The Secret (20 page)

After a couple of weeks they went back to the man who had pierced them and had him install permanent platinum rings, fastened with solder, that could not be removed except by cutting them. They were about the size of a nickel and as thick as the lead in a pencil. They hung in visible holes in their nipples.

After that they never wore their clips. They didn’t have to. They hung tiny silver chains between their nipples and suspended ornaments from them. Sue Ellen wore her engagement ring hanging between her breasts. I am not sure if she was mocking me or not.

Of course, they went topless all the time. I never thought I would get tired of looking at women’s boobs, but I got sick of looking at Sue Ellen’s and Mollie’s.

Then they began to talk about labial rings. The man who had pierced their nipples would pierce their inner labia, and they could wear rings there, as described in
The Story of O.
They had read the book, and the idea excited them. I did not bother to remind them that the rings installed on O’s most private parts were installed by and for
a man.
There was no point in talking to them.

They even asked me to get the skin of my penis pierced and to wear a pearl stud.

I’d reached a point where I confided a lot in Vicky. I had to be careful about that. I had to avoid reminding her that she was eighteen years older than I was—old enough, as I had objected to my father, to be my mother. I had to be careful not to treat her as a trusted older adviser.

She shrugged. “I know a young woman who wears rings in her pussy,” she said.
“Gross!”

“The only thing worse, that I can think of, is piercing your tongue,” I said.

“If this kid wants to have her cunt pierced, she’s weird, Len.”

I nodded.

Vicky smiled. “Hear what I’ve just said. I called your wife, who’s your own age, I suppose, a kid.”

She put her hands to her own shaved crotch and separated the fleshy lips. “To punch holes in there … Too painful for me.”

“I’ve got to get rid of her, Vicky.”

“Both of them,” she said.

Suddenly it occurred to me that we’d just said something significant. If I got rid of Sue Ellen, did that mean…? I think it occurred to Vicky, too. We dropped the subject.

My wife was not bright. Or maybe it was Mollie who was not bright. More likely, neither one of them was. They simply handed me my opportunity, carelessly. I imagine they thought I would never act against them.

Maybe I should have tried to evict Mollie and worked to save my marriage. Maybe I would have, if not for Vicky. Vicky had taken the place Sue Ellen had once had and could have had still.

I came home one night to find Sue Ellen and Mollie naked and making video tapes of each other. They had bought a camera.

They put a tape they had made on the VCR and pushed me down on the couch to watch it.

It was pretty tame. They had not yet figured out a way to photograph themselves together, so the tape showed only one of them at a time. Each one stripped. Then she posed, showing herself off. They had focused on their crotches, then on their anuses, each spread apart with fingers. Even they were disappointed in the results.

“What we need is a cameraman,” said Mollie.

They made me the cameraman. While I aimed and focused, my wife shoved her face into Mollie’s crotch and licked her labia and clitoris. The camera recorded sound, and they recorded talk as well as pictures:

“Oh,
God! Oh,
God!”

“You taste so
good!
”

“You gettin’ this, Len? You
gettin’
this?”

“Don’t care if he don’t. We’ll do it again.”

“
Yeah!
Ha-ha-ha-ha! Yeah! Ten times more.”

Sue Ellen pulled back, and Mollie set to work on her.

Well … this kind of stuff has a certain sameness about it. If you’ve seen one of these, you’ve seen them all; and seeing the girls do it is no more a turn-on than the tape.

Hey! I’m not one of those guys that pretends nothing can turn him on. I’ve been with guys at strip shows, where an absolutely gorgeous gal is showing it all, and watched a guy pretend he was just so, so blasé. What’s boring is not the show but him. Who the hell’s he think he is?

Sue Ellen turned over, and Mollie ran her tongue up her ass. Sue Ellen moaned.

Am I gonna say I wasn’t turned on? If I said that, who’d believe me?

The two girls loved it. They loved to watch their tapes. They commented on them as if they were drama critics:

“What we supposed to think you are there, Mollie? A virgin?”

“You know, you lick sloppy sometimes.”

