Jack of Diamonds (42 page)

When Dolly McClymont had snubbed my mother and refused to speak to her, my poor little mom had simply accepted this gross indignity for years. I only understood later how much this must have hurt and humiliated her, and how much it had affected me. The Dolly McClymonts, Mrs Hendersons and Alf Fields of this world can inflict a great deal of harm because they rely on their victims being too timid to retaliate. Yelling or pulling rank might not be the answer but I had seen not only my mom but Mac permanently damaged by bullying and I knew that being a victim could easily become a habit. Something always needs to be done, and early. It was just like when I was at school: you might end up with a bloody nose, but it will be the last one you have to endure. Bullies do not come back for more if you show them there is always going to be a price to pay. It was the only useful thing my father, a perfect example of a brutal bully, taught me.

I knew confrontation wasn’t going to help me with Fields, it would simply make the atmosphere even frostier, and I could hardly complain to the management after we arrived. I guessed that if this scrawny bully in jumped-up chauffeur’s livery knew our true identity he probably thought he had us on the ropes. Something was required from me if I were to prove myself anything more than a cowed boy.

I didn’t usually confront people directly; it just wasn’t my style. As Joe would say in one of his semi-biblical maxims, ‘Bad mouth begets bad mouth. Yo talk shit yo gonna end up eatin’ it.’ I remembered how Joe handled things once or twice when there’d been a sudden altercation in the Jazz Warehouse – two drunken businessmen at war with each other or two local Mobsters huffing and puffing and muscling up, sometimes even a couple of women shrieking at each other. Joe would simply turn to the band and say, ‘Drum solo! Loud. Real loud!’ The drums usually did the trick. ‘No use hollerin’ at each other when they cain’t hear nothin’.’

I reached into my jacket pocket and drew out the Hohner Echo Elite and started to play, leading off with ‘I’ll Never Smile Again’, sung by Frank Sinatra, then into Jimmie Davis’s ‘You Are My Sunshine’, and Bing Crosby’s ‘Only Forever’. As we turned into a park I moved on to ‘In the Mood’ by Glenn Miller. They were some of the popular songs I’d play at the Brunswick most afternoons, then mix a bit of jazz for the cocktail lounge in the evenings.

Juicy Fruit loved every minute and joined in singing the lyrics to ‘Sunshine’, which everyone in the world seemed to know. She had a nice clear contralto voice and followed the music well. Alf sat there stiff-necked and straight-backed, radiating disapproval as far as I could tell. It came as a big surprise therefore when he opened the back door for Juicy Fruit wearing a smile as big as a slice of melon.

‘Welcome to the Hotel Saskatchewan, Mr and Mrs Kupple,’ he beamed as I slid over to emerge through the same rear door. ‘That’s the best station pick-up I’ve ever done and I thank you most kindly. Why, you sure known how to handle a harmonica, sir! I play a bit myself, but sure as damn I’ve never heard it played like that. You’re a master, sir.’

Two ‘sirs’ in a row! We were suddenly experiencing an entirely different Alf Fields who insisted on taking our luggage, such as it was, and escorting us into the hotel, shouting out to a sleeping desk clerk, ‘Randy, git movin’ boy! We’ve got important guests. Mr and Mrs Kupple have arrived. You see they get everything they need now.’ He placed our suitcases down and shook us both by the hand. ‘Damn, that was good!’ he exclaimed, shaking his head before departing.

Randy, startled out of a peaceful sleep, jumped to his feet and hastily straightened his necktie and put on his jacket. ‘Welcome, sir, madam,’ he announced in a flustered voice. ‘Musta dozed off.’

‘That’s okay, buddy, it’s pretty late. Lousy time to arrive anywhere,’ I said. He didn’t seem any older than me but somehow I’d grown since we left Moose Jaw and he seemed more like the Jack of yesterday than the Jack of today. The harmonica had given me back some of the initiative. Juicy Fruit clung to my arm like a new bride and I felt her squeeze it gleefully.

Randy, seemingly the only person on duty, was a model of obsequious attention as he escorted us in the lift to our eighth-floor room, which turned out to be a whole suite, not as swanky as Miss Frostbite’s suite at the Waldorf, but terrific just the same. There were silky curtains and fancy upholstered French chairs with those bent legs that bulge at the top, and carpets your toes sank into. ‘The honeymoon suite, sir,’ Randy announced proudly, handing me the key. Bringing his feet together and bowing slightly, he touched his head in a salute. ‘Just call the desk if you need anything, sir.’

‘Have a good sleep, Randy,’ I said, still a little high on the success of my harmonica ploy and feeling much more in control.

