One of the classic pieces of advice for authors is “Murder your darlings”. You have to be willing to sacrifice any individual part of the story – any scene, any character – for the greater good of the story as a whole, no matter how much you love them.
This passage is a classic example. This story – and the second part, coming next week – are intended to be an interlude between chapters in my Novel-in-progress City of Dreams. They tell the story of an old man who accidentally crosses over into Dream when such a thing shouldn’t be possible, and illustrates that Dream can be just as dangerous in its way as Nightmare (though you do die happy). Between the two sections, this “interlude” is more than 40 double-spaced pages long. Clearly, some darlings need to be murdered and some serious trimming needs to be done before the final draft of the book. You can’t have an “interlude” that’s 10% of the total book. But I love the story of George Fuller, Sally, and their summers at Coney Island. So I’d like to share it with you in its uncut form for perhaps the one and only time.
Beware. NC-17.
***
George Fuller sat on a bench on the Coney Island boardwalk and looked out at the ocean.
Born in 1922, George had lived the archetypal Greatest Generation life: he’d left college the day after Pearl Harbor to enlist in the Navy, served in the Pacific where he saw things that he could never talk about, came home, finished college on the GI bill, got married to a neighborhood girl (one Marjorie Donovan), got a house in a nice neighborhood in Brooklyn, had a passel of kids, and worked in an office in Manhattan for forty years before retiring with a gold watch and a pension.
He and Marjorie had enjoyed their retirement, spending the next fifteen years visiting their far-flung relations (especially their children, who had scattered all across the country, with the exception of Robert, who had stayed in Brooklyn) and generally going to see everything they’d always wanted to see. They finally got a bit old for all that travel when they crossed over into the undiscovered country of their eighties. As George had discovered repeatedly before in his life, there comes a time when something that used to be a grand adventure becomes just…uncomfortable.
Marjorie had died in 2012, at the age of eighty-eight. George hadn’t expected to live long after that. Frankly, he hadn’t expected to outlive her in the first place. But he had taken care of himself as best he knew how (discovering along the way just how much Marjorie had done without him even noticing), and here he was years later, still hanging on and getting tired of waiting.
Part of that was thanks to Robert. A few years after Marjorie’s death, Robert had talked him into selling off the house and going into the Ocean View Assisted Living Facility, a shiny new place right off the Coney Island boardwalk.
There were other nursing homes or assisted living facilities he could have gone to, places it might have made more sense for him to go to. But George Fuller had always loved Coney Island. When he was a child, his family would rent a bungalow in one of the bungalow colonies of the West End (long since replaced by the Seagate gated community), and he and his mother and his siblings would spend the summer with the sand and the surf and the sea breeze while his father worked in his office in the City and joined them on weekends. As the years had passed, he’d kept coming back, even during the darkest days of the Seventies and Eighties. He’d brought his children when they were small, he’d strolled the boardwalk with his wife when they were old, and he’d rejoiced when he’d realized that the Coney Island Renaissance was real.
He thought about all these things as he looked out at the sparkling water, all of them and more. He thought about hot summer nights dancing at a concert on the boardwalk and the bleak windswept beauty of cold winter days. He thought about storms blowing off the Atlantic like a black sunrise, and dancing in the rain. He thought about looking forever out to sea from the top of the Wonder Wheel, with Marjorie or one of the kids beside him(if it was Marjorie, they would be in one of the fixed cars; one of the cars on rails if it was one of the kids).
He thought about…
About…
Well.
He had never told his wife about his time in the Navy, his (seeing the kamikaze hit the deck, seeing his best friend Frank Bianchi scream and burn, knowing he was already dead, that he couldn’t be saved) “adventures” in the South Pacific, but she had known. Maybe not the details, but she had slept beside him for sixty years, and she’d been woken up by his nightmares often enough.
But there was something else he had never told her, and this thing she had never guessed. After all, nightmares might be unique, but all happy dreams look the same from the outside.
*
Her name was Sally. He’d met her the magic summer that he’d turned sixteen. She was just a local girl, Coney Island white trash from the from the Gut, the bad neighborhood a few streets back from the beach, “Barely better than a nigger” according to his mother. And she was his first real love. Oh, schoolboys and schoolgirls fall in love three times a day and in lust three times an hour (he remembered,intellectually, that there had once been a time when his pecker had been like a poorly-trained dog, barking at every woman in sight. But now that the dog was gray-muzzled and tended to sleep for weeks at a time, and he’d long since forgotten what it felt like to actually live that way. Marjorie had once assured him that schoolgirls’ cooters were much the same, and that the only reason the schools weren’t day-long orgies was because of the girls’ fears of ruined reputations and pregnancy – in that order, which tells you all you need to know about the priorities of the young), but this was different.
