Naked Came the Stranger - By Penelope Ashe Page 0,26

the moment, anyway.

"Querida," he said, grabbing her left ankle brutally.

"Say something dirty in Uxmex."

"Fantasy-break time again?" She stared back at him balefully.

The question turned Arthur off. He liked spontaneity – in fact, when he had first met Raina a year earlier, that had been her most attractive and endearing quality. When he wanted to play Unicorn, she had obligingly curled into the shape of a horn. When he had wanted her in the chapel, she had sweetly stretched herself into the form of a crucifix and – no questions asked – accepted his love-making in Latin.

("Vidi, vici, veni" – he had been inspired by the sight –

"I saw, I conquered, I came.")

But now it was a totally different story. Raina moved away from Arthur and eased her thighs into the Lotus position. She was let down, bruised to the depths of her superego. Perhaps Yoga could help her. It was better than pot or LSD, especially Tim Leary's much touted LSD trip without LSD (you sat barefoot in a quiet setting contemplating a tin can and fruit seed). Tim Leary, what a sellout. It was all right, of course, for producing visions, but she didn't want visions now. She wanted calm, higher understanding.

What upset her was not the fact of rejection. That would pass. The thing that bothered her was that they had played Indian before. Arthur was repeating a fantasy. Jesus H., if things were going to get boring, that was it. Boredom was Raina's major fear in life; it was the one evil to be avoided at any cost.

She waited there, in the Lotus position, waited for inspiration to overtake her. Arthur tried to pull the serape from beneath her and wrap it around his neck, possibly in imitation of a lei. ("Welcome to Hawaii," he said.) Unamused, thoroughly unamused now, Raina stood up, the serape still wrapped around her, and walked out of the room with dignity.

Arthur didn't give her a second thought. He rarely concerned himself with thinking about other people. His own moods were so much more fascinating. He began thumbing through the magazine again. And just as he hit upon another intriguing item – "Husband and wife, 21 and 19, both like hairy men – no women need apply" – the doorbell rang, and Arthur got up, still nude, to answer it.

It was Dexter, a huge Negro who had been Arthur's buddy in the army. (Arthur had allowed himself to be drafted a year after flunking out of Brandeis. So many of his friends had burned and urinated on their draft cards, feigned catalepsy, encouraged hideous rashes, learned to lisp and so forth that the only cool, the only truly cool, thing left to do was to go into the army, and so Arthur had allowed himself to be drafted. His friends had congratulated him on his imaginative stand, and Arthur was not unhappy about it himself. Actually he had enjoyed the army. Being an MP directing traffic on a Nike base in Maryland was a whole new bit. And even when he was discovered chewing morning glory seed on duty – his clearance had been lifted – he found that being a typist in personnel was just this side of wiggy. He had spent most of the time drawing obscene portraits of the thyroid-eyed WAC who sat opposite him and telling her such wild stories that, by the end of his stint, her mind was completely but permanently blown and she was reduced to mopping floors in Headquarters Battalion's psychiatric ward.)

Fond memories aside, here was Dexter. Good old Dexter. A tall, silent Black who communicated only in two-word sentences. "She fly," he would frequently say, meaning "She's good." Or he might say "She bad" – also meaning "She's good." "Woofing" (putting down) and "jammed up" (crazy) and "rapping" (playing up to) were some of his other judgments.

He seemed more excited than Arthur had ever seen him. Arthur looked at him with a tender smile spread across his pale bony face. He liked Dexter, truly liked him. Dexter never got mad, never asked questions, never thought about anything. He just grooved along from one day to the next, so cool he was almost dead. Arthur liked him so much, in fact, that if he ever got up the nerve to have a homosexual fling, Dexter would be his man. (Though he was loath to admit it, Arthur had never been able to make it with a man. He felt ashamed of the idiosyncrasy but