Autumn Scandals

CHAPTER ONE-2

He marshalled his thoughts. He was there to tutor a girl about to enter her freshman year in college. He had hired himself out to sharpen her scholastic in-fighting skills, not to have fun talking about books.

"Now, Judy, you told me you liked the ending, where Connie does a bunk with her husband's gamekeeper. Very well. Tell me why you ought to like it."

Judy's hand massaged her stung flank as her tutor sliced a dark, sharply fragrant Macintosh apple into wedges with an ivory-handled straight razor.

"No, really." He laid pale, red-veined lengths on the cheese board by the squares of smoked German Bruder Basil. "I'm fascinated by this sorority bid of yours. Another girl I know has the same itch.

"We Britons can't avoid our public school heritage. My generation and class could no more shirk the rigors of Eton and its ilk than a Pacific Coast pelican could avoid absorbing DDT. Both hazards came with the era.

"It defeats me why a young woman with full freedom to choose would elect a sorority such as Sigma Epsilon Xi, which proudly advertises how stringently it will restrict her liberty."

Judy hesitantly took a bit of cheese and slid it onto some apple. "I guess ... I don't know why you wouldn't, I mean ..."

She eloquently rubbed her caned bottom as she munched the snack. He watched her dress tighten and ease over the tender gluteal muscles. The sunlight from his dining room window touched her milky ankle.

"It's like you taught me about poetry, sort of." She fought to frame the concept. "There's this regular structure, an organized flow of things-like rhythm and meter and all that. We can be free within it and stronger because of that ... I guess it's like a skeleton. Without bones, we'd be a blob, sorta like an amoeba. That's free, but . . ."

She tilted her shoulders in a shrug, thrusting a fetching hip toward him. "Jonathan says everything's more rigid on the East Coast. I mean, they had Dukakis and we had Jerry Brown. Whole different heads. I guess a lot of people-lot of girls, particularly, want more framework. To give strength, not to just lock them up in a closet like Patty Hearst."

"I begin to comprehend." He furrowed his brow. "My terribly old-fashioned Old World British ways have become fashionable again, in this post-Warhol world. I've watched young ladies waft through Sigma House without comprehending-and there's a champion example, there."

She followed his glance and saw Lucretia Sue Merydith swaying along the sidewalk. Her smile broke out. "She's part of the reason I want to pledge. She's alum adviser to the new girls this year. I really want to get into her Basic Bio class next term, too."

"I've admired her as a colleague since she's been a lecturer at St. Cloud." The professor recalled the earlier attentions he'd bestowed during her very full course of his tutelage.

The six-foot redhead's body had been explosive and captivating, pliant as whalebone and rugged enough for the sports he loved best. A year at public school as an exchange student in England had polished some facets of the rough Georgian diamond, but she'd come to him with cold determination to have him finish the job. Her will had impressed him, and her stamina had led him to take her further than any girl he'd privately instructed.

Regret tinged his rosy memories. The woman who had blossomed under his hand now stood at the center of her own orchard, a revered alumna at Sigma, a graduate student already teaching as she thundered toward her doctorate.

He studied Judy Latimer. A sweet kid, and enough said.

"More apple?" He brandished the cut-throat razor over the cheese board.

"Why are you such an impossibly horny pig today, Mr. Scott Madrigal, hmmm?" The woman shifted her legs, which had been coiled on the park bench, so that he could burrow further down her black and grey skirt's waistband.

The pressure of his hand inside her pantihose, against her stone-chilled fanny cheek, felt warmly reassuring. A cold wind whipped along under slate-grey sky. Slivers of blue appeared and vanished in San Francisco Bay as the sun fought the overcast.

Nora Quincannon knew vaguely that the rest of the Bay Area languished in summer's heat. In the city, God's air conditioning lashed at the tiny Russian Hill park with full icy fury.

She loved the dank San Francisco climate. "Nora, I just don't believe this sorority thing of yours." Scott's breath tingled along her ear, down onto her neck where her hair had whipped back.

