16   

Problems of the whore/
madonna syndrome (Aryans at
half-mast)

Mirrored dramatically in A Son Goût’s polished window, Roy let his own image ravish him. From cap to boots and whip, he had never felt so tuned to his inner essence. He felt secure and strong, a man with an identity and a destiny at last, seduced as Narcissus.

When something else could intrude on his rapt self-admiration, the displayed pictures and X-rated toys in the window told him this was a place for lacks of a very special kind. A small rubric lettered low on the glass — CATERING TO YOUR REFINED NEEDS — confirmed the impression. Drumm had steered him right.

Entering, Roy found himself in an opulent anteroom done in red velvet plush. Two young men in White Paladin uniforms, on their way out, snapped to rigid attention, puzzling Roy until he realized he was the recipient of the courtesy. Good enough. He touched the whip to his cap bill.

“As you were. I was enlisted once myself. Carry on.”

“Good day, sir!” A distinguished older man in tux brushed through beaded curtains at the rear, menu tucked under one arm, manner silken. “We hoped you might honor us with a visit. Welcome to A Son Goût, Mr. Stride.” A slight but impeccable bow. “Adrian at your service.”

“Heard you had a real nice place here. Take care of, uh, special needs?”

“Absolutely,” Adrian assured him quickly. “A Son Goût has earned its reputation: purveyors of the best and the unusual, an oasis to the male libido athirst.”

“Huh?”

“My own little joke.” Adrian waved it away. “This way, sir.”

Roy followed him through the beaded curtains to another room in the same plush with more gold trimming and tables covered with crisp white damask. Adrian seated him with a flourish and opened the menu with a practiced twist — frowned and closed it again. Kind of a queer, Roy guessed, but he had to admire the flashing choreography of the white hands. Strictly class. Adrian reminded him of that guy who used to advertise expensive booze in magazines.

Adrian snapped his fingers. “Esmeralda?” A rear door opened and a thin girl of about eighteen skittered into the chamber. She looked passably slutty to Roy; he could make it with her in a pinch: thin hips, way too skinny, in ratty black tights and a leather miniskirt. The pouting face with its carmine mouth, green eye shadow and frowzy, peroxided hair over dark roots might interest him on an odd night — but not special. Too punk rock.

“Esmeralda, this is yesterday’s menu. Today’s please.” The girl changed them quickly and slipped out after a sultry glance at Roy.

“Esmeralda is one of today’s specials.” Adrian pursed his lips over the current bill of choices. “We are expecting a party from SoHo.” He beamed at Roy, hands laced. “Do we have an appetite today, sir? Truly lustful? A full repast or just something to pick at?”

“The full treatment.” Roy settled back. “Best you got.”

“Good, sir.”

Roy twitched his whip. “No spades or losers, you got it? That special don’t look so hot. And no Jews.”

Adrian stiffened. “But of course not, sir. We prepare to order.

Esmeralda was prepared for the disco trade. We offer as well an haute monde selection, very popular with the New York set. And for the palate beyond astonishment, an anorexic double amputee. Then there is the consideration of vintage. For example, the’67: an excellent year but still a trifle young.”

Roy whetted to the prospect. “I like’em young.”

“And the 70,” Adrian ventured. “Naive but a fun libation.” The delicate turn of a pale hand. “Though for a true Sauvignon complexity, may one suggest the’54, which should be superb now. And absolutely Wasp, sir.”

Roy nodded. “Now you got the idea.”

“Untainted with, shall we say, Mediterranean influences.”

“Pure blood is very important.”

The white hands described a precise sine qua non. “To the discriminate, quite everything.”

“That’s what I want. But, you know... kinky.”

“Kinks, sir?” Adrian managed to correct and reassure in one breath. “Proclivities, rather. By a miracle of serendipity, we have a selection of two today, each a masterpiece.” The sommelier’s gift for description grew to rhapsody. “Ms. Eleanor Padgett-Clive, vintage’60. Niece to an earl. Down from Cambridge, firsts and blues. An enormous, one might say legendary, appetite for men, curbed only by her breeding and the restraints of civil law.”

