CINDY’S ALL–DAY SEX–FEST ONLY LASTED HALF A DAY. OF course it started at dawn, so it was a long half day. During the half day I attempted to help her do all the things she had never got to do with men more successful than myself. They were not really very revolutionary things. In fact, they were sexual staples, familiar to millions, if not billions. But for some reason they had not yet become staples to Cindy, and she enjoyed them a lot.
We had to go out to lunch, since we were both ravenous and there was not enough food in Cindy’s larder to feed even one of us. So we went out and wolfed down some bacon cheeseburgers and happened to notice that there was a Humphrey Bogart double feature at a movie theater two doors from the restaurant. To Have and Have Not and Casablanca were the movies.
“We could go see them,” I suggested.
Cindy was delighted. It fit in perfectly with the unconventionality of the day. Seeing movies in the afternoon was an even greater defiance of the laws of success than lying around fucking. The latter was at least tinged with romance—the former was just lazy.
“We can eat popcorn and hold hands,” I added.
“Naw, I hate popcorn, it’s not good for you,” she said. “But we can hold hands. I’ve never seen either of those movies.”
“You must be the only person in the world who hasn’t seen Casablanca,” I said.
She looked at me as if I had just made a serious assertion.
“I don’t think I am,” she said.
If she was, she still is, because the minute we sat down she fell asleep and slept contentedly through most of both movies. I slept through most of To Have and Have Not myself—it had been a strenuous morning—but I woke up in Casablanca just as they were singing the “Marseillaise.” Not Cindy. She was snoozing soundly, her head on my shoulder, her mouth open. On the screen Ingrid Bergman was looking her freshest, her eyes liquid with the dew of youth and life. Cindy looked the picture of vulnerability. I kissed her and when she opened her eyes they were just as dewy as Ingrid Bergman’s. We abandoned the movie, bought a huge sack of groceries, and went back to her house.
Cindy went in the kitchen and began to put the groceries away, yawning big healthy yawns as she did it. She had bought five or six kinds of soup. Leek soup, turtle soup, gazpacho, split pea, lentil, and Manhattan clam chowder. She was happily stuffing them into her shelves, which already seemed to contain a lot of soup.
“It’s my favorite thing,” she said, a bit defiantly, when she caught me looking at the soup. Somehow it was a winning touch. Behind the poised social climber was a girl who liked to stockpile a lot of soups. Probably having a lot of soup made her feel secure. In an odd way it sort of made up for her lack of interest in antiques.
In effect she was a soup collector, a realization which cheered me, for some reason. I went over and kissed her just as she was starting a yawn. It was a happy move. A woman who is just getting into being awakened is usually eager to have the awakening continue.
“I’ll make you some soup,” she remarked, after the kiss.