Barbary Shore (8 page)

We drank in silence for a time, and then she sat back and stared at me with her provocative grin. “You know … Michael, you shouldn’t have done that the other afternoon. I could go for you.”

“Look, you called me Michael. What’s your first name?”

Guinevere.

“Well, what’s your last name?”

“Smith, Smith’s my husband’s name.”

I was dubious, but I nodded. She leaned forward for an instant. “I’ll tell you,” she said, “I was born Beverly Guinevere, but when I was on the stage, I just used to call myself Guinevere, you know one name, like Margo or Zorina. And I like it, I keep it, you know it’s not like other names.”

“You were on the stage?”

She nodded profoundly.

“What plays?” I asked.

“Oh, I was in burlesque, I was a queen. Boy, they used to go for me.” She glanced with distaste at her body. “I was a lot slimmer, not skinny, I never been skinny, I always been good to feel, but you know pleasingly plump.
Svelte.
They used to announce me, ‘and now presenting the svelte siren of sensation—Guinevere.’ ”
She caressed her arm abstractly. “They’d all go for me. There was an old gink, sixty-two years old, and he offered me a thousand dollars to go to bed with him once.”

Monina had appeared in the doorway, and Guinevere glanced at her. I looked about uneasily. The child was completely naked. “See Monina,” the mother said, “you see the way she’s built. That’s the way I was, but since I been married I let my figure go.” Emerging from the reverie, she shrieked suddenly, “Monina, put something on.”

But Monina coquetted, her arms raised, the tiny hands at her neck. I found myself reluctant to look at the child, for her body was extraordinary. She was virtually a miniature of a girl of eighteen, the limbs round, slender curves flowing from shoulder to hip, her luminous blonde hair lovely against the pale flesh. “No,” Monina pouted.

“I’ll get the strap.”

Monina sighed. She seemed bored with the strap, and although she retreated, I could swear she was listening from the hall.

Guinevere poured me another cup of coffee. “Someone was telling me you’re an author, Lovett,” she said.

“He was mistaken.”

She passed this by. “You know I been thinking there’s a way you and me could make a lot of money,” she said. “I got a story that’s worth a million bucks.”

“Well, then why don’t you write it?”

“I can’t. I can’t write. I haven’t got the patience. But here’s my idea. I’ll tell you the story, you write it, and we’ll split the money. I swear. When I think of the hundreds of thousands of dollars this book is worth, and it’s all in my head.”

She was not to be halted. “Listen, you really ought to listen to this. It’s a natural. I read lots of novels, and I never seen anything to compare to this.” Her voice became matter-of-fact again. “And you know it covers a span of years, it’s a serious
story.” She closed her eyes and rested her forehead against her fist, face twisted into concentration. “I’ve been trying to make up my mind which stars ought to play it, but so far I’m not sure, although I suppose they decide it all in Hollywood anyway. Just to think about it gets me excited.

“Here,” she offered. “It takes place in this city in New York State, and the main characters are a doctor, a real good-looking guy with a mustache, big you know, and his nurse, she looks like some of those blonde stars, and then he’s got a girl-friend, a dark-haired girl, any feature player could do that part.” Guinevere lit a cigarette. “Now, this guy, the doctor, he’s a pretty good guy, good heart and so forth, and he’s a wow with the women. He’s got the biggest whang on him in the whole town, and maybe he don’t know it. He’s got dozens of girl friends, and there isn’t one of them who won’t surrender herself to him, you know. But he’s got a favorite, the blonde star one, his nurse, and she’s a good kid too, worked hard all her life, and she goes for him. You know she’s really in love, but she don’t show it, puts up a tough front.” Guinevere sighed with content. “Now the other one is a society girl, hoity-toity, and she comes to see him about something or other, woman trouble maybe, and he seduces her in his medical chambers, and they really tie a can on. You know for weeks he just goes around with her, to night clubs and to the beach, the country club, and he can’t get her out of his system, it’s chemical. Only all the time, at the same time, he still keeps the nurse on the string, and they get together once in a while, and it’s love with them, it’s just passion with the other.”

“That is,” I interposed, “it’s the blonde star one he’s really in love with?”

