Barbary Shore (7 page)

“What’s that?” I asked.

“She says you’re good-looking.” Guinevere laughed. “You know, you ain’t bad, Lovett.” Now, both the child and the mother were looking at me. I was hardly comfortable, and Monina, who had seemed somewhat retarded to me with her baby talk, had created a presence far larger than herself. “When does she take her nap?” I asked.

“Oh, that kid don’t nap. You never saw anything like her. She keeps the same hours I do. I swear she don’t go to bed half the time till midnight.” Guinevere swigged the root beer, and handed it to Monina who parodied her mother, throwing back her tiny blonde head and tilting the bottle. She did not hold it against her mouth however, and a considerable quantity splashed upon her chin, dribbled down the undershirt, and trickled to the floor. “You slob,” her mother shrieked.

Monina giggled. “Ditter Luft doodooking,” she said again.

“Why don’t we go into the other room?” I suggested. “And Monina can play in the bedroom. You want to play in the bedroom, don’t you, Monina?”

“Nooo.”

“She follows me everywhere,” Guinevere said. “Monina
can’t be without me.” She yawned. “All right, come on, we’ll all go in the living room.” But “living room” was apparently more than just a word and her manner became haughty again. With a ridiculous gesture, Guinevere pointed to the ashtray, and said, “You can take that with you if you wish, Mr. Lovett,” implying by the action a cornucopia of servants, brandy, and cigars.

Actually, to my surprise, her living room was not in execrable taste. The furniture was modest, but she had achieved some decent effects. A mattress and spring on legs was covered by a dark green spread and served as a couch. There were several old armchairs with new print materials, and a dull tan rug was set against tomato-colored drapes. There were more mirrors than she needed upon the wall, the lamps were shabby, and needless gewgaws were clustered upon every end table, but altogether one could notice a certain unity. Yet, like people who build a house when at heart they desire a monument, I had the impression that she was seldom here.

She paced about uneasily before settling in one of the chairs. “This is a nice room,” I told her.

“Yeah, I like it; I worked hard on it,” Guinevere said dispiritedly. “If I had more money I could do something with these things.” Then she lapsed into silence, unaccountably depressed, her eyes staring at the carpet. “Boy, the work I put into this,” she muttered. Her hand fretted into the money pocket of her shorts and turned it inside out. “But does he appreciate this? No.” She leaned back, her breasts lolling heavily in the halter, her fingers pinching a rope of flesh about her waist.

She lay there dormant, but her restlessness was conveyed to the child who pranced about the room. I watched Monina. She halted before a mirror and preened her body, kissing her wrist with the absorbed self-admiration she had seen in her mother. “Dashtray,” I heard her whisper. “Dake dashtray.” Her little arms fluttered, her head nodded politely, and she extended an
invitation in pantomime, glowing with satisfied laughter at the portrait of herself in the mirror. She pirouetted away to stand in contemplation before a set of china knickknacks upon a table. Selecting a tiny bowl of cheap porcelain, she stared at the decoration painted about the rim. “Mommie, Monina, Mommie, Monina,” she said aloud. A smile set upon her face, she approached me, and repeated the same formula, holding the bowl before my eyes and pointing to the cupids painted upon it.

Guinevere stirred heavily in the armchair. “Put it down, Monina,” she shouted at the child. But the command was too ambiguous. What was meaning and what was sound?

Monina smashed the bowl upon the floor.

“Oh, you little bitch,” Guinevere shouted. “Go to the bedroom.”

“No,” Monina screamed.

“Stand in the corner.”

“No!”

Guinevere stood up threateningly. “I’ll get the strap,” she shrieked. Monina pouted, her eyes glaring at her mother.

“All right,” she conceded at last. She trailed reluctantly to the door, and then turned about and pronounced anathema. “Mommie-diggie, mommie-diggie.”

“I’ll get the strap!”

And Monina disappeared.

Guinevere groaned. “Oh, that kid’ll drive me crazy.” Eyes closed, she laughed, her belly shaking in jollity. “Oh, murder.” After a moment she stirred herself and began to pick the pieces off the floor. She was less than a yard away from me, and knelt in such a position that it was impossible not to stare at her breasts. Chuckling, she seemed in excellent humor. “That kid,” she murmured.

