I knew that I should leave that place now and go somewhere else, because it wasn't any good that night. The trouble was that it wouldn't be any better anyplace else, and I knew that too, but I didn't want to stay there any longer. Part of it was that I was getting a little drunk and drunks always depress me; and part of it was that I wasn't getting anywhere near drunk enough. The real trouble was not the people and not the talk, although god knows they were both pretty bad that night, but just that I was seeing too much sense in everything. I was beginning to wonder again what in hell had happened to my life when I wasn't looking, and where everything had gone. It was one of those panicky moods that used to send me back to my room and my typewriter to put a few eternal verities on paper, as though if I didn't get it said I might forget it, but I had found out that when I did that I was usually too drunk to write, and when I read it over the next day it never was what I had wanted it to be. After I had tried that a few times I didn't do it any more, and every time now that somebody tells me that so-and-so does his best work when he is drunk I can be damned certain that so-and-so isn't worth reading. Trying to write when you are drunk is like climbing into bed with a cunt when you are too drunk to get a hard on; if anything at all happens in either case you are lucky, and if you end up with something pretty good you always know that if you hadn't been drunk it would have been better. So I knew that I wasn't going back to my room to work. I was just going there because there wasn't any better place to be.
Uncle Gino was at the bar when I went through on my way out of his place, and he said hello to me the way he always did when I was going out. He never spoke to anybody when they came in, but when they were going out he seemed to notice them for the first time, and if you weren't on to the trick you stopped and talked to him, and because he talked to you over the bar you usually bought at least one more drink. I don't know how many extra drinks he sold in a night that way, but he must have sold some, because he never gave up that trick so far as I know. None of the regular trade paid any attention to him, of course, and I went on through the bar without stopping and went out to the street.
It was raining worse than it had been earlier in the evening, and I stopped by the doorway to turn up my coat collar. Then I saw her standing there. It was Ruth, and she looked as though she had been standing there for hours.
“Toby threw me out,” she said.
“Get the hell out of here. I'm not having any,” I said.
“It's for good this time. He locked me out and won't even let me in to get a toothbrush.”
“I don't know anything about it. I don't want to know anything. To hell with it. You knew about Toby when you went with him. I don't want to hear your hard-luck story.”
It was raining so hard that the water was running off my hat in a stream. Water was dripping down the back of my neck too, and when I pulled my collar closer it was clammy on my skin. I looked at Ruth standing there in that puddle, and I wondered how long she had been there waiting for me to come out of Uncle's.
“I haven't got any money,” she told me. There isn't any place I can go.”
I stepped back in the doorway where there was some light, but all I had left was about forty-five cents in change. Poppa wouldn't cash a check, either.
“To hell with you then,” Ruth said.
She started to go off down the street. I looked after her for a minute, and then I followed her.
“You'll have to go someplace else tomorrow,” I said. “I don't want you around my place longer than that.”
I had a feeling that I was doing something very foolish to let her stay there even for the night, and if I had waited there in the doorway a while longer I probably wouldn't have gone after her that way, and the whole thing would have been finished and over with, the way it should have been when she left me to live with the fairy, but now that I had told her she could stay that night I couldn't change my mind. We walked over to the street car line, and once on the way she put her arm in mine the way she had always done, but she took it off almost at once. We didn't say anything, not then nor while we were waiting for the trolley. When the car finally came we got a seat near the back and Ruth tried to look out of the window and I read the car ads until we got to my comer.
The landlady had put up some clean curtains for me; except for that, the two rooms were just about the same as they had been when Ruth had been there. She took the newspaper that I hadn't read yet and spread it on the floor in the corner and hung her coat so it would drip on it, and it was all just like it used to be. All but us.
I never have more than one pair of bedroom slippers at a time, but I had some old tennis shoes that I could wear, so I gave the slippers to Ruth and handed her the robe out of the closet. She put it over her arm and touched it with her fingers.
“That was the color I wanted to get you,” she said, “but I never got around to it. Did you buy it?”
I told her yes, but I didn't tell her it was because it was the one she had pointed out to me in the window one day. She lifted the robe to her nose and smelled of it.
“It smells like you,” she said.
“For god's sake, cut out the act and change your clothes,” I said.
I sat down on the chair and pulled off my wet shoes and socks. Ruth picked up my shoes and went to the closet with them. She found the shoe trees she had bought me once.
“They're just where they were when I left,” she said. “I knew that you wouldn't use them if someone didn't make you.”
“There's some stuff of yours on a shelf in there. I put it away in a box. You can take it with you tomorrow.”
Ruth watched me as I undressed and put on the extra robe. I was trying to be casual about it, but I kept remembering that she didn't come and touch me and interfere. I was conscious of my prick dangling down there, and I was conscious of my hairiness, and I put on the robe as quickly as I could. Ruth didn't say anything. She just watched me, and when I had the robe on and went to the closet to hang up my things she started to take her own clothes off. They were very wet, and everything clung to her so even when she had her slip on I could see almost every line of her body. I gave her a towel, and I should have gotten out of the room while I was still able to control what I was doing, but for some reason I didn't. I stayed and watched her rubbing her skin pink.
She looked just the same; her body seemingly slim, but with wide hips and heavy tits that jiggled with her ass when she walked or when she moved suddenly; her belly dark with a streak of hair down through the center of it. I looked at her cunt and the black froth of hair that grew around it. She was just the same, all as I remembered her. She looked up and saw me looking at her.
“Do you remember the first time I was here?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I wasn't a bit afraid. I was a virgin, too. But it was only afterward I was afraid. After you had fucked me and I forgot what it was going to do for my poetry and my soul and found out what a prick meant. Then, after a while, I was not afraid any more. And now I'm afraid again.”