Sally was the first girl where he didn’t care what anybody thought about her or his feelings for her. Always before, he had only expressed his loves and lusts in ways that were…appropriate. It was a strange word to apply to the expression of loves and lusts, and if you had used it around his sixteen-year-old self, he would have asked if you thought he was a sissy, and fought you if didn’t say “no” quickly enough. But he could think of none better. When you were around your buddies, you pretended that your loves were lusts – getting all romantic was for fruits. When you were with a girl, you might buy some flowers or try to win her a kewpie doll, but you were careful not to get too mushy. No poetry. When you were around your parents, you acted like a peck on the cheek was as far as you ever took it. When you were alone with your date, you took it as far as she’d let you go, and then pushed a little to see if she’d let you go further. But you didn’t expect to get too far with a nice girl. Not like today, when girls fall on their backs with their legs open before the dessert is served on the first date. Back then,you might get a kiss on the first date, but anything more than the very lightest of petting meant you were going steady. If you wanted more than that, you went to a girl who wasn’t so nice. Everyone knew who they were, the neighborhood bad girls. The ones who liked to smoke and talk tough. Hot as a pistol at fourteen, hard-eyed mothers of three with another on the way at twenty-four. His friends had told him of the pleasures to be had with the bad girls, but then, this was the one subject on which their nineteen-thirties teenage honor allowed them to lie. He didn’t know himself; he didn’t get to find out what all the talk was about until his twenty-first birthday, when his Navy buddies paid for a hooker on some sweaty island in the South Pacific to make a man of him.
Thing was, whatever you did with the bad girls, it was further than you could get with a real girlfriend, who was of course a nice girl. And you made sure that everyone knew that the bad girl you were making out with on Saturday night was just some girl you picked up, not a real girlfriend.
But with Sally, it was different. She was Coney Island white trash from the Gut, no better than a nigger, and he didn’t care if anyone knew that she was his real girlfriend.
She was pretty, of course: blonde hair that she kept in a pert ponytail; laughing blue eyes; a spray of freckles across her nose and cheeks; a grin that he would have immediately recognized as bold and adventurous if she’d been a boy; and an athletic figure with surprisingly powerful arms and legs from doing more manual labor than he’d ever done in his life. She looked like she belonged on a farm in Kansas, not the Coney Island boardwalk.
But if she had just been pretty, she would have been no different from the bad girls back in the neighborhood. She was smart, too, but that wasn’t it,either. A lot of the nice girls were smart, and better educated to boot. In the end, it was just that he liked spending time with her. It was that simple, and that unusual.
Not that he didn’t enjoy going on dates!
(What do you think I am, a sissy? Took too long to answer that. Pow. Etc.)
It was just…you hung out with your pals to relax and be yourself. Presumably girls did the same. Dates had pressure. You had to watch what you said around girls,and it seemed that they had things they didn’t like to talk about around boys,too, or they wouldn’t go to the bathroom in groups and stay there for ten minutes.
Sally wasn’t like that. He could be himself around Sally, and that had been clear from the moment he had first seen her.
*
She’d been shooting at a shooting gallery,and she’d been shooting so well that the barker had started using her as an advertisement: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is amazing! Never in all my years have I seen a woman shoot like this lovely young lady is shooting! We got us a regular Annie Oakley here, folks!”
As the barker had surely hoped, a crowd had gathered around, and George had been among them. Most of the people in that crowd had cheered,but there had been a certain amount of catcalling as well, and perhaps the barker had wanted that, too. After all, if they broke her concentration, he wouldn’t have to give her quite so good a prize.
If that was what he wanted, it didn’t work. Sally just kept hitting her targets, and before long, she’d won herself a Buck Rogers model rocket.
As she turned away from the game and the barker started shouting “Step right up, gentlemen, you’re not going to let a girl show you up like that, are you?”, George had expected her to walkaway. Instead, she’d walked right up to him, put the model in his hands, and said: “Here you go, Slim. I won this for you.”
