Nice, she thought. I have become an economic seductress. I am expected to give my all for Cable Howard. And they call the streetwalkers names and arrest them. Beautiful, modem morality.
She looked at herself framed in the six lights that encircled the vanity mirror, concentrated on getting the left false eyelash properly fixed, then steadied her hand to apply the black eyeliner that gave her the final naive touch and sat back, satisfied.
Pretty, she mused. I'm all sleekly feminine, grossly beautiful and the perfect target of attack. Bait. A lousy piece of bait. Fifteen thousand a year and expenses to draw the suckers into the net. A bonus when S.C. thought the job was worth it. What happened, Sharon? You used to be a little country girl smothered in ideals, with starry eyes. You liked the smell of cut grass and the wind coming off the ocean. You collected seashells and bugs, then one day you grew up and the bull dike editor from
Future
called you in to do some more teen-age modeling, saw the change and did the spread that got Cable Howard Productions to pick you up for that sun-fun picture. Oh, you were great, little sexpot, only you didn't like to have to walk the plank of assistant directors and fat-lipped agents who had been mail room clerks the year before. Your Coke bottle made old S.C.'s ears ring and he thought you were cute enough to work out your option on his staff ... except that you did your work a little too well and here you were.
She got up, posed in front of the full-length mirror, a naked, overgrown pixie. “I still like me,” she whispered. “At least there's still one thing left.”
The lovely, tanned image stared back at her, its eyes traversing the curves of her body, then meeting her eyes with a direct, peculiar stare. “I have a funny feeling,” she said.
The image looked back without saying anything. Then, slowly, it smiled.
Â
The invitation had said six thirty, and Sharon was fashionably late, two propositions and a champagne cocktail down, a roomful of people to say hello to still and a conversation with Raul Fucia to contend with. Somehow she couldn't remember how it started, but she pulled herself back from thoughts that were too many years old into the near-mesmerizing voice of the sensually lean man beside her.
“But, my dear, women are the
true
predators. They are the ones who do the ... how do you say it? ... the prowling. The men simply make themselves available when they desire to.”
“Your attitude is a little too European, Mr. Fucia.”
“Please, call me Raul ... and my attitude is only universal. The masculine viewpoint, and especially true here in New York.”
“We New Yorkers pride ourselves on being rather sophisticated. I don't think it's true at all.”
“Oh? Then look around you. See the men? They stand and let themselves be surrounded. They listen to the overtures, gauge the quality of the bodies and select the one they believe will be most appreciative of their favors. Already there has been some discreet pairing off.”
“Regular cocktail party routine, Raul. Same people, just a different time and place.”
“No, my dear, not routine at all. The women vie. Yes, they vie. They beg, they implore, they demand. Unlike the animal world, it is the women who compete in style and showy displays of flesh to entice the opposite sex into accepting their advances. For instance, look at yourself.”
Sharon turned and looked at him, smiling wryly. “I seem to be on the conservative side, don't I?”
The smile he returned was deliberate, eyes dropping beneath the level of her own. “Not really,” he said. “Assuming that professional women are all properly coiffed and made up, carefully tailored and impeccably mannered, can you explain why you are not wearing a brassiere, nor why neither seam nor hem of undergarment shows beneath that silken Pucci minisheath you're wearing? Except for your dress and shoes, you are completely naked, and when you stand erect certain basic hirsute attributes are proudly evident despite the outer covering.”
“I didn't think it showed,” Sharon said. She knew the red was showing on her shoulders, but the blush wasn't in the casual tone of her voice.
“Perhaps I have a more experienced eye than most. And perhaps I think you are lying. You
do
know it shows.”
“Then you shouldn't be looking in that direction.”
“Why not? It is the reason for your ... undressed appearance. Flaunting the female plumage, no? An admirable approach. I am thoroughly enchanted. And why not? Your skin is flawless, your physique perfect. Of all the women in the room, your breasts are by far most suited for their purpose. Large enough to be the objects of attention, to sustain themselves without implementation, yet not so large as to interfere with more important actions.”
“Is sex all that you have on your mind?” she asked him. His half-shaded eyes unveiled themselves momentarily in surprise and she was pleased that her voice had held no expression of excitement he had deliberately tried to implant in her.
“That is generally true,” he told her. “Can you suggest something that should take precedence?” He sipped his drink and waited for her answer.
“Try gainful employment.”
Raul shrugged and smiled again. “Hardly necessary. I am quite wealthy. Working for more would only be a pretense. I would rather spend my time and energy working on you, my dear. You interest me immensely.”
“For what purpose?”
“The ultimate purpose,” he said, “of taking you to bed with me, totally naked and ready for the unlimited capacity of Raul Fucia. Your enjoyment of my efforts would be profuse.”
Sharon let her eyes range over him, then her teeth glinted in a small grin. “I'm afraid I'd be a disappointment to you, Raul. You see, I'm quite virginal.”
“Lovely,” he said. “A woman virginal in spirit is a wonder to behold.”
“In body, my friend. I'm a complete maidenheaded virgin. How about that?”
There was no denying the tone of her voice at all this time. She had calculated it to perfection without any effort at all and for a moment nearly enjoyed the consternation that showed in his face.
“Impossible!”
“Not so impossible. I've just never been laid, that's all. I never met a man I wanted to get that close to. Simple, when you consider it.”
He put the drink down, pulled up the ottoman beside her and sat down quickly, his hand reaching for hers. She let him take it without resisting. “Then, by all means, you must have me. I insist, you must!”
“Why?”
“Because the initial experience has to be a momentous occasion. Only a man of experience can ...”
“Raul ... balls. When I want to, I'll go. Not before. You're not the man either.”
“But you have not seen me.”
“You're beginning to show, Raul. The thought of a possible virgin in your life was a little too much. Was that why you sat down?”
