Little Casino (7 page)

S
HORTS AND DRESSES. AND SKIRTS AND
blouses.

And shirts and slips and half-slips and camisoles.

And brassieres and panties and corsets and girdles and teddies.

And garter belts, sheer stockings, high heels.

Suits, evening gowns, slacks, jeans. Christ knows what else, or what they’re called. Dozens, scores, hundreds, thousands of each article of clothing, lacy and silky and soft and smooth and shining, mountains of the stuff, miles of it. Hats.

But not a single woman to be discovered in any one of these things, not one, anywhere. This, says Father Graham to himself, is the libertine’s hell, or should be, at least it’s mine. His eyes are looking at something that is not in the rectory, his eyes are glassy, yet frightened. The liquefaction of her clothes, he says, and moans. Help me, God, help me.

“O how that glittering taketh me!” O! O! O!

This “Father Graham,” surely the figment, the crude figment of a particularly diseased imagination, does not in any way represent the loving, serene, chaste, and paternal shepherd whom millions of the faithful have honored and will continue to honor as the true bulwark of Holy Mother Church: Joseph Cardinal Cullinane.

“O my God! I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because I have offended Thee, my God, Who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.”

It is, perhaps, just as well that Father Graham has sublimated his tormenting desires into simple fetishes, since the parish is filled with women in their actual flesh.

Their flesh, he whispers, in the dark. Their sinful flesh!

Beauty Parade

A
T FIFTEEN, DURING THE CRUSHINGLY
slow months of the numbingly lonely vacations that his family spends at the lake, he discovers, one day, over at the Lang house, dozens of copies of
Beauty Parade,
dating back five years or so, leafs through the pages of big luscious women, all rich curves and swelling flesh pushing out of the tight, astonishingly abbreviated costumes that have not, surely, words adequate to describe them. And amid the sliding and mildewed piles of newspapers, magazines, junk statuary, empty whiskey bottles, fishing lures and spoons and hooks, sinkers and floats, and cartons, half-cartons, and opened packs of Lord Salisbury cigarettes, he learns to lust and to smoke.

Orville and Jackie Lang, old bachelor brothers, who allow anyone the run of their house and the raw, half-finished workshop behind it when they’re away at work, have unwittingly introduced this boy to the twin, darkly scintillant vices of self-abuse and smoking, two wondrous hells which he luxuriously inhabits. Orville owns a flat-bottomed rowboat, painted a bright, harsh, somehow sinful green, which is moored under the rusting footbridge at the end of the road leading to a small island, the keys to its padlock, along with its oars, just behind the door to the workshop. Each afternoon, all that thickly hot summer, our youthful lecher masturbates himself into nirvana at picture after picture of these utterly generous and unashamed, sensual women, who smile directly at him from out of their welter of lace and satin and elastic, of nylon and patent leather, then he smokes a Lord Salisbury, takes two more, and prepares to spend the balance of the afternoon rowing down the little river to the lake, where he drifts in its center, smoking his stolen cigarettes and listening to the voices and laughter of the young people, whom he does not know and whom he desperately envies, slide out to him in faint timbre from the far-off beach.

In three years’ time, he will fall in love with one of the girls who sat, that very summer, on that beach with her sister and mother, a girl whom he will meet through, somehow, a casual friend, Perry? He and this girl will often cross the footbridge to the deserted and overgrown island where, their young flesh sweating, they will drive each other mad in the dark. He will not comment to her on the rowboat, nor, of course, on the delirium of his lost afternoons, when, kneeling amid the hardly credible mountains of junk and trash at the Langs’, he showed his complaisant harem what he was made of! And in three years’ time, he will know the words for each item of underwear worn by those women, women who patiently wait for his unlikely return. The girl that he will adore will not, of course, wear the wondrously tawdry garments of his courtesans. Such is life.

And, in three years’ time, he will occasionally sit, in early twilight, with Orville, and accept a Lord Salisbury, even though he smokes Philip Morris. Jackie will emerge from the disaster of a house in a vast reek of Aqua Velva to climb into his black Chrysler convertible and start up the hill for a night of drinking and dancing with yet another graying widow who can, as Jackie always says, “ball that goddamned jack.” But he will be uncomfortable with Orville, and, soon, will stop passing the occasional hour or so with him altogether.

The winter before this youth met the girl with the honey-colored hair, there came to him one night a question that he had never before posed himself, one that he had, perhaps consciously, never even formulated, or, to be more precise, refused to formulate: Why did Orville, an old, gray-haired man with brown-stained teeth and yellow fingers, buy and keep every issue of
Beauty Parade?
As soon as this question “arranged” itself, let’s say, in his head, his face grew hot and red. He and Orville, Orville and he and the women. The women are
theirs,
they shared them that entire summer of his sixteenth year. He and Orville.

Orville was a color lithographer and worked for the
Journal-American.

Jackie owned a service station, Jack’s Texaco. His best mechanic, Andy, had a sister who worked as a nurse’s aide in the Caledonia Hospital in Brooklyn.

Linda! Louise! Candy!

Linda! Louise! Candy!

Linda! Louise! Candy!

Music! Music! Music!

Again! Again! Again!

“My devotion, dear ladies, is endless and deep as the ocean.”

The black force of Eros

B
UT WHAT OF THE WOMEN IN
BEAUTY PARADE?
They have been somewhat carelessly, if rhetorically described as “big luscious women, all rich curves and swelling flesh pushing out of the tight, astonishingly abbreviated costumes” of a kind that no woman, inhabitant of the mundane world, would ever wear or even consider wearing. But the youth whose eyes have been bedazzled by the precise and overt lewdness of these erotic icons will not believe this. Let’s say that he can’t afford to believe it, read that as you will. There, lying on the daybed in the corner of the musty, stiflingly hot Lang porch, is the August 1944 issue, in which six of these stupendously free and arrogantly sexual women pose in quintessential lasciviousness. They are not wholly free, though, for their status as wives, lovers, mothers, daughters, friends, or whores, their very existence, is dependent upon the narrative skills of the foolish adolescent boy who drives them and himself hither and yon in his adoring imagination. His body grows hot and dry as he thinks of them, one at a time, waiting for his attentions, in the impossible gleam of their satin, the immaculate crispness of their lace.

They are all there, Mary Marshall, Dolores Salvati, Georgene Rydstrom, Charlotte Ryan, Nancy Ippolito, Terri O’Neill: minions and bacchantes, servants of Aphrodite and Dionysos, slaves to the black force of Eros, devotees of earthy, occulted mysteries. They order that which they desire to be done to them by their acolytes, their groveling husbands and lovers and trembling fools. They are pleased to have this power, although they are not aware of its effect on the boy who, though its creator, is obedient before it. Their not knowing is very much the same as not caring, the aristocratic aloofness of the hierophants who keep secret the sacred mysteries. They will live forever, at the behest of the dark gods, their incarnations will be endless, unceasing. Mary, Dolores, Georgene, Charlotte, Nancy, Terri.

For three months of the year, Apollo left his temple at Delphi, and his place was taken by Dionysos.

It is, surely, ludicrous to think of this stupefied boy, in 1944, as venerator of the god, but in the slow, burning days of that wartime summer, he worshiped, as it was given him to worship, as best he could. It may be that the god noticed and was pleased.

Drunk, with a half-smile, his hair bound up with aromatic grasses, a “young boy loggy with vine-must.” And the burning, orange-colored sky.

Mechanics of the dream world