“Dig.”
“And they always want something from you.”
“That’s the truth.”
“But just try going without. Hey, will you look at me? And that’s just from talking about it.”
He looked where Buddy was pointing, saw the bulge in the man’s pants. He wanted to avert his eyes but somehow couldn’t.
“How about you, Bert? The topic of conversation having the same effect on you?”
A large hairless hand dropped casually upon Bert’s groin. The fingers moved, handling him, and something within his head vibrated like a tuning fork. His mouth was dry. A pulse worked in his throat. And he felt him self growing, stiffening, in response to the ministrations of that hand.
“Yeah, I can see you’re in the same kind of mood I am,” Buddy was saying, his voice different now. “You must be feeling kinda cramped in those pants. I know I am.”
Buddy got to his feet, began to undress. Bert began to remove his own clothes. The whole thing had a dreamlike quality to it. He felt utterly bereft of will; he could only play out his part, could not affect the outcome in any way. He disrobed, and Buddy reached for him, positioned him on the couch, knelt beside him and went down on him.
Girls had done this. Not often, and never this well, but they had done this to him from time to time. It had been nothing like this. Nothing had been like this, nothing in his lifetime. He thought God, God, and then thought stopped and he gave himself over entirely to sensation.
After, still in a dream, still without thought, he knelt before Buddy and took the man’s penis into his mouth.
As he did so a feeling of contentment filled him. He could not identify the feeling, and he realized afterward that it was because he had never been contented before.
Fresh drinks afterward, and cigarettes, and for a long time he sat wordless at the piano, playing songs he had played often before. For a long time he played and Buddy listened and neither of them spoke.
After awhile he said, “I guess you figured on this all along, huh? Back at the bar?”
“I thought we both figured on it, Bert.”
“No. I never... hell. I hate to sound like an idiot. It’s just that I’m finding out something about myself, and it’s taking time getting used to it. You thought I was queer right off, huh?”
“Gay’s a better word for it. Yeah, I thought so. Maybe I just wanted you to be or maybe I sensed something that was there. I wouldn’t have pitched you if I didn’t think it was what you were looking for. You’re crazy to waste the summer hopping suitcases. Can you use a fakebook?”
“I don’t need one. If I know a melody I can play anything.”
“Do you realize you’re ahead of sixty percent of the guys working this kind of gig? I’m serious. It doesn’t seem like an accomplishment to you because it comes naturally, it’s something you can do. There’s a club a few blocks from the joint I’m at, the guy’s looking to replace a guy who quit on him a few days ago. You don’t think you’re good enough but you’re better than the guy you’d be following. You won’t get rich but it’s a better way to spend the summer than what you’re doing.”
“I don’t know. I get my room and board and all.”
“Well, you could stay here, Bert.”
“Oh, I see.”
“No, you don’t see. You see strings attached and there aren’t any. All I’ll be doing is taking you to the club and telling the prick who owns it to listen to you, and I don’t want anything in return for that. You can buy me a drink because that’s as much of a favor as it amounts to. I’m saying you could live here because I think maybe you want to.”
“Maybe I do.”
‘Play ‘Laura,’ why don’t you? I never play it, it’s a private thing, but I like to listen to it. ‘Play it Sam.’ Yeah, that’s nice. I like that.”
The next afternoon he took a job at Bobo’s Club. He went back to the hotel and told them to shove their job, and moved his clothes to Buddy’s apartment. In September he went back to college for his final year. No one noticed any difference in him. He was very careful to behave as he had always behaved. Sometimes, but not often, he would experience urgent sexual yearnings for certain men on campus. Now and then he sensed that these feelings were reciprocated, but in any event he avoided acting on them. Instead, he dated girls as he had always dated girls, and he took these girls to bed and performed as he had always performed. There was no difficulty in performing with them. There never had been any difficulty and there was none now. As before, there was a certain amount of pleasure in the act; as before, it brought no contentment, no real satisfaction.
Periodically he would go to Richmond for a night or a weekend. He knew what he was looking for, and, thanks to the experience of the summer, he knew how and where to find it.
Warren said, “You’re sure it was Melanie Jaeger.”
“That’s the name she gave. I suppose there could be more than one Melanie Jaeger in Buck’s County—”
“It’s surprising enough that there’s one. The likelihood of two strikes me as infinitesimal. Melanie Jaeger. And she was definitely on the prowl.”
“Absolutely. She had that look in her eye that said she was out to find a man and didn’t much care who he was. And something else, too.”
“What?”
“This is just intuition.”
“Your intuition’s usually good.”
“You say the nicest things. I had the feeling she was ready to let go. That the wilder a scene was, the more she would dig it.”
“Interesting.”
“Yes, isn’t it?”
Warren lit a cigarette. “We haven’t made a scene like that in a good long while, have we?”
“No.”
“I think it might be nice.”
“So do I.”
“There’s a special poetry to it, you know. Sully’s cuckolded half the married men in the county. He’s spent twenty years establishing a reputation of screwing anything with a hole in it. Trading his wives in every five years, fucking his waitresses. Hmmm. It would be very satisfying to pin a huge pair of horns on that ursine head.”
“Ursine?”
“Bearish. As in Ursa Major, the Big Bear. That’s Sully. Big old horny bear! Time to pin a perfect pair of horns on the horny old bear.” He laughed, stretched out on the king-size bed, yawned luxuriously. “I’ll have to find out more about her. I haven’t heard anything, and it’s the sort of thing one would expect to hear. But the possibilities are delicious.”
“They seem to be having an effect on you.”
“How cunning of you to notice. Do you think there’s anything you could do about it?”
“I’ll think of something,” Bert said.
Fourteen
Gretchen Vann lay awake in the night, conscious of the warmth of Peter’s still body beside her. She put a hand on his shoulder and he did not stir. She ran the hand across his smooth chest, down over his stomach to his loins. Her fingers encircled him and still he slept.
He was sleeping more lately, and sleeping very soundly. He was stealing her sleep, she thought. Taking the sleep that ought to be hers and adding it onto his own, so that each night she slept less and each night he slept more. He was a sleep thief, filching her rest piece by precious piece.
Across the room in her own small bed Robin turned over in her sleep and made a slight sighing sound. Robin, too, Gretchen thought. Another thief of sleep. The child slept like a child, Peter slept like a child, they all slept like children while she lay awake like — like what? Like an adult? No, not that. Like what, then?
There were no pills. Pills would make her sleep. However far she might be from the brink of sleep, Seconal would rush her to the edge and throw her over, blanketing her in fuzzy darkness for eight or ten hours. Of course it was never true sleep. It was merely a bandage on the wound of insomnia, a couple of stitches in time bridging the gap between tonight and tomorrow.