The Girl from Pussycat by Ted Mark - Chapter 01

Genre 1965: Vintage Sleaze / Lady Spies

PENNY . . . CANDIE?

Sure, it's an improbable name. But that’s only the first of many improbable things about this pretty Penny. As 21-year-old editor of Lovelights magazine, she should know all about love. But she doesn’t-and that gap in her knowledge is what sets off this rollicking gambol that goes from one end of New York to the other, picking up speed and laughs as it goes. Loaded with slapstick misadventures and sharp satire, this may well be Ted Mark's funniest book yet. Read it and judge for yourself!

CHAPTER 1

“The liquid sounds of lovemaking . . .”

Squish—squish?

No, that couldn’t be right. Penny Candie re-read the phrase. She put the manuscript aside. She closed her innocent blue eyes and strained her brain to imagine what “the liquid sounds of love-making” might sound like. Squish-squish was definitely out. So was slurp-slurp.

Drip-drip.

Absurd!

Sizzle-drizzle?

Mmm . . .

Tickle-trickle?

Interesting.

Pitter-patter-putter?

Not very romantic.

Slap-lap-slap-lap?

A possibility.

Eel-squeal?

Yes! That was definitely it phonetically. But What did it mean? Penny didn’t know. But then what did “the liquid sounds of love-making” mean? Penny didn’t know that; either. She’d find out, though. She was determined to find out. And within the next twenty-four hours, too, or her name Wasn’t Penny Candie!

That really was her name. Penelope Candie. But the “Penelope” had been shortened to “Penny” for the past four years, ever since she had embarked on her career.

That was during her last year in high school, when she was seventeen. She had entered a movie fan magazine contest:

“. . .(name of favorite movie star) is my ideal because. . .”

In five hundred words or less, Penny had justified her choice of Elizabeth Taylor because of virtue expressed in the star’s ability to love. She cited Miss Taylor’s courage in standing up to poorhouse-bound producers, their wailing stockholders, and various wives who had obviously been stifling the talents of their Taylor-made spouses. She stressed Miss Taylor’s talents, waxing indignant at critics who judged them only with a tape measure while neglecting to appreciate the star’s ability to subdue her own sweet personality and portray an ambitious, amoral, husband-stealing Egyptian vamp — a role so obviously foreign to her own nature.

Penny was lucky. Her entry arrived at a time when Elizabeth Taylor’s “sweet” nature was being expressed in a million-dollar libel suit against a rival fan publication. Since lip-licking and oft-exaggerated accounts of Liz’s loves had long been selling copies of all the fan mags, fear now ran rampant that she might start slapping subpoenas on all and sundry in the gossip game.

The stall of the magazine whose contest Penny had entered felt themselves particularly vulnerable. The publishers, whose whimsical name, Pussycat Publications, Inc., thinly masked a totally hard-headed and commercial attitude, knew they could never back up their story that the Marc that Cleo would wriggle her asp for when Dick petered out was Liberace. So they had seized upon Penny’s entry, proclaimed it the winner, and printed it in full as a means of assuaging any intentions Miss Taylor might have had to invoke the libel laws against them.

Penny’s price was the job of “Teenage Consultant” to the magazine. In each issue she dealt with a teenage problem submitted by a reader. To the gratification of the magazine’s editors, she performed her task very well and with a refreshing innocence of approach which met with the approval of the readers as well.

After high-school graduation, Penny was hired on a full-time basis. She was given a teenage column in a romance magazine to write in addition to the one she was doing for the movie fan book. The following year she was moved up to assistant editor of the romance book and given a raise. This enabled her to move from her parents’ home in Forest Hills to the independence of a one-room efficiency apartment on the East Side of Manhattan in the eighties.

The promotions kept coming over the next couple of years. The latest one raised her to the position of editor of the romance magazine. Lovelights was now her baby. But the first few weeks of editorship raised increasing self-doubts for Penny. Honesty and sincerity were the hallmarks of her character. She made herself face the fact squarely that there might be certain lacks in her ability to edit Lovelights. She expressed this feeling to her friend and mentor, Fanny Hill, editor of the teenager magazine.

“What lacks?” Fanny wanted to know.

“Experience mostly. Personal experience.” Penny hung her head. “I’ve never had a love affair,” she confessed. “How can I edit Lovelights in the dark?”

“You mean you’re a virgin?” Fanny Hill asked disbelievingly.

“Yes.”

“How old are you?”

“I was just twenty-one.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” Fanny thought about it a moment. “Still,” she concluded finally, “I don’t see why you feel that disqualifies you from Lovelights.”

"‘But how can I edit a magazine about love problems when I’ve never had any?”