There didn't seem to be any answer. Perhaps she didn't expect any. She lifted the towel above her head to dry her hair, and the movement pulled her tits up, making them flatter. They were colored from being rubbed with the towel, and the nipples stood out sharp and straight. She flung her hair back over her shoulders with a quick motion of her head, and then she hung up the towel. She stood in front of the bureau combing her hair with my comb, and I could remember a hundred times before when it had been just like that, with the two of us there, and everything almost the same as it was just then. She hadn't been away very long. Two months. Two thousand years.
“Bill,” Ruth said, 'let's go to bed now.”
“I'll need one of the blankets. I can use the pillows on the couch,” I said.
“You're acting like-Do you have to be such a prick to me?”
“I know. I'm acting like a child. Let's not fight about it. I don't feel like fighting about anything.”
“I didn't expect punishment from you.”
“I have the clap,” I said.
“If it were really that…” Ruth said. She came to the bed where I was sitting and sat down alongside me. She put her hand on my thigh and sat there with her legs crossed at the ankles and looked at me. “Let's not be silly, Bill. I want you to fuck me.”
Her legs were flattened and spread at the thighs, and the whole side of her body felt warm even through the robe I had on. I looked at her belly and the spreading hair that ran to a sharp V between her legs. A few scattering black hairs were on the inner sides of her thighs, and you could find them almost halfway to her knees. My guts burned, I wanted so much to screw her, and I couldn't kid even myself about that. I remembered Toby, the pansy, and I wondered what it had been like with them; if he had fucked her if he had even tried to fuck her, or what had happened. When I thought of that and thought of all she had been wasting on that crummy fake, I wanted more than before to fuck her myself. It might have been because he was a pansy, and it might have been because he was a fake; whichever it was, when she went off with him it had left me feeling the way you feel when music you like is stopped right in the middle. If something isn't done about it you don't feel right for a long time.
Ruth was moving her hand up and down on my leg, spreading her fingers and closing them on the muscles. I was getting a hard on, and she could see it, but she didn't try to put her hands either on my prick or under my robe. And after a minute she stopped touching my leg and lay back on the bed with her own legs apart just a little and her hands held up by her shoulders with the palms up. I sat and looked at her. I looked at her teats falling, each one, to the side and outward, and I looked at her armpits that she never shaved, and I looked up between her legs, at her cunt. I stood up and I took off the robe.
My prick wasn't hard yet. It stood out in front of me looking angry and big, but it still had a long way to go. Ruth looked at it and at me, and she put one hand out for it. I climbed across the bed, and when I got close enough her hand touched it. I sat leaning on one hand and Ruth just touched my prick. We both watched her hand moving over it and under it, and while we watched it lifted up until it was erect.
It had been a long time ago when I had taken Ruth to that room and given her the first jazzing she'd had, and a lot of things had happened since then. She had learned almost everything there is to know, and since she had been with Toby I supposed that she had learned even more than that. For a while, when I had first known her, she had fucked for Art's sweet sake, or something like that, but it hadn't taken her long to find that you can fuck just for what is in it, and she was better after that. Everybody I knew who had ever fucked her said that she was a hot lay, and what was better, an easy lay, so I decided at last that she was just a natural, and I didn't have to listen to her quoting Eliot so much after that when I was trying to get her legs apart. And even if she let every man she knew jazz her once in a while there was something that made it pretty good to be together, and when we finally got that straightened out everything had been all right with us until this affair of Toby.
I watched Ruth's face now while she played around my cock. From the way she was looking at it I knew that it would be in her mouth in a minute. The first time I had jazzed her she wouldn't suck my prick, and it had taken me several days to get her to do more than just hold it in her mouth while I shoved it back and forth. Then, when she did start to suck it the first time, she had been so worried that I might shoot it in her mouth that it wasn't as much fun as it should have been. But I was careful about that, and once she decided that she liked it there wasn't any stopping point. Then one night she had come home with her change purse full of half dollars and the knees of her stockings dirty. She didn't have any reason for it but boredom, but she had gone along the streets like a whore and propositioned every man she came across, if she liked one it was easy for her to get them to walk down an alley with her. She had even gotten a big Irish cop she came across, too, and that was the part of the story that seemed most amazing to me, because he didn't threaten to run her in if she didn't give it to him for nothing, but paid his fifty cents just like everybody else. The way she told it it was very funny, and when she told it you could really almost see the cop standing with the front of his uniform trousers unbuttoned and Ruth on her knees in the dirt of the alley, leaning against his legs with her mouth closed over the end of his cock, and I always thought that someday I would put that into a story, if I could ever find the right story for it.
The end of my prick was oozing, like clear, white blood spilling from a cut. Ruth had the stuff on her hands, and she was rubbing it onto my prick and onto my balls and then onto her own belly. Every time that she squeezed my prick some more of it spilled out, and there was always some left. She rolled close to me and put her face down on my thigh, and then when she squeezed my prick the stuff dripped down her face. It ran along her cheek, and she turned her head to make it run to the corner of her mouth. Her tongue shot out after it.
“I'm awfully glad you're normal, Bill,” she said. “I never thought of that when I was with you, but being with Toby scared me.”
“A little home in the country,” I said. “Maybe we could raise chickens and have a patch of radishes.”
“I want you to know about something, Bill. He couldn't fuck me, and he wouldn't let me have anybody else that I did want. All I could do-do you want me to tell you about it?”
“This is a hell of a time to talk about your little fag. Why don't you go back to him? Go right now.”
“I'm not going back with him. I'll think of something else to do tomorrow.”
“Balls.”
“I had to dress up like a man, and then he did something to me. I didn't even feel like a woman. It wasn't the same. It wasn't at all like when you jazz me.”
“My god, do we have to talk about that now?”
Ruth looked up from under my prick. She sat up then, and shrugged me away when I tried to push her down on her back.
“Wouldn't it be the same if I stayed with you now? Would anything be changed from what it was before I went with him? Would it?”
