Well-Charlie and Ruth had known each other for a long time and they got along all right now. They hadn't gotten along so well at first because Charlie wanted to take her apart and put her back together the way he thought she ought to be. When he forgot that idea they got along pretty well.
We sat around in his place and he told us about the old farm house he had lived in one summer. It sounded all right, and he said that he could wire to the people who owned it and if it was to be had we could probably go up in a couple of days. Ruth didn't want to wait that long.
“It won't be a good idea in a couple of days,” she said.
Charlie said that he supposed he could telephone, and fix it up, so we had him do that. Then, while he was on the phone the doorbell rang and I answered it. I didn't know the fellow who walked in, but Charlie waved at him and he sat down and poured himself a drink. Ruth was in the bathroom just then, and she didn't come out until Charlie had finished talking to the people who owned the farm.
“It's all right,” Charlie said when he clicked the receiver down. “You can go up tomorrow if you want to.”
“Introduce me to the girl,” said the fellow who had just come in. “I want to talk to her.”
Charlie said the words and mixed another shakerful of drinks. “If we're going up there tomorrow we'd better get back to the house and get things ready,” I said.
But Ruth didn't want to go then. The new fellow was talking to her about Henry Miller, and they both had a great deal to say about Henry Miller, and I saw that we weren't going to leave yet.
“Did you know that he was a tailor before he went to Paris?” the fellow said to me.
I said yes, I knew that he had been a tailor, but did anybody know if he had been a good tailor? The fellow didn't seem to think that was important, and he acted as though he thought I was being funny, so when Charlie went out to the kitchen for more ice cubes I went too.
“What the hell?” I asked Charlie.
“He's all right,” Charlie said. “You just have to get used to him.”
“Not me,” I said. “I've gotten over that business of getting used to people.”
We broke the ice up and went back to the other room, and Ruth was sitting on the couch in a way that gave everybody a fine view of what she had to show. I gave her the last drink in the shaker.
“Why don't you change into something more comfortable?” I asked her. She moved her legs and fixed her dress.
Charlie's friend didn't look so good, and he didn't say much after that. I felt a little sorry for him. After all, you can't blame a man for trying. Or so they tell me.
“Listen to this,” said Charlie. “I just found it: 'Look at this pretty girl, for instance… her little head, her beautiful throat, her charmingly rounded form and all the rest. In what corner of her person could a grain of virtue find lodgement? There is no room, all is so firm, so full of sap, plump and well filled. Virtue, like the raven, lives among the ruins. It is to be found in the lines and wrinkles of the body.'“ He closed the book and put it back on the shelf.
“Who is that?” Charlie's friend asked.
“Anatole France,” I told him. “He lived in France too, but I don't believe that he was ever a tailor.”
“What odd friends you have, Charlie,” the fellow said. “Can I have another drink now?”
“You're all right,” Charlie said. “He's just trying to get your goat. Ruth, let's see if you have any wrinkles where a grain of virtue might find lodgement.”
“You know all about my wrinkles,” Ruth said. “Bill, I think we ought to go. Grandma's eyes are getting big.”
We finished our drinks and said thanks to Charlie about the farm and good-bye to his friend and then we left. It was still early and there was only a little packing to do, so we walked down to a movie.
“He wasn't a bad guy, Charlie's friend,” I said. “He just needs to be put back and cooked a little longer.”
“I could have forgotten that if you had left me alone with him for a little while longer. Why didn't you fellows go out for cigarettes or something? He would have been good.”
“If you feel like that you can still go back. You can let Charlie point out the lines and wrinkles for him.”
“I don't want to go back now. I just felt like that for a minute. That's why I was sitting that way when you came back from the kitchen. Could he see it all right?”
“Yes, god damn it, he could see it!! Why didn't you lie down on the floor and wave your legs at him?”
“I probably would have if you and Charlie hadn't been there. I wasn't going to make it a free-for-all. I hadn't had enough to drink to do that.”
“Christ, you're getting moral,” I said.
“I had him going, Bill. He knew I was showing him my cunt on purpose, but he was afraid to do anything about it. You should have seen him squirming around before you and Charlie came back!”