“Simple. Do you know Frank Flabgut?”

“Slightly,” Penny replied. “What does he have to do with it?”

“Just this. Frank edits a muscle man’s magazine. Now just think of him a minute. The only exercise he gets is chasing his secretary around the water cooler. And he deliberately hired a secretary with a club foot. Just take a good look at him some time. Isometrically speaking, he’s a disaster area. Yet he edits a book for muscle addicts. And then there’s Arch Faggot.”

“I don’t know him.”

“He edits a cheesecake magazine. Yet he can’t even stand the sight of women. After a hard day’s work, he goes to the men’s room at Penn Station and stands around watching just to get over the ordeal of having to look at pictures of naked women all day. He does a good job, too, except maybe he tends to run too many derriere shots. Still, he’s fruity as a nutcake.”

“I think I see what you’re driving at,” Penny admitted.

“Sure you do. And it even applies to me. I edited a movie magazine for five years, and for five years I was unable to sit through a movie. Now I edit a teenage book — me, with my name, Fanny Hill, and all it signifies. Me, charting a life-course for young adolescents! What could be more ludicrous? So you see, just because you’re a virgin doesn’t mean you can’t deal with sex problems. It doesn’t mean you can’t edit a romance magazine.”

Penny had allowed herself to be persuaded. She stayed on the job at Pussycat. However, since her editorship involved the constant gleaming of such phrases as “the liquid sounds of love-making,” her sense of her own inadequacies did not diminish.

What did those “sounds” sound like? What did it feel like when one’s body “burned with passion”? Just what did it smell like when “the sweet aroma of animal desire dilated her nostrils”? Such were the questions posed daily by her editing of romance manuscripts.

Eyen more disturbing was the point these confession stories drove home that any girl worth her salt had surely been deflowered by the age of twenty-one. Penny’s petals were intact. But why?

There was no obvious answer. It seemed to be a matter of fate. Shuffle the deck thoroughly and one card still ends up in the same place. Set the rooster to servicing the hens and still one female fowl produces no egg. Prune a cherry tree and always one cherry will somehow remain unplucked.

That was Penny. An unturned queen; an unlaid egg; an unplucked cherry. Penny Candie—the great unplucked!

Some queens, of course, remain unmoved by choice. Some eggs, naturally, remain unlaid because of physical difficulty. Some cherries, obviously, remain unplucked because they simply aren’t appetizing. However, none of these applied to Penny.

She was not determined to remain a virgin queen. Her doctor periodically pronounced her ovarian yolks Grade A. And as to her being appetizing, her own eyes confirmed her yumminess regularly.

Stepping out of her shower and gazing at herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door, Penny would blush prettily. The darling girl couldn’t help being reminded of the descriptions in the romance stories she edited daily. Yes, there was the “golden-haired innocence” and “blue-eyed naïvete” of the farm girl seduced in “SIN IN THE SILO”. And there were the “high cheekbones”, the “oval face” and the “kiss-pursed mouth” of the victim in “I WAS RAPED BY A TEENAGE GANG”. Yes, and the “satin-smooth shoulders,” the “uptilted, pear-shaped breasts” and the swaying, womanly hips of the heroine of “ADULTERY WAS MY FAVORITE INDOOR SPORT”. Her legs were “long and slender and lightly-muscled like a ballet dancer”, just like the limbs of Nina in “IF YOU WANT ME, ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS WHISTLE”. Her waist was “tiny”, her belly “smooth”, just the way Lauras’s were in “HOW MY BODY BETRAYED ME”. And inside she felt as warmly willing as the multiple-orgy queen of “NUBILE NYMPHO ON THE TOWN”.

Yet no man had come along to sully her virgin perfection. That this was at best a dreadful waste and possibly a great sin of omission was confirmed to Penny by her after-hours reading. As if by instinct, she had filled her lonely evenings with a literary selection beginning with Gone With The Wind and Forever Amber, proceeding through Peyton Place and The Carpetbaggers, and arriving inevitably at Lady Chatterly’s Lover, and the works of Henry Miller.

It was this last-mentioned that truly convinced Penny that she’d somehow been diverted from the mainstream of New York life. In his Tropic of Capricorn, Miller succinctly identified New York in highly specific language, as the land of sexual intercourse. The evidence he offered to justify the name was overwhelming. Yet here was Penny, twenty-one years old, and she still hadn’t gotten the lay of the land.

In vain the sweaters a size too small and stretched over the pointy-tipped bras. In vain the hip-wiggling walk and the up-from-under look meant to hint at boudoir cooperation. In vain the long conversations insisting on emancipated woman’s right to a single standard. For three years Penny had been gobbling birth-control pills religiously And the only thing they’d done for her was give her heartburn. It all seemed to prove that virtue, if anything, was its own punishment!

