“Yes, thanks,” said Sissy. She did feel more comfortable, but she also felt as if she should apologize for not having on a brassiere. Bra hooks can test the most agile of thumbs, as many a frustrated boy will testify, and Sissy had been unable to wear that garment whose name in French means, enigmatically, “arm protector,” since she had left her mama. Light seeping in from a crack in the bathroom door gave a strawberry sheen to her gumdrop-shaped nipples. She hoped she wasn't embarrassing these nice people.
Oh my goodness, she must have been, for in a second Marie slipped out of her own brassiere—in an effort, obviously, to make Sissy feel less conspicuous.
Marie moved her bare bosom close to Sissy's. The two sets of nipples stiffened in formal greeting, like diplomats from small nations. “Mine are fuller but yours are more perfectly shaped,” observed Marie. She leaned closer. The envoys exchanged state secrets.
“Highly debatable,” said Howard. “I'll wager they're the exact same size.” Judiciously, in the spirit of fair play that characterizes his profession, he cupped his left hand about a Marie breast and his right about one of Sissy's.
He weighed them in his palms, squeezed them the way an honest grocer squeezes excess water from a lettuce, let his spread fingers sample their circumference. “Hmmm. Yours
are
larger, Marie, but Miss Hankshaw's—Sissy's—are more firm. You'd think they would have started to droop; I mean, from not wearing a bra.”
“Howard! Watch your manners. You've made her blush. Here, Sissy, let
me
compare.” Marie seized Sissy's free breast, quickly, like a monkey picking a fruit, rolling it about in her hungry little fingers, rubbing it against her chin and cheeks.
Now, Sissy became more awake. Consciousness returned and when it unpacked its bags, there was suspicion in them. She shouldn't be staying, uninvited, in the bedroom of an ill man with whom she'd scarcely spoken. She ought to get back to the Countess's. Did Mr. and Mrs. Barth have her best interests at heart? She had been so relieved to get out of that dress that she hadn't considered hanky-panky. She wondered if this friendly couple could be up to something?
Her question was answered by a hand—she was not sure whose—creeping into her panties. She tried to turn away from its probings, but her cunt, without her knowledge or permission, had grown quite slippery, and a finger fell into it almost as if by accident.
Lowered steadily, like a flag at sunset, her panties were soon below her knees. She thought she felt a second finger slish into her pussy, but before that could be confirmed, still another finger muscled up her asshole . . . and . . . ohhh. It was like her early days as a hitchhiker. It was nostalgic; it was disgusting; it was . . . ohhh.
Philosophers, poets, painters and scholars, debate all you want on the nature of beauty!
Tropical plums. Wine in a rowboat. Clouds, babies and Buddhas, resembling one another. Bicycle bells. Honeysuckle. Parachutes. Shooting stars seen through lace curtains. A silver radio that attracts butterflies; a déjà that just won't quit vuing. Han-shan wrote, after a moment of ecstasy, “This place is finer than the place I live!”
Across Sissy's lips passed Marie's tongue, then Howard's tongue, then Marie's titty, then Howard's . . . then Howard's . . . Howard's . . . !!! One by one, like apartments in a new high-rise, orifices were being filled.
Anima mixed with animus. It was Marie who was climbing her, sliding around on her, pulling down her own panties with a wild hand. Marie nuzzled Sissy's calves, then her thighs. Marie's mouth, oozing hot saliva, apparently had a destination. But before it could be reached, Howard entered his wife from the rear.
Ah, sir penis, that old show-stopper! Chalk up another stolen scene for the one-eyed matinée idol. Marie could not suck for groaning.
Like a disc jockey from Paradise, Howard flipped Marie over and played her B side. Every now and again, he reached for Sissy, attempting to include her, but certain laws of physics insisted on being obeyed. Over and over, Marie called Sissy's name, but her eyes were half-closed and her caresses blind and scattered.
The Barths were really going at it. It would tax a day's output at the Countess's factory to quell the spreading funk in that room. Marie was kind of yowling, sounding so much like a cat that the poodle in the kitchen began to grrr. God knows what the birds in their cage were thinking.
