Nikki (25 page)

She took a cautious half jigger, capped the bottle and put it resolutely in a kitchen cupboard. She diluted the half ounce in a full glass of water, so that her drink was actually no drink at all. She walked around taking small sips of the whiskey-scented water, feeling quite in command of herself, the more so because she was free to take a small drink whenever she chose without any slavish dread of the silly stuff.

There had been nothing actually alcoholic about her father, he’d simply willed his will away and indulged himself in weakness. But maybe it had been a strength, or at least a lesser weakness. It had opposed his incestuous desires.

A little less water this time, she decided, pouring a full jigger.

When there was an unrecognized perverted desire, the desire did not vanish, it merely expressed itself in less direct ways. It got to the mind and the will and shaped it toward those ends, toward substitute gratifications, toward less direct, less intense, less nakedly animal gratifications. Far worse, really, to let a physical desire for submission take over the mind and character. Better the honest facing of the outright perversion, the honest satisfaction of it, and leave the mind free.

She remembered Dolores beginning to make love to her and she left a hot wave of sexual desire. Ah, but it had been exquisite. Not alone the physical sensation, but the knowledge of her own total triumph. Dolores had been powerfully entrenched, standing high as the mistress of her home, beloved and protected by a good man, and she had been secure and stronger, far stronger than Nikki. And Nikki had taken the man and put him at her own feet.

And knowing this, Dolores had yet found her irresistible and surrendered totally, pleading for the feel of Nikki’s mastery, adoring her flesh with her humbled lips.

There was a sudden ice-cold sickness in Nikki’s stomach and she thought she would retch. To have broken Dolores’s will and brought her into such humiliation was unbearable.

But then, of course, Dolores had only begun. She had stopped, revolted, frightened by that naked glimpse of herself.

Nikki cringed at the ugliness of her own pleasure in such a dreadful thing. To see the fine and the proud and the beautiful demeaned was not truly Nikki Duquesne. True, she had enjoyed triumphs in games, in competitions of many kinds; she was a driving force, but to have come to the perverted enjoyment of these ugly sorts of victory, these deeply destructive victories …

In these few weeks she had hurt whoever she touched, John Barket, Dolores, Jim, Archer—with the possible exception of the kids. She felt herself choking up. Her touch there had been uncorrupting. It was as though … she shook her head, went out and got another drink … as though she knew herself to be vile, and anyone who gave her love loved the vile and she would strike out with all her destructive power to punish them and herself. Her relation to the children had been that of giving love, and whatever love she got in return was ignorant of her vileness, and blameless.

She knew that if she had been kissing Dolores’s body, instead of the other way around, she would have been in purest ecstasy. She wanted to take and enjoy a sexual object, just as a man did, instead of wanting, like a woman, to be taken and enjoyed. In a flash she knew the nature of her vileness, her twisted aggression. She shook her head, then drew a deep breath. Well, she wasn’t afraid of a word,
Lesbian
, or the truth behind it. She drank herself groggy and collapsed into sleep.

The next day she bought a new outfit and went to a beauty salon.

The first cabbie didn’t know what she was talking about and suggested the YWCA; the second gave her a long leering inspection from head to toe and said in a hopeful tone that he could do anything a bull could do; the third driver glared, turned and spat.

“I’m a stranger in town,” she told the fourth, showing him a ten, “and I’m interested in meeting some girls.”

“Things are sort of tight in this town,” he began, then hesitated. “I know a couple of girls … models. Sometimes work is a little slow for them and they fill in their income, you know, entertaning lonely … well, you know … guys.”

Nikki gave him the ten and got into the cab beside him. “I didn’t have in mind a professional girl …” she laughed embarrassedly, “especially if she’d be expecting a guy.”

“Don’t let that bother you, miss. One of them for sure would do anything you told her to. She wants fifty dollars, but, you know, she’s a girl that gives you your money’s worth.”

“What I’d want … well, there must be hangouts, bars, something.”

He laughed. “Yeah, they should pay you, a girl like you. Anyway, it was just a suggestion, no offense. There’s a couple of little places around North Beach. One’s a sort of big dirty barn and bi-sexual, like, lots of pansy guys along with the oddie gals. Only trouble, you’re sitting there, see, letting the bulls know there you are and what’ve they got to offer, and something comes up to you and you can’t tell is it a guy trying to look like a dame or a dame trying to look like a guy. Where we better go is The Petticoat, where it’s more exclusive. It’s right down here a couple more blocks. It’s got a punk little restaurant and bar upstairs, but the main go is below.”

