“So beautiful. Such beautiful breasts. You could make a fortune with them. Roz. You could model with them for paperback covers.”
“Kiss them, Linc—”
He did not need to be coaxed. He moved lower on the bed and his lips found the valley between the two breasts. Her skin was very soft there, very sensitive, and his tongue reached out to tease the tender skin. She squirmed, needing him, and he kissed her, moving from the valley to the mountains themselves.
He kissed first one breast and then the other. She was alive with Just now, alive with need, and she put her hands on the back of his head and pressed his face into her breasts, loving the tricks he performed so perfectly with lips and tongue.
His hands dropped to her thighs. He squeezed her and a tiny moan escaped her lips.
“Linc—”
His hands were clever. God, how she needed him! She loved him and needed him and she had to have him or die.
“Linc—”
And then suddenly, too suddenly, he was moving away from her. His eyes were pools of terror and his face was white. His shoulders sagged and his chin fell.
“What’s the matter?”
“I can’t,” he snapped. “I can’t, that’s all. That’s what’s the goddamned matter.”
“Oh, darling—”
“I’m a first class son of a bitch,” he said. “I managed to get you all worked up and now I can’t finish the job. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me, honey. Maybe I ought to go blow my brains out. Maybe that’s the answer.”
“Don’t talk like that!”
He shrugged, impatient with himself. “I’m a son of a bitch,” he said again. “I didn’t think this could happen, Roz. I … I really wanted you. I needed you. I thought it would work.”
“I understand.”
“I thought it would work, that everything would be all right, that I would be able to. It didn’t work.”
“You’re all tied up in knots,” she said. “You’re in a stinking slump and it’s a vicious circle. It’s nothing to worry about.”
“No?”
“No, Linc. It’s all right.”
He turned away. “Look,” he said, “I have to get out of the house, have to be by myself for awhile.”
“I understand.”
“I’m going into town,” he said. “I’ll head over to the tavern, have a few drinks. I’ve got to straighten myself out.”
“All right.”
“Don’t wait up for me.”
She waited in bed while he dressed, left the bedroom. She listened for the slam of the door, then heard him start the car’s engine and drive off into the night. She hoped he’d be all right—he had a tendency to drink too much when he was depressed, and he was about as depressed now as she had ever seen him.
But he held his liquor well. He would be home all right. She did not have to worry about him.
She lay for a few minutes in the darkness.
Alone, she cried.
T
HURSDAY
and Friday were ordinary days in Cheshire Point, ordinary days with ordinary weather and ordinary turns of events. Linc Barclay, who had come home drunk as a skunk when the bar closed Thursday morning, spent all of Thursday trying to get over a hangover and all day Friday trying to write. He managed the first, thanks to a liberal quantity of black coffee and several B-complex vitamin pills. The second was still impossible. Two pages—bad ones, he assured Roz—rolled through the typewriter in the course of a nine-hour stint on Friday. That was all.
Thursday afternoon a salesman came to Elly Carr’s house. He was a college kid, working his way through school by selling sets of encyclopedias to people who did not really want sets of encyclopedias at all. Elly Carr did not want what he was selling. But, when she looked at the muscular young man, she did want something. She wanted him.
“It was one for the books,” he told a friend that night, sitting over glasses of draft beer in a saloon in Brooklyn, where he lived. “She was a cute little number. She came to the door all dolled up in tight slacks and a tighter sweater. She let me get my foot in the door, then invited me inside. We sat down in the living room. I started to go into my routine, telling her just how much her lousy family needed a lousy Global Encyclopedia and World Atlas. But I didn’t get very far.
“First she brought me a cup of coffee and a sandwich. Then she suggested we sit together on the couch so she could hear me better. And the next thing I knew she was fumbling with my shirt, and her hand was on my chest, see? I was going out of my skull. I didn’t get it, you know. I thought it was happening to somebody else, see? I was dreaming it, or something.
“So I just let her alone. And she went on with what she was doing, and she started talking to me, talking dirty. You wouldn’t believe the filthy words that came out of that little rosebud mouth. She had me climbing the lousy walls, fooling around with me like that and talking like that.
