“I wouldn’t.”
“Maybe not.” She shrugged. “It’s something you’ll work out, Ell. Something you’ll resolve on your own.”
“So we get dressed now?”
“That’s right.”
“I see.”
Maggie studied the tip of her cigarette. She was doing this stupidly, she thought. She wanted Elly, wanted her desperately, and it would be easier to take advantage of her now, to keep her from sliding back into the heterosexual scheme of things. But she simply wasn’t put together that way. Whatever happened, the decision had to be Elly’s and it had to be a free one. Otherwise everything would be ruined.
“Mag—”
“What is it, honey?”
“Before we get dressed and go, could we—”
“Could we what?”
“Could we make love?”
“Why … oh, God, Ell. Oh, baby!”
“But I don’t know what to do,” Elly was saying now, the words pouring out in a rush. “I want to. I really want to, but I don’t know what to do. Will you help me, Maggie?”
“Oh, God,” she breathed. “Yes, Ell. Yes, my baby. Yes, my darling, I’ll help you. I’ll help you, honey.”
19
ALL day Tuesday Nan waited for Ted Carr to call.
She didn’t know whether to expect the phone or the doorbell to ring. Maybe he would come to her as he had come the day before, ringing her doorbell, telling her to get her clothes off, then making love to her on the living room floor. Maybe he would call instead, to talk to her, to give her instructions on a time and place when and where they could be together. She expected the call rather than his personal appearance, since she couldn’t expect him to double back from New York a second day in a row. And she looked forward to the call. She waited to hear his voice, wanted to see what would happen next.
There was one possibility which never occurred to her. She took it for granted that he would contact her, one way or another, and she never conceived of the possibility that he would not call her at all.
He did not call her at all.
She waited until it was quite obvious that he was not calling. She was a few minutes late picking up Skip and Danny at school, and on the way home she barely understood their conversation because she was too busy thinking about Ted. She drove home fast, and while the two of them went downstairs to mesmerize themselves in front of the television set, she sat waiting for the phone to ring.
She almost forgot Ted that night. It was a busy evening; Howard picked up the babysitter at seven, brought the sitter over to help Danny and Skip watch television, and then they went to the inevitable PTA meeting. The meeting was a gigantic bore, complete with a speaker who provided a rather harrowing picture of teenage narcotics addiction. Since Danny and Skip would not be teenagers for awhile, much less narcotics addicts, the speech was not exactly down Nan’s alley. Still, it was something to listen to, and while she was at the meeting she hardly thought about Ted Carr at all.
That night she wanted Howard to make love to her. She wanted this very much, but something kept her from putting her desire into words, and Howard did not think of the idea all by himself. He kissed her, and he failed to notice when she pressed up against him a bit more warmly than usual. Then he got into bed and closed his eyes, and before long she heard the rhythmic breathing which told her he was asleep.
But she was not asleep. She stayed awake for hours, thinking about Ted, trying to guess why he hadn’t called her. He could have called no matter how busy he was, could at least have said hello to her. Maybe he had just wanted her once. Maybe he was done with her now, and it was time for the boredom to start all over again, and—
She couldn’t believe that. She had pleased him—she knew this for a fact—and he would call again, would return soon. And, she decided triumphantly, when he did call she would hang up on him, and when he rang her bell she would shut the door in his face. She could play his game as well as he could. Whether or not she let the affair go on, she was not going to make it easy for him.
She almost believed this.
He didn’t call Wednesday, either. She was sure he would call this time, and she put off going shopping in order to be home when he called, but the phone never rang and the doorbell remained silent. Three or four times she walked to the phone, almost ready to dial the number of his New York office, and each time she walked away from the phone, telling herself she was behaving like an idiot and commanding herself to put him out of her mind once and for all.
He called on Thursday.
When the call finally did come, at two-thirty in the afternoon, she had not been expecting it at all. If his aim was to catch her off-base he was succeeding admirably, for she had just about managed to condition herself to the idea that he was never going to contact her again when the phone rang. She picked up the receiver, not even thinking it might be Ted, and his voice said hello to her.
“You didn’t call,” she said, her resolve to hang up long dissipated. “I was waiting. You didn’t call.”
“That’s right,” he said pleasantly. “I didn’t.”
“I was waiting. But you didn’t—”
“You sound like a broken record, Nan-O. I’m at the Star Bright Motel on Route 9. How about getting here as quick as you can?”
“Ted—”
“Unit Six,” he went on. “Just come to the door, hurry inside, and pull your panties off. I’m sitting here all ready for you, Nan-O. All ready, kid.”
“Ted—”
“Unit Six at the Star Bright Motel. Don’t forget.”
“Ted, I’m not coming.”
A short and sardonic laugh.
“I’m not. I—”
“Of course you are.”
“Ted, listen to me. Ted, I’m a wife and a mother—”
More laughter. “You’re also a whore and a tramp, Nan-O. I’ll be waiting for you.”
He hung up on her.
She stood there, her hands knotted into fists, her blood pulsing through her system. I’m not going, she told herself. I’m not going, I don’t want to go, I hate the rotten bastard and I’m not going.