“It's just that I've never had anybody run out on me to live with a damned fag,” I said. “I've become a sort of a bad joke to myself.”
Ruth lay down again the way she had been, and she held my prick in her two hands and petted it. She rubbed her nose along the side of it and put the end of it up against her nostrils, smearing them with its wetness.
“My nose is shiny,” she said.
She wrinkled her nose and looked cross-eyed down at the tip of it and tried to touch it with her tongue. She rubbed the stuff off on her arm, and then she lay there and rubbed her mouth with the end of my prick until her lips had the stuff on them too. She did it carefully, using my cock like a lipstick, and painting her mouth all over with it.
“Did you ever see a man do that?” she asked. “It's awful. I hope you never have to see it. You'd want to hit somebody if you did.”
“I never hit anybody any more,” I said. “I don't want to see it, though. Did Toby have his boy friends in?”
“They were there all of the time. It seemed as though it were all of the time. I thought it would be fun to watch, but it wasn't, and I had to dress up like a man and be part of it. It wasn't fun.”
“I thought he wouldn't let you have anyone else,” I said. “Wasn't that what you said?”
“He wouldn't let me go out with anybody who could fuck. Only those damn fairies. They aren't people like anybody else. They're something apart from everything and everybody in the world.”
Ruth rubbed my prick from one side to the other over her mouth. She pushed it up by her nose and brushed it with her eyelashes, brushing the end by fluttering her eyelids.
“You don't sound very sympathetic to them,” I said. “That's just the way they are, like people being white or black. You like niggers, don't you?”
“That isn't good logic. I can't get used to hearing you call them niggers, either. If you like them so much, why don't you call them black people?”
“You wouldn't understand that. That isn't good logic either. And I don't like them so much. I just like them better than whites. I'm not exactly a negrophile.”
“Then I'm not exactly unsympathetic to Toby's friends. I don't like them, but one night when Toby came home after a truck driver had beaten him up I felt awful. I thought I loved him that night, just because of that.”
She had gotten a loose lash into her eye, and she stopped to work it out. When she had it out she began again to touch her lips with my prick, but her lips were open more, and the end rubbed on the inside of them, and against her teeth. She took her hands away and held my cock with her mouth. She put her fists on my belly, with her fingers curled under, and then worked them the way a tom-cat works his claws when he has a she under him. She wiggled her lips; then she put her tongue under the end of my prick and pushed upward. It felt good for a minute, but then it was like being caught in a slicing machine. I yanked my cock away from her mouth, and the dent marks of her teeth were there on the end.
“What the hell are you trying to do?” I said. “Is that something Toby's friends do?”
She licked the marks, and then she kissed them. She took the end in her mouth again and made her lips very wet and moved it around in them.
“I forgot,” she said. “It's because your prick is so much more like a prick. Those others didn't seem real.”
She was sitting up again, but when I pushed her back she went down. She held my cock in her hands and then put it in her mouth and then held it in her hands again.
“Is that what you did?” I asked her. “Did you go down on all of Toby's fag friends?”
She nodded her head, and she looked as though she thought I might be going to hit her.
“They thought it would be fun to jazz just for the novelty, but it didn't work with them. After they tried it once they weren't interested in that, but they wanted me to suck them off. Some of them couldn't even get a hard on when I did that. Like Toby: if I had my clothes off and looked like a woman he couldn't do anything.”
“Stop talking about Toby. Jesus Christ, you make me sick,” I said.
She knelt on the bed and took my cock in her mouth, this time all of it, and not just the end, and I watched her sucking it. She pulled my hair with her fingers, and she pulled the skin of my scrotum, and she moved her head up and down while she was sucking. Sometimes she took it out of her mouth and put the end against her face, and it kept getting redder and redder until it was almost blue. Her tits hung down with the tips like big drops of blood ready to drip from them. I put my hands under them and slid them up and down; the nipples were smooth sliding on the palms of my hands, and Ruth sucked harder when I did that to them. I couldn't get it out of my mind, the thought that probably as late as that afternoon she had been going down on a bunch of pansies.
“What in hell did they do that you could stay with Toby for so long? Do they give honey when you suck them off?” I said.
“Do you want to know?”
“No,” I said. “I want to shoot in your damn little cock sucking mouth.”
I put my legs around her and I dragged her down and held her head. Then I shot, all of it, until she was choking and sucking and swallowing all at the same time. When it was over she was gasping for breath.
I got up and got a glass of water. Now that what I had had to drink at Uncle's was wearing off I was thirsty and I was hungry, and the water was too warm, no matter how long I let it run. I took a glass of water back to the bedroom for Ruth. She was lying with her head in the pillows, and at first I thought that she was crying.
“Do you want to go out and have something to eat after a while?” I asked her.
“I'd never be hungry enough to put those wet clothes on,” she said. “You go. I'll stay here.”
I looked out of the window at the rain pouring into the street and running black along the curbs, and I decided that I wasn't hungry enough to go out into that. I sat on the bed and Ruth moved over to let me lie down next to her. When I did she held my prick in one hand and started to talk to me.
“I found out something about Toby,” she said. “You know those caricatures he does on tablecloths and at parties? I found out that he practices them first, and if you want him to do one he hasn't practiced he can't do it.”
“Shut up about Toby. I'm sorry I acted that way.”
“That was all right,” she said. “But will you be able to get another one so we can jazz?”
“Don't you ever think of anything else?”
“I do afterward, but right now I can't.”
I rolled onto her. My legs were between hers, and she was still holding my prick. She put it against her cunt. It wasn't hard at all, but it felt good to have her hold it there and rub it in her hair.
“You don't care about my cunt,” she said. “And if I wanted you to play with my tits you'd want to do something else.”
I left her tits alone and put my fingers down with hers. Everything was wet down there, and her cunt was hot.