She looked up, and a broad coarse grin formed upon her mouth. “Well, Lovett, here we are alone,” she jeered.

“Yes, I got what I wanted,” I drawled.

“Oh, you.” She dropped the pieces in the ashtray by my side, and went back to her chair. This time she sprawled with her legs akimbo, her hands kneading her breasts. “Mmmmm,” she purred. Slowly she massaged her bare shoulders against the print of the seat cover in a slow luxurious motion from side to side. “You ever rub your back against velvet?” she asked.

“Don’t think so.” My voice was husky.

“Oh, I love it. Mmm,” she purred again. “Boy, I wish this was velvet. This is just cotton, scratches a little.” She yawned pleasurably. “You know I’ll tell you something, I don’t know why I’m telling you, I never told anyone else, but when I’m alone, I love to take off my clothes and lie in velvet.”

Was this a secret vice, or something she had invented on the spur of the situation? “Interesting,” I murmured. I was hardly concerned with what I said.

“Oh, the times I’ve had,” she told me. “Brutal!”

I stood up and walked toward her. She tasted my kiss for a few seconds, and then pushed me back, and hummed a breathy, “Whew.” She smiled. “That was nice.”

I reached out for her, and she caught my arm. “Aw, now hold on.”

But like the bull who has passed the pic, and felt the flank of the horse collapsed by his horn, I must gore and gore, reach out and pin to earth. My hands clutched various parts of her body. “Whew,” she said again, and pushed me away competently, standing up from the chair in the same motion.

We stood face to face, my arms about her. “What the hell is it I got?” she demanded in pleasurable anger. “Boy, you guys can’t leave me alone.”

“No,” I mumbled.

She sighed and walked away. “I tell you I’ve had all kinds of men, and there hasn’t been one of them who didn’t fall in love with me. Just must be something chemical I got.” She turned around and examined me. “You know, Lovett, you’re not
a bad-looking guy. I could go for you, but I’m not fooling around any more. I don’t know why, it isn’t my husband, but I play it close to the vest.” Her voice exuded satisfaction. “Now you and me could get together, but what profit is there in it for me? You tell me.”

“Oh, the hell with that.” I reached forward and kissed her once again. She closed her eyes indolently and moved her mouth against mine as if she were eating candy.

“What Mommie done, what Mommie done.” Monina stood in the doorway and pointed an accusing finger.

To my surprise Guinevere taunted the child. “What Mommie done,” she mimicked. “I’ll get the strap! Go to bed.”

“Mommie bad, mommie-diggie.” It was impossible to know what the child felt. She quivered, and hot furious tears stood in her eyes. Yet suddenly she coquetted at me. “Kiss Monina, too,” she demanded.

Guinevere patted her bottom. “Go to bed, or I’ll get the strap,” she shrieked automatically. And once again, reluctantly, the child withdrew.

“See what you’ve done,” Guinevere grumbled. “That kid’ll have something on me now. Wait, she’ll let me know about it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Lot of good that does,” she whipped at me. “You guys give me a pain in the ass.” She turned away to light a cigarette and laughed. “Here,” she said unexpectedly, “here, you want to feel my breasts, here, feel them,” and she took my hand and placed it. I kissed her again, and indolently she raised the arm which supported the cigarette and returned the embrace.

She was not without response. The kiss must have lasted for over a minute, and my hands moved in a crescendo about her. When we paused, her breath was coming quickly too.

“Hey,” she said.

“Come on.” Nothing was going to stop me now. “Come on.”

“We cant.”

“Right here.”

She stiffened. “Look,” she whispered, “the kid’s around. Are you crazy?”

I would not be thwarted. “Upstairs in my room.”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ve got to come upstairs.”

She pinched me suddenly. “All right, I will.”

“You promise?”

“I’ll be up.” She groaned. “Oh, my God, what you guys get me into.”

“You promise?”

“Yes, I’ll be up in ten minutes. Now, get out of here, and let me get Monina to bed.”

Battered, drunk with lust, I stumbled to my room.

G
UINEVERE
did not follow.

I was furious. In the next miserable hour I lay on my cot under the baking heat of the roof and stared at the wall. The hot summer afternoon dragged by, carrying me with it in torpor. I tried to read, I thought of working, but neither was practicable. At last I took a walk.

