BED and BREAKFAST

A steamy excerpt from White Palace thirty-three-year-old GLENN SAVAN's first novel, which kicks off Bantam's New Fiction line this month

Nora it turned out,could walk just fine, and didn't seem nearly as

drunk as she had inside the bar. It was possible that she was simply finessing this ride home in order to afford herself an opportunity to seduce him, but that didn't matter at this point. Max had promised to drive her home, and so drive her home he would. Besides, what was she going to do—attack and overpower him?

Nora proved to be anything but a gracious passenger. First she put up an infantile fight when he insisted that she buckle herself in. Seat belts, she complained, made her claustrophobic. Max calmly informed her that she had her choice: she could either put on her seat belt or sit there in his Volvo until she was sober enough to get out and drive her own car, whichever came first. Then, once they were on the road, Nora asked him if he couldn't find something else to play on his tape deck. "This is Mozart," he said. "Well, it's giving me a headache." "What sort of music would you rather listen to?" Nora shrugged and fussed with her

shoulder strap. "You got any Oak Ridge Boys?" she asked him. They compromised and listened to nothing. Nora lived in Dogtown, the rundown little area south of Forest Park which, according to St. Louis legend, had been the campground for the workers who built the 1904 World's Fair. There were as many explanations for the origin of the name as there were tellers. Dogtown was called Dogtown because the immigrant laborers had been Lithuanians who ate dogs, or Chinamen who ate dogs, or Blackfoot Indians who ate dogs. Others maintained it had been the site of the city's first dog pound. Nora failed to enlighten Max on this score. "It's probably called Dogtown," Nora said, "because nobody lives there unless they're in the doghouse."

Then, giving off her complex atmosphere of cigarettes, cheap perfume, and loamy womanhood, Nora launched into an unexpected topic: Marilyn Monroe and the mysterious circumstances of her death. She brought a real passion to her subject, and had evidently done her homework. She knew, for instance, that Marilyn, who had been obsessed with

the upkeep of her breasts and so had made a lifelong habit of sleeping in her bra, had been discovered nude on the morning of her alleged suicide. Why? she wanted to know. Max suggested that maybe Marilyn hadn't cared what her breasts were going to look like after she was dead. Nora snorted at this and went on: did Max think that Jack Kennedy, in an attempt to protect the reputation of his randy younger brother, had enlisted the aid of the C.I.A. in having her discreetly bumped off? And what about her famous diary which disappeared? On and on Nora speculated in a devout torrent of minutiae, pausing only to drag on her cigarette or to guide him through the narrow, rather spooky streets of Dogtown, past the tiny bungalow houses and the dilapidated corner bars, until Max, who had been driving with the exaggerated caution of a guilty drunk, allowed himself the brief luxury of rolling his eyes heavenward as he started the turn into her driveway, and plowed straight into her mailbox.

straight His Volvo seemed hardly to be moving at the moment of impact, yet he and Nora flew forward and back like dummies in a crash test, and the sound of his bumper crumpling was like a gunshot in his ears.

Both of them were still upright in their harnesses; the windshield was intact; he felt no pain. Nora had her hand over her mouth and was laughing.

"You're lucky I made you put on your seat belt."

"My hero," Nora said, in falsetto.

Max got out on wobbly legs to inspect the damage. The mailbox had flown away, and the iron stem was bent toward the jagged black socket where the headlight used to be. Nora's

He watched her in amazement, as if he were grappling with an angel.

house was on a cul-de-sac of identical houses that looked like houses on a Monopoly board. He took a few steps toward it, then sat on the grass with a groan. The door to his Volvo slammed shut.

"I hope you got insurance," Nora said. She pronounced "insurance" with the stress on the first syllable. "Say, I got an idea. Why don't you come on inside and I'll fix you some coffee? You don't want to go driving home in this condition, do you?"

Max turned to look at her, silhouetted against the starry sky. Somehow she knew instinctively which arguments would work best on him, and somehow she was getting him where she'd wanted him all along—in her lair. He looked at his wounded car. She was right. He wasn't going anywhere without some coffee in him.

"Lead the way," Max said.