Now, laying aside the manuscript with its still puzzling reference to the liquidity of love, Penny renewed her determination that her unwanted chastity would be breeched that very night. For this was the evening of her first overnight date with a man. And the man was Studs Levine!

Studs Levine was the advertising representative of the publishing company for which Penny worked. He was a tall, muscular young man with shoulders too broad to be hidden by the Brooks Brothers suits he wore. His smile was a testimonial to fluoridated toothpaste and he was always masculinely deodorized. His personality was modeled on Rock Hudson in any movie prior to the scene in which Doris Day neutralizes it with matrimonial honey. This combination underlay the aptness of his nickname.

Studs’ success with women was phenomenal. It was also frequently calculated. Explaining it in terms of business to male cronies, Studs was fond of telling how he “plowed my way through half the pertinent receptionists and private secretaries in New York to land my accounts. As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he would add with a wink.

With women, of course, he was not quite so blunt. Rather, he was the soul of subtlety. Seduction was an art with him, and like any good artisan he prided himself on his individualistic technique.

Nor were all his conquests in the line of duty. To the beautiful and shapely and willing, Studs could be a true philanthropist. Charitably, he bestowed his seed ’twixt many a thigh incapable of furthering his career. Studs was never stingy. He would not withhold the elixir of his potency from the world of thirsting femininity.

Correctly, he gauged the extent of Penny’s parch. The panting Bartletts ’neath her sweater weren’t lost on him. The sweet flush of her yearning was a plea he couldn’t disregard. And so Studs had invited her for a weekend at his bungalow in Arverne.

Penny had immediately recognized the implications of the invitation. She knew Studs’ reputation and realized that seduction was his aim. But this knowledge only made her all the more eager to accept. Thus she found herself alone in the bungalow with him, alone with her eagerness to experience, alone with the man most likely to vanquish her despised virginity.

“You just relax and make yourself comfortable,”

Studs told her when he’s closed the door behind them. “I’m going to fix us a salad and some steaks for dinner.”

“I’m not hungry,” she said impatiently.

“Well then, I’ll mix us some martinis.”

“I don’t need liquor,” Penny told him forthrightly.

“Umm. Well, just let me put some records on the stereo.”

“I’d rather listen to the sound of the ocean lapping the shore.”

“Oh?” Studs was stymied. There were certain rituals to be gone through. This girl was disregarding them. She wasn’t playing the game. Preliminaries were important. You have to learn to crawl before you can walk, he thought to himself irrelevantly.

“Aren’t you going to defile me?” Penny asked when the silence lengthened uncomfortably.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Defile me. You know, like in Fanny Hill.”

“I never read it. Never got around to it, I guess. I keep pretty busy what with business and all,” he finished lamely.

“I hear you do,” she told him archly. “I’ve heard about how busy you keep. But when are you going to get busy with me? When are you going to slip it to me?”

“Slip what to you?”

“It. Like in the Tropics, you know.”

“I’ve never been in the tropics.”

“I mean the Miller books. Come on! You brought me here to screw me, didn’t you?”

“Good grief!” Studs drew back, appalled at her frankness. “You don’t waste much time on romance, do you?”

“Romance? Oh, you mean like in Lady Chatterly? Okay. Bring on the floral arrangements. I’m ready to be twined and vined.”

“Penny, what the hell are you talking about?

“Going to bed with you. Isn’t that why you brought me here?”

“Well, sure, but—”

“But what?”

“At four o’clock in the afternoon? Without a drink? Or dinner? Or anything?”

“Or anything?” Penny thought that over. “You mean like foreplay?” she said finally with the air of one who has just noticed an electric light bulb going on over her head.

“I’m not sure that I’d put it that way—”

“Oh, I know what you mean. And you’re right, of course. How thoughtless of me! All right, foreplay it is. Kiss the hollow of my neck.”

“Huh?”

“It’s an erogenous zone. Kiss it. Or breathe on it hotly, if you’d rather.”

“But I can’t just—”

“Maybe you’d rather stroke my breasts until the nipples stand out hard and erect against the thin silk of my blouse,” Penny suggested.

“I don’t think—”

“Or perhaps you might caress my legs above my stocking-tops until the flesh grows hot with desire and my thighs fall apart.”

“I think I’m going to fall apart,” Studs muttered.

“Beg pardon?”

“Let’s go for a swim,” Studs said desperately. “Maybe that way we can sort of ease into the – umm — foreplay.”

“You mean frolic in the water like playful, uninhibited animals? Will you kiss me underwater and push down my bikini so that my pear-shaped breasts bobble free?”

