Chapter 7
Pete Galton woke up in the middle of a bathroom floor. The room smelled of sex and sickness. Pete’s head ached dully, a slow pain that was always there and never stabbing, never biting, never proving to him that he was alive. Just a pain. He opened his eyes warily and looked around. He looked at the filthy bathroom. Then he looked down and studied the girl beside him.
At first he was afraid that she might be dead. Then he saw that she was breathing, slowly but regularly, and he felt better. Not good, but better. He eased himself up from the girl, careful not to wake her, took a last look around the bathroom and then he went out into the other room.
The room was empty of people. It reeked of sex and sweat, of people, of lust. Clothes were scattered throughout the room, and they reminded Pete that he was naked. He looked around for the slacks and shirt he had worn but they were gone. He remembered what a mess they had been and wondered hazily why anybody would want them. He did manage to find some underwear that was his size and his own tennis shoes, but he couldn’t find the rest of his clothing. It irritated him.
Then, unaccountably, he found that someone had abandoned a perfectly fine gray flannel suit. He tried it on and it fit. Then he found a white shirt to go with it and took off the jacket, put on the shirt, buttoned it, and put on the jacket once again. Why in the world had anybody left the suit behind? Hats get forgotten, umbrellas get left at parties, but suits?
And then he began to remember the party. All of it, from the beginning when he had walked through the door with Joyce Kendall on his arm, to the end, when he had unceremoniously passed out in the pleasant aftermath of intercourse with Joyce Kendall.
All of it.
And now, remembering it, it seemed impossible that all that he remembered could ever have taken place. He could not fully believe that he had done the things he now remembered doing, that he could have seen the things he now remembered seeing. He felt weak in the knees and looked for a place to sit down. He found a cushion and sat on it but that didn’t help. He was nauseous now and he had to throw up.
He didn’t run into the bathroom. He vomited square in the middle of the floor, his stomach doing a neat flip and turning itself inside-out, and then he turned away and sat down again. He felt a little better now.
What was the matter with him? How sick was he, how rotten inside, that he could have done the things he remembered doing?
You’re no good, he told himself. You’re a pig. Rotten inside. No good at all.
Now what was he supposed to do? He wanted to get out of the place, to take a cab back to his own apartment and try to forget what had happened. A cab? Sure, except what in hell was he going to use for money? His wallet had been in his pants pocket. His pants were gone. That was nice.
On a hunch, he checked the gray flannel suit, checked first the pants and the jacket. If the suit’s owner had had a wallet, he had it no longer. But there were a few crumpled bills in a back pocket, a five and three ones, and that would get him home.
He stood up and started for the door. Then he remembered the girl and remembering her made him stop in his tracks and try to figure things out all over again.
In a sense, what had happened to her was his fault. He had brought her here, brought her unprepared for what was going to happen. In another sense, she had asked for it, had wanted to go with him wherever he wanted to take her, had asked no questions and made no conditions whatsoever.
Was she his responsibility? Was anyone, himself concluded, the responsibility of one Pete Galton?
It was hard to say.
He was shaky now and he needed a cigarette. There weren’t any in the gray flannel suit, unfortunately, and he rummaged around the room hunting for a pack. He found several flip-top boxes, all sadly empty, and he nursed a deep loathing for the manufacturers of flip-top boxes. The damned things looked full when they were empty. It was frustrating.
There was one Lucky left in a crumpled pack and he salvaged it, straightened it out, and let it dangle out of his mouth. Then he made another search and found a match. He lit the cigarette and took a deep drag on it.
It helped.
The girl, Joyce Kendall. What, now, was he going to do with her? Leave her there?
He got a good mental picture of the girl waking up, alone, nude, in an empty and filthy loft in the middle of nowhere. Alone with memories of the night before, memories that couldn’t be too pleasing to her. She wouldn’t even be able to find her way home. Probably wouldn’t want to go home anyway. Hell, she might even take a dive through the window.
You never could tell. He himself was sick enough at the memory of the night before, and he was a dissipated man, not an innocent girl. And he hadn’t done that much—while she had played hostess to at least twenty men.
Christ.
