Thirty - Jill Emerson [48]
It wasn’t him.
At the hotel, Edgar was a little less smooth about things than he might have been. I was supposed to wait in the lobby while he handled things at the desk. I’m sure the desk didn’t care, but maybe he didn’t want me to see what name he used, or something like that. And then there was a lot of business with hand movements and head nods designed to clue me in that I should get on the elevator ahead of him. For a guy who had done this before, he was acting like a guy who hadn’t done this before.
In the room, he gave me this long look. I prepared myself for the news that Marcie didn’t understand him. I had news for him. Marcie understood him.
Instead he said, “You know, I always liked you, Jan.”
“We always liked each other.”
“Yes. Whenever the gang got together—”
“We responded to each other.”
“Exactly.”
Poor little Beady Eyes, I thought, and closed my own eyes and waited for him to kiss me. Which he proceeded to do. Ah, Marcie, I thought, savoring the kiss, rubbing my body against him, ah, Marcie, I wish you were here to watch.
Who would have guessed that he would turn out to be so oral? Kissing everywhere, hungry, desperate to kiss and lick. Not very good at it, and a rank idiot at missing the clitoris, but ravenously eager to please. And who would have guessed that, after he heaved himself out of the crouch and onto me, after he plunged squishily into me, after he gave the requisite number of thrusts and splashed my insides with his seed, he would pass out on me and give every evidence of having succumbed to a massive coronary?
I went through this whole trip about what to do next. Call the desk? Call a doctor? Call the police? Hello, I was fucking this fellow, the husband of a girl who used to be a very close friend of mine, when all of a sudden he happened to have a heart attack and die, and if you could just send up a couple of male nurses to sort of roll him off me, I’d be very grateful.
I could just sneak out, I decided. And leave him like that? And then what would happen?
God only knows what I might have done, but of course he opened his eyes and told me I was fantastic, the best there ever was. How would he know? All I’d had a chance to do was open my legs and lie there for a while.
We sat up in bed smoking cigarettes. “I’ll bet you’ve made some crazy scenes, Jan.”
“Oh, you could call it that.”
“I don’t blame you a bit. Same thing everybody would do if they had the guts. Who wants to spend the rest of your life with a millstone around your neck, right?”
“Right, Edgar.”
“Crazy scenes. Down in the Village, I know about the Village, you don’t have to tell me about the Village. Before I married Marcie I used to go down there all the time. I moved around, you know. I kept in motion.”
“I’m sure you did.”
“That was a lot of shit about living with a couple of shfoogs, wasn’t it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You had me going for a few minutes. You live alone?”
“No, as a matter of fact, I have a roommate.”
“Oh, a roommate.”
“You’d like her.”
“Her.”
“A Chinese girl a couple years younger than I am. Really beautiful.”
“Is that right.”
“And if you think I’m wild, you should see her. I could tell you stories.”
“Really?”
So I made up some stories. I knew it would get him excited. What he really wanted was to screw my Oriental roommate, but she wasn’t available, so he settled for taking it all in and then screwing me while he pictured her. It was sort of fun.
There was one more pretty good moment, after we were dressed again, after he had taken down my address and phone number (the wrong address, and the wrong phone number). He asked if there was anything I needed, anything he could do for me, anything at all, just ask, anything.
“Well, now that you mention it—”
“You’re a little short?”
“Well, if you could spare a few dollars.”
“Jan, you should have said something. Whatever you want, whatever you need. Just pick a number.”
“Well—” trying it on “—well, see, I generally get twenty-five