Сидни Шелдон – The Other Side of Midnight (страница 15)

‘So am I.’ And she was. She really was. She could be certain that Ron was a good lover. He had been factory-tested and approved by every horny coed within a radius of a hundred and fifty miles. It would have been humiliating to have had her first sexual experience with someone as ignorant as she was. With Ron she was getting a master. After tonight she would not be calling herself Saint Catherine any longer. Instead she would probably be known as ‘Catherine the Great.’ And this time she would know what the ‘Great’ stood for. She would be fantastic in bed. The trick was not to panic. All the wonderful things she had read about in the little green books she used to keep hidden from her mother and father were about to happen to her. Her body was going to be an organ filled with exquisite music. Oh, she knew it would hurt the first time; it always did. But she would not let Ron know. She would move her behind around a lot because men hated for a woman to just lie there, motionless. And when Ron penetrated her, she would bite her lip to conceal the pain and cover it up with a sexy cry.

‘What?’

She turned to Ron, appalled, and realized she had cried aloud. ‘I–I didn’t say anything.’

‘You gave a kind of funny cry.’

‘Did I?’ She forced a little laugh.

‘You’re a million miles away.’

She analysed the line and decided it was bad. She must be more like Jean-Anne. Catherine put her hand on his arm and moved closer. ‘I’m right here,’ she said.

She tried to make her voice throaty, like Jean Arthur in Calamity Jane.

Ron looked down at her, confused, but the only thing he could read in her face was an eager warmth.

Lum Fong’s was a dreary-looking, run-of-the-mill Chinese restaurant located under the Elevated. All through dinner they could hear the rumble of the trains as they ran overhead rattling the dishes. The restaurant looked like a thousand other anonymous Chinese restaurants all over America, but Catherine carefully absorbed the details of the booth they were seated in, committing to memory the cheap, spotted wallpaper, the chipped china teapot, the soy-sauce stains on the table.

A little Chinese waiter came up to the table and asked if they wanted a drink. Catherine had tasted whiskey a few times in her life and hated it, but this was New Year’s Eve, the Fourth of July, the End of her Maidenhood. It was fitting to celebrate.

‘I’ll have an old-fashioned with a cherry in it.’ Cherry! Oh, God! It was a dead giveaway.

‘Scotch and soda,’ Ron said.

The waiter bowed himself away from the table. Catherine wondered if it were true that Oriental women were built slantwise.

‘I don’t know why we never became friends before,’ Ron was saying. ‘Everyone says you’re the brightest girl in the whole goddamned university.’

‘You know how people exaggerate.’

‘And you’re damned pretty.’

‘Thank you.’ She tried to make her voice sound like Katherine Hepburn in Alice Adams and looked meaningfully into his eyes. She was no longer Catherine Alexander. She was a sex machine. She was about to join Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Cleopatra. They were all going to be sisters under the foreskin.

The waiter brought the drink and she finished it in one quick nervous gulp. Ron watched her in surprise.

‘Easy,’ he warned. ‘That’s pretty potent stuff.’

‘I can handle it,’ Catherine assured him, confidently.

‘Another round,’ he told the waiter. Ron reached across the table and caressed her hand. ‘It’s funny. Everybody at school had you wrong.’

‘Wrong. No one at school’s had me.’

He stared at her. Careful, don’t be clever. Men preferred to bed girls who had excessively large mammary glands and gluteus maximus muscles and exceedingly small cerebrums.

‘I’ve had a – thing for you for a long time,’ she said, hurriedly.

‘You sure kept it a secret.’ Ron pulled out the note she had written and smoothed it out. ‘Try our Cashier,’ he read aloud, and laughed. ‘So far I like it better than the Banana Split.’ He ran his hands up and down Catherine’s arm and his touch sent tiny ripples down her spine, just like the books said it would. Perhaps after tonight she would write a manual on sex to instruct all the poor, dumb virgins who didn’t know what life was all about. After the second drink Catherine was beginning to feel sorry for them.

‘It’s a pity.’

‘What’s a pity?’

She had spoken aloud again. She decided to be bold. ‘I was feeling sorry for all the virgins in the world,’ she said.