“You have a good cunt. You have everything good, but I'm not to be jazzed. I've been that way for two months.”
“You're being maudlin,” she said, “and I don't believe you, either.”
“It wasn't the same,” I said.
“Poor darling,” she said, “have you been going with whores again? Won't you ever learn that it isn't any good that way? I'd rather have you jerk off than go with whores.”
“I haven't been going with whores. I went to bed with the same ones I went to bed with when you were here. Oh, yes: and one new one. But it wasn't the same.”
“Your cock is getting bigger. Is it because you're thinking about the new one? Who is she? Do I know her?”
“I wasn't thinking about her, and I don't know who she was. I only saw her once. I went to see Stanley and she was there with him. I don't think he knows who she is, but I'll ask him next time I see him, if you think I ought to.”
My prick continued to get hard, and when it was straight Ruth pushed my fingers away from her cunt and put the end of my prick where I had had two of them. I poked it up into her and started to jazz her.
“If you hadn't told me I might have believed you,” she said. “About the two months. You act as though it might have been that way.”
I pulled my cock out of her and it was straight up, and red and big. She grabbed it and held it for a minute and then I speared her again and she said 'oh' and closed her eyes, not exactly smiling, but showing her teeth; and I wondered how many times before this that had happened. It was all familiar, but I couldn't remember any one time that it had been just like that.
“My mother wanted me to be a lady,” she said, “and now look at me. I spend most of my time looking at somebody's ceiling. Do you think there's really any future in this?”
“The future almost caught up with me that time. If you're going to talk I won't bother to wait for you again.”
“If you shoot before I'm ready I'll cut your heart out… But a man who would do that wouldn't have any heart, would he?… Then I'd cut your balls off.”
“I'm not appreciating you,” I said.
Ruth got her feet in between my knees and yanked herself against me.
“Your god damn balls don't have anything in them anyway. You don't appreciate brilliant conversation and you don't appreciate a good jazzing. What are you good for? Don't tell me you're a writer?”
“Balls on this,” I said. “I'm going in on the couch and get some sleep.”
“I'll show you how I can really hump, then. Bury it. That's right. Don't look so funny: it isn't going to come out my ears.”
“Something is liable to come out of your ears when I shoot. It has to go someplace.”
“My belly's big enough to hold it. You can't fill it up. There isn't enough jism in the world to fill my belly tonight.”
“I'll fill it with cock.”
“One cock couldn't do that, either. Three might; three if they were big ones.”
“You never had three in you. Not all in your cunt at once.”
“I've had two,” she said. “You've seen me do that yourself.”
“I suppose you're proud of that. That's a hell of a thing to be proud of.”
She wormed her belly over mine and shook her tits in my face.
“I was respectably inhibited until you got me,” she said. “Everything I am today I owe to my good friend Bill and total abstinence from abstinence.”
I ploughed her, liking the hotness between her legs, and the feel of her legs holding me. I gave her everything, wishing it could be like that forever, but knowing that every time I shot my prick forward I was that much closer to ending it; there was no keeping still and no slowing it down; I had to keep moving, and I had to jazz her. She rubbed my sides and pulled my hair, and none of it was a fake and none of it was part of a show.
“You won't have to wait for me,” she said. “Don't bother with that. I'm going to beat you this time. There's something inside me that you're touching and if you do it just once more time it's going to happen.”
When I did it that one more time it happened to both of us, but it happened to Ruth first. I knew how she acted, and I was ready for her when she tried to fight me off, and I jazzed her and held her until she was limp and I had shot everything I had into her.
She must have been standing outside of Uncle's for a long time, because as soon as it was over she started to doze. She was so tired that I didn't try to talk to her any more that night. I helped her to get into bed, and when I got in with her I felt a lot better than I had felt since she had gone away.
Ruth was up before I was. It had always been like that; no matter how tired we were it was Ruth who got up first, and she usually had a breakfast ready by the time I got into my clothes. I was not so sleepy that morning, but I didn't get up right away. I lay in bed and watched her dress, and then I waited and watched her moving around and getting the coffee started.
“It's a good thing you don't work like other people,” Ruth said. “It would kill you to have to be someplace on time every morning.”
“I have a good idea,” I said. “Let's fuck.”
Ruth said it was too early in the morning, and she never felt like that in the morning. When I got out of bed she lifted her dress and stood still while I felt of her ass and her legs and her cunt, but I couldn't get any sympathy with the condition of my cock. She knew it was hard because I had to piss.
“I'll go over to Toby's and get your stuff,” I said when we were eating.
“That won't be pleasant,” Ruth said. “You'll feel funny about it and you'll probably want to hit him. Promise me you won't hit him!”
“Oh shit!” I said. “Come here and let me see you sit on this rail I've got.”
She came over to my side of the table, but she didn't do as I suggested. She went down on the floor and opened my pants and put the thing in her mouth.
“It tastes fishy. Why don't you wash it?”
“Because I knew you'd want to go down on it. And I'm a lazy son of a bitch.”
“That's dirty. You don't know how to treat a lady.”
“Don't I!”
She snapped it up and licked the end, and then she licked my balls. She was holding my balls in her mouth and pretending to chew them, and neither of us heard the superintendent when he walked in to collect the trash until he had closed the door. She couldn't get up quickly enough not to be seen, but he didn't seem to notice us at all. He was a half-witted Portuguese who never seemed to notice anything, and if I didn't watch him on his errand, he was liable to carry off whatever he could slip into his pockets. Ruth stood making faces at him behind his back until he went out.
“I wish you'd put the trash outside, Bill,” she said. “He gives me the creeps.”
“Women are funny. If he had noticed what you were doing you'd have been mad. Or perhaps you wouldn't. It's probably because he doesn't pay any attention to you that you don't like him.”
“I don't think he knows what a woman is for. I'm going to find out some day.”