“I wondered when you were gonna come up for breath!”

They begged me, literally, to let one of them tape me taking sex from one of them. I refused. Flatly.

When we had a stack of tape cartridges, maybe a dozen of them, I began to take them, one at a time, into the city to a duplicating service. I knew what those bastards would do. They handed me back my original and my copy, and they sold the dozen or so other copies they had made. In a short time, Sue Ellen and Mollie were underground porn stars, their bodies and faces and voices known to thousands.

I waited a few weeks. Then I went into a tape-rental store on East Forty-third Street.

“Have you got the Sue Ellen and Mollie tapes?”

“Sue Ellen and…?”

“Mollie. Two gals doing it to each other. I hear they’re really something.”

“Well … yeah, I think we got one or two of those. You wanta rent one?”

“I want to
buy
one.”

“I’d have to have a hundred bucks.”

“How many do you have?”

“I think I got three. Y’understand, they’re not new. They been rented.”

“I’ll give you two hundred for the three.”

“Uh … two-forty.”

“Two twenty-five.”

“Deal.”

I went back to Connecticut and talked to a lawyer. I handed over the tapes and told him to view them. In a few days I talked with him again.

“What do you want, Mr. Cooper?”

“I want a divorce. Quick, easy, and cheap I bought those tapes in a store on East Forty-third Street My wife won’t want her father to find out that she—”

“I get you. Quick, easy, and cheap.”

I let Sue Ellen and Mollie live in the Greenwich house until the lease expired, that is, for a year and a half after I moved out. I paid the rent for that year and a half. That was all she got from me. Her father at Hale & Dorr was furious, mostly at her for letting me off so easy. He guessed something was radically wrong, though, and when Sue Ellen showed up in Boston with Mollie in tow, he
knew
what was wrong.

*   *   *

“How’d ya pull it off, for Christ’s sake?” my father asked. I told him, and he said, “Blood will tell. Uncle Harry couldn’t have screwed anybody better.”

I grabbed his hand and shook it. “You think better of me? I mean, seriously?”

He squeezed my hand. “Believe it or not, your mother would think better of you, too. And I mean that seriously.”

36

At twenty-seven, I guess I was smug. I thought I had some reason to be satisfied with myself. I had escaped from my marriage with little fuss and little cost. I was living with a forty-five-year-old mistress whose maiden name was Castellano. I was a rainmaker at Gottsman, Scheck & Shapiro. Only two years out of law school, I was well on my way to being made a partner in a law firm that was very respectable, though it was not one of the preeminent firms in New York City. No one else in my class had done any better.

Of course, I was reluctant to admit that contacts and luck had had a good deal to do with it.

Though we agreed that the firm would not become general counsel to Cheeks, my father sent me several clients. I did not get Charlie Han, but through Charlie I got two of his subcontractors: sweatshop operators. Vicky helped me bring in business besides Interboro Fruit. I need hardly say that she had a wide circle of acquaintances.

My relationship with Vicky broadened and deepened. We vacated the little love-nest apartment where we had been shacking up and rented—that is to say,
she
rented, chiefly—a much bigger place with a handsome view from the living-room windows of the East River and Roosevelt Island.

Her son was seventeen now and knew about me, which was a little awkward. His name was Anthony, and he was always so called, never Tony. Vicky’s widowed sister moved into the apartment that had been Vicky’s home, shared the rent, and Anthony lived there with her. He had dinner with us two or three times a week. Vicky went to his school functions and took him on his tour of colleges. The day they went to look at Yale, I drove them to New Haven.

The relationship between Vicky and me was anomalous, no getting around it. We had passionate sex together, but neither of us ever spoke the word
love.
Our living arrangements were as much like marriage as could be, but I never thought of marrying her and was certain she never thought of marrying me.

We were friends. Very good friends. I suppose we didn’t realize how good friends we were.

Cheeks continued to expand. I said to my father that he had to learn to delegate authority, that he could never build the really big business he wanted until he abandoned his personal, hands-on management style. His response was to lease a Lear jet, so he could fly farther, faster—a typical Jerry Cooper reaction.