Too befuddled to come up with anything to say, George fell back on his training: “Uh…thanks.”
“Want to go get an ice cream?”
“Sure.”
And the rest was history.
It had actually taken him some time –years? Decades? – to figure out that she’d actually asked him out on a date that day. For the longest time, he’d thought that their“first date” had been a few days later, when he’d taken her to see The Adventures of Robin Hood at a local last-run theatre and they’d gone to Nathan’s for hot dogs after.
Not that she’d made any great secret of it; she told him that very day, as they sat on a bench eating their ice cream,that she’d seen him around several times that summer, decided he was cute, and wondered how she might approach him. When she’d seen him in the crowd at the shooting gallery, she’d just acted in the moment. But he hadn’t recognized it for what it was because asking boys out was something that girls just didn’t do, outside running gags in Lil’Abner. It was possible she hadn’t recognized it for what it was herself. After all, while girls might not have asked boys out, they would go to amazing lengths to get the boys to ask them out, and Sally had just taken an extra step.
But asking him out on that date wasn’t the only thing Sally did that made her different from other girls. She could shoot like nobody he knew, of course. She could play baseball – her pitches might not be quite as hard as the best of his buddies, but they were more accurate – but more importantly, she could talk baseball. He learned that on that first date, at the moment he suddenly realized that they’d been talking for the last half hour about the Yankees and the Pirates. Several times that summer, he would see her sitting in front of the radio, screaming and cheering like she was actually at the ball game. What was more, she could spit as well as she could shoot, and she enjoyed a certain kind of joke that most girls didn’t enjoy…or at least, didn’t admit to enjoying around boys.
And then there was the incident with the Delancey brothers…
All very unladylike, of course, but that didn’t seem to matter when it was Sally. Loving her was like having a best pal you could kiss. And in spite of all that unladylikeness,Sally could dance.
*
George wouldn’t find anyone even kinda like Sally again until years later, after he got back from the Pacific, when he took his car in for some repairs and ran into the most fascinating girl working as a mechanic, covered in grease and looking like an angel from Heaven.
(Marjorie lost that job a few months later, had it taken away so it could be given to one of the boys fresh home from the War. That was happening allover to the Rosie the Riveters; after all, the men either had families to take care of or soon would. Fortunately, by that time, George had another job all lined up for her, this one with a lifetime guarantee.)
*
They spent most of that summer living a beach-movie dream. Sort of. The people in those movies never seemed to have anything else to do but hang out at the beach and act out their little dramas. His summer was a little like that, but Sally’s most definitely was not. There were days he didn’t see her at all because she was so busy doing chores and odd jobs to help her family.
Most days, though, they would meet in the afternoon and do summer things. They would walk the beach and the boardwalk, talking endlessly about their lives: his growing up in Brooklyn, son of a father who worked eighty-hour weeks in an office in the City; hers as a Kansas farmgirl (he’d been right!) whose family had moved all the way to New York City looking for work. They would swim and sunbathe. Sometimes in the evenings, they would go to the Friday night fireworks, or dances on the boardwalk.
They would beachcomb, which also doubled as a way to help her family, though there was that one time she found a quarter…she was so excited that she could treat him for once. They went to the sideshow and had a basket of fried clam strips after.
Most of the time, he treated, of course. He was the boy and it was the Thirties. He didn’t mind. She didn’t exactly have expensive tastes. She was happy to walk the Bowery(where she would win half the prizes at any game she played), eat hot dogs and ice cream, maybe ride the Cyclone or the Wonder Wheel, and go to the last-run theatre to catch a picture. One time, he wanted to take her to an actual nice restaurant – the Childs Restaurant on the boardwalk, which was about as nice a restaurant as a kid could afford,certainly one of the nicest in Coney at the time – and she hadn’t known what to do (answer: wear her nice summer dress and look pretty, which she had done very well).
Her family liked him well enough. And why not? He was a nice boy from a good family who didn’t get too fresh and brought Sally home on time.
Oddly enough, it was taking her home –through the back streets of Coney Island, to the Gut – that turned out to be the most dangerous thing they did that summer.
