Between the crowded tables in the restaurant I fled from the stranger to the ladies' room. It was ridiculousjust because of the way he had looked at me and what he had said to me. There was nothing he could do to me, not out there or anywhere. He was a harmless nuta suave, middle-aged man, looking like somebody in an ad for expensive shirts, who got his kicks by making indecent proposals to young women.
No, not proposals. Statements. Not suggesting but telling me the outrageous things he would dowe would do-and incredibly I had taken him seriously, and here I was hiding in a ladies' room because it was the one haven from mankind. Hiding, actually, from his eyes that even now made me feel naked and exposed.
Two chattering women came in. I turned away from them so they wouldn't see whatever was in my face; I ducked into a booth. There I stood with heart pounding and breasts aching and a jittering in my groin. I touched my nipples. Through blouse and bra I felt them rigid and sharply sensitive to my fingers. My other hand clutched my quivering belly. As if with a will of its own, that hand slipped down under my skirt and up the moist insides of my thigh.
Dear God, what was I doing? And here in a restaurant toiletand because of somebody I had never seen before fifteen minutes ago and never wanted to see again! I snatched my hands from myself and dropped limply on the seat.
Out there among the noonday diners Edwina French was waiting for me to return. And so was he. This morning Edwina and I had made a date to meet here in Schiller's restaurant for lunch and then go shopping in the downtown stores. As usual she had been late. I had been waiting for her at a table for two against the wall when I had become aware of a man at the next table staring at me.
A complete stranger. Deep in his forties. Thin face and hair graying at the fringes. A cigarette in the corner of a tight mouth. You grow used to men undressing you with their eyes, especially when you wear something like a figure-molding knit pullover blouse, but there was a quiet possessiveness in his deep-set eyes that made me more than ordinarily self-conscious. And I have to admit itI got self-conscious easily. I lowered my own eyes to the table top.
At that he came over to my table and sat down opposite me and casually mashed out his cigarette in my ashtray.
I expected the usual opening, the haven't we-met-somewhere routine, and I was set to give him a firm brushoff. What he said was, "You must be very beautiful naked."
I was startled. This was hardly an approach to be expected from a man with a cultured voice and an urbane manner.
"Please go away," I said.
"I see you haven't ordered yet," he said. "Are you expecting somebody?" "I am. But that's none of your business."
I wasn't usually so fresh, but he was beginning to frighten me. He was smiling all the time, not so much with his tight mouth as by crinkling the corners of his rather arrogant eyes. Eyes that seemed, somehow, to hold a kind of secret knowledge about me.
"Definitely you're my business," he said blandly. "It's not only your spectacular figure that enchants me. It's your look of pervading innocence. I find the combination irresistible. A combination I expect to be wholly delightful when you are naked for me and we make love."
Just like that.
I said, "Do I have to call the manager to make you let me alone?"
"Not many women are more attractive out of clothes than in them," he went on as if nothing I had to say could matter. He looked at my breasts pushed full and high against my knit pullover, and I had a sense of them suddenly having been completely bared for him. "I believe that you are. Though one can't be quite sure at this point, can one? Girdles and brassieres overcome sags and bulges, and for all I know there are hideous scars under your clothes." He put his hands flat on the table; they were long and graceful with the nails beautifully manicured, "Well, we will see soon enough."
"And I have nothing to say about it, I suppose?" I flung at him.
"On the contrary, it will be what you also want. I am going to have you, and you will be eager for me to have you."
His hair grew down to the middle of his high forehead in a grayish widow's peak. And suddenly I knew what he looked like. Satan. The widow's peak and the thin face and knowing eyes and bland sophistication.
"Look, I'm married," I told him. And I was surprised to hear the pleading quality in my voice. "I noticed your ring. So what?" He leaned partway across the table to look deep into my eyes. "I believe you're ripe and ready to be awakened to things every woman yearns for whether or not she knows it. I don't mean only lovemaking. There will be that, of course. You will discover sexual ecstasy in ways and with an intensity beyond your imagination at present. But that will be only one by-product of the fact that you will be owned by me."
"Owned by you!" I echoed scornfully. "Next you'll be offering to take me on as your slave. How very kind of you."
My sarcasm didn't work. Because if he was crazy, he was infusing me with part of his craziness. Under the table I squeezed my thighs together.
"Slave isn't the word," he said with that crinkly smile that was utterly serious. "There will be no physical compulsion. You will eagerly and freely submit to me as your master. You will come to me naked when I wish and go when I wish. When you deserve punishment, you will undress to be punished. Whatever I desire from you for my pleasure you will take pleasure in. You will achieve orgasm through debasement."
I said, "I will call the manager."
He just sat there opposite me amid the hurly-burly of the restaurant, his deep quiet eyes in that satanic face possessing me. And I, too, just sat there. If I didn't want to raise a fuss by calling the manager, I could get up and walk away. I did neither. I couldn't understand why I just stayed there, afraid and quivering inside me with something other than fear, and feeling as nakedhis favorite wordin this crowded public place as in an erotic dream.
"Look into yourself," he said at last. "Examine what I am rousing in you."
My head snapped up. "You're mad!" I said. "Youyou dirty man!" And I pulled back my chair to get away from him.
I was halfway out of it when I saw Edwina French making her way toward me between tables. I sank back into the chair.
"It's about time you got here, Edwina," I called out to let him know I had been rescued. He stood up. He was slim, Hardly any hips. The lean rugged look of a man who took care of his body. Lots of tennis, swimming, bowling, maybe something as aristocratic as polo, A man you expected to be charming in a drawing room, but never to speak as he had spoken to me. Satan in person.
Edwina stood at the table with that tentative smile of a woman waiting to be introduced to a presentable man. He seemed to expect the same thing. Even if I had known his name I wouldn't have introduced him. He was nobody to me, less than nobody, and I wanted to be rid of him for good and all.
There was a brittle pause. Then he said to me, "I'll see you soon, my dear," and made a gallant bow and returned to his table.
When Edwina had settled herself in the chair he had vacated, she asked me who he was. "I've no idea," I said.
"But he was sitting with you."
"He tried to pick me up. I couldn't seem to discourage him till you showed up."
She turned her head for a more thorough inspection of him. He was eating, ignoring us, but I didn't feel released from him.
"A bit on the old side," she commented, "but older men are all the fashion these days. He looks exciting. Like an elegant English movie actor." She leaned over the table and lowered her voice. "Amy, he said he'd see you soon."
"I can't imagine what he meant," I mumbled.
"What could he have meant but that he'll see you soon." Her chubby face lit up; she loved scandal. "I do think you made a date with him."
"Of course not."
She studied my face. I had nothing to feel guilty about, but the fact was that I did. "I almost believe you," she cried. "It's hard to think of you of all people carrying on an affair. Why, Amy, you're blushing!"
I had a way of blushing too easily, that was all it was. I said, "It's hot in here," though the restaurant was air-conditioned, and I put my napkin to my mouth.
A waitress came to take our orders. When she left, Edwina whispered, "He can't take his eyes from you. Amy, there is something."
She didn't have to tell me. I knew he was at it again. And suddenly I felt hemmed in by their eyes-by his possessive eyes and her curious eyes. Getting up to my feet, I blurted, "I'm going to the ladies' room," and fled.
So there I was hidden away in a toilet booth. Like at home as a child I used to lock myself in the bathroom, when I had done something wrong and was afraid of punishment. Not that either of my parents had ever hit me (facing Father's anger had been bad enough), but the stranger out there would if he could. He had said so. When you deserve punishment you will undress to be punished, he had saidand in my mind I saw myself dropping off my clothes before him and placing myself across his knees and thrashing and kicking in an obscene display as he spanked me on my bare behind. Trembling, sweat trickling under my bra, I held that image like a vision of exciting loveliness, then thrust it from me in a fury at myself. What was happening to me?
I left the booth. I doused my flushed face with water and adjusted my hair and returned to the clamor of the restaurant dining room.
His table was empty.
"You can relax," Edwina said when I reached her. "He paid his check and left." My fruit cup was waiting for me. I picked up my spoon. My hand wasn't steady.
She watched me eat (she had already finished her shrimp cocktail), and after a minute she said, "Is it that serious? Do you want to tell me about it?"
"There's nothing to tell," I snapped at her.
She patted my hand. "I know how it is, Amy. I won't pry."
How could I convince her there was nothing to pry into? I dropped the subject. We talked of other things during lunch and then we went to the stores. I managed to put him out of my mind. Most of the time.
Tuesday, July 15 There was only one empty seat on the bus I took home from the dentist's office. I got it because I was the first one on at that stopan aisle seat next to a dumpy woman. Other passengers crowded in after me. The bus started with a lurch and somebody standing in the aisle swayed against me. I glanced up, and there was that thin, aristocratic face hovering over me.
I cringed as if under a threatened blow. His eyes crinkled, amused at my reaction. But he didn't say anything, not even hello.
Yesterday he had told me he would see me again soon, and here he was. He must have been right behind me boarding the bus. How could he have known I would be at that bus stop at that particular time?
I folded my hands on my lap and looked straight ahead. His body didn't touch mine again, but I had a crushing sense of his closeness. I felt the weight of his eyes on me, possessing me, owning me. I am going to have you, he had said, and somehow he was already doing it, right here among all these people.
The bus stopped to let off a passenger. Across the street a lean man in a plaid jacket walked a white poodle clipped to the skin except for ruffs at its neck and legs. The poodle balked at going on, spreading its legs on the sidewalk against the tug of the leash. The man gave it several whacks with the end of the leash, then held out his hand to it. The trembling poodle licked the back of the hand that had beaten it and submissively trotted after its master.
Master! You will submit to me as your master, was another thing he had said to me, and overwhelmed by the sense of him hovering over me I saw myself like that poodle, led by a leash from a collar around my neck, crawling stark naked after him on hands and knees, breasts swaying under me, buttocks wiggling, my sex widely revealed to all on the street, and there was a short whip in his hand to punish me with if I No! Like yesterday I was letting myself drift into a masochistic fantasy. He was responsibleyesterday by his words, today by his mere presence, I shook myself out of it.
Above me I heard a small chuckle. Could he know what had been in my mind? It almost seemed so. Why was I letting him do this to me? I kept my head down and my hands tightly clasped. The bus was still some ten blocks from my stop when the woman who shared my seat prepared to leave.
Panic gripped me. He would take that seat as soon as it was empty. He would be sitting with me, his thigh and hip and shoulder pressed to me. That mustn't happen!
The woman rose. I pulled my feet back to give her room to sidle by me, then I leaped up after her. I shouldered past him and other passengers to follow her out.
He didn't come after me. From the sidewalk I watched the doors close with him still inside, All the same, as I walked the rest of the way home, I kept glancing behind me as if expecting him to be suddenly there. It wasn't till I was in my apartment that I relaxed the least bit.
My mother-in-law was playing solitaire on the living room table, I said hello. She glanced up at me and made an impersonal gesture with her mouth and then scowled at the card she had uncovered.
"Mother," I said, "did anybody phone me while I was out?"
After three years I was still uncomfortable about calling her Mother. She wasn't my mother; I had a mother alive and well. I could hardly call her Mrs. Kimball (which anyway had become my name also), and she wasn't the kind of mother-in-law you called by her first name, which was Bertha. So for the first year of our marriage I hadn't called her anything, but then I gave in, mostly because Henry had insisted.
She uncovered another card before replying. Then she said, "No, there was no call for you." "Well, did you tell anybody about my dentist appointment?"
"Why would I?" she said to the cards.
"I mean, did somebody call and say it was urgent to get in touch with me and did you tell him where I was?"
It was a random idea. Assuming he had learned my name and address, that could explain how he had known which bus I would take home and at about what time-if meeting me on it hadn't been an accident after all.
Again she took time answering. "Did you expect such a call?" Her tone changed slightly. "And from a man?"
"What happened," I said, trying to climb out of the hole I was digging myself into, "was that somebody phoned the dentist's office before I got there and asked for me and didn't leave his name."
She looked at me. She was an attractive middle-aged woman with beautiful legs and a good figure carefully maintained. An angular face that could be pretty when she let it relax. It seldom did with me. She had never liked me much. I doubt that she would have liked anybody who had married her Henry.
"Do you know who it could have been?" she said.
"I've no idea."
"Well, nobody called." She shuffled the cards. "Amy, isn't it time you put up the roast?" So it was, but I resented her reminding me. It wouldn't have hurt her to put it into the oven herself. I was restless after dinner. I asked Henry to take me out somewhere, to the movies or a drive or a walk in the park, but his mother had suddenly developed one of her migraine headaches and he wouldn't think of leaving her alone when she wasn't in perfect health. So we spent the evening in the living room watching television. Her headache was not so severe as to prevent her from watching with us.
The programs were as insane as usual. They sat together on the sofa laughing at the childish goings-on on the screen while I, alone with myself a few feet away, sat curled up on the armchair on my legs.
I wished I had a baby. It would be something to cuddle and nurse and cherish and be my own. At ten o'clock I said, "Let's go to bed, Henry."
"But it's early," he said.
"I'm tired."
"You run along," he said. "After the next program I'll" "Darling, please, I want you to come with me."
He hesitated, torn between one of his stupid programs and getting into bed with his wife. Then his mother said, "Run along, dear, and get a good night's sleep," and that decided him. He kissed her good-night and I said, "Goodnight, Mother," and we went together into our bedroom.
As soon as the door was closed behind us, I thrust myself against him and kissed him long and ardently. During it, I dug my fingers into his broad back and rolled my hips against him.
"Wow!" he said. "Why this sudden burst of passion?"
"I've been wanting to do this since you came home," I said. "I wanted to snuggle with you while watching television, the way a wife ought to. The only time we're alone together is here in our room."
"I know. Sometimes it's inconvenient having Mother around all the time." He kissed me; this one was his own idea. "Well, we're alone now, sweetheart."
I would have liked him to have thrown me on the bed and ripped the clothes off me and taken me violently. But we were husband and wife, and after that second kiss we sedately prepared for bed.
I went into our bathroom to change into my nightgown, closing the door between us. As I put it on, I saw myself in the mirror. You must be very beautiful naked, he had said. Not Henry. Henry sometimes had a compliment for me, but not that kind. It had had to come from a rather frightening stranger.
I pulled off the nightgown and stepped back to see all of me in the mirror, down to my knees. Maybe two or three pounds too many. One hundred and eighteen was my best weight; this morning before breakfast the scale had said one hundred twenty-one. I had a tendency to put it on my breasts and hips. I touched my breasts, pleased with their smooth firmness. What sag they had was only natural since they were rather full. But not really heavy, thank heaven. I let the nightgown fall to the floor and ran both hands voluptuously over belly and hips and mound and thighs. At that moment I was in love with my nakedness.
Stark naked as I was, I opened the door and stepped into the bedroom. Henry was already in his pajamas and in bed. While waiting for me he was leafing through one of his engineering magazines.
He was quite the handsomest husband of any of my friends. Shoulders of the football player he had been in college and a hard tapering muscular body to go with them. A sweet boyish face, rather soft and round. He had had loads of girls after him-an Adonis with a fine future as an engineer and a nice guy to boot-and I had been the lucky one. He was always kind to me. I loved him dearly.
I stood there till he became aware of me and raised his head from the magazine. He gawked at me as if he'd never seen me without anything on.
As a matter of fact, he seldom did. Or I him. We respected the privacy of each other's bodies. When we dressed or undressed in each other's presence, we did it with our backs turned till we had some underwear on, and we closed our bathroom door when bathing or showering.
"What's the matter, Amy?" he said.
"What do you mean?"
"Why are you standing there like that?"
I pulled my shoulders back to lift my breasts and I put a hand saucily on my hip. I felt excitingly coquettish. I said, "Darling, do you think I am beautiful naked?"
"Of course."
"Then say it." "Why?"
"I want to hear you say it."
"You're beautiful naked and dressed and every other way," he said. "Now put on your nightgown and come to bed."
Being naked with a man had become very important. The man being Henry, of course, and nobody else! "Isn't it foolish for people to get dressed to go to bed?" I said. "We wear more in bed than on a public beach."
"That's different." He put down his magazine. "Sweetheart, I thought you said you were tired." "Suddenly I'm not," I said. And I literally jumped on top of him on the bed.
As I kissed him, I pulled the cover off him. I wiggled against him. I put my hand down to his pajama bottom and found him excited too.
"You're shameless," he said happily. "I want to be. Darling, I need you, I need you."
"Wait," he said as I tugged down his bottoms. "I'll turn off the light." "Don't bother. Don't leave me!"
But he pulled away from me and got out of bed. He went into the bathroom and put out that light and came back with a towel. Then he climbed back into bed and turned off the bedside lamp and my nakedness was hidden by darkness. The proper darkness for making proper love.
By that time some of the edge was taken off. Enough was left. I pulled his face down to my breasts for him to kiss them. He pecked at one nipple and the other and then he was rising over me, fumbling at his pajamas.
"Not yet," I said. "Play with me, darling. Make me ready."
Propped up on one elbow, he slipped his other hand between us to my crotch. Dutifully he stroked my clitoris. I wished he would act as if he enjoyed doing it, but that was all right, I was very hot again, but I needed more, much more. "Your finger," I moaned. "Put your finger in." He did, and I wondered why I had to tell him, why he seldom thought of such things himself. I clamped my thighs over his hand and ground against his knuckles. I reached down and took him between my hands, the urgent virility of him squeezed by my sweating palms, and I had an insane urge to kiss it, something I had never done before or till this moment seriously thought of doing. I squeezed tighter.
"I can't wait," he gasped. "You'd betterbetter"
I gathered him into me just in time. In time for him. I had hardly a chance to move to meet him when it was finished for him. With a weary sigh of a biologic necessity accomplished he began to pull out of me.
"Henry, please not yet!" I dug my hands into his buttocks and fiercely held him in me as I writhed under him. "Any moment now, darling! Stay like that! Only a little more, darling!" Sounding desperate to myself as I begged for a crumb of satisfaction.
He was kind. He hung onrather grimly, I felttill I achieved my own orgasm.
It wasn't so very much. The whole thing had taken maybe three minutes, Sometimes it seemed hardly worth the effort.
He put the towel under me and kissed me good-night and rolled to his side of the bed. In a minute he was asleep.
Lying beside him in the darkness, I saw the stranger standing beside me on the bus. My hands trailed over my flesh, from breasts to thighs, up and down, down and up, and I had a sense of him seeing this, watching me even here in bed with my husband with whom I had just made love. You will discover sexual ecstasy in ways beyond your imagination. There I was quoting him again in my mind-as if he were Shakespeare or George Bernard Shaw. And he was nobody, nobody, nobody. Nothing! I slipped out of bed and went to the bathroom and washed and put on my nightgown and returned to bed and snuggled up to my husband.
Wednesday, July 16 He was standing outside my building, lounging against the brick wall not far from the marquee. He couldn't have been waiting long. It was before ten in the morning; I usually did my twice-a-week marketing early to avoid the long lines at the checking counter.
I lowered my eyes as I walked past him. I was trembling and I knew that he knew it. That was why he was thereto make every nerve in my body quiver in awareness of him. Like yesterday on the bus.
Suddenly I was angry. Enough of this was enough. I stopped and turned and strode to where he stood. He took his cigarette from his tight mouth.
Indolently he shifted his shoulders from the wall. He wore a white turtle-neck shirt, blue blazer jacket, dark-gray pantsa picture of an immaculate prematurely graying gentleman languidly waiting for somebody in the street. And here was that somebody.
"I won't have you hounding me like this," I said.
"I see we're making progress." His crinkling eyes laughed at me. "Does this mean you've stopped running away?"
"I'm not used to being followed. On the bus yesterday, that was no coincidence." "Not at all."
"Did you follow me everywhere I went since I left the house to go to my dentist?" "It was unnecessary."
"Nobody will own me. Least of all you." "How did you find out where I live?"
"I know quite a bit about you, Amy Kimball. Including your name, you see. Needless to say, I brief myself on the girl I am going to own."
He looked lazily down from my face to my body in shirt and shorts, and as always before his quiet eyes seemed to see me naked. I felt the heat of the hot morning sun on my half-bare thighs.
"But I will," he said, stepping on his cigarette. His voice was always low-pitched, always so smooth and confident. "I will take your innocence and"
"I am not innocent," I cut him off. "If thinking I am is making you act like this, you can stop it. I'm married. I told you that in the restaurant, I've been married over three years."
He picked up my left hand. His touch was like fire. He ran the tip of a manicured finger over the curve of my wedding ring.
"All this signifies is that you are not a virgin," he said. "Virgins bore me. Innocence is something else. It exists to be possessed and subjugated."
I tried to snatch my hand from him. His grip tightened. I could do nothing without struggling there on my own street along people who knew me. Not fifty feet away stood Marty, our doorman. And there was Mrs. Bigby, who lived on our floor, turning her head as she walked by to gawk at me having my hand held by a man who wasn't my husband.
"Please let me alone," I whispered.
"I mean you no harm," he said. "Even when I will consider it necessary to whip you from time to time, it will not be to harm you."
He had to be mad.
"I'll yell for help if you don't let go of me," I said.
He nodded amiably, as if I'd said something especially nice to him. He patted my hand, the way a kindly gentleman would a child's, then released it.
"It won't be long now," he told me. And walked away.
I looked after him strolling lean and very erect past the entrance to my building. Standing directly in the blaze of the sun I felt a chill. When he turned the corner I roused myself and went on to do my marketing.
At night in bed I dreamed I was being whipped.
It was not quite a dream. I was half-awake, and it was more like the conscious fantasies I had been having these last few days.
I was in a medieval dungeon, the kind you see in historical movies. I was naked (as always in the fantasies) in a great stone room, hanging by my wrists from the ceiling, my legs held wide apart by chains so that I was wholly open. A man was there holding a whip like a black snake. He wore a black executioner's hood, but I well knew the face it covered. Aside from the hood, black boots and a broad leather belt. Nothing else, and his member jutting toward me rampant and larger than seemed possible in a human being. He raised the whip, I begged him not to. Writhing from my chained wrists, I said, "Please, please, please." The whip struck, curling around my waist. My body jumped in midair. I dangled quivering waiting for the next blow. It came. Again and again. Somehow I couldn't scream, but I could speak. I blubbered, "No, more! Do anything to me, but I can't stand being whipped." He paused. "Anything?" he said softly. And touched his immense jutting self, letting it rest on his palm like an offering, "Anything, Amy Kimball?" he said, I knew it would split me in two. It would destroy me utterly. In horror I stared down at it and couldn't speak. He laughed and said, "So it will be more of the whip, Amy Kimball, but in a different way. Like this." he reversed the whip handle and stepped to me and thrust the sleek black leather handle up between my legs. It entered me. It spread inside me. It squirmed in me, palpitating like living flesh, making of itself a disembodied lover. And it was good. My dangling body twisted and bucked in mindless ecstasy. I crooned my gratitude. The black hood leaned to me; if I had had a free hand I would have pulled the mouth under the hood to my swollen breasts. "More," I moaned, "Harder." And I tried to swing myself against the middle of my master, to make contact with his immense "Amy, are you awake? What's the matter?"
It was Henry. He was holding me to him. My nightgown was damp with sweat. "I'm all right," I muttered. But I wasn't. I was tied up in a hundred knots.
"The way you were tossing you almost knocked me out of bed," he said. "And moaning and sobbing. Did you have a nightmare?"
"I guess so."
He held me for a while and then turned his back to me and slept. It was easy enough for him to sleep. I couldn't. After a while I woke him up. I said, "Henry, can't you take your vacation at the end of this week?" "What?" he murmured.
"I have nothing to do with myself. Most of my friends are away. I wish you'd take the two weeks you were going to this summer now instead of waiting till the end of August."
"Impossible."
"Why?"
"The first reason is that I've already put in for the last two weeks in August." "You can change it."
"It wouldn't be easy. Besides, that's during the period Mother plans to visit Aunt Marge. If we go before then, we'll be leaving her here all alone."
"So what? She's a grown woman. She can take care of herself."
"I can't change it, that's all." His voice got testy. "My God, did you wake me up just to start an argument?" "I'm not arguing. I'm merely asking you to change the time of your vacation."
"Well, it can't be done. Now let me sleep."
In the darkness I felt him pull the cover up to his neck. Soon he was snoring in that soft way of his. I lay apart from him. He had refused to help me escapeanyway, escape for two weeks. Of course he didn't know. I couldn't tell him or anybody that what scared me was mostly myself and my fantasies.
Thursday, July 17 I went out three times during the day. I went to the drugstore and then strolled in the park I went to say good-bye to Debby Levine who was leaving tomorrow on a six-week European tour. I went to the bookstore to buy a paperback novel and a birthday card for Father.
There was no sign of him, the first day since Monday. I was greatly relieved.
Friday, July 18 Now in midsummer, when there were few social activities and most of my friends were out of the city, I often went to the park when the day was pleasant.
Especially Tuesdays and Fridays when Leslie came in at eleven to clean and stayed to prepare and serve dinner, which left me little to do at home. The park was only four blocks away.
Sometimes I sat on a bench at the wading pool and watched the children play and envied the mothers my age who had them to mind and scold and fuss over and love. More often I read a book on a rocky little knoll shaded by trees.
Today after lunch I went to the knoll. Probably weekends and evenings lovers came here, for trees and shrubbery and a semicircle of boulders gave the spot a certain amount of privacy. I stretched out in the shade on the sloping granite shelf that was like an immense chaise-longue and read the novel I had bought yesterday.
I became aware of somebody watching me. Even before I looked up I knew who it would be. I hadn't seen him come up the footpath. He seemed to have sprung into being a dozen feet away, and it struck me that the devil would appear suddenly like that.
"How lovely you look lying there," he said. I sat up with my legs under me.
He wore a plaid open-neck shirt and his jacket was draped over his arm. He stood above me on the shelf, out of the shade, and the sun glinted in those eyes set deep under the gray widow's peak-eyes that had never, since the first moment Monday, done anything but pierce into me. I tugged the hem of my dress toward my knees, but it was fashionably short and covered only half my thighs. He would have made me feel self-conscious in an overcoat.
He tossed aside the cigarette he had been puffing on and came over and squatted down facing me. My heart thumped. I wet my lips and said, "Please!"
"Please what?" he said. "You can get up and leave. I won't stop you. I'll never use force on you. I passed a policeman on the other side of the boulders. You merely have to yell."
I looked away from him. I saw my breasts heave in the square bodice of my cotton summer dress. "The fact is," he went on, "you came here knowing I would follow you. Or hoping I would." "That's not true. I come here often. You're driving me away."
"Am I, Amy?" he said softly.
"I'm going!" I said, telling that as much to myself as to him. And I started to rise.
His hand fell on my thigh, just above the knee.
He put no particular pressure on me to make me drop back to the rock shelf, but I did. It was as if the ground came up under me, and I was again sitting on my legs. I wore no stockings and my bare flesh tingled under his hand curled on my thigh.
I found myself looking into his eyes, searching for something, perhaps an image of myself. There was that arrogance I had come to know, that absolute self-assurance, and I was drowning in their quiet depths. And his spread hand flexed as it crept slowly, slowly up the swell of my thigh.
Distantly children shouted at the wading pool. A plane roared overhead. The clamor of traffic outside the park drifted in the stifling air. Here on the knoll I was alone in all the world with a stranger who held my flesh.
I looked down from his face to his hand. It was out of sight under my dress. I remembered it as slim and graceful, and then the tips of his fingers touched my panties.
"Oh, God!" I whimpered.
He said nothing. His hand spoke for him. It glided up over my hip to the waistband. The panties were as brief as could be, a wisp; my bare belly drew in quivering when he touched it. I waited tense and breathless for the hand to slip in under the waistband. Instead it traced the curves of my belly, folded and softened by my sitting position. A fingertip dug into my navel. It was like being stabbed; I could have screamed. Then the hand moved down again, over the panties, and through the so thin nylon gently stroked my mound.
It would have been easy to free myself from that hand by jumping to my feet. Or twisting away from it. What I did was sit there biting the knuckle of my thumb as delicately he traced through the nylon the subtle little hills and hollows. And then the hand pushed in under the panties.
I moaned. I dropped the book and put both hands to my face. I was no longer aware of him as an entity, of his body, even of his eyes. Only of his fingers. His fingers brushing the short curls, electrifying them through the delicate friction so that each tendril acquired a sensation of its own.
I lay back. He didn't tell me to; he still said not a word, just squatted beside me with that one hand extended under my dress and panties while he solemnly watched my face. I lay back on the hard slab because I had to. My legs parted by themselves. A finger slid down the crack, down and in.
"Ah, you're moist," he said, pleased.
Overhead there was a single cloud like a puff of smoke. It vanished as my eyes rolled to the top of my head. The air was filled with moaning. It came from me. None of him touched me but his exquisite fingersthe fluttering, knowing, penetrating fingers giving me the gift of unbearable sensation. I had never guessed that fingers could do so much. It took a stranger, who at times looked like Satan himself, to make me discover in a public park under the blazing sun really and truly for the first time the full marvel of my clitoris. To make me all aflow with strange lubricating juices. To bring me at last to fluttering orgasms like small waves gathering to form a giant wave.
And the wave broke and I bit my forearm. The wave tossed me and shattered me and was reluctant to let go of me. Then I had no breath and no strength and I lay on the rock shelf like something flung there.
Oh, he knew everything. He knew my body better than I did. And he knew exactly when to withdraw his hand and let me subside.
