Free Barbary Shore by Norman Mailer Page A

experiences.” Guinevere tapped the ash from her cigarette. “Well, this goes on for a while and there’s a climax. One night just for the hell of it he has one on the house with the society girl, and she gets pregnant. Only in the meantime before she finds out, he’s decided that he’s really more interested in the nurse, and they’re thinking of getting married. When the society girl comes in, you know, knocked up, he talks to her for a while and convinces her he’s not in love, and that she ought to have an operation. And so here’s the first big scene. The doctor makes an operation on this dame he’s had a hot affair with, and the nurse, the woman he’s in love with, assists him right at it. I mean you can see how this would make a movie even though they’d have trouble with such a scene. I imagine they could work it out though. She could have a brain tumor, or something of that nature. It would be a good scene the operation, you know with him giving directions to the nurse, scalpel nurse, forceps nurse, sponge, acting cold because he’s a good doctor, and he’s got lots of responsibility.” Guinevere stared at me blankly. “The operation turns out a failure. She isn’t going to have the baby any more, but at the same time he does something, he makes a mistake, and the society girl can’t make love any more. She looks perfectly okay, but she’s crippled there, a beautiful girl and yet she can’t do it any more. Well, when she finds out, she’s mad, and she’s going to expose him, but the nurse who’s a wonderful character convinces him he ought to marry the society girl, and he does even though there can’t be anything between them, and for a while they all keep living in the same town, and he keeps up his affair with the blonde nurse. They’re still in love, and it’s gotten very chemical like it used to be with the society girl, he goes down on her and everything, and she loves him. But the wife who’s now turned out a bitch is going to expose him all over again, and so the nurse takes off and goes to New York, and the doctor gets richer and richer, fooling around with a lot of dames on theside, but his heart is still with the blonde nurse. Only they don’t see each other for years.” She stopped. “Guess what the ending’s going to be?”
    I was not to hear it so quickly. Guinevere went on developing wondrous detail upon detail; my attention flagged, and I listened indifferently. For Monina stood in the hall entrance performing a dance. The child was still nude, but somewhere she had picked up a coaster for a highball glass, and now in a posture of unbelievable provocation, she held it like a fig leaf, writhing her limbs sinuously through a parody of amorous advance and retreat. She would approach a few steps, her blonde head cocked to one side in sensuous repose as if she were stirred by an exotic music, and then abruptly with a tiny pout upon her lips, she would draw back, an attitude of feigned horror in the pose of her limbs. As her mother spoke she danced silently, an interpreter. The story drew to a close, and with it the dance. Monina reclined against the doorway, her arm caressing her thigh. She never looked in my direction, yet everything was done for me. Her blonde eyelashes fluttered upon her cheek, her eyes opened to gaze boldly at the wall. And all the while, Guinevere, unheeding, continued to talk.
    “They meet again in New York, just about a year ago, the nurse and the doctor, and the doctors wife is dead, and whammo do they get together. I mean drinking and making love, nothing can stop them. And the nurse doesn’t tell him about that baby she had from him after she left cause she knows he won’t believe her; he’ll think it belongs to some other guy. And the doctor wants to get married, and she holds him off cause she doesn’t know what to do with the kid. And then what do you think, she can’t tell him so she murders the kid, her own child, and she’s caught, and