the city. I hit the city walls as often as I hit the gate, but I had determination, and when a man has enough determination there are times when he can do the impossible after all, like the poem says.
The city fell.
And it was a ghost town.
Once Helen realized the battle was all over, the city had fallen, she suddenly quit. Completely. She just up and stopped. She lay there like a board. That beautiful body, so cleverly muscled to afford the finest in nocturnal pleasure, just lay there beneath me like a corpse. She might just as well have been alone, for all the effect I had on her.
And when it was all over, she refused to talk to me. She wouldn’t even acknowledge my existence for the next two days. And we were at Bermuda before we ever tried it again.
I’ve got to say this much for Helen, the second time she actually did try. The whole thing revolted her, but she put on the stiff upper lip and did her best not to show it.
And that selfsame night I became an adulterer for the first time, with a young lady named Linda Holmes, a bikini-clad beach girl with all the right equipment and all the right attitudes, whose mother had apparently minded her own business, which is as unusual as it is delightful.
So that, in essence, was my wedding night. My first wedding night. Is it any wonder I leaped at the opportunity to have another chance at a wedding night? No, it isn’t any wonder at all.
Of course, you win a little and you lose a little. Helen had not culminated our wedding night with the presentation of a five-year-old boy. I mean, there’s always that consolation.
On the other hand, Jodi did. Looking apologetic and worried, but nevertheless fatalistic, she presented me with a five-year-old boy, name of Everett Whittington, and she asked me quite seriously to smuggle him out of the country and down to South America and into Brazil.
Having traded banter with the moppet for a few minutes, I sat down in Jodi’s living room for some heavy thinking and some heavy smoking. Jodi sat across from me, still looking worried, but also looking hopeful now, and the tad scampered around like an innocent five-year-old.
The wretch.
At last, I said, “Tell me straight, Jodi. Is this a kidnapping?”
She shook her head. “No, it isn’t. Al promised me it wasn’t. It isn’t anything like that at all.”
“I mean, kidnapping is bad enough if you just take the kid across a state line. If you take him across national boundaries, God knows what they’re liable to do to you.”
“It isn’t anything like that,” she said.
“Then what is it?”
She took a deep breath. “I’ll tell you as much as Al told me,” she said.
Eight
After she told me, we did the only thing possible under the circumstances. We put young Everett in the bathroom, ostensibly to splash splendidly in the tub, and we locked the door on him by wedging the top of a chair under the knob. An old college trick, that, and whoever maintained that a college education is less than essential in the modern world?
Then, as you might almost have guessed unaided, we played the games all newlyweds play. Not all newlyweds play such games with a brat locked in the bathroom, although said brat’s imminent appearance on the scene within a matter of six or seven months is often enough the cause of their newlywed state. Be that as it may, there were we, a-tumbling and a-loving, and there in the powder room was Young Everett Whittington.
There was, of course, a bad moment. It came at a bad time, this bad moment did. At the moment of crisis, the delicious moment of crisis, came a shrill five-year-old cry from the bathroom.
“Hey,” bubbled Everett, “let me out of here!”
Did we ignore him? One could sooner ignore a typhoon. But did we let him out? One would sooner liberate an evil imp from a bottle. So we pressed onward, with youthful wails in our ears, and I realized just how fortunate I was that Helen was barren. Life with Helen was all too unbearable without an offspring.
Helen, I thought, abstinence makes the heart grow fonder.
But it didn’t. Not really.
And then we were up and dressed, Jodi and I, and Evil Everett was liberated from his prison of plumbing, and it was rushing time. So rush we did. We rushed to the West Side Terminal, and we missed the last bus to Newark that would get us to our plane on time, and we leaped into a cab and pressed an outrageous twenty dollars upon the sardonic little man behind the wheel, and we sped to Newark, checked our overweight luggage, boarded a gleaming jet, and spent at least ten minutes convincing our moppet that he ought to fasten his seat belt.
“Listen,” I told him, “you don’t fasten that belt and you’ll bump your head on the seat in from of you.”
This did not impress him.
“Listen,” Jodi told him, after I had made other dire threats, all quite ineffectual, “you don’t fasten that belt and I’ll wrap it around your neck until your eyes pop out of your head.”
This impressed him. I assured Jodi that she had a way with wee ones, and all at once there was a tear in her eye. A small tear, a tear that looked out of place, a tear that looked infinitely sad.
“I can never have children,” Jodi said.
I remembered what she had told me on that first afternoon of our reunion — a batch of abortions, the last one a final one because more than a fetus had been removed. A whore shedding tears for her unborn children.
“I’m sorry, Jodi,” I said. And she squeezed my hand.
The plane taxied down the runway (imagine a taxi planing down a runway, if you will) and suddenly we were in the air, going like a bat from hell. The FASTEN BELTS sign went out, and we loosened our own belts. Everett could not read. His belt remained fastened. Why mobilize an enemy? Why unchain the forces of destruction? The NO SMOKING sign went out, too, and I lit two cigarettes and put one between Jodi’s red lips.
She took a long drag and filled the plane with smoke. “Sometimes,” she said, “I wonder about them.” I asked her about whom, and the tear appeared again. I leaned across to wipe it from her eye with a fingertip, but as soon as I did this another tear took its place.
“The dead ones,” she said. “The ones they cut out of me. The poor little kids never had a chance, Harvey. I asked the doctor one time whether it was a boy or a girl. He said it was too early to tell, so I don’t know. Those kids never had a chance to be born.”
I suggested that they might have been better off that way — that, as far as it went, everyone might have been better off unborn. But Jodi shook her head sadly.