in the corner to the left of the television set, Osterflood and I sat down on opposite ends of the couch, he staring at the
gray lifeless screen of the television set and I at the brown leather miniskirt and tan, creamy legs of Gina.
She came and handed each of us a nice stiff Scotch on the rocks, staring into my eyes with that same incongruous
innocent child's face and saying coldly: `You want the same as him?'
I looked over at Osterflood, who was staring down at the rug. He seemed sullen.
`What do you mean?'
I asked, looking back up at her. She was wearing a tan, v-neck sweater that buttoned down the front and her breasts
ballooned out at me distractingly.
`What are you here for?' she asked, not taking her eyes off me.
`I'm just an old friend,' I said. `Just here to watch.'
'That type,' she said. `Fifty bucks.'
'50 bucks?'
'You heard me.'
'I see. It must be quite a show: I looked back at Osterflood, he still stared at the subliminal floor show on the rug. `I'll
need to think about it.'
`I'd like another drink,' Osterflood said and, head lowered, reached out his long, nicely tailored arm with his glass and
two ice cubes.
'The money,' she said to him without moving.
He pulled out his wallet and peeled out four bills of undetermined denomination. She ambled over to him, took the
bills, fingered each of them carefully, then took his glass and disappeared back into the kitchen. She moved like a
sleepy leopardess.
Osterflood said without looking over at me: 'can't you stand guard outside?'
`Can't take the chance. The killer might already be inside the apartment.'
He glanced up and around nervously.
`I thought you said your date was disgusting?' I said.
`She is,' he said, and shuddered.
The disgusting flesh flesh flesh returned and fixed Osterflood his second drink and freshened her own. I was only
sipping at mine, determined to keep my mind alert for the clean, aesthetic moment of truth. It was eight forty-eight by
my watch.
`Look, mister,' Gina was saying in front of me again. `Fifty bucks or out. This isn't a waiting room.'
Her voice! If only she would never say a word.
`I see.'
I turned to my friend. `Better give her a fifty, Frank.'
He took out his wallet a second time and pulled off a single bill. She fingered it and stuffed it into a tiny pocket in her
tiny leather skirt.
`Okay,' she said. `Let's go.'
She walked over and turned on the television set, fiddling carefully with the dials and adjusting the volume quite high.
When she moved away from the screen three young men were twitching away and playing loudly some rhythmic tune
which was world-famous and which I almost recognized.
I was paying fifty dollars for this? No. Osterflood was paying. I relaxed. - `You want some hash tonight?' she asked
Osterflood. He was brooding into his half-finished drink.
`Yes,' he said.
When Gina returned from the kitchen this time she had a small pipe, apparently fully loaded, since she handed it to Osterflood and he lit up right away.
He passed it up to her and she took a long toke and then sat down on the couch between us, leaning back and reaching out an arm to hand the pipe to me. I'd read someplace that the United States Marines found marijuana and hashish excellent aids to the performance of their duties, so I took a healthy puff and passed the pipe back to her.
After only about three or four puffs by each of us, the pipe seemed to have gone out, but after a few minutes, as I was watching a handsome, sincere American clobber a greasy Latin American type on the TV screen, the pipe appeared under my nose again nicely lit. As I passed the pipe back to Gina, holding the smoke in my lungs, I smiled at her, and her soft baby face and large brown eyes looked sorrowfully and innocently into mine. If only she doesn't talk. Was she Negro or Italian? By the fourth toke of the second series I was really enjoying the rhythm of the deep inhale, the earnest American talking, frowning, driving his jet-powered jeep, then the blossoming beneath my nose of the gem-studded pipe, the inhale … As I passed the pipe back to her this time, I felt like smiling at her again, hoping she was enjoying the show too, and I watched with interest as she put the pipe in her mouth and Osterflood's hand bloomed into view just below her chin, clutched like an octopus onto one side of the v of Gina's sweater and then in slow motion flew away, sending the buttons in front popping off onto the living room rug like machine-gun pellets. Gins continued her inhale and handed the pipe back to me, her eyes focused on the ceiling. I looked at the pipe pleasurably, examining the lacework of fake gems around the outside of the bowl, looked at the small, black, charcoal-looking lump inside, and took a pleasant, long toke. ABC, I now noticed, was presenting `CIA in Action' a new adventure series, and when the commercial for Johnson's Baby Powder ended, two earnest Americans, one of whom I remembered seeing earlier, began talking about a Red plot in front of a backdrop of toiling peasants.
When I turned lazily to hand Gina the pipe she was sitting exactly as before, her head back against the couch and eyes ceiling-ward, but nude from the waist up. Her two breasts rose on her chest like two mounds of molded honey, with two neat circular sculpted crowns of brown sugar at the peak of each rounded, honeyed hilt.
Without smoking she passed the pipe on to Osterflood on the other side of her. The pipe went flying off onto the living room floor on top of the buttons, the sweater and the bra. He had bashed at her hand.
`Get up,' Osterflood said.
Slowly, like a sated leopardess, she stood. I could see Osterflood now and he was staring at her bleary-eyed and without expression, neat in his soft, gray suit.