“Hey, a real nymphermaniac?”

“With frequent relapses,” Adrian blandished, “which allow us to feature her as a selection of rare value. And — if it is not redundant to observe — dying to meet you, Mr. Stride. Are we tempted, sir?”

“Right on!” Roy bumped back the chair. “Lead me to it.”

Adrian wheeled with the precision of a sergeant major on parade. “This way, please.”

The bedroom was something out of old movies, done mostly in merciless scarlet and electric blue. To any taste but the most diseased, the colors alone might have precluded sleep or even relaxation; for Roy they were Uptown.

“Bon appttit, sir.” Adrian withdrew.

If this was hell, it was definitely the high-rent district, and why not? Damned for making it just once with Charity, and that once not all that good. Face it, she didn’t know much, and he had his usual troubles like with any respectable girl. Why shouldn’t he land in clover just once: power, girls, every dream about to come true? He could really get comfortable here, make it every time with the right kind of woman.

“That’s our wish,” the low, musical contralto voice read his thought, “and our purpose, Roy.”

Eleanor Padgett-Clive poised in the doorway like an exquisite painting, marvelously sexual without working at it in the least, in a diaphanous dressing gown that left just enough to erotic imagination. She glided to Roy and slipped her arms about his neck. “Sorry to be late. I was reading and the time just stole away. Hello, darling.”

Roy felt bleak. To most men this side of terminal impotence, Eleanor would be a love call in herself. She resembled several English film stars of the’60s and’70s: full, luscious mouth, her face sculpted over exquisite bones. Her voice alone, low and musical, could remind a man of biological imperatives.

Could but did not; for Roy, everything about Eleanor was wrong. Wrong voice, wrong face, too damned high-class. Classy women made him feel angry and inferior, but he allowed her to lead him to the bed. Eleanor began to undress him. Her hands moved faster and faster, her breathing rapid and shallow with desire, until she was tearing the clothes from him.

“Hey, careful of the shirt, it’s new.”

In a very short time, Roy was naked as a peeled egg. Eleanor let her gown slide from creamy shoulders and pulled him eagerly down onto the bed, her heavy sensual mouth crushed to his. “Take me, darling. Use me. Ravage me.”

He wished he could.

“Darling, what’s the matter?” Eleanor searched Roy’s face for some answering spark and found none. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” he evaded. “Just...”

“Please, I’m so ready for you.” Eleanor writhed against him.

“Hey, take it easy, okay? Shit.” The same old trouble, no different here than back home. He could never make it with a nice girl like Charity that you wanted to marry. Even if Eleanor was just a whore, she looked nice. And there were other things needed that he usually had to pay for.

“A challenge,” Eleanor whispered. “Shall we not rise to it?”

She was more than beautiful, she was admirably deft and proved it in the next few minutes. The range of her erotic skill was phenomenal, employing the full gamut of her own marvelous equipment and parts of Roy even the Air Force doctors had missed. He only became more depressed and angry, thinking of all the guys who would’ve died happily by this time, how good it could be without that lousy hang-up, but... nothing.

At length, Eleanor desisted. “Love’s labors are definitely lost. Your sort are so predictably alike.”

That did it. She wasn’t his type but no woman talked to him like that. “What you mean all alike?”

Eleanor glanced down at his defeat. “A midsummer’s night dream turns to a winter’s tale or a comedy of errors.”

He didn’t know what the hell she was talking about but it sounded like she was making fun of him. A stud like him who could go all night with the right kind of woman. “Hey, listen, bitch. With a man sometimes the woman don’t turn him on, you know? Not my fault if you don’t do nothing for me.”

“The point is moot.” Eleanor slid from the bed and into her gown. “But then you’re not my sort either, you inadequate little man.”

“You shut your fuckin mouth, bitch!”

“Certainly.” Eleanor knew how to make a graceful exit with ruin in her wake. “This place isn’t your hell, darling. Nowhere you go will ever be. You carry it with you. For you, nice girls don’t, isn’t that so? You can never quite reconcile sexuality with virtue. Actually nice girls have more talent for sex. Less guilt, more imagination and a great deal more fun.”