The moment the door shut, Juicy Fruit burst into laughter, threw up her hands, danced over to me and flung her arms around my neck. ‘Oh, Jack, you were terrific. The harmonica sure turned that bastard around!’ She released me and twirled across the room, her outflung arm taking in everything around us. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Jack! Look at all this! I think I just died and went direct to heaven!’ She ran through to the bedroom where she let out a cry of delight. ‘Jack, come quick!’ I walked across to the bedroom to join her. ‘Look, Jack, the bed’s got curtains, like a love nest!’ She slipped between the lace hangings surrounding the four-poster bed and flung herself full length, like an excited eight-year-old. ‘Oooh-ah, feel the springs!’ she said, bouncing up and down. I noticed the cover had been removed and the bed turned down for the night.

I grinned to see her so obviously happy, but I must say I was surprised. I’d imagined she’d have been pretty accustomed to . . . you know . . . assignations, lonely commercial travellers sneaking girls into their hotel rooms at night. But then again, I don’t suppose many commercial travellers booked the honeymoon suite, and I’d learned along the way that most of them stayed in cheap accommodation, boarding houses and the like, and entertained at the cocktail lounges of the big hotels to give their clients the impression they were staying there. They’d be the guys who’d drop me a quarter during the afternoon while I was playing in the foyer and say, ‘Hey buddy, when I come into the cocktail lounge with a client, will you just nod or smile and say, ‘Welcome back, Mr Brown.’ It helped to have a good memory – some nights I’d make a couple of dollars.

‘Jack, I’ve never seen anything like this!’ Juicy Fruit was excited almost to the point of tears. ‘Oh, we are going to have us such a good time, baby!’

She brushed the curtains aside and headed for the bathroom. Moments later she was at it again. ‘Oh, quick, come and look! Jack, what luck!’

I wasn’t much of an expert on hotel bathrooms – bathtub, tiles, towels, taps, soap holder . . . I mean what else could you expect? Gold dragon’s head taps at the Waldorf, maybe, but not here. ‘What?’ I asked, seeing nothing unusual.

She pointed. ‘The shower, it’s on its own. Look, behind those curtains. Oh Jack, let’s have a shower! Get lovely and clean for bed.’

‘Righto, you go first,’ I said, not thinking.

‘Jack Spayd! Now you listen to me, boy!’ Juicy Fruit announced in a voice that made me jump. ‘We’re alone and I’m in charge, remember?’

‘What . . . what is it?’ I asked, perplexed.

‘Get your clothes off.’

‘Huh? Right now? At this moment?’ I asked stupidly.

‘Ain’t any other moment I had in mind, honey,’ she said, undoing a zip in the side of her dress. She bent over and promptly pulled her green silk dress over her head and moments later stood in her panties, brassiere, garter belt, stockings and black court shoes. ‘Well, go on! Off with it,’ she said, flicking a scarlet-tipped forefinger in the direction of my suit. ‘We haven’t got all night!’

Unfortunately that was exactly what we did have.

She picked up the dress, shook it out and draped it over her arm then turned to me. ‘When I get back you be in your birthday suit, you hear me now Jack Spayd?’ she scolded.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ I replied, touching my brow in an informal salute. The confidence I’d so recently gained was slipping away like quicksand. I watched as she click-clacked across the tiles and out of the bathroom in her heels and undies. She had a perfectly splendid bottom and nice long legs and what her bra contained was simply too marvellous for words.

Alone in the hotel bathroom as I wrestled my necktie loose, I could think of few more awkward moments in my life up till then. The anchor motif on the tie was a perfect symbol of my predicament: I was sunk in deep water. I removed my jacket, shirt collar and shirt, draping them across the edge of the bath, then I sat on the edge and pulled off my shoes and socks and stood to undo my belt, so that the trousers, always slightly too big around the waist, concertinaed around my ankles. Stepping free, I folded them and smoothed them over the edge of the bath. I’d have to hang them up somewhere later on if I was going to wear the suit in the morning.

Standing in my Jockeys I gazed down, but nothing stirred, nothing stretched, nothing woke from deep slumber. At that very moment Juicy Fruit entered the room entirely naked and without a glance at me she stepped behind the shower curtain and turned on the shower. I stood where I was, growing increasingly anxious, unsure what to do next. I could see her blurred silhouette through the curtains and she seemed to stand there motionless for ages. When she finally emerged her hand and arm glistened with water. ‘Perfect,’ she announced. I realised then that she had been adjusting the temperature.