“You have the most marvelous taste.”
She went into the bedroom then. I thought of waiting there until the mail came, because I was expecting a check, but while I was finishing my last cup of coffee I decided to see Toby before he had a chance to get out.
It was a good morning, and I walked part of the way before I caught a cab, so I was a little bit later in getting to Toby's place than I had wanted to be. But he hadn't gone out yet. He came to the door in a fancy smoking jacket and a church warden pipe hanging out of the corner of his mouth, all of it looking arty as all hell. He had grown a Van Dyke since I had seen him last.
“Hello Bill. Did Ruth send you?” he said.
I answered the first part of that and walked in. He had something set up on an easel in one corner but I didn't pay much attention to it. Toby was in a great hurry to finish something whenever you saw him, and he had something like that in his place every time I went there, but I never saw it after it was finished, and I never knew anybody who had seen anything of his that was finished.
He gave me a drink of sherry that was pretty good sherry, and then because we both knew why I was there he got a couple of bags and all of Ruth's things that he could find. All of what she had wasn't enough to fill the bags; I knew that because I had done all of this before. When she wanted to be someplace else she just packed the two bags and that was all there was to be done. When the bags had been moved she would have moved and get her mail at the new place. Then one day she would come back and I would go after the bags again, or if I didn't go after them it would be whoever was taking her next. But she always came back to me after she had been away for a while.
Toby tried to help me with the packing, but he didn't have any more idea of packing than Ruth had, and so when he had put several things in the bags and I had taken them out and put them in right he went and sat down and smoked his pipe.
“It couldn't have worked out. Ruthie and I, I mean,” Toby said.
“The Van Dyke looks silly,” I said.
Toby stroked his chin, and he looked at himself in the glass of a picture that was on the table, frowning, and holding his head on one side.
“It has its advantages,” he said.
He smiled that horrible smile that I had been afraid of seeing ever since I had known Toby. I had more or less expected that he would do it someday, but I had known him so long without ever having seen it that I had come to believe that he had enough sense to leave his friends, or the people he thought were his friends, alone.
“I like you, Billy,” he said. “I like you a great deal.”
I threw the rest of the things into the bags and snapped them shut. Toby had poured some more sherry into my glass, so I had to stay long enough to drink that, but as soon as I had finished it I took the bags and left. I was sorry that he had done that, because I was afraid that he would try it again now.
At the corner I got a taxi, and I started back to my place. But after I had gone a few blocks I saw somebody I thought looked familiar. I had the driver slow down, and it was Paul. He came over to the taxi and where had I been and how the hell was I? So I got out and sent the taxi on with the bags and Paul and I went down the street to have a drink.
Paul was playing a five-a-week gig at some place uptown, so he was in better shape than he was the last time I had seen him. The band wasn't union, but they were doing all right, and he had some money in his pockets and he was wearing a clean shirt. He told me all about it over his gin, and he was sorry to hear that I wasn't playing around any more.
I stuck to the sherry. Paul could drink an enormous amount of gin, though, and when we left the bar we were both feeling about the same. He kept talking about a new record Miles had just made, and he talked about it so much that we went down to the Music Shop to buy it, and before we got out of there I had bought more records than I could afford. Then Paul wanted me to go home with him and listen to a couple of old Coltrane records he had picked up some place.
I had never known before where Paul lived, but it was where I had expected: in an old tenement down in the heart of town. It was pretty shabby on the outside and next to an old factory. In between there was an alley and the whole length of it smelled of piss. Paul's side of it wasn't so bad as the side next to the factory. He said that a lot of winos used the place as a sort of urinal and that in the middle of the summer it was worse. I didn't notice the smell after the first few minutes, and I suppose that the people who lived there got used to it the same way you would get used to the view from a Swiss chalet and didn't notice it at all.
Paul played his Coltrane records for me, and then we played the records I had just bought, and he got a pint bottle of gin from someplace, but I still knew enough not to mix it with the sherry, so he did all of the drinking that was done. He began to show it pretty much, and he wanted to lie down; so he lay down on the couch with the bottle and the glass on the floor beside him and rolled his eyes at the music while I played the records, and then there was a girl in the room.
“My little sister, Patty,” Paul said. “Patty this is my friend, Bill.”
The girl must have been his half-sister. She was a lot lighter than Paul, and they didn't look very much alike. Paul had close, kinky hair and a flat nose and thick lips, and the girl wasn't like that. She said something to me that I didn't get because of the music, and she picked up the gin bottle, but after she had smelled of it she changed her mind about wanting a drink. She sat down and listened to the records, and Paul talked for a while and then he fell asleep.
There's only one reason why it's called jazz music, despite all the stories they have about itinerant river musicians called jabbo or jass, and even the people who don't know what it's all about can sometimes guess that. I don't suppose they could ever have gotten away with calling it fuck music, but anybody who doesn't know what jazz music is about is socially, more than musically, ignorant. For that matter, as long as we're on the subject, when I was a kid out in Chicago a shag wasn't exactly a dance.
I was speaking of Paul's sister. She sat listening to the music with me, and sometimes I would change the records and sometimes she would, and then she asked me if I would like to dance. I don't dance well, but I said I would like to dance with her. We put on a record that we didn't particularly want to listen to and we danced through that side and the other side of it. Patty danced up close to me, rubbing her belly against me and sliding one of her legs between mine, and when she moved up with my leg between hers she would do a step that squeezed my thigh and rubbed her pussy against me. I was holding her with my hand low on her ass, and I could feel her muscles working there when she socked it up to me. When the second side of the record was finished I had my hand on her ass and was feeling it, and she was rubbing around and feeling my prick with her belly. Paul woke up and flapped one hand at us like a flipper and grinned with all his teeth. He poured himself about half a tumbler of gin and drank it and then fell asleep again.
