Andrew Shaw - Sin Hellcat

“Yeah? What happened?”

“She had a baby.”

“Oh,” I said hollowly. “Then... do you want to wait while I... uh... find a drugstore?”

Alarm was an ugly black shadow across her pretty face. “That will take too long,” she said. “I couldn’t possibly wait. It would tear me apart.”

I had to admit that I couldn’t wait either. The dilemma grew. And grew. And grew.

“Harvey,” she said plaintively. “Harvey, there is a way. I... you might not like it. I mean, it’s not... some people would say it isn’t normal. If that makes a difference. But I wouldn’t get a baby that way.”

I asked her what way she meant and she told me.

Is there anyone in the world so prudish as a college boy? The young lotharic type, out to conquer the female half of the universe, is in his own weak way as puritanical as any spinster from here to Bessarabia. If they have spinsters in Bessarabia. And I was quite roundly shocked.

But I was also quite roundly ready, and it was easier to conceal the shock than the evidence of my interest in Jodi. So I reached for her, playing the scene by ear as it were, and it began.

It was her first time at that particular fun-and-games method, but she took to it like a mallard to hydrous oxide, and away we went, off into outer space. It was good, and it was fun, and Jodi’s particular brand of Scotch was chosen forever.

I spent the night with her. Ill-advised, in a way — any damned fool could have wandered into her little room and loused things up for both of us as far as the college was concerned. But I was unable to see myself tiptoeing out of the girl’s dorm at three in the morning. Nonchalance is only good for so long. Then the roof falls in on you.

So we topped the world by being a bit much in the line of nonchalance. We slept, body to body, and when we woke up the idea of her getting pregnant seemed far less important, and we risked it. Then she went off to breakfast, bringing me a very modest repast in a paper bag, and we crawled back in the sack for another go at it.

I left that dorm at high noon and no one looked at me twice.

Youth. She didn’t get pregnant from that delightful evening. And after that I was careful, very careful. And, for some reason which eluded me then but which was very important nevertheless, my conquest became a secret one. I suppose it was Jodi’s change in status from conquest to partner. We were having an affair, not playing a seduction scene. There was no need to ply her with liquor, to woo her with words of love, to con her in one perverse way or another. There was no need to do anything but ask her, and that was enough.

I was clever and conscientious. I kept up-to-date in my scholastic endeavors, such as they were. I slept alone, confining our amours to an hour here and an hour there. I worked at my books and I gave her the hours that were left, because school was important and the future, the glowing shiny chrome-plated future, it was more important. And Jodi — well, Jodi was important, too, because Jodi was a valuable outlet and a pleasant way to spend an hour here and an hour there. But Jodi was not important enough.

“It’s a shame,” she said, one afternoon on a blanket on the golf course — a common abode of lovers; no one in the history of the college ever committed the cardinal sin of playing golf there, for the love of God — “that you don’t love me. And that I don’t love you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she said, dreamily, her hand doing magical things. “I don’t know, exactly. Except that I think it would be nice.”

“Love,” I said. “Nice.”

“Kind of.”

I put my hand inside her blouse and felt a nipple stiffen. I caressed and she purred. I put another hand up her skirt and she gasped. Not a gasp of surprise and not a gasp of passion but something harder to define. As if she was thrilled by the fact that I was touching her and that she was responding, and wasn’t it nice?

It was that. And the afternoon was a trip to the moon on the gossamerest of wings, and, in the words of the bard, the world moved. No sleeping bag, but you can’t have everything.

She remembered the next day. “Love,” she said.

“Love,” I said. “Moon and June. Do you know that there are only four words in the English language that rhyme with love?” I told her erroneously.

She hadn’t known that.

“Glove, dove, shove and above,” I said. “Want to write a poem? Sing a song?”

She didn’t. She wanted to be somber. “I don’t think I’ll ever fall in love,” she said. “I’d like to, kind of. But I don’t think it will ever happen to me.”

It was the regal Jodi speaking, the far-off look in the lovely eye. One did not speak when the queen spoke. One listened thoughtfully and hung on every word.

“Some women are made for love,” she said, “and some are not. I’m made for sex, I guess. Or something like that. But not for love.”

“How can you tell?”

The spell was broken the mood shattered. Wherever she had been, she was there no longer. “Let’s make love,” she said happily. “Or let’s make sex. Let’s make something, for goodness sake, and let’s do it as well as we possibly can.” Which was very well indeed...

I garaged the car, not wanting to carry the memory any further. It had carried me as far as Manhattan and that was quite far enough. Any more would be bad, because the only course for memory to follow was the course of an affair that went downhill from there in a way I did not enjoy reminiscing about. And after that there were ten more years of my life to consider, and the less I considered them, the better.

So I garaged the car and paid the man and walked into Manhattan. I don’t know what I was looking for, exactly, except that I was thirsty. The bar I found was on 47th Street between Fifth and Madison. It was late, businesswise, but the boys were still there.

I heard phrases that I didn’t want to listen to. I heard the fey patter and the unhip hipness, and I drank Vat 69 and did not talk to anybody. I was roundly bored, and the only thing that could have been more boring was the little split-personality home in Rockland County, with or without my barren witch aboard to louse things up.

The liquor was good and I drank quite a bit of it. I’d had no dinner, of course — just a mouthful of Dexter’s Deflavored Dishwater — and I still had a little of the edge from the Scotch I’d shared with Jodi. And the more I drank the more sploshed I got, and the more sploshed I got the less I wanted to spend the evening sitting in an ad man’s bar.

I left the place, left the unasked-for twist of lemon curling around the rim of my glass, and I walked. I did not know where I was going.

I was actually surprised when I found out that I was on Lexington Avenue. Surprised, but not confused. Lexington rang its bell at once and I knew where I was and why, and I only hoped she wasn’t busy with a customer.

I stopped for a drink on the way. Then I stopped again, this time in a liquor store, and I asked the clerk for a bottle of Vat 69. He gave it to me and took my money and I waltzed out into the street again.

The desk clerk at her hotel called her on the phone. “Let me talk to him,” she must have said, because he presented me with the receiver and I held it to my ear.

“Harvey,” she said, sounding pleased. Her voice was a throaty whisper. “Honey, can you come back in half an hour? Or forty-five minutes, that would be better. I’m busy right now, honey, but forty-five minutes—”

I found a bar for the forty-five minutes. I felt silly, paying bar prices for liquor with a paper bag full of better liquor at my foot. I felt even sillier, waiting for three quarters of an hour to see a girl I’d seen that afternoon, waiting until my friend, who happened to be a whore, got rid of her guest, who could only be a customer. I drank a little more than I’d planned on drinking and when I left the bar and returned to the hotel, exactly forty-five minutes after I had talked to her, I was pretty well stoned.