One thing Louise had never found possible – the ability to choke back the feeling of anguish she invariably had whenever she had to say goodbye to Hector. All her married life it had been so if the world's airports, its docks or its railroad stations ever meant the happiness of reunion, they meant, much more, the misery of parting. Thus Louise thought as she drove back from Nice airport, tearful and utterly dejected, after having taken Hector to catch his Athens-bound plane.
At her hotel she flung herself upon her bed, yielding wholly to her misery, to the utter and sudden plunge into loneliness provoked by Hector's going. Why? she thought unhappily. Why? Why? Why. Why the rat race in which they seemed so bound up? Surely sometime, somewhere, she and Hector could stay put and put down roots.
And yet she knew, deep in her misery that this would be impossible. She loved her life. Travel was of the essence of her being. It was her life. New countries, new people, new languages spoken in completely-new environments. New types of feminine beauty always coming to her, relying on her for the power she could give these women to attract their men. The pale-skinned, the sun-tanned, the dark and exotic, the cold, aloof ones, the women of the tropics and the snow countries, of the Orient, Europe and America. All the women of the world to her were but as surface textures to an artist upon which to paint and to create. And Louise loved it.
The only thing that jarred, she thought, was the disorganization thrown into her life by the agonies of separation she seemed fated to endure each time she and Hector had to part.
It was bitter, and Louise was woman enough to drain out her broken heart in unrestrained crying. For long minutes she sobbed into her pillow until, to staunch her flow of grief, relief came in the guise of sleep.
Waking toward evening, she telephoned Claudine.
"I'm flat," she confessed miserably. "Have dinner with me?"
Claudine was understanding. She had intended a rehearsal for that evening. But, she thought, the hell with it. The cast can rehearse by themselves. "By all means," she offered. "Sorry to hear you're so low, honey. Andrew not around?"
"Andrew's not the easiest man in this hotel to be with," said Louise. "Has duties and things. Any case, I don't think it's Andrew I really need, not right now."
"Poor girl. But I understand."
Claudine was at the hotel within an hour. She had a way with people who've succumbed to the blues. Two martinis and a couple of succulent tournedos later, and Louise felt a new woman. Morale was up and the shock separation was over. "Now," said Claudine. "I hadn't meant this, but vast warehouse where the cast was practicing for the cast could get on without me, but I did want to be there tonight. Want to come? You can meet the bunch. They're crazy as knitting, but you may get a change out of them."
"What can I lose? You've been wonderful, Claudine. I think I'd miss you if you left now. Let's go, then."
Claudine was engaged in rehearsing a new production, a musical fantasy. Of all places, it was in a vast warehouse that the cast was practicing for the forthcoming production.
The warehouse owner had allowed the thirty or forty people in the cast to use a corner of his warehouse, basking in a sort of reflected glory that came with this nodding familiarity with "show people".
It was a hall, and in one corner Claudine had installed a tinny-sounding, crazy-Otto type of upright piano. Makeshift curtains indicated a section for action that, later on, would translate into the actual stage. For the show-business people it was certainly makeshift, but it did save theatre hire. A theatre could come later, when the show had shaken down into its routine. On the eventual stage, the final slickness necessary to a musical could be imparted. For the time being, however, this huge barn was ideal in that it was both secluded from the city's activity and fairly private.
A tangle of wires was the lighting conversion, bathing the stage corner in light, and casting a penumbra of shadow deeper into the hall, where new cars were storaged, silent and shining.
Perhaps twenty people were taking part on this particular evening, as Louise and Claudine came in a couple of acrobatic dancers were going through their act to the tinny jazz from the old piano.
A way in another corner, a ventriloquist was juggling three balls while holding a zany conversation with his doll.
Nobody paid any attention as Claudine and Louise came up to the group in the corner, under the lights. A few bade Claudine a casual good evening. Most of the artists simply went ahead with what they were doing. The rest had retired to the half-gloom on the edge of the lighted area.
Louise found herself entranced with the ventriloquist. She could not resist – laughing at the droll, goggle-eyed look on the face of the doll as it seemed to be trying to unravel the intricacy of the juggling.
Bending and twisting its head, now squinting up at the topmost ball, now down at the fast-working hands of the juggler, the wooden puppet was keeping up a flow of wisecracks as the ventriloquist strove to explain how he kept the three balls moving.
