Free Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 by Angel in Black (v5.0)

Jo Stafford, both Bing and Frankie—and when I told her I knew Sinatra personally and that maybe I could introduce her someday, she had given me a great big kiss.
    And then we necked, like schoolkids, and for a change I was drunk not with rum but with a girl’s beauty and her perfume and those clear blue-green eyes that you wanted to dive into and splash around. We petted, and I caressed her perfect breasts—they were full and firm and more than a handful—and finally she let me undo the back of her dress and it folded down around her waist like flower petals and her skin was a remarkable alabaster, smooth and flawless, with a beauty mark on one shoulder. I kissed the buds of her breasts and she moaned with pleasure and I kissed them some more, buried my face in their soft firmness, but when my hand, stroking the suppleness of her thighs, tried to edge up between them, she took me by the wrist and drew my hand back, shaking her head, her expression almost sad, as she said, “No, no, not yet, it’s too early,” and I could understand that, since this was only our first night, so when her hand undid my zipper and her head dipped into my lap, that pile of curls bobbing up and down, working expertly, I was stunned, I was shocked, I was delighted. . . .

    I saw her three more times. Whether I picked her up at the hotel where she was freeloading off model friends, or simply met her at the Morrison, she would be dolled up in expensive clothes—either that leopard fur coat or a white fur, and black outfits with dark nylons, her white-powdered face glowing angelically in the night, red lips like a lovely scarlet wound—looking like a movie star, not a would-be actress waiting tables. She borrowed money from me every time we were together—as little as twenty, as much as a hundred—but she was not a hooker, at least she didn’t see herself that way, and I refused to see her that way.
    We would talk about each other. She described herself as Black Irish—“lace curtain, not shanty!”—and wondered why a man with a Jewish last name looked so Irish, and I explained that my father had been an apostate Jew, a leftist bookseller on the West Side, and my Irish mother, who died when I was born, had given me my red hair and Mick mug. She said she barely knew her father, that he had been an entrepreneur who had had a small chain of miniature golf courses that failed in the early years of the Depression, and disappeared, only to turn up years later in California, where she had tried to get to know him, and failed.
    Because she was so soft on servicemen, I found myself telling her how I’d been in the Marines and on Guadalcanal, since after all I had to compete with these kids in uniform she was writing her letters to; and she even wormed it out of me that I’d been awarded a Silver Star—something I never mentioned to anybody; I never talked about the war—but, what the hell, she could know anything, she could take anything, considering what she was giving.
    And I told her about Peggy, and she told me about her late fiancé, Matt, a major in the Flying Tigers who had been killed on his way home from India, in a plane crash, earlier that year.
    “That’s why I haven’t . . . you know, gone all the way with you,” she explained on my couch, the second night we were together. “I didn’t date while Matt was away, keeping true to him . . . and now that he’s gone, I’m having to start all over again, just taking little tiny baby steps.”

    No, she wasn’t going “all the way” with me; she was just putting her head in my lap—some little baby steps! Yet for some reason, I didn’t feel like pointing out this glaring, illogical inconsistency.
    Anyway, there was more to her reluctance to perform intercourse than the memory of her dead pilot: on the third evening, she had requested a loan of one hundred dollars because she needed to see a “female-trouble doctor” in Gary.
    “You’re not pregnant, are you?”