"I've been dogpaddling in the business world almost ten years. You and the people I know at Sherman and Michaels make up my whole social life. That's it." The woman hoped he understood her frustration.

"Okay, going back to college makes a pretty big change after the real world." Under her wool skirt and nylon pantihose, his hand reacquainted itself with familiar, friendly curves. "But a Greek letter hen house?"

He kissed her eyes, her chin, her fog-cool lips. Her errogenous zones blazed.

"I respect you for returning to school, but you're almost thirty. You just can't go home again." His voice vibrated against her cheek as she nuzzled his neck. Hairs he'd missed shaving prickled her skin. "I graduated from college seven years ago-"

"Sally Klein swore she'd give me a recommendation to Sigma Epsilon Xi."

He turned rigid against her. His fingers pressed stiffly into her bottomcheek.

"That's a . . . there's this gal at The Daily Cal who's in their Berkeley chapter. She claimed she couldn't sit for the first seven weeks of class."

His intense concern thrilled her. "Sally described it pretty graphically."

"Really? They walloped her when she didn't say 'please' and paddy whacked her when she said 'cheese.' I mean, writing for the paper at Berkeley I know that college is a whole different mindset from real life. Okay. But those gals are far f*****g out."

She loved it as his free hand closed protectively over her breasts. "The hard part, big guy, will be giving you up during the Boy Ban. That's the total embargo on private dating from the first day of class until the Harvest Festival in . . . in . . ."

"October," he finished for her.

She twisted her face up to stare at him.

"Hey, I knew someone out at St. Cloud." He squeezed her reassuringly. "Harvest's the big party season opener. Hallowe'en, Veteran's, Thanksgiving-Playboy may give Chico State the rep, but St. Cloud knows how to boogie down-and-dirty. The action's right here in the Bay Area."

"Orinda? A party capital? Oop!" She struggled to sit up. "Get your hand out, now." She pulled herself up and leaned against him, crushing his buried palm between her flesh-padded right ischial bone and the stone bench.

A couple rounded the trees. He had a blue windbreaker and camera. A cap jammed tightly on his grey hair. She hugged at herself in her red and orange sweats. Sun had sizzled her skin to deeply seamed leather.

"How do you people live like this?" The woman demanded. "It's over 100 degrees in Tulsa!"

"That's why I stay in San Francisco." Nora felt the band on Scott's class ring bite at her bottom.

The guy in the windbreaker laughed. "They got ways of keeping warm, Alice. Figure it out." His eyes lingered. "I'll show you back at the Hyatt."

The tourists passed on.

Steam hammered and spat in the pipes heating Nora's trim studio apartment. She straddled her naked lover's chest on her open sofa bed. The stereo competed with the radiator, trying to wrap them in the tide pull of Debussy's La Mer.

Scott's fingers kept their own tempo, diddling with her breasts at an adagio appassionato pace. The University of California class ring brushed her left n****e again and again. She yearned for a fat, gaudy ring with St. Cloud University's emblem.

"Most of what I did at Chabot will transfer," she murmured dreamily. "In a couple of years, I'll have a real degree-not just units toward an A.A."

He bucked his hips, prodding her bare buttocks with his rubber-armored c**k. "Hey, are we f*****g or mapping your game plan for the future?"

"I just thought you'd care to know," her lips made a slow circuit of his cheeks and forehead, "that I intend to keep this place. I'll need it when I graduate."

He laced his fingers together at the nape of her neck, under her dark, rust-colored hair. She felt his strength as an insistent tug pulled her torso so that one elongated n****e entered his mouth.

"Besides, they don't house pledges. I couldn't live there for six months-assuming they'll have me, anyway."

His teeth marked a generous bite of tit. An exquisite fever scored her skin. He licked and nibbled, the hot flesh flaring with sensation.

The whole idea of a female support group seemed elusive and gossamer-thin. Nora remembered that party group Donna Earl had wanted to start-five or six women friends who'd throw regular, serious get-togethers so they could all meet and share new men.