I pulled Patty onto one of the chairs with me and commenced feeling her up, and she was willing enough. She got her hand into my pants and slid it around until she got my cock in it and she started to jerk me off. The trouble with that was that it was back seat stuff, and not very damn comfortable with all her weight forward on my knees. I looked at Paul on the couch, and Patty looked at him and called him. He didn't make a move, and even when she got up and shook him he only groaned a little, so we knew he was happy and wouldn't wake up for a long time, and Patty and I went upstairs.
“Didn't I see you out at the Owl Club once?” I asked.
Patty had her dress and her slip off, and she was dancing a shuffle step wearing just her pants and her slippers. The pants were white, and she looked darker in them than she did when she had the dress on, and she looked darker when she wasn't in the same room with Paul because he was almost black.
“I used to be in the show up there,” she said, “but I never saw you.”
“I've seen you. I know you better with your clothes off.”
“You never saw me like this at the Owl. The cops made us put on pasties after the first night,” she said.
She shuffled up close to me and practically threw it in my face. I pulled her pants down and then she backed over to the bed and took them off. Her legs were round and smooth-brown, and she had a small scar on one thigh where she had been vaccinated.
“That was a hell of a job at the Owl,” she said. “Nine to three every night and then another hour while the boss chased me around his office. I never had enough sleep.”
“Is anybody liable to walk in on us?”
“Not a chance,” she said.
Just the same, I locked the door before I got onto the bed with her.
“You sure are a worryin' man,” she said. “I don't see how a man can be hot and worry at the same time.”
“He can't; that's why I locked the door.”
“Nigger gets hot and he doesn't have any worries. You get worried and you can't get hot. Funny world,” Patty said.
“Shove that stuff,” I said, “or I'll shove this.”
Patty looked at my prick and then grabbed it.
She fell on top of it, jerking me off and pushing her pussy against my balls, and she tied my legs up with hers and squeezed them. I clawed for her cunt and got one finger into it.
“You got a girl friend?” Patty asked. “A regular girl friend that you fuck all the time?”
“I've got one that fucks everybody all the time.”
“That's too bad,” Patty said. “I thought you might come around and see me sometimes.”
“For god's sake, are you always like this? You're getting ahead of yourself.”
“I don't need ten days free trial to tell a man that can fuck. The way you go after what's down there is all I need to know about you.”
I pushed her off of me and I held her up to me and felt of her with my whole body. I took her tits and shook them, and they were smaller than Ruth's but they felt good to my hands. Patty was more restless than Ruth; she couldn't be still while I was feeling of her, and she put her own fingers in her cunt when I took mine away from there.
“Your jelly roll is going to be stale,” she said. “We will both be old and gray if you don't put it to work pretty damn soon.”
“Freshen it up a little. I jazz better after I'm Frenched anyway.”
“I don't French,” Patty said.
“The hell you don't. Maybe you didn't yesterday, but you do today. Wrap your mouth over it.”
She opened her mouth when I got my prick close enough to it, and there wasn't any more play about her not doing it. She sucked it hard and she chewed it hard, and I almost gave her a shot before I knew it, because her tongue and the inside of her mouth was rougher than Ruth's. I didn't know whether to shoot while she was sucking my cock or whether I wanted to wait until I was jazzing her, but she took care of that by stopping in a minute and lying back with her legs open. I was so near to shooting that I had to wait a few minutes before I got on her, and she lay with her cunt toward me and petted it and worked it open and shut with her fingers until I was sure that she was going to make herself come before I ever got my cock in her.
“My boss up at the Owl used to give me five dollars when I Frenched him,” she said. “Then he got tight and wanted me to do it again so that I could keep the job. Oh that was a hell of a job up at the Owl.”
“If you sucked him off the way you were working on me he got his money's worth. You don't know how close you came to having a mouthful of jism shot down your throat.”
“He got his money's worth, all right. I think the son of a bitch shoved cotton up his cock so he couldn't shoot. Maybe he thought I should be paid by the hour for blowing him. He took longer to shoot than anybody I ever Frenched. And when he couldn't hold it any longer he'd try to choke me with it. That was a hell of a job up there.”
I couldn't lie and watch her jerk herself off any longer. I slid up on her and she held her cunt open and socked my cock into her so hard that I thought I heard one of the bedsprings snap. Her cunt was like her mouth, rough and hot and big, and when she got a taste of my prick in it she laughed in a way that white people never laugh, or maybe can't laugh anymore.
“You're not as white as your skin,” I said.
“One of my grandfathers was Spanish, and I think my father was Irish,” Patty said. “But when I fuck I'm all nigger.”
I bucked up and down on her, but she said I was going too fast for her, so I slowed down taking it easy and reaching for the top of her belly when I shinnied in. After I had jazzed until it was almost as though somebody had left a valve open inside of her, and we made a sound like a piston working in oil.
“My god, you're good cunt,” I said. “God, but you're hot jazzing.”
I meant it, too. That lazy way she had of drawing herself up and heaving her brown belly had my prick boiling, and I was glad I had seen Paul that morning. I hadn't even known he had a sister, let alone a cunt like Patty.
“I had to practice to get good. I wasn't much good the first couple of times I was jazzed,” she said.
“You must have practiced awfully fast,” I said. “You aren't old enough to have been practicing very long.”
“I'm old enough to remember the parties Snub-nose Jones used to throw,” she said.
Snub-nose had been in Atlanta seven years then, almost eight, and it seemed longer than that.
“You must have been just a kid.”
“I wasn't much more than that. I was part of a show he hired for one of his parties, and his boys put the boots to me in one of the bedrooms. I was so damned scared I was afraid to say anything about it. I'd like to see them try it now.”
“And you hadn't been jazzed before?”
“Sure I'd been jazzed before, but not the way they did it. I guess it must have been their idea of fun.”
“Anyway you're good cunt,” I said. “Look at what you've done to my prick.”