Now she faced me full frontal and pointed silently at my Jockeys. Keeping my eyes fixed on hers I slowly slid my underpants down to my ankles and stepped out of them. She’d removed the hairpins that held the victory rolls and brushed out her hair. It now fell softly from the crown of her head to her shoulders. Juicy Fruit was Mary Magdalene; in every possible way she was every woman that ever was, not beautiful but much, much more than that. She wasn’t young or old, innocent or experienced in the ways of men; the only way I could think to describe her was that she was of the earth and perfectly, delectably ripe. The word fecund sprang into my mind, beloved of D.H. Lawrence, who seemed to like his women rich, lush and flourishing. It seemed to apply to the glorious woman who now fixed me with large brown eyes that glinted with gold flecks.

I would come to know a lot of women and make love to a great many of them, but there is always one moment when you know that you are about to make love to every woman at once. In barely a few seconds it seemed to me I stood rampant. ‘Come, Jack,’ Juicy Fruit invited, then, not even glancing at my erection, she took my hand and we stepped into the shower together. ‘Hold me tight, Jack,’ she said.

‘How?’ I asked, glancing down.

‘Oh,’ she said, laughing. She reached down and held my cock then shook it like a recalcitrant child.

‘Don’t!’ I cried. ‘One more like that and I’m a goner!’

‘Oh, this is such fun,’ Juicy Fruit cried, stepping into the shower. As the water streamed over her head and shoulders she lifted her face into it, allowing it to cascade over her tightly closed eyes and down her cheeks. She stepped back and wiped the water from her face, sweeping her palms down her neck to her wonderful breasts, her nipples bouncing as she swished the water from her skin, her lovely body glistening. Finally she opened her eyes. ‘Now it’s your turn, Jack,’ she said, laughing.

I wet myself down, rubbing the water over my skin and being careful to avoid the unsheathed but overeager erection that couldn’t be trusted to behave for a moment. I told myself I had to concentrate on something else until we got into bed so that I could lose my virginity properly. I greatly feared what was to come, and worried that I would not last a minute before I disgraced myself.

I turned Juicy Fruit back into the warm cascading water. She searched blindly for the soap and handed it to me with her eyes tightly shut, her face directly under the shower rose. Speaking in a bubbly sort of underwater voice she said, ‘Jack, soap me everywhere, with your hands, with your fingers, every part. You got to know every part of a woman when you go to bed with her, so I want you to wash every single woman’s part of me.’

Instructing me like this under the shower made it seem a bit more natural. I’d never touched a woman’s breasts before, much less the neatly clipped pubic bit I’d observed only once before, when Miss Flash had opened her coat and shocked me to my core. It was central to all of this and the grand entrance to manhood. I’d spent hundreds of hours imagining the naked female body, this part in particular, but I still knew nothing about it. Sure, I knew you could slide in and move up and down and soon grand things would happen, or they were supposed to. In Reggie Blunt’s case, he’d discovered that even though he possessed a marriage licence, free entry was barred. But I knew this wasn’t going to happen to me, just the opposite in fact. Juicy Fruit’s suggestion that I soap her was a stroke of genius. Armed with a bar of soap I could guard against any lascivious thoughts. I had a task to perform, almost a duty, which allowed me to curb my prurient fantasies. After all, I’d been obeying instructions from women all my life.

I set about with gusto, soaping my large hands before I began at her feet and ankles, deciding I’d do the parts we had in common first. After all, while a woman’s back might be more shapely, it didn’t differ all that much from a man’s. Legs, bottom, back. In this manner I could delay, or work up to, soaping the major differences, all of which seemed to be situated at the front. Or so I’d hitherto imagined.

It was lovely to soap and lather her as the shower splashed over her front, and soon enough I arrived at her delicious bottom, the walking wiggle, the part of the female anatomy that had turned me on a hundred times, mostly when it belonged to one of the twins as they left the club. I knew the twins used it as a weapon, showboating, strutting their stuff, but I guessed that while it had a powerful effect on a male, it probably didn’t have the capacity to make a woman feel horny. I soaped her rump carefully, my big hands moving in circles over both cheeks, then suddenly she bent over, her hands grasping her ankles. ‘Holy smoke!’ I stumbled back into the shower curtain and what hove into view very nearly caused me to fall on my ass. ‘Jack, soap me, sweetheart, right inside,’ Juicy Fruit said. Of course I knew what I was looking at, but never in my wildest imaginings had I expected to see it from such a viewpoint, two lovely mounds with paradise valley enfolded between them. ‘Soap me, Jack,’ Juicy Fruit instructed. I did as she requested, gently soaping this astonishing female part, which I had long imagined. She ran her hands up her calves from her ankles, resting on her knees but still bent over in full display. ‘Now rub your finger along inside, just a little at first, at the very top. Not hard, gentle, with the pad of your finger.’