pad was a mess—dirty clothes on the floor, a layer of dirt covering everything. Not romantic, but he didn’t suppose that made much difference. It was not the setting itself but the prevailing mood that unnerved him. He and the girl were together in a room she had never been in before to do something she had never done before.
Shank had left, sneering, aware of the agenda. Now Joe was scheduled to make some sort of pass at her, at which she ought to respond avidly. Thereupon they were supposed to make mad and passionate love among the dirt and debris of the apartment.
Then he would go to sleep, or turn on, or go for a walk, or see some people, or do something. And she would board the train for Harlem and say hello to grandma and fall asleep in her own little bed.
It wasn’t going to work, Joe thought.
“Look,” he said, feeling terribly awkward. “Look, you can call this off. We can stop here and say good-bye. Or we can sit around and talk.”
She started. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No,” he said. “But—”
“If I did it was an accident. I…I want you to make love to me. That’s all.”
“We could wait until tomorrow. You could relax a little and then—”
“Tonight.”
He digested that. He still did not know where to begin, but he decided that there had to be a way, that all girls were built the same, that somehow they would wind up making their own kind of love. Then, he felt certain, she would go back to Harlem never to return. Sex was one thing. Commitment to an emptiness far greater than the one she spoke of was another. So Joe put his arm around Anita again and this time he kissed her, quietly. Her mouth stayed closed, but after a moment of the gentle pressure of one pair of lips upon another, her young arms curled around him and held him very close. He liked the taste of her lips, their coolness, and he imagined the sweetness of her young body.
He kissed her again and her lips opened, his tongue turning up between them. Without trying as yet to arouse her, he wanted to know her, to understand her body with his, to touch her in some way not strictly sexual. He kissed her again and he felt the vague foreshadowings of response—the indrawn breath, the muscular tension and faint quiverings.
“Scared?” Joe said.
Startled, she looked up at him, as if he had been reading her mind.
“This is your ball game,” he assured her. “You can call the shots. So there’s nothing to be scared of.”
And, because there was nothing in the world to say after that, he kissed the girl. He leaned against her a little and they rolled back on the bed. They were lying on their sides, facing one another. He kissed her closed eyes, and kissed her nose. He pressed his lips to her throat, the softness there surprising him. He kissed her again and again.
Then his hand finger-tipped her breast, pliant through the clothing. She stiffened a little. He remembered that this had been as much as the square cat, the engineer, had accomplished in many months of dating. So he held her breast very gently and kissed her again. He released her. “The light,” he explained, and he crossed the room to kill the lamp. The room was plunged into a kind of charcoal gray. He walked back and stretched out next to the girl curled up on the bed like a sleepy kitten in front of a fire, her eyes still closed. Joe could dimly feel the outline of the white bra through Anita’s white sweater. For a time he stroked and fondled. Then, slowly, he pulled the sweater free from the skirt and slipped his hand beneath to rub her back, the small of her back and her shoulders. He found the bra clasp and mastered it.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh—”
He kissed her lips. He used both hands to draw the sweater over her head. He could feel the tension in her body. He knew that nobody, no man, at least, had ever seen her breasts before. He knew that exposure scared her, and that he would have to be gentle. When he had removed the white sweater, he folded it carefully on a chair. He gazed at her bare and lovely breasts, large and firm, crisscrossed by light blue veins, and the nipples miniature red puffs newly wrinkled. Joe stroked her cool breasts gently, thoughtfully; he was happily aware of her sensual response, but he was sensitive at the same time to a reluctance in that very response that might be welling out of fear. He felt both desire and restraint increasing in Anita and struggling for supremacy and he wondered which would triumph.
After he had undressed, he kissed her breast again, and then linked a chain of light muzzlings around her. She smiled sleepily and he was glad, feeling you had to keep your sense of humor to enjoy sex; humorless, it could drag you, slow you up.
“Joe…” she whispered. “No more.”
“You’re very pretty, Anita. Very lovely.”
“Do you like my breasts?”
“Very much.”
“I like it when you kiss them. It makes me feel…funny. I don’t know. Funny and good.”
“I like to kiss them.”
“Do it some more.”
He complied, and as he did so he hurried a hand beneath the folds of her skirt, touching the inevitable roughness of a knee and passing upward to the incredibly fantastic softness of a thigh. She gasped.
Now came the really critical part, for Joe to undress her.
He unhooked and unbelted her skirt and he took it off, his eyes dwelling on the dimly discernible wonder of her beautifully slender legs. He paused for a moment, and then he kissed her belly and thighs. She again quivered and again Joe felt from the girl the same contradictory pairing of passion and fear. Now she was nude and utterly defenseless; and, before he could touch her, her fear moved to the foreground and made her body rigid with shame. Joe understood, and became motionless.
“You can go home now,” he said. “If you want to. We don’t have to go through with it, not now, not if you’re afraid of it. We can make it some other time, there’s lots of time, you can go home now and rest and relax and think about it and then you can come back tomorrow or the next day or not at all, whatever way you want it. But we don’t have to make it now, not when you’re afraid.”
Her eyes opened.
She looked at him, at his nakedness, and her eyes held neither shame nor fear. Then she stared down at herself, at her own nakedness, and she smiled a soft and personal smile.
“I want to, Joe.”
“Are you sure?”
“I want to,” Anita said. “Of course I’m scared, any girl would be, it’s natural, I can’t help it. But I want to make love, I want to—even if I can’t get as excited as I’d like to. I want to, I want you to do it to me, please do it, please—”
Joe touched her breasts, then, sleeping things awakening the instant he found them; and his hand trailed to find the softest warmth of her, bringing her to an apex of life.
Like creatures in the oldest of dreams, they moved bodies toward one another, and they flowed together into one, the girl’s pain at first so agonizing that Joe himself ached from it, his head spinning, his eyes balls of lead. But gradually pain subsided and silken, throbbing pleasure claimed her so magically that, when Anita opened her eyes momentarily to scan the great power of her lover, she could have sworn the charcoal gray of the room had become quilted with rosy fire.
Roaches scurried across the wooden floor, ignoring two warm bodies locked in sorcery and sweetness but not quite love.
Andy’s Castle, a cubbyhole bar on Houston Street, was close enough to the mainstream of the Village to be a meeting-place, and far enough away to escape the stream of tourists and Village habitues. A jukebox behind the bar blared the pop tunes of the day. If the place had an Andy, he failed to be in evidence. A woman barkeep, a blowsy female whose dyed red hair tumbled over burly shoulders, was drawing a stein of draft beer for a rheumy-eyed man.
A boy in the booth at the back very nearly jumped when Shank pushed in through the heavy brown door. The boy forced himself to be calm while Shank ordered a glass of draft.
“Man,” the boy said. “Man.”