Well, he decided, he didn’t have a hell of a lot of choice in the matter. He had to take care of her and that was all there was to it. He had to get her dressed, somehow, and get her back to the apartment, somehow, and get her to bed. Alone.
Clothes first—because it simply wouldn’t do to carry a naked woman through the streets of New York. It just might attract attention. Briefly he remembered a case he had covered as a reporter, a case that had attracted a hell of a lot of attention. It seemed there was this joker from Jersey who came to New York, hit a few bars and ran into an old buddy who insisted on taking him home for the night.
They sacked out, he and the buddy, and the next thing he knew, the buddy’s wife was hitting him over the head with a frying pan and chasing him out of the house for no apparent reason. He had waited on the street, and then she had thrown down his sport jacket.
Nothing more.
So the cops found him out on the streets of Brooklyn, this joker from Jersey, dressed in a sport jacket and a pair of shoes.
Nothing else.
It had caused a stir. And it would cause even more of a stir if he tried to carry Joyce Kendall home in her birthday suit. So he had to find something for her to put on.
The only female clothing in the room consisted of undergarments. No dresses, no sweaters, no skirts, no blouses. There were plenty of bras, some padded, some small, some the size of shopping bags, and plenty of lacy panties. But that was all, and Joyce Kendall in bra-and-panties was just as attention-getting as Joyce Kendall stark naked.
On a hunch, he checked the bathroom. Her clothes were piled in the tub—which was lucky. He decided that it would be silly to try putting underwear on her. Blouse, skirt and shoes would have to do. But how did you put clothes on a naked girl without waking her up? And, if the girl woke up while he was putting clothing on her, what in hell was he supposed to say?
He lifted her by her shoulders and managed to slip the blouse under her. He got her arms into the sleeves and buttoned all of the buttons. Any other time he might have had trouble ignoring the perfection of her body, the slope of her thighs, the swell of her breasts. Now, with sexual activity of any kind the furthest possible thing from his mind, it was easy.
When he was in the process of pulling the skirt up over her thighs, her eyes blinked. He got a hand under her rump, lifted, and pulled the skirt the rest of the way.
And she woke up.
“Wha—”
“Everything’s going to be all right,” he said quickly. “I’m trying to help you. Finish getting dressed and come with me. That’s right—fix the skirt. Fine. And tuck the blouse in. Here are your shoes. Slip them on. That’s right, that’ll do it. Now come with me.”
He noticed that she was in a daze, which was just as well with him. If she started asking questions now he didn’t know what in the name of God he would do. But she was too dazed to ask questions. She stood up on unsteady feet and staggered along with him, out of the bathroom, through the main room, down the stairs to the street. It was the same gray dull morning outside the loft as it had been inside. He wished he had another cigarette.
Together they walked to Third Avenue. He had to hold her so that she would not fall to the sidewalk, so he had his arm around her waist, but there was nothing remotely sexual about the whole thing. He could barely believe that last night he had made love to this girl, that the two of them had been incredibly stimulated, that she had screamed at him, shouted for him to do it to her. Nor could he conceive of himself doing what he had done. It was something that had happened ages ago, in another time continuum in another universe, and it had no bearing whatsoever on here and now.
Here and now was entirely different. Here and now he was a Boy Scout doing his good deed for the day, after which he could tie a knot in his neckerchief and feel good about life. She was the old lady he was helping across the street.
They reached Third Avenue and he hailed a cab. The driver gave them both a funny look, but a fare was a fare and he wasn’t about to give anybody a hard time. They piled into the back seat and he gave the driver the address, telling him to hurry.
The driver hurried.
They got out of the cab at the corner of Gay and Christopher. He gave the driver two singles and told him to keep the change. He didn’t care how big a tip he left. The money wasn’t his, anyway—it belonged to the man in the gray flannel suit. He couldn’t care one way or the other about it. He just wanted to get the girl home, give her a sedative and put her to bed.
The front door was locked and he didn’t have his keys. He pressed a buzzer for one of the other apartments and the return buzzer sounded quickly. A woman stared at him as he steered the girl up the stairs. “Forgot my key,” he explained quickly, not waiting around to see how the explanation went over.