“Yeah.” Without missing a breath, she continued. “Well, all this time, there’s been a hullaballoo with the brunette society one’s parents, you know they don’t like the doctor because he’s also from lowly origin like the nurse. But there’s nothing they can do, it’s real flaming youth.” She halted, and murmured in
aside, “Some of this I’m drawing from my own experiences.” Guinevere tapped the ash from her cigarette. “Well, this goes on for a while and there’s a climax. One night just for the hell of it he has one on the house with the society girl, and she gets pregnant. Only in the meantime before she finds out, he’s decided that he’s really more interested in the nurse, and they’re thinking of getting married. When the society girl comes in, you know, knocked up, he talks to her for a while and convinces her he’s not in love, and that she ought to have an operation. And so here’s the first big scene. The doctor makes an operation on this dame he’s had a hot affair with, and the nurse, the woman he’s in love with, assists him right at it. I mean you can see how this would make a movie even though they’d have trouble with such a scene. I imagine they could work it out though. She could have a brain tumor, or something of that nature. It would be a good scene the operation, you know with him giving directions to the nurse, scalpel nurse, forceps nurse, sponge, acting cold because he’s a good doctor, and he’s got lots of responsibility.” Guinevere stared at me blankly. “The operation turns out a failure. She isn’t going to have the baby any more, but at the same time he does something, he makes a mistake, and the society girl can’t make love any more. She looks perfectly okay, but she’s crippled there, a beautiful girl and yet she can’t do it any more. Well, when she finds out, she’s mad, and she’s going to expose him, but the nurse who’s a wonderful character convinces him he ought to marry the society girl, and he does even though there can’t be anything between them, and for a while they all keep living in the same town, and he keeps up his affair with the blonde nurse. They’re still in love, and it’s gotten very chemical like it used to be with the society girl, he goes down on her and everything, and she loves him. But the wife who’s now turned out a bitch is going to expose him all over again, and so the nurse takes off and goes to New York, and the doctor gets richer and richer, fooling around with a lot of dames on the
side, but his heart is still with the blonde nurse. Only they don’t see each other for years.” She stopped. “Guess what the ending’s going to be?”

I was not to hear it so quickly. Guinevere went on developing wondrous detail upon detail; my attention flagged, and I listened indifferently. For Monina stood in the hall entrance performing a dance. The child was still nude, but somewhere she had picked up a coaster for a highball glass, and now in a posture of unbelievable provocation, she held it like a fig leaf, writhing her limbs sinuously through a parody of amorous advance and retreat. She would approach a few steps, her blonde head cocked to one side in sensuous repose as if she were stirred by an exotic music, and then abruptly with a tiny pout upon her lips, she would draw back, an attitude of feigned horror in the pose of her limbs. As her mother spoke she danced silently, an interpreter. The story drew to a close, and with it the dance. Monina reclined against the doorway, her arm caressing her thigh. She never looked in my direction, yet everything was done for me. Her blonde eyelashes fluttered upon her cheek, her eyes opened to gaze boldly at the wall. And all the while, Guinevere, unheeding, continued to talk.

“They meet again in New York, just about a year ago, the nurse and the doctor, and the doctors wife is dead, and whammo do they get together. I mean drinking and making love, nothing can stop them. And the nurse doesn’t tell him about that baby she had from him after she left cause she knows he won’t believe her; he’ll think it belongs to some other guy. And the doctor wants to get married, and she holds him off cause she doesn’t know what to do with the kid. And then what do you think, she can’t tell him so she murders the kid, her own child, and she’s caught, and the doctor too. I forgot to say he made out the death certificate cause she brought him in on it at the end, and then in prison, which’ll be the last chapter, they’re brought together for a final hour by the warden who’s a pretty good guy,
and there in the cell behind the bars they have a last one that really makes it worth while being killed.”

And Monina, resolving the chord, ran toward me on tiptoe, nude nymph, halted within the reach of my arm, and in a child’s counterfeit of a leer raised the fig leaf above her head, exposed and triumphant.

For the first time she stared at me as though I were real.

In the next instant a look of confusion mounted upon her face, deepened into terror. Abruptly, her mouth crumpled, her eyebrows knotted, and she began to wail in panic. Within a minute she was hysterical.