Silly idea. She had Scott, after all. Other kinds of female support . . . maybe Sigma and St. Cloud had them; probably they didn't. A gamble. Maybe he had it right, some kind of bid for missed youth. A Peggy Sue Got Married trip on a college campus ...

"Boy Ban." Scott had started kissing along her upper ribs. She knew the routine and readied herself to rise on all fours, "Joy Ban."

His lips and tongue gently inflamed her belly as she straightened up on her four limbs. He slid further under her, kissing her cunt, his teeth teasing the blood-hot labia.

She clambered around over him, putting her knees behind his head. She faced the dark, latex-shrouded prick.

His tongue's lavish attentions drove her mouth down onto the impatient fleshy horn. The taste always reminded her of a dental clinician's gloved finger impersonally engorging her mouth. She sucked away, eager to get through that ritual section of their foreplay.

To the east of San Francisco Bay, behind the Berkeley hills, the shallow valley holding Orinda felt the late summer heat beat on dry trees and drought-burned lawns.

Six feet from her heel-less sandals to her carroty-haired scalp, Lucretia Sue Merydith ambled down the walkway toward the sorority house front door. Fat shingled pillars supported the porch roof that shielded the full width of the building's street side.

That classic Southern California architecture had been imported into the Bay Area sometime in the 1920's. St. Cloud University had been a lonely bible college, lost amid the hills of brown grass.

After its conversion to a full-range institution of higher learning, the school had accepted Sigma Epsilon Xi as its first Greek organization. The years had not treated that pioneering heritage kindly, Lucretia Sue reflected.

She swung open the beveled glass door and stepped into the cool entry hall. The Social Room on her right seemed deserted and forgotten. She had taken her B.A. only three years previously, and she remembered when it would have been alive with actives, even this early before the term began.

She turned toward the dining room and caught sight of a thoughtful Gerry Vestry.

"Well hug me blue and call me Babe," the tall Georgian drawled, "I thought that straggly-haired mess who yelled 'Suckers!' at us in Mardi Blanc had a familiar flip to her fanny. I should have recognized those tinsley li'l glasses of yours, but I never expected to see any Sigmas running for the boat fit to rupture a lung."

Gerry Vestry's mouth curved ruefully under her silver-rimmed spectacles. "That exit caning had me distracted, or I'd have known that flame-topped mop. This kid at the Customs Shed could really hit. But I guess you found that out."

She winced eloquently.

"Rank Hath Its ever-loving Privileges, sugar," Lucre-tia Sue informed. "My friend Ju's daddy, the local baronet, just oozes with it. He posted a bond in lieu of that tenderizing stick-though it did give us a wholesome fright until they learned whose kin she was."

"I can't believe it!" The blonde gaped. "You should have protested. That vile entry and exit caning routine is Mardi Blanc's most memorable custom."

Her sorority sister nodded. "I believe. The island's quaint and 19th century-kissing cousin to a Bronte novel, in fact."

"The brochure that Jan Ladrone's Aunt Tilly showed us mentioned 'an unspoiled lifestyle' and 'extraordinary Victorian architecture.' She booked us for the rancid pit."

"Extraordinary captures it," Lucretia Sue nodded. "The jailhouse comes right out of Victor Hugo. Maybe Jan's auntie had some trepidations about her niece's still-marketable virtue being scuffed up by a Mayfair remittance man pastured out on Bermuda, or by some island stud working the Bimini tourist crop."

Gerry Vestry shuddered. "She picked the right shoal to maroon us on. My career as a duena dripped with success."

She poked her thumb toward the dining room. "We'd better go on in. A serious pow-wow, once Irene gets here."

"I do imagine. What's all this about accepting a bid by some 29-year-old sophomore?" Lucretia Sue followed the blonde, noting her still gingerly hip motions. "I'm the alumna adviser, the grand old lady of bonded and aged wisdom this year, and she's four years longer in the tooth than I am."