He followed her heavily switching buttocks across the lawn and into the darkened house. Nora flicked on the

hallway light and Max stopped in his tracks. The place might have been trashed by a goon squad. Strewn along the floor of the front hallway and spilling over into the living room like the debris of some indecent parade was a fallen wardrobe of nylons, pastel panties, blue jeans, tennis shoes, and skimpy bras of black and white and tan. On the coffee table in the living room stood dirty plates and glasses, ashtrays peaking with butts, and crumpled cellophane junk-food wrappers. There were twisted-up sheets on the sofa, magazines flung everywhere, and the carpet had received a long rain of ashes, glints of plastic, bits of paper, yet more nylons, and balledup Kleenex. The scene unnerved Max: he felt like a fireman gazing at a blaze which he wasn't licensed to put out.

On the wall opposite the sofa was a black-and-white poster of Marilyn Monroe in a matador's hat. And here, where he stood in the hallway, was nothing less than a photographic shrine devoted to her—there must have been three dozen framed pictures of Marilyn making love to the camera. Nora watched him as he inspected the photos, twisting one of her earrings.

Max cautioned himself against any wisecracks. He was, after all, an unbeliever loitering in the holy of holies. "How about that coffee?" he asked her.

Nora led the way into the kitchen and started clearing off the small square Formica table that bore the petrified remains of a meal: a dish with a dried orange dollop of what looked like canned spaghetti, a partially eaten sandwich made with white bread, a glass coated with milk, a jar of mayonnaise. In the sink was a moldering hill of dishes.

He asked Nora the way to the bathroom.

Here was a surprise. The bathroom was scrupulously clean. There was a plastic dish filled with never-beforeused eggs of colored soap; the towels were neatly folded and looked fresh; the sink gleamed. The top of the toilet was covered with blue fur, as was the toilet seat. Max lifted it, took a long vigorous piss, and, remembering that he was in a woman's house, dutifully closed it again. What could possibly

explain such an oasis of cleanliness and order in such an otherwise filthy house? Houses, he supposed, like human personalities, contained anomalous comers which refused to subscribe to the general pattern. In her housekeeping, Nora was like a brutal serial murderess who nevertheless went to Mass every morning and never forgot her mother's birthday.

Back in the kitchen he found Nora seated at the table before a bottle of Smirnoff, a bottle of Schweppes tonic water, and a pink ceramic swanshaped ashtray in which yet another Winston sat burning. She had let her hair down in his absence, and its beauty shocked him. It fell, gorgeous and thick, to the small of her back, so lustrously black that as she shifted in her chair to pick up her drink, it gave off winking highlights of blue.

He felt a queer pressure in his chest.

"I'm afraid I got you here under false pretenses," she told him. "I could've sworn I had me a whole new can of Folger's coffee in the cabinet."

"You don't have any coffee at all?"

Nora shrugged, then smiled for him. "Can't you make it home without your coffee?"

"I'm afraid of tempting fate," he said.

"Well, why don't you call a cab?"

Max checked his wallet. Three dollars—nowhere near enough to get him all the way out to Kirkwood. How many vodka tonics had he bought this woman, anyway? Then he remembered that he had been drinking Chivas Regal.

"Let me check my purse and see what I've got," Nora said.

"No," Max told her. "I don't want to take your money."

"It'd be a loan, honey."

This woman was obviously too poor to lend him the twenty dollars—or whatever it would take—to get him back to his apartment. "Just keep your money," he told her.

"Well, what-all do you want to do?"

He saw that he had little choice but to spend the night (the invitation was imminent) in this dirty house, under the same roof with this partly repulsive, partly attractive, inexplicable woman who was probably going to do her damnedest to seduce him.

"I tell you what," Nora said, pulling on her cigarette. "I got me a sofa in the living room that folds out into a bed, and we can put you up there. How's that?"

''Well, I appreciate the offer," Max said.

''What else are you going to do, honey? Walk home?"

Max opened his eyes and there was Marilyn Monroe.

No—it was only a poster of Marilyn Monroe, seductively smirking beneath her matador's hat, and the erotic dream he'd been having was only that, a dream. Or was it? The sensations of that dream raged on, and when he raised his head and saw the iridescent black hair fanning across his belly and the upraised coppery ass rising and ducking behind it, he understood, without knowing if he was grateful or outraged or what, that Nora was in the process of raping him.

