Nikki (26 page)

However corny, Carol Jane’s wiles were terribly appealing and quite as winning as the real thing. Abruptly, Nikki realized it was the real thing. Obviously everything had been moving too fast, and however much Carol Jane had delighted in the rush and spectacle, she was now frightened of this bold stranger.

Swiftly, Nikki reversed tactics, smiling softly and moving gently to her and saying, “You mustn’t be afraid. Here, let me help you with your coat.”

The girl responded torpidly, like a sleepy baby, and Nikki coaxed her into her coat and then stood by with a waiting, deferential air. When Nikki had Carol Jane moving, she hurried to get her own coat and carried it across her arm, almost catching up to Carol Jane. She remained gallantly in the rear. Reassured, Carol Jane minced along, displaying to one and all that she was desirable indeed, fought for and won by a prince from afar. A memorable exit, Nikki thought gleefully.

It was chilly outside and the audience wasn’t there. When Nikki waved at a cab her cow got scared again.

“Don’t you have a car?”

“Not at the moment.”

A steedless knight wasn’t reassuring. “Where are we going? You promised me champagne.”

Nikki urged her into the cab. “Wherever you want to go, and don’t fret, you’ll get the champagne.”

“Everybody goes to the Top of the Mark.”

“We’re on our way. Driver, we’d like to go to the Top of the Mark,” Nikki said grandly.

Carol Jane was warm again, and like any proper middle-class young lady on a first date she kept her respectable distance on the seat and made tidily certain that her skirt covered her knees.

At a window-side table with the city at her feet and a waiter and a champagne cart in the offing, the girl took on great elegance. During the next half hour Nikki learned that she was a file clerk or, as Carol Jane put it, Assistant Director of Correspondence and Data Records, for a large legal firm. She allowed that she had natural tastes for the finer things, such as champagne, and she would like a mink coat, a Cadillac and Hollywood stardom.

She thought it would be fun for the two of them to talk, for the benefit of other customers, as if what they really were were starlets from Hollywood, here on a location picture. Nikki fell in with this idea with relish, making the girl giggle happily over some of her inventions. On the way out, only slightly tipsy, Carol Jane confided that everybody really thought they were starlets.

“
You
they wouldn’t have any trouble believing it about, a pretty thing like you,” Nikki whispered, and gave her an adoring look of such compelling earnestness that Carol Jane had to look away in confusion. Damn, but this was fun, Nikki thought as they waited in a small group for the elevator. She gave the girl another of those adoring looks, just to see her squirm.

“My place,” Nikki said, entering the cab, “is just a few blocks.”

“Oh, but I can’t.” Carol Jane protested, but only for the record.

The apartment positively awed her.

“Like it?” Nikki grinned.

“
Like
it? My goodness, it’s like something in the movies. Let’s go back in that big living room and look out at the view with the lights out.”

“Aha, with the lights out,” Nikki said in a sinister voice.

“I didn’t mean that. You’ve got to promise to be good.” Carol Jane simpered. “No, I mean you’ve got to raise your hand and promise.”

“Promise,” Nikki said. “You have the loveliest, daintiest wrists; did you know that?”

The girl looked at her wrists with pleased discovery, said nothing, then walked into the living room. Nikki followed, switched off the lights. The girl moved over to the window, stood motionlessly silhouetted. Nikki didn’t move to her. Presently the girl turned her head.

“Are you here?”

“Yes,” Nikki said in a loud whisper. “But I can’t come near you; it’d be dangerous to my promise.”

“Well, you can be good without being scary. It gives me the shivers.”

Saying nothing, Nikki crossed the room silently.

“Sam would always break promises.”

Nikki said nothing.

“Another thing, Johnny Quick,” Carol Jane said in a babyish, scolding voice. “The way you looked at me in front of all those people; you’ve got to promise not to.”

“Promise.”

“With you as pretty as you are, I could go around anyplace. It’s not like with Sam, where people start to think something right away, she’s so abnormal looking.”

“Go in the bedroom and take off your clothes,” Nikki said in a rush.

“Well, of all the nerve!”

“Cut the comedy,” Nikki said sharply.

“When you haven’t even once kissed me or hugged me or petted me?”