Eventually he broke down and the doll went limp as he tossed the balls on to a nearby table. As he wiped his brow, he noticed Louise…
"Hullo," he said, appraising her stunning beauty. "You're a new face. You in the show?"
"No," said Louise, appraising the man's appraisal of her, "I came with Claudine. That act of yours is a scream. How do you do it?"
"Glad you like it," acknowledged the ventriloquist. "It's ad-lib, mostly. Look, like this."
He took up a ball, a cube and a triangular prism, all about the same size, and his painted wooden puppet, "Those screeched thing's don't have the same shapes!" the falsetto, impertinent voice of the doll. It was unexpected, hearing the doll chatter before even the act had begun.
"Quiet, stupid!" admonished the man. "They're not supposed to be. Anybody can juggle with ordinary balls."
"So you're so smart you've got to use different shapes now?" jeered the doll. "This, buddy, I gotta see!"
"Then watch, carefully," said the man in his own voice.
He tossed the cube into the air. The doll's head twisted round and up, to watch the cube in flight. Down it came – on to the doll's head.
"Hey!" exclaimed the doll, in anger. "You gotta watch it, Buster! That one hurt!"
"So? Next time, duck your fool head, stupid!"
The man got the three objects going, at which the doll shook its head in quaint disbelief.
"Tsk-tsk-tsk! I don't believe it, personally," it commented cheekily. "It's just not possible. Not with a guy as dumb as this!"
"You'll get another one on your head in a minute. Mind your manners, friend."
"Make it the round one, then, will you?"
"Why the round one?"
"It's softer. Got no corners on her, like the last one. Who's the girl friend, Buster?"
"This one who just came in?"
"Who else, stupid? Claudine I know already. Good looker, isn't she? What's her name?"
"Says her name's Louise."
"Louise who? I knew a Louise once, that time we were playing in London. She in the show? Hey, watch that sharp one there, Houdini! It could hurt. You a friend of Claudine?"
It was absolutely uncanny, thought Louise, weak with laughter. She found herself answering the ridiculous doll.
"Yes, I am."
"Well, you watch out, sister," warned the doll, devoting its attention now to Louise.
Meanwhile the three objects flashed up and down in bewildering succession.
"Why?" asked Louise, stringing along in spite of herself.
"Mean to say you never heard? Tsk-tsk-tsk! Showbiz, cet ees not for ze toureest, man petit chou! Don't say Charlie-boy didn't warn you!"
"What do you mean speaking to a lady like that, you idiot?" chided the ventriloquist. "And about her friend, too?"
"She? A lady? And in this room, with all these busted down people? That's all somebody had to tell me."
"Since you know so much about people, what's the matter with us, wise guy?"
"Queer. Everyone of you. Queer as a ruddy three-pound note!"
"That's enough from you, Charlie-boy!"
Saying which, the ventriloquist broke his act down and put his doll down on the table next to the three objects he had been juggling.
"Quite fantastic!" cried Louise, happily. "What a wonderful act! I suppose you could go on for hours. It all seems so easy to you!"
"Years of practice, honey," he grinned. "The name is Rollo. Hi, Louise."
"Hi," she said, accepting his handshake.
Claudine was in a far corner, speaking to a troupe of female dancers. Onstage the acrobatic pair were still practicing their gyrations. In another comer, two groups were rehearsing their own acts.
"Come and tell me about the show," she said.
"Delighted."
Rollo led her out from the aura of light in which he'd been working, and they sat down on the running board of a car, in the gloom. "It's a musical, see? A revue."
"I see. A lot of acts all strung together. Any continuity?"
"That's its trouble. The acts are good. None better. But the story's pure corn, and Claudine can't see it!"
"But if the acts are good, the story doesn't matter."
"I dunno. It may go, but I always say give the customers something just better than they're going to get in this lot."
On stage, the acrobats called a halt. Limp and damp with perspiration, they collapsed on a pile of blankets at the side of the rough stage. Claudine was calling the dancers onstage now.
"This'll be interesting," said Rollo, pointing. "Watch."
Aloofly unconcerned, about ten of the girls, each of them tall and stately with the shape of showgirls the world over, began openly to undress. Louise caught her breath. In the vast, otherwise deserted room, this was a piquant development.
