She was not built that way. Anonymous pickups and quickie affairs were not her dish of tea, and that was all there was to it. She had tried them—she remembered all too vividly the evening when Rhonda Michaels, her love-of-the-moment, had failed to put in an appearance at the Partial Dome on Cornelia Street. So, oversexed and overtired, she had permitted a butchy type named Jo to pick her up. Jo had small breasts and broad shoulders and a deep voice, and she swore like an unhappy truckdriver. She took Maggie to a filthy apartment on the Lower East Side, filled her with rotgut wine, peeled off her clothes, played with her breasts, and spent about two hours kissing her. She had never seen Jo again. And, if she never did, that was fine.
From a purely physical standpoint, the experience with Jo had been satisfying enough. She’d been extremely excited, and she’d reached orgasm, and that much was fine. But it was sex in a vacuum, meaningless and pointless sex that made Maggie Whitcomb feel cheap and dirty inside. When you were thirsty you drank a glass of water; when you were itchy you picked up someone else who was itchy and you went to bed. That was Dave’s philosophy and Jo’s philosophy as well. It did not work for Maggie.
She needed love, or some reasonable facsimile thereof. She needed affection and understanding and a genuine emotional attachment. She needed a relationship that exceeded the bounds of the bed, a relationship that satisfied more urges than the purely pubic ones. She did not need, or want, a genuinely enduring relationship, a genuinely sincere love. She did not need or want anything that would make her want to leave Dave Whitcomb or anything that would make her live a gay life instead of the one she lived now, complete with its veneer of heterosexuality. More than one affair had ended because her partner had demanded more than Maggie had been willing to give.
She sighed. She sipped her drink, which was a little stronger than she liked it. She lighted a cigarette, smoked, put the cigarette out. She finished her drink, set the empty glass upon an end table, and stretched out on her back upon the couch. For a few minutes her eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling. Then they were closed.
She thought, again, about Elly Carr.
Elly was very lovely. That was the first thing—Elly was beautiful, and Maggie couldn’t help thinking of her in sexual terms, imagining herself cupping Elly’s girlish breasts in her own trembling hands, imagining Elly’s mouth kissing her and Elly’s hands stroking her body in return. In her mind she could taste Elly’s mouth, could sense the thrilling contact of Elly’s bare flesh against her own. Elly’s legs all tangled up with her own legs, Elly’s body pressed tight against her own, Elly, Elly Elly Elly—
She had never before attempted to seduce a woman in Cheshire Point. The arguments Dave had advanced were not ones which had not already occurred to her a thousand times, arguments which flooded into her mind every time she felt herself attracted to a woman in the exurbanite community. But this time she was not going to repress her desires. They were too strong. A lover in Greenwich Village could not dissipate her insatiable ache to get Elly on a bed.
And it was not as though she would be breaking up an ideal marriage. She was hardly the home wrecker type, and she had no intention of taking Elly away from her husband. Elly would go on being married to Ted Carr, and Maggie would seduce her and they would have their fling, and in time Elly would be back in Ted’s arms and none the worse for wear.
And Ted Carr had no right to expect fidelity from his wife. That was another point, and a pretty damned valid one. Ted Carr would and did go for anything in a skirt. He had tried, more than once, to go for Maggie. Not knowing that she was a lesbian, and firmly convinced that he was Christ’s gift to American womanhood, and strongly attracted by her breasts and hips and all-around sexuality, he had made his passes. It had been, if nothing else, a little awkward.
She had solved it neatly. She had told him, gently but firmly, that if he bothered her again with his sexual suggestions she would cut off his manhood.
This worked. He had turned a rather attractive shade of green and had stalked off, never to offer his fair white body to her again. An emasculated Ted Carr would be like an unarmed gunman or a defrocked priest, and the thought alone was enough to put him off permanently.
Ted Carr, though, was a louse.
That was the whole point. He was a louse, and he was cheating right and left on Elly, and what was sauce for the gander was undeniably sauce for the goose as well. Which was why the thought of introducing Elly Carr to the highways and byways of female homosexuality did not exactly strike Maggie as patently immoral.
Her eyes were still closed. She was thinking back now, thinking all the way back to the first time. It had been years ago, many years ago. It had happened at her high school, a fancy girls’ boarding school in New England where only girls from the better families were accepted.
And, she thought, where more subjects were offered than were listed in the school catalogue.