When I opened my eyes, he was standing a short distance away, lighting a cigarette. I sat up. He came over and extended the pack down to me.
"I don't smoke," I said.
"Or drink?"
"No."
"Or fool around with men?"
I blushed. Almost anything made me blush. "Must you taunt me?" I said.
"Why, Amy, this was nothing. A mere preliminary. And strictly one-sided." He sat on his heels like a boy. "Receiving without thinking of giving in return is one mark of innocence. You'll learn. Did anybody ever do that to you before?"
I looked at the mark of my teeth on my forearm. Not even Henry like this-not as a complete act in itself, a complete conclusion, its own justification. But I wouldn't say so to him.
"Your husband, I suppose," he said. "I would hope so for your sake. No other man?" "No."
"Not even so small a thing?"
"You may call it small. I don't." I had had time to become ashamed. "What about with boy friends before you were married?" he persisted. "Certainly not."
"With that face and figure you must have been quite popular. Did you at least neck or pet or make out or whatever your generation called it?"
"Sometimes."
"But not below the waist. We've established that. Kissing in parked cars and now and then letting a boy play beanbag with your breasts. Did they feel them over or under your clothes?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Let me guess. You were one of those dates that got the boys hot and bothered and then left them frustrated and embittered. How about your husband?"
"What do you mean?"
"When he was courting you, did he ever get below your waist and do what I just did?" "He never" I stopped. "He was a" I stopped again.
"I know," he said, flipping away his cigarette. "He was a gentleman. He respected your virtue. One hardly speaks of virtue any more. But then you wereand arewhat used to be called an old-fashioned girl, with maidenhead and practically everything else intact when you came to your sanctified marriage bed."
"What's wrong with that?" I flared up.
"For my purpose, not a thing. I spotted your innocence at once. That was what attracted me to you even more than your body. Only the innocent are worth subjugating."
That was what was being done to me, not seduced but subjugated. And I knew it was only the beginning. Like my fantasies. Like my half-awake dream of being strung up in a dungeon.
I said tightly, "You mentioned something when we spoke outside my house. Something about whipping me."
"So I did."
"You didn't mean it. You were just frightening me." "Does the idea frighten you or excite you?"
Was the answer both? The dream of being whipped had been a sex dream. Lowering my eyes, I said nothing.
He reached and touched my cheek. My skin tingled. "Whatever I do you'll want done," he drawled. "There will be nothing excluded." His hand slid down my cheek. It pushed the short sleeves of my dress past my shoulders.
"Oh, no!" I cried. "Not here!" "Sit still!"
I sat still as he lowered the sleeves to my elbows, uncovering my bra and the upper slopes of my breasts swelling over it. He pulled down the straps of my bra and my breasts tumbled out of the cups. They felt terribly naked and unusually heavy; they were displayed not only to him but would be to whoever appeared on the footpath. I threw my arms across them.
"Don't do that," he ordered me.
I dropped my arms. I pressed my fist down on the rock, leaning back a little under his quiet gaze. "They're lovely," he said. Not to me but to himself; he nodded to himself as if glad to have found what he had expected. Then his hands went to them.
I wanted to moan again, but I managed to keep my voice locked in my throat. Those delicate fingers of his moved over them, discovering their texture, their elasticity, their weight. I leaned back farther against my fists holding me up; I stopped worrying about somebody suddenly appearing; I drew in my breath to make them tighter for his caressing, striking, squeezing hands.
His head bent. He kissed a nipple. It sprang erect against his tongue. This was the first time his mouth had been on me. He shifted it to the other breast; his sucking lips sent tremors through me. The top of his head filled my sight. It drew my mouth as my hippies drew his. My lips ran through his hair and fastened on his earlobethe first time I had touched him anywhere.
Sudden pressure of his cheek on my breasts forced me down on my back. Again I lay stretched out under the sun. My still stiff nipples pointed up to the sky. He pushed up the bottom of my dress to my hips.
I thought: If somebody comes along. But I didn't say it. I couldn't speak. He tugged at my panties. I lay helpless, without will, as they slipped out from under my buttocks. But only to the middle of my thighs. Leaving them there, he sat beside my leg looking down at the heart of my sexual being. As if, I thought with a flash of resentment, studying it to decide if it pleased him. Then he kissed me there.
I cried out at the feel of his mouth where nobody's mouth had ever been. In a frenzy of need I grabbed his rather thick hair to hold him tighter to me. His head slipped away and he was gone, rising to his feet.
That was all. He went to where his jacket was, leaving me lying there with my clothes obscenely out of place, dress lowered at top and raised at the bottom, bra tight under my breasts and panties around my thighs. I stared at him picking up his jacket, knowing that I was being deliberately tormented by him. How I hated him!
"I have to run along," he said casually. "Next time there will be other things."
I roused. I tugged my panties up. I sat and adjusted my bra and dress. My hands trembled. I didn't look at him.
He said, "Stand up and kiss me."
Sit still, he said, and I sat still. Stand up, he said, and I stood up.
When I was on my feet, he put his arms around me. He was not short, though not nearly as tall as Henry. Kiss me, he had said, and I kissed him. Now for the first time our mouths were together-our mouths and the full lengths of our bodies. His lips parted, and so mine did, and we gave each other our tongues. I had a sense of feeding at his mouth; I couldn't get enough of it. He was the one who pulled away.
"I'll be in touch," he said, And sauntered down the path.
After he was out of sight, I realized that I had learned nothing about him. Not even his name.
Monday, July,21 Late in the afternoon he phoned me at home. As soon as I heard his voice, I said, "I don't want to see you ever again. Let me alone!"
All weekend I had been rehearsing what I would say to him the next time I looked up to see him in the street or the park or anywhere or if ha phoned. Each time the words had been somewhat different, sometimes pleading, sometimes threatening, sometimes ladylike, sometimes crude, but every variation had come to the same thing. The more time passed since what had happened in the park, the more I was ashamed and resolved not to repeat it.
It had at any rate been a bad weekend. Part had been dull and part miserable. Saturday had been the dull day.
Henry rose at seven in the morning to play golf with some of his cronies. He knew how I felt about him leaving me on one of his days off, but he went anyway. He promised to rush through eighteen holes and be home by eleven. At two-thirty he appeared, exhausted from playing in the blazing heat. By the time we were through with dinner the day was practically over, and about all there was left for us to do on a Saturday night was go to the movies. The three of us, for as usual his mother came along.
And the picture was no good. Even if it had been, I wouldn't have paid much attention to it. Because, sitting in the theater holding hands with Henry (his mother sat on the other side of him, sharing him as it were), I went over and over in my mind what I would tell him, whose name I didn't even know, next time he spoke to me. One thing was absolutely sure: I would never again let anybody but Henry put his hands on me.
Sunday had been the miserable day. It had hardly started when I had a fight with my mother-in-law.
Henry had gone out for the Sunday paper. When I went to dress (I was in my housecoat), I discovered Leslie hadn't ironed things of mine I had asked her to Friday. I learned that what had happened was that while I had been in the park (with him) my mother-in-law had told Leslie to wash out the kitchen cabinets instead.
"They were a mess," my mother-in-law told me. "They had to be done."
"The ironing was more important," I said.
She sniffed. "Surely you can iron a blouse yourself." "That's not the point, Amy, if I may ask?"
Standing there with her lips compressed and her hands folded and her voice dripping icicles, she made me feel like an unreasonable child. I spoke to her as I never had before. I said, "The point is that I am the one who decides what my maid is to do in my house."
She looked at me as if I had struck her. In a way I had.
We were in the living room and Henry heard what I said as he let himself into the apartment. So he got into it too.
He tried to be impartial, which meant that by not taking my side he in effect took hers. He said that this was the home of all three of us and we should live together in peace and harmony. Anyway, words to that effect. Before he could finish his little speech, I ran into our bedroom and slammed the door.
In a few minutes he came in and tried to placate me by saying I was right but that we had to be kind to her because she was a lonely widow who had nobody but us.
"She has a sister," I said. "Let her live with her for a change." "It's impossible," he said.
"It's impossible because her own sister can't stand her for more than short periods at a time. Why should I have to?"
"I'm her son and you're my wife."
"Sometimes I think you married the wrong woman. Maybe you should have married your mother." "My God, Amy, how can you talk like that?"
"I'm sorry," I said wearily.
Such a small matter, really, whether a few of my blouses and dresses were ironed or not, to lead to this kind of nastiness. Except that it did go so much deeper.
"Besides," Henry was saying, "Mother pays more than her share of the expenses. We couldn't afford this apartment without her."
"Without her we could live in a smaller apartment."
She spent the rest of the day and all evening sulking in her room, coming out only for dinner which as usual I cooked and served. I sulked in my own way by not speaking more than I had to to either of them. He read the paper and watched a baseball game on television and did the Sunday crossword puzzle. And so a lovely July Sunday slipped away from us.
When at last it was late enough to go to bed, he wanted to make up by making love. I wouldn't let him. I wouldn't even let him kiss me good-night. I didn't want any man to touch me.
At breakfast we were all quite formal with each other, the way people are after a quarrel. I kissed him good-bye when he left for work-anyway, a peck on the cheek. He was really a sweet man, always anxious to do the right thing. If only he weren't such a spineless mama's boy!
And then it was afternoon and there was that so smooth voice on the phone.
Luckily my mother-in-law had gone out. There were three phones in the apartment-in my room, in her room, and in the kitchenand she would have listened in, especially if she had been the one to answer and had heard a man's voice.
I said, "Hello?" and he said, "Amy Kimball?" and through whatever it was that jumped into my throat I blurted what I had been preparing myself to say. Let me alone!like a cry of despair.
He simply ignored what I had said. "Meet me tomorrow in the park at two," he told me. "No. Absolutely not. I refuse to be"
"The same place," he went on as if I hadn't spoken at all, "And this time leave off your brassiere and panties. Is that clear?"
"I won't be there."
"See you tomorrow," he said and hung up.
I was the one who should have hung up on him. The monumental conceit of the man! It was my fault. I had been so incredibly foolish and shameless as to have let him- Never again. Never, never.
I despised all men. Including Henry.
Tuesday, July 22 I went.
Maybe it was because the rain, which had started during the night, made me restless. I stood at a window and felt very much alone in the gray, wet world, and I couldn't bear being shut in. Shut in not so much by the walls of the apartment (where in the kitchen my mother-in-law and Leslie chattered incessantly) as feeling closed in and isolated within myself. So a few minutes before two o'clock I put on my raincoat and rain kerchief and boots.
"Where in earth are you going in this weather?" my mother-in-law asked, coming out of the kitchen. "I think I'll drop in on Edwina."
When I reached the street, I found that the steady rain had turned into a cloudburst. I stood in the building entrance waiting for it to let up. In about fifteen minutes it didanyway, enough for me to venture out into the open.
The park was absolutely empty. He had said the same place, which meant the knoll, but he hadn't counted on a rainstorm. It was ridiculous to go there. But there was no alternate meeting place, I didn't seem to have a choice, and so I plodded between the puddles in the blacktop walks, bowing to the swirling wind, water running down my bare legs into my boots, my face full of rain, and trying not to be frightened by the thunder I had never liked. The narrow footpath up to the knoll had become a running stream up which I had to wade.
He wasn't there. Of course he wasn't. He had more sense than I.
I stood under one of the trees, waiting though I was sure there was nothing to wait for. Lightning flashed close or seemed to, followed quickly by thunder, and I remembered that under a tree was the most dangerous place in a thunderstorm. I left then. I made my way down the knoll, slipping twice in mud, and fought the storm all the way out of the park.
I had gone into the park at the entrance nearest my house. I came out the same way. "Amy!" somebody shouted above the downpour.
Looking around, I saw his face at the open door of a green sedan at the curb. I ran to it. He slid across the seat to the side behind the wheel to give me room on his right. I got in and slammed the door after me and at last I was out of the rain.
I sank back in the wide seat to catch my breath. He handed me a box of tissues. As I wiped my face and hands, I said, "I walked all the way to the knoll and back."
"I know. I saw you go into the park."
I looked at him. He wore a black raincoat buttoned to his chin. His tight mouth was tighter than usual. "You mean you were sitting here watching the entrance?" I said.
"Of course. Since two o'clock."
"And you didn't call me or come after me?" "Obviously I didn't."
"Why not?"
"You were fully fifteen minutes late. I refuse to be kept waiting. You had to be punished." "There's a storm."
"That's no excuse."
"It's the best excuse," I said furiously. "You should be grateful I came out at all to meet you." "Don't expect gratitude from me. You came for your own pleasure." His right hand rested on the wheel and from the cigarette between two fingers smoke as lazy as his voice drifted across the blurred windshield. "You were quite disappointed not to find me in the park, weren't you?"
I thought of leaving. I thought of opening the door and getting out of there where I was closed in with him and going home where I belonged. All I did was think of it.
"You seem very sure of me," I said.
"I am now," he said.
He crushed out his cigarette in the dashboard ashtray, then moved closer to me and put his hand on my knee.
"No," I said. "We can't sit here. It's too near my home." "You can't be recognized through these rain-smeared windows." "I don't want to sit parked here."
He didn't argue and he didn't start the car. He slid his hand up under the bottom of my dress. That part of the dress was wet from the swirling rain and my thighs were damp. His hand curled, moving warm and tender and, oh, so slowly.
It was hot and stuffy in the car. All the windows were closed. A bus rolled by.
His fingers stretched to touch my panties. He scowled. His hand withdrew. He raised it and slapped my face. Then his other hand swept up to slap my other cheek.
Nothing like this had ever been done to me. I had never been struck anywhere by anybody, not even as a child. I burst into tears.
He watched me sit huddled beside him sobbing. Presently he took some tissues out of the box and gave them to me. I wiped my eyes. The tears stopped, but I couldn't stop sniffling.
"Wh-why did you?" I said at last.
"I told you to leave your underwear off." He opened a button on my raincoat and squeezed my right breast. "You're wearing a brassiere too. I definitely told you."
"II was wearing them when I decided to meet you after all. I didn't thinkI didn't bother to" I sat erect. I drew in my breath. "Anyway, who are you to tell me what to wear or not? What right have you to humiliate me like this?"
"I've assumed the right," he said. "You are to obey me without question. I made that clear from the first." I turned away from him. I wanted to say to him, The hell with you, you bastard! in exactly those words, words I seldom used, but I was afraid I'd burst out crying again if I did. I grasped the door handle to open the door.
I hesitated. I knew that if I went through that door I would be going away from him for good, rid of him, free from him. I hesitated, and then it was too late. He put his hand on my arm.
I let him draw me to him. My face turned to him, and when he kissed me my hand went to the back of his head. My mouth opened and my tongue came out to meet his and through our tongues we were joined together.
I felt helpless and doomed. I felt all soft and fluttery.
Too soon he released me and lit a cigarette. When he had stuck the lighter back into the dashboard, he said, "All right, now take off your things."
"You can't mean undress here in the car?"
"Hardly. Remove what you shouldn't have worn, your panties and brassiere." "Can't we at least drive to where it's more private?"
"No."
The panties were easy. I unbuttoned my raincoat and reached under my dress and pulled them down my legs and over my boots. Then I said, "That will have to be all. I can't take off my bra without taking off my coat and dress."
He said nothing, just sat with an elbow on the wheel and a cigarette in his mouth and his eyes boring into me.
"Will it be all right if I only unhook it?" I asked anxiously.
He didn't say yes or no. He sat turned to me waiting. I dared not delay doing at least something. I was wearing my scallop-front dress which buttoned all the way down. I opened the top two buttons.
The rain had slackened somewhat. Two boys passed on the sidewalk between the car and the park fence. If I could see them through the streaked window, they could see me. So could whoever else passed by on foot or, on the other side, in cars. Keeping the front of me covered as much as I could by the coat, I unbuttoned more buttons. I turned fully to him so that his body would block me out from the road and through the opening in the dress I worked my hands behind me and unhooked the bra. Then as, holding my dress together, I straightened up, I saw the knife in his hand.
It was only a penknife, but as he leaned to me and drew my dress apart I felt a moment of terror. I cowered. "Hold still!" he ordered.
What he did with the knife was to cut one strap of the bra and then the other. Then he sat back and took a puff on his cigarette and put the knife away. He hadn't touched my now available breasts at all.
I pulled the loose bra out of the dress and dropped it on top of the panties on the seat and held my coat clutched together.
"You may button your dress, Amy."
I did so. He had had his way. I had on nothing but dress and raincoat and kerchief and boots. "Can we leave here now?" I said.
"We have all afternoon."
"Why must it be so near my house where I might be seen with you by somebody who knows me?" "Suppose you are?" he said. "You'll say I'm a one-time teacher of yours and you ducked* into my car out of the rain to say hello. We're merely talking."
But as he was saying that, his hand was again on my thigh, moving up under my dress. People glancing into the car could see nothing but the two of us sitting quite sedately, a foot or two apart. They could see my face, though, if they passed close, and I couldn't keep out of it what was being done to me. I turned more to him, putting my left leg up on the seat so my knee dug into his hip, and pressed my cheek to the top of the seat.
It was the same as on the knoll Friday, except that this time there were no panties to encumber him. His hand slid directly up the inside of my thigh to where I was wide open for him. Open and already aflow with anticipation. He lingered at my clitoris, rolling it with fingertips to throbbing erection, my right leg spread away to open me even more, as far as possible, and when a finger slipped easily into the wanton damp awaiting it, the heel of my right boot began to grind on the floor.
He was a virtuoso of the fingers. I had known how, with the slightest of movements, the most delicate of flexing, the strumming and the gliding and the swirling, such delirium could be produced, How I adored his fingers! I had an urge to tell him so, but there in the car on the busy street I had to keep my contorted face hidden against the seat and my moans stifled by its material. And all the time he held a smoldering cigarette in his other hand and watched the side of my face visible to him, And the rain pelted on the roof and I heard thunder and in the humid, airless car I belonged wholly to his fingers.
Then the storm was pounding inside me. My own private storm. My right heel tried to grind itself through the floorboard. He seemed to be watching my orgasm. The caressing of his fingers changed, soothing now instead of stimulating, and then, as I subsided, simply holding me there by the hand for another minute before taking it away. Then he leaned to the ashtray to stub out his cigarette.
I put both feet on the floorboard and tugged down the hem of my dress. Prickles of sensation continued to run through me, dribbling away. He lit another cigarette; he smoked all the time. Because of the closed windows, the smoke rasped my throat. I looked out at the rain.
Kid stuff in a parked car, I thought now that it was over. I, a married woman and he much older and no doubt very much a man of the world, yet merely the kind of thing schoolgirls called not quite going all the way with a date, the safe and non-committal orgasms. But with us, it could be only a preliminary. The beginning of a beginning. And so what now?
He wasn't making any move. We sat apart, both silent. I said, "Do you want me to go home now?" "Do you want to?"
I didn't answer.
"Do you want to?" he repeated. "No. But"
He laughed. "You're wondering why I would be satisfied with so little, I'm not. Are you?" I bit my lower lip. I didn't answer that either.
"We're getting acquainted in various little ways," he said. "You achieve maturity when you stop rushing things. You savor each delicacy. Tell me about yourself, Amy."
"There's not much to tell."
"A husband, of course. What does he do?" "He's an engineer with the city highway department." "Do you like him?"
"I love him."
He nodded as if he had expected me to say that. "It's true," I said sharply.
"I see no reason why it shouldn't be. How old are you?" "Twenty-seven."
"A fine age for a woman. In her sexual prime. Where do you come from?"
"My father is a history professor at Trevan College. I lived there all my life till I was married three years ago and moved here."
"That's an all-girl college, isn't it?"
"Yes. I went there after I graduated from the local high school." "In short, you didn't have many boys around you." "Oh, they came from other schools to date us."
"But it was essentially a female atmosphere. Any brothers or sisters?" "No."
"So you were an only child sheltered from the male world." "Other professors were constantly in the house." "Mostly older men, I suppose. Like me."
"What are you getting at? I did go out quite a bit with boys. Just because I wasn't one of the easy girlsbecause I didn't letbecause never like a few minutes agonot even Henry till"
I stopped trying to be coherent. I turned away from him to look out at the rain-swept park. "You're adorable," he said. "I'm beginning to understand your fascinating mixture of sophistication and naivete." He took my hand from my lap and kissed it, his first really affectionate gesture. "Let's go, Amy."
"Go where?"
"Where we were to meet. The knoll in the park." "It's raining."
"It was raining harder when you went expecting to meet me there."
I buttoned my raincoat and adjusted my kerchief over my hair. When I shifted along the seat to the door, I brushed my panties and my ruined bra to the floor. I left them there.
I walked ahead as he locked the car doors. There was no need to be seen openly with him on the street. Well inside the entrance to the empty park I waited for him. When he reached me, I took his arm. We walked huddled together.
I didn't understand why we were here, but I was learning not to question him.
The path up to the knoll was now a torrent. We had to go single file. He led the way up, pausing every few feet to give me a hand. He had no boots or even rubbers; the water came up to the cuffs of his pants. It was crazy. What was up there?
The great granite slab was up there, and when we stood on it he took me in his arms. Our mouths came together. I tasted rain on his lips. Then there in the storm, in the rain and wind and thunder and lightning, he began to unbutton my coat.
"I'll get soaked," I said.
He ignored my protest. He always did. He unbuttoned my coat all the way down and opened it wide. Almost at once my dress was sopping wet. Then, with both of us battered by the wind and the rain, he undid every button on my dress and spread it apart, denuding me down to the tops of my boots to the cool rain.
He looked at my breasts (the nipples stiff with chill) and then kissed them. His tongue lapped up the rain pouring over them. I nuzzled his drenched hair, I nibbled at his ear, I kissed his temple; like him I drank rain. He straightened up. His weight bearing me backward, his encircling arms eased me down to the granite slab. I lay on my back, feeling the hard wet coldness of it through my coat and dress, with all of the front of me naked to the storm and to him.
He fumbled at the buttons of his raincoat, at his clothes under the coat. Then he was over me, and I was partly sheltered by his propped-up body, and his cool wet flesh touched my cool wet flesh. I raised my head to look at him in that traditional half-crouch rampantly preparing to thrust. I remembered my fantasy of the dungeon and the whipping and the whip handle and of how he, in his obscene executioner's outfit, had had an organ of fantastic size, I half-expected to see that now, but of course he was perfectly normal. Not Satan but a man. Which was exactly what was so good about this now here in the downpour. My hands shot down between us. I seized it with both hands, holding it between my palms. It felt exactly right. It felt marvelously smooth and rigid and avid. I would have liked to have stroked it for a while, but I was in no condition to hold off. Straining up to him, I quickly guided him into me.
The back of his raincoat was slippery under my clawing hands. It seemed that lightning flashed with each of our thrusts, and when the thunder followed it echoed in my blood, I no longer feared the lightning here in the open joined to him, absorbing him, part of him physically as he was part of me. The thunder was as once outside me and in me. His mouth fastened on my breast. "Bite it!" I cried. I didn't think he heard me. I thrashed on the rain-slick rock. "More!" I cried. "Harder!" He turned into a battering ram. Good! Batter me, bite me, fulfill me. No need to beg him to wait for me, I knew that he could and would wait for the right moment. And it was coming, "Now!" I cried. Coming, coming. Caught up and battered in a drenched world of tumultuous sensation, I screamed as loud as the storm itself.
Nothing like this had ever before happened to me.
He slipped away from me. With the canopy of his body gone, the rain washed over my flesh: It was too much effort at the moment to cover myself. I lay where I was, drenched and fulfilled, and the rain felt surprisingly gentle. My eyes had been closed for some time. I opened them and looked up at a rift in the clouds and the rain was again slackening. It was as if the storm had spent itself along with me.
He stood looking down at me as he buttoned his raincoat. I realized how utterly revealed I was and stirred at last to pull the sodden dress together at the top and down at the bottom.
"Modest," he commented. "The eternal innocent."
"I don't feel very innocent."
"But you are, Amy. You don't know how innocent."
He reached down and helped me to my feet. I buttoned all the buttons that had to be buttoned. He watched me the way he always watched me.
I said, "Why here in the open in the storm? You could have taken me somewhere else." "It was dramatic. I never laid a woman under these circumstances. You'll do many things because they please my fancy. And you enjoyed it."
"You know I did," I said. And suddenly I couldn't meet his eyes.
We started down from the knoll. Again he led the way. Near the bottom I stopped and stood ankle-deep in the down-rushing water.
"I still don't know your name," I said. He turned. "What's that?"
"Your name. I don't know it." "Zorn."
"Zorn what? Is that your first or last name?" "Zorn will do," he said and moved on.
On the walk at the foot of the path I took his arm. Soaked through and through, we strolled on level ground, still with the park all to ourselves. Though the rain continued, a bit of sunlight had broken through. The air smelled fresh and clean. I felt curiously content.
Near the gate where we had entered I stopped and slipped my hand from his arm. "I'd better walk the rest of the way home alone."
"Very well."
There was a silence. I stood waiting.
His eyes crinkled. "Say it, Amy. You want to ask me when you'll see me again."
"Yes."
"When I want you. Tomorrow. Next week. I'll decide."
I felt a flash of resentment at his manner. But only a small flash and then it was gone. He had in a way acquired me, acquired my will along with my body, and standing with him in the now gentle rain there seemed nothing at all wrong with that.
I said, "Listen. When you phone mewell, there are problems. I mean, we have extension phones and there are people in the house and a strange man calling me"
"Don't worry. Depend on me not to do anything to disrupt your marriage. A woman named Gertrude will phone you."
"Who is she?"
"My housekeeper. Say she is a new friend of yours. You will ostensibly go places with her. That will make you available."
"It can't be Saturdays or Sundays or evenings."
"I am aware of the restrictions of a married life. Anyway, I prefer the daytime." "Are you also married?"
"No."
"I really don't know a thing about you."
"You know all you need to know." He kissed me briefly, chastely, a mere brushing of the lips. "Now go, Amy."
I walked away from the man who had slapped my face and made me remove my underwear in his car and intimately caressed me amid passersby and cars and trucks and on a rock shelf in a thunder storm stripped me and possessed me. A man who was not young, who was arrogant and brutal and frightening. My lover.
Part Two. THE OCTAGONAL ROOM
Friday, July 25
Everytime the phone rang my heart jumped. I could hardly breathe till, answering it myself or listening to my mother-in-law or Leslie or Henry answer it, I learned it was not that call.
It hadn't come on Wednesday or Thursday, and when Zornrather, a woman named Gertrudehadn't called by early afternoon today, that probably meant I wouldn't hear from him till next week. If then.
He might have lost interest. Having had his way, having overcome what he liked to call my innocence, he might have no more use for me. Some men were like that. And I would be glad. If I couldn't save myself, he might save me. Or so now and then I told myself as I settled down to wait for next week.
Wednesday night Henry had wanted to make love. Ordinarily that would have been all right. The last time had been Saturday night and usually there were only three or four days between when we both were feeling well. But Wednesday had been only the evening after the rainy afternoon in the car and in the park with Zorn, and the idea of Henry so soon after appalled me. He had been easy to put off. Being the kind and considerate man he was, he almost never insisted.
Now Friday night when we went to bed he was again eager. It was practically a week's interval for him, and I was his wife and had to be fair to him. And by then I did want to, really. He was the most attractive man I knew, and his kisses began to rouse me. He didn't dally long; he spread his muscular body over me, quite covering me. As usual he had a bit of trouble getting in, hurting me for a moment. (Why had it been so easy, so open and oiled, with Zorn on the stone slab in the downpour?) Then he was snugly settled in me, it was all right, no problem when he began to glide, just the simple pleasure of love and life. This was the way it should be, I thought as I rolled my hips to keep up with him-here in my comfortable bed among familiar things with my husband, not out in a storm in a public park with an arrogant, frightening, probably evil stranger. That had been demented and demeaning, something out of a sex fantasy. This was real and clean and proper. This was love. And very nice, too, as for once we more or less came together.
Merely nice. I didn't scream as I had in the rain and the thunder and the lightning. I didn't even moan. And as Henry rested over me on his elbows in the brief aftermath, I realized that all the time he had been physically inside me pictures of myself and Zorn had been in my head. Both, heaven help me, had had me at the same time. I slipped out from under Henry and went to the bathroom to wash up.
Returning to the bedroom, I paused with my hand on the light switch. Through the open door the glow from the bathroom reached the bed, and I looked at Henry lying on his back with his eyes closed and a contented smile on his face. He was young and wholesome and handsomeexactly what a woman wanted in a man. I went and bent over him and covered his face with kisses.
"I love you," I said, running my mouth over his eyes and nose and mouth and chin. And I did love him, I did.
Sunday, July 27 The head of Henry's department invited us to spend the day at his country club. It was very hot, and my mother-in-law and I were at the pool most of the time while Henry and his boss played golf. Considering that she had a son of twenty-nine, she made a fine figure in a bathing suit.
We returned home in the evening. The phone rang as Henry unlocked the door. My mother-in-law, who was convinced that every phone call had to be for her, hurried ahead to answer it in the kitchen. I stood very still in the hall, listening.
"Amy, it's for you," she shouted. "A Mrs. Ember." I relaxed as I went to the kitchen. "Mrs. who?"
"Mrs. Ember." As she handed me the phone, her eyes demanded an explanation of who Mrs. Ember was. Everything was her business.
I said, "Hello?"
"Amy?" a pleasant voice said. "This is Gertrude Ember." Zorn's Gertrude! I tried to act casual.