*
He’d been trying to show off his knowledge of the Coney Island back streets – after all, she might live there, but her family had only recently moved there, while his had been coming out to the bungalow colonies every summer of his life – and he’d gotten them lost. It wasn’t his fault, really – there was a building where his shortcut from last summer had been, and trying to go around had led them into a rabbit warren of counterintuitive turns and dead ends. It wasn’t that big a deal. Coney Island wasn’t that big, and they had plenty of time before her curfew.
The real problem was that all of those turns and dead ends were taking them intos ome not-so-nice areas of Coney. They needed to get out of here before –
“Where you going, Fuller?”
Oh, hell.
He considered running, but that would be like running from a vicious dog. It would just make it want to chase you more. Instead, he stopped and turned. Sally did the same, though she gave him a confused look before she did it.
And there they stood. The Delancey brothers, Mike and Brian.
They were great, carroty-haired slabs of shanty Irish white trash who went everywhere in their worn overalls and boots and little else. Twins or Irish Twins or near as damn it, in any case close enough in age so neither was really big brother to the other. Exactly the kind of Bad Element that his mother didn’t want him to associate with, and in this case, he agreed. He’d tried to make friends with them the first time he met them, back when he was six, and had been left beaten, bloody and minus his pocket money under the boardwalk. He’d done his best to steer clear of them ever since, and mostly he’d succeeded. Mostly. It was relatively easy if you stayed in the nice areas – the bungalow colonies, the amusements, the beach. There were plenty of petty criminals in those areas, pickpockets and con men and ladies of the evening,and the Delancey boys would have loved to be among them. But Mike and Brian were the kind of big, dumb thugs who were easy to spot and chase away, which the police started doing regularly once they got big enough to start being a threat to grown-ups. Maybe not everyone at Coney made an honest buck, but no one wanted a couple of mean galoots scaring away the customers.
(This was back when Coney was still the Playground of America, a resort with grand hotels, not a slum with a few rides like something out of a traveling carnie like it later became.)
But now he was in the Gut. In their territory.
“What can I do for you fellers?” He asked,doing his best not to show any fear. Partly because he didn’t want to look like a coward in front of Sally,of course. But mostly because they were vicious dogs who would attack if they knew you were scared.
“Oh, not much, rich boy,” Mike said.“Nothing you’ll miss. We’ll just take whatever money you’ve got on you – “
“Just the regular toll for walking on our street, you know,” Brian added, elaborately casual.
That was no great surprise. George was already reaching into his pocket and hoping that Sally didn’t think he was too much of a coward, when Mike added to the price:
“And we’ll take a little time with your skirt there, too.”
That was new. How far did they mean to take this? They were a couple of cheap dime-store hoods,bullies and thugs, but did that also make them rapists? He didn’t know. To this day, he didn’t know. But he wondered. He wondered if any women in France or Germany had found out, before the Delancey brothers had done the world a favor by getting themselves blown up by a booby trap left behind in a bar in Normandy by the retreating Wehrmacht.
He didn’t want to find out.
He’d been reaching into his pocket for his money, and Brian had been stepping forward to take it. But instead of turning it over – instead of shouting or arguing or threatening or any of the other preliminaries that usually proceeded a fight – he had punched Brian in the nose, sharp and sudden.
The big galoot stumbled back a step,clutching his bleeding nose, his eyes wide with amazement. George had managed to catch him off-guard,but he didn’t kid himself that that would save him. Maybe bullies in books and movies backed down if you fought back, but if there was one thing that Brian and Mike Delancey were used to and not scared of, it was getting hit. Between their old man and each other, they stayed in practice.
“You’re dead, faggot!” Brian roared,swinging a fist the size of a canned ham. George dodged it, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep that up for long.
“Run, Sally!” He shouted. Then Brian’s other fist crashed into the side of his head, and the whole world started spinning. He staggered a few steps away, but only a few steps, before Mike grabbed him and put him in a full nelson.
“Big mistake, rich boy,” he growled. “Your family’s gonna spend their whole fortune on your hospital bills.”
They seemed to think his family was much richer than it actually was. His dad had a good job, but he was hardly Daddy Warbucks. He considered explaining that to them, but it seemed like there was something more important going on. Then Brian appeared in front of him and drew back his big, calloused fist, and he remembered. Not that there was much he could do about it.
“Get ready, punk,” Brian growled, drawing that fist back still farther. Instead of following his advice, George opted to try to squirm free. It didn’t work.