She had her key in the pocket of her skirt. He opened her door for her and shoved her inside. She stood there, bewildered, waiting for somebody to tell her what to do or where to go, waiting for some instructions or other because, right now, she obviously did not have a mind of her own.
“Wait right here,” he said firmly. “I’ll be right back. Wait here.”
He raced up the stairs to his own apartment. The door was unlocked as always and he charged inside, found the bottle of Seconal in the medicine cabinet, took two pills and ran downstairs again. He found a glass in her apartment, filled it with water and presented her with the glass of water and the two pills.
“Take these,” he urged.
She popped the pills into her mouth and washed them down automatically with a swallow of water. She followed his instructions implicitly, and he had the strange idea that if he told her to open the window and step outside, she would do just that, never stopping to question his suggestions.
“Take off your clothes,” he said.
She got undressed, not at all embarrassed about appearing nude before him, and he made her get into bed and drew the covers over her. He told her to close her eyes, then sat down in a chair and waited for her to fall asleep. The Seconal worked quickly and it was not long before her eyes stayed closed and her breathing regulated itself.
On a strange, slightly disturbing impulse, he walked to the side of the bed and looked down at her. Then, very suddenly he stooped over and kissed her cheek.
She opened both her eyes. She looked around vacantly and discovered that she was in her own apartment. What day was it? Thursday? She was supposed to be at work. And it was too late for work, much too late for work.
And then, all at once, she remembered.
The Professor. Stripping her clothes from her body, his hands reaching for her. She had wanted it and they had slipped down onto the bathroom floor and the tiles had been rough beneath her but she had not minded them.
Then other men.
So many other men.
Man after man after man.
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She couldn’t believe it and yet she knew that it was true, that everything and more that she remembered was true, that it had happened, that it had happened to her, that no matter how fervently she attempted to deny its existence, that existence would be no less valid, that occurrence would be in no case erased.
She wanted to scream.
How could she have done it? What was wrong with her? She recalled her loneliness and her need and she wondered if these things had betrayed her. Or had there been something else? It seemed impossible that she could have been transformed into a sex maniac by the simple need for companionship, that her loneliness had changed her into a sex-hungry bitch who took on all comers on the bare scratchy floor of somebody’s bathroom.
But—
It was too much for her. She heaved a sigh, then rolled over on her side and groaned.
And there was the man.
She didn’t know his name, didn’t recognize him, not exactly. She knew that she had seen him before, that he looked familiar, but her disorderly memory couldn’t make all the connections that had to be made.
“Who are you?”
“Pete Galton.”
The name, too, was familiar.
“Do I know you?”
“Yes.”
“Then—”
He put out the cigarette he had been smoking. “Joyce,” he said gently, “how much do you remember?”
Her face went red.
“I took you to a party,” he said. “And I woke up and you were there. I brought you home.”
“Did we—”
“Yes,” he said. “We made love.”
There was absolutely nothing to say to that. She looked at him and wondered what it had been like making love with him, wondered whether he had enjoyed it, wondered whether she herself had enjoyed it. It was impossible to remember, equally impossible to imagine. She was thoroughly lost.
“Pete—”
“Yes?”
“Tell me what happened.”
“Don’t you remember?”
“Some of it,” she said. “It’s all blurred. I don’t understand it at all. I . . . would you explain it to me? As much as you know about it?”
His face darkened. “You remember some of it,” he said. “Maybe that’s enough.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Maybe you know as much as you ought to know. Maybe it would be a good idea to forget the rest.”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “No, that’s no good. I want to know. Don’t you see, Pete? I have to know what happened. I just have to know.”
“Why?”
“Because I do.”
“But why?”
“I just do,” she said. “No matter what I did, it’s better if I know about it. Please tell me.”
He found another cigarette, put it to his lips, scratched a match and lit the cigarette. His eyes were troubled and she thought that perhaps he was right, perhaps she should leave well enough alone and forget the parts that she couldn’t remember. But she couldn’t do that. She had to know.
“Please tell me, Pete—”
“Joyce—”
“Please, Pete. I have to know.”
“All right,” he said slowly. “All right.”