"Oh, hello," I said.
"How have you been, Amy?" "Fine."
"I can get off tomorrow to go to the museum. I'll pick you up in my car at eleven-thirty in the morning." "That early?" I said.
They were now both in the kitchen. Henry was taking a bottle of coke from the refrigerator while his mother was getting glasses from the cupboard. I would have taken the call in my room if I had known who it was.
"We can have a long day," the voice on the line was saying. "We'll have lunch together." "In the museum?"
"No. I know a good place nearby. Be at the southeast corner of Pine and Third. You must be prompt. It's impossible to park there for even a minute, so you'll have to be waiting for me. I'll be driving east on Pine Street. Is that clear?"
"Yes."
"Then I'll see you tomorrow. Good-bye, Amy."
I hung up. Henry was pouring coke into three glasses. And, of course, my mother-in-law had to ask who that was.
"Gertrude Ember," I said. "She's a new friend. I'm getting together with her tomorrow." Henry handed one of the filled glasses to his mother and one to me. "I don't remember you mentioning her."
"I met her recently. Throughthrough Debby Levine." Using Debby's name was safer than Edwina's or any other friend's because she was off in Europe. "We're going to the museum. There's that new exhibit."
"Ember?" Henry said between gulps of coke. "Seems I heard that name. What does her husband do?" "She hasn't got a husband."
"Mother called her missus," he said. "Didn't you, Mother?"
Looking at me over the top of her glass in an oddly intent way, she said, "She certainly called herself Mrs. Ember."
I drank to avoid meeting her eyes. If anybody would suspect anything, she would. "She's divorced," I said. "I don't know much about her and nothing about her husband. Sheshe's an artist and interested in African art and asked me to go with her."
I was blurting out words. I had to get out of the close confines of the kitchen where I felt hemmed in by them. I put down my half-full glass.
"There's a piece in today's paper about that exhibit," she said. "I'd very much like to see it." "Well, you can't come with us," I told her shrilly. Almost at once I recovered. "I mean, Mother, that Gertrude and I want to go to a number of places together. And we're having lunch together."
"Oh, I understand perfectly," she said in that long-suffering, chin-up way of hers. "I hope you don't imagine I want to impose on you."
Mumbling something about changing into my housecoat, I turned and went to my room. I'd done it badly, I knew. But then I'd never before done anything like that.
Monday, July 28 By eleven o'clock I had showered and dressed and was ready to go.
I thought I looked rather smart in the full-length mirror on the outside wall of the bathroom door. I had on my form-fitting nylon shift with long sleeves and surplice neck, and I wore meshed stockings and open-toed pumps. If the pinched waistline emphasized my bosom too much, that was the way I was built. Perhaps too much lipstick. I rubbed a bit off with a tissue.
I had no idea where he would take me. Certainly not the museum or any other public place. Maybe to his home-if he hadn't a good reason to keep me away from there. Maybe it would again be something like last Tuesday, first sitting in his parked car, then going not to the park (which on a fine day like this would be full of people), but, say, some isolated spot in the country where Suddenly I realized that nothing about my outfit was right.
First the dress. It couldn't be opened anywhere but at the zipper in back, and the neck was high and the sleeves were long. And second, what was under the dressbra, panties, garter belt.
Last time he had been angry because I had worn underwear. This time he hadn't said I shouldn't, but he hadn't spoken to me, Gertrude had, and she might have forgotten to tell me. Or he had assumed that I knew that henceforth I was to leave off everything under my dress. At any rate, I had better, not only to avoid being slapped but (and I flushed at the thought) to make things easier for him. Yes, and for me too.
I took off everything down to my skin and started over again. Luckily I had time. My second outfit was simpler to get into. All it consisted of were white sandals and my casual cotton dress with the big patch pockets and (most important) button front. The bodice was loose enough not to indicate my nipples or show me jiggling when I walked.
My mother-in-law was glancing through the ads in the morning paper in the living room when I passed through it.
"Are you leaving for the museum?" she said.
"Yes. We're having the steak tonight. If I'm not home by five-thirty, please put up baked potatoes." She was looking at my body. I felt she could see me naked under my dress. Though that was highly unlikely.
"Do you expect to be out so late?" she said. "I really don't know."
And I didn't.
The intersection of Pine Street and Third Avenue was three blocks from my house. It was twenty-five after eleven when I got there. I stood at the southeast corner tensely clutching my handbag with both hands as I looked down Pine Street (a one-way street) from where he would come. His car, I recalled, was a big green sedan.
The corner was a bus stop, so others were waiting there along with me. Which was both good and bad. The small crowd gave me some protective coloration, but it increased the chance of somebody who knew me being there and seeing me enter a strange man's car. I was full of fears and suspicions.
A taxi pulled up exactly where I stood at the curb. The driver looked at me and grinned and reached over the seat to open the back door. I shook my head. This was one time I didn't want a taxi.
"Get in, Mrs. Kimball," he said.
I went close and whispered, "You're from Mr. Zorn?" and he nodded. So I got in. Sinking back in the seat, I felt like a character in a spy novel.
The driver had thin gray hair and the back of his neck was creased with age. His identification card said his name was Joseph Dunwald.
I leaned forward. "There were other women on that corner. How did you know I was the one?" "Easy. He said a young lady with a terrific build."
"Where are we going?"
He glanced around in surprise. He had a sad, broken-down face. "You don't know?" "No."
"Mr. Zorn's house."
We drove out of the city and through the western outskirts where housing developments were only now being built. We climbed a steep road and burst upon a house perched on top of a cliff. Beyond it was nothing but the bright summer sky.
The house was what they called contemporary. Built of stone and cedar and lots of glass, it sprawled on several staggered levels, with the back of it considerably lower than the front. His green sedan was parked in a dug-out flat area. Near it the taxi stopped.
"Here we are," the driver said.
I got out and opened my handbag.
"It's all been taken care of, lady. I'll be back to drive you home." "When will that be?"
"They'll let me know."
The taxi turned and disappeared over the crest of the road. Nobody was in sight. The entrance was on the right where stone steps led up to a high fieldstone terrace. I stood a moment, feeling butterflies in my stomach. Then I started toward the steps.
"Mrs. Kimball."
A huge man stood at a ground-level door. His face was square and rigid and his hair was like a haphazard heap of straw. He wore a black linen suit and white shirt with black bowtie.
"This way, madam," he said.
He went in ahead of me through that back door. I followed him up a narrow hall and up a staircase so high and steep that I was somewhat out of breath when I reached the landing at the top. He opened a door and stepped aside. I entered. He closed the door behind me.
I found myself alone in a quite large octagonal room full of sunlight. Three of the walls opposite me consisted of glass from floor to ceiling and past them was the sky. I crossed the room, moving over lush bright-red carpeting. The three glass walls extended over the hill so that standing there was like standing at the edge of space. In the distance gleamed the towers of the city.
I turned back to the room. Each of the three other walls had doors in them. The two remaining walls were covered with paintings, hung as profusely as in an Italian art museum. Most were abstract-impressionist in gay colors. Originals, as far as I could tell.
Dominating the room was an immense round divan covered with a hand-woven spread, red like the carpet though a darker shade, and strewn with varicolored cushions. There were two deep upholstered armchairs, a leather hassock, a free-form coffee table, end tables and standing lamps. A room for lounging and partying, and for dining in this instance; a smallish square table was set for two. An air conditioner hummed.
The middle door opened (I had entered through the door on its left) and a woman came in with a glass pitcher. She was plump with a pleasant motherly face and walked as if her feet hurt her.
"Good-morning, Mrs. Kimball," she said. I knew the voice. "You're Mrs. Ember."
"Gertrude," she said. "Everybody calls me Gertrude." "Where is Mr. Zorn?"
"He knows you're here " She dragged herself to the third door and opened it. "This is the bathroom. Would you like to freshen up?"
"Thanks."
I started toward it, but I didn't reach it. Zorn appeared through the same door she had. He wore slacks and a sport shirt with the two top buttons open. Portrait of a dignified man-of-the-world receiving a mistress in his plush home.
He didn't say hello. His eyes merely crinkled as he came to where I stood. He put his hands on my hips and kissed me.
My mouth tingled, responding, and then I stiffened. His hands had risen to my breasts, and there close by was Gertrude pouring juice from the pitcher. Embarrassed, I tried to pull away.
His hands tightened on my breasts covered only by my dress. He hurt them. "I'm not finished," he said irritably.
"Wait till we're alone," I whispered. "Nonsense!"
He pulled me against him and put his tongue in my mouth. I stood submissively, afraid of being hurt again. Out of the corner of my eyes I saw her leave the room. At that I relaxed against him.
When he released me, I stood fluffing my hair. He watched me in that completely possessive way of his, and I thought he was going to take me now. In a bedroom or right here on the round divan. But he just kept looking at me.
To ease the tension building up in me, I said, "What a lovely room!" "I'm glad you like it."
"I'd love to see the rest of the house."
He glanced at his watch. "We'll eat now. There's a long afternoon ahead of us."
We sat down at the table. This was two weeks to the day after we had sat opposite each other at that table in Schiller's restaurant and he had said those first words to me, You must be very beautiful naked. And he had said other things that had outraged and frightened me, yet here I was. I picked up my glass of vegetable juice, and my hand wasn't steady. Watching my hand, he smiled.
I said, "Do you live alone in this big house?" "With my servants, Gertrude and Kurt." "Is Kurt the big blond man?"
"Yes."
"Isn't there anybody else?" I said. "I mean, why did you have me come in through the back door? As if I were being sneaked in."
"That's absurd," he said. "I don't sneak anybody anywhere. That door happens to be one way to enter this house."
Gertrude brought in two plates of tuna fish salad. As she put down one of the plates before me, she said half-apologetically, "Mr. Zorn always has a light lunch, Mrs. Kimball."
"That's good, so do I." And when she was out of the room, I said to him, "I suppose you had to tell Gertrude my name since she called me, but did you have to tell everybody?"
"Are you thinking of something like blackmail?" The idea amused him. "You needn't worry. Gertrude and Kurt are absolutely trustworthy."
"What about the taxi driver?"
"I trust him also." He reached to put a hand on mine. "Amy, I've told you this before. I've no interest in disrupting your marriage in any way."
We finished lunch with fresh fruit and coffee. No fattening dessert. Then, as Gertrude cleared the table, he sat in the deeper of the two armchairs, a lounge chair, smoking a cigarette while I stood at the windows looking out at the city. We waited.
At last the table was cleared and the tablecloth removed and there was no need for Gertrude to come in again. Zorn lit a fresh cigarette and slumped over in his chair and said, "Take your clothes off, Amy."
"Can't we go to a bedroom?"
"No. Here."
Half-turned from him, I started to unbutton my dress. I was shy about it. He had seen and felt the most intimate parts of me on the knoll in the park, but now it would be all of it at once. With my lower lip between my teeth, I shed the dress. Of course I had nothing under it. For a moment I held it in front of me, then with a small tight laugh tossed it on the divan and faced him fully.
You must be very beautiful naked.
And here I was naked, the way he had been confident from the very beginning he would have me. And his eyes glowed.
"Yes," he said. "Yes, I was right. Turn around."
I turned slowly, like a dress model, and took a few steps this way and that. "See, no scars," I said coyly. "No deformities."
"Your shoes," he said.
I lifted one foot and then the other to unstrap the sandals. He sat there smoking quietly, in no hurry. He was never in a hurry.
"I remembered to leave off my underwear," I said, anxious to make him pleased with me in everything. "It doesn't matter," he said. "You may wear anything you wish when you come here." He mashed out his cigarette. I waited tremulous, waiting for him to come and take. He came to within two feet of me and put hands on my breasts.
Only his palms at first. He rolled them on the nipples which stiffened tingling against his skin. I shivered. He pushed my breasts apart and together and up as if testing their resilience.
"Very good," he commented. "I was a bit afraideven after what I'd felt and seen of themthey'd be too big and sloppy. They're neither. They're luscious." He bent his gray-fringed head to kiss them. His hands ran down over my waist. "Good hips. I want a woman to feel like a woman." His hands slid around to the back of me. "Full, round buttocks. Smooth thighs."
I had to giggle. "You sound like you're taking an inventory."
"I am." Always his hands moved. Then one paused at the triangle. "Neat pussy. Not scraggly and not too thick." And he probed.
Moaning, I thrust myself against him. I rose on my toes to reach his mouth with mine. I clutched and squirmed.
He pushed me away. He did it gently, and I thought he wanted to undress before taking me to the divan. But what he did was walk away from me. He went to the end table beside the lounge chair on which he had sat and picked up his pack of cigarettes.
"What is it?" I said. "Don't you want me?" "Very much, Amy. But first you have to be whipped." I stared at him.
"You're not serious," I said.
He stuck a cigarette between his thin lips. It bobbed as he spoke. "I told you I would whip you." Yes. The morning when we had spoken outside my building he had said something about whipping me, and that night I had dreamed about being whipped in a dungeon. I hadn't believed it could actually happen (anything like that had been so far from my experience, so impossible), and here in this sunny, modern, civilized room it wasn't credible.
"Butbut you said punishment," I argued. "I've done whatever you wanted. I let you have me in the park. I came here. I left off my underwear because I thought it would please you. I undressed. I wanted to make love with you-want to right now. In God's name, punishment for what?"
"That whipping will not be punishment, Amy."
"Then why? Why?"
He took his time answering. He snapped his lighter and brought it to his cigarette. Behind the lighter his face showed no emotion. I wondered if I should throw myself at him. At his feet. Knowing him, he would probably kick me away. I was afraid to move* At last he said, "I made it clear from the first that you are to be subjugated." "But I haven't denied you anything."
"And you won't. Including my right to whip you. You will remember this whipping always. The thought of it will be ingrained in your very bones. It's the final step in mastering you completely. And you want to be mastered, Amy."
"No!"
"You do. That's why you're here. Isn't that so, Amy?" I didn't answer. I bowed my head. My hair fell over my face. "Good," he said. "You understand. Now get down on your knees."
I looked up. "Do you want me to beg you on my knees? All right, I will." I started to go to him. "Stay where you are," he ordered. "I will not be begged or argued with or thanked. You will simply comply. You are to be whipped on your knees."
I stood there overwhelmed by the utter defenselessness of my nakedness. "Down, Amy!"
Like a command to a dog. I obeyed.
The carpet was soft under my knees. Sweat ran under my arms. I began to weep.
He had gone across the octagonal room and had pressed a button beside the middle door. Gertrude entered. She glanced at me, not in the least surprised to see me kneeling naked. I was terribly ashamed of my body and of my debasement. I bent over almost double and put my hands to my face.
Their voices muttered. One voice separated itself from the others. The word whip. Then there was silence. He was back in his chair, smoking as he watched me.
"It will leave scars," I whimpered. "I'll be disfigured. And how will I explain them to my husband?" "Amy, would I want to mark that lovely body of yours?" His voice was gentler than I had ever heard it. "I don't mar beauty. Especially not your beauty from which I expect to derive much pleasure."
I blubbered, "But a whipI bruise so easilyeven a small whip"
"This is a special kind. It's on the principle of an electric cattle prod, though its effect is far more powerful. It has a number of wire strands which become charged when the handle is turned. There will be only light flicks on your body."
"Will it hurt?"
"Very much."
"Oh, God!" I wailed.
The middle door opened. Gertrude returned. Close behind her came the blond servant Kurt. This was too much. It was humiliating enough to be exposed so naked before an elderly woman. It was unbearable before that man or any man but my lover. Arms crossed in front of me, I leaped to my feet. I snatched up my dress from the divan and held it to my breasts with one hand and to my crotch with the other.
"Amy, stay on your knees," Zorn said.
"I won't! You can't shame me like this!" "Amy!"
"I won't let you whip me! You can't make me stay here!"
There was no sound then but my sobbing. Kurt placed a long, narrow box down on the table and stood there impassively watching me. And Zorn rose leisurely and came toward me. I cowered.
"You are not compelled to do anything," he said quietly. "You can leave or stay as you wish. But if you stay, you will do as you're told."
And he slapped my face.
The pain was nothing. The worst of it was that he did it before his servants, and while I was naked or trying to cover my nakedness. In a way it destroyed me. I sank to my knees.
"Do you want to leave?" he said as he stood over me.
He was taunting me. He knew that I could no more go away from him here than I had been able to last week in his car when he had slapped me. Sniffling, I bowed my head. "Then if you stay, get rid of that dress." I still had it pressed to me. I thrust it away from me, and I was again wholly naked. Naked for him and for his servants, and for the whip.
He reached down and patted my cheek. "It won't last long, Amy." His touch was tender; I had an impulse to kiss that hand and press it to my heaving breasts. But he straightened up. "Okay, Kurt," he said as he returned to his chair.
At the table Kurt took the whip out of the box. It had a thick dark handle. From it extended many silver wires that glinted quivering in the sunlight. They danced sinuously at his side as he came toward me.
He paused at Zorn's chair. "How many, sir?"
"Six."
Kurt came on to stand at my right side. My head turned toward him. Brushing my hair from my face, I looked up at him over my shoulder. He loomed enormous. He turned the lower part of the handle. The wires writhed as his arm rose.
Not high. Just a little above my shoulder. Then the wires flicked out to envelop the small of my back. It was nothing I could have imagined. I had thought that pain was an earache, a stubbed toe, a banged finger. None of those approximated pain. Within an instant I learned that pain could possess all of you, every nerve and muscle and bone, flesh and blood, heart and brain, everything in you that could feel and react and protest. It tore from my throat my voice shrill and raw, and it swept me off my knees.
And then it seeped out of me, leaving me on my hands and knees, like an animal crouched in terror, trembling and twitching and heaving, and my screams had turned to ragged gasps.
Through my straggled hair I saw the frightful wires at rest along Kurt's thick right legs. I became aware of my spread thighs as I knelt, lewdly exposing me to him. I struggled up erect on my knees and clamped them together. In front of me Zorn sat with his chin thoughtfully on the backs of his hands. As I cleared my throat to beg him to stop it, beg uselessly but because I had to, the wires reached out for me.
Everything was repeated, the intolerable agony and the release from it and the dreadful anticipation of its return. Again I was down on my hands and knees. This time I stayed like that, hoping for a longer interval before the next blow if I delayed straightening up.
It came anyway. The wires touched my buttocks.
I collapsed on my face. Carpet fibers pushed into my shrieking mouth. In the aftermath of pain I lay sprawled flat and past shame.
"Please return to your knees, madam," Kurt requested.
All I did was raise my head. My tears made Zorn's face shimmer against the high back of his chair. Gertrude was turned partly away as if she couldn't bear to see what was going on. I wailed, "I can't stand it-stop him-I'll do anything-please, please, please"
Zorn nodded. For a moment I thought that he had taken pity on me, that he would spare me the rest, and my heart went out to him in gratitude. Only for a moment. Then he said, "Let her stay as she is for the rest," and the wires descended across my shoulders.
That was the fourth. Then the fifth, and after it I lay boring myself into the carpet and into the floor beneath, telling myself there would be only one more, only one more, I could stand one more. But when it came it was somehow the worst of all.
Kurt's feet moved away. There were small sounds in the room, then nothing, no movement and no words as I lay pervaded by the memory of pain which was in a way like pain itself.
"'Mrs. Kimball, I have something for you."
Gertrude knelt beside me. She had a glass. I raised myself on an elbow. We were alone in the room. "What is it?" I asked.
"Something to soothe your nerves. Drink it."
The cloudy liquid tasted like rotten eggs. I spilled some of it on my skin and on the carpet, but I got it down.
She had a washcloth and a towel. She washed the tears from my face and dried my sweaty body. When she stood up, I asked her where Mr. Zorn was.
"In another part of the house," she said. "Will he come back?"
"I expect so."
She went out, leaving me as I was on the floor. I sat up. My dress had been taken away; I had nothing to cover myself with. I climbed to my feet. My legs wobbled. I flopped down on the round divan. Lying on my back among the cushions, I watched the door.
Soon he came in. He wore slippers and a silk robe red like the carpet and the divan. Anxiously I watched him approach. Would he now be kind?
"How do you feel?" he asked, standing over me. "It was horrible." Tears filled my eyes and I sniffled.
"Physically there's little after-effect," he said. "It lingers in the mind where it matters most. Every woman needs to be whipped at least once."
"Does that mean I'll never be whipped again?" "That depends. I said at least once."
I couldn't worry about the future. My whipping was in the past, over and done with, and now I yearned for him to join me on the divan and take me in my arms and draw the inner hurt out of me. He intended to, didn't he? Otherwise why would he have changed into a robe? I stretched out an arm to him. Ignoring it, he turned his back to me and walked away.
"Don't leave me!" I cried. "Please don't!"
He went only as far as his lounge chair. He dropped into it, again facing me, and lit a cigarette. The hair on his bare legs were as dark as the dark hairs on his head, but at the V-neck of his red robe thick curls were grayish like his satanic widow's peak. Apparently he wore nothing under the robe. I let my legs fall apart, but all he did was sit there looking at me through cigarette smoke without a thing in his face. Till he had smoked the cigarette halfway down, when he crushed it out in the end table ashtray and leaned back in the deep chair and drawled, "You may come here, Amy."
I would have run that short distance if my legs hadn't still been weak. I crawled off the divan and straightened up and took the few necessary steps to stand before him. My bare toes almost touched his slippered feet. Afraid and uncertain, I searched his face for a sign. There was none. "What do you want me to do?" I asked. "I give you permission to do whatever you wish." I put my hands on the arms of the chair and leaned over to him and kissed him. His mouth was quiet under mine, wholly passive. And he kept his hands to himself, though all of me was there for him, my legs apart and my breasts dangling over him. I felt that in some way I was being tested. Very well. If I could do what I wished, I proceeded to do what I wished. I took my mouth from his and untied the cord of his robe and began to unbutton the buttons.
Bending so far over him was an effort in my wobbly condition and awkward, especially when I reached the lower buttons. I sank down on my knees, between his extended legs. I got the rest of the buttons open and spread the robe apart. And there he was. He could keep his face impassive and his mouth unresponsive, but this was one part of him that gave him away, pointing straight up at me and quivering in its eagerness. Really seeing it for the first time, not much unlike Henry's, maybe a bit thinner and a bit longer, a spear to impale me. At that moment terribly beautiful. On impulse I kissed the turgid tip.
My boldness startled me. I took a quick glance up at his face. Sure enough the corners of his eyes crinkled. Was this a part of the test and was I doing well? I was pleased that he seemed pleased. My head dipped again. His hand lay negligently on his knee. That slender, graceful hand. I kissed it. Then I kissed each finger in turn. The tip of my tongue felt invisible hairs between the knuckles.
Like the poodle, I thought suddenly. That shorn naked white poodle I had seen from the bus being whipped with its leash by its master (while Zorn had stood beside my seat), after which it had avidly licked the hand that had whipped it. As I had been whipped and was now licking my master's hand. I was a naked white poodle at my master's feet here where fantasy and reality merged-a picture of myself so overwhelmingly exciting that I could no longer hold myself off. I climbed up on the deep wide chair with Zorn, my knees astride his thighs.
He no longer smiled. His eyes were half-closed and his cheeks taut. I reached a hand under me and found him and gradually lowered myself, bit by bit, each slow stroke taking him in a little deeper, till comfortably and snugly I had all of him. Quivering, I sagged against his chest, needing to rest in my whipped weariness. But the solidity of him pulsating so deep in me started to control me. I found my hips wiggle with a will of their own. Sensation revived me. I rolled my buttocks on his thighs. He groaned. I sat erect to look at his facedown at it because of my position. His head was flung back and his eyes were wide and sightless. As gently I rode up and down, broken purring sounds dribbled from him. If he owned me, at this moment at least I also owned him. I rubbed my breasts in his face. He sought to capture a nipple in his mouth and I let him. Then suddenly I had an idea. Experimenting, I leaned away from him, back and back, till my head touched the floor as we remained joined. That was when I came the first time. Usually that would have been it, I would have been through, but there was nothing usual about any bit of this, heaven knew, especially about having been whipped, and I very much wasn't ready yet for a parting. I reached for his hands and he pulled me back up, our connection like a well-oiled hinge. I rested panting with my teeth in his shoulder and the marvelous feel of him still very much alive in me.
"How can you hold out so long?" I murmured. "You haven't made it easy. I'm about at the end of my rope."
I found a sudden surge of strength. I rode him furiously, twisting and grinding. He stayed with me, gnawing my breasts, doing things with his fingers. I came and came and screamed and screamed. He let me have his till there was no more left in me. I snuggled down into the curve of his arm.
"Good, Amy?" he asked, stroking my hair.
He knew it was. He had said it would be. He had said he would whip me. He had said he would be my master. Everything he had said had been true. So be it.
"Oh, yes," I murmured drowsily against his chest. "So very, very good." And drifted off to sleep. Somebody shook me by the shoulder. It was Gertrude. Zorn was gone. I was back on the divan to where he must have carried me while I slept.
"It's time for you to leave," she said.
I sat up and crossed my arms on my bosom, not having wholly shed the instinct for modesty. "Where's my dress?"
"I hung it up in the bathroom." "Can I take a shower?"
"Of course." She went with me as far as the bathroom door. "You'll find everything in there. A douche too if that's what you use."
The one advantage of being sterile was that you didn't have to use anything. I saw no point in telling her I was. I said, "Thanks," and went in.
The bathroom was spacious. It had white carpeting and dark-blue fixtures and wall tiles. My dress hung on the wall; below it stood my sandals. There was a dressing table with a wide bench. Shelves held cosmetics, make-up, bath saltswhatever a woman needed. Apparently I wasn't the first woman who had been brought here. I hadn't thought I was.
I looked at my back in the dressing table mirror. The wires had left no marks. The whipping seemed like something that had happened long agoin one of my dreams. I stepped into the roomy stall shower. A shower cap hung on a fixture next to the soap dish.
I soaped myself thoroughly. I was going home to Henry from here and I had to be cleansed for him. When I returned to the other room refreshed and combed and dressed, Gertrude was waiting for me. My handbag was on the coffee table where I had put it down hours ago. I picked it up. Gertrude had gone to the right-hand door, the one through which I had entered, and as I approached she opened it for me.
I paused. "Isn't Mr. Zorn going to say good-bye?"
"I guess not. He said to tell you he'll see you again this week." "Did he say what day?"
"Just that it will be this week. Good-bye, Mrs. Kimball." "Good-bye, Gertrude."
Kurt stood at the foot of the stairs. I flushed as I went down to the man who had whipped me naked. I followed him down the hall to the back door. Holding it open for me, he said, "Good-bye, madam." I didn't answer him.
Outside the old man named Joseph Dunwald sat behind the wheel of his taxi. I got in and he drove me home.
Wednesday, July 30 Edwina French phoned me after breakfast. A cousin from Iowa was visiting her and Edwina was asking those of the girls who were in town these sweltering days over for lunch to meet her.
I begged off with the standard social lie, that I had a sick headache. The truth was that there was a good chance there would be a call from Gertrude.
It was only the second day since I had been there, but he had said (through Gertrude) sometime again this week. This could be the day.
By two in the afternoon it was too late in the day for anything to happen. I hung around the apartment another thirty minutes, just in case, and then left for the park. I strolled to the wading pool to watch the children play and then went up on the knoll. Though I had brought a book, I didn't read. I lay under the sky on the rock shelf, as I had the first time he had touched me and again during the storm when he had become my lover.
Of course he didn't appear. He no longer had to follow me. All he had to do was have Gertrude make a phone call.
Thursday, July 31 The phone call came as I was straightening up our bedroom shortly after Henry had left for work. Gertrude said she would pick me up at the same time and place as Monday.
When she had hung up, I continued to lie across the unmade bed with the phone to my ear. Sure enough there was a click on the wire. That would be my cagy mother-in-law who, having listened in on the extension in her room, had delayed hanging up so as not to give herself away.
What had she expected to hear, that I had a secret lover?
Again I got to the corner of Pine and Third a few minutes before eleven-thirty and again Joseph Dunwald picked me up in his taxi.
At Zorn's house I went directly up the stone steps and across the high terrace to the front door. There was a bell. I pressed the button.
No answer. I rang again, hearing the bell inside the house. Somebody had to be in; I was expected; I had been sent for. But nobody came to the door.
Below in the flat area was Zorn's green sedan. The taxi had turned and left. On the terrace above the city I stood in the blazing sun ignored and excluded for my presumptuous-ness in wanting to enter his house in front like anybody else.
I went down from the terrace and around to the back door. This one opened at the first ring. I had been put in my place.
"Good morning, madam," Kurt said. I didn't as much as nod. I was furious.
He led me up the hall to the first door on the left and stopped there. He opened the door. "You are to undress here in the den, madam."
I looked in. The smallish room contained a desk and a leather clubchair and a tweed sofa. If the idea was for me to change into something sexy before going up to Zorn, like slinky pajamas or a diaphanous robe, nothing like that was in sight and there was no closet.
"I don't know what you mean," I said.
"Simply, madam, that you are to leave your clothes here and then go upstairs." "Without anything on?"
"Yes, madam." He was polite and impassive, quite the proper servant. I said, "I certainly will not. Did Mr. Zorn tell you to tell me this?"
"I merely relay his instructions, madam." "I want to speak to him."
"Of course, madam, when you have undressed I will take you to him." "I know the way. And I intend to go up dressed. Let me by."
Like a monolith in a bulging black linen suit, his great bulk stood between me and the stairs. He didn't stir and he didn't speak.
