Jack of Diamonds (41 page)

‘Open your mouth just a little, Jack, so I can get my tongue into your mouth. It’s . . .’ she seemed to be searching for a word, ‘deep kissing, like passionate. I think I’m going to enjoy tonight. How lucky can a girl get, eh? A lover I can train to please me.’

I had no idea what was expected of me but I decided humility was the best option. In fact there was no alternative, so I attempted to say in what I hoped was a more or less gallant manner, ‘Of course, whatever you want, Miss Juicy Fruit. But you’ll have to show me.’

She lowered herself onto her elbows. ‘Oh boy, I’d never have thought this would happen in my whole life!’ She was plainly delighted. ‘So, let’s begin then, Jack. Now open your mouth only slightly when I kiss you, just enough for my tongue to enter,’ she said, bringing her slightly parted lips down softly onto my own.

The effect was magical, it was . . . well, just wonderful, and I slid my own tongue into her mouth and it was even better, our two tongues making love. Eventually Juicy Fruit drew back.

‘Wow!’ I announced, lost for words.

Juicy Fruit moved off me and came to kneel beside the bunk. It was a relief down below, but now I faced yet another embarrassment: I was unmistakably tent-poling. Juicy Fruit leaned over and kissed the tent. ‘Time I made you comfortable, Jack. Then we can sit down and chat and when we get to the hotel we’ll continue, eh?’ She grinned. ‘I’ll be teacher and you can be teacher’s pet.’ She had a nice turn of phrase and was obviously smart. She undid my top button, then glancing up at me, she went to work on the rest. ‘Oh my, and what have we got in here?’ she exclaimed, easing my penis from my Jockeys.

My imprisoned member shot up and out like a ramrod. ‘Wow! What a lucky girl am I!’ Juicy Fruit exclaimed again, leaning over and holding the base gently between her forefinger and thumb, then, to my astonishment, kissing it. My first thought was that she was going to . . . well, you know, start to rub me using those pretty hands with the long red nails. But then, to my astounded delight, she brought her mouth over the top and a good half of my rampant juddering manhood disappeared into it.

Perhaps if I’d known what was coming it might have been different, but it was simply the happiest surprise of my life as she began to stroke me with her tender beautiful lips.

I’d like to report that this went on for ages and ages but I was much too excited and after a few minutes I started to moan and, though I tried to hang on, Juicy Fruit gripped me more firmly and also increased her speed and with a huge, wonderful surge I came. It was as if I had reached some new pinnacle of pleasure that was so unsustainable it simply had to end. Of course, the act of ejaculation wasn’t new to me, but this was infinitely more pleasurable. It was the first time I’d experienced oral sex – any sort of sex! – and there could be no possible comparison to the simple bodily function that leads to relief for every teenage boy. To have a woman willing to give freely with no thought of immediate return was, in itself, an exquisite act of unselfish lovemaking. I instinctively knew that, although it could have been performed dutifully, somehow that wasn’t what Juicy Fruit was doing for me.

Although I was still by definition a virgin, I had now, with her tender ministrations, learned that the first joy in making love was sharing – I was dying to give back what I had received. I had fallen in love with womankind, not just the person with whom I had experienced this first act of love, but all of womankind, the gender itself. Alas, I didn’t know how I was ever to please Juicy Fruit as she had so wonderfully and selflessly pleased me.

I know people reading this may think, ‘Oh well, she was a prostitute and probably gave oral sex routinely when men demanded it, so what’s the big deal?’ But that’s not what it was for me. Juicy Fruit had won me in a raffle, she didn’t have to prove her credentials, she had a young guy who knew nothing and it could well have amused her to make fun of me or make demands on me I couldn’t or didn’t know how to meet – the hooker’s ultimate revenge for all the men who had abused, insulted and taken her for granted. The fat cop when she’d been eighteen was just one of what I imagined had been dozens, possibly hundreds of such men. But she’d done no such thing. She’d made me unselfconscious and eager to learn as much as I possibly could. She had prepared me for what was to come.

