Andrew Shaw - Sin Hellcat

Then I snuck into the Personnel office and found out her name and age and home address and other fascinating information and I went around smirking at her for a few days, and she went on cutting me just as dead as if I didn’t know that she’d changed her name

Invariably, she irked me. There finally came the day when she had irked me just a little too much, and I no longer even wanted her to replace Jodi. On that fateful day, out of a meanness of spirit that until then I hadn’t known I possessed, I became snide with dear Laura Gray.

It was a Wednesday afternoon, and I was gathering correspondence from outbaskets all over the place. I paused beside Laura’s desk, looking at her as she typed glaze-eyed the orders being whispered to her by the ubiquitous Dictaphone machine, and waited for her to notice me.

She did, at last, and raised her foot from the machine pedal, cutting off its dictation. “What do you want?” she demanded, and there was a whole world of scorn in those four syllables.

“I was just wondering,” I said, my voice as sweet as blueberry pie.

“Wondering what?” she snapped, with Olympian impatience.

“If it’s true what they say about Jewish girls,” I said.

She blinked. “What?”

“You know. About it being sideways.”

Now, of course there were about ten thousand possible answers to that remark, any one of which would have been enough to get me fired, but I just didn’t care. I was irked. So I stood blandly and waited for her answer.

Lo and behold! The color fled her face at first, but then rushed right back again, all in the space of a second. And then she smiled! Laura smiled!

And said, all trace of hostility gone from her voice, “No, silly. That’s Chinese girls.”

“Oh, go on,” I said. That’s all I could manage, under the circumstances.

Laura was being very arch all of a sudden, smiling coyly and generally being flirtatious as all get-out. It just goes to show you, you never know the right approach.

At any rate, we discussed anatomy a little while longer, and before I returned to the mailroom we had made a date for that very night.

There are many similarities between the young man on Madison Avenue who works in the mailroom and a young man on Madison Avenue who works as, say, an account executive. They dress in precisely the same uniform, they wear precisely the same horn-rimmed glasses, they eat precisely the same lunch in precisely the same luncheonettes, they read precisely the same magazines, and they work precisely the same hours. There is only one difference between them. The account executive earns about five times as much as the mailroom boy.

Which is simply to say that I did not take Laura Gray to the Ruban Bleu. Nor did I take her to see a Broadway show. I took her to a cheap movie theater in the Village and we saw two depressing flicks from Italy. Then I took her to a cheap coffee house, and I swear the customers were the same people we’d just seen in the movies. And then I took her home. To her home, I mean. I was still living at the Y. Mailroom salaries and all that.

She lived up on West 69th Street, in one of those buildings that looks as though it must have grown like a tree because nobody in the world would be idiotic enough to build a building that way, and I accompanied her all the way up in the elevator and to her apartment door.

Where she said, “Thank you for a lovely evening.” Scarcely original.

“The evening,” I said, also with scant originality, “is a pup.”

“I don’t hear it barking,” she said.

Now, there’s no possible answer to a nonsense line like that. So I didn’t try to answer it. Instead, I wrapped my manly arms around her womanly body, and I kissed her.

She kissed very well. She curved against me as though she wanted to be glued in place, and her fingers played at the back of my neck, and her waist was just the perfect size for my arm.

We broke at last, and she smiled. “Thank you again,” she said, her voice huskier than normal.

“Thank you,” I said gallantly, and reached for her again.

She backed away, bumping into her apartment door. “I have to go to bed now,” she said.

“Of course,” I said.

“Now, Harvey,” she said. “You’ve been a perfect gentleman all evening.”

“Ridiculous,” I exclaimed, stung to the quick. “Who did you think that was in the movie, the little old lady on the other side of you?”

“You know what I mean,” she said, smiling again.

I coughed, not too convincingly. “I’m dying,” I told her, “for a cup of coffee.”

“That isn’t what you’re really after,” she said. She was being coy again.

“Let’s talk about it,” I said, “while I drink the coffee.”

“Well, all right.”

She unlocked her door, and we went in. I drank the coffee — it was instant, and terrible — and then she started talking about me going home again. We were in the kitchen, so I merely backed her up against the refrigerator and kissed her again. She responded just as nicely as she had the last time. I was emboldened, certain that she was simply putting up token resistance, and so I started to waltz. Still kissing her, I waltzed her out of the kitchen and across the living room, headed for the bedroom beyond. But midway across the room she took the lead away from me and veered us away from the bedroom door and toward the sofa. I went along with the gag, figuring that if she wanted to make an intermediate stop it was okay with me, and we tumbled onto the sofa together, our arms still around one another and our lips still pressed firmly one to one.

When we came up for air at last, she murmured, “We shouldn’t, Harv,” and sort of wriggled against me.

“You’re absolutely right,” I told her, and unbuttoned her blouse.

We discussed the situation, amid kisses and caresses and other amusements, for about half an hour, which is to say until we were both nude. And then I suggested that it was time we went on into the bedroom.

“Harv, we shouldn’t,” she said, a line that was getting progressively sillier as we went along.

“At this point,” I told her, “I think we absolutely should. Not only that, I think we must, if you see what I mean.”

She giggled, seeing what I meant.

But she wouldn’t get up from the sofa. And so, at last, I simply got to my feet, gathered her into my arms, and carried her into the bedroom, where I plopped her down on the bed during another, “Harv, we shouldn’t.”

Perhaps we shouldn’t, but we did.

Did you ever see a fan with ribbons tied on the front grill? When the fan is turned on, the ribbons fly straight out, fluttering and jumping around like mad. Change this picture from the horizontal to the vertical, change the ribbons to arms and legs, and you have some idea what I had to contend with, once we decided to do that which we shouldn’t.

Talk about explosions! Another thing those ribbons lack are claws. I was certain that by the time it was all over I was going to be black and blue everywhere except where I was clawed bright red. Very colorful, no doubt, but not too comfortable.

But such mundane thoughts cannot hold one’s attention long under circumstances of that type, nor did they hold me for very long. I simply gave as good as I got, discovered that both of us enjoyed the mutual pummeling no end, and so we hurtled on across the bed to ecstasy.

When it was all over but the heavy breathing, Laura smiled at me and stroked my cheek with soft hands, and lit me a cigarette. I smoked it, contented, and Laura said, “You see? Not true at all.”

“Must be the Chinese,” I said.

After a while, we put our cigarettes out, turned out the light, and prepared ourselves for sleep. Shortly before sleep came, I whispered, “I’ll get my things from the Y tomorrow.”