Bernard Boyce Bennington & The American Dream Read Online Free PDF Page A

says to me. ‘Where do you want us to meet?’”
    McCoy gives out a low whistle. “How’d she know your name?”
    “I have absolutely no idea…but, if she was a succubus then one can only presume that she had abilities far beyond our understanding.”
    Jack pushes his cloth to one side and leans heavier on the bar. “Did you go meet her?”
    “I regret that I did.”
    “You regret ? What? Was she a dog?”
    “No,” the man says to the bartender with a sad smile. “No, far from it. She was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.
    “Long story short, I met up with her, corner of 23rd and 3rd, and we walked into Gramercy Park, hand in hand. I remember how cold her hand felt to the touch, but I didn’t think anything of it…at least not then. It was late at night and it was a cool night and I just put it down to bad circulation. Anyway, unusually for me, I became quite…shall we say, stimulated by her—there was something about her, some aura, some intoxicating scent…a mixture of fresh flowers and musk or patchouli, something sweet-smelling and yet old and musty…hard to explain. And I stopped, just inside the park, and suggested that perhaps we could go back to my apartment, but she declined. Or perhaps hers, I suggested…and she laughed. She didn’t have an apartment. She lived out in the city, she told me, in the bars and drinking holes, the hotel lounges and the nightclubs, a different one every evening. She said that she got all the custom she needed from these places and that the newspaper advertisement was simply an experiment. Mine had been the only call, she told me, and she would not be repeating the experiment.
    “We carried on into the park and-” He stopped and looked at his beer for a few seconds. “This is a little difficult for me.” He took a deep sigh and a long gulp of beer, draining the glass. “She was very attentive to me. So attentive in fact that by the time we had gone but a few yards into the park, barely out of the glow of the lamps by the street, she had fully removed her clothes, pulling them off in bravura sweeps of crinoline and lace, whisking them up into the night air to expose white flesh which seemed to exude some kind of aroma all of its own. The grass around us became quickly littered with her clothes, a skirt, then her blouse, followed by a satin vest and a brassiere, and finally by her panties.
    “Then I removed my own clothes.”
    “Jesus H. Christ,” Edgar mutters.
    Jim Leafman twists awkwardly on his seat.
    McCoy says, “That kind of thing can get you locked up.”
    Jack Fedogan agrees.
    “Believe me,” B. B. Bennington says imploringly, “this is not something I normally do. I was…I was drunk with her, I felt the heavens coming down to meet me and me crashing upwards to meet them; I felt that I could lift a mountain and live forever; I felt so happy I wanted to weep. But that was only the beginning.” He looks up at Jack. “Could I have another of those beers?”
    In a flash, Jack reaches behind and pulls a Michelob across, flips the cap and stands it next to the newcomer’s empty glass. Then he shifts his weight to his other leg and says, “Then what happened?”
    The man pours the beer, takes a sip and continues with his story. As he does so, he takes something out of his jacket pocket—something in a brown paper bag, folded in a rectangular shape like maybe it’s a book—and he sets it on the counter. All eyes watch the stranger’s hand place the object but no eyes move away with the hand: they stay on the object, four minds wondering what on earth it could be and what significance it could have to the story now unfolding.
    Bernard Boyce Bennington shrugs. “Then the inevitable happened, of course. Right there on the grass in Gramercy Park. I…I won’t go into the details here, gentlemen; it is sufficient to say that I have never felt such a feeling before. More than that, I truly never believed such a feeling were possible. She moved