The Sinful Ones (14 page)

As he struggled up beside her, the truck hustled down the worn brick incline at the opposite end of the bridge and ground to a stop. A maroon and green awning stretched to the edge of the sidewalk. Above the awning, backed by ancient windows painted black, a bold, blinking, blue neon script proclaimed:
Goldie’s Casablanca.

“That’s us,” said Carr. He hopped down and lifted Jane off as the truck started up again.

Inside the solid glass door beneath the awning, a tall, tuxedo-splitting individual with the vacant smile of a one-time sparring partner, was remonstrating quietly with an arm-swinging fat man whom he held pinned against the wall with one hand. Jane and Carr swept past them. Carr whipped out several dollar bills and held them clipped between bent finger and thumb. They descended a short flight of stairs, made a sharp turn, and found themselves in the noisiest and most crowded nightclub in the world.

The bar, which ran along the wall to their left, was jammed three deep. Behind it towered two horse-faced men in white coats. The one was reaching behind him for a bottle. The other was violently shaking a silver cylinder above his head, but the rattle was lost in the general din. He might, Carr thought, be performing a mysterious rite in honor of the Moorish maidens on the mural behind him. The willowy harem figures suggested El Greco, but someone—Goldie no doubt—had pasted cut-out, larger-than-life-size photographs of the faces of popular movie stars just above their bright yellow necks. The effect was arresting.

Packed tables, with no discernable aisles between extended from the foot of the stairs to the edge of a small and slightly raised dance floor, upon which, like some thick vegetable stew being stirred by laziest cook in creation, a solid mass of hunchedly embracing couples was slowly revolving.

The tinkly music for this elephantine exercise, almost as inaudible as the cocktail shaker, came from somewhere behind an inward-facing phalanx of alternately black and bare shoulders toward the far end of the wall to the right.

Everyone, even the dancers, seemed to be talking as fast as they could get the words out and as forcefully as the strength of tobacco-fogged lungs would permit.

Two couples marched straight at Carr. He swung aside, bumping a waiter who was coming around the end of the bar with a tray of cocktails. The waiter checked himself while the others passed, a crashing chord jetted up over the phalanx, applause vehement as carpet-beating began, and Carr substituted two of the bills for two of the cocktails just as the waiter continued forward and another couple came between them. Deftly holding the two cocktails in one hand and the rest of the bills in the other, Carr turned to Jane. But she had already left him and was edging through the press some tables away. Beyond her was a busy door marked “Setters,” close beside another labeled “Pointers.” Carr grimaced, leaned against the wall, closed his eyes, downed one of the cocktails, put the empty glass in his pocket and slowly sipped the other.

When he opened his eyes again, the dancers had all squeezed themselves into hitherto imperceptible nooks and crannies around the tables. The phalanx had dispersed to reveal a grossly fat man whose paunch abutted the keyboard of a tiny, cream-colored piano. A short apish individual who looked all dazzling white shirt-front—Goldie, surely at last—was standing on the edge of the empty dance floor and saying in a loud hoarse voice that in total lack of any honest enthusiasm would have been suitable for a carp: “And now let’s give the little chick a great big ovation!”

The earnest carpet-beaters started to work again. Goldie, ducking down from the platform, rewarded them with a cold sneer. The fat man’s hands began to scuttle up and down the keyboard like two fat white rats. And a blonde in a small black dress stepped up on the platform. She held in one hand something that might have been a shabby muff.

But even as the applause swelled, most of the people at the tables started to jabber at each other again.

Carr shivered. Here you have it, he thought suddenly—the bare stage, the unlistening audience, the ritual of the machine. The bacchanal shrunk to a precalculated and profit-motivated booze-fest under the direction of a Pan who’d gone all to watery flesh and been hitting the dope for two thousand years. The dreadful rhythm of progress without purpose. Did these people see or hear at all? Did they taste or touch? Did they even thrill to their drunkenness? Oh, into what sterile corners the whip of beauty-hunger has driven the drugged, near-dead if not dead already, spirit of man!

The blonde raised her arm and the muff unfolded to show, capping her unseen hand, a small face of painted wood that was at once foolish, frightened and lecherous. Two diminutive hands flapped beside it. The blonde began to hum to the music.