“So this is what it's like,” thought Sissy. Fascinated, she propped herself up on her elbows to observe. Often she had imagined the act, but she was never entirely sure she imagined it correctly, not even after that evening of embracing Kerouac in a Colorado corn field. “So this is what it's
really
like.” The Great Secret could be returned to its bottle. Perceptual transformations were no longer necessary. This truly
was
educational.
In truth, Sissy found it more interesting than the canoe races at LaConner, Washington, more interesting than the San Andreas Fault, or Niagara Falls, or Bonnie and Clyde State Park, or Tapioca State Pudding—of course, Sissy never was one for sightseeing. She even found it more interesting than the Tobacco Festival, although not so much a challenge to the wiles of her thumbs.
Before the performance was over, however, and to Howard and Marie's dismay, Sissy debedded on a particularly high bounce and walked out. She pattered to the living room couch and crawled under the cover with Julian. There she stayed three days.
25.
THEY HAD A LOT TO TALK ABOUT.
Julian was still in his formal trousers, cummerbund attached, while Sissy was nude as she had ever been, and was smeared, besides, with those feminine juices, both her own and Marie's, that gave the Countess nose trouble—but the sofa-mates refused to let those differences stand in their way; they had a lot to talk about and there were larger differences than dress.
It would seem that Julian Gitche had dealt with the world by combining pigment with water in varying viscosities and making it spread, leak, splash, pour, spray, soak or fold onto a chosen paper format in selected tones, hues, volumes, shapes and lines. Sissy Hankshaw had dealt with the world by hitchhiking with a dedication, perspective and style such as the world had never seen. It was as befuddling to Sissy that an Indian would spend his life painting genteel watercolors in a bourgeois milieu as it was mind-wrenching to Julian that a bright, pretty, if slightly afflicted, young woman with a promising modeling career would spend hers endlessly hitchhiking.
“You have a romantic concept of Indians,” said Julian. “They are people, like any other; a people whose time has passed. I see no virtue in wallowing in the past, especially a past that was more often miserable than not. I am a Mohawk Indian in the same sense that Spiro Agnew is a Greek: a descendant, nothing more. And believe me, the Mohawk never approximated the glory that was Greece. My grandfather was one of the first Mohawks to work as a steel-rigger in New York City; you know Mohawks are used extensively on sky-scraper construction because they have no fear of height. My dad helped build the Empire State Building. Later, he founded his own steeplejack service, and despite prejudices against him by the unions and so forth for being an uppity redskin, he made a great deal of money. Enough to send me to Yale. I have a masters degree in fine arts and fairly good connections in Manhattan art circles. Primitive cultures, Indian or otherwise, hold a minimum of attraction for me. I cherish the firm order of symmetry that marks Western civilization off from the more heterogeneous, random societies in an imperfect world.”
In the limited space of the sofa, Sissy turned over, dinging one of her Howard-and-Marie accentuated nipples against one of Julian's shirt studs. “I don't know anything about this order and symmetry business. I'm a high school dropout from a race—the Poor White Trash race—that has done nothing for ten centuries but pick up rocks, hoe weeds, sweat in factories and march off to war whenever told to; and each generation has begot a smaller potato patch. But I've spent some time in libraries, not all of it asleep, and I have learned this: every civilized culture in history has discriminated against its abnormal members. 'Schizophrenia' is a civilized Western term, and so are 'witch' and 'misfit'—terms used to rationalize the cruel and unusual punishments doled out to extraordinary people. Yet the American Indian tribes, as you ought to know, treated their freaks as special beings.
Their
schizoids were recognized as having a gift, the power of visions, and were revered for it. The physically deformed were also regarded as favorites of the Great Spirit, welcome reliefs to the monotony of anatomical regularity, and everybody loved them, enjoyed them and paid them favor. In that ancient Greece that you find so glorious, somebody like me would have been killed at birth.”
“Now, Sissy, you're being overly sensitive and defensive. You saw how you were treated last night by my highly civilized friends. Why, not one of us even looked at your . . . your . . . your . . . thumbs.”
“Exactly my point,” said Sissy.
And so that argument went. The other one went something like this.
“Aside from everything else, Sissy, I fail to see how you've even survived. My God! A girl, alone, on the roads, for years. And not killed or injured or outraged or taken sick.”
