like a boxer’s counterpunch, he leaped in again and this time caught the slower man in a flying scissors, his strong smooth legs gripped around the sagging torso of the big Russian. The big man grunted as the youthful body struck him, but recovering quickly he began to turn slowly, dragging the younger man with him, Jones’s blond head held just above the canvas of the ring. As he accelerated his macabre pirouette his mouth twisted with the strain of his movements and the pressure of the young legs locked around his middle.
Grace saw the heavy calf muscles bulge above his high-top boots, and his heavy thighs and buttocks straining from the weight they bore, as Krosniac gathered momentum in his spin. The crowd, which had screamed its approbation a moment before, now subsided into silence as the big man spun faster and faster on his straining legs, dragging the bouncing body of the hero around the ring, the blond head hitting the canvas with every revolution.
“Let go! Let go!” Martha cried, the sweat running unnoticed down her flaming cheeks, half crouched now in the open space beside her chair.
With a mighty roar from the crowd the body of the blond man separated itself from that of the spinning Krosniac and slithered across the mat, to be brought up with a heavy thud against a cornerpost.
Martha screamed, standing on her feet now in the open space beside her chair. A sympathetic moan rolled down from the hidden seats at the sides of the smoke-filled auditorium and was carried forward to the ringside.
The big Russian, left standing dizzily in the middle of the ring as Jones was thrown away from him, hesitated only long enough to find his way to the other’s side. With a wild grin he threw himself on the supine form of the blond young man, straddling him with his legs, and pulling him clear of the ropes. Then he grasped both of the other man’s arms and forced them back beyond the young man’s head. The referee ran over and bent low to catch the touching of Jimmy’s shoulders to the canvas to signify the fall.
The crowd went wild, standing up on its feet, shouting, screaming, cursing. The woman two seats away from Grace turned on her disinterested male companion and berated him openly for refusing to get to his feet and protest. Grace looked across the head of the man in the next chair to the figure of his insignificant wife, slightly amazed at the way she had switched her hatred from the villain in the ring to her husband.
Then she strained to the left into the space vacated by Martha, who was now three or four feet out from the rows of chairs, waving her arms in the air and shouting to the referee in both German and English. Grace found an uninterrupted view of the 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
