The Silence on the Shore. Hugh Garner
corner of the ring where Krosniac, to her a picture of big cruel maleness personified, was striving to pin his opponent’s shoulders. The referee straightened up without giving a sign that a fall had been made, and the two men on the mat, locked together in a straining embrace, pushed against each other, their arms jerking from side to side with the strain.
The younger man, seemingly unhurt from the crash against the ringpost, was forcing his arms up from the canvas and pushing the big Russian back from him, so that no longer did the mat of heavy hair on Krosniac’s chest come in contact with his face.
Grace gripped her hands into fists, feeling that she was the one straining beneath the bull weight and strength of the big man, able to smell the sweat of him, being forced into an exquisite agony of sexual refusal, knowing that soon she would collapse inertly, letting him have his way with her, yet meeting him with a new-found eagerness and pliability that his mastery had brought about. She found her nipples harden and rub themselves against the cups of her brassiere as she twisted around on her feet, her breath hissing from her open lips.
Krosniac was forced back by the other’s strong young arms until he sat upon the other’s belly. Grace watched him spellbound, wanting him to have his way with the figure beneath him, feeling the weight and heat from his loins upon her own soft belly. The big Russian lifted one knee and forced it between the other man’s thighs, spreading them in a true re-enactment of the sexual posture. The figure on its back upon the canvas was no longer a man but a blonde virgin, the timid Grace of forty years before, being taken in lust by a dark naked hairy figure in her bed in Bad Kissingen.
The big man forced his other knee between the spreading thighs of the blond young man, his fat belly lowering upon that of the other. The smooth hairless legs of the younger man spread wide upon the canvas, pushed aside inexorably by the strength of those that were inserted between them. Jimmy Jones gradually forced his body up, regaining his strength against the bigger man, but Grace was no longer interested in reality.
Weaving on her feet she shut her eyes and once again felt herself give way beneath the bulky weight of the man who had forced himself upon her in her virgin bed. Things she had forgotten until then came back in a head-splitting rush: the roughness of his hairy legs between her thighs, the heavy sagging belly falling upon her, the mumbled threats and pleas in her ears, and the sudden weakness in her arms. She gave in, as she had given in that other time, hearing the tearing of her nightgown in the darkness, feeling the fumbling fingers, gasping at the sudden thrust of him, conscious of his moustache on her cheek and the rasping scrape of his chest upon her breasts …
“Vat —” she started to cry involuntarily, but cut the cry short through clenching teeth.
“Hey, Grace, what’s wrong with you?” asked Martha, staring at her strangely.
Grace opened her eyes as the lassitude settled in her limbs and she became soft and dizzy with post-climactic weakness. She felt Martha pushing at her with her hip and as she moved back to her own chair she saw that everyone else was seated once again. With the blood rushing to her face and neck, and afraid to remember what had happened to her, she dropped into her chair keeping her eyes on the ring, but no longer conscious of what was going on there.
From around her came the increased noise of the crowd as Jumping Jimmy threw the heavier man away from him. Then an ear-splitting din filled the Gardens as the blond young man caught the older one in a flying neck scissors and forced him back to the canvas, switched to an overhead wristlock, and pinned Krosniac’s shoulders to the mat.
Martha was standing beside her chair, her hair undone and her arms waving wildly. “That’ll teach him, Jimmy!” she cried. “Oh, you big beautiful sweetheart!”
As Krosniac stepped from the ring, his dressing gown thrown loosely around his shoulders, the crowd gave him its customary boos. He acknowledged them with an ugly grin, turning his face from right to left and raising it to the unseen seats above the circle of light. Martha joined in the booing lustily, screaming at the wrestler until he disappeared into the entrance to the dressing rooms. After Jones had been photographed and had smiled his boyish smile in the direction of the television cameras, he donned his gown and left the ring to the strident cheers of the crowd.
Martha took her seat once more, searching in her handbag for some Kleenex to wipe the sweat from her face. “Jimmy didn’t run away tonight!” she exulted in Grace’s ear. “Maybe a little bit at first but that was all.”
Grace nodded and tried to smile at her friend.
“Say, what’s the matter, huh?” Martha asked, bending forward and staring into the eyes of her friend. “What happened, Gretchen?”
“Nothing,” Grace answered. She was uncomfortable, feeling betrayed and ashamed of herself, yet somehow relieved and pacified.
“You don’t look too good, Gretchen,” Martha said. “It’s the heat in here.” She finished wiping her face and neck with the paper tissues before squeezing them into a hall and throwing them beneath the chairs.
“I’m all right, Mart’,” Grace said.
They got to their feet and slowly followed the crowd to the nearest exit door. Now that the lights were on, the people looked thoroughly ordinary. All the screaming, panting people of a few moments before had taken on their everyday drabness, the women old and ugly and with lecherous faces and many of the men weak and frightened-looking. In many ways they had enjoyed themselves, pretending to believe the faked cruelties of the villains and the stalwart goodness of their heroes in the ring. Some of them had vicariously asserted themselves before their boss, while some like the little woman two seats away from Grace, had won their battles with their husbands. A few bored men and some of the younger women had watched the matches merely from the interested position of spectators at the exhibition, as the promoter called it.
There were others, like Grace, who had got more out of it than was there. They left the Gardens with the satiated step of Romans leaving the Coliseum or the shamed shuffle of unsatisfied spectators leaving a sexual circus.
Grace began to feel let down, her mind still reeling from the re-enactment of her defloration, her senses made sluggish by the too-vivid memory of that horrible yet strangely fascinating night so long ago. She felt alone in the crowd, separated from it by the incident she didn’t really want to forget.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” her friend asked.
“Sure. My lumbago is bothering me, that’s all,” she answered. “I’ll have to remember to get some of my pills.”
As the two women stepped into the street they felt the unseasonable heat of the day rising from the pavement, making the evening air even warmer than that inside the Gardens, though it was only June.
“Let’s go over to Yonge Street and get a cup of tea,” Martha invited.
“Not tonight, Mart’,” said Grace. “I’m going to catch the subway and go straight home.”
“I’ll be running along then, Gretchen,” said Martha, who lived in the opposite direction.
“I’ll see you, Mart’. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.”
By the time she reached the movie house near the subway station, the crowd from the Gardens had thinned. Standing against a display case full of movie stills was her newest roomer, Clark Cronin. He was smoking a cigarette while keeping his eye on the figure of a thirtyish woman who was pretending to read the posters on a stand in the middle of the doorway. He didn’t see Grace as she passed, and she quickly turned her head away.
When she reached the shadows of a building farther along the street she looked back. The woman was walking slowly in the direction of the Gardens, and Clark was sauntering behind her.
CHAPTER SIX
The first intimation Sophia Karpluk had that the room next to her’s was rented was when she heard somebody whistling from behind the thin wallboard partition that separated her “kitchenette” from the clothes closet next door. She knew immediately it was a man, for the whistling was a man’s: strong, in