May greets me at the door. She looks like she has been waiting for me. She doesn’t look like the highland girls, she looks more Polynesian, from Hawaii, or Fiji or somewhere even more exotic. I don’t speak, just grab her arm and pull her towards her little bedroom. She laughs. I laugh. I remove my clothes and help her take hers from her exquisite body. She lies on the bed and I roll on top of her, go quickly to her place of entry, find my way in, and move, gently, because May is a gentle woman full of what seems to be love and kindness. I have no time for foreplay, for seduction, and May doesn’t seem interested either. My confidence is growing. If, on the odd occasion, the lizard cannot find a way in, I make a quick adjustment and seek a more suitable location. When my final rush is over and we both lie still I ask her if she would like a cup of tea. She says yes and gets up to make it.
I am reading The Carpetbaggers, another Harold Robbins tome. There’s a bloke in it I like, Nevada Smith. He’s part Kiowa, an American Indian tribe from Oklahoma. He’s strong, tough, a killer, a lover, a man. His parents are killed by some bandits and he chases them down one by one and kills them all like the racist dogs they are and begins a life of crime, killing and sex. Along the way he is insulted and abused for being Indian, mistaken for a white man, all kinds of women throw themselves at him and he becomes a movie star. He has piercing blue eyes. I try to make mine pierce and I dream of important battles to fight and incidents to avenge. If only some evil prick would oblige and kill May and force me to track him down like the pig he is so I can slit the bastard’s throat with my hunting knife and avenge not only May but all women like her who have been ravaged by men like him.
I don’t knock, not anymore, I just walk in. May is sitting at her little kitchen table in her tiny kitchen. She smiles. I smile. When May smiles you lose control over your face. I look towards the tiny bedroom off the kitchen. It is the only other room. She smiles again. She gets up from her chair and puts her empty cup on the sink.
Can I go to the toilet first, Jack? she asks.
No, May, I say, no toilet.
We know it’s a joke. Of course she can go to the toilet. She knows she can, but she can see the eagerness in my eyes, the hunger in my body. May knows I have come for sex.
When she is done and I am done and we lie naked on her bed I say: May, you are a Lutheran, right?
Yes, Jack.
What do Lutherans have to say about sex?
She turns away.
I mean, do they say that you shouldn’t be doing it, that it is a sacred act and that you should be married first?
Is it what you believe, Jack?
I laugh, then May laughs and I push myself into her again.
We are still. I sit up and look at her silky naked blackness. She has the perfect figure, a thirty-five, twenty-three, thirty-five, the Tania Verstak numbers, those belonging to the former Miss Australia and Miss International, the first foreign-born Australian to win a beauty pageant and the only famous woman my dad ever seemed to get sweaty over. Tania Verstak is out of my range, but May is mine.
Have you heard of George Kanluna? I ask.
Of course, May says. He is a big man.
How big?
He might be our prime minister. Have you met him?