“I grabbed onto her boobs and we started making out like madmen. It didn’t take her long to show me the way to that bedroom of hers. She took off her goddamned clothes and stood there like a marble statue, you know, and I just touched everything in sight. She was the hottest thing going, man. Hot as a roman candle.
“And we made it. It was … Jesus, I don’t know. She knew more tricks than any broad I ever got close to in my life. She was … great, that’s all. We wound up on the moon. Then she told me to get to hell out, so I put on my pants and went home.
“I figured that was enough work for the day. I just didn’t feel like peddling the goddamned Global Encyclopedia and World Atlas any more. Man, you never met a woman like that! Imagine being married to her, for God’s sake—her poor husband must carry his scrotum around in a wheelbarrow. I bet she drives him nuts.”
The college kid didn’t know that Elly lay in bed crying after he left. She was horribly depressed. After the Rudy Gerber affair, and after Maggie Whitcomb’s visit had suggested that a friendship with Maggie might prove a solution to her promiscuity, she had taken a very solemn vow not to make love with anyone but Ted.
And now—
Now she had broken that vow. Now a broad-shouldered college kid had come stumbling in the door with some crud about an encyclopedia, and she had practically raped the little idiot. Phantom lover—oh, it was all such a mess, such a goddamn mess!
Elly had planned on going to Maggie’s that afternoon. She’d wanted to talk to her, to get to know her better. But now she couldn’t bring herself to see anyone. She felt filthy, inside and out, filthy and rotten and crawling and disgusting. The shower she took did not help, and when she changed the bed linen, as she always did after an act of infidelity, it seemed like a vacuous gesture, a sickening attempt to erase the immensely wrong act she had been so responsible for.
She did not go to Maggie’s. She stayed home that day, sitting around, glancing through a magazine, letting time pass.
Friday, in the afternoon, she dropped in on Maggie Whitcomb.
Thursday and Friday were dull days for Nan Haskell, but this did not surprise her. It seemed now as though every day was a dull day, as though every day would go on being a dull day until, one dull day, her heart stopped beating and she died. On Thursday morning and on Friday morning as well she awoke at fourteen minutes to seven when the electric alarm clock screamed its message of wakefulness into her ears. She brushed her teeth, washed her face, made Howard’s breakfast, drove him to the station. She returned each morning to wake the boys, to feed them, to run them down to their school. Then her own breakfast, and the house cleaning, and the shopping and what a damned bore it all was!
Then a call from Ted.
Thursday, at two in the afternoon, she was angry that he had called. This time his call was a little stronger—he used vulgar words, and extraordinarily descriptive phrases, and he told her just what he was going to do with her and just what she was going to do with him and just how much they would both enjoy it. The words had a bizarre effect upon her. She wanted to hang up on him but somehow she could not. The receiver stayed glued to her ear, and her hands began trembling involuntarily, and she listened to every obscene word and felt her heartbeat quicken in response.
She welcomed his call on Friday. She waited for it, like a teenage girl waiting for her steady boy friend to call her away from her homework, and when the phone rang she ran to answer it. He said hello, his voice husky, and she answered him warmly.
He laughed.
“You’re getting interested,” he said. “Aren’t you, Nan-O?”
She didn’t answer.
“You want me,” he went on confidently. “You were all cold and angry at first, but you’ve been thinking it over, and now your mind is changing. You want Ted between your legs, Nan-O. Don’t you?”
“Maybe I do.”
Her words surprised her. She had not meant to say them, had not even meant to think them, but they had come from her lips against her will. There was no way to call them back now. They had been said, and he had chuckled warmly in response, and the die seemed to have been cast.
“When, Nan-O?”
She swallowed.
“When?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Neither do I,” he said levelly. “I want to do it. Doing is more fun than talking, Nan-O.”
“Ted—”
“Not over the weekend,” he said. “I think I’ll spend the weekend with wife and child. Next week, Nan-O. Monday or Tuesday, say. How does that sound to you, Nan-O?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think about it,” he said, his voice dripping lust. “Dream about it, Nan-O. Monday or Tuesday. It’s a date.”
About the time Nan Haskell was replacing the receiver on the hook with shaking hands, Elly Carr was drinking black coffee laced with Scotch at Maggie Whitcomb’s house.