"This is outrageous," I said. "Tell him I'll leave." He just stood there.
"Very well, I'll leave." I strode to the back door and flung it open. The taxi was of course gone. Noonday heat shimmered on the hilltop. I turned around to Kurt who hadn't budged. "How will I get home?" "I will drive you, madam, if you wish."
They were making it easy for me. Except that it was anything but easy. My hand rolled on the doorknob. I had said this was outrageous, yet hadn't everything been outrageous from the first minute? And I had kept coming back for more.
"Oh, very well," I said.
I returned to the open door of the den and stepped through it and slammed it.
I had on a blouse and skirt and this time underwear. I now understood why Zorn had said, last time, that it didn't matter what I wore. I wouldn't be wearing anything when I went up to him. There was no place to hang anything; I put my blouse and then my bra on the sofa. My breasts felt swollen. I stood mashing them before I removed my skirt. Again I paused, thinking that I should be permitted at least panties and shoes going there. But what was the use trying? Kurt would send me back. My shoes and panties followed.
Naked in that strange and impersonal room and ready to leave it, I felt particularly defenseless. As if, with Zorn, I wasn't always without defenses!
I opened the door a couple of inches and peered out into the hall. Kurt stood fixed against the opposite wall.
"I can go up myself," I told him through the crack in the door. "I don't need an escort." "Mr. Zorn said to take you," he said in that stolid way of his.
I opened the door all the way. He looked at me, looked down at me from his overwhelming bulk, and flickers appeared in his eyes. Being seen naked by him wasn't new, but it felt new. It was a new time and situation and we were alone together. I lowered my head, and I suppose I blushed.
Since he made no move to go first, I did. My flesh shrank brushing by him in the narrow hall. His shoes thumped behind me on the wooden floor. My own feet, bare like the rest of me, made no sound.
As I ascended the steep stairs, I had a physical sense of his eyes looking up at me. There was no way to keep my buttocks from sliding, my legs from lifting high and apart one at a time. He was a step behind me when I reached the landing. He sidled by me, our bodies again brushing, and opened the door for me.
Oh, I was a grand lady all right, attended by a servant who didn't let me as much as open a door myself. I entered the octagonal room.
Zorn stood in his red robe at the triple glass walls. He never said hello or good-bye to me in so many words. I stayed where I was at the door Kurt had closed behind me, and I tried not to tremble as he quietly looked at my body.
It seemed a long time before he crushed out his cigarette and said, "Come here, Amy." I started toward him with dignity, head up and shoulders back. But halfway to him I broke into a run and flung myself into his arms. Pressed to him, I broke into tears.
"What's that for?" he said irritably.
"Why do you demean me so? Not letting me in the front door was bad enough. Why did you make me undress downstairs?"
"I prefer you naked."
"Why couldn't I undress here?"
"I'm not interested in you in clothes. I want you to be naked from my first to my last sight of you. I was drawn to you because I visualized how beautiful you would be like this. And you are, Amy, you are." He stroked my hips and buttocks as we stood together. "And you feel beautiful, which is as much to the point."
"I don't mind with you. Not in the least. But Kurt"
"He's my servant."
"What difference does that make?"
I cried out as his hands harshly gripped my shoulders. He pushed me from him, holding me off from him as his fingers, which could be so delicate and loving dug painfully into my flesh.
"Get this straight," he said. "I'll not tell you again. I won't be questioned by you or disobeyed. If you don't like it, don't come back."
"You're hurting me!"
"Of course I am. And I detest blubbering women. Stop it!"
Though his hands didn't leave my shoulders, they relaxed. I brushed at my tears with my forearm and looked uncertainly at him. His eyes crinkled. I was being forgiven. I rose on my bare toes to kiss him.
The feel of his responding mouth, of his tongue flicking the insides of my lips, made me shameless. I fumbled open the cord of his robe and pulled the robe apart so that there would be nothing between our bodies. I rolled my hips.
"You're improving," he complimented me.
He took me to the round divan. I lay down on it; he sat on the curved edge of it and put his hand on my belly. He caressed my breasts, my shoulders, my throat. How tender he could be! He bent his head, watching his hand trace the contours of my nose and lips, and then move down the side of my neck and past the ridge of collarbone. He rolled a nipple between two fingers till it ached rock-hard with desire, then that hand worked on the shape of my breast, molding it this way and that, squeezing it into a teepee topped by the dark aureole and the rigid nipple sticking up from it like a darker chimney-while his other hand slowly massaged the insides of my thighs. I flung my legs apart, my blood following the one hand now on my belly and the other sliding up to within an inch of where I had to have it. I raised my hips from the divan, arching myself to his hands in an unspoken plea. His deep eyes smiled, satisfied with my reaction, and he let both hands come together at my crotch.
My head sank back and my mouth went slack. Zorn's exquisite fingers! All ten fingers at once, some gliding, some strumming, some stroking. It was lovely, lovely. My eyes rolled to the tops of their sockets. The walls of glass behind me showed only sky. As on the knoll when he had done the same thing to me, but that had been merely a foretaste of this. This! I flung myself about. I heard guttural sounds issue from my throat, the kind an animal would make. The sounds turned into gasped words saying, "You must now, I can't wait!"
At that he stood up and dropped off his robe. But he didn't come back to me. He stood rampant but controlled, looking down at me lying open and twitching, watching with that same at once curious and amused expression he had been watching my response to what his hands did to me. As if I were a laboratory animal being experimented on. Which I had been from the beginning, of course. Nothing mattered but the need he had worked up in me. I stretched out a hand to him.
"Come on," I moaned. "I want you."
He stayed where he was, deliberately tantalizing me as I lay obscenely open to his gaze. Naked as I, jutting with the brutal power of the rampant male, he stood beyond reach of my hand-stood lean and hard-bodied, the grayish hairs spread across his chest and darkening as they ran into a scraggly line over his navel below which they thickened to a thick black jungle. I thought of how Henry, who was built like a Greek god, would never have stood in front of me so blatant and at ease in his roused nakedness or that I would have displayed myself to him so visibly lewd; but this was a different world in which, while I was in it, I was becoming a different person. One raised knee writhing, I was ready to explode with expectancy.
"Please!" I whined. "For God's sake, please!"
He nodded. "I was waiting for you to say please like a good little girl." And he came up on the divan, and I grabbed him and stuffed him into me.
This one didn't last very long. It couldn't, it was too intense for both of us, too violent. Detonating, I bit his shoulder. He held me fiercely to him with his own spasm, our flesh shuddering in harmony. When I thought I was subsiding, another orgasm seized me and then another: Presently he went off to the bathroom. Lying languorous among the cushions, I was happy with my nakedness and the knowledge that he was happy with it. The sun streaming over me through all that glass was as cozy as a blanket in the air-conditioned room. I loved being here.
He returned in his robe and slippers, saying briskly, "Amy, it's time for lunch." He pressed a bell button beside the middle door and sat down at the table. It had been set before I had arrived.
I got off the divan. "Can I have something to wear?"
"No."
"Only a robe. At least while we eat. I'll take it off right after." "No."
I washed up in the bathroom. I was pulling out the chair opposite him when Gertrude entered with a tray. "Hello, Mrs. Kimball," she said as if it were perfectly normal for a woman to sit down stark naked to lunch with the head of the house, and I mumbled, "Hello, Gertrude." After a minute I got used to myself (I was getting used to a lot of things), and Gertrude came and went serving us, and he and I talked and sometimes laughed, and I ate for dessert the apricot tart I shouldn't have had if I cared about my figure.
After lunch we sat in the lounge chair, I on his lap. The afternoon was still young. I put my cheek against his, feeling as placidly sensual as a kitten being stroked. Which was what he was lazily doing with the hand of the arm that wasn't about me.
"You know, Amy," he drawled, "you're actually a lousy lay." I was startled. "How can you say that after what happened just before lunch?" "That's exactly why I say it!"
"You seemed to enjoy me very much," I protested.
"So I did. You're new and delectable. You have this superb body. But the thing is that once innocence has been totally possessed it starts to lose its appeal."
"Are you saying you're already tired of me?" "Not at all, Amy. Only of your innocence."
"I don't feel very innocent." I raised my head and smiled at Zorn's hand lazily stroking me between the legs. "Or look it," I added. "What did I do wrong before lunch?"
"It's what you didn't do," he said. "In sex it should be as blessed to give at to receive. You're a greedy little bitch. You're first-rate at receiving. That's fine; that's half of it. But what about the other half? Like most so-called good women, you're sexually selfish. There I was working you up to a frenzy on the divan, and you were so full of your own pleasure that it didn't occur to you that I would like the same done to me."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"I was curious to see how far you'd go on your own."
"Oh, I'm sorry," I said, squeezing his hand between my thighs. "You mean like mutual foreplay?" He chuckled. "A chapter in every bride's handbook. Yes, I mean like mutual foreplay and duringplay and afterplay. You know the language, but that's about all. What the hell kind of man is your husband?"
"He's very nice. We don't have to talk about him."
"He must be a crashing bore in bed if he hasn't taught you anything. No doubt he doesn't know himself. A pair of innocents fluttering on the outskirts of sex."
"What about the other time I was hereMondayright here on this chair?" I said defensively. "I had been whipped and I was exhausted, yet I got down andand kissed" I felt myself blush, which was absurd considering I was naked on his lap. "Didn't that please you?"
"You stopped practically as soon as you started. Then you mounted me on the chair and what you did was exclusively for your satisfaction. I concede there was satisfaction for me as well, but as far as you were concerned it was strictly a by-product of yours. What you need is a lesson." He pushed me off his lap; I stood up and so did he. "Amy, kneel on the floor."
I cowered before him, remembering the other time he had ordered me to kneel on the floor. "Oh, God, you're not going to whip me?"
"Don't be silly. I am going to give you a chance to use your hands and mouth properly. Especially your mouth." He dropped off his robe and stood with feet apart and arms folded on his chest. He was only half-roused. "It's yours, Amy. See what you can do with it."
I knelt and took it in my hands and, as on Monday, lightly kissed the tip. I kissed here and there. With each kiss it grew. I stopped. I looked up at him to see how I was doing.
"Goddamn it, Amy!" he said. "You've a mouth. You've a tongue. You've fingers." I hesitated. Whenever I had heard or read or thought about it, the very idea had seemed unspeakably nasty.
But I did because he told me to. I began tentatively. Nibbling and then, as I got into the swing of it, gulping. Pretty soon it began to excite me. More and more, I experimented and discovered different things that could be done. Yes, I definitely had a mouth and a tongue and fingers, and there was a perverse delight in the servile indecency of me on my knees using them all. And this was, after all, the part of him I loved best, even more than his fingers, and I could see that he enjoyed what I was doing by the quivering of his belly before my eyes and by hearing his ragged breathing above me. Filling that second opening in me, he began to throb as in that other place, and suddenly I tasted I pulled away and looked up at him. "Don't in my mouth."
He didn't answer. Maybe he thought an answer unnecessary; maybe at the moment he couldn't find his voice. "Please not in my mouth," I pleaded. And I lowered my head, my hair in my face, knowing there was nothing I would not do if he said I must. When he said, "All right, get on your hands and knees," I gratefully and eagerly scrambled into position.
He knelt behind me with his hands on my hips. This was new to me (as so much was with him), and I was surprised at how easily he could slip in from behind with only a little help from me. And I was a naked white poodle again, and now he was a lean terrier taking me in heat. Vigorously I wagged my tail.
A door opened. On my hands and knees I froze. Gertrude came in with an empty tray. She didn't retreat at the sight of us on the floor like a couple of rutting dogs. Though she did more or less avert her eyes, she began to clear our lunch dishes from the table. As for Zorn, he was annoyed not at her but at me.
"Never mind her," he said harshly. "Go on, I like that wiggle."
Don't mind Gertrude because she was his servant, as I wasn't to mind being conducted naked to this room by Kurt because he was his servant. I was to learn a whole new way of life.
"Get going!" Putting his hands under me, he seized my down-thrust breasts and squeezed. "Get going, damn it!" he said, slamming against my buttocks.
So I got going. I resumed the wagging of my tail, and in spite of Gertrude's presenceor because of itI mounted to a new peak of unbridled licentiousness. Let her hear me screamif by then she was any longer in the room. I didn't see her leave. The top of my head ground into the carpet; I was wholly occupied with my climb to the peak and my plunge off it. And afterward I crawled into Zorn's arms and lay on the sun-drenched carpet in drowsy contentment. I was sure that now he was quite pleased with me.
Presently we rose and showered together in the commodious stall shower in the blue-tiled bathroom. Showering with a man was another first for me. We soaped each other and then stood in a soap-slick embrace under the tepid spray. We dried each other. For a moment then he looked as if he wanted to once more, but he didn't. He left the bathroom before I did, and when I came out he wasn't in the octagonal room.
Gertrude stood at the door through which I had entered and departed. I couldn't meet her eyes because of what she had seen and because of my continuing nakedness. I hadn't after all, lost all sense of shame in my two visits here. Not yet. She turned and opened the door for me. I was being sent home. She said good-bye to me (which was more than Zorn had) and I stepped out to the landing.
As on Monday, Kurt was waiting for me at the foot of the stairs. I had had clothes on then. Going down those steep stairs now, what bothered me as much as him looking up between my legs was the way my breasts bobbed. I slowed down my descent. That did no good; the risers were so high that I came down each one with a thump. And a bounce. So the rest of the way I held my breasts with my two hands, and his square face came close to smiling. Head down, I brushed by him. His heavy tread followed me to the den. I went in and dressed. He waited at the back door to show me out. When he opened it, I saw the taxi.
"Good-bye, madam."
This time I said, "Good-bye, Kurt." Because I really had nothing against him. The way I felt at the moment I had nothing against anybody. Not even against myself.
Saturday, August 2 It rained in the morning. I was glad because it kept Henry from his Saturday golf game and let us stay in bed till a decent hour. Since there was nothing else to do in that weather, we set out after breakfast on some random shopping in a discount store. His mother let us go without her.
We picked up our mail in the lobby and then went down to the basement garage. There was a letter from Mother (my mother) that I read standing as I waited for Henry to bring our car to the exit. When we were on our way, I looked through the rest of the mail. There was a letter from Lake Bliss Lodge confirming a reservation for Mr. and Mrs. Henry Kimball from dinner on Friday, August 22 to lunch on Monday, September 1, which was Labor Day.
So soon. And for seventeen whole days. I couldn't bear the thought of being away that long from the octagonal room.
And Henry of course said, "Less than two weeks. This is one vacation I've been looking forward to." The rain pounded on the car and streaked the windows. I thought of another car in another rainstormwhere I had sat in this raincoat and these boots and after a while I had taken off my panties and bra.
"Henry," I said.
"Yes, sweetheart."
"I don't want to go to Lake Bliss."
"What's this all of a sudden? You liked it last year."
"That was only for one week. Now two weeks. Longer than that-till over Labor Day. It will get boring." He took his eyes from the road to frown at me. "You didn't object before this. You let me go ahead and make the reservation."
"I didn't know you were sending a deposit."
"You knew I was going to and it was all right with you." His voice had sharpened. But he was seldom angry with me for more than a minute. In less than that he reached out his right hand to pat me like a puppy dog. "Sweetheart, have you somewhere else in mind?"
"Let's save your vacation for the winter." "You mean not go anywhere this summer?"
"It's a thought." I shifted closer to him and hugged his arm to my bosom. "Darling, the reason I hate Lake Bliss or any place like that is you'll leave me alone much of the time while you're off playing golf."
"If you'll take lessons and learn the game like I've been after you to"
"I detest golf. I love skiing. And you like skiing practically as much as golf. Why don't we go on the kind of vacation where we can do a sport together?"
"Are you forgetting I put the third week of my vacation down for the winter?"
"Darling, why not three whole weeks this winter? We could go to Switzerland or Austria. It would be glorious."
"And expensive as hell."
"There are special group tours for municipal workers. They tell all about it in that brochure you brought home from your union. Darling, it's a marvelous idea."
"Yeah, and spend the whole damn summer in the city."
"Our apartment is air-conditioned and so is your office. What's so good about an overcrowded hotel?" We had reached the parking area at the discount store. He didn't say anything while he fought off two other cars swooping down on a just vacated space near the main entrance. When he was in it, he looked at me and shook his head.
"I swear I don't understand you, Amy. Not so long ago you woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me you wanted me to take my vacation right away. You couldn't wait to get away from the city. Now you want to spend every minute of the summer here. What made you change your mind?"
"You and your golf for one," I said, putting the burden on him. "I'm tired of being a golf widow, and I don't look forward to being one at Lake Bliss. Besides, we've never been abroad together. I can't think of anything more perfect than a three-week skiing holiday at some glamorous foreign place. Will you, darling?"
"Well, there's something to be said for it," he conceded. He patted me again. "We'll see." So half the battle was won.
For the rest, I waited till night. The best place to talk things over with your husband was in bed. Especially when a big-eared mother-in-law was always under foot.
But first we made love. Instead of raising my nightgown, I removed it entirely, and then, kneeling over him, I stripped him of his pajamas. I had learned a few tricks and surprised and quite overwhelmed him with one or two of them. I kept telling him I loved him, meaning it, loving his mouth and his youth and his goodness, loving the only man I loved. I stayed over him, pinning him under me, and for once I was the aggressor and managed to satisfy myself as well as him.
And then we talked. Before we fell asleep we reached a compromise. He would change the reservation to the last week in August, including Labor Day, and we would go to Europe for two weeks in December or January.
Winter was far off. August was what mattered. I had won the next three weeks for going to the octagonal room whenever I was sent for, and at the end of the month I would have to be away for only ten or eleven days.
I curled up to Henry and kissed the back of his neck.
Tuesday, August 5 I woke up certain that Gertrude would phone today, and shortly after breakfast she did. This time I was told to be at the corner at eleven o'clock. When the taxi let me off at the house, I went straight to the back door.
Kurt admitted me. This morning I had a greeting smile for him.
I went ahead of him up the hall and stopped at the door to the den. "Kurt, am I to undress down here again?"
"Yes, madam."
"Will this be the routine every time I come?" "I think so, madam."
I went into the den and took my clothes off. Kurt waited for me fixed to the hall wall. If, as I came out, his impassive eyes abashed me, they now also gave me a voluptuous sense of my nakedness. He followed me. This second time I moved naturally, without the pointless awkwardness of trying to keep my hips from undulating and, going up the stairs, to keep my thighs together. When on the landing he opened the door for me, I said, "Thank you, Kurt." Oh, I was full of good will this morning.
Gertrude was alone in the octagonal room. We greeted each other cordially. She was setting the table. "Please tell Mr. Zorn I'm here," I said.
"I'm sure he knows." She put the last piece of silver in place, a fork, and looked at me with her motherly smile. "I've been wanting to tell you, Mrs. Kimball. You're lovely. You're the most beautiful one who" Her voice trailed off as if she had completed the sentence.
"Thank you," I said. "But the one who what?" "Beg pardon?"
"Did you start to say I'm the most beautiful one who comes here?" "You're the only one, Mrs. Kimball."
"Were there others before me? There were, weren't there, Gertrude? That's what you almost said. Did he also make the others come in naked? Did he also whip them?"
She didn't answer. She fussed with the place settings, though they looked perfectly all right. I said with a nervous little laugh, "I suppose I sound jealous. I'm not really. If I can have another man as wellI mean my husbandwhy should I mind another woman? But why all the mystery? Why can't I see the rest of the house?"
"I guess he doesn't want you running all over the place without a stitch on."
"But he refused to show me the house when I was dressed. And when I arrive dressed I can't use the front door. Who lives here?"
"Mr. Zorn and Kurt and me."
"Nobody else? Or if they don't live here regularly, who visits?" "Why don't you ask Mr. Zorn all these questions?"
"He doesn't tell me anything. I don't even know his first name. What is his first name, Gertrude?"
"If he doesn't tell you himself"
I said, "Gertrude, you're afraid of him. That's it, isn't it? You too." "Mr. Zorn has a very strong character."
"Don't I know it! Gertrude, does he whip you?"
Her lower lip quivered. She swung around to the middle door-to go through it and away from my questions. She stopped and uttered a yelp like a small animal. And I saw what she saw. The door was partly open.
The door opened all the way and Zorn came in. He wore his red robe.
"I didn't tell her anything," Gertrude whined. "If you heard us, you heard I didn't answer her questions." "Leave us," he said quietly.
Gertrude hurried out through the middle door. Anxiously I watched his face. It was cold and remote. He moved toward me, and I was so very vulnerable in my nakedness.
"They were harmless questions," I said, hearing my voice whine as Gertrude's had. "I was just passing the time waiting for you. And why shouldn't I be interested inin my lover? You know all about me."
He stood before me. Both his hands shot out. I thought he was going to slap me; instinctively I threw my arms up in front of my face. What he did was seize my breasts.
I shrieked with pain as his fingers dug into the yielding flesh. His hands twisted. I clawed at his wrists. "Put your hands down," he ordered.
I dared not disobey even though he kept on hurting me. Writhing, I clutched my thighs. "Amy, you're never to snoop into my affairs." And the quiet way he said that was more frightening than if he had shouted.
"I didn't mean anything. I'm sorry, really I am. Please, it hurts so much!"
His terrible hands (terrible now, usually so loving) continued to maul my breasts, holding them so tightly that my flesh, darker at the aureoles and nipples, oozed between his spread fingers. My own hands moved again to defend myself; with an effort I controlled them. I dared not struggle against his right to punish me as he pleased. And so I used the only defense I had. Or thought I had. I threw my arms around his neck and sought to kiss his mouth. To make him take me and forgive me.
My lips didn't reach his. He flung me from him to the floor.
I lay sobbing. The mere touch of the carpeted floor on my breasts intensified the pain, like an aching tooth being bitten. I turned on my back. He stood over me.
"I try so hard to be good to you," I said. "Why do you get so mean?" "I punish you when you deserve it."
"You enjoy it," I said. "That was just your excuse for hurting me."
"I see no reason to justify my actions to you." His foot rose. The point of his slipper prodded my nearer breast; it felt like a knife jabbed into my sore flesh. He said, "I'll tell you this for the last time. You get as much of me as I choose to give you, no more. You come only when I send for you and go when I tell you to. You have this room and the back door to it and that's all. I'll not be possessed by you in any way."
The sole of his slipper rolled my nipple like a marble. I lay still except for my belly heaving like that of a beaten dog.
"You're the one who possesses me," I protested. "Of course. Otherwise I wouldn't have you here."
His foot pressed down harder. It was like a hot iron on my poor breasts.
"Please!" I wailed. "I'm very, very, very sorry. I'll never again. Please love me. Please, I want you." He took his foot away. I rose to my knees. I pulled apart the lower part of his robe. Being a male, he couldn't hide the fact that punishing me had roused him mightily. I gave it my open mouthsomething he had liked very much last time.
He twisted away from me so violently that his hip striking my shoulder knocked me to the floor. "Sometimes you disgust me," he said.
The middle door slammed. I was alone in the room. I was alone a long time before that door opened again.
It was only Gertrude. I had transferred from the floor to the divan where I lay gently massaging my bruised breasts.
"I'll serve you lunch," she said. "Will Mr. Zorn have it with me?' "He ate in the dining room." "Then I don't want any."
"He said to give you lunch, so you better go to the table."
I got off the divan. The weight of my breasts as I stood increased the pain. I put my forearm under them, holding them up. That helped somewhat.
I said, "Gertrude, I'm sorry I got you in trouble." "It's all right. He doesn't blame me."
I sat at the table. There was a melon on my plate.
"Gertrude," I said, "will I be punished some more? I mean, if he's still angry will he have me whipped?" "I wouldn't know." Then, wanting to be kind, she added, "I doubt it."
After I had eaten, which was very little, I curled up on his favorite chair. Gertrude cleared the table. Alone again, I waited for him to come. He didn't. My breasts kept hurting. I went into the bathroom and drew myself a warm bath, deeper than the overflow drain, and lay in the tub with my breasts under the water.
He shouldn't have said that. Slapping me and mauling me and even whipping me was one thing, but he shouldn't have said I disgusted him. Sometimes, he had said. All right, but he had taught me that Thursday afternoon, what I had started to do when I had knelt and opened his robe, what had pleased him very much, and I had only wanted to be good to him and show him humbly on my knees that though he had hurt me I desired him.
Why didn't he come? I would like him to find me in the tub. It would be fun bathing together. Even more fun than showering together, which we had done last time. I wondered if it was possible to do it under water.
I dried myself and went back to the armchair.
The air-conditioned room felt chillier than before. Maybe because of the warm bath. I thought of taking a big bathtowel from the bathroom and wrapping it around myself, but I didn't. He might be annoyed if he came in and found me covered, even a little bit. I pulled my knees up against me on the lounge chair and huddled in my arms.
The afternoon wore on. I hadn't been told to stay. I wouldn't be stopped from going down to the den and dressing and leaving; if the taxi hadn't been sent for this early, Kurt would drive me home. But if I hadn't been told to stay, I hadn't been told to leave. I sat on my legs in that deep chair and waited for the middle door to open.
Eventually it did.
And it wasn't Gertrude. It was Zorn. He wore slacks and a sport shirt instead of his robe. Anxiously I watched his face as he came toward me. His eyes crinkled. A good sign. He stopped some five feet from my chair. Standing with his fists on his hips and his legs astride, he said, "You wanted it before. Now come and get it."
My punishment was over.
I dropped to my knees. Somehow I was always beginning or ending up on the floor. When I had unbuckled his belt, he told me to undress him completely as he stood there. The way I did it was my own idea. I pulled off his pants and his underpants and I covered with kisses every bit of him I bared. I rose and removed his shirt; front and back my mouth ran over him. I loved the way he shivered when I rolled my tongue down his spine. And below the spine. Everywhere. His feet too. Down on the floor again, I was that naked white poodle on all fours kissing each of his ten toes. And all the time my lord and master stood imperious, wide-legged, arms crossed, letting my mouth adore him.
At last I returned to where I had started when I had opened his slacks. Again, as earlier, my mouth engulfed him. This time he permitted it. I could see a muscle throb in his thigh; I could hear above me his breathing grow ragged. Ah, yes, he was vulnerable too. And I knew better what to do than last time, I had learned by experience, and I was a lot less inhibited. Here in this room I had shed the last vestiges of inhibition, as naked of it as I was of clothes.
I left off for a moment to look up at him. "Does this disgust you?" I said rather coyly.
"It's very nice, Amy."
"Why did you say I disgusted you?"
"You do when you act the whore. When you try to use your body to get something from me." "I want to do this," I said. "I really do."
"Then get on with it," he said harshly.
I fell to with gusto. That palpitating began. It would be any moment now. In my mouth. I put my head back, not saying anything, the question in my eyes.
"I see you're still finicky," he said wryly.
I remained silent. I didn't shake my head yes or no. I waited for his command. "Very well, between your breasts," he said. "I particularly like it there."
He was not being kind. He knew how painful my breasts were from his mauling. I obeyed-it didn't occur to me not toand a hundred needles pierced them as I pressed them around him. I cried out and eased the pressure, but at the least I had to hold them pushed together to caress him with soft and now so tender flesh. I felt him looking curiously down at me, though whimpering against his squirming belly I could no more see his face than he could see mine. Biting my lower lip, I mashed my breasts so viciously that we both gasped.
He couldn't hold out. As I felt his jerking orgasm on my skin, I screamed as if sharing it with him. And in a way, in my self-inflicted torture, I was. Or beginning to. I fell back on the floor, pulling him along with me. He was still capable of entering me. And did in a single brutal plunge. I wrapped myself around him and deliberately rubbed my agonized breasts against his hard chest. Having discovered that pain and pleasure were one and the same thing.
Friday, August 8 Even Edwina thought the bathing suit too daring.
We had met downtown for one of our shopping expeditions. As we strolled along Market Street, I saw it in a store window on a mannequin. It was fiery red, what there was of it. And I did need a second bathing suit for our vacation at Lake Bliss. We went in.
When the saleswoman brought it to the counter in my size, Edwina had two comments. The first was that red wasn't my color, which was true. The second was that anybody wearing it could be admitted to a nudist camp.
"It's called a mini bikini," the saleswoman explained.
"I'll say it's mini," Edwina said. "Compared to this my bikini swaddles me." She stretched the bottom part between her hands. "You'll have to shave, Amy, if you wear this."
The saleswoman giggled. I suppose I blushed. Nevertheless I bought it. And though it came in other colors, I chose the red.
When we were out in the street, Edwina said, "What are you doing, Amy, breaking out of your shell?" "What do you mean?"
"That suit. Your bathing suits haven't been much different from what my mother wears. Now all of a sudden this."
"Don't you think I have the figure for it?"
"You certainly have. But it isn't only a figure one needs. It's a state of mind." She gave me a sidelong glance as we walked. "I've been wondering about that man in Schiller's."
"What man?" I said, keeping a straight face.
"You know, the distinguished-looking man last month who was sitting with you when I came in. He said he'd see you soon. Amy, do you see him?"
"Of course not," I said.
In the evening I tried it on in my room.
I could virtually cover with my hand what the bottom part covered in front. It had no sides; the front and back red nylon patches were connected by a lace just below the hipbones. As for the top, a lace around the neck and another at the back held in place a pair of scant semi-cups connected only by two more laces, leaving the sides as well as the tops of my breasts exposed and somehow making them look fuller than I had ever seen them. My reflection in the mirror smiled wantonly at myself.
