Luke Rheinhart - The Diceman

had just used the word bordello.

`May I kiss you?' I asked. At a hundred bucks a toss it didn't seem too much to ask.

Her eyes went vaguer and she said, `Oh yes.'

I pulled her little body to me and leaned down to meet her lips. Without premeditation I found myself kissing only

with my lips upon her lips. Her mouth was small, her lips dry. After a few seconds I straightened up.

`You're awfully pretty,' I said.

`Thank you.'

`Your lips are very nice'

`Yours are too,' she said.

`Now you kiss me.'

She looked up and waited for me to lower my head, but I remained upright and even leaned back against the couch

while still looking down at her, sexily. After a moment's uncertainty, she placed her drink on the coffee table and got up on her knees. Putting her hands on my neck she slowly leaned towards me. My arms circled her, one hand closed hard around a buttock and I pressed my mouth and tongue against hers. For ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty seconds I kept my tongue in her mouth and moved my hands over her back, buttocks and thighs. Her body was small but firm, her little behind round and rubbery through the woolen skirt. Finally I pulled back and looked at her.

She smiled the smile of a straight-A student.

`That was awfully nice,' I said.

`Oh yes. It was good,' she replied.

`Put your tongue in my mouth,' I said, and as I slid sideways to a horizontal position on the couch, I pulled he her over

on top of me. She was remarkably light and her tongue came out of her small mouth in little tentative darts like a snake trying to frighten someone. I bought both my hands up under her skirt and panties and exploring between her legs, got lost. That is, of the two caves traditionally located in the underbrush, I was able to locate only one, and that, in the immortal words of Robert Frost, The one less traveled by.'

Had she been sewn up? I discovered and caressed a slippery crack, but it led not to the warm-cushioned opening of a

Lil or Arlene but to a dead-end: a virgin with a vengeance. She pulled up a few inches away from me.

`Please don't touch me there,' she said.

`I beg your pardon,' I said and delicately withdrew my hands and smoothed down her skirt.

She hesitated, a moment and then brought her little mouth down warmly on mine, her hands framing my face. Her

abdomen pressing down on my extended penis began to create climactic feelings so I broke our kiss and rolled us both

into sitting positions again. She looked up at me brightly, as if pleased by having brought home a good report card. Of

course it may have been the brightness of sexual excitement: certainly my gooey fingers didn't indicate scholarly

interests. Looking at her a bit drunkenly I asked in a husky voice; `Shall we go to the bedroom?'

`Oh no,' she said, `I have to finish my drink.'

Further straightening her skirt, she reached forward and took a healthier swig from her gin and tonic. I rediscovered

my glass on the floor at my feet and finished it off.

`Are you a professor?' she asked.

`Yes I am.'

`What of?'

'Of history.'

'Oh yes, you told me. That must be interesting. What history do you like best?'

`I'm a specialist in papal bulls of the Renaissance. Look, can't I get you another drink?'

`Oh really? I loved reading about Cesare Borgia and the Popes. I'd love another drink. Were the Popes really as bad as the books say?'

I walked liquor-ward a trifle aggressively but said over my shoulder: `It all depends on what you mean by bad.'

`I mean have children and all.'

`Alexander I had several children as did Pope John IX, but before they became popes.'

The Church is much purer today.'

I poured her a huge gin, added a trickle of tonic, gave myself a bathtub-glassful of Scotch and marched back toward

the couch.

`How much college have you finished?' I asked.

`This is my fourth semester at Hunter. I'm majoring in sociology I think. Oh! - Er.'

`What's the matter?'

For a moment I thought I must have spilled her drink as I handed it to her, but it wasn't that. My fly wasn't open. But she looked frightened. `Nothing,' she said and took a deep drink from her gin and tonic. `But. .. how did you … I mean why did you think I

went to college?'

'You seem intelligent,' I said. `You couldn't know all about the Renaissance just from high school.'

She looked away from me at the grimy, unused fireplace and didn't seem to be as cheerful as she had been.

`Doesn't it seem … strange that a college girl should be … here?'

'Ah. Her breach of role playing was bothering her.

`Certainly not,' I said firmly. 'According to my fried, almost all the call girls he knows are college students, many of

them straight 'A' students. Tuition costs being what they are, what can a girl do?'

This line of reasoning seemed to take some time to absorb. She blushed and turned away at the phrase call girl, but finally said quietly that's true.' `Also,' I said, `college girls learn how irrational all sexual inhibitions are. They learn how safe sexual intercourse can

be and how profitable.'

`But she said. `But - of course some girls still fear that God - that sex -'

'You're right there, of course. But even many deeply religious college girls have also become call girls.'

She now looked up at me questioningly.

'They realize,' I went on, `that God always examines the reasons we do anything. If a girl gives her body to a man to

give him pleasure and to earn money so that she may educate herself and thus increase her ability to serve God she is

actually performing a good act.'

She looked away nervously. - `But God says adultery is a sin,' she said.

'Ah, but the Hebrew word for adultery, fornication, actually means sexual intercourse had only for pleasure. The

Commandment actually should be translated: "Though shall not selfishly give yourself in adultery."

Many of the girls at LIU in Bible History 162 have been quite surprised and pleased to realize the true nature of God's

command.'

She was hunched over on the couch beside me drinking her gin with absentminded abandonment. She stared into her

glass as if it might hold the ultimate answers.

`But God says that…' she started. `Paul says that . . . the Church says that-'

`Only selfish pleasure. The Hebrew is absolutely explicit. In Second Corinthians, verse eight, the text reads: "She who

lets a man know her for the glory of God is blessed, but woe unto her who in selfishness commits adultery. Verily the

very earth will swallow her up."

Again hesitation. Then:

'The glory of God?' she asked.

`Saint Thomas Aquinas interprets this as meaning any act which is intended to further the individual's ability to glorify

God. He cites the case of Bathsheba's daughter who gave herself to the Aramite that she might convert him. He also cites the prostitute Magdalen of the New Testament who, according to tradition, continued to sell herself to men that she might better know them and testify to the Divinity of Christ.'

`Really?' she said sharply, as if at last Truth were being touched.

`In Dante's Paradisio, which you may have read, the religious prostitutes are placed in the third sphere of heaven, just

below the saints, but above the nuns and virgins. In the words of Beatrice, his guide, "A fugitive and cloistered virtue

can never reach as close to God as an active one. If the soul is pure the body cannot be soiled."

`Oh I read that. Was that Dante?'

`Paradisio, Canto Seventeen I think. Milton paraphrased this verse in his famous essay on divorce.'

`It's funny…' she said and jiggled the remaining ice cubes in her glass before taking another swallow.