W
E
made hot milk for Monina, we put her to bed. Guinevere sat beside the child and stroked her hair, crooning fragments of love ballads in an absorption so great that I am certain she was unaware of me. And the language, conventional enough—“Oh, go to sleep, baby, cause Mommie loves you, go to sleep”—was startling from Guinevere. A tear which might have been genuine coursed down her cheek. “You’re all I got,” she murmured once, and that compassion which is just one degree from self-pity shone upon her face.

Monina quieted at last and fell asleep. Fingers held to our lips, we tiptoed from the room, closed the door, and went into the kitchen.

I was shaken. Like the spectator at an accident I wanted to talk, but Guinevere gave me small opportunity. “Whew,” she said, “I never saw her that way before.” She leaned an elbow on the table, and munched a crust of bread. And whatever she might have revealed with Monina was not to be revealed again. “Lordy, that was something. I don’t understand the kid,” she said in an offhand tone.

She had acted somewhat differently the moment Monina had begun to cry. Then she had started from the chair, picked the child up, and spanked her once with fury across the bottom.
“How long was she doing that?” Guinevere had shrieked at me. When I stammered that Monina had been in the room for several minutes, Guinevere scorched me with fury. “Why you lousy no-good son of a bitch,” she screamed in her harsh voice, “why didn’t you do something?” She had clapped her forehead. “Oh, my God, I’ll go crazy.”

It was not an appetizing scene. While Monina sobbed and wailed, her body trembling, Guinevere abused me for over a minute in a more formidable rage than I had believed she could muster. And conscious that I had allowed Monina to continue, I stomached her outburst, humiliated, yet too shamed to make any response.

Guinevere collected herself finally, and carried the child into the bedroom. Now, half an hour later, she revealed no dregs of her tantrum. “Honest, Lovett,” she said, “it’s hell bringing up a kid,” speaking in a conventional voice which might have belonged to any housewife on the street. She seemed almost in a good humor.

“Here, I’ll make some more coffee for us,” she offered.

“I’ve had enough, thank you.”

“Oh, I haven’t. I could drink it all day long.”

We chatted at random for several minutes, or more exactly Guinevere talked. I listened indifferently, my attention wandering. As I nodded my head, she told story after story about this man and that lover, about presents she had accepted and presents spurned, of drinking bouts and happy license, and then occasionally if she sensed my belief flagging or my detachment growing, she would parade a special attraction and describe with relish the baubles of a particular lover. “I been every kind of woman you’d want, Lovett. There isn’t anything I haven’t done. But times change. I can tell you it’s a damn shame you didn’t know me a couple of years ago. Why we’d a been together after two hours or two minutes, but now you know I’m different. There’s the child to think about,” she said smugly.

“And then,” I suggested on an impulse, “you’re religious now, too.”

For an instant I could have sworn Guinevere looked at me in perplexity. She shrugged dubiously. “Oh, yeah, that. Yeah, I’m religious.” For conversation like this, her footing was always stable. She might have stumbled, but without visible effort she drew to a gallop, and spoke once more of the Witnesses. “And you know, it was my husband who first converted me. He’s a religious man, religious as they come.” She bent forward and chuckled. “When I think about him in private, I call him the deacon. If you ever met him you’d be amazed I married a man like that, but then opposites attract, you know there’s some truth in that.”

“He’s Monina’s father, isn’t he?”

She nodded carefully as though debating her next words. “Lovett, I’ll tell you something. I don’t know.” She held up her hand. “Not that I was fooling around with anybody else at the time, but I could swear it wasn’t him. She don’t look like him, she looks exactly like me, and she ain’t got any of his temperament.” Her voice lowered; this, the deepest of secrets, to be revealed, she bent forward again, confiding. “Now, you know I ain’t a Catholic, but there’s times when I think they got something, like with Mary. I’m not saying Monina was born the same way they claim for Jesus, but you know it might have been a similar kind of thing, the doctors are always discovering new secrets, and who’s to say?” Reflectively, sensuously, she caressed her arm, her large blue eyes staring at me in calculated innocence.

I offered my small fagot. “Lots of odd things happen.”

“That’s what I think. There’s always something fishy going on. If I was to tell you some of the things that happened in this house. You know I just can’t keep up with it all, and I’m supposed to keep a lookout.”