“You're going to do something like that just one time too often,” I said. “One of these days a man is going to give you what you deserve for tricks like that.”
“It wasn't a trick. I was ready to spread my legs, but I couldn't do it when you were around.”
A girl was standing on the corner and the wind blew her dress very high. She clutched it close to herself and turned her back to the wind. Ruth grabbed my arm.
“Why doesn't the wind ever do that to my dress?” she said. “Wasn't she pretty, Bill?”
“I couldn't see that far,” I said.
“I'll bet you'd like to walk up and get your prick against her little bare ass,” she said.
“She was wearing pants. I could see far enough to tell that.”
“I wonder what she's like? Don't you ever wonder about people you see? Don't you ever wonder when you see a girl if she's hot and how many men she's jazzed and if she goes down on them all? Things like that bother me.”
“Why the hell don't you ask her?” I said. “If it bothers you so much, find out about it.”
“I suppose you think I won't do it.”
I tried to stop her, but she walked up to the girl. She touched her arm and the girl turned around quickly.
“I beg your pardon,” Ruth said, “but I'd like to know if you French.”
The girl looked closely at Ruth's face. She smiled without comprehension.
“Do you like to suck cocks?” Ruth said.
The girl made an ugly noise in her throat. She smiled and shook her head and reached into her purse for a pad of paper and a pencil. Ruth took the pencil and the pad and then she wrote a question about a street. The girl pointed in the direction we were walking and held up four fingers. Ruth smiled and said thank you with her lips and then we walked away.
“I'm sorry about that. I feel awful,” she said.
“You don't have to whisper,” I said. “She can't hear you. What are you sorry about?”
“She looked so nice with the wind blowing her dress. And then she's like that. It isn't right.”
“Not being able to talk doesn't make her any less nice. And it probably makes her a better fuck.”
“I want to get drunk,” Ruth said. “I want to get drunk as hell and be jazzed.”
“We're going to the movies,” I said.
In the theatre Ruth was quiet for a long time, and I was really surprised when she slid her hand through the arm of my seat and began to feel around my pants. When she got my prick in her fist she just hung onto it, and first it got hard and then it got soft again, and she just held it like that until the picture was over.
There were two busses a day to where we wanted to go, but one of them left at eight-thirty in the morning, which is a hell of a time to start for any place. The other one left at three in the morning and made the trip in four hours, so we decided to take that.
Ruth's things hadn't been unpacked. I put a few of my own things in a bag and sent the three bags to the bus station and then we tried to decide what to do with the evening that we still had ahead of us. Ruth counted on her fingers some of the places where we could go, including one place where I had never been, but where they had, according to Ruth, a peep-show circus that covered about everything you could think of. She said that even the rooms with the regular customers had peep-holes. A hell of a whore house, I thought. I told her that I didn't feel like going to that kind of a place that night. If we were going out I wanted to go someplace where the entertainment wasn't so damned exotic. I really wasn't anxious to go out at all, especially if it meant going somewhere to drink, because when I thought back and counted them I realized that I had already taken a good many drinks that day. I have to watch that. If I'm not careful I find myself taking in a great quantity of alcohol without ever getting really drunk, and I don't like that at all because I have a lot of things I want to get finished before I die.
“Do we have to go out?” I said.
“I want to go out.”
She wanted to go out. I looked around the place to be certain that all the windows were closed and everything was the way it ought to be.
The food at the place Ruth picked out for dinner wasn't as good as the name of the place. The chairs were leather and chromium and the walls were covered with murals that didn't mean anything. There was a four piece outfit playing salon music, and that got on my nerves. It didn't help any to remember that Joe Marshal, who had done those murals, had been a pretty good friend of mine. He had been living on nickels for about a year when he got a chance to do that job, and he didn't want to take it then, but everybody told him not to be an asshole and that it wouldn't kill him. Of course it wasn't anybody's fault, but when those things were finished Joe was around town drunk for a couple of days and then, the next thing we heard about him was that he had fallen on a picket fence and driven a picket into his mouth and that was the last we heard of Joe Marshal.
I messed the food around in my plate. Ruth kicked my shin.
“That man over there,” she said.
“What about him? He looks like a stuffed shirt.”
“I know him,” she said. “He's a doctor.”