I went into the living room where Henry was reading the paper and his mother was watching television. "I bought a new bathing suit today," I said as casually as I could. "How do you like it?" Henry raised his head and nodded automatically and then stared. His mother looked me over with an oddly quizzical expression.
"It's awfully skimpy," he said. "Don't you agree, Mother?"
She said, "It's what I've seen skinny little teenagers wear and the wild society women in the magazines. But for a respectable married woman" She expressed the rest of that sentence by pursing her mouth.
"Well, I like it," I said defiantly.
"I'm not sure I do," Henry said. "Maybe I'm a bit old-fashioned, but I don't think I want my wife appearing like that in public. What do you think, Mother?"
I had expected to shock them a little. I had wanted to, probably. But this what-do-you-think-Mother was too much. I had married only one of them.
"She ought to return it," she said, speaking past me to him as if I were a child or a mental defective. "Bathing suits can't be returned," I said.
"Then at least take it off," he said.
"I will!" I exploded. And yanking open the lace under my shoulder blades and the one behind my neck, I whipped the top off with my other hand. I felt my breasts pop into their startled faces.
A couple of weeks ago I couldn't have imagined doing anything remotely like this. But a couple of weeks ago I wouldn't have bought a mini bikini.
"Amy!" Henry said. "What do you think you're doing?" "You told me to take it off."
"Amy, you're embarrassing us," he said.
"You're my husband and she's a woman. If my breasts embarrass you, that's too damn bad." "Amy, what came over you?" he said.
The thought crossed my mind to take the bottom off too. That would really show them. Then suddenly I felt downright silly. This wasn't the octagonal room. This was a different world with different people.
I muttered, "Oh, all right," and holding the top to my bosom I went back to my room. There I put the top on again and looked at myself some more in the mirror. I didn't care what they thought or said. I approved of myself in it and was going to wear it at Lake Bliss.
Even though red wasn't my color. But those days I had an affinity for red. Bright red like the divan and the carpet in that room and his robe.
A whole week now since the last time. Why didn't he have Gertrude call?
Thursday, August 14 All of it was lovely. Mostly, I suppose, because on this my fourth visit I had come to accept without question my place in Zorn's scheme of things.
When Gertrude phoned me at ten in the morning that I would be picked up at eleven, I thanked her for calling. Of course she was merely conveying a message, but the way I felt I had to thank somebody.
While driving out in the taxi, instead of sitting in a corner silent and indrawn as before I started a relaxed conversation with Joseph Dunwald, and pretty soon he passed back to me snapshots of his nine grandchildren. At the back door of the house Kurt was waiting for me.
The hall was chilly when, having undressed, I came out of the den. I lingered virtually unabashed by my nakedness to tell Kurt that last time I had been here the air-conditioner had made me somewhat uncomfortable. Could he turn it down?
"Forgive me, madam." He looked at my body; I had a feeling that inside that impassive exterior he was smiling. "It was inconsiderate of me not to bear in mind that you wear considerably less than the rest of us. I'll attend to it, madam."
"Thank you," Kurt," I said, and went on ahead of him to the octagonal room. And on this day Zorn was very nice to me.
He was there in his red robe when I entered. Though he didn't say hello in so many words, he at once gathered me in his arms and kissed my mouth and breasts. Then he took me to the divan.
We lay among the cushions dallying leisurely with each other. He was so very right about it being as blessed to give as to receive. I felt my fingers to be as lovely as his, and I had learned new uses for my mouth. I propped myself up on an elbow and watched the way I made his thin cheeks strain from the cheekbones, made those deepset eyes stare widely, made him groan like a man in agony. He was a fool if he thought he could own me without being owned by me. Anyway, at moments like this when he belonged as much to me as I to him. When he mounted me, I deliberately held him off with both hands, stroking him there, rubbing the tip against me, but not letting him get in.
"Enough of this, Amy!" he snapped. "I want it in."
It crossed my mind to make him bega delightful game with anybody else. But of course not with him; in fact, I had annoyed him, a dangerous thing to do. So I at once obeyed, and I was glad to have him absorbed by me so tight and so alive, and he was again a tender lover. He pulled me to my side so I lay half-cradled against him, with my mouth and uppermost breast available to his mouth. Gently at first and then more and more violently we rocked each other in that cradle to a particularly sweet climax.
We washed up and had lunch. Then, again on the divan, we lay in pleasant languor in the full splash of the sun.
He had me talk about myself, he who never talked about himself. He was interested in everything about me-my parents, my mother-in-law, my friends, my clubs and social activities, most of all my husband. I didn't mind talking about Henryexcept for one thing, my sexual relations with him. Especially not while lying side by side on the divan, with Zorn's cheek on my breast and his hand toying with me further down in that casual way of his when merely whiling away time. I tried to brush off his questions about what Henry and I did in bed and how all that, but that never worked with him. So I made an effort to act at ease about it, though I wasn't.
I said, "You sound like the questionnaire Henry and I made out every six months for a cancer survey." "What has sex to do with cancer?"
"I don't know. Maybe something about cancer of the cervix. Anyway, they ask a number of questions about your sex life."
"Such as how many times you screw a week?" "Yes. Of course they call it sexual intercourse."
"It's the same whatever it's called," Zorn said, slipping in his index finger. "Well, how many times a week?"
I wished he would stop playing with me during this particular conversation, but there was nothing I could do about it. I said somewhat breathlessly, "We discussed it and decided we averaged twice."
"A week?"
"Yes."
"Twice a week with this inspiring body of yours! My God, if I were his age!" "You seem to manage all right."
"You should have known me fifteen years ago." He took a nibble at my nipple. "Does the questionnaire ask about orgasms?"
"Only the women. They assume that a man practically always comes." "What was your answer?"
"Usually."
"Not always?"
"Well, yes, recently," I said, putting my face to the side of his neck. What he was doing, along with the conversation, was beginning to overwhelm me.
"Does recently mean since you know me?" Zorn persisted. "I guess so," I murmured against his skin.
"Which means he has something to thank me for. And you have much more to thank me for. How many orgasms do you think you have with me?"
"I don't know. A lot. Little ones as well as big ones." I bit his neck. "I'll have one right now if you keep this up."
"Then let's make the most of it," he said.
Kneeling at my feet, he seized my ankles and pushed my legs up and apart till my toes pointed at the ceiling. I was as open and revealed as could be. Or so I thought. Still he wasn't satisfied. He continued the pressure. I bent my knees and gripped my calves and by raising my torso slightly I got my knees to my shoulders. Seeing I could hold myself in that position, he let go of me and studied me. I stayed like that for his crinkly gaze, savoring along with him the utter wantonness of my position. Then his foraging fingers went to me. I quaked so violently that I could hardly hold onto my legs. The gray-fringed head bent over me, watching (as always) with that amused and triumphant expression on the satanic face how his fingers could deprive me of the least bit of control. I began to beg him. He liked me to beg him; the reason I did was that I couldn't hold off begging him if I wanted to. Finally he nodded, consenting to bestow upon me the beautifully jutting gift he had for me. Taking my raised buttocks in his hands, he pressed forward. In that position he entered so deeply that the tip touched my heart. Or felt like it, and something like insanity possessed me.
How many orgasms? I didn't try to keep track. I couldn't. They went off like a string of firecrackers. I became aware of him shuddering out his own fulfillment. That started me off again. Before I finished my sweaty hands went lax and slipped away from my calves. My legs fell to the divan in a convulsive sprawl. He moved away from me, and still I twitched and vibrated.
Oh, Zorn, my master, what you do to me!
As usual when it had been so shattering I dozed off. When I woke up I was alone in the room. Gertrude came into the bathroom while I was showering. She said the taxi would arrive in ten minutes. As I dried myself we chatted about the humidity outside and how it seemed to rain more in August than in July. At the foot of the stairs Kurt stood as always to see me out. Coming down them I held my breasts, not now to keep him from seeing them bounce but because they felt uncomfortable bouncing. I thanked him for having raised the temperature in the octagonal room and moved past him to get dressed.
A very pleasant day.
Saturday, August 16 For the next three weeks or longer (much longer, I hoped) my home would be my own. Yesterday my mother-in-law had left for her annual visit to her sister Marge in Oregon. And today, the first non-working day I could have Henry to myself in the apartment, he followed his Saturday routine of getting out of bed at an indecently early hour to leave me for his golf foursome.
It didn't occur to him that anything was different, or ought to be, with his mother away. I stayed in bed a couple of hours longer and had a lonely breakfast and killed the morning with minor household chores. I was very restless.
When Henry came home at noon, tired and sweaty and hungry, I was still in my nightgown and housecoat. He went to shower and I went into the kitchen to prepare lunch. I opened the refrigerator and stood a long moment, my thoughts elsewhere. Then I closed the refrigerator without having taken anything out and went to our bathroom.
The shower was over the bathtub which was enclosed by a pair of frosted glass panels. Henry's offkey whistling of a popular tune mingled with the sound of the water. I took off my housecoat and nightgown and put on my shower cap. I slid open one of the bathtub panels.
"May a lady join you?" I said.
He stopped whistling. He stopped soaping himself. He blinked at me as I lifted a foot over the side of the tub. One would think we were strangers.
"I'm sure you don't mind, darling," I said.
He could hardly say he did. And probably didn't want to say it after the first small shock. It was simply that we had never showered or bathed together. Not even during our honeymoon when we were discovering each other.
There had been a lot we hadn't discovered about each other. "Come in, the water's fine," he said gallantly.
I was already in. Our bodies touched; some of the soap on his came off on mine. He moved a little to give me more room and then didn't know what to do.
I knew. I had recently acquired experience. I said, "Here, let me finish soaping you." I did it with lingering caresses. Though we'd been married for three years, it could surprise me how tall and deep-chested and young-bodied he was. Of course. I was comparing him with a leaner and shorter and older manthe only other man with whom I had taken a shower. Between my soapy rolling hands he roused quickly and fully. Clawing at my hips, he pressed himself to me.
"Sweetheart, do you want to make love?" he said hoarsely. As if he had to ask me!
"Yes, darling!" I said. "Yes, yes!"
"Then let's wash the soap off and dry ourselves and get into bed."
My impetuous husband! I almost laughed with scorn against his shoulder. I didn't. I had an inspirationthe kind that would have been impossible a very few weeks ago. I slipped down along his length and sat in the tub with my legs on either side of his feet. His anxious organ hovered over me. I leaned back on the slope of the tub and raised my legs so that the backs of my heels rested on the rims of the tub. As there was no water in it except for the inch or less running off from the shower, I was almost as exposed as the other afternoon on the divan with Zorn. The water from the shower spray stung my belly and groin.
Henry gawked down at me as if he didn't know me. And of course he didn't. "Come down here!" I said. "Darling, come down here and take me."
Slowly, in a kind of daze, he lowered himself between my extended legs. There was not enough room; it would have been impossible with water in the tub. We managed. Rather, I managed for both us, for I had to do the shifting and positioning and tugging. Once we were together, though, he was more avid than I could remember. He carried on like a man in pain as the shower pounded down on his broad back. A couple of times we almost lost each other as, in our heaving, we slipped and skidded and rolled in the slick tub. This was so vastly different for me with him and no doubt for him with anybody, so abandoned and exciting, that we hit our climaxes practically together though he held out no longer than usual. And I did scream, loud and shameless in my own home, and I was delighted that Henry had made me scream. For once.
He helped me to my feet. For another minute we stood under the shower; I clung to him feeling small and cuddly and protected. He was again surprised when I suggested we dry each other, but he did as he was told, and on his own initiative while doing it he kissed my shoulders and breasts and bellybutton.
He started to dress as soon as we came out of the bathroom. Naked, I dropped down on the made bed and lay watching him step into his underwear shorts.
He looked at me. His eyes again had that look of not being altogether sure who or what I was. My legs weren't far apart, but instinctively I snapped them together.
"You've changed, Amy," he said.
"Have I? In what way?"
"You've become morewell" "Uninhibited?" I helped him out. "Something like that."
"I'm more relaxed when your mother isn't around."
He sat down on the chair to put on his socks. "Not only just now," he said slowly. "It struck me the other night."
"Do you object?"
"I think it's great. In the bathtub just now-terrific!" "Then don't complain," I said.
"I'm not complaining. I've been wondering why all of a suddenwell, you are different." What was it Zorn had said the other day while sucking my breasts? That Henry ought to be grateful to him. "Maybe more ardent, darling, that's all. Because I love you so much. Do you love me?" "You know I do."
"Then say it."
"I love you." He pulled on his pants. "How about getting dressed and giving me lunch?"
Smiling lazily to myself, I wondered how he would react if I went out like this and sat naked at the table with him the way I did with Zorn.
Not that I ever would. Those were two separate worlds-my apartment and the octagonal room. I got off the bed and put on my housecoat.
Wednesday, August 20 There was no phone call from Gertrude till today. That meant that two-fifths of the week I had talked Henry out of spending at Lake Bliss was wasted, and now when I heard her voice on the line it was shortly after I had discovered that the rest of the week wouldn't be any good either.
"I'll pick you up at eleven-thirty," she told me.
As my mother-in-law was in Oregon and this wasn't one of Leslie's days, I could speak freely. "I don't know if he'll want to see me. I'm unwell."
"What's the matter with you?"
"I mean I'm having my period." "Oh," Gertrude said. "Hold on a minute."
It turned out to be at least ten minutes. And when she was back on the wire, she said what I had hoped she would.
"Come anyway," she said. "But make it at two o'clock instead of eleven-thirty." Though I would have liked to have lunch with him as always before, I was grateful that he wanted me to come at all.
When Kurt admitted me at the back door, I started to go directly to the octagonal room without stopping at the den.
"Mrs. Kimball," he called after me. "You are forgetting to undress." I turned; I was halfway up the hall. "Mr. Zorn will tell you it's different today." "He told me, madam, that you are to be permitted to wear the absolute minimum." So I went into the den and stripped down to my panties. They were a substantial white cotton pair I wore under the circumstances. If I had known (maybe I should have), I would have put on something a lot more decorative.
Kurt looked at the panties when I came out. He seemed doubtful. "These are the minimum," I explained. In fact apologized. He nodded and I went ahead of him.
Nobody was in the octagonal room. I sat nervously leafing through a magazine, like in a dentist's office. When he came in, I jumped to my feet. He was dressed in slacks and an open-neck shirt instead of his lovemaking robe. As usual, no word or nod or smile. His eyes were what counted; I watched them for a sign that I could go to his arms. His eyes were blank. With a cigarette limp at the edge of his mouth, he looked at my white cotton panties. They embarrassed me more than total nakedness ever had in this room.
I said uneasily, "It's not my fault I'm menstruating."
"Did I say it was?"
"It seems to annoy you."
"It does," he said crisply. "I'd set aside time for you today. You've inconvenienced me. From now on let Gertrude know in advance when you expect your period."
"I can't. My problem is I'm very irregular. Maybe it has something to do with me not being able to have a baby. This last time it was six weeks. Sometimes it's only three." I felt, unreasonably, that I had failed him. "I'm terribly sorry. It started during the night."
"Well, we can't argue with nature," he said, softening. "But I certainly don't intend to let it deprive me of you."
"That's impossible. I mean, you wouldn't want to. I'm always a mess the first two days." He said, "You have a mouth, Amy."
Yes, I had a mouth. And hands. And breasts. I got down between his legs and pulled open his zipper and did the things he had taught me to. I played little games with him, using fingertips and the insides of my lips and my nipples. He clawed at my hair, my ears, my shoulders. I was happy to be able to make him happy. He exuded sexual tension. Any moment now, I thought, and started to finish him off the way I had last time, between my breasts. But he wouldn't let me; he told me it had to stay in my mouth till after the finish. I stopped, motionless like an obscene kneeling statue with mouth distended around him. His eyes were wild and his cheeks drawn to a look of emaciation; I had never seen him quite that affected. "Goddamn it, Amy!" he croaked, squirming his thighs against my head. "Don't stop! Goddamn it, keep it up!" So I went on because he said so. The mouth was a more sensitive place; I could feel every tremor, every jerk, every spurt. That was a terribly exciting thing. I forgot about having thought it would be nasty. And the taste was nothing like what I had expected, like nothing much actually, except that there was a surprising lot of it. I had no choice but to gulp because even then he wouldn't let me stop. I drained him till there wasn't much left of him.
I sat on my legs on the floor, the back of my hand to my mouth, watching him zip up his pants and go for a cigarette.
"How was it, Amy?" he asked as he lit it. Being a man, he had recovered quickly. I was still shaky inside and outside.
"For you it seemed fine," I said.
"And not for you?" Taunting me for no good reason I could see. With eyes crinkling, he drawled, "Why, the nectar of your master should be like the nectar of a god! Wasn't it, Amy?"
"Yes," I said because that was the least complicated thing to say. And in a way that was true. I would drink him down a second time, and enjoy doing it, if I myself would be requited. Damn nature!
He stood up. "That's it for today, Amy," he said brusquely. "You may leave." And turned his back to go. I had served my purpose.
"Wait." I jumped up. "You know I'm going away Friday for ten days." "So you told me. Well?"
"We'll be back Labor Day evening." "I'll bear that in mind. Anything else."
"Yes." I licked the inside of my mouth where the cloy taste of him lingered. "We won't see each other for almost two weeks. Aren't you going to kiss me good-bye?"
"If you wish."
He stood where he was, a portrait of lean, gray-tinged dignity, making me come to him. Gladly I did. I kissed him.
Clinging to him, I said, "Don't wait long after I come back. Call me right away. The day after Labor Day." "I'll call you when I want you," he snapped.
But he did kiss me back and give me an affectionate pat on the back of my cotton panties before going through the middle door.
Home again. Henry, at any rate, enjoyed the vacation.
He played a lot of golf on the hotel's eighteen-hole course, usually in the morning, while at the lakefront I swam or played bridge or basked in the sun with a novel and a bottle of suntan lotion. Afternoons he more often than not deprived himself of a second round of golf to swim with me or canoe with me or be my bridge partner. Evenings after dinner we danced and chatted with other guests and let comedians and singers entertain us.
I took my red mini bikini with me, but I didn't wear it. There was no point in it. What had been important was buying it and then displaying myself in it in our living room to Henry and his mother-that is, to Henry in front of his mother. At Lake Bliss scant bathing suits were common enough, and one or two women no younger than I wore suits almost as daring, but when I came right down to it I found that the last five or six weeks hadn't changed me that much. Anyway, not in my public life where I could blush as easily as before. Besides, I saw no reason to make an issue over the suit with Henry.
So for the first few days I confined myself to the other bathing suit I had brought. It was two years old; it had a modest bodice and a bit of a skirt. Tuesday I drove to the nearby village and bought a sleek black one-piece affair with almost no sides and not much top. Henry liked it. So much for that.
Ten days.
Also ten nights, and we made love on half of them. A record for us? We achieved it because as often as not I was the aggressor. Two of those five nights were very good.
All the same, I couldn't wait to get back home.
At last Labor Day. We left after lunch and fought traffic in our car for eight hours to cover a normally four-hour drive. At eleven we reached our apartment and flopped into bed. Henry, in that healthy animal way of his, was asleep in no time.
But II lay awake in the dark, tingling with the thought that home again meant available again.
Wednesday, September 3 I had told Zorn I would be back Monday evening. One would think he would very much want me after two weeks without me. That he would send for me as soon as possible, the very day after I was back. Now it was two days.
Thursday, September 4 No phone call.
Friday, September 5 They welcomed me back like a friend. Gertrude, when she phoned to say I would be picked up at eleven, lingered on the line to chat about my vacation. Joseph Dunwald, when I had stepped into his taxi, told me the holiday had made me look prettier than ever. Kurt, when I came undressed out of the den, looked at the heightened contrast of white and tan skin and affably remarked, "I see, Mrs. Kimball, that you spent a lot of time in the sun."
But the one who mattered merely glanced up from a newspaper when I entered the octagonal room and then, without a word or smile or nod, resumed reading.
Not that that was any indication of his moodwhether indifferent or affectionate or horrid or whatever. His mood varied, sometimes from minute to minute, but what was constant was his taking me for granted, with never a hello and seldom a good-bye.
This was my sixth visit here; I was no longer the shy, nervous, self-conscious woman I had been. I strode to his chair and stood in front of him with my hands on my hips and said, "Aren't you glad to see me?"
Zorn lowered the newspaper. A cigarette bobbed at his lips as he snapped, "I'm reading something," and again he raised the paper between himself and me. While I stood there waiting stark naked for him to finish a news item (or the entire paper if he pleased) before paying the least attention to me.
And that was what I had learned to expect from my lover and master, what I was willing to accept, and what, in effect, all the more roused my desire for him.
Presently he folded the newspaper in half and put it on the end table. But he didn't rise and take me in his arms, so I perched myself on his knee. The cigarette was still in his mouth. I reached for it to pluck it out and put it in the ashtray so that I could kiss him.
Only a short stub of it was left and my fingers pinching it touched the burning end. My hand jerked and the cigarette fell on my bare thigh. With a yelp of pain I twisted on his lap to brush it off. As I did so, the elbow of my other arm struck him on the nose.
Both his fists jammed into soft parts of my flesh. I had been getting to my feet; I stumbled, regained my balance, and crouched, gasping, holding my midriff where he had punched me and my thigh where the cigarette had burned me.
"You clumsy bitch!" he said. "I'm terribly sorry. I didn't mean"
He hit me with his open handsmy face, my breasts, my ribs. His eyes showed his rage; a trickle of blood ran from his nose. Though he didn't hit me nearly as hard as he could, his blows drove me down to the floor. As I sat huddled there, covering my face with my arms, he kicked me in the belly. It was actually more of a shove and his slipper was soft, but in terror I flung myself face down on the floor to protect the front of me.
Sobbing against my forearm, I lay expecting more punishment.
After a long moment I again felt his foot on me. But now without a slipper on it and not hurting me. His bare foot moved slowly down the small of my back and the cleft of my buttocks, gently stroking. I looked up at him. He held a handkerchief to his nose.
"It-it-it was an accident," I whimpered. "You hurt me."
"You know I didn't mean to. I wanted to kiss you." "I don't like to be hurt."
There was no arguing with him, ever. He didn't like to be hurt, but he liked to hurt me. He seldom passed up an excuse to slap or twist or squeeze, and naked as I always was with him I was especially vulnerable.
And I was vulnerable in another way as wellat this moment to his bare foot. It slid up the inside of my thigh. Toes probing like fingers. Then there was his big toe only, the big stubby toe that was like his thumb.
I moaned and adjusted my position to open myself for him.
He laughed. "Being mastered means being beaten. How you love it, Amy!"
Let him think and say what he pleased. Let it be true or not true. Only let him keep on doing what he was doing.
He stopped. I raised my head. He was taking off his robe. When he got down on the floor with me, I turned on my side to him.
He let me choose the position, one he had taught me. Face to face, making cradles for each other with our raised thighs, we were each wholly within reach of the other, so that I could stroke him as I pleased while he at will could shift his mouth from my eyes and cheeks and mouth to my shoulder and breast without ceasing to caress me from the back of my neck to my ankles. My flesh sore from his slaps and punches and kicks gloried in the feel of him. I was grateful that it pleased him, absorbed him in shattering ecstasy, and, having subsided, remained for a time longer joined with his body.
Afterward, still on the floor, I lay beside him on my back. And he said, "Do you love me, Amy?" I was startled. Neither of us had ever used that word, not even in orgiastic frenzy when we uttered all kinds of wild and extravagant things. I was silent.
"I asked you a question, Amy."
"I didn't think you were interested," I said. "That love mattered in the least." "I want an answer."
I didn't know what to say. If I said no, he might be angry; besides, would it be true? If I said yes, would that be true?
"Yes," I murmured.
"You never said it before." "You never asked me."
"It's the kind of thing one isn't supposed to ask for," he said.
I could have pointed out that for that matter he had never told me he loved me. I didn't. What, actually, did love have to do with what was between us? If anything, I probably hated him more than I loved him.
All the same, I got on top of him and kissed him and said, "I love you." And though aware that he was demeaning me in still another way by making me say it to him and he not saying it to me, I kept repeating, "I love you," between kissing his mouth as I lay naked on his nakedness.
That day it was quite late in the afternoon before we got around to having Gertrude serve us lunch.
Tuesday, September 9 Henry came home from work an hour earlier than usual. He was in a great hurry. As he took off his jacket and tie, he said he had to make the 6:57 P.M. train to the state capital, which meant that he had to start for the station in forty minutes. So I told Leslie (who was here because it was a Tuesday) to forget about the dinner of veal cutlets we had planned and instead get canned soup and an omelet on the table as soon as possible. Then I went into our bathroom where Henry in his shorts was shaving for the second time that day. He explained what it was about.
The Governor (who like all governors was harassed for money) had recommended today out of the blue sky that all state and state-aided road construction be cut from this year's budget. This caused consternation in Henry's department since the already approved city parkway along the river was to be financed mainly by state and federal funds. The city highway commissioner was rushing up to the capital with some of his experts, including Henry, to meet with legislators from the city tonight and spend the following two days buttonholing influential officials and testifying at the budget hearing.
"So I won't be back till Thursday at the earliest," Henry said as he slapped shaving lotion on his face. "And with Mother away, you'll be all alone. I hate to do this to you."
"I'll be all right," I said. "I'm a big girl."
"Sure. There's nothing to be nervous about. The thing is, we're not used to spending nights away from each other."
"I know." I stood up and pressed myself against his bare back. I liked the smell of his shaving lotion and the smooth strong feel of him. I kissed him between the shoulder-blades. "Darling, I love you."
When I said it to him, I meant it. It wasn't dragged out of me.
Then why was I already thinking, as I held him from behind around his waist, that with him away and his mother in Oregon I would have two whole nights free as well as the days?
I packed his bag while he got into fresh clothes and we ate hurriedly and I drove him to the station. When I returned, Leslie had cleaned up the kitchen and left. Alone in the apartment, I faced the night.
If Zorn knew, wouldn't he want me to come to him? But how to let him know?
There was no phone in the octagonal room, so there was no number I could have seen on it to remember. I didn't know his address either, for the hill road to his house had no street sign. And no first name for him. Which was the way he wanted it, that I be his without him being minethat I remain somebody permitted to come to him only when he sent for me at his inclination.
All right, I accepted that. But he would-or might-want me for a whole night or two nights and also the day between if he was aware that that had suddenly become possible. He wouldn't mind if just this once I got in touch with him, would he?
Because there was a way to get hold of his phone number. If I didn't know anything else about him, I knew that he lived in the suburb called Shadyville. Definitely in the area of the Shadyville exchange.
I called Shadyville Information. She had two Zorns, one Stanley and the other Luther. I wrote down the numbers.
My stomach jittered as I dialed the first number. Would he be angry when he heard my voice? He would understand when I explained. Or would he? Could I be sure of anything with him? Tensely I listened to the sound of ringing.
A woman's voice. Not Gertrude's. Yes, she was Mrs. Stanley Zorn. I hesitated, then asked if Gertrude Ember lived there. Wrong Zorn.
I dialed the second number. Luther Zorn himself answered, and obviously he wasn't my Zorn. Again I spoke to Shadyville Information. I asked if she had an unlisted number for a third Zorn in her exchange. Sorry, they didn't give out information about unlisted numbers. I demanded to speak to the supervisor; I told the supervisor it was a matter of life and death, but I hadn't prepared details and floundered. She said, "I am sorry, miss," and there I was.
I was nowhere but home with a precious night going to waste. I read and I moped and I went to bed early and lay holding my flesh as I assured myself that tomorrow Gertrude would call.
I had last been there Friday and tomorrow, was Wednesday and that would be just about time to be sent for. And when I told him I would be free for the next twenty-four hours, he would let me stay the night. He would let me come at last into the rest of the house, after I had gone down to the den to dress or still naked as I always was in the octagonal room; it would be all the same to me either way. And when it was bedtime he would take me into his bed with him. We had never done it except during the day and never in a bed with a sheet and pillows in pillowcases and a blanket, and we would spend part of the time experimenting with positions not even he had thought of and the other part snuggled together under the cover, and we would wake together in the bright morning refreshed and perhaps ready for more.
Yes. Oh, yes, I told my loving hands. If Gertrude calls, yes. Please.
Wednesday, September 10 At nine-thirty the phone rang. I was still in bed; for well over an hour I had been lying awake waiting for it to ring. But it was only Tilly Odom. She reminded me that now that summer was over our Wednesday bridge parties would resume this afternoon in her house. I told her I wouldn't be able to make it.
Then it was ten o'clock. If Gertrude didn't call within a few minutes, she wouldn't call at all today. I got out of bed and made breakfast for myself.
Ten-thirty. Still a chance. I dressed. Eleven. No chance now.
For another half-hour I hung around the apartment, then went down to the garage for the car. Ordinarily I hadn't the use of it on weekdays because Henry drove to work. I headed for Zorn's housefor the first time not in Joseph Dunwald's taxi. When I reached the hill road, I had to hold the wheel harder to keep my hands steady.
His green sedan was in the parking area, which meant, probably, that he was home. I parked beside it and got out. The day was gloomy; a chill was in the air. I took a deep breath and went to the door. The back door, of course; I was well-trained. I rang the bell.
I rang three or four times, with long heart-thumping intervals between, before the door opened. Kurt, his straw hair almost brushing the top of the doorway, stared down at me in astonishment.