“Can anybody get in?”

“Oh, hell yes; I could, even, if I didn’t mind the feel of the joint; honey, they sure dagger my back whenever I try to have a peaceful beer in there. I tell you what it is, them bulls are scared, all the time scared, and I mean hostile to a real man. And I tell you what the reason for that is, it’s the cows, like you, because the cows themselves can be real lookers, something any guy would go for, and half the time the cows got no real feel for the queer stuff, ain’t really queer, they just leave the bulls have their fun on them, but they’d just as lief it was a man, so the bulls are always scared the cows’ll walk out on them for a real man.”

“That’s very interesting, uh …”

“Ted. Ted Seeber. You call yourself anything special?”

“Jane Doe, if you don’t mind.”

“That’s your business, sweetie. I just thought I’d mention a few things. In case you want to cross back over the line, I’d be more than pleased to know you. I’m down at that stand where you picked me up, most of the time. As a matter of fact, if you get a little hard up or anything and you don’t have too much objection to guys, it could be worth your time. Purely business.”

“I may be in touch with you, Ted.”

She smiled, going into The Petticoat, thinking a gal that had the stuff like Nikki Duquesne had limitless possibilities for careers. Even Ted Seeber could tell. She wondered if fifty dollars wasn’t rather high for the average customer. Or maybe that had just been an asking price, or the price for specialty work. On the other hand, fifty seemed low. Anyway, she was already in too high a tax bracket, and what she was here for was … the restaurant was empty, the tiny bar had one customer, but there were lively sounds from below. She turned left, stepped down to the landing and paused to draw a long breath.

So all right, as Professor Ted Seeber had lectured, bulls were scared, though he hadn’t known a bull when she was sitting right beside him, and bulls were “and I mean hostile” to real men. Correct there, Professor, I am indeed hostile to men. Seventeen steps from the landing to the concrete floor to the downstairs bar. This time she wasn’t a tourist, sheltered by a group, teasing the freaks, but yea, one of them.

She heard not quite a hush, but a brief diminuendo of voice sound, and she saw the glances in her direction from the female bartender directly ahead, from the line on the bar stools, and from many of the women and girls at the score of rough tables. Then the directed attention toward her subsided.

She stood where she was at the foot of the stairs and let her gaze roam, not with any intention of retreating, but merely to let them all see that
somebody
had arrived. A muscular, squatty, carrot-haired woman was dancing on ugly bare feet and hoisting her skirt—for her own amusement, since no one seemed to pay any attention.

The woman stopped dancing, glared, and shouted above the jukebox music, “Who are you?”

Nikki looked through her, strolled slowly along the bar, scanning every face at the tables. She found a bar stool alongside a pair of elderly sheep-faced women huddled together over wine glasses.

“Whiskey.”

“Her money ain’t no good around here, Luke,” the muscular, barefoot woman shouted. “What’s your pleasure, Yum Yum? I’m buying.”

“I pay my own way.”

“What kind of whiskey, miss?” the woman bartender said.

“Any good Bourbon, I don’t care. I’m paying.”

“Peel off, Tom, the lady’s doing her own buying.”

Tom turned her back on Nikki and faced the tables with her fists on her hips. She announced loudly, “I got her staked out in my pasture, see? That understood to everybody Tom spun, faced Nikki. “C’mon, we’re sitting at a table.”

“Tom!” the bartender warned. “You’re drunk. And you’re too rough.”

“I can be gentler than a kitten,” the woman told Nikki. “I got me a white Lincoln convertible, you can ask anybody. It’s new, almost. I can aford to trade it in like that, too, if it don’t suit you. Hell, I ain’t rough. Gentler than a kitten, and I treat a doll right, better than they treat me, but I don’t give a damn.”

“Get away from me.”

“What?”

“I said get away from me before I—” Nikki looked at her icily, the message clear.

“Say-y-y, what are you?”

“You’ll find out, brother! In about two seconds I’m going to land all over you. So beat it! I’m looking for the same thing you are.”

“Well, keep out of
my
way,” Tom grumbled, and stomped off.