Ron grinned at Catherine. ‘I’ll drink to that.’ He lifted his glass. She looked at him sitting across from her obviously enjoying her company. She had nothing to worry about. Everything was going beautifully. He asked if she would like another drink, but Catherine declined. She did not intend to be in an alcoholic stupor when she was deflowered. Deflowered? Did people still use words like deflowered? Anyway, she wanted to remember every moment, every sensation. Oh, my God! She wasn’t wearing anything! Would he? Surely a man as experienced as Ron Peterson would have something to put on, some protection so she wouldn’t get pregnant. What if he was expecting the same thing? What if he was thinking that a girl as experienced as Catherine Alexander would surely have some protection? Could she come right out and ask him? She decided that she would rather die first, right at the table. They could carry her body away and give her a ceremonial Chinese burial.

Ron ordered the dollar seventy-five six-course dinner, and Catherine pretended to eat it, but it might as well have been Chinese cardboard. She was beginning to get so tense she couldn’t taste anything. Her tongue was suddenly dry and the roof of her mouth felt strangely numb. What if she had just had a stroke? If she had sex right after a stroke, it would probably kill her. Perhaps she should warn Ron. It would hurt his reputation if they found a dead girl in his bed. Or maybe it would enhance it.

‘What’s the matter?’ Ron asked. ‘You look pale.’

‘I feel great,’ Catherine said, recklessly. ‘I’m just excited about being with you.’

Ron looked at her approvingly, his brown eyes taking in every detail of her face and moving down to her breasts and lingering there. ‘I feel the same way,’ he replied.

The waiter had taken the dishes away, and Ron had paid the cheque. He looked at her, but Catherine couldn’t move.

‘Do you want anything else?’ Ron asked.

Do I? Oh, yes! I want to be on a slow boat to China. I want to be in a cannibal’s kettle being boiled for dinner. I want my mother!

Ron was watching her, waiting, Catherine took a deep breath. ‘I–I can’t think of anything.’

‘Good.’ He drew the syllable out, long and lastingly so that it seemed to put a bed on the table between them. ‘Let’s go.’ He stood up and Catherine followed. The euphoric feeling from the drinks had completely vanished and her legs began to tremble.

They were outside in the warm night air when a sudden thought hit Catherine and filled her with relief. He’s not going to take me to bed tonight. Men never do that with a girl on the first date. He’s going to ask me out to dinner again and next time we’ll go to Henrici’s and we’ll get to know each other better. Really know each other. And we’ll probably fall in love – madly – and he’ll take me to meet his parents and then everything will be all right … and I won’t feel this stupid panic.

‘Do you have any preference in motels?’ Ron asked.

Catherine stared up at him, speechless. Gone were the dreams of a genteel musicale evening with his mother and father. The bastard was planning to take her to bed in a motel! Well, that was what she wanted, wasn’t it? Wasn’t that the reason she had written that insane note?

Ron’s hand was on Catherine’s shoulder now, sliding down her arm. She felt a warm sensation in her groin. She swallowed and said, ‘If you’ve seen one motel, you’ve seen them all.’

Ron looked at her strangely. But all he said was, ‘OK. Let’s go.’

They got into his car and started driving west. Catherine’s body had turned into a block of ice, but her mind was racing at a feverish pitch. The last time she had stayed in a motel was when she was eight and was driving across country with her mother and father. Now she was going to one to go to bed with a man who was a total stranger. What did she know about him anyway? Only that he was handsome, popular and knew an easy lay when he saw one.

Ron reached over and took her hand. ‘Your hands are cold,’ he said.

‘Cold hands, hot legs.’ Oh, Christ, she thought. There I go again. For some reason, the lyrics of ‘Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life’ started to go through Catherine’s head. Well she was about to solve it. She was on her way to finding out what everything was all about. The books, the sexy advertisements, the thinly veiled love lyrics – ‘Rock Me in the Cradle of Love,’ ‘Do It Again,’ ‘Birds Do It.’ OK, she thought. Now Catherine is going to do it.

Ron turned south onto Clark Street.

Ahead on both sides of the street were huge blinking red eyes, neon signs that were alive in the night, screaming out their offers of cheap and temporary havens for impatient young lovers. ‘EASY REST MOTEL.’ ‘OVERNIGHT MOTEL,’ ‘COME INN,’ (Now that had to be Freudian!) ‘TRAVELLER’S REST.’ The paucity of imagination was staggering, but on the other hand the owners of these places were probably too busy bustling fornicating young couples in and out of bed to worry about being literary.