Damned in Paradise

“You must think I’m terribly wicked,” she said. “Just a little tramp.”

I sipped the rum. “I certainly won’t respect you in the morning.”

She knew I was kidding, but she asked anyway, “You won’t?”

“Not some little trollop who sleeps with the first good-lookin’ kike who comes along.”

She yelped a laugh, and grabbed a pillow and hit me with it; I protected the flask so as not to spill any of its precious contents.

“You’re an awful person!”

“Better you figure that out now than later.”

She put her pillow back in place, and snuggled against me, again. “I suppose you think we’ll be doing this every night of the trip.”

“I have nothing else planned.”

“I’m really normally a very good girl.”

“Good, hell. You’re great.”

“You want me to hit you again?” she asked, reaching for the pillow. But she left it in its place, and settled back against it and me and said, “You just pushed the right button, that’s all.”

I slipped a hand over one silk-covered bosom and touched a forefinger to a puffy nipple ever so gently. “Hope to shout…”

“Awful person,” she said, and blew out smoke, and French-kissed me. It was a smoky, rum-tinged kiss, but nice. And memorable. Funny how much this rich little good girl kissed like some of the poor little nasty girls I’d run across.

“Poor Thalo,” she sighed, taking the flask from me.

“What?”

“Sex relations can be so wonderful. So much fun.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

She swigged, wiped her mouth with a hand. “To have it ruined…by some awful greasy native beasts.” She shuddered. “Just to think of it makes me want to run and hide….”

“What was she like?”

“Thalo?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean, growing up together?”

“Yeah. Docile, quiet…?”

“Thalo! Not hardly! You think it’s a bowl of cherries, being rich. But you more or less have to raise yourself. Not that I’m complaining. Those days at Bayport, they were something….”

“Bayport?”

“It’s a little community on the South Shore of Long Island. Thalo’s parents have a summer home there. It’s like a park, really—that big house, lake, woods…. We used to go bareback riding…and I do mean bare.”

“No parents around to object to such shenanigans?”

Another swig. “They were gone most of the time—social functions, foreign jaunts. The house was run by the Filipino domestics, who Thalo didn’t have to answer to. Glorious days, really.”

“You went to school together, too?”

“Yes—Hillside in Norwalk, then, later, National Cathedral, in Washington. Strict schools, but summers were madcap; we ran wild. Lived in our bathing suits all summer.”

She handed me the flask and got out of bed; a lovely thing in that teddy, completely unselfconscious in her near nudity.

“We had this old Ford,” she said, fishing another smoke from her purse, “that we painted up with all sorts of colors and crazy sayings. Rode around with our feet and legs hanging out of the car. Tore around, regular little speed demons.”

“Never got picked up? Never lost your license?”

She lighted up the new ciggie. “Oh, we didn’t have licenses. We weren’t old enough.”

Soon she was back in bed with me, the orange eye of her cigarette staring in the darkness.

“I shouldn’t say this, but…she used to love it.”

“Love what?”

“It. You know—it! Doing it? Boys from our set, visiting their own parents, they’d come to that big house…we had the run of the place…come midnight we’d go skinny-dipping in the lake….”

“With the boys?”

“Not with the gardener! I don’t think Tommie…nothing.”