Little Casino Read Online Free PDF Page B

She is terribly excited, as is he, and yet he says, looking directly into her dark eyes, “Don’t throw bouquets at me.”
    This is sometimes known as putting the kibosh on things. It is followed by his wife’s:
    “God! Let me get out of this damned uniform! How do those nurses wear these tacky things?”
    All over for the nonce.
    Stories of costume parties at which people actually do become other people are few and far between, but mostly true.
    A. English Department meetings at any American university or college.
    To get this young wife “out of [her] damned uniform” is not at all the same thing as having her undress.
    Tu-whit, tu-whoo, jug-jug, and ding-a-ding.

The libertine’s hell

    S HORTS AND DRESSES. AND SKIRTS AND blouses.
    And shirts and slips and half-slips and camisoles.
    And brassieres and panties and corsets and girdles and teddies.
    And garter belts, sheer stockings, high heels.
    Suits, evening gowns, slacks, jeans. Christ knows what else, or what they’re called. Dozens, scores, hundreds, thousands of each article of clothing, lacy and silky and soft and smooth and shining, mountains of the stuff, miles of it. Hats.
    But not a single woman to be discovered in any one of these things, not one, anywhere. This, says Father Graham to himself, is the libertine’s hell, or should be, at least it’s mine. His eyes are looking at something that is not in the rectory, his eyes are glassy, yet frightened. The liquefaction of her clothes, he says, and moans. Help me, God, help me.

    “O how that glittering taketh me!” O! O! O!
    This “Father Graham,” surely the figment, the crude figment of a particularly diseased imagination, does not in any way represent the loving, serene, chaste, and paternal shepherd whom millions of the faithful have honored and will continue to honor as the true bulwark of Holy Mother Church: Joseph Cardinal Cullinane.
    “O my God! I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because I have offended Thee, my God, Who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.”
    It is, perhaps, just as well that Father Graham has sublimated his tormenting desires into simple fetishes, since the parish is filled with women in their actual flesh.
    Their flesh, he whispers, in the dark. Their sinful flesh!

Beauty Parade

    A T FIFTEEN, DURING THE CRUSHINGLY slow months of the numbingly lonely vacations that his family spends at the lake, he discovers, one day, over at the Lang house, dozens of copies of Beauty Parade, dating back five years or so, leafs through the pages of big luscious women, all rich curves and swelling flesh pushing out of the tight, astonishingly abbreviated costumes that have not, surely, words adequate to describe them. And amid the sliding and mildewed piles of newspapers, magazines, junk statuary, empty whiskey bottles, fishing lures and spoons and hooks, sinkers and floats, and cartons, half-cartons, and opened packs of Lord Salisbury cigarettes, he learns to lust and to smoke.
    Orville and Jackie Lang, old bachelor brothers, who allow anyone the run of their house and the raw, half-finished workshop behind it when they’re away at work, have unwittingly introduced this boy to the twin, darkly scintillant vices of self-abuse and smoking, two wondrous hells which he luxuriously inhabits. Orville owns a flat-bottomed rowboat, painted a bright, harsh, somehow sinful green, which is moored under the rusting footbridge at the end of the road leading to a small island, the keys to its padlock, along with its oars, just behind the door to the workshop. Each afternoon, all that thickly hot summer, our youthful lecher masturbates himself into nirvana at picture after picture of these utterly generous and unashamed, sensual women, who smile directly at him from out of their