"Nudes?" she asked.
"Nudes," he grinned. "That's Claudine. Any other night, they could dance in what they're wearing. But they all dance nude in the show and when Claudine comes, they strip. Me, I think the woman's got a thing about it, personally."
The girls had peeled down to their buffs by this time.
Ten nudes is a lot of nudes, especially when they are show nudes, Louise was thinking. There was something dangerously erotic at the sight of them filing into a chorus line under the harsh light of that section of the room that represented the stage. By now, everybody was looking on. All other rehearsals had stopped…
Claudine called out some instructions. The pianist swung into a medium-slow "St. Louis Blues," and the chorus line came to life.
It was a crisp, staccato, off-beat routine, and Claudine was aiming at an almost mechanical synchronization. Fascinated, Louise watched the unbelievable sight of twenty naked breasts jouncing there in splendid unison, twenty legs flashing up and down in polished accuracy and, from time to time as the… girls high-kicked in great arcs, the ten twats all momentarily exposed, wide-mouthed and tantalizing.
Claudine allowed the number to go its full 32 bars, then called a halt.
The girls stood relaxed, chests rising and falling in splendid nudity as Claudine instructed them in their next routine. It was to be a snaky samba line in which the dancers had to serpentine about the stage.
The piano tinkled out its introduction and the white flash of human flesh bent into the contorting march. Louise saw, then, what Claudine was after.
This was a dance glorifying the female breast and the female buttocks. Bent over as they were, undulating and genuflecting, the girls displayed the full splendor of pendulous mammaries and, as their undulations took them further backstage, the succulent view of ten pairs of buttocks was a poem of artistic indecency. Louise found her sexual appetite becoming aroused and beginning their demands upon her body. The nakedness was really obscene and was having its effect on her. In her loins she could feel the stirring of desire. At the lips of her twat, she could feel the warm oiliness of her cunt fluid. At her breasts, there was the hardening of her nipples. She hoped Rollo would not notice as she sat, trying to give no indication of her feelings.
But Rollo, wise in show-business, knew. That was why he was working for Claudine. He could have sold his act to any producer in the world. He preferred Claudine simply for the audacious sexiness of the woman's productions. Suddenly he clutched at Louise's arm.
"Look," he said, directing her attention to a pair of mattresses lying just outside the glare of the light above the stage. Louise, adjusting her vision to the darkness, presently made out what Rollo was trying… to show her. She gasped as she realized what was happening.
Three male Hungarian acrobats had retired to the mattresses when the dance rehearsal had begun. Under the stimulus of that display of female flesh bathed in the harsh lights, each had come into sexual erection. Now, uninhibitedly, they had begun to masturbate mutually. Against the black of their working tights, their three white penises were clearly visible, each in full erection, and each being stroked by the hand of somebody else.
"Always do it," whispered Rollo, just as fascinated now as Louise was. "Brothers, too. But every time Claudine calls for a dance rehearsal, it's the same with them."
Suddenly Louise stiffened. With her eyes accustomed to the penumbral gloom, she could just make out a flurry of suggestive activity where the pair of acrobatic dancers had retired, on to their pile of blankets.
"Look, Rollo!" she whispered. "The acrobatic dancers. Aren't they fucking, over there?"
Rollo grinned at the verb.
"Wouldn't surprise me," he said. "People just do in this show. That's all there is to it. Claudine knows it, but I've never seen her notice it. I think the bitch just gets her kicks from knowing, and ignoring it. Must be a hell of a charge she gets causing the fucking, then pretending she's absolutely unaware of what's going on."
The two dancers were now tightly locked in coitus, the male on top of the woman, whose thighs had been thrown up and parted, locked around the body of the man to receive the fucking she was getting. Every now and again there was the flash of bans and cock as the man withdrew for some particularly long, sexy plunge.
"Let's get up closer," pleaded Louise.
Quietly they crept toward the fornicating couple, who were stealing rapid glances at the naked display of women on stage, as if to whet their appetites for the sex in which they already were being consumed. When they got close to the straining, copulating couple, Rollo did a surprising thing. He reached forward, tapped the man on his shoulder, and whispered something into his ear.
"Sure," Louise heard him say. "Why not?"