Suddenly it was all rendered moot as a girl’s patent-leather shoe came up between Brian’s legs and slammed into his balls. He gave a most unintimidating squawk – he was not used to that! – and sank to his knees, clutching his wounded sweetmeats, revealing Sally standing behind him.
“You dirty little bitch!” Mike roared, tossing George aside and swinging his own massive fist at her. Then there was a trashcan lid in her hand, and she was pistoning it out to meet his swing. And then there was a loud, clanging crash, and Mike was howling in pain.
She dropped the trashcan lid and rushed over to wear George was picking himself up off the ground. “Are you okay,Slim?” She asked.
“I guess so.”
“Good. ‘Run, Sally’ my foot.”
“Okay, can we run now?”
A glance over to where Brian was picking himself up off the pavement and Mike was shaking his hand out.
“Yes. That would be a good idea.”
*
They ran all the way back to the Gut,where her family lived above a grocery. Mike and Brian didn’t follow them the whole way – they weren’t exactly built for speed, and besides, they were only brave in their own territory – but they didn’t dare to stop running anyway, not until they were up the stairs and inside the apartment.
There was a big foofaraw, of course. Sally’s mother fussed over George’s face and Sally’s hand, while her older brothers (all four of them as big as the Delancey Boys, give or take) set out to have a little talk with Mike and Brian. With axe-handles. George wasn’t sure if they found them, but he did know that old Mike and Brian laid low for the rest of the summer, and when he saw them again the following year,they’d hurried off the other way.
But it was what Sally’s father said that really stuck with him: “You’ve always been a good boy, son. Treating our Sally right. But tonight you proved you’d fight for her. Take a stand for her. Risk your neck for her. That’s what every father wants for his daughter.”
George had glanced at Sally surreptitiously, expecting her to be on the edge of laughter. After all, she had saved him. But no, she might not be sighing and staring at him with shining eyes like some damsel in distress from the movies, but she was beaming. She was proud. She was proud of him. He might not be her hero, exactly, but he was still a hero. And that was just aces with him,because as far as he was concerned, she was a hero, too.
*
His mother was waiting when he got home. There were very few telephones in Coney in those days, but news still traveled fast.
He was in high spirits when he came in the door. Why shouldn’t he be? The date had gone well, he was in before curfew, and he didn’t have anything incriminating on his breath. What more could a young man ask for?
(Oh yeah, being a hero in the eyes of both his girl and her family. And guess what? He had that too!)
Still, if the date hadn’t been so exciting, he might have sensed trouble before it hit him in the face. His mother was sitting in the living room reading her Bible, for Pete’s sake!
“Hi, Ma!” He said gaily, waving as he breezed through the living room toward the kitchen. A quick sandwich before bed would really hit the spot. Or maybe there was some of that fried chicken left…
“George.”
He stopped. That was not her “Welcome home, did you have a good time?” voice.
“Yes, Ma?”
“Come in here.”
He obeyed – not as reluctant as he would have been if he’d had any idea what he’d done wrong, he was never any good at covering up a guilty conscience, but not eager by any means – and stood before her. The room was dark except for the single lamp she had been using to read. It was like being interrogated by the cops. Or the Hun.
She stared him long and hard in the face,but not in the eyes. Why was she staring at the side of his head?
“So you’re getting in fights now,” she said at last.
Oh. Right. There was probably a good bruise coming on where Brian Delancey had pasted him.
“It wasn’t a fight…not really. The Delancey Boys tried to shake us down, and we got away. That’s all.”
“You don’t look like you got away.” She glanced pointedly at the side of his head again. He touched it and flinched. Yeah, he was gonna feel that in the mornin’.
“It could’ve been worse,” he said. “A lot worse.” He paused, remembering the Delancey Boys leering. “They wanted worse.”
“Maybe. And maybe it wouldn’t have happened at all if you hadn’t been down some back street with…that girl shaking her wares at everyone on the street.”
George’s jaw dropped. He’d known his mother didn’t like Sally for some reason he could never figure out, but this…?
“She wasn’t – “
“Wasn’t she?” She sneered, and he’d never seen such an ugly look on his mother’s face. “You boys…you men. You think all the good girls are stupid. You call it ‘pure’ or ‘innocent’, but stupid is what you mean. As if it requires some great talent to lie on your back and spread your legs! You think we don’t know what goes on, because you’re too ashamed to tell us. But we do. We know how a girl like that can steal a man away and ruin his life.”