“I said shut up.” Roy swung off the bed, ugly and dangerous. “You don’t talk to a man like that.”

“A man?” Eleanor’s laughter cut like shards of crystal. “And you’re what busy little Drumm dredged up for the people’s choice? White Paladin to the unwashed. Bon chance, darling. Hail and farewell from the gratefully obsolete.”

“Listen, you —” Roy took a vicious swing at her. She hardly moved, but whatever she did Bruce Lee would have paid to learn. Roy went tail over teakettle against the wall and landed head down, blinking at an upside-down Eleanor.

“Filet’s not for you, Mr. Stride. Adrian will fetch you something more in the line of grits.” The door closed behind Ms. Padgett-Clive.

Cold, shaking, Roy sat down on the bed, staring at the door. They knew. Everything. Got right down to the problem, even laughed at him. He cursed with feeble rage at Eleanor and Adrian and the whole goddamned lousy system that made things and people the way they were.

I didn’t make the rules about what’s nice and what ain’t. Just I’m a White Christian and that’s the way things are.

“Precisely, sir.” Adrian poised in the doorway, an etude in apology.

“Hey, man, do you people know what I’m thinking even?”

“Not exactly, but we have done business for ever so long. One hopes you will pardon my deplorable lapse of judgment. Eleanor of course was completely wrong for your specifications. Actually she specializes in the younger novelists. I insist on making amends. Our remaining selection is Florence Bird.”

Roy was in no mood to be gracious. “She better be the right stuff. Won’t be long’fore I got some pull around here. The business will go where I go, you got it? Who is she?”

Once more Adrian was the compleat sommelier. “Florence Bird: vintage’54. Robust, assertive as Pinot Noir. And absolutely Wasp.”

“For real?”

“On the house’s reputation: the last honest-to-Goebbels bottling Below Stairs.

“Well, run her in here before I go somewhere else. Can’t be only one whorehouse around here.”

“There is Club Banal for the pedestrian trade,” Adrian informed him with a definite chill. “Whatever they can make ordinary, A Son Goût can render sublime. Miss Bird, sir.”

Once more Adrian bowed and withdrew. Only a short wait, then the door flew open and Florence Bird gusted in. Roy’s heart leaped.

“’Allo, luv!”

Florence was large, frizzy-haired and utterly bare under the open nylon wrapper trimmed in rabbit fur that fluttered in her bold wake like the train of a raffish empress. Florence was nothing if not forthright.

“Had to spend a linnet up the apples for an’it and miss from all the pig’s ear and mother’s ruin down the rub-a-dub. Like me Bristols?”

Roy licked his lips in tumescent excitement. Florence was stout and coarse with a merry lasciviousness, though her very direct handshake was definitely not what he was used to from businesswomen. She sounded like some foreigner, very difficult to understand. “Hiya, honey. Where you from?”

“Lunnon,” Florence pealed like Bow Bells. “Carnt yer tell?”

More bullshit. He didn’t want to talk at all. She worked for him, all right, the kind that always did: loud, cheap, lay it on the line. Right on. There’d be no problems with Florence beyond translation. She was late, she explained, having been down at her pub having a few gins and beer chasers and had to stop at the bathroom for that and to rouge her nipples, knowing a man of his hearty tastes would appreciate the effect.

Right stuff, right on, Roy thrilled. Oh jeez, if she can only do the rest of it.

Subtle as a bayonet charge, Florence cupped Roy’s genitals and wiggled her hips. “Right bit o’ wick’n awls.” She winked, undulating her belly against his. “Like me Khyber?”

Whatever her Khyber was, Roy was all for it. “Yeah. Come on.”

“A course, for you, might have to down a few more pints to give yer what yer need, but we’ll give it a bash. Down on the floor, luv. Might be a bit left for yer.”

“Oh yeah. Yeah, that’s it, you got it.” Roy got ready, tingling with anticipation and need. “Give it to me, you lousy slut. The whip, too.”

Florence was cheerfully accommodating. Roy closed his eyes in bliss and pain under the benediction and the whip. Love had found Andy Hardy.