Fritz Leiber - The Sinful Ones

The blonde was making trotting motions with the puppet and the fat man was saying “Peter found that the blonde lived right next door to a furniture factory. Now Peter had no love of furniture factories because he’d once narrowly escaped becoming part of a Sheraton table leg. The screaming of the saws and the pounding of the hammers…” He did buzzy chromatic runs and anvil-chorusings “… terrified Peter. He felt that each nail was being driven right into his little wooden solar plexus, that the screaming saw was ruthlessly cutting off his precious wooden parts!”

Jane was standing near the blonde. Carr at last caught her eye. He thought he read there his own mixed feeling of pity and revulsion toward the noisy, mindless, beauty-blind horde.

He motioned her to come down, but she only smiled. Slowly she undid the gilt buttons of her coat and let it drop to the floor.

“Finally, conquering his terror, Peter raced past the furniture factory and darted up the walk to the blonde’s home… pink-pink-pink-pink!”

Jane had coolly begun to unbutton her white blouse.

Blushing, Carr tried to push forward, motioning urgently. She took no notice. He started to shout at her, but just then he realized something and the realization left him speechless.

The crowd wasn’t reacting. It was chattering as noisily as ever.

They were blind. They were mindless. They couldn’t contact anything that was outside of their mechanistic rhythm.

But that was ridiculous.

But that Jane should in reality be a strip-tease dancer at Goldie’s Casablanca—that was ridiculous too. Or that she should be so drunk…

“Peter followed the blonde up the stairs… trip-trip-trip …and into her bedroom. He felt the sap running madly up his legs and into his little wooden…tummy.”

Jane dropped her blouse, was in her slip and skirt.

Carr stood with his knee pushed forward against a table, swaying slightly, his hand still upraised like a drunken traffic cop ordering the world to stop.

“Then, his throat dry as sawdust with excitement, Peter jumped into bed with the blonde!” The fat hands tore up and down the keyboard. “And the blonde looked at Peter and said, ‘Little wooden man, what now?’”

Jane looked at Carr and dropped the shoulder straps and let her slip fall away. Carr swallowed. Tears stung his eyes. Her breasts seemed far more beautiful than flesh ought to be.

And then there was, not a reaction on the part of the crowd, but the ghost of one.

Sudden silences at parties are a common experience. One moment everyone is talking. The next, all conversations halt at once. You look about foolishly. You vaguely think, according to your turn of mind, of the mathematics of coincidence, of an invisible spirit passing, or of some chemical or physical stimulus, such as a faint odor or an odd half-heard sound, affecting everyone, but too tenuous to register clearly on anyone’s consciousness. Then someone laughs and you’re all talking again.

Such a momentary silence fell on Goldie’s Casablanca. Even the fat man’s glib phrases seemed to slacken and fade, like a phonograph record running down. His pudgy hands slowed, hung between cords. While the frozen gestures and expression of the people at the tables all hinted at words halted on the brink of utterance. And it seemed to Carr, as he started at Jane, that heads and eyes turned toward the platform, but only sluggishly and with difficulty, as if all these people were dreaming and only half-wakened from their dreams, or as if, dead, they felt a faint, almost painful, ripple of life. They seemed to see and yet not to see Jane’s naked breasts, to being to forget at the same moment they become aware.

And although he knew it was ridiculous and that his mind was hazy with liquor, Carr felt that Jane was showing herself to him alone, and the stupefied audience were no more than cattle who turn to look toward a sound, experience some brief sluggish glow of consciousness, and go back to their cud-chewing an their dark wordless inner life.

Then, all at once, the crowd was jabbering again, the fat man was smirking and tittering, the blonde was fighting off a madly amorous puppet, and Jane was hurrying among the tables, her arms pressed to her sides to hold up her slip, with snatched-up coat and blouse trailing from one hand. As she approached, it seemed to Carr that everything else was melting into her, blurring off, becoming unimportant.

When she’d squeezed past the long table, he grabbed her hand. They didn’t say anything. Their eyes took care of that. He helped her into her coat. As they hurried up the stairs and out the glass door, they heard the fat man’s recitation die away like the chugging of a black greasy engine: “And what do you think little Alice found when she went up to the nursery?—her puppet Peter and her French doll Goldielocks in a most compromising position, oh, yes, a most…”

It was five blocks to Carr’s room. The streets were empty. A stiff breeze from the lake had blown the smoke from the sky, and the stars glittered down into the trenches between the buildings. The darkness that clung to the brick walls and besieged the street lamps seemed to Carr to be compounded of excitement and terror and desire in a mixture beyond analysis. He and Jane hurried on, holding hands.

The hall was dark. He let himself in quietly and they tiptoed up the stairs. Inside his room, he pulled down the shades, switched on the light. A blurred Jane was standing by the door, taking off her coat. For a moment Carr was afraid that he might have drunk too much. He moved toward her quickly. Then she smiled and her image cleared and he knew he wasn’t too drunk. He almost cried as he clapped his arms around her.

How strange it was. What she had been doing in Goldie’s Casablanca was not exhibiting herself, but hiding; from them. Taking on protective coloration. To him alone, he was sure, had she been truly revealed. And it was this revelation that teased him. Taunted him, now.

The coat and blouse were off. Suddenly and almost innocently the slip dropped, the last curtain between them. This was the true Jane, all of Jane. The Jane tempting, delectable, rosy between her big-nippled, big-aureoled, tiny breasts, ivory in the shaven area above her triangle of Venus. He tasted this throbbing curving flesh with his hands, then his seeking lips. As desire soared hotly within him, it mounted responsively in her. She gave herself to him completely, part by smooth part (so very smooth, indeed), and yet not solely giving, but taking. Drawing on him as he drew on her. Fire slowly, sensuously. Then at increasing pace, until theirs was the swift, searing throb of climatic love, waxing to a poignant ecstasy beyond anything either had ever known—and waning, waning, as the crested wave breaks and wanes, only to renew itself and again rise surgingly to a new peak of bliss.

After they had slept together he found himself realizing that he had never felt so delightfully sober in his life, though granting that the picture might change a bit if he made a sudden movement. From where he lay he could see Jane in the mirror. She’d thrown on his dressing gown and was mixing drinks for them. A faucet gurgled briefly. Then she came back and he turned over and hitched himself up on an elbow.

“Here,” she said, handing him a glass.

He laughed. “I’m not sure what this will do to me. My mind’s in a delicate state.”

“Just a small one,” she said. “To us.”

“To us.” They clinked glasses. Following her example, he drained his. She sat down on the bed and looked at him.

“Hello, darling,” he said.

“Hello.”

“Feeling okay?”

“Wonderful.”