George wondered if she as talking about more than just Sally, but didn’t dare to ask.
“I’m not going to forbid you to see her,”she said, and George would have been relieved at that, but he could tell from her tone that there was more coming. Sure enough… “I’m not going to turn you into Romeo and Juliet. That’s the surest way I know of to get you to do something stupid. I just want you to remember that this girl is nothing but a bit of summer fun, like the Cyclone or the Thunderbolt, and just like them, when the summer’s over, so is she.” She sneered again, and this time it was even uglier. “Just make sure that when you’re playing your games under the boardwalk, you don’t give her a kewpie doll to take home.”
“But Ma, I l– “
“Don’t you finish that sentence!” She shouted, lunging out of her chair and jabbing her finger into his face. “Don’t you dare! That girl is nothing but Coney Island white trash, no better than a nigger, and it’s bad enough that you go around in public with her, where people can see you! I won’t hear you talk about anything else, do you here me? I won’t!”
She paused, as if waiting to see if he would try to say anything else. He didn’t.
“Now go to bed.”
“Ma…”
“No. Nothing more tonight. Don’t give me reason to be more disappointed in you than I already am.”
*
That night cast a pall over the rest of the summer, but fortunately there wasn’t much of it left. Only about a week or two until Labor Day, as best he could remember it, and then on Labor Day itself, they went all-out. One last hurrah. They spent all day at Steeplechase Park, had dinner at Childs, then danced on the Boardwalk to jazz and swing with the whole rest of the surging Labor Day, end-of-Summer crowd.
Then when they were done dancing, when the Moon was high and they were sheened with sweat, bodies aching but far too excited to be tired, tingling with awareness of every time they had touched and pressed together over the last few hours, they went under the Boardwalk.
To this day, he could remember every detail of that night under the boardwalk. In some ways, it seemed more real than the old man sitting on a bench,wrapped in a blanket despite the warmth of the Sun, because even the summer wind could chill him. Like that night under the boardwalk was the last real thing that had happened, and the eighty years since then had been a dream, and he would wake up any moment now and be young and strong and handsome and sixteenagain.
He remembered moonbeams and lamplight shining down between the boards of the boardwalk, and the sound of tramping feet overhead. If he had wanted to, he could probably have looked up and gotten a good look up some girl’s skirts. Or maybe not. It was a bit dark for that. Besides, he had all he needed in that department down here.
He remembered the music still playing off in the distance, swing and jazz pouring out of bars and dance halls and bandstands on the boardwalk. He remembered the sea grass on the dunes and the scatter of trash on the ground –food wrappers, mostly. He remembered the other couples, each off in their own shadow, making their own first explorations and experiments at love (and in some cases, he was sure, making their first children).
Then Sally grabbed him and kissed him, and his memories stopped including anything at all but her.
They pressed up against a column, hands and mouths roving across each other’s bodies – mouths licking, sucking, even nipping. And kissing? Oh, yes. Her mouth still tasted of root beer (so different than the other girl who’d let his tongue in her mouth – a bad girl, of course – and her cigarettes).
As for their hands…
He squeezed the small soft mounds of her breasts through her blouse a few times, squeezed them and rubbed them like he was wishing for luck. But soon the two of them were pressed too close for that – he didn’t want his arms between them(and besides, her breasts were pressing against his chest, that was more than good enough) – so now hands were playing up and down flanks, down legs,clasping backs, and finally squeezing asses (hers was so muscular and tight!),pressing their hips together, as if they could force that secret forbidden thing they both wanted so much to just happenthrough all their layers of clothes.
Then one of her hands was up between them, pressing against his chest. “Wait, Slim…wait, wait…”
He backed off, a little frustrated (well,a lot frustrated if you counted his throbbing hard-on, but he didn’t, really. He was sixteen. He got throbbing hard-ons in algebra class), but mostly understanding. You could only expect to go so far with a good girl, even if she seemed as eager an excited as a boy sometimes (like tonight).
But then she was saying something, and maybe they weren’t done for the night after all.
“Okay, Slim…this is the last time we’re going to see each other this summer. Maybe the last time ever. I want it to be special. I want to give you something special, so you don’t forget me.”
His mind flashed a hundred different possibilities of what she could mean, not daring to let himself hope for any of them, and then she was unbuttoning her blouse.