“Women are tough and rather coarse. They were built for the raw, crude work of bearing children. You'd be amazed at what they can do when they divert that baby-hatching energy into some other enterprise.”
“Okay, that may well be true. But what an enterprise! Hitchhiking. Bumming rides. I think of hitchhiking I think of college kids, servicemen and penniless hippies. I think of punks in oily denims and maniacs with butcher knives hidden in their wad of rumpled belongings . . .”
“I've been told that I looked like an angel beside the highway.”
“Oh, I'm sure you are a beautiful exception to the rule. But why? Why bother? You've traveled your whole life without destination. You move but you have no direction.”
“What is the 'direction' of the Earth in its journey; where are the atoms 'going' when they spin?”
“There's an orderly pattern, some ultimate purpose in the movements of Nature. You've been constantly on the move for nearly twelve years. Tell me one thing that you've proven.”
“I've proven that people aren't trees, so it is false when they speak of roots.”
“Aimless . . .”
“Not aimless. Not in the least. It's just that my aims are different from most. There are plenty of aimless people on the road, all right. People who hitchhike from kicks to kicks, restlessly, searching for something: looking for America, as Jack Kerouac put it, or looking for themselves, or looking for some relation between America and themselves. But I'm not looking for anything. I've
found
something.”
“What is it that you've found?”
“Hitchhiking.”
That stopped Julian for a while, but on the second day, long after Howard and Marie had tiptoed out of his apartment, he returned to the subject. He could not appreciate Sissy's accomplishments. So what if she had once flagged down thirty-four cars in succession without a miss? What merit in the feat of crossing Texas blindfolded in cyclone season with a parakeet on her thumb? He viewed such deeds as pathetically, sophomorically, wanton. He shook his unpainted and featherless head sadly when he considered the police record (arrests for vagrancy, illegal solicitation of rides and, ironically, suspicion of prostitution) of an essentially respectable woman.
So effectively did he chide her about it that a vaguely guilty gloom arrived in her eyes, its cold feet shuffling in the dampness there. He wrung sniffles out of her, and when she was appropriately unhappy, he comforted her. He held her tightly in protective arms, built a castle around her, dug a moat, raised the drawbridge. Only her mama had ever held her like that, cooing in her ear. He petted her with poodle-petting hands, so soft they could get splinters from eating with chopsticks. He cuddled her as if she were an infant. He insulated her bare wires. And she, Sissy, who had slept in the excesses of every season, uncared for and without a care, snuggled down deeply in Julian's paternal tenderness and let herself be coddled.
It was at this point—Julian cooing, Sissy purring—that the magic that had attended her thumbs from the moment in her youth when she first made her commitment to a life less shallow, safe and small than our society demands of us, excused itself, tiptoed out of the apartment like Howard and Marie and strolled down to Stanley's Bar on Avenue B for a beer.
Beer does not satisfy magic, however. So the magic ordered a round of Harvey Wallbangers. But it takes more than vodka to fuel magic. It takes risks. It takes
EXTREMES
.
COWGIRL INTERLUDE (DELORES DEL RUBY)
Some folks said she had scaled a convent wall in San Antonio and run away with a Mexican circus. Others claimed she had been the favored daughter of a prominent Creole family in New Orleans, until she got mixed up with an alligator cult that practiced peyoteism. Still others said she was Gypsy, through and through, while one source insisted that—like so many “Spanish” dancers—she was actually Italian or Jewish, and had picked up her routines watching Zorro on television in the Bronx.
One thing all the cowgirls agreed on, however, was that their forewoman flicked an educated lash, so none disputed the story that she had acquired her first whip when she was five years old, a gift from an uncle who had said, upon presentation, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”
The day Delores del Ruby arrived at the Rubber Rose, a snake crawled across the dusty road that led to the ranch, carrying a card under its forked tongue. The card was the queen of spades.
26.
EACH TIME HE GOT UP,
whether it was to go to the bathroom or feed his pets, Julian had removed an article of clothing, so that now, on the third day of their sofaing, he was nearly as naked as she.
The smack of kisses sounded with increasing frequency in the room; discussions and naps were of shorter duration. After she had broken down and surrendered to his protective ministrations, the last faint traces of his asthma evaporated like moth pee off a sixty-watt bulb and he found himself host to an erection.