Memoirs of a beatnik (2 page)

Even in bed, I thought, the game is Cool. That side of the cantata was finished, and the record changer shuddered a little and started it over again from the beginning. Trumpets and woodwinds. A slight breeze stirred the curtain and passed over my naked body, raised goose bumps here and there as I went on thinking, sorting out the moments that had brought me here.

10

February Continued

Susan and I had been sitting in our booth together, each huddled into a corner, talking of this and that. Susan was watching the dance floor: a young man named Claudia, who had a black streak in his blonde hair was whirling and bending to some loud rhythm-and-blues number-Dinah Washington was moaning about what it was like to sleep with her landlord. I was watching the archway that separated the bar from the back room with its tables and dancing and Cosa Nostra guardian angels. I always sat where I could watch the door. A habit. We felt safe here, sure enough, but I was prepared for anything.

Two rather beautiful young men walked in and stood in the doorway. One was somewhat taller than the other, with dark eyes, incredible eyelashes, high cheekbones, and a rather pinched look. He wore a wondrous shirt of some soft material, with a high collar open at the neck and very full sleeves with wide cuffs. His friend looked softer, younger, with light blue eyes and an expensive Italian boat-neck jersey. We had met once before a few days earlier, in David's coffee shop. I had looked up to see the taller one standing in front of my table, looking down at me. "I'm Ivan," he had said, "and this is Robin." "I'm Diane," I had replied, "and this is Susan." We had grinned at each other for a while, and they had left.

Tonight our eyes met briefly with just a flicker of recognition. Then he turned and spoke a few works to his companion. The easy way he leaned over him and the vague softness with which the younger boy looked up at him made me wonder if they were lovers. I turned to Susan to ask her what she thought, and when I looked for them again they had already gone.

I had passed my hand over the rough denim that covered Susan's knee and smiled at her. For warmth, for comfort. She squeezed my hand between her legs and smiled back. Her long, slim hand playing with the beads of moisture on her beer glass caught the dim light. Anglo-Saxon innocence, I thought. That's what she has, what she is. Big blue saucer eyes, a soft full mouth, and an uptilted nose. What made St. Augustine say that thing: "Not Anglos, but Angels."

I turned in bed, thinking about her, and slid my hand under the pillow. Blonde hair cut straight across her forehead in bangs,

February Continued

and falling in a soft pageboy on her rather broad, rather slim shoulders. She looked like she sang in a Methodist choir—and she had, until rather recently. Her blouse was made of some really incredible thin stuff through which you could see the pert rosebud tips of her small breasts. Her blue jeans were cut high and hugged her hips closely, and around her waist she had tied a crimson sash. I pulled the sheet up around my shoulders to keep the wind away, and wondered where Susan was at this moment. How she was doing.

What had she and I been talking about last night? I wondered. I couldn't remember, though I clearly recalled the intensity of our conversation, and the lift and joy her presence always gave me. A lilt at the heart, like sparkling wine.

I remembered that a young sailor had suddenly sat down beside me in the booth. He was all eyes for Susan. He had been drinking and was very sad. Had we ever been, he wanted to know, to Springfield, Illinois? We had never been out of New York City, except for our brief escapades at college, and Springfield could have been the moon. We told him no. He told us how he had been in love with Peggy Lee all through high school. How he had cried when he discovered she was on junk-heroin, he called it. He nearly cried again, telling us about it. Strawberry blonde hair and pink, too-chubby cheeks. Milk-fed and dumb and on his way to Korea. We were all three playing kneesies casually under the table when Stevie Martini came by and asked Susan to dance. She got up immediately and I was left with Mr. Middle West.

He looked after Susan sadly. "She likes girls," he announced profoundly, half to himself. Then he turned to me and repeated, "She likes girls." I said nothing about it, having nothing to say.

"Do you like girls?" he asked, trying to look deep into my eyes without falling over.

"Sometimes," I answered him.

"I like girls," he informed me drunkenly, leaning across the table. You could see he was ready to have his heart broken again, the way Peggy Lee had broken it. Then he brightened. "Let's go find three girls." He lurched to his feet and headed toward the men's room.