The first-class sleeper cabin had its own bathroom, or at least a nice washbasin with hot water and other facilities. By the time we’d washed and brushed our teeth we had no more than half an hour to go before arriving in Regina, when it was going to be my turn to perform. Moreover, I knew, metaphorically speaking, this was no Rachmaninoff
Prelude in C Sharp Minor
party piece. I would be expected to give a major performance using a sexual musical score I’d never seen before in my life and which, after the oral sex experience, might contain unimaginable feats. Mostly I feared I was now running on empty, and that Wee Willy would be incapable of raising his weary head from the twin oval cushions on which he rested.

I thought about confessing there and then, but remembered that Juicy Fruit had previously warned me that she was the one in charge; she was making all the decisions. After all, she knew all about men and we might just sleep and then start whatever lessons were to come in the morning. What can a girl do when a boy can’t . . .?

‘Well now, what shall we talk about, Jack? We’re about to be lovers and know nothing about each other, so let me guess . . . you speak nicely and use big words and you’re seventeen and haven’t yet been with a woman; you play jazz piano and Peter Cornhill says you also play classical and come from Toronto. That tells me heaps.’

‘Well, what for instance?’

‘Oh, you know, decent family, good education, safe and secure, I’d say born with a bit of a silver spoon in your mouth, but then what I can’t figure out is what on earth you’re doing in Moose Jaw on River Street playing the piano.’

I laughed. ‘On my eighth birthday my dad, who was a council garbage collector, came home drunk as usual, smashed the little birthday cake my mom had baked with his fist and threw me against a wall. Usually he beat up my mom, but he didn’t that time. Two weeks later he won a battered harmonica in a craps game and gave it to me as a belated birthday gift. He told me I could blow crap instead of talking shit.’

I then gave Juicy Fruit a brief summary of my life in Cabbagetown and the luck that reading books and a talent for music and the careless gift of a battered second-hand harmonica had brought me. I fished into my jacket pocket and produced my shiny new Hohner Echo Elite. ‘I don’t feel secure without a harmonica,’ I confessed. ‘My dad’s thoughtless gift started everything. The rest I owe to four older women, if you don’t count my mom.’ I stupidly enumerated them, ‘Miss Mony, Mrs Hodgson, Miss Frostbite and Miss Bates,’ as if Juicy Fruit would have been any the wiser for knowing their names.

She smiled wickedly. ‘And now it’s five older women . . . Miss Juicy Fruit!’ she cried happily.

‘Oh my god, you’re right!’ I exclaimed.

She laughed. ‘We’ll soon see about that, Jack. You’ll have to tell me how you feel in the morning, eh?’

My heart sank. I knew I was going to fail her for sure.

‘Now you have to guess about me. I got you all wrong. See how you do,’ Juicy Fruit challenged.

I pretended to be thinking hard. ‘Well, let me see, Fruitino, that sounds Italian. You’ve already told me you’re a born and bred flatlander. Italian? That’s food, eating it or growing it. I’ll take a guess and say you come off the land from a big Italian family battling on a small farm, the long drought and the Depression, dust and debt. Your family was forced to leave the land and do the best they could.’ I shrugged. ‘At eighteen, with maybe younger brothers and sisters, you had to help support your family, so you did the best you could to survive.’ I was cheating of course. Almost all of this was sheer speculation that came from reading John Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath
, where he talked about the Oklahoma dustbowl. But, of course, I knew Saskatchewan had been through the same experience and with much the same suffering for people on the land. It was just a guess but it paid off. Miss Frostbite would often say, ‘Jack, if you listen carefully, people will tell you everything about themselves.’

I had always been a good listener. Mostly, I suppose, because my entire life had been controlled by instructions, other people’s plans and aspirations for me. Listening is what got me out of poverty and gave me a life, unlike most Cabbagetown kids who were destined for a job that involved little more than brute strength. My own father, a garbage collector, was a good example of what I could have expected. And while there was no shame in what he did, he was somebody who never listened to anyone. He knew everything he thought he needed to know but he had no say in his own destiny other than to become a vicious and bitter drunk.

Juicy Fruit now looked at me open-mouthed in what I took to be a mixture of admiration and incomprehension. ‘Why, Jack, how could you possibly know all that? We only met tonight. You couldn’t have known I’d win you in the raffle.’ She laughed. ‘I’m still putting my baby sister Maria through her last year in high school; she wants to be a hairdresser.’ She pointed a long painted fingernail at me. ‘I got you dead wrong and you got me dead right and I’m the one supposed to be doing the teaching!’ She shook her head. ‘Oh my, oh my! Ain’t that something now? When I was seventeen I was just a dumb kid with nice tits and a starving family and look at you, eh. Same age and reading books and playing the piano so folk come from everywhere to hear you.’

