The Secret (12 page)

I didn’t tell him but would let him discover that the Cheeks label wouldn’t be in the merchandise I supplied him and that the international-orange maillot, which was the only item distinctly identified with our name, would not be supplied.

Patrioto shook his head. “What my family has in mind is that we work together.”

“Well … I’ll have to check it out with my partner and my business advisers.”

“Okay. Who’s them?”

“My partner is Sal Nero.”

“Sal…?” He pinched up his face. “Of the Carlino family?”

I nodded. “Right.”

“And who’re your advisers?”

“Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky.”

“You’re shittin’ me,” he said, turning uglier than he already was.

I shrugged. “Call ’em.”

I did not advise my twenty-five-percent partner why I had sold the store in New Haven. I told him the town had become unfriendly and that we’d be lucky to get out of there without taking a beating. I mean, literally a beating.

And we were.

23

LEN

I realize that what I am telling of this story is set in a very different time frame from what my father is telling. I was as unconscious of the trials he and my mother endured to get their business going and expand it as I was of their experiences in World War II—until at last I prodded someone to tell me.

Sue Ellen and I were married and moved to New Haven. We rented an apartment and enrolled at Yale. I was a law student. She studied Chinese. We lived comfortably but not luxuriously in a furnished apartment. Sue Ellen was confident in my father’s generosity and was never surprised when his monthly check arrived. Her family were generous with gifts that arrived irregularly, but we lived on my father’s subsidy.

I was curious as to why there was no Cheeks store in New Haven. There was one in Hartford, one in Providence, three in Boston, but none in New Haven, which I would have thought an ideal market. I asked my father why, and he told me.

I went to the location where the store had been. It was occupied by a pool hall. I made a few casual inquiries and learned that—

—The store had changed its name and operated under new management for about a year, at which time it closed—which pleased me because it demonstrated that my father and mother had not just achieved something anyone could achieve but had used their brains and built a business others could not build.

—Betty Logan, now a woman of sixty-five or so, was still a procuress. She worked under the dominion of the Patrioto family, which appreciated her expertise and took half her earnings. She made her living in a way that afforded her no Social Security, no medical insurance, no retirement benefits, and no future but to do what she could as best as she could as long as she could. Her girls were not terribly pretty, but they were skilled at what they did and were happy with the money. What was more, she had taught them her specialty: making a john believe he had a Yale or Quinnipiac girl in the sack and glad to do anything he might want of her. Betty Logan was a merchandising genius. If she had chosen to sell some other line, God knows what she could have been. I never met her, though later I would have a most indirect contact with her. I have not ceased to be curious about her and regret that my father so airily dismissed her when he was telling his story. She must have been a smart, brave woman.

—Since his contact with my father, Alberto Patrioto had served a four-year term in the federal prison in Danbury, for tax evasion, but was now the Patrioto godfather, with authority over all New England. His term in prison had not diminished his authority. If anything, it had augmented it, and no one questioned him.

I didn’t press my father on why he didn’t open a
new
store in New Haven. He had a personal distaste for the town. He disliked New Haven for reasons beyond his Betty Logan experience. I never have learned what they were.

*   *   *

I had to warn Sue Ellen about Betty. My wife’s conspicuous boobs and taut, bouncy butt, plus the fact that she was genuinely a Yale graduate student and could talk about what she was studying, made her a prime target for Betty Logan. She would fetch a premium price.

I didn’t have to worry about Sue Ellen going into the trade. She had firm ideas about that. Happy to give and receive much and varied sex herself, she obsessively condemned merchandising it. In fact, she reserved—but I knew it was there—a nagging doubt about the Cheeks merchandising operation. Clearly Sue Ellen would never go into the trade. And I mean never.

On the other hand …

Betty Logan paid her girls to recruit others. “I’ve always got more trade than I can serve,” she assured them, “so earn the pay for a trick you didn’t turn by bringing me a new girl.”

When Sue Ellen first told me she had been talked to very solemnly by a girl who suggested she think about making a whole lot of money by doing something that was not difficult at all, she laughed about it. Then suddenly the crusader in her reared its head.