But I will, Nikki promised herself. “You made me promise, and a promise to you is sacred.”

“I know what we can do. It’ll be our wedding night and I’ll go and get all ready for you and you’ll knock on the door and ask please can you come in to your bride, and you’ll come and kneel at the bed. First carry me over the threshold.”

Nikki frowned, but the girl hurried past her over to the light switch, turned it on and stood looking across at Nikki with a seductive little smile. Nikki grinned a little shakily and stood rooted. Carol Jane plucked daintily at her skirt, lifted it a few inches above her knees. A pretty and dainty girl, soft and clean and young and purely feminine, but—

Nikki tapped her left arm. “I’m ashamed, but I hurt my arm. Tonight I couldn’t lift you.”

Carol Jane seemed to wilt with sympathy; she came hurriedly across, put her arms around Nikki, rose on her tiptoes and, pursing her lips, tried to kiss her. Involuntarily Nikki turned her face. Carol Jane drew back, frowned, studying her.

“You’re all trembly,” she said. “Don’t be, lover. I won’t tease you any more. I’ll hurry and get dainty and sweet for you. I’ll call you.”

Waiting, Nikki stared, paced nervously. Her fingertips, and undoubtedly her toes, were cold. She didn’t know what the hell was wrong with her. Well, of course she did. It was fear, a purely conventional fear. She twisted her mouth in a painful try at a grin. And she’d thought she was free, free to fulfill her needs, yet the prison of convention and taboo gripped her.

The need of her instinct, the very condition for her survival was to express her love, her sexuality honestly and clearly. Since she rejected males, her real desire was for a female love object, and therefore … A certain natural hesitancy, a drawing back, a certain physical revulsion. But these were only matters of conditioning, a lifelong indoctrination that the only proper love object should be the male.

She herself was psychologically male. She didn’t really like anyone to make love to her because what she most craved was to make love. If it couldn’t be Dolores, and clearly it couldn’t, ever, it would have to be a substitute. Otherwise, this perversion which wanted physical expression would continue to warp her mind and emotions, hold her enslaved mentally.

Once she accepted this rejected reality of herself, got her sex life shaped up right—right for her—she would then have a free mind and unsnarled emotions and she would know what to do with the rest of her life. All she needed was the courage to overcome the sense of shame. And that was one thing she had, courage, the courage to face whatever came along.

From the darkness of the bedroom the little voice called seductively and Nikki moved in, her legs stiff, her tread measured and slow. There was a pleasant scent of perfume, her own perfume, forming a delicate atmosphere around the bed. The girl was not under the covers, but on the silk spread, nude, the filter of outside night light soft on her flesh.

Nikki could feel a stroking sensuality over her own flesh, a mood of abandonment creeping over her like a warm drug. She lowered herself to a sitting position on the edge of the bed and leaned over the girl, and let her gaze stroke over the scented body. She touched it with chill fingers and noted the satiny texture of skin, and she let her fingers trace up over the soft round of one breast. The girl sighed and stirred, quickened with excitement.

“Kiss me, lover. Lover, kiss me.”

The urgency, the subtle pressure of the girls desire, the darkness, all reached into her, stirring Nikki’s senses. She realized that her heart was beating fast and her breath was rapid, and she told herself that she was excited and swept away. But the excitement was less and less sexual, more and more something like fear.

Yes, she was stimulated, just as she might have been by the danger of a cobra on that bed, and she had just about as much impulse to kiss the girl as she would have a cobra. As a matter of fact she didn’t even feel any intense rejection or revulsion or actual fear as she might have with something truly dangerous. She gave a short laugh. Kissing a board would be more like what she might feel … just silly.

“No good,” Nikki said. She switched on a lamp and got to her feet. “I’m terribly sorry, kid. I don’t want you. I mean, it’s not
you
, you’re a very attractive girl. I just never did this and well …” She shrugged. “I just don’t want to. Now, don’t be sore or hurt. I’m going to give you a nice little present and call a cab for you.”

“If you think I’d
take
anything from you …”

You will, Nikki thought. And she did.

