Raymond found it enjoyable. He could not have stood it as a constant diet (and he believed that there were people who could stand it as a constant diet) and it was all extremely confusing to him at first, from his doctrinaire perspective, because the properly dressed, immaculately spoken women seemed to him to be the wantons, and the naked or near-naked babes who talked like longshoremen seemed to be there as professional comics or entertainers on the piano or on the long-distance telephone. They were talking, talking, always talking, but never with the unpleasant garrulity of Johnny Iselin.
At first when Raymond allowed himself to get around to feeling like having a little action for himself he would grow flustered, be at a loss as to how to proceed, and he would close the door behind him in the converted dining room he called an office and try to forget about the whole thing, but that simply was not satisfactory. He did that the very first night Marco had guests and he sat there, nearly huddled up with misery, fearing that no one would ever come in to make him come out, but finally the door was flung open and a small but strapping redheaded girl with a figure that made him moan to himself, stood in the doorway and stared at him accusingly. “What the hell is the matter with you, honey?” she asked solicitously. “Are you queer?”
“Queer? Me?” Strapping was definitely the word for this girl. Everything she had was big in miniature and in aching proportion.
“There are four broads out there, honey,” she said, “and one man. Marco took me aside and told me that there was one more in here and although I ran right in here I’ve been worrying all the way because what the hell are you doing in here with very very ready broads out there?”
“Well—you see—” Raymond got up and took a slight step forward. “I’d like to introduce myself.” The excitement was rising and he forgot to think about himself. He was aware vaguely that this was the first time he had ever been courted and if she could keep the thing within bounds everything was going to be all right. “I’m Raymond Shaw.”
“So? I’m Winona Meighan. What has names got to do with what Marco promised I would be doing if I came here, but now I find out I may have to stand in line like at Radio City on a Sunday night?”
“I—I guess I simply didn’t know what else to say. I’m just as avidly interested as you are,” Raymond said, “but, I guess—well, I suppose you could say I am shy. Or new at all this. Shy, anyway.”
She waved her hand reassuringly. “All the men are shy today. Everything is changing right in front of our eyes. It’s become such a wonderful thing to find a man who actually is willing to go to bed with a woman that the women get all charged up and they press too much. I know it but I can’t change it.” As she talked she closed the door behind her. She couldn’t find any way to lock it so she pulled a heavy chair in front of it. “So if you’re shy we’ll put out the lights, sweetheart. Winona understands, baby. Just get out of those bulgy pants and come over here.” She unzipped the side of her dress and began to struggle out of it impatiently. “I have to get back downtown for an eleven o’clock show tonight, lover, so don’t let’s waste any more time.”
By the third night Raymond felt that he was fully adjusted to the new way of life. Winona had been extremely grateful for the extreme care he had put into his work with her and that squealing, activated gratitude, which had been coupled with an absolute insistence that he take her name and permanent address and that she write down his name and permanent address because her company was leaving in the morning for eight weeks in Las Vegas, had given him considerable confidence. After she had had to leave, both of them feeling exhausted but triste after the parting, he had moved quietly and weightlessly into the living room where Marco was playing at séance, explaining to the four girls that he understood, academically, exactly how a séance should operate because he had researched every necessary move and that if they would all cooperate by believing perhaps he could make something interesting happen the way things had happened in a fascinating textbook he had pored over all the way from San Francisco. It hadn’t worked, but everybody enjoyed themselves and when bedtime came two of the girls joined up with Raymond as though they had all been assigned to each other by a lewd housemother and, after loads of fun, they had all dropped off to sleep and had slept like lambs.
Raymond awoke twice during the night for a few languorous moments of trying to puzzle out how come he did not feel invaded by all these bodies that were hurling themselves at him or dotting the landscape of his privacy, but he could not reach the answer before he fell asleep, and, in the morning, with the girls getting ready to go off to offices or studios or dress houses or stores, no one had much more time than to wait patiently for a turn to put on lipstick hurriedly in the bathroom and rush out without any breakfast.
The extraordinary thing to Raymond was that none of them ever returned.
Marco would spend all of his day in the reading room of the Forty-second Street library, then, in the late afternoon, devote two hours to fruitful bird-dogging that was, mysteriously to Raymond, always successful, and when Raymond got back to the apartment at six twenty-two every day there would never be less than three interested and interesting girls there, making spaghetti or using the telephone.
Marco explained, on the first morning, that women were much more like men, in many almost invisible ways, than men were. Particularly in the noninvolvement area in which they were many, many more times like men simply because their natural instinct to capture and hold could be suspended. Marco said that there was not a healthy woman alive who would not gladly agree to rush into bed if that action displaced only the present and did not connect with the past nor had any possibility of any shape in the future. Good health could be served in this way, he said. No fears of reputation-tarnish could threaten. It meant sex without sin, in the sense that, in the middle of the twentieth century, when sexual activity is credited to a woman by several men, creating what was termed a past could also penalize her for any sexual activity in the future. Since good health demands good sex, he assured Raymond that very nearly the entire female population of the city of New York would happily cooperate with them if approached in the proper, understanding manner.
“But how?” Raymond asked him in awe and bewilderment.
“How what?”
“How do you approach them?”
“Well, I do have the edge on others by being patently an officer and a gentleman by act of Congress, and I am graced with a certain courtliness of manner.”
“Yes. I agree. But so am I.”
“I approach them smiling. I tell them I am an officer passing through New York, leaving in the morning for my new station in Hawaii, and that merely by looking at them I find them enormously attractive sexually.”
“But—what do they say?”
“First, of course, they thank me. They are with it, Raymond. Believe me, they are even way ahead of me and depending on whether they need to be at home that evening to greet a loyal breadwinner, or under the clock at the Biltmore to persuade a courtier, or are committed to one or another irrevocable obligations which mar metropolitan life, they are keenly aware that one night is such a short, short burst of time in such a packed and crowded concealing city as New York.”
“But when do they say—”
“Actually,” Marco told him pedantically, “I don’t actually know until I get back here, and the door bell begins to ring, who will arrive and who won’t. I always invite six. Every afternoon. So far we have not had to make do with less than three and—”