“I’m not a very good swimmer,” Studs confessed. “But if you promise to stay in shallow water, I’ll do my best.”

Penny went into the bedroom and changed into her bikini in a trice. Studs was waiting for her with his bathing trunks on, and he guided her out of the cottage, under the boardwalk and onto the beach. Here she broke loose and scampered into the surf. He followed more sedately. ’

It hadn’t been a very good beach day to begin with, and now the overcast sky of late afternoon had driven what sun-seekers had come out back to their pinochle games and mah-jong tiles. The dunes were deserted. They had the ocean virtually to themselves.

Penny dived into the first wave. Behind her, Studs edged into the water more gingerly. He went thigh-high and then stretched on the tips of his toes as the icy waves lapped intimately at his groin. Penny splashed him, and he gritted his teeth and plunged into the next breaker.

She swam out to the rope connecting the series of buoys and motioned for him to join her. He did, and then they were side by side, treading water and holding onto the rope with one hand. With her free hand, Penny leaned all her weight on Studs’ shoulder and pushed him beneath the surface. She sank down with him, wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him.

It was a long kiss, and Studs came up sputtering and gasping for air.

“Why didn’t you open your mouth so your tongue could dart like a flame when I kissed you?” Penny demanded reproachfully.

“Because,” he explained, “I was afraid I’d drown if I did.”

“Oh.” Penny took his free hand and pressed it against the expanse of bare bosom overflowing the top of her bikini. “How my flesh tingles for you! How quickly you make me breathe. How yearningly hot my flesh is! Doesn’t it feel that way?”

“It feels like a cold, wet fish gasping out of the water,” Studs muttered, retrieving his hand.

“What?"

“Nothing.” He shivered. “Let’s go in before we turn blue,” he suggested.

“Oh, all right.” Penny was disappointed.

However, her hopes revived when they were once again alone together in the bungalow. “Let me dry you,” she suggested, looping a Turkish towel over his shoulders and pressing her scantily clad body against his scantily clad body. Studs downed a hooker of whiskey, felt the warmth spread through his scantily clad body — which began pressing back against her scantily clad body — and decided to relax and enjoy it.

“Ohh, you smell so masculine—like the sea,” Penny sighed.

“Like the Fulton Fish Market, you mean,” Studs observed, sniffing at his armpits. “My deodorant must have let me down.” He went into the bathroom and returned spritzing himself with an atomizer.

“But I liked the way you smelled,” Penny protested. “Oh, well.” She shrugged and got back on her ovarian track. “Why don’t you dry me off now?” she asked coyly.

Studs took the towel and made a few passes at her back. Their scantily clad bodies went back into action. Soon Studs had forgotten his pique at her upsetting of his seduction formula and was reacting in keeping with his name.

Yes, he went along for the “L” of it. Lush breasts hot against his chest, longing sighs tickling his ear, lascivious thighs entwining with his, little whimpers, lustful groans —lovely, lovely, lovely was the love-hungry lass. Liberties he took with her, laving her lips with lecherous tongue, locking loins licentiously, lingering over large roseates still lavender from the cold sea. Lively he became, licking the long, semi-lactating nipples, fingers leching over her firm lower quarters, leaning his lump of lust into her liquefying lily-valley. Lastly, he lowered her to the chaise longue, his lust loosed and lenghty now, lightning rod lifted loftily, limbs taut with libilo, love-aimed at her now binkini-less body. Thus, lustily, lustfully, lovingy, lewdly, lifting and lowering, they sank into the depths of “L”.

But not quite.

Studs was a creature of sexual habit. Although Penny was juicily ready, rote called for Studs to bestow one final caress to insure maximum excitation. Thus he stroked the curl-covered hillock of Venus, played flip-flop with the burning, quivering, slippery sentinel at the arch-lipped gates of her womanhood, and finally dipped a pair of well-manicured fingers into the funnel of her pulsating honeypot.

One knuckle deep, and he stopped. He paused. He withdrew. “No!” he said.

“No?” Penny whimpered. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just can’t do it. I just can’t make love to you.” He rose and stood beside her, looking down, firm, proud, naked.

“But why not?” Penny asked. Why not? Her undulating hips echoed the question? Why not? Her outstretched, clutching hand repeated it in Braille. Why not? Her tight-clenched honeypot emitted a little suction sound of frustration.

“Because—” he explained, drawing himself up to his full height and speaking with a voice filled with dignity and a sense of honor befitting a man who has unexpectedly reached the point at which he will not compromise and found the strength to stick by his guns regardless of the strongest temptation, “—because you are a virgin!!!

Please let us know if you like this story in the comments. If there is enough interest, we will publish more of this story.