Pappy came home for long enough to have coffee with me before she left for work, even though this meant she dragged me out of bed two hours earlier than necessary. I was so anxious to find out what was going on that I didn’t care about the two lost hours of sleep. She was radiant—so beautiful!
“Where did you go?” I asked.
She explained that he keeps a weeny flat in Glebe, near Sydney University. “We went there, bolted the door, took the telephone off the hook, and never moved outside until six this morning. Oh, Harriet, he’s wonderful, perfect—a king, a god! Nothing like it has ever happened to me before! Would you believe that we lay naked together and played with each other for six hours before he took me the first time?” Her eyes glazed at the memory. “We tormented each other—licked and sucked until we nearly came, then stopped, then started all over again—our climax was simultaneous, isn’t that incredible? At one and the same moment! And then we plunged into a sadness so deep and full that we both wept.”
These confidences were so embarrassing that I begged her to keep the gory details to herself, but Pappy lacks inhibitions, she really does.
“You’re embarrassing yourself, Harriet,” she said in tones of disapproval. “It’s high time you came to terms with your body.”
I stuck my chin up. “There’s no one I fancy,” I lied. Toby, Toby, Toby.
“You’re afraid.”
“Of getting pregnant, for sure.”
“Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz says that if a woman doesn’t want a baby all the way through to her soul, she won’t conceive.”
I snorted. “Thank you, I have no intention of testing the Delvecchio Schwartz Theory, Pappy, and that’s that. So you had a jolly time with the Prof. Was it all sex, or did you talk too?”
“We talked endlessly! We smoked a little hashish, lay in each other’s arms, inhaled a little cocaine—I never realised how some substances can heighten one’s pleasure almost unbearably!”
I knew if I started to remonstrate with her about that, we’d quarrel, so instead I asked if the Prof was married.
“Yes,” she said quite happily, “to a sad, dreary woman he detests. They have seven children.”
“He can’t detest her that much, then. Where do they live?”
“Somewhere out near the Blue Mountains. He drives out there occasionally for the sake of the children, but he and his wife sleep in separate bedrooms.”
“That’s one method of birth control,” I said, a bit waspishly.
“Ezra told me that he fell in love with me the moment he set eyes on me. He says I’ve brought him joy no other woman ever has.”
“Does Ezra mean that your weekend parade of men is a thing of the past?” I asked.
Pappy looked genuinely shocked. “Of course it does, Harriet! My search is over, I’ve found Ezra. Other men are meaningless.”
Well, I honestly don’t know how much of all that I ought to believe. Pappy believes, so for her sake I hope my own doubts are without foundation. Hashish and cocaine. The Prof certainly knows how to indulge in ultimate pleasures. Married, too. Lots of men do have unhappy marriages, no reason to think that Ezra Marsupial—what is his name?—isn’t one of them. Oh, but what truly does set my teeth on edge is the way darling Ezra chooses to live his life. He keeps his wife and seven kids far enough away from his place of work to negate them, and he keeps this weeny flat in the Glebe. Very handy, a weeny flat right next door to a bottomless supply of nubile young maidens. For the life of me I can’t see why the wretched man is so attractive to those idiotic girls, but obviously he’s got something, though I doubt that his dingus is as long as Dad’s garden hose. It’s the hashish and cocaine, I reckon.
He’s just using Pappy, I know it in my bones. But why did he pick her, with all those others gazing at him with their tongues hanging out? Why, for that matter, is Pappy so desirable to so many men? When sex is uppermost on a man’s mind, the beauty of a woman’s nature isn’t what draws them. There’s a mystery here that I have to solve. I love Pappy, and I think she’s the prettiest creature in the world. But there’s more to it than that.
Harriet Purcell, you’re a novice in the love department, what gives you the right to speculate? Hurry up, King of Pentacles number one! I need a basis of reference.