“I don’t suppose she’s a virgin,” he says thoughtfully. “She didn’t act quite like one… I suppose some boy has taken her on a picnic or something like that. But it’s really wrong to take a girl like that, with all her illusions, and do to her what I did. But I couldn’t stop, once it was started! I had to screw her, and because she was young and innocent and little I acted worse with her than I did with her mother … I made her do everything that her mother did… . God! Mother and daughter I’ve screwed them both … . and I can’t forget either of them. What a situation! Alf, you know Alexandra; what would she do if she found out? Do you think she’d go to Ann? Would it be very bad? Christ, Almighty. I’d tell her myself, right now, if I thought it would do any good… …”
That’s what Sam has been doing with his time. As for Ann, she has another story and a hell of a story too. For some reason she wants me to believe that she has really jumped off the high board … perhaps she thinks that I’ll tell Sam and make him jealous … . . she won’t forget that card game he didn’t go to… …
There are two vague males … . so vague that Ann can’t even keep their names straight. And these two bozos, with Ann, are alleged to have promoted some very high jinx at her little hideaway a couple of nights ago. According to Ann’s story, she took them up there intending to let them fuck her, one at a time, and then got scared. Then, when they found out that she didn’t intend to take down her pants after all they got sore, tied her to the bed, and gave her the works… …
If she’d picked better names! If these birds had been called Sid and Ernest, for instance, I might have believed her. But these guys are a couple of tough frogs …
. perhaps Apaches … . and the whole, glittering picture is obviously a piece of cerebral adventuring.
“The way I was treated!” Ann exclaims, managing a shudder. “The filth I was obliged to endure! It’s impossible to speak of it… . . I shan’t even remember it!
Tied to a bed! Helpless, and at the mercy of men without mercy! What would Sam say if he suspected!”
Ann, unless she is careful, is liable to talk herself into something. In America, when a woman begins daydreaming like that, she goes to a psychoanalyst and has her mind felt up. In Paris she’s more likely to end up in a hotel bedroom with two thugs and a pimp with a movie camera… … .
BOOK III
Cherchez le Toit
Sam has plenty to say about the French these days. It’s a fake, says Sam, all this you hear about the indolent good living of the French. The indolence he is willing to concede … as to the good living, he wants to make speeches about it.
“An hour and a half for lunch,” he snorts to me … “I used to think that it must be a wonderfully carefree people who lived that way … until I found out how they spent that hour and a half. Backbiting, penny-pinching … do you really want to know why they take an hour and a half for lunch? Because they figure that they’re safe in a cafe, that they won’t be tempted to spend any more money than they’ve allowed themselves. If they stayed in the office maybe somebody would come in and sell them a new ribbon for a typewriter. That’s the whole idea … they shudder at the thought of doing business because it costs something to do business. Here, look, I’ll show you something… ” He finds a scrap of paper in his pocket and throws it on the table. “There’s a receipt I got this morning from a supposedly reputable business house. Do you see what it is … . the back of an envelope. That’s French business for you.”
And so it goes. Sam can find a thousand reasons for disliking the French, but the real trouble is that Sam has had his life somewhat upset since he’s been in Paris. I don’t pay much attention to all this as long as he doesn’t threaten to go home to America. Let him say anything he pleases … just so long as his wife and his daughter are here to fuck and he’s around to buy me a drink he can talk his head off for all I care.
Not that I don’t like Sam … . considering all the years I spent back in New York kissing the asses of men like him, we get along beautifully. He tells me all about his adventures with Alexandra and Tania; I tell him nothing about my adventures with Snuggles and Ann. It works perfectly that way.
Something new is happening to Ann … or so Billie tells me. Ann is still avoiding me, so I have to take Billie’s word for it. But I’ve no reason to believe that Billie might be shitting me… . .
Billie’s story is that Ann is trying to make her … and Billie should know, I suppose. She stops in one afternoon just after she’s been to see Ann with another delivery of those fancy watercolors that Ann’s collecting and gives me the lowdown, the real dope. Billie’s amused, but I think that she’s interested too.
After all, Ann is a fine-looking woman, and while Billie usually goes for the sweet young things like Jean and Snuggles I can imagine that she likes a change now and then.
According to Billie, Ann tried to flatter her pants off for a change, told her how lonely it was in Paris without any women friends, and practically asks Billie to teach her what The Well of Loneliness was all about. Billie thought it was just curiosity at first, but by now she’s decided that Ann really wants to go to bed with her. She wants to know what I think about it … . not that it will make much difference in the end.
Well, why not? Ann probably figures that she’s gone overboard so completely in Paris that it simply wouldn’t make sense to neglect an opportunity to find out the answers to all the questions she’s been asking herself. Paris, for Ann, is something that never happened before and probably won’t happen again once she’s on a boat for New York. If she wants to know what it’s like to sleep with a woman it’s now or never.
Billie nods, pleased because those are the things she wants to hear. What’s Ann like in bed, she wants to know. Is she a hot fuck? Is she as good as Jean, for instance? She wants me to tell her all about Ann, the way a man would want to be told. And what about the guy who foots the bills … what about her husband?
She throws one leg over the arm of the chair, not giving a fuck that I can see everything she owns, and throws questions at me.
“For the love of Jesus, will you put your leg down?” I finally have to interrupt.
“I haven’t had a lay in almost a week.”
Billie looks pained. She’s full of sympathy. Why don’t I call Jean? Or do I want her to ask Jean to come around when she goes home? That bitch! If she isn’t careful she won’t get home … I’m in a mood to lock up her clothes and keep her here a week, Lesbian or no Lesbian.
“What are you going to do about Ann?” I ask, when I’ve answered more questions than she can remember.
“I haven’t decided … . I’ll think about it. I’m wondering about Snuggles.”
Then she’s made up her mind to leave, and she’s gone before I can work myself up to raping her… … .
Ernest calls me. What have I been doing, he wants to know, about fixing things for that date at Ann’s? I have to tell him that I haven’t been doing anything
… I haven’t seen her long enough to talk to. Well, then, by all the fucking names of a name, he’ll take care of it himself … where can he find her? I tell him a couple of places where he might run into her and he hangs up.
He sounds as surprised as I am when he calls me back a couple of hours later. He’s found her, they’re in some joint on the rue St. Jacques, and he wants me to come right down.
“What do I want to do that for? Look, Ernest, you just fix things up… . I have to go out and eat pretty soon… .”
That won’t do at all, it seems. He has to go home and get the camera, and he can’t take her with him and he can’t leave her alone. He’s afraid she’ll sober up too much if there isn’t someone with her.
“Did she say it was all right about the party?” I ask him.
“Well, no, she didn’t exactly say that, Alf, but it’s going to be all right. Once we get her at her place we can fix that. What’s