I took my cock out of her and showed it to her, and she said she liked to look at it, but she liked to be jazzed better. I speared her again, and I had just started to jazz her when I shot. Patty felt the jism in her cunt, I suppose, and she couldn't have helped feeling the throbs, and she socked it in as far as she could make it go and then wiggled her ass. I held on, and I fucked her until I just couldn't fuck any longer, and just at the last minute she came.
I was sweating when it was over, and so was Patty. Her skin was shiny and between her legs was really wet. She asked me if I wanted to jazz her again, and I did, but I thought I ought to get back to my place and see if the check I was expecting had come and if Ruth was still there or moved someplace else by now, and I said I had some things to do. Patty said to call her up any time I wanted another jazzing, and I said I would and the next time we'd see how good she was at a couple of other things, and I went downstairs where Paul was still sleeping and I got my records and went out.
I felt pretty good on the way back to the place, except that the sherry had left a slight headache, but when I got there I didn't feel so good any more, because Toby was going out of my place just as I arrived. I didn't ask him to come back in, and I didn't spend any time talking to him.
“What the hell was he doing here?” I asked Ruth. “I don't like that bastard coming here.”
“He had a letter for me. From my father. That's important enough for him to come here, isn't it?”
“I don't care what it is; I don't like him around. What about the letter?”
“I haven't opened it yet. What will you bet? What will you offer me for it?”
“If there's one for me I'll trade even.”
Ruth wouldn't trade, so I took the letter that had come for me and she took hers and we sat on the couch to open them. I knew what was in mine, but I wanted to be sure that it was right, so I took it out and waved it under Ruth's nose.
“I should have traded,” she said.
But when she opened her letter it was a check for four hundred and fifty dollars. That made seven and a quarter; not bad for a morning's mail.
“We're rich,” Ruth said. “We're filthy rich! What are we going to do with it all?”
“You'd better read the letter. Maybe there's a catch to it.”
Ruth had never seen her father. There wasn't really any way of knowing that the checks that sometimes came were from her father and not from some nice old man who had taken her name from the telephone book and decided to pretend he was her father. When her mother was alive she had never heard from him, and everyone had assumed that he had died sometime after he got tired of being married and left the family. But about a year after her mother had died the first of the letters had come, and there was a check in it for two hundred dollars, and the letters had come more or less frequently after that. Sometimes there would be a check for fifty dollars in it, and they had run as high as five hundred. The letters seldom came from the same place twice, and it was never clear just what business the man was supposed to be in. He was forever writing that in a few months he hoped to be able to see her, but he never showed up, and Ruth had come to take the whole thing more or less for granted. She didn't mind having a little mystery in her life; especially when it was such a profitable mystery.
“He says he's coming to visit me,” Ruth said when she finished the letter.
“We've heard that one before. What are we going to do with the money?”
“We could get drunk.”
“You can't get that drunk.”
“We could rent a place in the country and rest.”
“Oh god, no! I tried that once. It's all snakes and mosquitoes and spiders.”
We talked about what we were going to do with the money, and I decided that the first thing I was going to do was to take fifty dollars and go and buy some of the books I wanted. Ruth wanted to go out to the bank with me, but she had to dress first, so I went in the bedroom and watched her change her clothes.
“What did you do this morning?” Ruth asked.
“I met a friend of mine when I was coming back from Toby's. We bought these records and then I went home with him and laid his sister.”
“That must have been fun. Did he lay her too?”
“Not while I was there. He fell asleep. I don't believe she was his full sister, anyway, so he probably lays her when he gets a chance.”
“Wouldn't he jazz her if she was his full sister? Is it less incestuous the way it is?”
“I don't believe he bothers to think about that. He never mentioned it.”
“He must be a very good friend if he takes you home to give you his sister. Don't I know him at all?'
“I haven't seen him in a long time, and we didn't go there to see the girl. We went there to play some records, and the rest was accidental.”
“Incidental, with you. Was she very pretty?”
“She was prettier after she'd been laid. She was brown. She was brown all over.”
“Is that a joke? If it is I don't understand it very well, I'm afraid.”
Ruth had all of her clothes off, and she walked across the room and slid down on the floor in front of me.
“Let me see your cock,” she said.
“It's just the same as it was this morning.”
“Show me your cock, you bastard.”
She pulled at the front of my pants.
“If you don't get up off your knees I'll do more than show it to you. I'll stuff it down your throat,” I said.
“I've gone down on better men than you.”
“You've sucked off a bunch of fairies. I don't know any other girl who has done that. How many of his friends did Toby make you French?”
“I didn't keep track of that. I don't have a dirty mind like you have. Did your little black girl go down on you this morning?”
“She was brown, not black.”
“She didn't do it after you jazzed her, anyway. I can smell her cunt all over you. Your cock reeks of it.”
She had my prick in her hands and she was sniffing it and touching the end of it with her tongue and making faces when she tasted it.
“You're not going to let a little cunt taste bother you, are you?” I said. “Not when you're always so anxious to get my heat under your ass. If you had a good dose of cunt some time you wouldn't be so squeamish about finding it on a prick.”
“It's always on your prick. You taste of cunt more often than anybody I ever sucked off.”
“I think you really like it when it tastes like that, or you wouldn't talk so much about it. Why don't you get a girl and French her? You haven't tried that yet.”
“I'll suck your god damned cock!” she said.
She stuck it into her mouth and pulled on it. She sucked it so hard that the end of it hurt. Then she held it in her fist and licked it and jerked me off and rubbed the end of it on her mouth.