“It’s a little wicked, I suppose,” Maggie had said. “But hell, Ell. We girls lead a strenuous life. A wee drink in the afternoon never hurt anybody, did it?”
“Never,” Elly had agreed.
“Besides, it’s solitary drinking that’s bad. And we’re drinking together. That makes it social drinking, and it’s in coffee anyway, and what the hell. Cigarette, Ell?”
She had taken the cigarette, had sipped the coffee. Now the cigarette was butted dead in a wide copper ashtray and the coffee cup was half-empty. Maggie was right, she had to admit. A little drink in the middle of the afternoon was hardly harmful, and it did do wonders to relax a person. Maybe that was what she needed— maybe, if she took a drink instead of a door-to-door salesman, she could get the same effect without being a round-heeled little tramp.
Of course there were dangers in that course of action. Every suburb and exurb had its quota of female alcoholics, lonely wives who searched for companionship in the bottom of bottles. Cheshire Point could boast of half a dozen women in that leaky canoe, and Elly didn’t want to wind up sharing their boat without a paddle.
But all this was ridiculous. She was only visiting a friend and drinking a cup of Irish coffee—or did you call it Scotch coffee when you used Scotch instead of Irish whisky? Well, whatever you called it, that was all she was doing. And for her to worry about alcoholism was about as nutty as you could get. She had better things to worry about, things like that encyclopedia-peddling college boy, things like Rudy Gerber, things like all the men who came to her door and wound up in her bed.
That sort of thing.
“What we both need,” Maggie was saying, “is a shopping trip. We could take a late train into New York, right after you get Pam on her way to school and spend the day on Fifth Avenue. We’d be back in time for you to pick up your darling daughter and get home to cook dinner.”
“Or Pam could go over to a friend’s house after school. That would save an hour or two.”
“It’s what we both need,” Maggie said. “How long has it been since you went into the city to shop?”
“Too long. I usually shop at Alexander’s, the upper Westchester branch. It’s convenient.”
“Very convenient.”
“Very convenient. But somehow Alexander’s isn’t the same as Fifth Avenue, Ell.”
“Cheshire Point isn’t the same as Manhattan.”
Maggie smiled. “You just said a mouthful. I miss New York, Ell. The air is better and the country is healthy as hell, and a house is more fun than an apartment, but I miss New York.”
“I do, too. I was born there.”
“Let’s go, then. On Monday. We’ll spend our husbands into the poorhouse and have lunch at the top of the Tishman Building and have an all-around ball. Is it a date?”
“It’s a date,” Elly said.
“More coffee? Your cup’s empty.”
“It must have a hole in it. Easy on the Scotch, huh?”
“Sure.”
They were midway through their second cups of coffee when Maggie raised her arms over her head and stretched, her breasts jutting out against the thin white cloth of her blouse. “I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I think it’s hot as hell in here.”
“It is a little warm.”
“I’d turn on the air-conditioner, except there isn’t one. If I were alone I’d take my blouse off.”
“Well, go ahead.”
Maggie grinned. “Sure you don’t mind? After all, it’s just us girls here. But I don’t want to behave like an exhibitionist.”
“Go ahead,” Elly said. “I don’t mind.”
She tried not to look at Maggie as the redhaired girl unbuttoned her white blouse and drew it back over her shoulders. But something forced her to watch. She was vaguely uncomfortable without knowing quite why. Maggie took off the blouse and set it beside her on the long low couch. Her bra was black and lacy, and she looked down at it and giggled softly.
“My one gross affectation,” she said. “I have a weakness for sexy underwear. I’m wearing a pair of peekaboo panties, believe it or not. Sexy as hell.”
Elly wanted to look away. She couldn’t. Maggie, she noticed, had perfect breasts, much larger than her own but firm with no tendency to sag or droop. And the black lacy bra
was
sexy; there was no question about it. But, as Maggie had said, it was just us girls here. Why should she react to Maggie’s near-nudity?
“That’s more like it, Ell. I’d take the bra off too, but this isn’t a strip show, is it? God, it’s nice to get air on my skin. Why don’t you pull that sweater over your head and relax?”