Words tumbled out of me. "Kurt, I have a message for Mr. Zorn. I couldn't reach him any other way, so I had to come to give it to him."
He said, "You aren't expected, madam."
"I know. I would have phoned, but I don't know the number. Is he in?" "He isn't expecting you."
"Then he is in. Just tell him this, Kurt. Tell him my husband is away and won't be back till tomorrow. I can spend the night here if he wants me to. In fact, all of the next twenty-four hours."
His heavy square face softened the least bit. He said almost kindly, "Mrs. Kimball, I suggest that you leave."
"Why can't you give him the message?" I persisted. "If he's busy, I'll wait. Will you at least do that for me, Kurt?"
"As you wish, madam."
He took a step backward and closed the door. If he didn't exactly slam it in my face, he did swing it shut, leaving me to wait out there like a not quite welcome salesman.
Time passed. My two-piece knit dress with thin blouse didn't protect me against the dank wind sweeping the hilltop. I got into my car and closed the window and sat half-turned behind the wheel to watch the back door.
What was taking Kurt so long? If there was a reason for me to wait, at least he could come out and tell me and make me comfortable in the den.
More time passed, A lot of time. I got out of the car. The chill penetrated me. I walked because it was easier on my nerves than standing or sitting. I walked back and forth on the flat area. As if picketing. All I needed was a sign saying: UNFAIR TO MISTRESSES.
I had some rights. Such as not being simply ignored. Suddenly I whirled around and strode to the back door. I pressed the bell-button without letup, pressed it so long that my finger began to ache.
That did it. Kurt appeared.
"Come in, madam," he said. "It's about time," I said.
As on my previous arrivals (after my first) he led me up the hall as far as the den and opened that door and stepped aside for me to enter.
He didn't have to tell me what to do. The routine of leaving my clothes here meant that Zorn was waiting for me in the octagonal room. I undressed smiling to myself. This was my first victory of any kind over him. From now on I would make sure that our relationship was on a more equitable basisthat at least I would have some say as to my coming and going. As it should be with lovers.
When I came out, Kurt was standing squarely between me and the stairs so that there was no room in that narrow hall to sidle by him and go ahead of him as always before. And he looked at me as if he had never before seen me naked. There was something different about his pale eyes and the set of his mouth. A kind of tension, I thought, and that troubled me.
"Aren't we going?" I said uneasily.
He turned abruptly and for once he led the way from the den to the stairs. Except that we didn't get as far as the stairs. He opened a door in the hall that always before we had passed and he went through it. I paused at the threshold, looking in.
This was the furnace room. The raw cement-block walls, the unfinished ceiling crisscrossed by ducts and pipes and wires, the concrete floor that would be cold and harsh under my bare feet-everything here was wrong and frightening to me in my nakedness.
"Come," Kurt said.
"Where are you taking me?"
He didn't tell me. He grabbed me by the arm. To be touched anywhere at all by anybody but Henry or Zorn when I was naked sent a shock through me. He tugged, not hard but firmly; moving by his side, I was dwarfed by his bulk. The knuckles of his huge hand encircling my upper arm pressed the outer bulge of my breast.
When we were past the furnace and the water heater I saw another door. We went through it into another basement roomthe laundry.
This room was friendlier. Its walls were paneled in pine and the floor was covered with vinyl tile; the clothes washer and drier and hamper and sink were objects a housewife could feel comfortable with. And at the other end stairs ran up into the house. The sight of them relaxed me. Evidently I was being taken to the part of the house I had not yet been insay, to a bedroom where I was to wait because for the time being Zorn was busy and didn't want me in the octagonal room, maybe because he was working there at whatever work he did or had visitors there. All right, whatever he wished.
Kurt let go of my arm and moved away from me. But not to the stairs. Puzzled, I watched him remove a box of detergent and some bottles from an old-time porcelain-top kitchen table standing beside the washing machine. He lifted the table by its sides.
"Kurt," I said, "what's going on?"
He put down the table in the middle of the room and straightened up and looked stonily at me. "Mrs. Kimball, you are to be whipped on this."
"Oh, no!"
"I am sorry." He slapped the top of the table. "Please get up on here. On your stomach." I didn't stir. Standing huddled within my crossed arms, I said brokenly, "Diddid Mr. Zorn tell you to?" "I would not take it on myself, madam. He said you must be taught not to intrude on his privacy. I tried to warn you. Over an hour ago I advised you to leave. You chose not to. Worse than that, madam, there was the way you incessantly rang the bell. It infuriated him."
"Did you give him my messagewhy I came?"
"Of course." Again he slapped the table. "Please, Mrs. Kimball, I prefer not to force you." "I want to speak to him."
"That's impossible."
"Isn't he coming down to watch?" My bitterness almost choked me. "He won't deprive himself of that pleasure."
"He doesn't enjoy it. He will even dislike hearing you scream, though that can't be helped. Now, madam!" He came around the table. Cowering, I burst into tears. He slid one arm across my shoulders and the other across the backs of my thighs and swung me off my feet. I was like a small limp blubbering child as he carried me to the table and put me down on it. Then he turned me over.
The porcelain was like ice against my breasts and belly. My head dangled over one end of the table and my legs over the other.
I raised my head and at once I saw it. It had been there when we had entered the laundry room, but I hadn't been looking for it then. The long narrow box holding the wire whip lay on top of the clothes drier.
At the moment Kurt was busy elsewhere, pulling towels out of the wicker hamper. He brought an armful to the table. Kneeling, he began to tie my right wrist to that leg of the table with one of the towels.
"For your own good, madam," he explained. "The table is so short and narrow you'll keep falling off and perhaps hurt yourself. The towels are soft and won't bruise your skin."
How considerate! My skin and flesh must remain unblemished for Zorn's pleasure. The sweat of fear warmed the porcelain under me.
Finished with my wrists, he did the same with my ankles. Then he took the whip from the box. I wanted to scream even before those gleaming, quivering wires came near me. Instead desperate, futile, wailing words poured out of me. "Kurt, how many? I can stand two. Won't two be enough? Kurt, wait! Tell Mr. Zorn I came because I love him. Tell him I know I deserve two. Then let him take me and I'll love him so. Kurt, tell him!" He stood beside the table, a blond giant reaching to the ceiling, and he raised the writhing wires. "Kurt, I'm not ready. At least give me another minute. Please, Kurt, only"
His wrist flicked.
The wires did a little dance on my bare back, I saw them over my shoulder and then I didn't see anything with eyes blurred with agony beyond belief. My body leaped and twisted on the table to the limit the towels would permit, and my shrieks were felt rather than heard, felt as part of the palpitating pervading pain. And when the pain subsided, so did I.
I lay limp, spread like a starfish on the hard smooth porcelain, my head hanging over the table and my hair in my wet eyes and mouth, waiting in terrible suspense for him to strike again. And he did.
There was no use begging between strokes whenever my voice came back to me for the mercy I knew was not for me. But I did, I had to, able to endure the waiting before the next onslaught of the unendurable only by sobbing, please, please, I can't stand any more, pleading for a little more time between, a minute, a second, let me at least have a drink of water before you go on, protesting that there had been only six the other time I had been whipped and now I'd had six already, I'd counted them, now seven, now eight, it was unfair, I was being killed, I would die, please God save me, please somebody have pity.
Maybe there were eight strokes of the wires, maybe nine, maybe ten, I lost track. Then a time came when the interval stretched out and out and I dared hope that it was over. I made the effort to drag my head up. Through the net of my hair dampened by tears and sweat I saw Kurt putting the whip back into the box. My head sank back over the end of the table. Finished with pain, I lay quivering and shuddering in the aftermath of pain.
Soon he untied my wrists and ankles. When I felt myself free, I moved to get off the table. His hand pressed down low on my spine. "No, Mrs. Kimball, stay as you are."
I obeyed. I would have obeyed anything, for he had the strength and the whip and the authority from Zorn. He stood at my feet. His hands spread on my hips and pulled my body toward him. My skin slid on the porcelain; my chin came over the table edge. He dragged me toward him till my feet touched the floor. Again he pressed down on the small of my back, and again he ordered me to stay like that. Then I felt him move in between my legs, and there was no doubt what he was going to do.
Weakly I lifted my head to look at him past my shoulder. He had taken off no clothes, not even his black jacket; he had merely opened his pants. Crouching, he prepared to take me from behind as an animal would. I put my cheek back on the cool porcelain and gripped the sides of the table. His fingers searched for the spot; I braced myself for the big thrust. It came like a spear of fire, and I cried out.
Instantly he drew back. "I'm sorry, madam," he apologized. "I didn't mean to hurt you." Which would have been funny if anything could have been funny at such a time.
By my thighs he tugged me a bit more off the table so that my belly pressed the edge and my feet could rest farther apart on the floor. Then he came at me again, and I gritted my teeth. He felt enormous, but that wasn't the trouble. Though I was not putting up the least resistance (what would be the use?), it was still a rape, and I was very tight and very dry. Still, he was gentle now, very gradual so as to hurt me as little as possiblehe who a few minutes ago had whipped me. I went limp all over, and the channel consented to open itself, absorbing all of him. Stuffing me. He paused. I heard him pant as at the completion of a strenuous piece of work. Then he began to pump. I lay wholly passivea wide open receptacle.
So I was being ravaged, and I didn't care. After the shame of being whipped, this was a bland kind of shame. And he was no brute except in size. Even now in a way he remained the very proper servant, almost humble about it, holding only as much of me as was necessary to keep me and himself in position. No kissing, no fondling, just those long strokes as rhythmic as a metronome. The rhythm got to me. My blood began to flow in time to it. Then the rhythm quickened to a staccato beat. I heard his breathing grow harsher and harsher. He clutched my buttocks-and the idea of him pouring himself into me abruptly sickened me.
I felt soiled, debased beyond redemption. As soon as I was free from him, I straightened up and went to the hamper on top of which were the towels with which he had tied me. As I wiped myself, I tottered. Kurt caught me around the waist.
"Are you all right, Mrs. Kimball?" "I feel weak."
He picked me up in his powerful arms and carried me through the furnace room and down the hall and into the den. He put me down on the tweed sofa and adjusted my legs so I lay stretched out on my back. Still bent over, he looked at me. I thought that now for the first time he would kiss me. I turned my face from him. He did kiss meon my navel. Then he left the room.
When he returned some minutes later, I was putting on my underwear. He had a water glass in his hand. "You're not leaving, madam?"
"Am I not allowed to? Does Mr. Zorn want to see me?"
"No. He said to tell you that when he wants to see you he will send for you. But you should rest. And a shower will do you good. There's a bathroom up the hall."
"I'll bathe and rest at home," I said. "If I may go." "As you wish, madam. But I suggest you drink this."
I hooked up my bra and took the glass from him. It contained the cloudy liquid tasting of rotten eggs I had been given after my first whipping. I drank it down sitting on the desk chair.
He stayed in the den as I finished dressing, and his heavy face was no less impassive than at other times as he watched me.
Stepping into my skirt, I said, "I suppose Mr. Zorn knows what you did." "Of course, madam."
"Did he tell you to?"
"I would not have otherwise. Would you care to know what Mr. Zorn said?" "Yes."
"He said that you were in such a lather to be laid-I am using his language, madam-that he delegated me to satisfy you."
I looked at him. I had to hurt him. I had to hurt somebody beside myself. "I wasn't in the least satisfied," I told him tartly. "You're a quite inferior proxy." But he had the last word. With a flicker of a smile he said, "If madam will permit me to try again" I turned my back to him to put on my blouse. When I had all my clothes on, I picked up my handbag and took two steps to the door and would have collapsed if he hadn't been there to catch me.
"Madam, you should rest."
"I want to get out of here!"
In the crook of his arm I wobbled out to my car. Sitting behind the wheel, I felt better. All I wanted was to return home to my empty apartment and wash Kurt and the whipping off me and flop into my bed.
I turned the ignition key. Kurt said, "Good-bye, Mrs. Kimball," and shut the car door and stepped back. Driving home, I would have wept for myself if there had been any tears left in me.
Thursday, September 11 Henry came home all affectionate after having been away for two days. When we went to bed, I didn't want to make love, but he was so eager that I let him. It was no good. Anyway, not for me. I lay passively under him thinking how I detested all men. Not only Kurt, not only Zorn.
Henry paused. "Anything the matter, sweetheart?" Not many weeks ago he wouldn't have asked that. He wouldn't have known to expect much more from me. Credit Zorn for that.
"I've a headache," I lied.
"I'm sorry. You should have told me."
"That's all right, darling. Finish yourself. I don't mind." He did, and a couple of minutes later he was asleep.
And lying away from him empty and alone, I prayed for strength not to go back to that house. I pressed my face against the pillow and saw myself naked in the octagonal roomyes, and in the laundry room. I saw myself slapped and hurt and humiliated and taken by Zorn-yes, and whipped and taken by Kurt. And all at once I was sexually roused as minutes ago Henry had not been able to rouse me.
Saturday, September 13 We drove out to the airport to pick up his mother. She had been away four weeks and one day. My holiday was over.
Monday, September 15 It was as if nothing had happened last Wednesday. The routine was resumed. Gertrude phoned and Joseph Dunwald picked me up and Kurt admitted me at the back door.
I had been wondering what to expect from Kurt, whether his attitude-even his conduct-would be different. He greeted me as before with that elaborate politeness of a servant who knows his place, and if he looked at me less impassively when I came undressed out of the den, that was all. He conducted me as always (not as always: not as last time) to the octagonal room.
I had not seen Zorn in ten days. I flew into his arms and burst into tears. "Cut that out!" he said. "You know I can't abide a blubbering woman."
I made myself stop. I rubbed my wet eyes against the lapel of his robe. Pressing myself to him, I wanted to ask why, why, why he had treated me like that Wednesday just because I had wanted to be with him, but I knew that I would only annoy him. He seemed in so good a mood today that it was better not to say anything. It was better to open his robe and rub our flesh together and passionately accept his mouth and hands and whatever else he cared to give me.
How beautiful the next hour! On the sun-drenched divan we lay together in various positions of love. This morning nothing wildly. Mostly cozy and affectionate. I lay on him, joined but not active, steeped in a quiet kind of lust while he placidly sucked my breast. A little later we were on our sides, he curled at my curled back, lying together like two attached embryosas indeed we were attached-while his uppermost hand under my uppermost arm languorously roamed the front of me from throat to knees. An unusually tender morning. Really and truly, that was all I asked of himthat he treat me with a little kindness. So a lovely hour passed like thattill I felt an orgasm build in me. I turned around to him in a third position, face to face on our sides, so that my mouth would be fastened to his at the big moment. It came, shattering our tranquillity in the best possible way. Then we showered together (how simple and convenient to shower when you don't have clothes to take off and put on) and then had a leisurely lunch.
Afterward I cuddled on his lap in the lounge chair. He had been so pleasant all morning that I dared say one thing about Wednesday.
I said, "Weren't you jealous?" "Of whom?"
"Of Kurt with me."
"Jealous?" As always when I was on his lap, Zorn's restless hands explored every part of my body as if, each time, to discover it all over again. "Jealous of my servant who followed my orders?"
"So that was supposed to make it all right?"
"Of course. Jealousy is based on fear. I have no fear of losing you to Kurt." "What about the way I felt about it?" I said.
"That's a good question." Those crinkling eyes. "Did you enjoy him?" "No."
"Are you sure, Amy?"
"It was as bad as the whipping."
"And was the whipping so bad?" he said. "If I told you to come tomorrow to be whipped and laid by Kurt, would you stay away?"
A lump formed in my throat. I was afraid I would weep again. I burrowed my face into the side of his neck and tasted his skin. And his hand stroked, caressed, fondled. And his delicate, all-knowing fingers!
I was happy to be here. I wad delighted with my nakedness. And when he said that we should transfer to the divan, I ran to it and eagerly stretched out to receive him.
Tuesday, September 16 Mother and Father stopped off to see me on their way home from their trip abroad. Classes at the college where he taught started next Monday; he had to be there several days before that and so they could only stay overnight. As we hadn't room for them in the apartment (my mother-in-law occupied what should have been the guest room), I made a reservation for them at a hotel.
Henry had left the car so I could pick them up at the airport. I did and went up with them to their hotel room. There Father held me at arm's length to take, he said, a real good look at me.
"You look marvelous," he said. "Good enough to eat."
"Amy," Mother said, "you've put on weight."
"Good for her," he said. "A woman should be juicy." He kissed my brow. "There's a glow about you. I diagnose it as sexual contentment.
"Aaron, I wish you wouldn't say such things to your daughter," Mother said. She was as prissy as I used to be.
"She's twenty-seven years old and very thoroughly married," he said. "I should hope she knows the facts of life. You are happy, sweetheart, aren't you?"
"Yes," I said. "Very."
But was happy the word? Contented wasn't the word either-unless you put the adjective he had in front of it. Sexually contented.
"Look, you're making her blush," Mother said. I turned and ran into the bathroom.
Through the door I heard Father say, "What in the world came over her?" "You embarrassed her," Mother said.
"I think you did by calling attention to her blushing," he said. "You know how sensitive she is." "You were the one who made her blush," she said.
They bickered mildly about who was to blame. Of course neither of them was. It was some minutes before I could bring myself to come out and face them. Nobody was in the octagonal room when I entered. Behind me Kurt closed the door. This would be the shortest day. The taxi had picked me up at two-thirty. It was now after three, and well before five I would have to start showering and dressing to be home in time to prepare dinner.
I hadn't the patience to sit while waiting. I stood at the triple walls of glass. Looking out at the city, I hoped Zorn wouldn't be angry because of yesterday.
Gertrude had called yesterday morning at the worst possible time-while Father and Mother had been having breakfast in the apartment with Henry and his mother and me. It had been a much later weekday breakfast than usual (Henry had delayed leaving for his office) and we had been still at the table when the phone had rung. I had gone to my room to answer it, and for the first time I had been distressed to hear Gertrude's voice. Meet her at eleven, she had said. Somewhat frantically I had told her that I absolutely had to stay with my parents till they left the city at four. Tomorrow, I had said. Tell him please tomorrow.
And she had indeed called back this morning. I could come, though not for lunch. So here I was in the middle of the afternoon waiting ripe and ready in that orgiastic room as the precious minutes trickled away.
After too long a time the middle door opened. At the sight of Zorn, my muscles flexed to run to him. I checked myself. The fact that he didn't greet me wasn't anything; I was used to that. But he chose that moment to snap his lighter for the cigarette already in his mouth, putting fire between us when he should have left his mouth free for my kiss. And something else. Instead of his red robe or casual clothes easy to shed he was all spruced up in a double-breasted suit.
I felt excluded and uneasy. Was I about to be punished?
"I'm terrible sorry about yesterday," I said. "Gertrude must have explained about my parents." He nodded. "I can't blame you. Though yesterday I had time. I wanted you before I went away." My heart contracted. "You're going away?"
"Some important business has come up." "For how long?" I said in a stricken voice. "A couple of months."
"Oh." At that moment two months meant forever.
"It may be less, I'm not sure." Across the room he smiled at me through a puff of smoke. "Don't worry, my dear, I have provided for your libido to be properly taken care of while I'm gone." He moved to the table and bent over it to write in a small pocket notebook. "Come here," he said.
My bare feet brushed over the thick red carpet. He tore the page out of the notebook and gave it to me. Dully I looked at a name he had written: Roscoe Jones. And an address: 17 Cleveland St. And a time: Monday, 1 P.M.
"What am I suppose to do with this?" I said.
"It's an appointment. Roscoe is my friend. Probably the only friend I have. His hobby is coitus. His tastes are somewhat more exotic than mine. He'll teach you a few things I haven't. You'll like him."
So smooth and bland. So matter-of-fact.
"Youyou're giving me to him?" I said.
"Call him my surrogate while I'm away. I will, of course, reclaim you when I return." "No!" I let the paper fall to the table. "I won't let you do this to me."
"I have given you a name and address. Whatever is done will be done by you for your satisfaction." He looked at his watch. "I have to leave."
"Right now?" Panic propelled me against him. I thrust myself to him; the buttons of his suit pressed cold against my naked flesh. "Aren't we going to make love before you go?"
"I'm afraid I haven't the time. It's been a crowded day and I still have things to do before I leave this evening."
"Then why did you have me undress? Why did you let me expect it would be like other times?" He discarded his cigarette in an ashtray, then put both hands on my waist. I threw my head back for his kiss and arched against him. But his head remained up, hovering over me, and his crinkling eyes taunted me.
"Poor Amy, all hot and bothered," he purred. "Rest assured I won't send you home unappeased. Kurt has agreed to service you again. He's waiting for you downstairs."
And with a pat on my behind he let go of me and reached in his pocket for his cigarettes. I stood with head bowed. My torso sagged, resting on one hip, jutting my belly, making me look ungraceful. I didn't care. The worst of it was that I had nothing to say.
Zorn doused the flame of his lighter and went to the middle door. There he turned. "I'll let you know when I'm back," he told me.
Remember that Roscoe Jones is expecting you Monday. Pick up his address and take it with you."
I picked up the paper from the table because he told me to.
"Don't keep Kurt waiting," he said. The door closed. No good-bye even on this occasion of a long parting. No kiss. No anything. I was somebodysomething consisting of mouth, breasts, genitalsto be lent to a friend, to a servant. And still I stood there in my nakedness tumescent and aching and so vulnerable.
I looked up and shouted, "You rotten lousy stinking son-of-a-bitch bastard!" But I said those words to the door through which he had gone when I should have said them to his face.
I went through my own door then, the one opening to the stairs. Kurt stood below, now for something other than to escort me to my clothes and out of the house.
Halfway down I stopped. His square face had come alive with anticipation. And a question in his pale eyes. Unlike Zorn, my master and his, he wasn't sure of me.
Holding my breasts, I resumed going down to him. When we stood on the same level, I tilted my head (he was more than a full head taller) and what I saw all of a sudden was a bashful man-childan awkward and unsure boy, like any man at some time when sexually confronting a woman. I could have laughed then. I did smile and took one of his big hands. He sighed at my acceptance of him. Hand in hand we moved down the hall.
"Not the laundry room," I said. "Absolutely not."
"No, madam. The den." He gave me a shy sidelong glance. "Will that be all right?" "I guess so."
Kurt stepped aside to let me enter first. I still held the little sheet of paper from Zorn's notebook. I put it on the desk. My clothes were on the sofa; I transferred them to the desk chair. Close to me in that small room Kurt was taking off his jacket. I stretched out on the sofa, my head resting on the arm and my legs straight out and pressed together. He sat down on the armchair and removed his shoes. Then in socks and pants and shirt and bowtie he reared up.
His bulk loomed immense. I cringed. In clothes he didn't even approximate a lover. He looked the rapist he had been in the laundry room.
"For goodness sake, take off your clothes," I said.
"If you wish, madam." But when he was down to his underwear he paused. "Should I remove everything?" "Of course. I have."
To bring him to my level, wherever that was. To make him as vulnerable as I in nakedness. He put his back to me. As Henry did when he stripped to the skin. Kurt was all brawn, like Henry, but even bigger. Much bigger. When he turned, I found him covered with hair from the tops of massive shoulders to his ankles. Hair like a mantle of curled straw. A blond beast. Mightily roused.
Somewhere I had read that the size of a man's penis had no relation to the size of the rest of his body. That wasn't true of Kurt. It projected hugely and fearfully over me. Like a bludgeon. I closed my eyes, waiting for the giant to mount me and split me in two.
Nothing happened. My eyes opened. Holding a towel, he stood looking down at me. The perfect servant having prepared a towel in advance so the tweed sofa wouldn't be soiled. He dropped it at my feet, then continued to stand there. A rampant beast, but evidently a shy beast. I used to be shy myselfonce. With an encouraging smile, I opened my legs, letting the outside one dangle off the sofa.
At that he sank to his knees on the floor. His head dipped, and his mouth was on my flesh. His tongue writhed in my navel, then slid down past my belly. He kissed my mound through the thick curls. A hundred kisses, it seemed, each like a spark igniting me. His mouth moved on, absorbed between my thighs. I wailed like a banshee when he nibbled my clitoris. I hooked my inside foot on top of the sofa. I had never been more open.
He paused to look at me. Why do men always want to look at women they're driving frantic with lust? "Kurt, don't stop!"
He resumed. I learned the shattering things a tongue could do. I threw my legs over his shoulders, held his face tighter to me by the thick blond thatch on his head, almost smothered him between my thighs. I wanted him to go on forever. Too soon he stopped.
"Kurt! Just a little more."
"That's what I am afraid of, madam. I would like to share your satisfaction." "Then do! But do something."
He was too big to get fully on the sofa while I was also on it. His feet stayed on the floor and as leaned over me. I reached between us. He felt enormous in my fist, but not now frightening. In fact, terribly exciting. I drew it to me. I was less gentle with myself than he had been with me in the laundry room, but I had been so well readied by him that I felt no twinge of pain. My insides closed about him, hugging him, and with a sigh he began to glide.
Though he was partly off the sofa, he covered me entirely. His hairy flesh smelled of something like shaving lotion. He was careful not to crush me. The considerate servant. He held himself hovering by propping himself up by one hand beside my waist and the other clutching the top of the sofa. Our bodies were in contact only where they had to be. I needed him closer. Embracing him with arms and legs, I began to slam myself up against him.
What was it Zorn had said? Kurt would service me. The words farmers used for mating a female animal with a male. Nasty and debasing the way he had used it. But all right, what did I care right now? Service me. Go on, Kurt, service me, service me.
He stared down at me. Those words, I realized, were pouring from my gasping mouth. Maybe they were incoherent, lost in other guttural sounds I uttered. "Service me!" I yelled in his ear. And he did, leaving me spent and sobbing. My arms and legs flopped away from him.
He hung on for a minute more, then climbed up to his feet. After first having put the towel under me. My thoughts came together as I recovered, and I was ashamed and afraid. It shouldn't have been so good with Kurt who was nothing to me. Neither husband nor lover.
He was sitting on the armchair. He had put on his pants and shoes, but nothing else. "There's a bathroom up the hall," he said. "The next door on this side."
"Thanks." I went out without putting anything on. I didn't think of itnot in this house where clothes had no purpose for me.
The bathroom was tiny, with hardly room for basin and toilet and shower stall. Clean but uncozy. Instead of showering, I washed at the sink.
When I returned to the den, I found that Kurt hadn't moved from the armchair. Still in only pants and shoes. I had to pass close to him to get to my clothes; I wondered if he would pull me down on his lap. He didn't. Had he had enough of me? For that matter, had I had enough of him? At the desk chair I looked down at my pile of clothes. Actually I had no wish to get dressed yet. As primly as a naked woman can I settled myself at one end of the sofa. There was no doubt of the hunger in those pale eyes.
"What time is it?" I asked.
My watch was in my handbag where I always put it before undressing here, along with my wedding and engagement rings. His was half-lost in the straw hair on his wrist.
"Ten after four. Joe Dunwald will be here at five to pick you up." Never taking his eyes off me, he licked his upper lip. "We have fifty minutes, Mrs. Kimball."
"So we have. Will you drive me if I leave now?" "If you wish, madam," he said unhappily.
I laughed. It was nice to know that there was one man in this household I could tease. I said, "Come here and kiss me. You never have, you know. I mean on the mouth."
He lumbered up to his feet and dropped down beside me on the sofa and drew me to his mammoth chest. He tasted of peppermint. He must have rinsed his mouth with mouthwash and doused himself with masculine perfume preparing himself for me. I took his hand and pressed it on my breast and gave him my tongue. The overpowering animalism of him! I reached down to his pants. He was very much ready again.
Kurt has agreed to service you.
Well, all right. Once more, Kurt, service me. In a brand new way that just popped into my head. In an exciting way his strength inspired.
I said, "Kurt, get undressed again."
He scrambled out of his pants and underpants, tore off his shoes. He flung his face at my crotch. When I got so I could hardly stand it, I made him stop. I had him sit upright on the sofa and there I straddled him. When I was all the way down on him he was so big and deep in me that I felt I had no room for breath. I took a brief rest while he chewed on my breasts.
"Kurt," I said after a minute, "can you stand up without us coming apart?" He looked surprised, then pleased. "I'm willing to try."
He pushed himselfand me, of courseto the edge of the sofa. My arms were already about his neck; I wound my legs around his waist. Or partway around because of his size there as well as elsewhere, resting mostly on his hips.
Putting his hands under my buttocks, he rose with me. For all my hundred and twenty-odd pounds he held me as easily as he ordinarily could a child. He did slip out somewhat in that changed position, but not enough to make much difference.
I said, "Kurt, can you walk like this with me out in the hall?" "But madam!"
"Go on, Kurt, try it. Humor me."
There was no great problem. With arms and legs I hung on as tightly as I could while his huge hands on my buttocks held me firmly fixed to him. And of course there was the natural movement of his walking, the jiggling and quivering. Nice. Very nice, like a game. I was delightfully lightheaded. I giggled at the great big joke. A joke on Zorn? On me? On Henry and his mother-in-law and the only world I had known? I began a movement of my own as he walked.
He reached the stairs and stopped. "Go up them, Kurt."
"That room up there is only for Mr. Zorn."
"I know. Just take me to the top of the stairs and then down. See if we can make it." No further argument from him. I was in the driver's seat-literally. He started up the stairs. We didn't come close to making it. After four or five of those steep steps, he lost control. Shaking all over, he pressed me against the wall. I let myself go too, the back of me squirming against the wall and the front of me grinding against him.