She wasn’t going slowly – Sally didn’t have it in her to tease – but each button still seemed to take forever to come undone, and he could do nothing but stare hungrily as her fingers moved from one to the next, and with each such move more creamy flesh and white cotton was revealed.
Then her blouse was open, and her bra was pushed up, and he could finally see what he’d only groped in the dark before.
Once, Bobby Majors had showed him a French Postcard that he’d pinched from his older brother’s sock drawer. It showed a woman, naked as a jaybird,standing and posing like some sort of Greek statue, with her hips cocked and her arms stretched over her head. Her hair was dark, and her skin was dark-ish, at least as far as he could tell in the black-and-white photograph. He imagined she was a gypsy. She was the first real naked woman he had ever seen – well yes, she was just a picture, but she was a picture of a real woman, as compared to the paintings of dancing nymphs and lounging harem girls he had peeked at in art books – and he had thought of her every time he had played with himself for months.
He was fascinated with the differences between that woman’s body and Sally’s. Where that woman’s breasts had been large and heavy with dark nipples,Sally’s were small and pert and milky white, with light pink nipples that, at the moment, were as hard as little pebbles.
They were beautiful.
It was funny. He’d spent years wanting nothing more than titties. He’d certainly taken every opportunity to stare at them or handle them or peak down cleavage. But now that he was presented with a pairthat was bare and offered to him freely, he…he had no idea what to do.
Apparently Sally realized it, too, because after a few moments of him just staring, she blushed, smiled, and softly said“Go ahead, George.”
That was all he needed. The next moment, those pert little breasts were in his hands.
He was eager, and he was sure he was clumsy, but he did his best to be gentle. His hands roamed over the soft little mounds, exploring, their goal not so much pleasure as experience. It was usually hard to remember, as a man in his nineties, a man who had been seeing and handling breasts for more than seventy years (one particular pair for most of that time, it was true), what it was like to be that young boy, discovering a woman’s body for the first time. The thrill in his belly, the blue-steel hardness in his pants…the wonder.
The skin of her breasts was soft and smooth under his hands, delicate-seeming, but she didn’t seem to mind when he kneaded a little harder to feel their consistency (soft, but firm). She gasped, but when he asked if she was okay, she just nodded and told him to go on. She actually moaned when he rolled her nipples between his fingers(small and hard and rough-textured, like a pebble), but he didn’t need to ask to know that it wasn’t a moan of pain.
Then, just because it seemed right, he wrapped one arm around her and started kissing her again, using his other hand to keep exploring. But then she took hold of that hand, whispered “Now here, George,” and – holy God! – moved that hand down and under her skirt.
At first, his hand just meant panties, and he could feel heat and moisture soaking through the thin material, but she maneuvered the hand until it was pressed flat against her belly with his fingers slid under the waistband.
“There, George,” she whispered. “There, there, there!”
Here, all of George’s sources of knowledge failed him. He knew that boys had penises and girls had vaginas, that much his dry and clinical sex-talk with his Dad had told him, but that was all. That, and how the two came together to make babies, which was not what he wanted to do. The French postcard had showed nothing but a dark triangle of hair between the woman’s legs. His buddies mostly talked in grunts when they got to this part of the story.
At first, his fingers just met hair, curly hair that was damp with sweat…and something else. He pushed a little lower,expecting to find…oh, who knows? A hole? A slit? Instead he found a mound. A split mound; Sally’s body was halved like a peach. One of his fingers slipped into that split –it was surprisingly easy, the flesh inside that split was slick with her body’s own oils – and Sally gasped.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, keep going, keep going!”
So he did. He slipped the finger in deeper, so it was completely engulfed by wet warmth. It was sort of like having his finger in her mouth (which had happened that time she’d licked melted ice cream off his fingers; from the perspective of his nineties, it was a teenager’s idea of seductiveness, ham-handed and silly; when he was sixteen he had jerked off to the memory for days), only the flesh was a little rougher in texture.
As he slid his finger in, Sally made a high, keening sound, like she was strangling a cry. He didn’t have to ask this time – he knew it wasn’t a cry of pain.
Then, just because his hand was cramped,he straightened a second finger and slid it into her. This time, her response was a deep groan that she couldn’t quite choke off.
Then her hips began thrusting, burying his fingers deeper and deeper in her body. Because it seemed like the right thing to do, he began thrusting his fingers in response, trying to match her rhythm.