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February Continued

Frankie, an Italian racketeer of about thirty, checked in for a minute. "Honey," he said, with his thick New York accent, "is dat guy bothering you? Should I get ridda him?"

"It's OK, Frankie," I told him. "I think I can handle him OK."

Frankie went back to his post of hooker-watching. He had two little girls working for him, and one of them was currently on the dance floor. I looked after him, grateful as always for his gruff solicitude—sort of like having an extra-tough big brother.

Dreamily now, I remembered the night we had met Frankie, Susan and I. We had been walking through the Village, not exactly sure where we wanted to be, or how to get there, when he loomed in front of us, ferret face, straight black hair, and peg pants, studying us with shrewd, heroin-glazed eyes. "Don't be embarrassed, and don't be afraid," he had pronounced slowly, as if the words had some profound, cosmic meaning, as if they were some kind of oracle. "Don't be embarrassed and don't be afraid," he had repeated, blocking our path. When he told us to come with him, we had followed him without question, and he had led us to this bar which had become haven and home to us.

Susan had just sat down again when the younger of the two boys I had been watching in the doorway—Robin, I remembered—appeared suddenly at our table and spoke to me.

"My friend wants to talk to you. He asked me to ask you to come outside."

I wasn't sure whether I liked or disliked the mixture of egotism and shyness that sent this message—was it a request or an order?—into my dark, warm world. The young man standing before me was full of light. I recalled the austere beauty of his friend-the dark Tartar eyes and the narrow face-and I stood up to leave.

"I'll see you," I said to Susan. "You'll be OK?"

She took a drag on her cigarette with practiced, seventeen-year-old toughness. "I'm fine," she said. "You go ahead."

I had a few misgivings, but I squelched them. Turned back for a moment at the archway, to see Robin sitting in my seat talking to Susan, holding both her hands in his. I pushed my way through the crowd at the bar, opened the door, and stepped into the cool, fresh night air.

February Continued

Wind, a sprinkling of rain. And a young man who looked like a mischievous pirate waiting for me at the bottom of a flight of wrought-iron steps.

All he said was "Hi" as he took my hand and slipped it inside his jacket pocket with his own, but his face showed relief and delight, and I was glad I hadn't quibbled over protocol. We walked through the streets and alleys in silence at first, the wet grime of the city covering our feet in their sandals. Cobblestones underfoot, slippy and slidy. Alleys with dark loading platforms, where we stopped occasionally to kiss. Foolish jokes and giddy talk, which sparkled like the rain. And in one place, a coffin standing simply, grimly, on the sidewalk outside a tenement, urging us home to warmth and love. If we had needed any urging.

We had made it up the one flight of stairs in the clean, well-painted hallway, and into the strange yellow and black apartment I was lying in now. Good, warming brandy, and Ivan slipped off my sandals and washed the city grime off my feet and his own with a hot towel. Slipped off my clothes with an awkwardness that made me trust him. Only slightly more sure of himself than I was, as I undid belt and buttons, uncovering that slim, olive-skinned body. My own whiteness gleamed in the light of that big candle, and the twenty-odd smaller candles placed here and there about the room.

The brandy set the lights to spinning around me. The brandy and his touch on my breasts. His mouth on mine as he undid my hair. I was kneeling on the straw rug, his cock in my mouth. My mouth was exploring the long smooth lines of his legs. The point of my tongue was tickling his balls, my hair fell over his feet as I nipped and fondled his ankles. He lay on the straw mat with me; we somehow got onto the bed. The world was a carousel, an amusement park full of spinning lights and loving noises. I had forgotten human speech, it stuck in my throat. I had forgotten the name of the man whose hand was in my cunt. I tugged at the hand. "Take off your ring," I said hoarsely. My voice came from Saturn and floated into the room.

He was on me now, bucking and straining like an animal. A faun. But it was too much. My small tight cunt couldn't take in his huge cock. His urgency, demanding, threw me off. I struggled against it. He buried his face in my hair. "Lie still," he said in my ear. "Lie still and listen to the rain."