I was gone for hours and ended at the docks where I sat on a deserted quay, flipping pebbles into the oily water which swirled about the piles. Twilight came, and across the harbor, skyscrapers reflected the sun. I ate my solitary meal in a lunchroom and returned to my desk in an attempt to write.

It was hardly productive. After several hours in which I was able to do very little, I went out again to pace through the dark streets. I was in the kind of mood where I made resolution after resolution. I was not doing enough work, I decided; then tomorrow I would begin a new schedule. I would get up early and work till evening, and I would do the same in the following days. I would leave Guinevere alone. Certainly I would not go to see her without some invitation.

Yet perversity is not without resource. I could detect in myself beneath twenty mattresses of frustration the small hard pea bean of relief that Guinevere had not kept her word. For an
image came to me of the two of us in my room. The door is locked, and I lie with my head at her breast while summer air shimmers over us. We are happy, we are content, and we are safe. Suddenly there is a knock. We start up, look desperately at one another, search for an escape. There is none. The door is the only door to the room, and the window is a hundred feet above the ground. We make no sound and draw the bedclothes to our necks. The knocking ceases, and there is silence. Then a key is inserted in the lock, turns back and forth. We wait, petrified, and the door opens, and on the threshold stands a stranger. His arm lifts in a menacing gesture, and I close my eyes and turn my head to the pillow.

This was a conscious fantasy, but even so, walking the street on a June night, I shuddered and there was a sweat on my back. Several minutes passed before I felt calm enough to light a cigarette, and I dallied beneath a lamp-post.

When I came back to the room, I picked up my novel, and on an impulse reread everything I had written. I intended a large ambitious work about an immense institution never defined more exactly than that, and about the people who wandered through it. The book had a hero and a heroine, but they never met while they were in the institution. It was only when they escaped, each of them in separate ways and by separate methods, that they were capable of love and so could discover each other.

I had never stated it so baldly before, and as I put the novel down, the story seemed absurd and I was abysmally dejected. Some of the chapters I had read were good, but I knew that as a whole the concept was sentimental, and that I hardly knew where I was led. In the morning, after a miserable night, I deserted my first resolution and went for a long breakfast, read a paper slowly, and delayed coming back to work. I did a page or two, tore them up. New ideas were forming on the novel, confused and often destructive; there was nevertheless a ferment.
For several days I worked steadily, alternating between excitement and depression, burrowing at a mountain whose girth I could not conceive. I thought of Guinevere frequently, but my reluctance equalled my desire, and the stalemate aided my determination to keep working.

Finally, the white flag appeared. I came back to my room one morning and found a note from her. In a small careful hand she had written:

The note decided my attitude. I changed my clothing, brushed my hair, and walked downstairs.

Guinevere opened the door with a tremulous smile.
“Hello,”
she said. Her voice was soft and husky. She might have been a maiden greeting her first lover, eyes downcast, body articulated in yearning. I would not have been startled if she had said demurely, “How can I look you in the face again?” She maintained the pose for several seconds, but when I failed to respond, she shed it like an overcoat. “Where the hell you been?” she demanded.

“Upstairs. Waiting for you. Waiting for seventy-two hours.” I had prepared this speech.

A gleam of satisfaction could have appeared in her face. Almost instantly, she began protesting. “Aw, listen, that was a mix-up the other day. Monina got sick right after you left. You know I had two doctors here, and it cost me twenty-five dollars. Honestly, what a day I had. First you getting me all
upset
”—she said this with great fondness, as if I were a bad boy whom she adored—“and then Monina. My husband had to give me a sedative that night.”

“What was the matter with Monina?”

“Nerves.” Guinevere sighed. “Come on, let’s go in the kitchen. I’m having my coffee.”

I shook my head. “Let’s take it in the living room. I’ll have one with you.”

So we took coffee in the parlor. Really she was like a cat who stirred at every sound, darted here and there at a footstep, and never gave herself wholly to any direction. A round table was set between us, a cloth was put upon it, and a silver service. She poured with her little finger crooked, her face set in poised, determined gaiety. Yet again she wore a bathrobe, and a loose strap from one of her voluminous undergarments slithered over her breast.