It seemed to work.
She clung to him tightly, making no sounds now except for her ragged breathing, matching him thrust for thrust, impaling herself, welcoming the impalement, welcoming the part of him that was buried deep in her soft wet heat, even if it wasn’t the part her hungry young body really wanted.
After a few moments of this, she clutched him tight, buried her face in his shoulder, and shivered – shivered so hard that for a moment he was afraid she was having a seizure or something – but after a moment she sighed and relaxed. The nonagenarian looking back on that hot summer night with knowledge the boy had lacked pondered that he had never seen a woman climax so quickly or so easily again. Sally must have been near out of her mind with lust.
“Are you alright?” He asked. She’d all but collapsed onto him, and it seemed like he was the only thing holding her up right now – not that he minded.
“Yeah,” she answered, nodding her head and straightening up. “Yeah, I am. In fact,that was wonderful. I…” Then she blinked, looked down, and when she looked back up, her wicked grin had returned. “Slim…your hand is still in my cooch.”
He almost jerked his hand away, like it had been slapped and he’d been told not to touch, but she caught his wrist before he could.
“Gently,” she said, slowly easing his handout of her pants and his fingers out of…her. “You don’t have to be so skittish,Slim. I just thought it would be kinda funny to be standing here having a conversation while you’re still two knuckles deep in me.”
He blushed, and pondered the strange and wondrous fact that part of him had actually been inside another human being’s body. Not the part that both of them wanted, but still. Decades later, the nonagenarian pondered that, and wondered when it had stopped being so wondrous and started being commonplace.
“Look at you blush” Sally giggled. It was surprisingly innocent. “Seems like I’m the one who should be embarrassed. I’m the one standing around with my drawers disarranged.” Then her grin turned wicked again. “Maybe you should fair up with me.”
He didn’t even have time to ask what she meant (not that he didn’t know, he just didn’t dare to believe) before she was attacking his belt buckle.
Still trying to be a gentleman in spite of everything, George started to say “You don’t have to – “ but Sally interrupted with a finger to his lips.
“Hush,” she said. “Let me pay you back.”
She extracted his throbbing hard-on from his pants. He gasped as her fingers closed around it.
“Oh gosh,” She giggled. “It’s bigger than I expected. I was expecting maybe the size of a finger or something! I don’t know if I could really take something this big inside me…but then, everyone who’s done it who’ll talk to me about it says it’s wonderful after the first few times.”
If she’d wanted to try taking it inside her at that moment, he would have agreed eagerly. Between her fingers wrapped around his shaft and her talk, he’d lost all his sense. Fortunately, she’d kept hers.
“Does this feel good?” She asked, trying to be sultry, as she started stroking.
It did. Oh god, it did. Later in his life, and not much later at that, George would learn what a real handjob felt like; Sally’s hand was dry except for a bit of sweat, she’d never touched a penis before in her life, and she was jerking too hard, he’d be sore in the morning. But for now, he was hornier than he’d ever been in his life (and he would rarely be this horny again), and the pleasure was overwhelming. It was maybe a minute before the familiar eruption ambushed him, and he was spurting,again and again and again, spurting into her hand and spurting into the sand.
Sally was laughing as he ejaculated, but even back then he could tell that she was laughing in surprise and delight, not scorn at how shamefully quickly he’d shot his wad.
“Oh gosh,” Sally giggled as she looked at the strings of pearly fluid dripping off her fingers. “That’s sticky. I’d better go wash it off. Wouldn’t want any of it getting anywhere it shouldn’t be, would we?”
He made a vaguely negative noise and she hurried off down the beach to wash her hands in the surf, leaving him to clean himself up with his handkerchief and get his clothes back in order.
A few minutes later, she returned, still flushed and grinning, fixing her skirt – or rather something under it. “Got a hitch in my britches,” she said.
“Can’t imagine why they’re so disarranged,” he said.
Once everything was all zipped and buttoned and back in place, he held out his arm, she hooked hers through it,and they walked out from under the boardwalk just as proper and innocent as if they were coming out of the movie theatre.
“Bet you’ll never forget tonight,” Sally said as they emerged into the light of the streetlamps.
He stopped and he looked at her, and said something that brought the first tears to her eyes that he’d ever seen there:“Sally, I never would have forgot you anyway. And I never will.”
And he never did.