Alone, Nikki toyed briefly with the idea that it had simply been the wrong girl, the right girl being forever out of reach. But, no; that wasn’t it. The instinct rebelled. Yet there was no comfort in this fiasco of an evening—far from it. She’d thought she had the solution to everything wrong about her. Now everything was right back where it had been. Nowhere.

If only Archer Cole would call, would forgive her, would give her another chance. Never, never would she hurt him again. She shook her head. Or if John Barket would call. She went hastily to her desk, got out notepaper and began to write an abject apology.

She tore up the note.

Jim? Just assuming he were totally free … Oh, stop it! Jim, in the role of the father, the good strong head of the household, had had a luster. But yanked out of that into the role of lover … No!

Whatever her specific reasons in individual cases, all the men she had rejected had been wrong for her. The very fact that she wasn’t drawn powerfully enough to them to keep from breaking with them was reason enough.

No man but Daddy! Probably that was it. The blindly idealizing little girl in her had fixed on his image and nobody could ever fit it. Not even Daddy himself could.

What she could do was jump out of the window. Interesting but messy. The way that was liable to mess up her looks was positively shameful. She’d blush in her casket with embarrassment.

Tomorrow night she’d slink herself up and go prowling low dives, teasing fate, and get her a guy who would beat the hell out of her. Regularly. A person like she was, always compelled to win, to beat somebody, to inflict pain. Wasn’t the underlying answer the truth? Didn’t she secretly lust to
be
beaten? Consider that professional paddling she’d taken from that bullish masseuse just before reappearing in Dolores’s life. She’d told herself she wanted to prove her toughness, but what did the capacity to take physical pain prove, when it was emotional pain she dreaded?

Ah, yes, tomorrow night a bruiser for her lover. She hated to get hurt, and he would hurt her and she would be happy … punished as she deserved and happy.

Yes.

No!

Because what she’d end up doing with a brute lover was murder him.

Damn, what headlines she’d make. She’d go out with no whimper but a bang for sure, or a suffocation, legal lethal gas chamber suffocation.

Does not appeal to the undersigned.

And you can’t go home again.

Though you can try, try to fit yourself out with a Daddy again and a loving mother and call them Jim and Dolores and be their good little girl, and move far back in time and live it all over, live it over right this time, and never break her heart or break his pride and never never be a bitch crocodile, strong and snapping and hurting and killing, but weak and good, and Daddy always strong.

She sat down in the middle of the living room carpet and rocked herself dumbly, choked and crying and knowing she could never go back, never undo the things she had done. Then she went across and opened the window and stared down, crying and afraid. But the one thing she did have, at least, was courage.

In less than a minute it would be over forever and ever, and all the pain and terror would be gone. She swung one leg outside. It was clumsy and she became annoyed with the painful mechanics of getting out these silly casement windows. By damn, the way they made windows these days …

She got back into the room. She unconsciously touched her buttocks, thinking, “I want to go home.” There was no home to go to. Those spankings. She’d accused her father of filthy incestuous desires, and had actually felt them herself. Those arguments. Sometimes they’d been about Nietzche. Nietzche idealized might; and his superman was supposed to be above good and evil, a law unto himself.

Nikki felt dizzy, nauseated. For the first time she realized that it hadn’t been her father’s guilty desires that she had considered weakness; deep in her belly she had blamed him not for the desires but for the failure to stand commandingly above the moral law and act upon them!

Is
that
what you’ve been holding against his memory? she asked herself. Suddenly the image of him and of the whole two thousand acres that had been his world was free of distortion and she said aloud, “You damned fool.”

And who said you can’t go home again? There a person had space and quiet. She had never been able to study as well anywhere else, and it was beautiful country, Virginia, and so was the Duquesne land. Those orchards should be tended and the barns remodeled and the house put into condition. Her father had always been a grandly arrogant fool about the soil, thinking it was so holy. What it needed was a little no-nonsense chemical analysis and refertilization along scientific lines.

All the place needed was a good manager, and she could be that; and at the same time study something, take a masters, like Dolores said. Or better, she’d take a degree in law and if the Judge was fool enough not to want a Duquesne in his firm she’d set up her own firm. Maybe she’d take on a husband, too, and maybe she wouldn’t, for that matter; she’d see.