Nikki paid for and drank her whiskey. The whole roomful was looking at her now, some of them with dumb gapes of surprise. Nikki began slowly to promenade, assuming a mild swagger, a tight, challenging smile on her face. She was, she knew, quite something to look at. She had a new, brilliantly brocaded black silk Chinese tunic with a gold rope at the waist that flared out tulip-like around her hips and upper thighs; below she wore slim green silk pants which bared her pale slim ankles and shapely sandeled feet.

Her hair had been re-styled, and fell in a sleek red shoulder-length pageboy bob that featured low, straight, sexy bangs. She’d penciled her eyes, elongating them, and she had darkened her lids faintly, giving her white, delicate face a sultry, shadowy, ultra-feminine look. She felt a double satisfaction in emphasizing her physical feminity while making this unmistakable assertion of a masculine will.

Almost at once her eye had gone to a bored and charmingly pretty soft-faced brown-haired girl with great soft eyes and a full, pouting mouth. It was not Dolores, but an equivalent of Dolores. She was in the company of a small, tense-faced female with a mannish haircut and shell-rimmed glasses.

As Nikki moved past, staring boldly at the soft, pretty girl, her bull got up and walked with a comically exaggerated swagger back to the cigarette machine. Then, almost at once, certainly before she could have had time to buy cigarettes, the bull came back, the tense scowl looking positively painful.

Reaching the table, the little bull said gruffly, “It’s getting late. Let’s hit the road, kid!”

The girl looked at her with bored indifference, took a dainty bite of pretzel. “I’m not ready.”

“C’mon, c’mon.” The bull’s tight, ugly little face got even more authoritative, and she remarked in a loud, would-be manly voice, “Women. You can’t get ‘em to come and you can’t get ‘em to leave.”

Nikki paused, said in a man-to-man voice, “They’re nuts, ain’t they. The only way is to just walk out on them.”

The bull got red in the face and shrilled, “Say, why don’t you mind your own business? I ain’t walking out noplace!”

“Oh, Sam! You’re so unfriendly,” the pretty cow said, with mock reproof, her voice a sort of simpering exaggeration of coy femaleness. She looked flirtatiously at Nikki, then lowered her eyes. “You’re new, aren’t you?” she cooed.

“Yeah, just in from the East. And say, I like it here.” Nikki looked mockingly at Sam, who was now in a sort of agony. “What say I buy us all a drink. One for the road.”

“Why, you going to hit the road?” Sam bent back, opened her mouth and guffawed. Straightening, grinning fixedly at the girl, Sam repeated, “It’s going to hit the road.”

The girl was in heaven, making her lover squirm, being courted by a new prospect. For an instant Nikki hated her and felt a sort of impersonal pity for this homely, runty reject of a female trying to make the grade as a man.

“My name’s Johnny Quick,” Nikki said. “What’s yours? And what’s your pleasure?”

“Carol Jane, that’s what everybody calls me. And what I like—” she gave Sam a condescending glance “—but not what I get, is champagne.”

Nikki opened her purse, took out a small roll, peeled a twenty off. “We’ll have a bottle.”

“Why don’t you sit down, Johnny Quick?”

“Like hell!” Sam bristled.

“The lady invited me.”

“She’s with me.”

“I think that’s for her to decide.”

“After all, I’m not married to you,” Carol Jane said peevishly.

Nikki reached over and tapped Sam on the chest. “C’mon. You and me have something to settle in the rest room. C’mon!”

“Say, who do you think you are, coming around here and making trouble?”

“C’mon, get those specs off your big nose and put ‘em up or shut up.”

“You goddamned big …”

Nikki clamped her fist into the cloth of the little bull’s jacket, pushed her face close and growled, “Beat it, before I wipe the floor with you.”

Shaky, very near tears, Sam fled, yelling curses.

“Let’s get out of this dump,” Nikki said to the girl.

The girl looked at her with sparkling eyes. “Say, you sure do work
fast
.”

“What I want, I go after. You I want. So get your coat on!”

Nikki stood straight and tall, a sense of exultance tingling through her whole body, a radiance on her pale, lovely face as she looked at her prize. But Carol Jane didn’t move to put on her coat; instead a look of timidity touched her pretty face and melted-chocolate eyes. Nikki laughed softly, charmed by the utterly exquisite feminity of it, the defenseless-child air of sweet frailty.