It was the first time I had any influence on the business. He opened stores in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Louisville, Raleigh, Durham, Atlanta, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami—all within easy range of the little jet.

Then, shortly, he let me influence the business in a more important way.

Cheeks was a partnership, based on handshake agreements. When my mother was alive, she and my father had had a basic understanding that she owned half of his share of the business. But no document said so, and when she died her share was not listed as an asset of her estate. So, far as my father was concerned, Sal owned maybe twenty-five percent. He and Sal had drawing accounts and took money out regularly. So long as neither of them took so much as to alarm or offend the other, it was a good enough arrangement.

While he lived, everyone assumed Meyer Lansky had a small share, maybe five percent. He never demanded anything, but my father sent him a check from time to time, which he cashed without comment. When Lansky died and his estate proved almost insolvent, his heirs made no claim on Cheeks. My father sent a final large check to help with the funeral and other expenses.

Anyway, partnership, I explained to my father, was a dicey way to run a business. It involved too many uncertainties. I convinced him to form a corporation.

On January 18, 1989, Gazelle, Incorporated was chartered by the state of Delaware. The name was a play on
Giselle.

It issued ten thousand shares of common stock. My father would own 5,500, which gave him clear control. Sal would own 2,500. I would own five hundred. Vicky bought five hundred. Unknown to my father, she endorsed her share certificates to me immediately—though we did not register the transfer on the records of the company. That left one thousand shares as treasury shares retained by the corporation.

My father was president and treasurer. Sal was vice president. Vicky was second vice president. I was secretary.

The board of directors was: Jerry Cooper, Sal Nero, Vicky Lucchese, Leonard Cooper, and Roger Middleton. Roger Middleton was a vice president of Allied Chemical Bank, where my father did his business and personal banking.

My father was not accustomed to reviewing his decisions with others, not since my mother died, anyway. Sal often interfered, but he did not try to take a regular part in running the business.

Now, I advised my father, he had to at least go through the motions of doing business as a corporation.

“Meaning I gotta do what?”

“It means you have to hold annual stockholders’ meetings and monthly meetings of the board of directors. You report to the stockholders and directors, tell them what is going on. They can make motions, and votes are taken. Minutes have to be kept.”

“Len … that’s a lot of bullshit.”

“I suppose it is. But it can make an important difference some ways, some times. Like … suppose sometime we wanted to borrow a lot of money—”

“Not likely.”

“Suppose. A bank would run an audit, which would include a look at the company’s minutes.”

“Jesus!”

I remember one meeting in particular, which had to do with expanding our line of merchandise.

Although our signature line was daring, it did not include much that could be called fetishist merchandise. The nipple clips were about as close to that as Cheeks stores came. What was more important, the line did not include S-M items.

Sal raised the question in a directors meeting. “Hey, I think we’re missin’ out on a line of business that could bring in a bundle.” He opened an attaché case he was carrying and took out a pair of shiny, nickel-plated handcuffs, then a pair of leg irons. “They also come in dull black,” he said. “They sell cheap. For a little more money you can get leather ones that strap on, with little padlocks on the buckles. Hey, there’s all kinds of stuff like this.”

He withdrew more items from the attaché case—battery-powered vibrators, one of them shaped like an oversized cock, hard-rubber dildos, a red rubber ball with a strap running through it, to be fastened in a woman’s mouth as a gag …

“Where’d you get those items?” my father asked.

“I picked this stuff up in a place on Forty-eighth Street. He does a
business
in it.”

“Stocking that kind of stuff would change the whole character of the business, wouldn’t it, Sal?” I asked.

“The business of a business is makin’
money,
” he answered. “I’m sayin’ that for a small investment we can add a line that will damn well definitely make money.”

“There’s lots of things we could do that would make money, Sal,” my father said. “I’m not sure I want to get into any of them.”

“It’s related,” Sal argued. “Guys that come in to buy scanties for their girlfriends will—Well, some of them will buy vibrators or handcuffs.”