“If you know him don't tell me about him.
All I need to know about somebody is that you know them.”
“He has some pictures of me. They're not very nice pictures. He took them at a party.”
I put down my fork.
“Will you talk to him about them?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“What do you say about pictures like that?”
“I mean, will you try to get them.”
“By pretending to be your husband, perhaps? 'Sir, I'll trouble you for those photographs of my wife's moment of indiscretion.' I don't think so.”
“Please, Bill, try to get them,” she said. “You're a lot bigger than he is. You can probably get them without any trouble.”
“How many of them are there?” I asked.
“I don't know. He'll know, and if it's done right I don't think he'll keep any back. I'll go powder my nose to make it easier for you.”
She disappeared. I just sat there at the table until she came back.
“He wants to talk to you,” I said.
Ruth walked to the table and the man stood up, smiling, and she sat down there. I forked my food around and thought of what a guy Joe Marshal had been. Pretty soon Ruth was back.
“You didn't talk to him at all,” she said.
“I didn't have to talk to him to know that he wouldn't just hand them over.”
“He wants us to go up to his house now and he'll give them to me.”
“Us? What the hell do you mean, us?”
“If you're not going to finish your dinner we can go up right away.”
I took the check and Ruth and I went to the man's table and she said my name and his name. We went out of that place, then, the three of us, and got into a taxicab.
“Wait a minute,” I said.
I got out of the cab and went into the place next to the restaurant and bought a pack of cigarettes. They were still there when I came out, and that surprised me some. I got in the cab and we started off.
“Did you say you wanted to be dropped off at Uncle's?” Ruth asked me.
I looked at her. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, drop me there.”
The cab stopped after not very long.
“I'll be back in time to get the bus,” Ruth said.
“That's fine,” I said. “You'll be back in time to get the bus.”
I didn't go into Uncle's when they went on. Nobody was in Uncle's that early in the evening. I hadn't done any bowling in a long time, so I went down the street and went into a place and bowled until it was late enough to go someplace else.
I was back in Uncle's when Ruth got there. It was after two when she got there, and I had begun to wonder whether she would get there at all. She was drunk when she came in, and she was carrying a big bunch of roses.
“Look what he gave me to have on our trip, Bill.”
“I don't suppose you remember what you went up to get, do you?” I said.
She had an envelope in her purse, and the negatives and some prints were there.
“I don't think he kept even a single print,” Ruth said. “And you'd never guess where he had them. Guess, Bill.”
“Oh, he had them shoved up his ass, I suppose.”
“He had them in a file. He must have hundreds of pictures like these. It's sort of a hobby. Don't you think this one is a good likeness?”
It was a picture of Ruth and two men. One of them seemed to have most of his hand in her cunt and she was holding his prick. The other one was sitting on the other side of her and she had her face turned to that side and his cock was in her mouth.
“I thought I remembered all about that night,” Ruth said, “but I don't remember about those two men. I must have liked them though. Here's one of me I wouldn't recognize at all, but it was in the file and he said it was me.”
“It doesn't matter that you were supposed to be with me tonight,” I said. “You couldn't have found him any other night, could you?”
“I had to get them back.”
“And I wanted to be dropped at Uncle's. Balls.”
“Anyway, I won't see him again.”
“You were there long enough so that I should imagine you wouldn't have to see him again. Why didn't you just give him what he wanted and get out?”
“There might have been something I wanted too. You keep forgetting that I've been ready for it all day and haven't gotten any.”
“You got it from him, though, didn't you?”
“You can't be sore about that.”
“I can be sore about hanging around all night with nothing to do while you were up there being screwed.”
“We'll have to hurry to get the bus,” she said. “It will be nice in the country.”
“Oh Christ, yes,” I said. “Everything will be dandy in the country.”
On the bus, after we got out of the city, she wanted to go down on me. It was dark in the bus and we were in the back where no one would have seen us, and she asked me several times and tried to get me by lifting her dress and putting my hand on her cunt. I wouldn't let her, and after a while she fell asleep and the flowers dropped to the floor. I put them back on her lap and she woke up long enough to smile at me. Then there was no sound but the noise of the bus and the coughing of the old man who sat up front.