“Excuse me, sir.” The headwaiter was at my elbow.
I looked up at him questioningly.
“We’re filling up,” he apologized. “I wondered if you would mind if this lady shared the table and view with you?”
It was on the tip of my tongue to say that I minded very much, that I treasured my solitude, on this evening particularly. Before I could speak, however, the young lady in question edged out from behind the headwaiter and smiled at me.
“Well, I do declare! If it isn’t Mr. Steve Victor his very self. Hello, there,” Terry Niemath greeted me.
“Ah, you know each other.” The headwaiter was relieved. He held the chair out for her.
“Y’all don’t mind, Steve, do you?”
“Of course not.” I lied vehemently. “I’m glad of the company.” I compounded the lie. Of all the female company I didn’t feel like at this time, Terry Niemath’s headed the list.
The waiter came and took her order for a boilermaker. He looked surprised. I could understand why. This was a different Terry from the other two occasions I’d seen her. On the first she’d been the very picture of a voluptuous libertine who wore her lust as unashamedly as if it were a Dior original covering her nudity. On the second she’d been a brazen hoyden in too-tight, faded jeans and bosom-flaunting work-shirt.
Now, by contrast, she was wearing a simple, inexpensive dress of the sort a Little Rock matron might wear to an evening meeting of the Garden Club. Her sleek, blonde hair was combed neatly back from her face and held in place by a barrette. The skirt of the dark print dress hung demurely to mid-calf, and the top was buttoned all the way up to a high V. Although it was obvious that she wasn’t wearing a bra (I don’t believe she owned one), her nipples were lost in the busy print and her large, high breasts neither panted nor swayed to draw attention to themselves. She looked attractive and young, but not particularly sensual or available.
“Y’all look like your pet spaniel just got run over,” Terry observed.
Her perceptiveness surprised me. Before I knew it, I was telling her how I’d just split up with my woman friend. (I did not, however, tell her that the split-up had been precipitated by my labeling her, Terry, a nymphomaniac.) She listened sympathetically, asked questions about Stephanie, the length of the relationship, and the qualities that attracted us to each other.
“Sex surely is important,” she observed in response to my listing that as primary. “Y’all may not believe this, Steve, but I used to be real attracted to you that way.”
Used to be? I'd barely known her two days. “You mean you’re not attracted to me any more, Terry?”
“Nope. Oh, I like you as a person well ’nuf. But you don’t make me lust like at first. You see, Steve, it’s the way I am. If’n I know another woman rejected a fella, why, then he just loses all appeal for me.”
“You mean I don’t appeal to you any more?”
“ ’Fraid not.”
A surge of desire started down around my toenails and bubbled up to my sinuses. Yesterday Terry had wanted me and I hadn’t been terribly interested. Now she didn’t want me any more. Immediately, I knew that I had to have her!
I burned for her! Under the low table my instant erection was threatening to become a tilting embarrassment. My eyes devoured the sweep of her breasts. My brain reeled with the memory of her long arching legs, her hips in action, her pneumatic derriere—and with the effects of my fifth scotch.
“But we can still be friends,” I said carefully, cunningly, my mind already beginning to seethe with diabolically contrived plans to get her into bed. Rejection was not something that I, Steve Victor, the man from O.R.G.Y., could willingly accept from a (Up yours, Stephanie!) nymphomaniac.
“Of course, darlin’.”
“Then why don’t we go down to my room and have a friendly nightcap,” I suggested brightly.
“I do believe we have both had more than enough to drink,” Terry parried smoothly.
“Etchings?”
“My great-granddaddy warned me all ’bout that.”
“Then how about just plain, friendly sex?”
“Now, Steve, I already ’splained how I feel ’bout you in that department.”
“But you said we were friends.”
We are.
“Well, what are friends for?”
“To provide y’all with a shoulder to cry on when your lady friend gives you the gate.”
Some nymphomaniac!
“How about taking a drive,” I suggested desperately. Charles Putnam had arranged for a Mercedes 480 SL rental car to be waiting for me at the airport when we arrived. Now it was stashed in the garage under the hotel.
“Why, that’d be real nice. I’d love to see San Francisco by night.”
My contriving to get Terry Niemath into a car was really a form of sexual regression. Five scotches had reduced me to the basic stratagems of the years of my puberty. Hell, the old 'Let’s go-for-a-ride’ ploy had worked on Euphremia Hossenpfeffer when I was sixteen years old, so why not on Terry now?
Like Terry, Euphremia had had what in those days we called “a reputation”. (Fie, Stephanie Greenwillow! Fie, and plotz!) Of course, back then, I had been a virgin, and now I was the Man from O.R.G.Y., but the urge was just as strong. (Rejection makes me horny; I can’t help it.) Terry, like Euphremia, was being what I chose to regard as ‘coy’, but a quick spin in the moonlight climaxed by a parking interlude at a carefully chosen D.E.S. should take care of that.
I followed a zigzag, semi-scenic route from Nob Hill to Russian Hill to the Golden Gate Bridge. It didn’t provide the greatest views of San Francisco but, at that time of night, it drew less traffic than Chinatown, Fisherman’s Wharf, and Telegraph Hill in the other direction. Besides, I wanted to get across the bridge to Sausalito, where I figured I might find a suitable parking spot somewhere in the hills overlooking the waterfront. If you can’t pull off a seduction in the hills of Sausalito, you might as well give up on the West Coast altogether.
“Lordy! Isn’t that the most beautiful sight y’all ever did see!” Each step of the way—Russian Hill, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Sausalito waterfront itself-—Terry had been making comments like that. This one, however, was certainly justified. I had taken the high ground and found us a deserted scenic overlook on top of a bay-side cliff that provided a truly spectacular view of lit-up San Francisco across the water.
“Romantic, too.” Hell, how subtle do you have to be at my age with five scotches inside you?
“Yes,” she sighed. “It surely is.”
Some such dialogue had once been my cue to kiss Euphremia Hossenpfeffer, she of the pudgy thighs and questionable “reputation”. Such signals aren’t subject to change, are they? I put my arms around Terry Niemath and pressed my lips to hers.
Deja vu!
“I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about me,” Euphremia Hossenpfeffer had told me on that long-ago night when I had accompanied that first kiss with Seduction Step Number One (as outlined to me by my friend Murray Wiener, who was two years older than me, going to college, and who claimed to have been laid, thus already the man of the world I was panting to become), the forcing of the male tongue into the female mouth.
“Y’all don’t get any wrong ideas now, hear?” Terry said as she released my tongue from between her lips.
“Of course not, just a friendly kiss between friends.” I slid my hand down from her shoulder to the tilted missile-mounds of her breasts.
“I don’t think I should let you touch me there, Stephen,” Euphremia had protested. (But Murray had said she was ‘hot to trot’, and Murray had been a Man of the World.)
“I do thank y’all might be gettin’ a wee bit too friendly.” But the polyester of Terry’s dress was thin and (unlike Euphremia) she wasn’t wearing a bra, and the stiffness of her nipple belied her protest.