She went, of course.
The Star Bright Motel was not a haven for weary travelers. If it had been, the owner might well have starved to death, since his location was hardly ideal in that respect. Travelers heading out of New York would go farther than Westchester before calling it a day, and travelers heading into New York would go all the way in instead of stopping so close to their destination. Still, the Star Bright did a booming business.
In the parlance of the inn-keeper’s trade, the Star Bright was a hot-pillow joint. Its occupants were occasionally married, but never to each other. The place was popular for extramarital affairs, equally popular among the younger set that was sufficiently mature to find the back seats of cars uncomfortable.
Otis Wheeler was the owner. Now one would be hard put to find a more suitable occupation for Otis Wheeler than the one he had. It brought him a good income, and there is certainly nothing wrong with a good income. But there was more to it than that. Otis Wheeler was a voyeur, and there is no place for a voyeur quite so delightful as a hot-pillow joint.
Now it was three on Thursday afternoon, and Otis Wheeler was watching. He was in the little concealed hallway between units five and six, his eyes glued to the piece of one-way glass which was set in the wall of unit six. That had been Otis Wheeler’s own special idea. The occupants of the units saw a mirror, while Otis saw them. Why, one couple who had taken a special sort of delight in making love in front of mirrors had justified the expense of installation all by themselves!
But now …
The tall man with the sandy hair had been sitting alone, waiting. He sat on a straight-backed chair, which was not unusual. What was unusual was the fact that he sat in the chair without any clothes on. He had hung his clothes in the closet.
For awhile Otis thought he was wasting his time watching a lunatic who got his kicks sitting n
aked in a motel unit. Then the woman came in and Otis knew he was not wasting his time. The woman was blonde, and the woman was pretty, and the woman was stacked like a brick outhouse. Otis liked to watch stacked blondes. He was pleased.
The man sneered, and said something which was probably unpleasant, judging from the expression on his face. The woman cringed. Then, slowly and deliberately, she began to remove her clothes.
Otis watched her. It was not hard to do. The stacked blonde did a slow strip, and from where he was Otis was able to see everything there was to see. Among other things, he was able to determine that the stacked blonde was genuinely stacked.
The man said something else. The stacked blonde then tried to argue. She opened her mouth and talked back, shaking her blonde head prettily. Whereupon the man seemed to lose his temper.
He appeared to curse. Then he asked something which made the blonde go pale all over. She nodded sadly and sank to her knees. The tall man swung his hand and brought it down hard on her shoulders. It left an ugly red mark.
Otis watched, spellbound, while the tall sandy-haired man spanked the stacked blonde on various interesting portions of her anatomy. Then he said something else and the girl obediently crawled around the floor on all fours, performing various imaginative exercises en route.
She returned, finally, and kneeled before the man—Otis watched. His eyes bugged out. He stared.
20
WHEN the city-dweller thinks of the country, he thinks of good weather. He imagines summers with a hot sun in a clear sky and a steady breeze blowing, all in contrast to the sooty horror of summer in New York, where the heat is never relieved by breezes and where the tall buildings hold the heat in close and mix it with smoke and sweat. When he thinks of spring in the country he imagines green things coming into bloom, and when he thinks of winter his mind conjures up images of placid unbroken fields of powdery snow. Fall brings images of colored leaves to his mind, and football weather, and brisk air. Winter in New York, on the other hand, means slush; spring means the melting of the slush, and autumn barely exists.
The country-dweller has a somewhat more accurate understanding of these seasonal images of bucolic serenity. He knows that the summer may bring temperatures of 98 in the shade, and that there may well be no shade. He knows that winter can be more than dismal, that snow is wet and cold and needs to be shoveled, that tires skid in it and cars get stuck, and that you can have a coronary shoveling out your driveway. He knows that spring is when the crab grass begins to flourish, and that snow melts in the country in just as revolting a manner as slush melts in city streets, except that it takes longer in the country and that there is more of it.
He knows too that fall, the most nearly acceptable season, can be rainy. He knows that when it rains it pours, and that there are many autumn days in the country that might better be dispensed with.
Friday in Cheshire Point might better have been dispensed with.
The rain had started coming down before dawn would have broken. But dawn didn’t really break that day anyway. The sun never really rose; there were too many clouds in the way, all of them black, all of them spilling wetness upon Cheshire Point. There was thunder, and there was lightning, but above all there was rain.
It rained cats and dogs. It rained buckets and barrels and pitchforks. But what it rained most of all was water, and it rained an inordinate quantity of it. It rained and it rained and it rained.
No one really liked the rain. There were a few look-on-the-better-side and every-cold-has-a-cardboard-lining types who told one another that the rain was at least good for the farmers, while the poor farmers sat in their leaky farmhouses and watched their crops get washed out of the ground. Because it was that kind of rain. It was not good for anybody.
The multicolored autumn leaves were picked up and carried along by the rain. They blocked the multicolored autumn sewers, and the rain backed up and filled the multicolored autumn streets of the multicolored autumn towns. Cars plowed through deep water and splashed any poor souls unfortunate and/or stupid enough to be out for a walk.