Continuing to toy with the piano, the fat man glanced around briefly. In a rapid, piping voice on the verge of a titter he confided, “And now you shall hear the sad tale of that most unfortunate creature, Peter Puppet.”

Carr finished his second drink in a gulp, looked around for Jane, couldn’t see her.

“Peter was perfect puppet,” the fat man intoned leisurely, accompanying himself with suitable runs and chords. Carr leaned forward, frowning. It was hard to hear with the jabber going on. “Yes, Peter was the prize Pinocchio of them all. He was carved out of wood to resemble a human being in complete detail, oh the most complete detail. Peter had everything a man has…in wood!”

The puppet made eyes at the blonde. She ignored him and began to dance sketchily.

The fat man whirled on tables, beetling his brows, “But he had one fault!” he half-shrieked. “He wanted to be alive!” Then, going back to the lazy titter, “Yes, our Peter wanted to be a man. He wanted to do everything a man does. He even wanted to do those things that you’d never, never, never think could be done by a gentleman…with wooden parts!”

Some guffaws came through the general jabber. The fat man’s hands darted venomously along the keyboard, eliciting dream, pastoral tones.

“Then one lovely spring day while Peter was wandering through the meadows, wishing he were a man, he chanced to see a beautiful, a simply be-unbelievably be-yutiful be-londe. Peter was shaken to his wooden core. He felt a swelling in his little wooden…” The fat man smirked briefly at the audience “…heart.”

With all sorts of handclasps and hopeful gawkings, the puppet was laying siege to the blonde. She closed her eyes, smiled, shook her head, went on humming.

Carr noticed Jane picking her way through the tables. But she was moving away from him. He tried to catch her eye.

“…and so Peter decided to follow the blonde home.” The fat man made footsteps in an upper octave.
“Pink-pink-pink
…went his little wooden tootsies…
pink-pink-ping.”

Jane reached the platform and to Carr’s astonishment, stepped up on it. Carr started forward, but the packed tables balked him.

Besides, contrary to his expectation, no one seemed inclined to bother Jane. Goldie was nowhere in sight, the noisy audience took no notice, and the fat man and the blonde apparently had decided to ignore her for the time being.

The blonde was making trotting motions with the puppet and the fat man was saying “Peter found that the blonde lived right next door to a furniture factory. Now Peter had no love of furniture factories because he’d once narrowly escaped becoming part of a Sheraton table leg. The screaming of the saws and the pounding of the hammers…” He did buzzy chromatic runs and anvil-chorusings “…
terrified
Peter. He felt that each nail was being driven right into his little wooden solar plexus, that the screaming saw was ruthlessly cutting off his precious wooden parts!”

Jane was standing near the blonde. Carr at last caught her eye. He thought he read there his own mixed feeling of pity and revulsion toward the noisy, mindless, beauty-blind horde.

He motioned her to come down, but she only smiled. Slowly she undid the gilt buttons of her coat and let it drop to the floor.

“Finally, conquering his terror, Peter
raced
past the furniture factory and
darted
up the walk to the blonde’s home…
pink-pink-pink-pink!”

Jane had coolly begun to unbutton her white blouse.

Blushing, Carr tried to push forward, motioning urgently. She took no notice. He started to shout at her, but just then he realized something and the realization left him speechless.

The crowd wasn’t reacting.
It was chattering as noisily as ever.

They
were
blind. They
were
mindless. They couldn’t contact anything that was outside of their mechanistic rhythm.

But that was ridiculous.

But that Jane should in reality be a strip-tease dancer at Goldie’s Casablanca—that was ridiculous too. Or that she should be so drunk…

“Peter followed the blonde up the stairs…
trip-trip-trip
…and into her bedroom. He felt the sap running madly up his legs and into his little wooden…tummy.”

Jane dropped her blouse, was in her slip and skirt.

Carr stood with his knee pushed forward against a table, swaying slightly, his hand still upraised like a drunken traffic cop ordering the world to stop.

“Then, his throat dry as sawdust with excitement, Peter
jumped
into bed with the blonde!” The fat hands tore up and down the keyboard. “And the blonde looked at Peter and said, ‘Little wooden man, what now?’”

Jane looked at Carr and dropped the shoulder straps and let her slip fall away. Carr swallowed. Tears stung his eyes. Her breasts seemed far more beautiful than flesh ought to be.