‘Yeah, look at me, real bright
I don’t think
! I didn’t even know how to perform a passionate kiss. All theory and no practice, books and piano but nothing else.’ I grinned. ‘Believe me, if what you can teach me could have been found in books I’d have been a Lothario by now.’

‘A what?’

‘No, not a what, a
who
; he was a character in a book written a long, long time ago. A Lothario has his wicked way with women and doesn’t always treat them very well.’

‘Sounds like most men I know,’ Juicy Fruit said, then collecting herself she leaned forward and touched me on the knee, excited as a schoolgirl. ‘Oh, Jack, baby, we’re going to have us some fun tonight. Just you wait and see. It’s been a long time since I got excited over a man.’ She gave my thigh a squeeze. ‘Ain’t no puppy fat there. All good muscle!’

Leaning forward with her dress falling open a bit at the top she gave me a glimpse of her truly beautiful breasts, and as the train approached Regina with a rhythmic
chuffer, chuffer, chuffer, chuff, chuff, chuff
, I could feel a vague stirring. Wee Willy was either waking up or stretching in his sleep.

CHAPTER TEN

WE ARRIVED IN REGINA
to be met at the station by Alf Fields, the hotel chauffeur, in a chocolate-brown 1939 Pontiac. Judging from his expression and curt response to my ebullient ‘Good evening, you must be Alf’, he was clearly not thrilled at having to make such a late pick-up. ‘We’re sorry to bring you out so late, Alf,’ I said.

‘Taxis,’ he said, pointing to a cab rank. He was as tall as me but impossibly thin. I carried no fat but I must have been twice as broad across the shoulders. It was as if his long string-bean body only had the capacity to produce one word at a time and each word had to be curt or mean. The way he slammed the rear door of the Pontiac after we’d ensconced ourselves, then the deliberate omission of ‘sir’ left us in very little doubt about his attitude. Juicy Fruit glanced at me, her right eyebrow slightly arched in silent comment.

Even though the train trip had gone so well and we’d got on like a house on fire, I was anxious that nothing should dampen our spirits before we arrived at the hotel, and Alf the driver wasn’t being helpful. God knows this was going to be difficult enough without us having to put up with a bunch of sour-faced staff looking down their noses and making silent though undoubtedly snide judgments about the late-night advent of Mr and Mrs Kupple (thanks very much for the moniker, Reggie, about as subtle as a slap in the mouth).

As if the name wasn’t a giveaway, we were carrying identical suitcases, small Woolworths overnight bags, which were highly indicative of a one-night stand and certainly not of an extravagant and carefully planned twenty-four-hour honeymoon.

I almost envied Reggie his abortive wedding night. At least it was his wife who couldn’t cope. It was different when the woman was the virgin. Innocence and ignorance, purity, faithfulness and love lay folded in the pleats of the pure white surplice she wore figuratively as her nightdress on her wedding night. She was allowed, almost expected, to weep in lamentation for her lost virginity, while I was expected to rise like a stallion on his hind legs, whinnying in exultation that I’d been given the opportunity to get rid of a tiresome and unfortunate boyhood affliction.

‘Nice guy!’ I said now, turning to Juicy Fruit.

‘Take no notice of that long streak of dry shit, Jack,’ she advised, her River Street language reminding me abruptly of who and what she was.

‘No, he’s not going to get away with this!’ I exclaimed, though I wasn’t quite sure what to do and was feigning courage I didn’t think I had. Politeness had always been my main defence, but I was damned if he was going to spoil things. I may only have been seventeen but I’d been to the Waldorf in New York with Miss Frostbite and they’d treated her and me with the utmost courtesy. We’d often arrived back very late at night from a jazz show or concert and the polite welcome we received had never varied. I may have been an ignorant teenager in some respects but I wasn’t a punk kid and if he was taking it out on Juicy Fruit, having guessed or been told her profession, I wasn’t prepared to allow him to humiliate her.