That ended it. I slipped away from him and at once headed for the bathroom. All of a sudden I didn't want to be near him.
This time I took a shower. I felt I had a lot of cleaning up of myself to do. In the mirror as I dried myself I hardly recognized myself. I looked as I always did, maybe a little tired around the eyes; at the same time I didn't quite know the face staring back at me. Frightened, I went back to the den. Finding Kurt in there tying his bowtie somehow relieved me. At least he was somebody real.
He watched me dress. We had nothing to talk about. There was no reason why we should have. I spoke when I had pulled my dress over my head. "Kurt, will you see Mr. Zorn before he leaves?" "I am to drive him to the airport at seven."
"Tell him I enjoyed you very much," I said. "Tell him I had lots of orgasms." He put on his jacket, saying nothing.
"Tell him how I made you do it a second time," I went on. "How I had you carry me up the hall and up the stairs."
"Was that why you did it, madam?"
"Oh, no. Because I found you so much more exciting than I ever did him. Will you tell him that, Kurt." I wasn't usually vicious. But then I wasn't usually anything that I was in this house. Slowly he buttoned his jacket. Then he looked at me and said, "You don't know him, Mrs. Kimball, if you think you can get back at him that way."
"All men are conceited about sex," I said. "So you won't tell him?" "Mr. Zorn gets to know everything," he said in that stiff servant's manner. I picked up my handbag and turned to the door.
"Madam, you forgot this."
He had the page from Zorn's notebook. I took it from him. We went out to the waiting taxi where quite formally I said good-bye to him. We were, of course, strangers, Kurt and I.
Sitting back in the taxi, I discovered in my hand that sheet of paper with that name and address. I couldn't seem to get away from it. I crumpled it and opened the car window to throw it out. But I didn't. Instead I stuck it into my handbag.
Part Three. THE CORRUPTERS
Sunday, September 21
Usually only Saturday was Henry's golf day, but this weekend he and his cronies played on both days.
Their excuse was that the season would soon be over and it would be a shame not to take advantage of the current good weather. So both mornings he was up and out by seven.
Saturday morning I had gotten up with him to have breakfast with him. On Sunday I stayed in bed. In fact, I stayed in bed all morning and beyond.
Twice my mother-in-law came into my room and asked me if I was sick. I told her I was lazy. Each time she stared down at me with lips pursed and then went out.
I was still in bed when Henry returned at two o'clock. I heard him and his mother muttering in the living room. Then he came in and kissed my brow to feel if I had a fever, and he asked me what hurt me.
"A woman's complaint," I said. "Induced by a husband who spends his weekends on the golf course." "I guess you're right, I shouldn't have. I'm sorry, Amy." He could be sorry about anything at the drop of a hat. "But you must be sick, sweetheart, if you stay in bed."
"All right, so I'm sick."
"Have you had lunch?"
"No. I'll get up and make yours."
"You stay in bed if you're not well," he said. "Mother will take care of me."
He left the bedroom door open and I could hear them discuss me. She told him that in her opinion I was exhausted from running around with that Gertrude Ember woman. He said he hadn't known I was seeing her that often. Practically every other day, his mother said.
Which wasn't true. I'd been seeing Gertrudemeaning Zornhardly more than once a week. Twice a week when I was lucky. And now it wouldn't be for a number of weeks and maybe months.
Nothing but my ordinary life to look forward to in all that time.
"Mother, have you ever met this Gertrude?" I heard Henry ask.
"That's the odd thing," she said. "Amy is constantly running to meet her, but she has never once invited her to this house. You would think there is something to hide."
"Mother, what are you getting at?" he said.
"Nothing, dear," she said. "Not a thing. I am positive Amy is a loyal and devoted wife. What would you like to have for lunch, dear?"
I lay in bed thinking: Oh, that bitch!
Of course she couldn't know anything. In her not-so-subtle way she was being her usual troublemaker, nothing else. All the same, she scared me.
Henry brought in canned soup and a Spanish omelet and coffee on a tray. He sat and kept me company while I ate. There was nothing the matter with my appetite.
When I finished, he said, "Is there anything else you want?" "Yes, darling," I said. "Undress and come into bed."
Standing with the tray in his hands, he gawked down at me. "Sick as you are?" "I'm not sick. I'm bored. I want to make love."
"But with Mother in the house!"
"She's in the house nights as well," I said. "Darling, don't I appeal to you?"
The cover was about my waist and there wasn't much bodice to my nightgown and I thought I was provocative enough even for a husband. And Henry did look at me the way Zorn did and Kurt and the mere girl-watchers in the park and at swimming, and he was handsomer than anybody and I loved him more than anybody, and what a minute before had been a random idea to pass the time and maybe rouse me out of my lethargy became a positive yearning.
"Tonight," he promised me. "It's a definite date. I mean if you're feeling all right." With that he put down the tray and brushed his lips across mine and patted my half-bared bosom and picked up the tray and carried it out to the kitchen.
So there I was. I had a choice: whether to be bored in bed or bored out of bed. As being where I was was duller than being where I wasn't, I got out and put on my housecoat and watched television with them in the living room.
In the evening we visited Edwina and Marvin French. She was my best friend and I was quite fond of Marvin, but I was still bored.
We returned home at eleven and went right to bed because tomorrow was a workday. When I came out of the bathroom (without my nightgown on) Henry was practically asleep. All that golf over the weekend, plus a couple of cocktails at the Frenches', had been too much for him.
I didn't remind him of our date. I put on my nightgown before joining him in bed, I had a feeling that that too would have bored me. So all I did was kiss his cheek and curl myself against his broad back. And thought that tomorrow was Monday and that at one o'clock a man named Roscoe Jones would be expecting me.
Friday I had torn into little pieces and flushed down the drain the sheet of notebook paper Zorn had given me. But that had been a pointless gesture, protecting me from nothing, most of all not from myself. It was an easy name and address to remember.
Monday, September 22 Cleveland Street was a fifteen-minute walk from my house. I walked because this was a lovely fall day and because driving up in a taxi might make me conspicuous. I reached number 17 at five minutes to one.
It was a three-story brick building between a garage and an aging apartment house. A quiet, shabby-genteel neighborhood where ordinary people led ordinary lives.
Six mailboxes in the vestibule, and on one his name: ROSCOE JONES, 3B. There were no bell buttons, so I turned the inner door. It opened. I found myself in a clean, well-lit hall smelling of cooking in olive oil. Somewhere on the first floor a woman shrieked at a child.
Still very ordinary. Oddly, that made me all the more nervous. What had I expected, some exotic den of iniquity?
Apartment 3B would be on the third floor. When I reached the top of the first flight of stairs, I began to hear the piano. The sound of it grew as I mounted the second flight, and when I was on the third floor I discovered that it came from where I was going, the door marked 3B at the rear.
For a long minute I stood at that door out of breath from the climb and jittery and thinking of not going through with it. Then I took a deep breath and knocked.
The piano continued playing and the door stayed closed.
As I knocked again and then again, each time louder, I was reminded of how at Zorn's house my ringing of a doorbell had been ignored when I had tried to enter through the front door at any time or the back door at the wrong time. Here it could only mean that the uproar of the piano drowned out my knocking. Annoyed, I rattled the knob. It turned in my hand and the door moved inward.
There was no foyer or entry room. I stood in the doorway looking into a studio room dominated by a concert grand piano.
The man banging away at it was stripped to the waist. His thin bent torso weaved and bobbed as he pounded the keys with fists as well as fingers. What he played was very modern indeed. Atonal, of course. Full of dissonance and clamor. I stepped into the room.
"Roscoe Jones?" I shouted.
That broke his concentration. He became aware that he was not alone and stopped playing. "Hi," he said cheerfully. He picked up a juice glass from the piano and took a drink of the dark liquid in it and replaced it. Then he said, "You're Amy, I guess."
"Yes."
"Be with you in a minute," he said, and brought ten fingers down on the keys with a crash that shook a table lamp. And played on.
Though I didn't care much for the kind of music he was making, he was very good at it. I closed the door behind me and stood waiting with my hands clutching my handbag.
Dusty sunlight flowed down through a skylight as well as through uncurtained windows. This could have been a charming room if anybody had been interested. Apparently he wasn't interestedexcept in the piano and probably the imposing built-in ornately carved bar. For the rest, a scattering of nondescript furniture cluttered with newspapers, magazines, sheet music, used paper cups, discarded clothing. The carpet needed vacuuming and everything needed dusting and wiping.
The other rooms weren't in better shape. They were off the two side walls, and from where I stood I could see through open doors (not one was closed) a bedroom with unmade bed, a bathroom with two towels on the floor, a kitchen with unwashed dishes all over the place.
Some love nest!
Abruptly the piano playing ceased. The silence startled me. Merry gray eyes were looking me over. "Sorry," he said. "I woke up with this idea for the second movement of my symphony and I had to try it out. In my head it was great. On the keyboard, not so hot. What do you think, honey?"
"I really wouldn't know," I said. "Are you a composer?"
"One of the great unknowns." All his teeth showed when he smiled. "So you're Amy," he said. "It doesn't look as if you expected me."
"I couldn't be sure you'd come, could I? Let's say I hoped." He rose from the bench; he was so tall and loose-jointed that he seemed to unwind himself upward. "Oh, you mean this mess and me being undressed? I meant to straighten up for you when I got up, but that was only an hour ago and I became involved with the symphony."
I could see now that Roscoe Jones wore a pair of pajama pants. Creased and baggy and sagging well below the navel. Feet bare. A face amiably homely, with pixie eyes and wide mouth that smiled easily and quickly. Shaggy hair running every which way. Well in his thirties, I guessed.
He didn't particularly appeal to me.
"Arthur's Amy," he said as his eyes blithely peeled the clothes off me. "Beautiful! He sure didn't overstate your pulchritude."
"So I'm acceptable?" I said tartly.
"Let's put it this way, honey. At the moment I consider myself the luckiest of men." With that Roscoe Jones plucked the juice glass from the piano and raised it to me in a wordless toast and drank. Whiskey by the color of it and the careful way he took it down. There was lots of it at the bar.
I said, "Is that Zorn's first name-Arthur?"
"Do you mean to say you don't know it by now?" "Only his last name. He tells me nothing about himself."
"I know. But not his name! For your information, it's Arthur M. Zorn." He started the glass back to his mouth and stopped it before it got there. "I forget my manners. What do you drink?"
"No, thanks."
"It's a bit early, I admit," he said, misunderstanding. "For me this is a pre-breakfast pickup. Have you had breakfast yet, Amy?"
"Breakfast and lunch."
"Sure thing. You're one of the normal people who sleep during the night." He rubbed his stubbled chin. "Sit down. Make yourself comfortable while I pretty myself up for you. Better yet, how about putting up some coffee? I haven't eaten since midnight. Okay?"
I nodded.
He went into the bathroom, and without closing the door, stepped out of his pajama pants. He knew I could see him moving about in there preparing to shower, and he didn't care, blatantly already taking me and my role here for granted. I turned away.
There were two doors I could go througheither the one into the kitchen or the one out of here. I went into the kitchen.
An old-fashioned kitchen from the days when they built them large enough for a dinette table and three chairs in addition to necessary equipment. And an ungodly mess. Dishes and pots unwashed for days on whatever would hold them. Encrusted food. Floor sticky with something spilled and not mopped up.
The very opposite of Zorn's immaculate place, and Roscoe Jones wasn't anything like Zorn (whose name turned out to be Arthur), and what in the world was I doing here?
What I did here to begin with was to scour the electric percolator and hunt up coffee and fill it and plug it in. Then I started at the unsavory task of cleaning up enough of the kitchen to make it possible to sit at the table without turning sick to the stomach.
The busy little housewife and about-to-be mistress. Keeping myself occupied to keep myself from bursting into tears or running out screaming.
The dishes were soaking in the sink and the table was set and the coffee done and bread ready for the toaster when Roscoe Jones came in. Showered and shaven, but hair in a riot. The pajama pants were back on him, still sagging to the level of mere decency. His attire for receiving bedmates.
At least he appreciated the minor miracle I had wrought in those few minutes. "Nothing like a woman in a kitchen," he said, and kissed me.
I had a moment of panic as his arms went around me. I wasn't readyif I ever would be. But it was a quick kiss, a somewhat formal kiss of thanks, after which he let go of me and sat down.
I served him and myself coffee and toast. Though I had eaten an hour ago, I needed more coffee now the way some people needed whiskey in a moment of stress. I had taken milk and butter and marmalade from the refrigerator.
"It's not much of a breakfast," I said. "Would you like eggs?"
"Honey, this is beautiful. I'm not a big eater till evening. I'll go out for a real meal at five. That's about when you have to leave, huh?"
"Yes."
"I'm strictly a night person. Usually I don't get up much before this. What did Arthur Zorn tell you about me?"
"Nothing." I looked down at my coffee cup. "Only that you'll be his" my voice dropped to a whisper"surrogate."
"Surrogate!" His homely face grinned with every muscle in it. "Arthur has a knack for the precise word." He touched my hand. "I'm going to be grateful as hell to him for this."
I didn't raise my head.
He rose to put more bread in the toaster. I felt him pause behind me. "We'll get along fine," he said, and his mouth dipped to the back of my neck.
Another brief, chaste-type kiss, but when he straightened up he stayed behind me to reach around and stroke my cheek. His hand trailed down over my chin, lingered on my throat, moved on. I was wearing my two-piece suit dress, and his fingers slid down under the V-collar of my jacket. While his bare belly pressed the back of my head.
"Don't," I said. But I said it without stirring. I felt that if I didn't hold all my nerves and muscles together I would quake violently. "Not here," I said thickly.
"Of course not here," he said above my head. "I have a roomy bed for that. But you're not a girl I can keep my hands off."
He had one of the hands he could not keep off me on my shoulder and the other under my slip and into my bra. My compressed breasts were right against the curve of his spread fingers, swelling into them.
"Beautiful!" he breathed. "Arthur wasn't kidding when he said you have the most pneumatic pair of tits." I jerked myself sideways so violently that his hand was yanked out of my bodice. He didn't try to hold me down. I jumped up to my feet, knocking the chair over.
Roscoe Jones gawked at me in surprise. I wasn't supposed to be acting like thiscertainly not one sent to him by his good friend Arthur Zorn who in advance had described my breasts and every other part of me.
"II shouldn't have come," I gasped, and ran out of the kitchen.
He hurried after me. He caught me by the arm as I started to open the entrance door. "Let go of me!" I shouted. "Why don't you men ever let go of me?"
All right, I was unreasonable; he could have reminded me that it was I who had come here and for what purpose. Instead, with contrition all over his face, he apologized.
"Look, honey, if I was crude I'm sorry. Let's go and finish our breakfast." He knew how to smile tenderly as he peered down into my face. "Am I forgiven?"
My knees were buckling. If I stood there clinging to the doorknob much longer I would crumple at his feet. Of weep. Or kick him in his unprotected groin.
"I shouldn't have come," I said again.
"Honey, honey!" he took my face between his hands-and I let him. "Don't you care for me the least bit?" "I don't know you."
"Then let's get acquainted. That was what I was trying to do in the kitchen. Something went wrong. Let's wipe everything out and start from the beginning. You knock and I go to the door and open it and we say hello. Hello, Amy."
He was, after all, rather nice. If he wasn't Zorn, he would be kinder and more considerate; he would say hello and good-bye and kiss me affectionately when I came and went. If he was unhandsome and sloppy, he wasn't repulsive. If he had no swank home and no servants and was a terrible housekeeper, what kind of snob was I to let that bother me?
I made myself smile a little. "Hello, Roscoe," I said.
Holding my cheeks, he dipped his head and kissed me. His mouth tasted of a mixture of whiskey and toothpaste and coffee. I liked the taste. He slid his hands to my back and gathered me to him. I felt small and vulnerable and desired.
After another kiss he said, "Should we finish our coffee?" "No," I said. "Take me to bed."
So in the circle of his arm I went with Roscoe Jones to his bedroom. The bed was full-size with a shelved backboard holding a small radio and a junkshop of odds and ends. Not a drawer in the chest of drawers was closed. A shirt was on the floor. What really bothered me was the way the bed was messed up-and the bed was the whole point of me being here. I set to work smoothing the bottom sheet, folding the blanket, fluffing out the pillows continuing as his housekeeper before ever I became his mistress. He leaned against the doorjamb, his grin making me quite self-conscious. Of course his eyes were already undressing me. Oh, well, in a minute I would be naked for him.
It turned out that he was naked first. When I took off my dress top he took off his pajama bottom. Instinctively I glanced down at him; he was quite flaccid. I wasn't sure whether to be relieved or worried. He got on the bed and lay wholly uncovered with his head turned to me. Quickly I got rid of the rest of my clothes, putting them on the chair.
"Beautiful!" Roscoe said.
Suddenly his grin put me at my easeanyway, more than I had been. It was a boy's grin, open and honest, going with his boy's pixie eyes and his boy's rib-showing chest. Somewhat shyly I lay down beside him. Flat on my back as he was on his. Neither of us pulled the blanket up over us.
He put his hand high on my thigh. My skin jumped. My breath clogged as I waited for his hand to go on from there. It didn't. It lay spread motionless over the full curve of my upper thigha wide, long-fingered pianist's hand. Through it currents flowed into my blood. He was letting me, I thought, rouse myself, and I was glad of it. I had to get used to him.
Through the single window the sun streamed over this bed as it did over the round red divan through the triple windows in the octagonal room. It struck me that I had never before been in an actual bed with any man but Henrymeaning never with Zorn or Kurt. A bed was homey; it was normal; it provided a built-in coziness. He shifted an inch or two closer. That brought further contacts, hips and legs. I looked down along our bodies-mine the familiar swells and curves and the dark triangle, his lank and largely hairless, and I discovered that without having done anything but hold my thigh he had roused fully. Standing up very erect like a soldier in a round hat at attention waiting for an order.
Seeing what I was looking at, he said cheerfully, "Say when, honey."
A considerate lover. He hadn't grabbed me; he hadn't imposed himself on me. All at once I knew that a man who grinned like that and had such merry eyes would be nicer to me than anybody. My heart swelled with tenderness. I said, "I'd like to be kissed."
Laughing, he kissed my lips and eyes and nose and throat. His mouth went to my breasts, slipping from one to the other, and when it lingered to suck a nipple I felt I was nursing some alien but precious child. He shifted down on me with mouth and tongue and hands, exploring every bit of me. As if tasting a new dish and, finding it delicious, greedily lapping it up. I flung my legs wide and pressed his head between them, wanting from his mouth what I had received from Kurt in the den. And he did. How wonderfully he did. My hands went up over my head, my fists mashing the headboard, my hips rolling and breasts writhing.
His torso slid up along my side. His face hovered over me. "Now, honey, or more playing?" It was up to me. What I wanted mattered to him. There was, after all, a wholly considerate lover in this world.
"All right, now," I said.
He swung over me and I became one with this sweet stranger. Sweet was the word. He didn't drive me as wild as Zorn did. Zorn was special; Zorn was brutal and gentle, charming and arrogant; Zorn was the master. Never mind Zorn. Concentrate on his surrogate who was so little like him. An amiable, happy, thoughtful lover. If Roscoe Jones didn't bring me up to heights of mindless frenzy, he took me to a quieter plateau of pure sensual delight. It lasted and lasted. I adored him for his control and patiencefor the way he played my clitoris as he played the piano, with tempo and texture bringing me gradually along.
"Let's come together," he said. "Okay, honey?"
"If we can."
"Give me some advance notice and I'll be right there with you."
I said, "Very soon now," and then I said, "Now, now," and his strokes grew deeper and faster, and as one we reached the crescendo.
With that unselfish patience of his, he waited propped up over me during my ebbing aftermath. I was not shaken, it had not been all that wild; I had flowed to completion on a warm tide. Sweet was still the word, and sweet could be as satisfying as anything. I made a small motion with my hips. He understood without being told and pulled gently out. Then again we lay side by side in the sun, this time holding hands like a couple of glowing kids in a park.
I asked him to tell me about himself.
"I work in a nightclub," he said. "That's why I lead a topsy-turvy life. Anyway, by your standards. I seldom come home right after I'm through, so I sleep all my mornings away. At seven in the evening I have to be there for the dinner crowd."
"I suppose you play the piano."
"What then? I do that better than waiting on tables or bouncing unruly drunks. It could be worse. Once I sank so low as to play with a rock combo. Vapid juvenile beats for the juvenile soul, if any. At least the Majesticthat's where I workis the one place in town where there's enough musical taste to appreciate good jazz. Do you know jazz, honey?"
"Not really. You don't hear much of it these days."
"More's the pity. Even some of our real composers are forgetting it exists. I say you can't write serious music as an American without a thorough knowledge of jazz and an affinity for it. It's the only indigenous American music. It's the fabric of my symphony."
He could, after all, be quite earnest and solemn. About music, at any rate. I snuggled up to him and kissed his shoulder.
He hadn't forgotten I was naked beside him. He reached across his chest to cup my breast while he went on, "What you heard of my symphony when you came in wasn't anything. Merely some fooling around. I'll play the good parts for you when we're otherwise occupied." He squeezed my breast. "Speaking of fooling around, honey, what mood are you in?
"Quite friendly."
"Than it's time for an encore."
I put my hand out and very soon in my fist the soldier stood at attention again. This time, having become acquainted, I blessed myself by giving as much as I received.
Fooling around in the most pleasurable way possible, I made him gasp and he made me whimper and our mouths were full of each other. Like Zorn-like all the capable and experienced ones, I supposed-he extended sensation to the fullest, and I had been learning to do the same. The difference with him was that none of it was grim. All of it was done in a gay spirit, and it seemed inevitable that when we finally got into position it had a comic element to it.
We joined ourselves with our backs at opposite ends of the bed, our torsos held at an incline by our elbows, his long legs extended along my sides while my ankles were on his shoulders. Not the tightest or deepest or most comfortable connection, but a new one to me and with certain advantages. Across the lengths of our torsos we could face each other and watch each other and carry on a conversation without overwhelming tension. While I gently rocked my hips (alternating between side to side and back and forth), Roscoe told me that he was the only one in his jazz band who wasn't a fairy, and far away the best explanation would be the sight of me at this moment. I said, "Thank you, kind sir," and gave an extra wiggle. It was all so snug and congenial, like a particularly friendly visit. I decided that homely, skinny men with wide-open grinning faces were beautiful, and my buttocks joined my hips in their activity. He began to stroke my clitoriseasy for him in that positionand I practically flew out of my skin. "Let's go, honey," he said, and we grabbed each other's hands and pulled each other up to sit hugging each other, and off we went.
Again together. Which ended that particular visit.
We got out of bed and put on robes. His was a snappy plaid affair-given to him recently by a girl, he told me. When he took it from the bedroom closet, he also took out a lime negligee for me. Diaphanous and quite short, but a lot more than I wore in the octagonal room.
"Does this negligee belong to the same girl who gave you the robe?" I asked as I tied the sash. "No. Another one left it some time ago. It's handy to have around."
"You must have quite a few girls."
"I like girls," he said, giving me a squeeze and a kiss.
I put up a fresh pot of coffee. While waiting for it to perk, I attacked the dishes soaking in the sink and made him dry them. Over the coffee he related humorous adventures he had had while playing with bands, and I had a cozy feeling that we were becoming friends.
I had never before been friends with a lover.
"Only ten to four," he said, looking at the wall clock. "Would you like to go back to bed?" "Oh, you couldn't so soon again."
"Try me."
So I tried him. And he could and so could I.
What was it Zorn had said about him? His hobby is coitus. Yes! He knew everything there was to know. He made a thing of wit and humor out of sex, never grim, never a headlong plunge to climax, never selfisha gay and bubbly sport you played to draw sensation out to the utmost in every way imaginable. Nothing like that had happened to me even in the octagonal room. And having the capacity to be insatiable, he made me insatiable. Dear God, yes!
It was after five-thirty when, drained, I crawled out of bed. While I showered (with the bathroom door open) he banged away on the piano and sipped whiskey between passages. We dressed together and he went to the door with me and kissed me good-bye. It was nice to have a lover who observed the affectionate amenities.
"When will I see you again?" he asked.
"I can almost always make time during the day. Will you send for me?"
"Honey, forget the Arthur Zorn pattern with me. I'm a different kind of guy. Come whenever you wish." "Can I phone you?"
"Of course. My number is in the book. But you don't have to bother. My door is always open to you. In fact, it's seldom locked. You'll find me home mornings and usually afternoons." He took my face in his hands. "Amy, honey, you're the loveliest thing that happened to me in ages."
We kissed once more and I left all aglow.
Wednesday, September 24 I used to look forward to the weekly sessions of what we cutely called the Wednesday Afternoon Bridge Ladies. Practically all my friends belonged, and there was as much chattering as bridge playing, both of which I usually enjoyed.
Being here this afternoon, though, was a waste. I could have been in that sloppy apartment on Cleveland Street. Two days would be a decent enough intervalif decent was a word I could use-between visits. With Roscoe Jones I did not have to wait to be sent for; he had said I could come any time. Instead here I was with women surrounded by women's talk and playing a game on which I couldn't keep my mind.
We were meeting this week in Debby Levine's gorgeous home, and my seat at one of the four cardtables faced the piano. A grand piano rather lost in a corner of that huge living roomalmost as big as Roscoe's, maybe the same size. The top was down, making a great flat shiny surface, and suddenly there leaped into my head a terribly exciting picture of its possibilities.
At the moment Tilly Odom, who was my partner, was bawling me out as she shuffled the cards for having played the last hand stupidly. I knew I had and didn't care and didn't listen. Past her head I was looking at the piano and seeing Roscoe and me naked on top of his.
He was such a sex expert, was he? Well, tomorrow I would show him a place and position I bet he had never thought of. And maybe, because he made sex such a fun thing, while at it he would be able to reach down to the keyboard and play an appropriate tune to our movements. I couldn't help giggling.
Tilly's hand came to a halt as she dealt. "Let us in on the joke, Amy," she said severely. "It's nothing, really," I said, feeling confused and guilty.
"Why, Amy, you're blushing!" Cindy Rivers on my right exclaimed. "You're positively scarlet. Isn't she, girls?"
The girls agreed that I was and nagged me to tell them why. I said I had just remembered a very funny dirty story Henry had told me last night. They wanted to hear it, of course. I said I simply couldn't repeat it in public. They accepted that because I had the reputation for being the pure and prissy one in the group.
I made an effort to concentrate on my cards, but the image stayed with me. I could hardly wait.
Thursday, September 25 One of the good things about Roscoe Jones was not having to wait to be sent for. Twenty minutes after Henry had left for work I was dressed and ready to go.
Naturally my snoopy mother-in-law had to ask me where I was headed for this early. "I'm meeting some of the girls downtown for the day," I told her vaguely.
A quite normal excuse, better than the mythical Gertrude who could never come to my house to meet the family. All the same, she gave me one of those long, hostile looks of hers I was getting more and more of these days. I cringed inwardly. She could not possibly suspect anythingthough if anybody ever did, she would be the one.
"Goody-bye, Mother," I said, and went.
Again I walked to Cleveland Street instead of taking a taxi. Now and then I glanced behind me, not putting it past her to be following me. My guilty conscience? I wiped her from my thoughts and excited myself by what awaited me. Including the top of his piano.
This time I didn't knock at the third floor rear apartment. I turned the knob and sure enough the door was unlocked. Softly I closed it behind me.
I had expected Roscoe to be fast asleep at nine in the morning, and he was. Through the partly open bedroom door I saw him burrowed under the cover. I beamed at the piano.
The place was as much of a mess as last time. By the looks of the kitchen, not a dish had been washed since I had washed them Monday, and the living room was as disorderly and cluttered as before. I decided to let him sleep while I did some housework, after which I would prepare a good breakfast for him and wake him when it was ready. We had, probably, all day ahead of us.
I put down my handbag and took off my black tweed coat and went to close the bedroom door so as not to disturb him. I paused to look at him.
He lay under the blanket with face half-buried in a bunched-up pillow into which he snored. What I could see of his was unshaven and disheveled and unhandsomea lot less than a girl's dream of a lover. But in one afternoon I had learned better.
I closed the door and then stood there tingling at a sudden idea. As good an idea as the piano, maybe better, and this one could be put into immediate execution.
I stripped to my skin in the living room and quietly entered the bedroom. Feeling bubbly and breathless, I gently tugged the blanket off him. He stirred, and I thought he would wake up, which wouldn't be at all bad with me ready to pop in with him, but I preferred him not to. He flopped over on his back and groped for the blanket that was no longer there, and resumed snoring. Perfect!
Carefully I climbed up on the bed and knelt astride his long legs. All he had on were his rumpled pajama pants. Gingerly I opened the three snaps. He was flaccid in sleep. A limp bud flopped on his thigh. The tips of my fingers stroked him like feathers. His wide mouth curled in a beatific smile and he kind of purred and began to respondstill asleep and no doubt deep in a delightful dream my hands inspired. Giggling inside mehow giggly I was with him!-I shifted my straddling position up on him, and bit by bit I absorbed him.
Resting in the pleasure of the snugness of him, I thought suddenly of Zorn and how with him I would never have done anything like this. He was too stern and unpredictable; if he had not explicitly told me to do it, he might as soon thrust me from him with a slap as be pleased. As for with Henry, it would not have occurred to me.
I woke Roscoe by wiggling.
