The Cesspool

We raised our glasses and drank. It tasted like bonded rye.

One of the male customers rose from his cushion, left the girl he was talking to and went across the room to a blonde who was sitting with another man. When he said something to her, the blonde looked inquiringly at the man she had been entertaining, who only shrugged. Rising, the blonde accompanied the first man toward a stairway visible through an arch at the end of the room.

I raised my eyebrows at Sara.

“You can pick any girl you want any time you’re ready,” she explained. “I’ll have to leave you if someone wants me. Unless you decide you do.”

She was a cute kid, but I’d come to see Sally. I decided to wait.

During the next fifteen minutes two more couples strolled off toward the stairway, another male customer came in and one of the remaining two surplus girls joined him at the far side of the room. Then a man and woman came down the stairs.

The man immediately crossed to the bar and began to mix himself a drink, but the woman stopped in the archway and ran her eyes over every man in the room. She didn’t even glance at the other women.

The redheaded Sara said, “There she is,” then raised her voice and called, “Oh, Sally!”

Instantly Sally came over. She was a slim, deliciously curved brunette somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, with still, delicately carved features. While not precisely beautiful, there was an aura of eager vitality about her which made her almost overpoweringly feminine. At the same time, she somehow managed to give an impression of naive freshness combined with genteel breeding. Dressed in something other than her harem attire, you might have taken her for a younger member of some country club set.

I couldn’t detect what George Swift had described as a hot, sultry look on her face, but she did have a sort of still, waiting expression, as though she hoped I might reach out and touch her.

I had risen, and Sara, still in a seated position, said, “This is Pete, Sally. He wanted to meet you.”

Sally looked at me steadily, without smiling and without saying anything. Sara rose languorously, gave me a tiny wave of goodby and returned to the radio-phonograph.

I said, “Can I buy you a drink, Sally?”

Slowly her eyes moved over me from head to foot. “Do you want to take time for a drink?”

I said, “Not particularly. I was just being considerate. I thought you might like a recess.”

“I only work till midnight,” she said. “And it’s nearly ten now. Let’s not waste time on drinks.”

I began to see what George had meant about Sally liking her work. There probably wasn’t another girl in the place who wouldn’t have been glad for an excuse to dally over a drink instead of going upstairs. But Sally, just having returned from a session with another man, was impatient to be gone again.

I killed the rest of my drink and set the glass on the cocktail table.

Upstairs the oriental motif continued to be carried out. The room to which she took me was furnished with a huge sleeping cushion, about seven feet square and a foot thick, instead of a bed. A couple of ottomans, a long, low cocktail table and two large wall mirrors were the only other furnishings. Except for the inevitable silken drapes, purple in this case.

“Do you like light?” Sally asked.

“Do you?” I countered.

She nodded. “If you don’t mind. Don’t you think it adds something?”

A small lamp on the cocktail table already lighted the room dimly. Sally switched on a bright overhead light. Then she took my hand and led me to the sleeping cushion.

For a moment we merely sat side-by-side holding hands. She looked at me sidewise, almost timidly.

“Would you do me a favor?” she asked in a low voice.

“Probably. What?”

“Treat me like what I am. Make me crawl and kiss your feet and feel like the lowest tramp in town.”

“All right,” I said.

Her lips parted and I could feel her hand begin to tremble in mine. “Will you really?” she asked.

“If you like rough treatment, you came to the right boy,” I said.

Freeing my hand from hers, I wound it into her hair, jerked back her head and kissed her with all the savagery in me.

As Thursday was Harlan Johnson’s night off, only George and I met at the Men’s Bar the next night. I told George I’d been to see Sally, but didn’t happen to mention it again on either Friday or Saturday.

Sunday, one of George’s two nights off, Harlan and I were standing at the bar together when it occurred to me he knew nothing of my experience.

I said casually, “I guess I didn’t tell you that I made the Silk and Satin the other night.”

For a moment Harlan stood very still. Then he said, “Sally?”

“Yeah,” I said. “George didn’t exaggerate her a bit.”

For a time Harlan kept looking at me, then looked away, as though fighting some battle with himself. Presently his shoulders seemed to sag a little and he gave me a sort of beseeching, apologetic look.

“Can I ask you a kind of favor, Pete?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Maybe we’d better sit in a booth.”