At which he ceased his copulation and allowed the woman to creep out from under him. He said something to her, and pointed to Louise and Rollo. She agreed, and the man arranged his partner in a sort of wrestler's bridge, arching her supple back with her thighs widely spread, so that she rested backwards on hands and feet like some upside-down crab. In that pose, the entire pink majesty of her cunt was deliciously exposed in the half-light.
Now the man lay on his back, too, and wriggling his shoulders through the parted legs of the woman, insinuated his way up and under her, until his penis stood, throbbing, at a point just opposite her cunt. At this, the woman tried to work her way downwards, so that her cunt was opened, pleadingly, to the cock beneath it. Try as they might, however, the pair could not make the prick enter the slit of the woman, now wet and pulsating with desire.
Louise could bear it no longer. She crept forward, grasped the penis, and with one or two rubs made iridescent droplets of spunk splash from its pipe. Then she bent it upwards and guided it gently all the way into its hairy nest.
Once it slid in, the rest was easy. Abandoned entirely to their pleasure, the woman allowed the cock to surge back and forth in her cunt in the to-and-fro rubbing of the fuck. Imperceptibly, the couple increased their tempo – to and fro to and fro, as Louise looked on, unable to take her eyes off the most exposed fuck she had ever seen.
In that position all was visible: the great swollen cock, the hairy, tight-drawn scrotum of the man constricting his balls, and the vast hungry maw of the cunt into which it was driving in and out, in and out, viciously, greedily, relentlessly.
When Rollo advanced, then, on Louise, it was upon a woman who was past noticing what was happening. With one hand he had entered her blouse and was furiously fingering her nipples, with the other hand up her skirts, he had gotten three fingers up the wet, palpitating cunt. Into his mouth he crammed her ear, tonguing the aural orifice as he felt Louise yield to the lecherous ministrations he was bestowing upon her. And all the time, not once did her gaze falter from the magnetism of that spread and embracing cunt into which the penis was now thrusting more forcibly and furiously.
While Louise's body was delivering itself uninhibitedly to the fingers of the ventriloquist at her nipples and cunt, her mind was busy with another fornication altogether. And suddenly, after about two minutes, she could sense that the two dancers were about to come. The penis seemed to swell to double its size as it slid in and out of that hairy bush of a twat. The twat seemed to have developed special muscles that literally grabbed at the prick boring away inside it. Louise knew that climax was upon them. And, aware now of the fingers within her own cunt, she knew that she, too, must scream into orgasm. At the moment she realized this, her orgasm was there. Spluttering from her cunt as she clamped down on the fingers inside it, she threw herself forward at the same time, to participate in the climax she had just watched from penetration to final ejaculation. In his frenzy, she knew the man must part from that vagina. His penis must slip out. Feverishly she put out a hand to catch the ejaculation that was spilling hotly and creamily from the cunt lips of the arch-backed woman. She pressed the cock back in. She seemed to hold the twat over its massive prisoner, feeling her palm hot and wet with sperm which was now spilling from the cunt. It looked for all the world as if the woman's cunt had grown its own cock at that moment. It was an obscene sight, mighty in the majesty of obscenity. Louise stared, fascinated, still in orgasm. In her own vagina shot after shot of foamy spunk was cascading over the fingers of the man who was masturbating her, spilling down her thighs in delicious warm dribbles. But Louise was past caring.
Fuck, she thought, swooning. God, but it was all! It was life, all life itself. Let there he no end of it! Let there be no end to the variety of it! Let it be open, unrestrained, uninhibited. Let all the world fuck, all in the same room! Let there be the fucking of fingers, of penises, of cunts! Let there be titfucking and cuntsucking and frigging of pricks and tonguing of tips of huge, hairy penises! Let there be fucking in mouths, in armpits in cunts and in assholes – let the whole world be one over-joying acreage of pure, unfettered fucking! Let one person fuck another, and be twelve fucks away, simultaneously, from the person he is being fucked by!
Bless Claudine, she thought, weeping tears of abandon as she spent gloriously on Rollo's fingers! Bless Claudine for knowing, and bless her for providing irresistibly, knowing the agony she was causing by forcing that prick against the clitoris of the split woman, Louise wrenched the cock from its nest in a drenching gush of spunk and threw her mouth at the gashed, slashed and angry vagina, drinking and sucking in sheer gluttony at the spigot of sperm that flooded, white and mucousy, over the gaping hole. And, having drunk, she fell forward overcome, to join the group on the blankets.