He watched her in amazement, as if he were grappling with an angel. His nostrils were full of her: blood, earth, tobacco, cheap perfume. A hot patch of sunlight, boiling with dust, fell over them where they lay upon the sofa bed and gave to Nora's skin an unreal honeyed glow. Her broad haunches were raised high; her freckled shoulders wedged his thighs apart. Her head nodded slowly and deeply above his belly, as if in emphatic agreement with some undeniable truth coming clear at the back of her brain.

Had Nora been any less forceful or unhesitating in her assault, Max might have recovered the presence of mind to resist. But by the time he struggled out of sleep and saw clearly what was happening, Nora was already so far along in her work, and he himself was so aroused, that the call to resist sounded as far-off, tinny, and ridiculous as the voice of a soapbox madman on a street comer three blocks away.

Oh, whatever else this woman was, she was a talent when it came to this. His wife, Janey, had brought to this act an air of sweet, hopeful performance, like a little girl induced to do a tap dance before a crowd of half-drunken adults. But there was nothing apologetic in Nora's approach. She wasn't doing him any favors. She was doing this because she liked it. This notion excited him still further, sent still more blood sluicing down to his groin, and he

sat partway up, gripping her hot freckled shoulders, and spoke her name.

He drew her up by the armpits and she wriggled forward until her mouth was over his. Her breath was stale and brassy and he did not want to kiss her. But he did, and, oddly, she tasted sweet.

Nora sat back on her heels and gave her coal-black hair a prideful toss. In the slanted square of sunlight she shone like burnished bronze. Her thighs were solid, her thin arms rounded, but in her slightly wrinkled neck, her loose belly, and the fatty corrugations at her waist, her age—whatever it was—was apparent. She was pleasingly pear-shaped, like one of Botticelli's

She

appeared to be a living riddle, a sphinx, honeycombed with secret passageways and hidden chambers.

Graces, although even Botticelli would have endowed her with larger breasts; her coffee-colored nipples stood out on rises of flesh no deeper than the sections of a quilt. Max hooked his thumbs beneath her pelvic bone, and upon this fulcrum Nora rocked herself.

She picked up speed and intensity like a locomotive, let out a little cry, and fell over him, her breath pumping hard at his ear. And then, as she began to fight toward her climax, she began to speak.

No—she wasn't speaking at all, at least not in any language that Max had ever heard. She was letting loose a stream of fervent syllables that had all the cadence and inflection of speech, but no more meaning than the babbling of an infant or the entranced gibberish of a Pentecostal speaking in tongues. It was as guttural as German,

fluid as Italian, odd as Swahili, singsongy as Chinese. She pleaded, she questioned, she chided, she praised— and all in the medium of these wild prelingual noises, as if she were in rapt conversation with some older, lower part of herself, the reptile or the bird. Max listened, fascinated, until it seemed that he was no longer feeling the interlocked struggle of their lovemaking so much as hearing it, and then Nora took him with her, seized him, as it were, by the ears, and flung him into the still center of a hurricane.

Sometime later her odor, powerfully enriched by sex, snapped him back to consciousness like a whiff of smelling salts. She was a vast moist weight on top of him, and he was unable to expand his rib cage. Outside the window, a radio was going, tuned to the Cardinals' baseball game. So it was already afternoon. On the ceiling above him was a water stain in the approximate shape of the continent of Africa, and down to the right was another smaller stain that might have stood for Madagascar.

Nora stirred and gave a reluctant moan, like a child awakened against its will, then pushed away from him. Their bodies came unstuck with a gluey smack. She smiled down at him, holding her hair away from her face. "You're so beautiful," she said. "It almost hurts to look at you."

Max wished he could return the compliment.

She scratched her ribs. The curves and angles of her body, eclipsing the sunlight that was pouring through the window, were outlined in gold. She appeared to be a living riddle, a sphinx, so honeycombed with secret passageways and hidden chambers that she was a mystery even to herself. Now she reached down to scratch her ankles, her spinal column rippling beneath the thin translucent skin, and her mythical luster disappeared. She was suddenly something bitterly prosaic: a middle-aged, unbeautiful, hung-over woman in critical need of a bath, rousing herself from yet another one-night stand in the trash dump of her living room. Just the thought of trying to synthesize those two visions exhausted Max, and he lay back and blinked at the map of Africa floating in the cracked sea of her ceiling. □