Her first two years had been virtually sexless. The very few dates with boys had done nothing to her virginal status. She was sixteen, in her junior year, before sex reared its lovely head in the majestic person of a girl named Lily Raines.
Lily was tall and slender, a senior girl with a shock of jet black hair and the hollowest, deepest eyes Maggie had ever seen. Maggie was working on the school yearbook, which Lily Raines edited, and they became friendly. That was the beginning.
The friendship ripened. They talked about everything, were together constantly. They discussed sex and love and life. They sipped wine behind closed doors.
And one night it went a little further than that.
They were in Lily’s room. The dark-haired girl put a stack of records on, mood music with muted horns and a few thousand violins. “Let’s dance,” she suggested. “I haven’t danced with anyone in ages.”
They danced. They had been drinking red wine and it had gone to Maggie’s head. She was a little dizzy and a little sleepy. She moved with the music, close against Lily, and something began to happen.
She felt Lily’s breasts pressing against her own breasts, felt Lily’s hands rubbing her back and shoulders. She pushed tighter against Lily, inhaling her sweet perfume, smelling her and touching her, and, all at once, needing her.
Then Lily kissed her. The room rocked, and reason fell out the window, and things began to happen in a cosmic realm away from space and time. Lily handled her breasts, coaxing the rosebud nipples into new awareness, making them swell with passion. Lily kissed the tips of those breasts, ran her tongue around each nipple in tantalizing circles.
The night was long.
And now Maggie Whitcomb was a lesbian. Now she lay on a couch in a ranch house, eyes closed, breathing shallow. She was thinking about Elly Carr. She was going to make Elly feel the way Lily had made her feel, was going to do to Elly all the wonderful and mystic things that Lily had so capably taught her.
She smiled.
9
ROZ BARCLAY didn’t have to ask the question
There were times when you did not have to ask certain questions. When your husband walked in the side door with his shoulders slumped, with his beard drooping and his eyes vacant, you did not ask him how it had gone at the sweet old typewriter. You knew damned well that it had gone horribly, so there was very little point in asking.
Even so, she said: “A bad day?”
He nodded.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing at all. A page, one goddamned page to show for six goddamned hours staring at the keyboard of the goddamned typewriter. It’s not even a good page, Roz. I’ll look at it in the morning and tear it to ribbons. It’s a lousy page.”
“It’s one less page to write.”
“Not if I tear it up.” He shrugged. “Oh, hell. Maybe I’ll write another one tomorrow. At that rate it’ll take three months to finish the lousy book. Unless I shoot myself first.”
She thought it might be a good time to change the subject. “Hungry? I can fix you something to eat.”
“You have dinne
r already?”
“I took a sandwich. I didn’t want to interrupt you.
What can I get you?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Positive?”
“Positive. I’m not hungry. Let’s make love, Roz.”
Her heart quickened. “Do you … do you want to?
“I’d love to.”
She went to him, her eyes shining, her heart full of love for him. She pressed close to him, looking up into his face, hoping that it would happen, that they would be able to make love, that her body could bring him satisfaction and permit him to relax and come out of his shell.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go upstairs.”
They went upstairs. Her heart stayed full of hope, an almost desperate hope. She needed him. They went into the bedroom, closed the door. She went into his arms and their mouths met in a kiss. She gripped him tight, held onto him, clinging to him like a barnacle to the side of an ocean liner. Her tongue stabbed into his mouth and her hips ground against his with verve which a burlesque dancer would have been proud of and which a prostitute would have envied.
They undressed quickly. They stood nude and kissed, and her blood began to pound through veins and arteries. She felt his hairy chest against her bare breasts, felt his hands stroking her back and backside. She needed him with a blind and aching need.
It had to work. It had to—she needed him and he needed her and it had to work now, had to break right for him. Maybe one could cure the other, maybe if they made love it would shake the slump loose, maybe sex could release creative energy and he could get back to work on the book.
She was not certain. She knew now only that she needed him, that it had to work.
Period.
They groped their way to the bed. He tore off the blankets and they stretched out on the bed, their bodies together, their arms around each other. His tongue stabbed into her mouth and his hands were on her breasts, holding them, squeezing them. He was hurting her and the pain was a delight to her, an ache that was delicious. He squeezed once more and she writhed in passion.
“I love you, Roz—”
“Linc—”
“I love you, Roz baby. Oh, Christ, I love you. I love you so damned much.”
“God, Linc—”
“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.
10
THURSDAY 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 wheelb
arrow. 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.
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