“You have to have a chance,” she said. “You have to live. Then, when you make a mess out of it all, you know at least that you had that first chance somewhere along the way.”
It was a fairly profound speech, and I for once had no answer to it. I started to say that we were getting into deep water for a honeymoon trip. I didn’t say this, though.
“I shouldn’t go on this way,” she said, reading my mind. “It’s just depressing, Harvey. And you can’t be too interested.”
I told her, not altogether untruthfully, that I was interested in anything she had to say.
“But you’ve never had an abortion,” she said. “It’s not exactly up your alley.”
It wasn’t? True, I had never had an abortion. But I had been involved in one, had even paid for one. All of which happened after I was married, but not long after. And the abortee — is that the word? It might as well be — was not my wife, but Linda Holmes.
Remember the wedding, and the wedding night?
All on the good ship Lollypop bound Bermudaward? You must remember. I remember. As though it were yesterday, or perhaps the day before.
Every night has a morning after, and the manufacturers of Bromo-Seltzer remain ever grateful for this fact. Even wedding nights have mornings after, and mine was no exception. The exceptional element lay in the fact that upon that evil morning after I awoke in bed, not with my good wife Helen, but with another girl entirely.
Her name was Linda Holmes, of course. She had red hair and green eyes and breasts like someone in Swedish movies. Anita Ekberg, for example. Not Ingmar Bergman.
I rolled over that fine morning and almost called her Helen. But she had awakened before me, and when my eyes opened she came into my arms as soft and fresh and sweet and willing as — well, quite soft and fresh and sweet and willing, metaphor be damned. And I knew full well that this was not Helen. Not at all.
“Let’s play a game,” she whispered, her little pink tongue darting into my ear to blur the words — and to blur my vision, as well, and to make my knees knock together. “Mister Bridegroom, let’s play a game.”
We had played games a-plenty the night before. Did I tell you that Linda’s mother had a laissez-faire attitude toward sex? I must have, and she did. Linda had somehow escaped the puritanical upbringing of my fair Helen. Salemites might have burned her as a witch, had she not charmed them first.
“What kind of a game?”
“An Oriental game,” she said. “You’ll be a jaded sheik in an Oriental pleasure dome in Asia Minor, or something like that.”
“In Xanadu,” I suggested. “That’s the best place to decree stately pleasure domes.”
“In Xanadu,” she echoed. “And do you know what I’ll be?”
“A slave girl.”
She shook her head.
“A harem favorite,” I suggested.
“No. Remember, you’re a jaded old sheik. The harem favorites don’t jolt you anymore.”
“A tender virgin,” I said, wincing slightly because after Helen the whole idea of virginity was somehow nauseating. “A tender virgin at the sheik’s mercy.”
“Too jaded,” she insisted stubbornly. “You eat virgins for breakfast.”
The idea was not entirely without appeal, I must admit. I put a hand on one of those fair Swedish peaks, and I felt a nipple go stiff, and I squeezed. A hand came for me — a soft little hand attached to a strong little arm attached to Linda Holmes — and the hand found the object of its search, and the hand held and stroked.
“Linda,” I said.
“Not Linda,” she said. “You’re old and jaded, Pukka Sahib. Countless nights of dissipation have ruined your appetite for normal lust. And now, oh Great Leader, you are hard to arouse.”
I put my hand on her hand, raising my eyebrows as I did so. “Linda,” I said, “believe the evidence of your senses. Hard to arouse, no.”
She giggled. Her hand did things, and my hand did things and for a moment passion caught hold of us. But suddenly she stiffened, pulled away playfully, and regarded my hungry eyes with mirthful ones.
“Women no longer excite you,” she said. “Do you know what you need now?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
I told her in four letters and she shook her head solemnly. “You need a young boy,” she said. “Huh?”
“A young boy. You see—”
“You,” I said, “have the wrong number.”
She sighed. “It’s a game, silly. Listen, you’re the sheik, or the harem leader, or whatever the hell it is. Get it? I think we’ve got our geography all balled up, and so on, but you’re the Lord High Everything Else of Xanadu, see, and I’m the young boy assigned to bring you pleasure. Now, you have to make love to me as though I were a boy.”
I told her that if she were a boy I was the Lord High Whatzit of Xanadu.
“Exactly,” she said.
But once we caught the spirit of the thing it was fine. I stroked her not-at-all boyish body, disobeying her injunctions to leave her breasts alone. “You’re a boy,” I insisted, pinching pink nipples and cupping globes of soft firmness. “I’m just rubbing your flat chest. Use your imagination, for God’s sake.”
Finally she was kneeling before me on the bed. I looked at the back of her head, her flaming red hair. I ran my hands over her back, feeling skin that was wondrously soft. I cupped her buttocks, and no buttocks in the world were as butty as they. Round and pink, firm and delicious — I have never felt particularly cannibalistic, but if I ever were to begin a diet of human flesh, I think I should like to start with buttocks like hers. Roasted Buttocks of Succulent Girl — one could do worse.
She writhed and moaned while I caressed her bouncy behind, wiggled and squirmed and told me what a great Lord High Whatever I was. And then I came between them like a family feud between Romeo and Juliet, and my hands went around her to grip her breasts while I surged again and again into her.
You may understand, I suspect, how surprised I was to discover, two months later, that she was pregnant.
She called me in New York. I was back at the agency, swinging away madly in a mad effort to keep my wife from driving me to suicide. The phone rang one fine day, it did, and there, by God, was Linda Holmes.
“Harvey,” she said, clear as a bell, “this is Linda Holmes. Remember?”
I remembered — some things are not so easily forgotten, and Linda was one of the unforgettables. I smiled at her memory, and thought to myself that it would be very fine indeed to see her again, and wondered what sort of games we would play this time. I decided to leave the choice up to her.
“Harvey,” she said, clear as an open window, “I am going to have a baby.”
Now remember please what we had done, she and I. Remember that I had entered, as it were, by the back door, the servant’s entrance. Remember this.
I said, “That’s impossible.”
“Harvey,” she said, clear as a Windex commercial, “I am pregnant.”
“Not pregnant. Constipated, maybe, but not pregnant. Listen, don’t you remember—”
She remembered, of course. But she also remembered that the Jaded Sheik was not my only role, although it remained most memorable. Lovable Linda was pregnant. Layable Linda was going to have a baby. Lousy Linda was making a father out of me.
“I’d marry you,” I said. “But I already did that.”
“I don’t want to get married, Harvey.”
“What do you want?”
“First I want to go to bed with you,” she said, clear as a bell, as clear no doubt to the switchboard girl as to me. “Because I miss you, I mean. But what I really want is to have an abortion.”
I got her phone number and her address, and then I left the office early and found a run-down bar on Sixth Avenue. There are times when liquor is a tongue-loosener, and I could ill afford a loose tongue in the presence of mine enemies, and all the hucksters I might encounter in Ulcer Gulch drinkeries were to be counted amongst mine enemies. So I chose a bar where the draft beer was fifteen cents and the bar rye was varnish, and I drank boilermakers that could not have tasted worse without killing me.