“How
could
she?”

She meant, how could her new friend—like herself, a student of Chinese—sell her body? It was unthinkable! The whole idea was abhorrent to Sue Ellen.

She decided to save Mollie from Mollie—actually, from Betty Logan, though she had not yet heard of her.

When I met Mollie, I judged that what she looked for from the men who bought her was not so much the money but acceptance and approval, even admiration. She was a graduate student, as was Sue Ellen, and she had come to Yale from Mount Holyoke, to there from Sacred Heart in Greenwich. You could see when you looked at her that she had never attracted dates.

If two words could describe Mollie, those words would have to be
small
and
square.
Her little face was square, framed by carelessly cut, dishwater-blond hair. Her eyes behind her little, round steel-rimmed spectacles were blue, her nose short and flat, her mouth wide and thin. She wore blue jeans stretched tight over her broad hips and generous ass, with sweatshirts draped over her round breasts.

She had a pleasant personality. That she was anxious to please came across from the moment you met her. It was an appealing anxiety, and it would have been difficult not to like her. It was difficult to think that this innocent-looking, small, square girl turned tricks. That it
was
difficult to imagine was part of her appeal. A john could fantasize that he was seducing a horny, adventuresome virgin.

Sue Ellen and I had our apartment. So did Mollie, sharing hers with another woman graduate student. Sue Ellen took to inviting Mollie for dinner one evening a week, usually Friday. Mollie would bring wine and a dessert, and Sue Ellen, typically, would prepare a platter of one or another type of pasta. Sue Ellen had made herself a close friend to Mollie and was trying with some degree of subtlety to lure her out of prostitution.

Mollie was no fool. She knew what Sue Ellen was trying to do and was amused by it.

I came in from the law library early one Friday evening to find my wife and her new best friend bare-breasted. Sue Ellen’s nipple clips were on Mollie’s nipples, and her emerald pendant hung between Mollie’s melonlike boobs.

“When I told her about them, she asked if she could try them.”

Mollie was not embarrassed. She had no sense of modesty whatever. We were friends, and she knew that I knew she played for pay. If she was flustered, it was not because I was staring at her naked tits but because she was wearing Sue Ellen’s clips, chain, and pendant, which she knew were a gift from my father.

For myself, I was dumbfounded, not just to see my wife’s jeweled clips hanging between another woman’s tits but to see both of them with their hooters naked.

She started to take one of the clips off, but I shook my head and said, “No. Leave them on awhile. It looks almost as good on you as it does on Sue Ellen.”

I reached down and gave a short, gentle tug on the chain. Her nipple stretched, but the clip did not come off, as I had known it wouldn’t.

“They’re
nice,
Len. I’d give anything to have a pair of my own.”

I called my father and asked him to send me another set of nipple clips and chain. I told him why. A package arrived a couple of days later. These clips were not like the loops of platinum wire, tightened by little slide rings, that Sue Ellen wore. These were
clamps,
spring-loaded. They did not loop around the erect nipple the way the wire clips did. No. They were alligator clips with soft rubber sheathing over the teeth, and they pinched. The chain between them was not fine jewelry chain but stainless steel chain with links almost a quarter of an inch in diameter.

Mollie took off her sweater and bra, squeezed the clamps to open them, and let them close, pinching her nipples and distorting them. Sue Ellen winced, but Mollie threw back her shoulders and shoved her boobs forward. Mollie was game. These clips hurt—though not very much—and I wonder if in fact the pain didn’t arouse Mollie.

That evening at dinner my wife and her new best friend sat at the table with tits out, chains swinging between their nipples. What was coming was obvious.

I had mixed feelings. It was some kind of privilege to have two bare-titted young women at dinner. I can’t deny it gave me a hard-on. But it was going to change the nature of my marriage. That was unavoidable, and I had to wonder what was coming and what I should do.

24

I came home one afternoon and found Sue Ellen wearing a dog collar. It was a heavy leather collar, suitable maybe for a Great Dane or some such breed: a dog big and strong and heavy. The prong of the buckle ended in a little loop, through which passed the shackle of a tiny laminated padlock. The collar could not be removed except by opening the lock—or cutting the leather. She smiled coyly and handed me a key.