And it went on raining.
Elly Carr sat by her front window and looked at the rain. There was no poetic ritual of listening to the pitter-patter of tiny raindrops on the window pane. In the first place, the raindrops were not tiny. They were huge, monstrous and montizorous, and there is nothing particularly romantic in a montizorous raindrop. In the second place, montizorous raindrops do not go pitter-patter. They go whoosh, sort of, and they don’t fall on a window but lash at it. So Elly Carr sat looking at the rain, and listening to the whoosh of montizorous raindrops against the window pane, and not liking it at all.
She made up a little song and sang it to herself. It went to the tune of Let’s go Barmy, We’re in the Army from the Three-Penny Opera. She sang quietly, enjoying herself:
Pam’s in school and Ted’s at work
And here I sit complaining
In front of the window like a jerk
All’s dull because it’s raining.
She broke off in the middle of the parody, leaving the window, finding a cigarette and putting a match to it. She smoked silently, trying to get her mind organized. She had not seen Maggie since Tuesday morning, when they had first made love quite magnificently and then had ridden back to the Point on the train. She had talked twice to the redheaded girl on the telephone, but she had not yet been to see her.
The thing was that she had to make a decision, and whichever way she made it, she had a hard life staring her in the face. She was certain now that her lesbianism was a genuine thing, that her only chance for sexual happiness and emotional satisfaction lay in the arms of women, not men. So she was more than willing to continue her homosexual relationship with Maggie Whitcomb.
That was not the problem.
The problem was along those lines of course. The problem lay in the fact that, for the first time, Maggie Whitcomb was wholeheartedly in love. And the type of relationship which Maggie had previously found to be ideal now would not do at all.
“I’m in love with you,” Maggie had told her on the phone. “I don’t want to share you, Ell. Not with anybody.”
That meant no marriage. According to Maggie, she had two choices. They could break up, in which event she would remain with Ted and hide her lesbianism under a nymphomaniacal bushel. Or she could go off with Maggie, divorcing her husband while Maggie divorced Dave, sharing an apartment in Greenwich Village or some similar place, and leading the gay life all the way.
She could not, Maggie had explained, both have and eat her cake. Love would not permit such a relationship. She could be Ted’s or Maggie’s, but not both.
Which, of course, was a problem.
Because she would have liked to have her cake and eat it as well. She wanted the respectability of marriage to Ted; the idea of leaving mate and child and becoming a sexual pariah did not particularly appeal. But the thought of giving up Maggie and all that Maggie meant was no more appealing. She was caught in a neat little bind, and either way out seemed to be a pitfall, and on top of everything else it was raining.
Hell.
Hell and damnation.
Hell!
“Look at it this way,” Maggie had explained, her voice persuasively logical. “We’ll be hiding, Ell. Hiding everything, worrying about exposure, playing secret little games. And eventually some prying snooping long-eared nosy son-of a bitch will find out, and then we’ll be in the worst possible kind of mess. That’s no good, Ell.”
True enough. That was distinctly no good.
“And we don’t have each other, not as well as we should. I don’t want to make love to you while I’m looking at my watch. I want you around all the time. I want to go to bed with you at night and wake up with you in the morning. I don’t want to share you, not sexually or emotionally. I want you for more than sex, Ell. I’m in love with you.”
And, naturally, she was in love with Maggie. She knew how Maggie felt and felt the same way hers
elf. But was she ready to commit herself that completely? Was she ready to toss everything overboard and become a full-time lesbian? Maybe what she was going through was a passing phase, maybe some morning she would open her eyes and discover that lesbianism was less than absurd, that she wanted to sleep with men rather than women.
Maybe—
Hell.
The rain was not letting up. It was getting worse, if that were possible, and Elly thought hysterically that it was going to go on like this for forty days and forty nights. The thing to do, she told herself, was to get busy building an ark. She would make it forty cubits long and thirty cubits deep and twenty cubits wide, and into it she would put two members of each species of every living thing. But she would put in two women of each species. It would be the first lesbian ark in history.
She laughed. Outside the rain kept coming down.
21
NAN HASKELL was taking a bath. There was enough water outside for her to bathe in the yard, but she hadn’t gone quite that far yet. Ted was breaking down her reserve, pushing her inhibitions a little farther each time, but she had not yet reached the point where she would go out and bathe in the rain.
She rarely took tub baths. She usually preferred showers—they were faster and simpler, and you didn’t wind up lolling in a tub of dirty water that way. But this morning she was taking a bath. She was not interested in getting clean, since she had already had her morning shower. She was sitting in a tub of hot water because she ached.
Ached.
Her muscles were sore, and her flesh was sore, and her stomach was weak from throwing up. The little fun-and-games episode at the Star Bright Motel had left her broken and vomiting. It had been one for the books, all things considered.
She never would have believed herself capable of such perverted behavior, never could have imagined herself submitting to such bestiality and, what was more, getting an insane sort of kick out of it. And yet she had submitted, and had gotten those insane kicks, and now her whole body ached.
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