“My dear Sharon ...”
“I've been around, my fine foreign friend. I've necked, petted and experienced orgasm. I've engaged in a few sexual episodes that produced the proper physical pleasures and enjoyed it and I'll probably do more of the same again when I want to. I know all the tricks, positions and erogenous zones and I'll be a real terror when the time comes. Only right now I still have the little goodie that makes me an unpenetrated virgin and I'm going to keep it that way.”
She felt his hand slip away from hers slowly, his eyes uncertain. “You are a ... a ...”
“Lesbian?”
He nodded.
“No, though I allowed myself the pleasure of experimenting in that direction several times. Does that startle you?”
Apparently it did. The bewilderment touched his mouth and he reached for his drink again. “But ... when you could have had a man ...”
“I have,” she said firmly, “but not in the primary circumstance. I have felt and tasted several men. There was great mutual enjoyment. Have I been explicit enough? There has even been penetration of another nature I found extremely satisfactory. So no, I am not a Lesbian, I am not frigid, I am not sexually abnormal. I am simply hanging on to an asset a man might consider quite valuable someday.”
Raul finished the drink, found an empty spot on the end table beside him and put the glass down. “American women,” he said. “You are quite shocking.”
“At my age I can afford to be,” Sharon told him. She deliberately leaned forward, knowing he was able to see the full sweep of her breasts beneath her dress in the movement. The slippery feel of the fabric made her nipples thrust forward prominently. “Now, why don't you practice your erection on someone more appreciative.”
Somehow he managed to contain his frustration and rose to bow in a continental manner. She took his fingers in a gentle handshake. “I feel sorry for you, Sharon Cass,” he said.
She smiled again, a flash of amusement in her eyes. “I feel sorry for you, Raul. You know what you are missing and there is no possible chance of getting it at all.”
“Not quite true, my dear.”
“Quite
true, Raul. I would deball you before you could rape me. My thirty-two years have been very athletic and, like I said, I know all the tricks ... even those.”
His exit was graceful, she thought, for someone who had to revise all his thinking. Tonight he'd have some woman tucked under silken sheets next to him, wondering if somewhere along the primrose path he had lost his touch. His performance wouldn't be up to par at all and tomorrow he'd begin to worry. So he'd try for her again and lose the battle again and the decline would begin. Like the gross income chart on S. C. Cable's wall behind his desk.
“Would you really deball him?”
It was a funny voice, oddly scratchy with a strange accent she couldn't quite place, a Brooklyn voice with the New Yorkese deliberately rubbed out. She half turned and looked at him, then smiled because he was out of place somehow and she couldn't tell why either. She let all the reasons compute in her analytical mind and decided that he was too big in the shoulders and chest for one thing, and his hair too short for another. It was what they used to call a crew cut. His black suit was new, but molded from a different era, as if he were conscious of only one style and couldn't care less for what the “in” crowd had adopted. He looks like an eagle, she thought.
Suddenly she was back in front of the mirror again. She felt the tiny blonde hairs rise on the backs of her forearms and a prickle go across her shoulders. It was like dropping into an abstract vortex of time and sound and colors she couldn't understand at all. Her stomach muscles seemed to tighten until juices were being squeezed right out of her. Inside her mind a faraway voice said, “I have a funny, funny feeling.” And she answered back, “No. It's silly and childish. It never will really happen.”
“Well?” he asked.
“It wouldn't have been very difficult.”
“Your destruction of the boy was, a little more practical,” he said.
“I didn't think there was an eavesdropper.”
“Hell, kid, I wouldn't miss a scene like that for the world. I was envying his approach until you dropped him. You really mean all that stuff?”
A curious laugh escaped Sharon's lips. “Yes. It was all true.”
“Even about being a virgin?”
“Does it sound odd?”
This time he grinned and shrugged, toasting her with his drink. “Sounds crazy, kid, but it's your game.”
She wondered where he had found a beer in Walt Gentry's supply. It was something Walt only brought in for his slumming parties. “What's
your
game, Mr....”
“Kelly. My first name's a beaut. It's D-O-G-E-R-O-N, but people call me Dog. I don't take offense.”
But it did happen. It was too quick, too fast and she wasn't prepare for it. It was the bomb blowing up in your face before you even had the time set for it. It was the world rocking to a standstill when a second before it was serene and placid. It was a chasm opening under your feet while you were walking up a beautiful path lined with flowers and happiness and the sense of accomplishment. Discipline and self-denial reacted before she was aware of it ... ages of fighting the battle of the sexes brought out the instinctive armor of words and demeanor. And always that little thought ... she could be wrong. The chances were that she was.
Forget it, little blonde girl. Coincidences do happen and it's hard to remember anymore. That was all a long time ago and you've romanticized the image. You've held on to a stupid dream too long and now it's starting to show. Like the time two years ago when he turned out to be a Brazilian engineer with ten kids. And the seaman on the Esso tanker with the same name. Only he was sixty-three and a grandfather. There is no real Dogeron Kelly. You left him there at the train station and now he's dead. The whole family says so.
“So Dog's your name, but what's your game, Mr. Kelly? You look like a cop. Are you?”
He shook his head. “Hardly. I'm an individual entreprenuer. I do whatever is profitable and comes to hand. I'm a specialist in generalities and it would have been fun to watch you deball your friend.”
“You think I couldn't?”
He gave a tight-lipped shrug and then grinned at her. “It's not very hard. I've ticked off a few knotheads that way in my time too. It's just that it's an extreme penalty to pay.”
“For rape?” she asked quietly.
“Come on, nobody would have to rape you.”
“Now you're on a sex kick too.”
“Kid,
you
brought the subject up. I wouldn't bother raping you.”
“Oh? What would you do?”