Naked Came the Stranger - By Penelope Ashe Page 0,76

up and washed the make-up from his face. He strode back to Gillian.

"What about Hank?" she said.

Willoughby Martin breathed in the night air. "If that son of a bitch ever bothers me again," he said, "I'll knock him on his ass."

They laughed. Willoughby thought his voice sounded deeper. By God, he was a man.

They spent the night on the beach. That Gillian. He couldn't get enough of her. And imagine all the women who were out there in the world waiting for him. Just wait till Hank tried to come crawling back. Hank! thought Willoughby, and he snorted to himself. That damn queer.

A few weeks later, King's Neck lost its pet homosexuals. They moved out shortly after neighbors reported hearing a terrible row. The day after the fight, someone saw Hank in town with a bandaged nose and blackened eyes. A month after that, one of the garden club officers reported meeting Willoughby in the city. She said she had hardly recognized him; he was wearing a sweatshirt, and he had gotten a crew-cut. And believe it or not, she said, he had tried to proposition her. Someone told Gillian about it. "Well," she said. "It's like they say. Don't knock it until you've tried it."

EXCERPT FROM "THE BILLY & GILLY SHOW," JULY 2ND

Billy: The man says he doesn't want any publicity, that's what the man says. And, speaking personally, I find that attitude a refreshing change from most of the authors we manage to lure onto the show.

Gilly: You'd think that out of sheer neighborliness….

Billy: Neighborliness? That fellow moves about in much the way an astronaut does – except, from what I hear, at a lower level. And I have to admit I've always felt he was overrated as a writer, strictly a one-book author. Gilly: You mean The Hard and the Moist?

Billy: What else?

Gilly: Well, how about Mountaintop?

Billy: Same book, different title. Look at him, honey. What is he – forty-four years old? – the world's oldest flower child.

Gilly: But still, still he's Caradoc.

ZOLTAN CARADOC

Gillian realized there was no legitimate reason to include Zoltan Caradoc on her list. He had been married four times – most recently to Paige Marchand, the dancer – but they were never marriages in the customary sense. It had been several years since he had allowed a woman to share his bayside castle for more than a night or two. In fact, for nine months of every year Caradoc was a virtual hermit, a professional loner, a man who spent long hours fashioning sentences while studying the sullen winter waters of Long Island Sound.

These were his working months, his caged-in months. Caradoc spent the time roaming from one room to another, one glass-fronted cubicle to another, always within sight of the water and always surrounded by the tape recorders and stereo sets and color television consoles and electric typewriters. He lived three-fourths of his life in an ultra-modern electronic womb. Cable umbilicals carried him regular progress reports from the outside world; sensitive microphones were always handy to transmit and preserve his thoughts and memories for posterity. And though only forty-four years old, Zoltan Caradoc had already strung together enough words to more than equal the lifetime output of Proust.

And every year, as the cold season came to an end, Caradoc once again ventured into the real world. Ventured… no, say rather, exploded. He would, in that three-month interval, be photographed stalking chamois in Bhutan, hunting wild boar in Bulgaria, pursuing teenyboppers in San Francisco.

Gillian, like most of the cognoscenti, kept up with the ever growing legend that was Zoltan Caradoc. She recalled the news account of his bloody encounter with a killer shark off Tanzania; Caradoc had lost three fingers of his left hand but had saved the life of a native oarsman. And she recalled another hair-raising adventure – his being arrested in his suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel in the company of three blonde call girls, an ancient Negro sculptress and a Shetland pony. Gillian had first met Caradoc in early winter – midway between Morton Earbrow and Joshua Turnbull, as she now measured time. It was during the power failure, the electric blackout of King's Neck that lasted twenty-seven hours. Caradoc had endured the power failure as long as he could and then had deserted his suddenly lifeless machinery for the candlelit warmth of Morarity's Shamrock Bar & Grill. Gillian, too, had stopped in for a moment's warmth. She stood, her back to an open fire, and she instantly