A Diet of Treacle (7 page)

“Don’t you?”

Anita put out her cigarette. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know anything. I think I’m cracking up. Can you believe that? I think I’m cracking up. A nice intelligent nice Italian nice bright nice nice nice girl and I’m positively cracking up. Let’s get out of here, Joe.” She glanced at the check for the first time—no more than a dollar-seventy. She was pleasantly surprised. She put two dollars on the table and they walked out.

They walked over Eighth Street to Macdougal to the park and found a bench to sit on. On the way she didn’t know whether to take his arm or no.

They sat on the bench and were silent. She observed the passers-by and she wondered who she was. She had to be somebody. She watched boys, men with beards, girls with very long and very wild hair, and she wondered if she were one of them. She thought about the girls and boys in her classes at Hunter, the other girls and boys in her neighborhood, and she wondered if she were like them. She had to be like somebody. You couldn’t be all by yourself, she thought. You would go crazy that way.

“I talked a blue streak,” Anita said. “Before. In the restaurant. I really went on. I ran off at the mouth.”

“You had things to say.”

“I never said them before. I hardly thought them.”

“But they were still there.”

“But I hardly even thought them,” she said. “I could never tell them to anybody. Not to Ray. If I tried, he would look at me as though I were insane. And I met you for the second time and I can tell you everything.”

“Maybe it’s because you don’t know me.”

“Or because I do.”

Joe lit a cigarette and gave one to Anita who took it without hesitation, smoking it for the first time without the persistent sensation of there being something inherently wrong with the act.

“What do you do, Joe?”

“Not much.”

“I don’t mean for a living. I mean what do you do? You know what I mean.”

He shrugged. “I live with another guy. I mentioned him. Shank. The guy I was with at The Palermo.”

She nodded.

“You sure you want to know all this? Some of it isn’t pretty. You may want to go away from me. You may not like me as much anymore,” Joe said carefully.

“I want to hear.”

“He sells marijuana,” he said. “He makes a living. He pays the rent, slips me a buck now and then. He supports me, you could say. I don’t cost much. Food, rent, a buck now and then to ball with. Nothing much else.”

“He’s a…pusher?”

“Not a pusher. He buys and sells. You could call him a connection, sort of. Strictly small-time. He makes enough money so that we live. Not in style but we live.”

Anita thought about that. Joe lived because Shank was willing to support him for reasons of his own. By all rules Joe was something contemptible—low, cheap, worthless. But for some reason this did not bother the girl. She judged it unimportant, his earning a living or no.

She felt comfortable with Joe. She could relax with him, a far more important consideration to her.

“So I bum around,” he went on. “With Shank, with other people, by myself. I wander. I look at things. That’s about it, I guess. I smoke a stick here and there, lie around the pad, sit in the park. I’m a waste of time.”

“Could I live with you?”

The question startled her at least as much as it startled him. She hadn’t planned on saying that. She hadn’t even realized it had been on her mind. But it was out now, in the open, and he was staring at her.

“You don’t mean that, Anita.”

“Don’t I?”

“No. Maybe I made it sound like a picnic. You don’t understand. It’s no picnic. It’s a drag, actually. When all is said and done it’s a drag. You come on about split-levels and fractional children and you miss making a lot of important connections. You’re hipped on forests so much you forget how much you hate trees.”

“I don’t understand.”

“That’s where it’s at. You don’t understand at all. You think this is roses or something. No worries, no sweat. Just dig everything because it’s real. You missed a few changes, Anita. You think I’m here because I love it so damn much. That’s not it.”

“I know.”

“Sure you do. You think it’s a perfect scene. You think it’s free and romantic and wonderful and anybody who works for a living is out of his head. You think you can beat the world by making a scene like this.”

“I didn’t say that.”

He ignored her. “You just don’t understand,” Joe said. “You think I make the let’s-be-beat scene because I like it. I don’t. I don’t like it at all.”

“Then—”

“I make it because there’s no other scene I could make. I make it because everything else is just a little bit worse. Not for the world. For me. Personally. It’s not the world’s fault. It’s my fault and I’m stuck with it.”

“I know,” she said. And when he tried to interrupt her she shook her head. “I understand,” she went on. “But you don’t. You think you’re the only person who thinks your way. Maybe I can’t…can’t make it…either. I don’t know the words yet. I don’t know how to talk the way you talk. Just how to think and even that I’m just learning. I don’t know who I am. But I know who I’m not. There’s a difference. And that’s why I want to come and live with you. Why I still want to. Unless you don’t want me.”

She felt his hand on her arm. She closed her eyes and stopped talking.

“You don’t love me, Anita.”

“Of course not!”

“Then—”

“I don’t love Ray, either. But I could marry him, still without loving him, and the whole world would throw rice at us. Does that make so much more sense?”

“Maybe not.”

“Then why can’t I live with you?”

He smiled gently. “Your grandmother won’t like it,” he said. “Even with a nice Italian boy like me. She won’t like it at all.”

“I’ll tell her I’m taking an apartment with another girl. I’ll tell her something. I don’t care what she thinks. She’ll leave me alone.”

“Ray won’t like it either.”

“He’ll find another girl. One who’ll fit in the split-level a little better. He’ll live.”

Joe Milani had no comment.

“I’m just a virgin,” she said slowly. “I won’t know what to do. But if we go to your place now you can show me, and tomorrow I can move in after I tell my grandmother something. And—”

“Are you very sure, Anita?”

She started to say yes and then she changed her mind. Because she was not at all certain and she saw no reason to conceal her uncertainty from him. “Of course not,” she said. “I’m not certain about anything. I’m all mixed up inside and I’m going to pop any minute. Now stop asking me questions. I know what I want right now. I want you to take me home and make love to me. That’s all I want.”

He stood up, held out a hand for her. She hesitated only for a second. Then she took his hand and straightened up and they began walking out of the park. When Joe and Anita slipped into the small apartment together, he could not help but sense a vague uneasiness.

Shank was there, sitting on his bed, a paperback novel in one hand. His eyes flicked from the book to the girl, then to Joe, and back to the girl. His lips never moved. His eyes somehow signified he recognized and remembered the girl, and was reserving judgment.

“Shank,” Joe said. “Anita.”

That was the introduction. Anita smiled at Shank, hesitantly, and Shank nodded shortly before returning to the book. Joe was disturbed by the feeling he could swing either with Shank or Anita—but the three of them?

“Shank—”

Eyes came up. Hard, cold.

“Could you do a brief split?” Joe said.

“Huh?”

“If I give you a quarter will you go to the movies? A little brother routine. Like that.”

“Oh,” Shank said. “Really?” He stood up, smiled strangely, and closed the novel, tucking it away in his hip pocket. He took out a cigarette and lit it, dropping the match to the floor. “Congratulations,” he said, speaking the words to Joe while his eyes were busy reassessing Anita. He had bold eyes. He stared hard at her breasts and loins until she flushed. Then he smiled, pleased, and headed for the door. He left it open and Joe had to close it.

Then he walked over and put his arm around Anita.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She raised her head.

“Messy,” he said. “Shank can be relatively evil. A mean stud.”

“I don’t like him,” Anita said quietly.

“I do.”

“Because he supports you?”

Joe grinned. “Hey,” he said. “Like let’s not go moralistic, huh? I like Shank. We swing together. I don’t want to throw stones at him, Anita. I’m not entirely without sin, you know, and I don’t want to cast the first one. Or the second. We get along. We share a pad, talk, hit the same sets.”

“I’m sorry.”

He led her over to the bed and they sat down together. He tried to figure out what he should do next. The 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.