956: The reception . . .
Leaving Small’s Hotel, Chapter 27 concludes
THE RECEPTION WAS rowdy. The tip of the consortium was plastered. They kept shouting “Mosh! Mosh!” and trying to persuade Lana to get up onto the bar and jump onto their outstretched hands, and when she refused they tried Albertine, and when she refused they tried Cutie, and when Tony T threatened to rearrange their faces, they feigned terror and began shouting “Encore!” in my direction.
“Okay,” I said. “How about this — I have omitted from Dead Air quite a few of the details of my obsession with Mrs. Jerrold — the way I stole snapshots of her now and then when she entrusted her film to me for developing and printing, the nightly masturbation with her in mind, and so on. These are my memoirs, after all, and in them I present myself not as I was but as I might have been. The simple truth is that I wished I could spend rainy afternoons with Mrs. Jerrold, in Mr. and Mrs. Jerrold’s bed, as Mr. Yummy, the bakery delivery man, sometimes did, and I have often asked myself, in the years since then, what would have happened if I had simply asked her. Suppose, just suppose, that on that afternoon — when Mrs. Jerrold said, “That’s enough thinking, I think,” I had told her what I was thinking, exactly what I was thinking. Ready? No manuscript, no notes, just thirty-seven years of dreams. Here goes.”
I CAUGHT HER HAND and said, “I was just wondering — ”
She raised an eyebrow inquiringly. “Yes?” she asked.
“What does Mr. Jerrold do?”
“What?”
“What does Mr. Jerrold do?”
“That’s what you were wondering?”
Was she being evasive? She seemed to be.
“I don’t mean to you — ”
“What?”
“I just mean — what does he do — at work?”
“Oh,” she said. She wiped her hands on her skirt and looked at me, hard. “What did you think I thought you meant?” she asked.
“Um — well, I thought you thought — ”
“Peter,” she said, slowly, “have you and your parents had a talk about — ” She paused.
“What?” I asked.
“About — you know — what you’re asking me about?”
“Yes,” I admitted, with my eyes down. “I guess I let my imagination run away with me.”
“Peter!”
“What?”
“What do you mean by that?” She put her hand under my chin and tilted my head upward until I was looking into her eyes.
I said, “Well, see, I got the idea that Mr. Jerrold — ” I was about to say that I had gotten the idea that Mr. Jerrold was a spy, but a look of panic came across her face and she put her finger to my lips to stop me from speaking.
She whispered, “You haven’t said anything to Junior about what you — imagined — have you?”
“Oh, no,” I assured her. “No.”
“Good,” she said, and I could see that she was relieved. “What does Roger do?” she said with a sigh. “Let’s just say that he doesn’t do anything unusual.” She winked.
I winked back and said, “I guess that’s the way he wants it to look.”
“What?”
“He doesn’t want to give himself away.”
She raised both eyebrows. “That’s a funny way of putting it,” she said.
“I mean he wants to look as if he does the same thing everybody else does, nothing unusual.”
“You’re right,” she said, knitting her brows. “I think you’re exactly right. He’s worried that he won’t seem to be — ”
“Ordinary,” I suggested.
“I was going to say normal, but I guess ordinary is close enough.”
“Well, he’s doing a great job. Most people would think that he was ordinary — or normal. I don’t think most people would put two and two together, you know what I mean?”
She brought her hand to her brow and shook her head. “Peter,” she asked, “how did we get onto this subject? What made you ask about all this?”
“It was — um — the tape recorder,” I admitted.
“The tape recorder? Oh, my God! You listened to that tape?”
“I did,” I confessed.
She put her hand on my shoulder. “Look, Peter,” she said, “I have to ask you to forget what you heard and never — ”
“Oh, I would never,” I said. I wanted to say I would never betray her and that I would never betray Mr. Jerrold, either, since revealing that he was a spy would cause her pain, but it sounded melodramatic in my mind’s ear, so I just repeated, “Never,” and then added, “but — ”
“But?” she said.
“Could I ask a favor?”
“Anything,” she said, “so long as you keep that tape a secret between us. What’s the favor?”
“I want to do with you what Mr. Yummy does with you.”
“What? What?”
“Don’t be upset. I don’t mean to upset you.”
“Oh, my God.”
“I — ah — I think about you a lot, Betty. Lots of times, at night, when I’m in my bed, I — ”
“I get the picture. You don’t have to go into the details.”
“It’s the details that I’m interested in,” I said.
I held my hands out to her as if she were a girl my age, and she, with a self-conscious laugh and a self-conscious sense of indulging a neighborhood boy with a passion for her, put her hands in mine.
“Betty,” I said, “kiss me.”
She opened her mouth as if she were going to object, then stopped, hesitated, leaned forward, and kissed me. It was an informed kiss, and I gave myself up to learning from it, and among the things I learned, or thought I learned, was that she would not, perhaps could not, allow herself to initiate anything, but that she was willing — maybe even eager — to give in to the pleading of a boy who needed her, but she wasn’t going to seduce that boy. The boy would have to seduce her, as well as he could.
“Betty,” I said, “let’s go upstairs.” It was the best I could do in the seduction-of-a-woman-more-than-twice-my-age line, but the best I could do turned out to be good enough, and when I stood and took her by the hand, she stood and followed me.
In bed, everything went beautifully. We maintained the fiction that I was the initiator in all things, but it was really she who took the lead, and we both knew it though neither of us acknowledged it. I was a little shaky and overeager, but she was composed and patient. She was a little large for me, and I was a little small for her, but passion saved me from embarrassment, and novelty saved her from disappointment. In fact, she sounded far more pleased in person than she had on tape, so I’ve always considered the afternoon a success.
“ALAS,” I said, “I didn’t do that. For one thing, I had my suspicions that Mr. Jerrold might be hiding in the bedroom closet, and since I also had my suspicions that he might be a spy, there was no good reason not to suspect that he might be packing a rod, and for another I would never have had the nerve, and for another — well, at any rate, I never did that, but maybe I should have tried. Maybe there was no one in the bedroom closet. Maybe, if I had asked politely, Mrs. Jerrold would have said yes. If I had asked, and she had said yes, and we had spent the rest of the afternoon in her bed, would I have been happy about it? Probably. Would she? I don’t know. Would I have been happy about it a day later? A week later? Would she have been happy about it a week later? Would I still be happy about it now? Would she? Was it a mistake not to ask her? I wonder. I have often wondered.”
AL TRIED TO CONVINCE the tip of the consortium to take rooms and spend the night, but they wouldn’t be convinced, and they carried Lana, who was unconscious, down to their penis boat, with all the inmates following, like worshipers of a dead goddess. They roared off into the night, their wake washing over our feet, and Al said, “You know what I wish I had now?”
“What?” I asked.
“A torpedo,” she said.
[to be continued]
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