“Help him clear this up, amp;8221; she said, and an edge of desperation was in her voice. “I think it would…might…make a difference.”
Then Eliot was back, and sat down with a fresh martini in hand.
“I hope I didn’t miss anything good,” he said.
My room was small but seemed larger due to the sparseness of the furnishings, metallic, institutional-gray clothes cabinet, a chair and a metal cot. A bare bulb bulged from the wall near the door, as if it had blossomed from the faded, fraying floral-print wallpaper. The wooden floor had a greasy, grimy look.
Katie was saying, “Hope it will do.”
“You still haven’t said what my duties are.”
“I’ll think of something. Now, if you need anything, I’m down the hall. Let me show you….”
I followed her to a doorway at the end of the narrow gloomy hallway. She unlocked the door with a key extracted from between her massive breasts, and ushered me into another world.
The livingroom of her apartment held a showroom-like suite of walnut furniture with carved arms, feet and base rails, the chairs and davenport sporting matching green mohair cushions, assembled on a green and blue wall-to-wall Axminster carpet. Pale yellow wallpaper with gold and pink highlights created a tapestry effect, while floral satin damask draperies dressed up the windows, venetian blinds keeping out prying eyes. Surprisingly tasteful, the room didn’t look very lived in.
“Posh digs,” I said, genuinely impressed.
“Came into some money recently. Spruced the joint up a little…. Now, if you need me after hours, be sure to knock good and loud.” She swayed over to a doorless doorway and nodded for me to come to her. “I’m a heavy sleeper.”
The bedroom was similarly decked out with new furnishings-a walnut-veener double bed, dresser and nightstand and three-mirror vanity with modern lines and zebrawood design panels-against ladylike pink-and-white floral wallpaper. The vanity top was neatly arranged with perfumes and face powder and the like, their combined scents lending the room a feminine bouquet. Framed prints of airbrushed flowers hung here and there, a large one over the bed, where sheets and blankets were neatly folded back below lush overstuffed feather pillows, as if by a maid.
“I had this room re-done, too,” she said. “My late husband, rest his soul, was a slob.”
Indeed it was hard to imagine a man sharing this room with her. There was a daintiness that didn’t match up with its inhabitant. The only sign that anybody lived here were the movie magazines on the bedstand in the glow of the only light, a creamy glazed pottery-base lamp whose gold parchment shade gave the room a glow.
The only person more out of place in this tidy, feminine suite than me, in my tattered secondhand store suit, was my blowsy hostess in her polka-dot peasant blouse and flowing dark skirt. She was excited and proud, showing off her fancy living quarters, bobbing up and down like an eager kid; it was cute and a little sickening.
Or maybe that was the cheap beer. I wasn’t drunk but I’d had three glasses of it.
“You okay, Bill?” she asked.
“Demon meatloaf,” I said.
“Sit, sit.”
And I was sitting on the edge of the bed. She stood before me, looming over me, frightening and oddly comely, with her massive bosom spilling from the blouse, her red-rouged mouth, her half-lidded long-lashed green eyes, mother/goddess/whore.
“It’s been lonely, Bill,” she said, “without my man.”
“Suh…sorry for your loss.”
“I could use a man around here, Bill.”
“Try to help.”
“It could be sweet for you.”
She tugged the peasant blouse down over the full, round, white-powdered melons that were her bosom, and pulled my head between them. Their suffocation was pleasant, even heady, and I was wondering whether I’d lost count of those beers when I fished in my trousers for my wallet for the lambskin.
I wasn’t
I had never been with a woman as overweight as Kathleen O’Meara before, and I don’t believe I ever was again; many a man might dismiss her as fat. But the sheer womanliness of her was overwhelming; there was so much of her, and she smelled so good, particularly for a saloonkeeper, her skin so smooth, her breasts and behind as firm as they were large and round, that the three nights I spent in her bed remain bittersweet memories. I didn’t love her, obviously, nor did she me-we were using each other, in our various nasty ways.
But it’s odd, how many times, over the years, the memory of carnality in Katie’s bed pops unbidden into my mind. On more than one occasion, in bed with a slender young girlish thing, the image of womanly, obscenely voluptuous Katie would taunt me, as if saying,
Katie was also a real monster. She waited until the second night, when I lay next to her in the recently purchased bed, in her luxuriant remodeled suite of rooms in a waterfront rooming house where her pitiful clientele slept on pancake-flat piss-scented mattresses, to invite me to be her accomplice.
“Someday I’ll move from here,” she said in the golden glow of the parchment lamp and the volcanic sex we’d just had. She was on her back, the sheet only half-covering the globes of her bosom; she was smoking, staring at the ceiling.
I was on my back, too-I wasn’t smoking, cigarettes being one filthy habit I didn’t partake of. “But, Katie-this place is hunky-dory.”
“These rooms are nice, love. But little Katie was meant for a better life than the Angles can provide.”
“You got a good business, here.”
She chuckled. “Better than you know.”
“What do you mean?”
She leaned on one elbow and the sheet fell away from the large, lovely bosoms. “Don’t you wonder why I’m so good to these stumblebums?”
“You give a lot of free beer away, I noticed.”
“Why do you suppose Katie does that?”
“’Cause you’re a good Christian woman?”
She roared with laughter, globes shimmering like Jello. “Don’t be a child! Have you heard of burial insurance, love?”
And she filled me in on the scheme-the lottery portion of it, at least, taking out policies on men who were good bets for quick rides to potter’s field. But she didn’t mention anything about helping speed the insured to even quicker, surer deaths.
“You disappointed in Katie?” she asked. “That I’m not such a good Christian woman?”
I grinned at her. “I’m tickled pink to find out how smart you are, baby. Was your old man in on this?”
“He was. But he wasn’t trustworthy.”
“Lucky for you he croaked.”
“Lucky.”
“Hey…I didn’t mean to be coldhearted, baby. I know you miss him.”
Her plump pretty face was as blank as a bisque baby’s. “He disappointed me.”
“How’d he die?”
“Got drunk and stepped in front of a car.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t pay for a dipso to run a bar, too much helpin’ himself…. I notice you don’t hit the sauce so hard. You don’t drink too much, and you hold what you do drink.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re just a good joe, down on his luck. Could use a break.”