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I went limp, I floated in a soft, grey mist. The room dissolved, had the candles gone out? I saw nothing. His long beautiful hands under my buttocks drew me closer to him. I embraced him with my thighs, locked my ankles around his back. I knew I was drowning, I could taste the sea. I could hear my own voice crying out as he pierced the membrane that protected my virginity, but I was unaware that I had spoken. The grey mist exploded in light and color around me. I could hear myself moaning, I could hear Ivan gasp. Over and over again he whispered my name, and then there was nothing left but pleasure I had never imagined surging through me in wave after wave.

Afterward there was blood on his cock, and when I could move again I licked it off, swallowing my childhood, entering the world of the living.

February Continued

February Concluded

"Hey," I said gently, "hey." I touched the side of his face with my hand. I slid my hand under his neck and drew him closer to me. I kissed him again, longer and more thoroughly, showing him how, a hundred hows he had forgotten, or never known.

His hand slipped under the sheet and examined my breast shyly. Then drew away and slid over my ribs, down my back. Played for a long time with my buttocks, really liked them. Their smoothness. Traced curves from hip to navel, then back again, searching gently the dark crease between the two mounds of my ass. He drew his hand away, sticky with half-dried come that had flowed there from my morning of lovemaking. He threw the sheet back and made marks on my hips with the wetness. Ivan's wetness, I could feel him thinking. I said nothing, but I had a thousand questions in my head.

Robin bent his head to my bared body, and took one of my breasts into his mouth. Deliberately. Trying it out. I curled my fingers in his hair, pressing him to me, half in pleasure, half in a vague attempt to comfort him for I knew not what.

As I held him so, I thought of the many strange, half-finished scenes I had found myself in during the past two years, since I had first allowed myself to be picked up at the age of fifteen on the way home from a modern dance class. Many were the experiments I had engaged in and abruptly stopped, many the love scenes I had witnessed or aided, but I had always been put off by the blase, professional quality of my partners, and had not been willing to "go all the way" till last night, when Ivan's beauty and awkwardness had completely won me over. All odds and ends of sexual skill which my seventeen-year-old self had accumulated, and which last night had been completely blasted out of my grasp by the intensity of our coming together, now returned, demanding to be tried and tested. This boy, more frightened and hungry than I had ever been, called them out of me.

It was strange to feel his clothing against me, buttons pressed into my belly and groin. I longed to undress him, to see his white, almost hairless torso, but I didn't know what he wanted, how much or how little, and somehow hesitated for fear I might frighten him off. This was, I reflected, a little sleepily, his shot. My fingers stroked the nape of his neck and under his collar. He withdrew his

February Concluded

lips from my nipple and, cupping both my breasts in his hands, buried his head between them, slowly working his way down the length of my torso.

I could feel the zipper of his pants scratch my thigh, his hard cock under it. He began to lick my stomach, the hair of my pussy, stiff with my come and Ivan's, deliberately, hungrily, tasting and devouring, pausing to sniff and smell at my thighs. He parted my buttocks slightly and licked at the come that was caught in the hair there, drawing all my hairs through his lips till they became soft again and curling. Then he began to lick the bud of my clitoris, first taking from it, too, the dried juices of my earlier lovemaking, and then finally paying attention to it for its own sake, caught up at last in the^ict he was engaged in.

His brusque tentativeness and my own sleepiness cut through defences I didn't know I still had, and, as he tongued my pink bud, I thrashed and moaned above him, throwing my hands above my head and clutching the top edge of the mattress while my body arched and shivered.

At last he moved slightly and brought his mouth against the lips of my cunt, gently parting them with his tongue, and sucking long and deep of the juices gathered inside me. Ivan's come, I again sensed him thinking. I could feel his mounting excitement in his hands as, all unconscious, they raked my sides, leaving the marks of his nails in my flanks. His tongue felt warm and curiously comfortable against the slightly sore skin of my cunt as he stroked first one wall and then the other. My excitement, which had abated slightly when his tongue left my clitoris, began to mount again and, as his straining tongue passed deeper into my opening, I began to jerk and leap, grasping his head tightly between my thighs while I let flow into his mouth the juices of my reawakened pleasure.