“There y’are, lover.”

It was Mollie’s idea. Whenever Mollie went out to meet a john she wore a dog collar. It turned them on. It would turn me on, she had promised Sue Ellen—

“Hey! Every guy dreams of making a slave of his girl. So … let ’em think so! I guarantee it’ll turn him on.”

Well … I have to admit it did. And after that Sue Ellen wore the collar whenever we were at home alone. She even wore it outside the apartment sometimes—under a turtleneck. It turned her on more than it did me.

The simple truth was, Sue Ellen’s erotic tastes were more varied than mine.

Sue Ellen was determined to exert an influence over Mollie, to get her to quit turning tricks. Mollie didn’t need the money. She did it for her personal satisfaction. She mistook the passion men showed her for affection.

Well … they had their fantasies about Mollie, that they were seducing an innocent college girl and so on. Why should she not have hers—that some of them, at least, really cared for her and were not just using her as a receptacle?

Mollie admitted that she worked for Betty Logan.

“She’d get very upset if I quit,” said Mollie. “She doesn’t like to lose her girls, particularly the ones who make real money—and
I
make real money.”

“Who the hell cares what she likes?” asked Sue Ellen. “Piss on the old bag. Anyway, what’s she gonna do about it?”

There we sat at another Friday-evening dinner: angel hair pasta with a cream sauce of shrimp and peppers and onions, laid out on a red-and-white checkered tablecloth on our scarred maple table. We ate by candlelight, the candles in two Chianti bottles we had emptied sometime earlier. Both girls were bare-titted, with chains swinging between their nipples.

Sue Ellen could not endure Mollie’s clamps for more than an hour, but Mollie took grim pride in enduring them, even though they pinched as Sue Ellen’s loops did not. I had become hesitant about expressing sympathy, knowing it would make no difference.

“Mollie says I don’t give you a good blow job,” said Sue Ellen abruptly.

“I haven’t complained,” I said. The fact was, she didn’t much like to do it and didn’t do it often. “I … have no complaint.”

“You might have a complaint, if you’d ever had head from a real pro,” said Mollie.

“Okay, I might, but I’m married to Sue Ellen, and she—”

“Listen to her, Len!” Sue Ellen protested. “Don’t talk so much. Just listen.”

“Well…” said Mollie. She shrugged. “I can teach her, but I can’t teach her by sucking my thumb. I need a cock.”

In my life I have been surprised. I have never been more surprised than when Sue Ellen agreed to take a cock-sucking lesson from Mollie—I supplying the cock. Imagine, for God’s sake!

“It’s all I do, just about,” said Mollie. “Hey, I turn two, three tricks a week, once in a while four. I don’t spread my legs once a month. Which is okay with me. Giving head … no sweaty weight bearing down on my body, no pounding into me, no sore afterwards. I’ve suggested to Betty she tell guys I give blow jobs only.”

“Jesus, Mollie…” Sue Ellen murmured. “I mean—”

“You mean it’s
humiliating
to put your face down in a guy’s crotch and suck and lick his cock. Well—okay, you better believe it is. It’s demeaning. But if you’re gonna sell yourself for money you’re better off sucking than fucking, believe me. Put your goddamned pride away. There isn’t any in what I do.”

“But with my husband?”

“Why not make him happy? You can make him happier this way than by spreading yourself and letting him pound it into you.”

“Well…”

“C’mon.”

They guided me down to the floor, pulled my pants and underpants down below my knees, and Mollie solemnly lectured Sue Ellen as she worked.

“First thing to do is suck it in, as much of it as you can. But don’t gag yourself. Use your tongue and your lips. They’re your tools, and every skilled worker has to know how to use the tools of the trade.”

I didn’t know how my wife, Sue Ellen, would react when she realized that the square little Mollie could lift me to heights I hadn’t realized were there.

The lecture went on.

“Now lick down here. No man I ever knew came from having his balls licked, but it does get ’em ready. And up and down the shaft. It’s licking, not sucking, that does the job.”