“Maybe I will get a girl and go down on her,” she said. “Why not? Why don't you take me to see that girl this afternoon? She tastes good. She tastes better than a lot of other cunts your prick has been in. Her brother could jazz me too. That's another thing I haven't tried; I haven't been laid by a black man. I'll tell you something else, too. If you had come home fifteen minutes earlier you'd have found me trying to suck off Toby again! He couldn't even get a hard on, but I wanted to suck off somebody, and I Frenched him anyway, and I offered to suck his ass-”
I stuck it into her mouth again to keep her from talking, because I didn't want to hear anymore about Toby. I was getting god damn sick of Toby; hearing about him and having anything to do with him was nothing but a pain in the ass, and it was too easy to imagine her doing the things she was talking about. I kept my prick in her mouth and made her suck it until I thought I was going to shoot, and then I yanked it away from her.
“Go on and shoot if you want to. Don't mind about me; you can't stop now,” Ruth said.
“The hell I can't.” I stood up and shoved my prick back in my pants. I almost shot anyway, and I would have if she had managed to hold onto it a couple of seconds longer.
“Get your clothes on and let's get the hell out of here,” I said.
I went into the front room and smoked a butt and played Louis Armstrong's “Gut Bucket Blues” and the first movement of Koussevitzky's recording of Sibelius' Second, and then Ruth came out all dressed up and we went out.
There was all kinds of shit at the bank when we tried to cash the checks, but I found a teller who knew me and we walked out with more money than we had had in a long time. Ruth wanted to eat at Uncle's so she could flash one of the century notes on him, but I said to hell with that and we went to a place where the food was decent. Ruth talked about going to the country on our money, and the way she told about it was better than anything I have ever heard about the country, and I finally began to almost believe that it would be the way she said it was. There was a lot of talk about drinking milk and sleeping late in the morning, and I liked that, and there was some more about taking a typewriter and me doing some work and I wasn't so sure about that part, but most of it sounded pretty good, and I didn't see why we shouldn't try it.
The place will probably be full of nice little farm girls who don't know anything,” Ruth said. “I hear that they are awfully easy to lay. It's all the nice fresh air and the eggs they eat. It makes them healthy, and being healthy makes them easy to get.”
She was giving the country a real build-up, and I said finally that it was all right with me if we tried it, but I wasn't going to come back with the Great American Novel all nicely typed and tied with blue ribbon. We decided that we would figure it all out later, and we went out to get the books I wanted.
There was only one fellow in the book store, and as soon as we walked in I noticed that Ruth was interested in him. He was all right, I guess, but I wished to hell she wouldn't do that when she was with me. She started to talk to him about some book and she got him back of one of the counters, and I knew then that she was getting the poor bastard so hot that he could hardly hold himself. I changed my mind about buying the books just then, and after I had picked out a couple I paid for them and we went out. I was sore about that business, and I didn't try to hide it when we were outside of the place.
“Jesus, you're a bitch! Can't you even give me a chance to buy some books?” I said.
“Oh Bill, you should have seen his face when I moved up against him behind the counter! He kept looking at you, and he was afraid you'd notice, but he couldn't keep himself from getting a hard on.”
“You don't understand anything. Sometimes I believe you don't feel anything either. Do you think I can go back there and buy books now?”
“He's a perfectly nice boy. He'd never remember you anyway, because they have a lot of trade at that place.”
“Sure,” I said. “And every man who comes in brings along a woman who gives the clerks a free feel. My god, you're sloppy.”
“It's all right for you to say that; you had a fuck already today. And what the lousy hell have I had? Toby.”
“If you mention him again I'll slam you,” I said. “I don't want to hear that nancy's name.”
We were passing Uncle's, and Ruth took my arm and we went in. We had our drinks at a table, and Ruth moved her chair around by mine and commenced to feel for my prick.
“Damn it,” I said, “if you don't stop I'll throw you on the bar with the other tidbits.”
“I'll have to suggest something like that to Uncle. A slice of bologna and a slice of ass. With the clientele he's got that would be a knock-out.”
“You're going to have us thrown out of here again. Uncle doesn't like to have you around since the time you came in here with just your coat.”
“I'll spit in Uncle's ravioli if he gets tough with me. I'll do worse than that. Bill, for god's sake, will you take me someplace and throw a fuck into me? I think I'm going crazy.”
“No,” I said. “I'm going to buy some books.” I stood up: “By myself.”
“If you don't fuck me. I'll go back there and ask the book clerk to do it. I mean it.”
“Now you've done it. I knew it. Here comes Uncle.”
Uncle lumbered like a bear on his sore feet.
“Something's wrong?” he asked. “The drinks ain't no good, maybe?”
“Everything's all right. Everything's fine.”
Ruth took one of the hundred dollar bills from her purse and gave it to him. He crumpled it up in his hand and smelled the drinks and then went back to the bar. He was standing at the cash drawer looking at the bill when we started out.
“Is this real?” he said.
“Of course it's real,” Ruth said. “See the threads in it?”
“Then I can't change it.”
“I guess this drink is on you then,” said Ruth.
She folded the bill and put it in her purse and we walked out of Uncle's place. That was the first free drink I'd ever had in there, and now that I saw how easy it was I thought I would try to do it more often.
“What are you going to do now?” I asked Ruth.
“I'm sorry I goosed the cook, or whatever it is I've done,” Ruth said. “Do you still want to take me to the country with you, Bill?”
“I guess so. I'm stoical, like the Indians.”
“Then let's do it right now. Let's fix it so we can go tomorrow. Do you know how you go to the country? All I know is that you take a bus.”
“I think Charlie Hodges went to the country once,” I said. “He ought to be home right now, too. I'll call him.”
We went into a cigar store, and Charlie was home and said to come up. He said he knew all about the country and even knew of a farm house we could get. I hung up and waited to see if my money would come back, but it didn't, and I went out and told Ruth what Charlie had said. There was a taxi stand at the corner, and because we had money now we started for that instead of the street car stop.
“We're going to the country! The CUNT-ery!” Ruth sang.
She started to skip, and I ran after her.