Rollo new what had happened. Madly excited now, he just had to fulfill his own lust. Seeing the cunt that had been so nearly split in two, he released his organ in one movement from its imprisoning fly and he bore down on it. The woman was past all feeling now, but Rollo was not. Into that cunt he plunged, and with only five or six fiendish lunges, he drenched his own load, time and glorious time again, deep into the dancer's bowels, listening to her screech of agonized protest at the second, unexpected, rape she had just endured.
All were now satisfied and after long moments, each stirred.
"My God," said the dancer. "Rollo, you slay me. Why the arch-backed act, then?"
"So that we could see it," said Rollo simply. "It's as wonderful to watch as it is to do, isn't it? Agree? Louise wanted to see. So did I."
"Then thank God for Louise," said the man.
"Who's Louise, anyway?"
"Visitor here. Friend of Claudine's."
On stage the ten naked girls were still rehearsing, doing the staccato routine of the "St. Louis Blues" again. From where the four people now lay, it was obvious that the pianist was having difficulty in providing the music. His penis, in the full frenzy of erection stood lecherously out of his opened fly, swaying like some bizarre conductor's baton to and fro between his thighs.
The man could play the tune in his sleep, but he needed both hands to beat it out.
And there, on stage, tantalizing him, were those flashing cunts as legs kicked up and circled out, revealing their red, hairy-nested, inviting sexual lips. Each one was shaven. Each, in the eventual show, would be covered by the black patch that the law demanded.
But now each was uncovered, open, lush and inviting, plucked and succulent – pink as a baby chicken. The pianist, in his agony of lust, simply had to go on playing. Every time Claudine called for a halt to give some instruction, the pianist would drop a hand to his penis, frigging away furiously at the monstrous desire consuming him. Then Claudine would demand music once more and his cock throbbing to and fro in his frustration, would have to stand, groping for relief.
Louise could stand his misery no longer. She looked around her furtively.
The piano stood at an angle to the stage. The player had his back to the wall, and Louise reasoned that if she crept up slowly, she could reach her objective without anyone nearby noticing what was happening. Not that she minded being seen.
She wriggled forward slowly. Then, reaching forward, she grasped the frantic prick in her hot, spunk-drenched palm. The pianist looked down in delight and dumb gratitude, and catching his glance, she smiled. Her palms were now bringing him blissful relief, and she knew she could give and get still more delight.
In a second she had opened her mouth, and had gone down on the red, angry, throbbing tool. She felt the familiar slither of spunk on her tongue and, grasping the base of the mighty prick, she sought for the balls upon which it stood, proud and randy. With movements he could not control, the pianist wriggled to aid Louise, thrusting the helmeted tip of his tool in delirious gratitude into Louise's warm, wet, containing mouth.
In thirty seconds it was all over.
Louise hardly felt it coming, it was so quick.
But she choked and spluttered as she felt the pianist's discharge coming in great uncontrollable jets into her sucking mouth. With her lipstick smeared an over that prick, it was a reddened engine of unbridled sexual demand, and she frigged furiously at its warm, throbbing length tossing off vast sheets of sperm into her receptive throat – a madwoman then in her desire, albeit this time it was a desire only to give pleasure, not to get it. Magnificently the man kept up the maddeningly insistent tempo of the number he was playing and the dancers, ten of them moving like one, now achieved a synchronization that only Claudine had ever dreamed of.
"Wonderful!" she cried at the end. "That was marvelous, girls! Just do that every night after we open, and you will go anywhere in the world. You're fantastic tonight, right out of this world!"
Spontaneously, a burst of applause swelled from the hall and rolled toward the stage. The other artists, recognizing stage perfection, were unstinting in its continuity. "You've been told that yet?"
Then into the circle of light filed the other players, smiling and aflame now with Claudine's own enthusiasm. Those who had so recently been in the throes of sex had adjusted themselves, and they slapped the naked backs of the chorus girls who were filing back into the hall to where their clothes were lying. There was the buzz of excitement as the players made ready to leave the last rehearsal they would ever have in that makeshift, garage "theatre".