And then there was, not a reaction on the part of the crowd, but the ghost of one.

Sudden silences at parties are a common experience. One moment everyone is talking. The next, all conversations halt at once. You look about foolishly. You vaguely think, according to your turn of mind, of the mathematics of coincidence, of an invisible spirit passing, or of some chemical or physical stimulus, such as a faint odor or an odd half-heard sound, affecting everyone, but too tenuous to register clearly on anyone’s consciousness. Then someone laughs and you’re all talking again.

Such a momentary silence fell on Goldie’s Casablanca. Even the fat man’s glib phrases seemed to slacken and fade, like a phonograph record running down. His pudgy hands slowed, hung between cords. While the frozen gestures and expression of the people at the tables all hinted at words halted on the brink of utterance. And it seemed to Carr, as he started at Jane, that heads and eyes turned toward the platform, but only sluggishly and with difficulty, as if all these people were dreaming and only half-wakened from their dreams, or as if, dead, they felt a faint, almost painful, ripple of life. They seemed to see and yet not to see Jane’s naked breasts, to being to forget at the same moment they become aware.

And although he knew it was ridiculous and that his mind was hazy with liquor, Carr felt that Jane was showing herself to him alone, and the stupefied audience were no more than cattle who turn to look toward a sound, experience some brief sluggish glow of consciousness, and go back to their cud-chewing an their dark wordless inner life.

Then, all at once, the crowd was jabbering again, the fat man was smirking and tittering, the blonde was fighting off a madly amorous puppet, and Jane was hurrying among the tables, her arms pressed to her sides to hold up her slip, with snatched-up coat and blouse trailing from one hand. As she approached, it seemed to Carr that everything else was melting into her, blurring off, becoming unimportant.

When she’d squeezed past the long table, he grabbed her hand. They didn’t say anything. Their eyes took care of that. He helped her into her coat. As they hurried up the stairs and out the glass door, they heard the fat man’s recitation die away like the chugging of a black greasy engine: “And what do you think little Alice found when she went up to the nursery?—her puppet Peter and her French doll Goldielocks in a most compromising position, oh, yes, a most…”

It was five blocks to Carr’s room. The streets were empty. A stiff breeze from the lake had blown the smoke from the sky, and the stars glittered down into the trenches between the buildings. The darkness that clung to the brick walls and besieged the street lamps seemed to Carr to be compounded of excitement and terror and desire in a mixture beyond analysis. He and Jane hurried on, holding hands.

The hall was dark. He let himself in quietly and they tiptoed up the stairs. Inside his room, he pulled down the shades, switched on the light. A blurred Jane was standing by the door, taking off her coat. For a moment Carr was afraid that he might have drunk too much. He moved toward her quickly. Then she smiled and her image cleared and he knew he wasn’t too drunk. He almost cried as he clapped his arms around her.

How strange it was. What she had been doing in Goldie’s Casablanca was not exhibiting herself, but hiding; from
them.
Taking on protective coloration. To him alone, he was sure, had she been truly revealed. And it was this revelation that teased him. Taunted him, now.

The coat and blouse were off. Suddenly and almost innocently the slip dropped, the last curtain between them. This was the true Jane, all of Jane. The Jane tempting, delectable, rosy between her big-nippled, big-aureoled, tiny breasts, ivory in the shaven area above her triangle of Venus. He tasted this throbbing curving flesh with his hands, then his seeking lips. As desire soared hotly within him, it mounted responsively in her. She gave herself to him completely, part by smooth part (so very smooth, indeed), and yet not solely giving, but taking. Drawing on him as he drew on her. Fire slowly, sensuously. Then at increasing pace, until theirs was the swift, searing throb of climatic love, waxing to a poignant ecstasy beyond anything either had ever known—and waning, waning, as the crested wave breaks and wanes, only to renew itself and again rise surgingly to a new peak of bliss.

After they had slept together he found himself realizing that he had never felt so delightfully sober in his life, though granting that the picture might change a bit if he made a sudden movement. From where he lay he could see Jane in the mirror. She’d thrown on his dressing gown and was mixing drinks for them. A faucet gurgled briefly. Then she came back and he turned over and hitched himself up on an elbow.