His eyes shot open. They blinked dazed at a naked female impaled on him and then they squeezed together as if something had to be wrong with them.
"Good-morning, Roscoe," I said.
He gaped up at my face. "Oh, it's you, Amy." "How many of your girl friends wake you up like this?"
"None till now." His hands went to my breasts. "Beautiful, honey! You're tremendous." His hands lowered to my active hips. "But coast a bit, huh? You've taken me by surprise and I like this kind of thing to last."
"So do I," I said, coasting.
He turned his face to the bedside table. "Pardon me," he said as he stretched a hand to it. What he was after was a juice glass half-full of whiskey.
"For heaven's sake," I said, "do you need a drink at a time like this?" "Now more than ever. Stay exactly as you are."
He just about managed to reach the glass without unseating me. Then he pushed himself up a little way with his other hand and drank.
I said, "I suppose the glass was there because you took it to bed with you." "Always. In case I wake up during the night, which I often do. It helps me sleep. "Does it also help you wake up?"
He drank some more. "What I can't stand about a good woman is that she assumes that just because a man lays her she has the right to nag him about his habits."
"I don't feel like a good woman. I certainly don't look it."
"That's for sure. Honey, can't you be still a minute? Here, take a drink of this. It will calm you down." "I don't drink and I don't want to be calmed down."
"Drink it," he said, holding the glass to my lips.
At that moment he sounded like Zorn, and I always obeyed Zorn, and Roscoe was his surrogate, and automatically I opened my mouth and drank.
This was by no means my first drink. Usually at a party where everybody else guzzled, including Henry to some extent, I would accept one weak highball and nurse it for hours. But I had never had whiskey straight and I took too big a gulp. It felt like raw fire. I coughed and sputtered and my chin knocked against the glass and what was left in it spilled on me.
When I had recovered, Roscoe said merrily, "Mustn't waste good stuff," and without disconnecting raised himself high enough to lick the whiskey from my chin and breasts while I jittered and clawed at his mop of hair. Then he sank back, lying flat, and below me his skinny body and homely face were beautiful.
"Now?" I said.
"Now," he said.
We spent the rest of the morning in bed. At noon I put on the negligee and cleaned up the kitchen and prepared lunch. As we ate I told him my day-dream about the piano top during the bridge party.
"Beautiful," he said.
So in the afternoon there was the grand piano. There had to be. Roscoe put down the piano top and we climbed on it. That shiny black surface made an erotic contrast with our skins. I lay on my back with my head to the keyboard. Directly overhead a fluff of cloud watched us through the skylight. He stretched himself on me. When he was snugly in me, he reached past my shoulder down to the keys.
The problem was that his hand was reversed. In order to twist it around he had to lean so heavily on me that he quite crushed me. He raised himself a bit and picked out a tune with one finger. What I had in mind was real playing. We disconnected to shift lengthwise over the keyboard, which was better. His arm was so long that he was able to turn his hand around while snugly lodged. Though the position limited him to one hand and a range of hardly more than an octave, that was good enough for a pianist of his skill.
He began with the theme from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Perfect for our purpose. Our hips kept time to the da-da-da-dum with a bump-bump-bump-thrustwhile I held my hand to his face in the V-for-victory sign. We began to giggle. Pretty soon we were laughing so hard that we almost fell off the piano. He caught me as my shoulder and buttock slipped off and we wiggled back to place.
"Now for the finale," he said when we had regained our breath. He thumped out The March of the Wooden Soldiers. A different beat, but with just as strong a stress on the thrust. Fun and sensation combining, so that when the spasms seized me my screams were full of wild laughter.
I had not known that sex could be so jolly and carefree, even at moments of greatest intensity, so clownish and giddy.
Saturday, September 27 For a searing few moments lovemaking with Henry was as good as with anybody. Better in a way, for I loved my husband dearly. And he had become a more facile and less selfish lover, having learned from me what I had learned from others.
No doubt about it-in recent weeks we had become more sexually compatible, as the marriage manuals put it.
And yet-and yet when those few minutes with the handsome young husband I loved were over and he turned from me to sleep, I lay curled against his broad back in our proper marital bed thinking that it wouldn't be till Monday before I would be free to pass another day in that apartment on Cleveland Street.
Because of morning chores and some necessary marketing for tonight's dinner, it was after eleven o'clock when I arrived at Roscoe's place.
As I entered the apartment, I heard water running. The sound came from the bathroom through the wide open door; he was up early for him and would be showering or bathing. I went directly to the bathroom to surprise him.
There was a surprise all rightfor me as well as for the person in the bathtub. Not Roscoe. A girl. She recovered a lot quicker than I did.
"Hi," she said brightly. "Who're you?"
Just like that. And sat up and turned off the faucets. Younger than I, in her very early twenties. Slim body and small-featured face-quite pretty. She sank down in the already well-filled tub and smiled up at me as if waiting for me to introduce myself.
I found my voice. "I can ask you who you are." "Louise," she said, quite friendly. "And you?" "Do we have to exchange names?" I snapped at her.
She shrugged and took up a washcloth and soap. She had fluffy red hair and tight, wide-spread breasts. Anywhere else I would have gotten out of the bathroom and slammed the door. Except that this wasn't anywhere else. This was another morally upside-down world like Zorn's-in fact, part of the same worldand so there was no point in being ill-mannered to a girl who apparently belonged to it as much as I did. She could as easily have barged in on me last Thursday taking a shower with the door open.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I thought Roscoe was in here."
"So you're one of his," Louise said placidly. "Didn't you see him when you came in? He was having coffee in the kitchen." She raised a leg out of the water to soap it. "Don't you want to tell me your name?"
"Why should I?"
"I can't think of a reason except to be friendly." She was being more gracious than I, so I said, "It's Amy." "You're lovely, Amy," she said.
I returned her smile then (she didn't seem a bad sort) and stepped back over the threshold and closed the door.
Roscoe was coming out of the kitchen holding a cup and saucer. He had on his plaid robe. "So you met Louise," he said.
"Yes."
Nervously I watched him stand in the doorway drinking his coffee. I felt guilty, on the defensive. "Didn't you see me in the kitchen when you came in?" he demanded.
"I didn't look in that direction. I heard water running and assumed it was you in the bathroom." I couldn't keep a pleading note out of my voice. "I wasn't snooping. II didn't mean to intrude. You said I could come any time without phoning. You did, Roscoe."
"Sure thing, honey. You're always welcome."
He put down the cup and saucer and came to me and took me in his arms and gave me his whiskey kiss. Trembling, I pressed myself to him.
"Honey, what are you scared of?" he said. "Do you take me for another Arthur Zorn who'll beat you or whip you?"
"II don't know."
"Look," he said, patting the back of my head. "I don't hit women, even when there's a good reason. Arthur and I may be close friends, but we're different people. I don't have a need for power over women. I'm a simple soul who merely enjoys loving their bodies. Yours more than any. Speaking of which, come to bed."
"But Louise" I said.
"She'll leave soon. She knows her way out. Come on."
We went into the bedroom. He didn't bother to close the door though he was in after I was. I stepped around him and closed it and stood against it. Of course the bed was all rumpled.
I said, "Did Louise spend the night with you?"
"Sure thing." He shed his robe and lay down, manifestly already excited, and lazily stretched his arms. "She was at the Majestic last night and was still hanging around when we were closing, so I brought her home with me."
"Was it the first time?"
"We're old friends. What're you waiting for, honey?" "Wasn't she enough for you?"
"Who, Louise? Just one bang a lot of hours ago, and she was being mostly accommodating. She can do without it. With men, I mean."
"A lesbian?"
"More or less. She swings both ways, though I think she prefers her own. A good kid." He grinned at me fixed against the door. "Could you be jealous, honey?"
"It's that I'm following on her heels."
"Don't I follow on your husband's heels? That should even up matters."
I took off my dress and hung it up in the closet. Then in my slip I said, "At least I'd like to change the sheet."
"Stop being so goddamn finicky. How long are you going to keep this thing waiting for you?" Only as long as it took me to get out of the rest of my clothes, and once I got started nothing else was important.
The door opened and Louise came in.
Barged in on me as I had on her. Except that I was doing a lot more than taking a bath. I was locked with Roscoe, and I was bouncing and jibbering with the pleasure of it. She was as naked as she had risen from the tuband as I was-and my first thought was that she had come for her clothes which would also be in the closet. She didn't go to the closet. She stood at the foot of the bed drying her fluffy red hair with a hand towel and smiling down at us.
I had been watched before. Not, not really watched. Several times Gertrude had walked in on me with Zorn in the octagonal room at such a time, but she had averted her face while doing whatever she had come in to do. Louise watched us as one watches an exciting exhibition, staring to miss nothing, and tension tightened her cheeks. The towel came down from her hair to the front of her, and she rubbed her mound with it in a slow and sensuous way.
I could look up at her as she looked down at us because both Roscoe and I were on our backs in a side-by-side position with the lower part of him under my hips. And he wasn't missing a beat, not minding her (any more than Zorn had minded Gertrude), and I was so far along that I couldn't bring myself to want to stop anything just yet.
Louise tossed aside her towel and said politely, "May I join you lovely people?" "Be our guest," Roscoe told her.
She got on my side of the bed and kissed me.
How soft and eager her mouth was! I needed kissing; because of our position Roscoe's face was out of reach. A hand smaller and smoother than his closed over one of my breasts. Four hands on me at once, occupying different areas. Her gulping mouth left mine and dipped to my breast. Her fluffy hair was damp on my face. My hand pressed between our bodies found her breast in turn. I squeezed it and thought it would be nice to suck it as she was sucking mine. I had to keep the position, though, to retain Roscoe, so I stayed as I was, half under her and half over himlay on my back possessed by four hands, one male organ, one female mouth running down on my torso tillhow could I stand it?male organ and female mouth combined at the sexual heart of me. I had both of them at once, and I screamed and screamed with sensation piling on sensation. And between them I was demolished and between them I was restored.
Louise was a fashion model and had an appointment to see somebody at two o'clock about an assignment. She phoned to say she couldn't make it, and she spent the rest of the day with us.
At one period in the middle of the afternoon Roscoe sat at the piano while Louise and I were on the sofa. He played for us jazz improvizations on the themes of popular songs. When he finished one, either she or I would call out another title to him. He knew them all. He would pick up his glass and take a drink while his free hand briefly tested the new melody, then off he would go on it, his bare torso swaying as in a sex act.
Because everything was sex. Like all three of us being completely naked at the time because it was the natural and titillating and convenient thing to be. And I felt wonderful. I felt drunk and contented. I kept beaming affectionately at him and at Louise.
I was sitting upright at one end of the sofa and she was stretched out on it with her head on my lap. She had taken my hand and passed it over her slim body, caressing her breasts and belly with it. Her breasts were on the smallish side, tight and pointing straight up when she lay on her back. Pretty soon my hand got the idea and moved over her from throat to the plump little bronze-tufted mons without being guided. My other hand held a tall glass of vodka and tonic which I kept sipping.
My second drink. Roscoe had fixed them for me. Vodka and tonic, he said, for drinkers who didn't like the taste of whiskey and didn't want the smell of it on their breaths when they got home. Which applied to me on both counts. I found I could get it down practically as easily as pop soda and so I didn't mind drinking sociably along with them, Because I wasn't used to it (and hadn't eaten anything since a skimpy breakfast but a ham sandwich from a plateful Louise and I had made) what would have been hardly anything for them hit me quick and hard. But in a delightful way that made everything utterly voluptuous.
Especially my naked body. And Louise's.
How nice women felt! Stroking her, I envied men who had women to fondle. I tittered at the way my fingers made her tiny pink nipples stiffen. I did the same to my bigger and darker nipples on my bigger breasts and tittered some more.
Louise stared up at me. Her face wavered. It seemed to be floating up to kiss me, but it didn't, which I regretted, and I didn't think I could bend down that far to kiss her.
She took my free hand again. She guided it down right between her legs. The shock or recognition and strangeness! The recognition of what a woman felt like because I was a woman and the strangeness because this for the first time was not myself. My finger extended itself into the avid juiciness of her. "That's it, darling!" she moaned, and her cheek turned on my thigh. Her mouth spread on my lower belly. I jittered against her mouth as she jittered around my finger. The music Roscoe was making took on a wailing quality, like somebody sobbing in a distance. Sobbing in my own voice as she nibbled at me.
The music stopped. Roscoe grinned at us around the top of the glass he held to his mouth. "Roscoe, play some more," her voice begged. "Do Clementine."
He played. The song swished in my head... miner, Forty-niner... oh, my darling, Clementine...
My darling Louise!
She sat up. She took my glass from me and put it down on the floor where hers was. She drew my face to her breasts and purred in my ear that I was adorable, that I had a marvelous body, that she loved me. I spread my mouth to try to get all of her smallish breast into it. Gently she pushed herself from me, saying, "Wait a minute," and hurried to the bedroom. She came back with the blanket from the bed and spread it on the carpet and lay down on it. "We'll be more comfortable here, darling."
I started to rise. The vodka almost knocked me over. I lowered myself to my hands and knees and crawled to the blanket, thinking of how restful it would be to lie there with her, a woman's flesh to woman's flesh. But as I lay down, Louise quickly reversed her position to put her feet at my head. Her face dug between my thighs and her own thighs captured my head between them. The smell and taste of female sex stifled me.
"Don't!" I said. "I don't want to."
But the words were muffled by the hair and folds of her sex. I tore my head free. "I don't want to!"
"Of course you do, darling. Both of us together. You'll love it, darling."
If I was too drunk to know anything else at the moment, I knew what I didn't want. I wanted everything with Zorn and Roscoe and maybe with Kurt, not to mention Henry, but not nearly everything with any girl. Suddenly I didn't even like her.
Between her widely spread legs I heaved my shoulders from the floor, but her weight held the rest of me pinned down. The effort seemed too much. I sank back woozily and lay in a swirl of music and vodka and helplessness. And then there was her tongue. That part was all right if I didn't have to do anything on my own. I lay quite still with the side of my face against the carpet to avoid the soft quivering warmth of her upper thigh and sex.
The music stopped. Roscoe stood over us. He seemed to reach all the way to the skylight. "Let's sandwich her," Louise said. "You know."
Her weight left me. There was movement. I was part of the movement. Without a will of my own, I was being adjusted by them. I found myself on top of Louise, in the same position that she had been on top of me. He knelt between my legs, which also put him over her head, and it was her fingers that opened me for his entrance. I responded with a happy moan because, after all, I now had my Roscoe. And there was her mouth coming up, and once more they had me both at once. Except that now she was available to my mouth too, right under my face the essential womanness of her like my womanness they both so wonderfully possessed. Wanting now in my ecstasy the taste of her and the feel and sense of her, I dipped my head and gave and took from her what she was giving and taking from me.
In the shower half art hour later, as the cold water cleared my head, I insisted to myself that I ought to be disgusted and ashamed. But I wasn't. Anyway, not very much.
On the way to Cleveland Street I stopped off at a southern fried chicken place and bought a bucketful and French fries and coleslaw.
It was noon, and Roscoe was already up and at the piano agonizing over his boisterous symphony. He stopped playing only long enough to be kissed so I let him be and took over the kitchen. After I had done the necessary housecleaning and set the table and put coffee up to percolate and arranged the food on platters, I sat and waited. I wasn't one to interrupt genius at work.
"Do I see honest-to-goodness eats?" he said when he finally came in.
"I decided you can't subsist on whiskey and coffee." "I have for years." "And look at youall bones." "I'd rather look at you with all that luscious stuff on your bones."
"That's a nasty thing to say to a woman who's worrying about her weight." "Honey, you've got exactly the right weight for my purpose."
He doubled up his lank frame to kiss me. As our mouths worked on each other, he fumbled at my zipper. "Not yet, Roscoe, please," I said. "Let's eat first." "In that case let's have a drink first." Since I couldn't reform him, I was falling into the habit of joining him. We went to the bar where he mixed a couple of vodka sours, and when we returned to the kitchen to eat I was glowing.
"I always feel completely relaxed with you," I told him as I nibbled on a chicken wing. "You're so different from Zorn."
"Everybody is different from everybody else."
"But how can you be close friends when you're such opposites? You're outgoing and full of fun. He's indrawn and stern and moody."
"And charming, don't forget that." "Yes-when he wants to be."
"Besides," Roscoe said with a mouthful of French fries, "he wouldn't be the same with you as with me. You're a woman. You serve a different purpose."
"It's a wonder you didn't say I'm merely a woman. That's all I am to him. Have you been friends long?" "Four years."
"He's quite a lot older than you."
"I'm thirty-six and he's forty-seven. At our ages that hardly matters. We have many things in common, including good music. Fact is, jazz brought us together. We met at one of those basement jam sessions. A bunch of Dixieland buffs. I go along with any style because I'm a thorough musician, though I'm more interested in cool or progressive jazz. Arthur Zorn is strictly a Dixieland man. He insists jazz was at its purest and earthiest at its beginnings in the whorehouses of Storyville. That's a simplistic approach. The old boys were good, but they didn't have the technical skills. When a superb instrumentalist like Charlie Parker came along to expand"
"But about Zorn," I broke in. I knew about Charlie Parker and didn't care to know more; you couldn't spend an hour with Roscoe without discovering that he was one of his musical gods right up there along with Bach, Beethoven, and Hindemith. About my lover Zorn I knew almost nothing, and here was my chance. "Is he a musician also?"
"Strictly an amateur, though good enough to sit in on jam sessions with us pros. He blows a mean horn, and he's not bad with the drums."
"I can't imagine him as a jazz drummer," I said. "You have to be so unrestrained." "That's because you know only what you see of him behind that curtain he puts up." "Does he put up a curtain between himself and all women?"
"Not all. Only the ones he lays."
"Why does he?"
Roscoe didn't answer. He reached for another piece of chicken and scooped up a forkful of coleslaw and chewed. His silence frightened me. I was guilty of prying, and Zorn had certainly made it clear to me that that was unpardonable.
But Roscoe Jones wasn't Arthur Zorn. He was kind and considerate and wouldn't as much as slap me no matter what. I looked for another opening.
"Zorn must have a profession," I said tentatively. "I mean, how does he make a living?" "He's an architectural consultant. That's why he's in India at the moment." "Oh, he's in India."
"That's right, you wouldn't know. He's over there advising the government on some housing project." "Then he's important?"
"Sort of," Roscoe said. "He could have been a top architect if he hadn't chucked that and everything else for a number of years."
"What happened?"
"What happens to a man? A woman. In his case, a wife."
I waited for him to go on from there. He didn't. He concentrated on gnawing around a thigh bone. "You started to tell about his wife," I reminded him. "Forget it," he said, and the sharpness of his tone made me jump.
I had gone too far in my prying. Apparently any distance at all was too far. "Why mustn't I know anything?" I cried. "Are there things so terrible you can't tell me?" "That's not it, honey. If Arthur wants to protect himself"
"Protect himself from what, for heaven's sake?" "From you mostly, I'd say, and from other women." "From me? Roscoe, that doesn't make sense."
"It does when you see the whole picture." "How can I see it if nobody lets me?"
He wiped his mouth and fingers with a paper napkin and then said cheerfully, "Well, why the hell not? What good are friends if you can't discuss them behind their backs? All his life his problem has been that he loved women too goddamn much."
"Is that why he hates them now?"
"He doesn't hate them. His problem remains. You said before you thought we were opposites. We sure are where women are concerned. I could always take 'em and leave 'em, and I like variety. I think you're terrific, Amy, but to be brutally frank, I couldn't bother to be dependent on you or any other. Probably I'll hate to see you go, when you go, but I wouldn't break down because you do. Not so with Arthur. He was born intense. He studied too hard, he worked too hard, he loved too hard. That made him a top student and a top architect and a good musician and billiard player and tennis player and whatever else he put his hand to. But in his love-life that meant one kick in the face after another. His youth was a succession of heartbreaks. Then at thirty he got married. And what did he marry? You know it. A dedicated bedhopper."
"I see," I muttered, thinking of myself these last ten weeks.
"You don't see," Roscoe said. "You're thinking of the classic pattern. Hubby finds out his beloved wife is a Grade-A tramp and tosses her out on her beautiful can. Life is more complex, and Arthur certainly was. First of all, it was some years before he found out. He was working his head off to become a success for her; he built her that house on the cliff; he worshipped her; she was the only woman in the world. All that romantic story-book crap. Then he found out. He was bound to. In other respects he was anything but an idiot and she got more and more blatant. And you know what he did then? Nothing. Not a goddamn blessed thing! Can you imagine that?"
"I suppose he was afraid of losing her."
"Right! Because, you see, worse than her hopping from bed to bed would be to have her hop out of his bed for good and all. He had to hang onto her no matter what. Which he did by silently enduring the biggest pair of horns in captivity. Not a peep out of him because he didn't dare to bring matters to a head. But she knew that he knew, and from then on he was her patsy, her doormat. Everywhere he was a suave and brilliant and highly respected man. At home he was strictly a nothing guy whose main worry was that sooner or later she would up and leave him flat. Which sooner or later she did. She went off with some other jerk. He never saw her again. Eventually he got a Mexican divorce."
"Did he take it hard?"
"Did he! That's the whole point. It made him into what he is today. Instead of celebrating, the poor slob went to pieces. He shut himself up in his house with his griefand, what was worse, with his self-contempt. There's no hate like hating yourself. Then one day he left his house and his job and his country. The way he told it to me, he went looking to regain the manhood she had stripped him of. He had money-money he'd earned and some his father had left him. He lived here and there all over the world. Five or six years ago he came back home and took up his life again."
"With his manhood restored," I said with a bit of a sneer.
Across the table Roscoe looked at me. "You should be a good judge of that."
"If he thinks abusing women and debasing them and calling himself their master is a sign of manhood, he's wrong. It's just the opposite. It means he's not sure of himself."
"You could be right," he surprised me by agreeing. "He came back determined never again to let a woman hurt him."
"Instead he does the hurting." My voice was shrill in spite of myself; I was in a cold sweat. "When he twists my breasts, he's really twisting his wife's breasts. When he had Kurt whip me, he's really having his wife whipped."
"That may be part of it, but by no means all. He acts the way he does with you and other women to keep you at arm's length. I'll tell you one way to measure his affection. The more he cares for you, the worse he'll treat you."
"I'll bear that in mind," I said sardonically, "When he's nice to me I'll know it's because he doesn't care for me."
Roscoe sighed and said, "The point is, honey, that he thinks he constantly has to defend himself because there's still plenty of the old Arthur Zorn left. He's no less intense about women than he was about his wife, so he's determined not to let any get close to him except physically. Keep them on one side of a curtain. Beat them, abuse them, degrade them. Be absolute master; they've no right to question anything. If they don't go for that, the hell with them. There are always beautiful, innocent things who love every bit of it and beg for more."
"Like me," I murmured. "But I do hate much of it."
"All that means, honey, is that you love what you hate. Arthur seems to know exactly what you sweet young things hanker for in your erotic dreams. He makes them come true. Look at you and me. Here I am, a rather nice guy and lots of fun, as you agree. I haven't got his looks, but I'm younger and believe I have more staying power in the sack, and I treat you a hell of a lot better. All the same, if at this minute the phone rings and it's Arthur saying he's back and wants you, you'll rush pell-mell out of here to go to him. Right?"
He was right. There was no need to tell him so. I rose from the table to fetch the coffee percolator. "You said that now he's only a consultant," I said as I poured. "I suppose that gives him more leisure time."
"Uh-huh. When he came back from abroad, he had no taste for keeping his nose to the grindstone. This way he can accept only the assignments that interest him and devote much of his time to music and tennis and travel and other hobbies."
"Of which I am one of his daytime hobbies." I picked up the cup and spoke past its rim. "Has he many other women?"
"Many is hardly the word. On the other hand, he's learned how vulnerable a man can be when there's only one woman." His eyebrows arched. "Well, well, the girl is jealous."
"Am I? I don't know. I'm certainly curious. Does anybody live with him?" "His two servants. You know them."
"I meant a woman. A permanent mistress in his house. Somebody like that."
"A rival, huh?" He seemed amused. "There's nobody more permanent than you. If there's anybody special at the moment, I have a feeling it's you."
"Then if there's nobody else in the rest of the house, why does he keep me out of it? Why does he restrict me to the octagonal room?"
"I thought I explained that. You've got to stay on the other side of the curtain. That's his protection. He can reach for you whenever he wants to, but you can't reach out for him. Have you ever tried?"
"Once. I went to his house when I wasn't sent for and he had me whipped by Kurt. Andand let Kurt have me."
"So there you are. You keep your place. If you don't, he makes clear to you what your place is. Take it or leave it." Roscoe pushed back his chair. "Talking about sex, I'm being a hell of a surrogate today."
"Not just yet, Roscoe. As long as you're telling me things, take another minute to tell me about me." "In bed. I do my best talking in a prone position."
"Please, darling, tell me now while I have the courage to listen." He sat down again and gravely studied my face. "Arthur sure scares hell out of you." "He'll punish me if he finds out I've been asking you about him. You won't tell him, Roscoe, will you?" "Me snitch on a lovely piece like you? Never. What do you want to hear about yourself you don't know?" "I'm not sure. What made him so confident of me from the moment he first saw me in Schiller's restaurant?
I can't explain it, but he seemed to know quite a bit about me by just looking at me. More than I did about myself, as it turned out. It was-creepy."
"That wasn't the first time he saw you."
"It wasn't?" Nope. It was a week or so before. I happened to be with him. Do you remember the Webster String Concert at Municipal Hall last July? They played Mozart and Barber. I thought they pretty much messed up Barber's Adagio for Strings. The viola didn't know beans about"
"Roscoe, never mind Barber. Yes, I was there with my husband and his mother. It was a Sunday afternoon."
"Right. Arthur went out for a smoke during intermission. He came back to his seat and told me he'd just seen a girl in the lobby he'd made up his mind he had to have. When the concert was over, he pointed you out to me coming up the aisle with a big, good-looking guy. I said I admired his taste, but the guy was probably your husband and you both looked like pretty solid citizens. He smiled-you know how his eyes squeeze at the corners when he doesand I remember what he said. He said you had the glow of innocence, and that the innocent were most easily corrupted by making their secret fantasies come true."
"He knew too much about other things," I persisted. "He knew which restaurant I'd eat in and when, which bus I'd take from the dentist, when I'd leave the house, when I'd walk in the park, How did he?"
"Put it down to research, honey. That's one reason he prefers to work only part-time; it gives him the leisure to mount a campaign against innocent young womanhood." Roscoe reached for my hand on the table and squeezed it. "For the success of which in your case I have reason to be grateful. It's bedtime, honey."
So we went to bed, but this afternoon I was so full of the thoughts of Zorn and myself that for the first time with Roscoe it wasn't terribly good for either of us.
Tuesday, October 7 When I came home from marketing, my mother-in-law told me that a Mr. Jones had phoned. I put down the two bags of groceries on the living room table and took off my coat, hoping there was no flush of guilt in my face.
"He didn't say who he was or what he wanted," she said with her gimlet eye fixed on me. I thought quickly. "He must be the upholsterer."
"What upholsterer?"
"I've been thinking of having the sofa redone. He's supposed to give me an estimate." I picked up the groceries and carried them into the kitchen.
She couldn't let it alone, not my mother-in-law. She followed me and sourly watched me squatting at the refrigerator freezer. "I don't see why he couldn't state his business to me."
"Maybe he thought you were the maid."
"I told him who I was."
"Then he must have thought you were visiting."
"He didn't act like a businessman. He just said to tell you Mr. Jones called and hung up. Are you sure you don't know two men named Jones?"
"Mother," I burst out, springing to my feet, "will you please stop nagging me about him? I'm not responsible for the way upholsterers speak on the phone."
Her face got that hurt, shut-in look. She sniffed and went to watch one of her television quiz shows. I finished what I had to do in the kitchen and came out to the living room and got back into my coat.
"Aren't you going to call Mr. Jones back?" she demanded. She seemed to have Mr. Jones on her mind as much as I did.
"There's no hurry," I snapped at her.
I called him from a phone booth in a drugstore several blocks away. "Amy, honey," Roscoe said. "It's been a whole week." "I know," I said. "I had my period."
"Is that all? I was worried you'd gotten tired of me. You shouldn't have let that keep you away. What's a little blood between friends?"
"I guess I'm squeamish. It was six weeks since the last period and this was a bad one. I was out of sorts." "What condition are you in this morning?"
"Fit and eager. I've been planning to drop in on you today at lunchtime." "Beautiful, honey! But why wait? Can you come right over?" "I'm on my way," I said.
When I entered his apartment, I was disappointed to find another couple there. The man was at the bar and the woman was sitting on the sofa with Roscoe.
He jumped up and kissed me vigorously. Then, swinging me around to face them, he said, "Here's Amy. Honey, meet two of my very good friends. JaneGeorgeAmy."
No second names, which was just as well. I didn't care to have mine bruited about. Jane, holding both a cigarette and a tall glass in her left hand, rose and stretched out her right hand to me.
A strapping woman with short tawny hair. In her thirties.
"How nice to meet you!" she said as she clung rather sweatily to my hand. She wore a wedding ring. I gave her a set smile and eased my hand out of hers and turned to George who had come from the bar. "Hi, my lovely," he said.
A slight young man with a soft small-featured face.
Dainty hands and feet and a flowing wave in his hair. A pretty little man, younger than Jane and looking half her size and I wondered if he was the one she was married to.
He didn't shake my hand. He drew me to him by it and gave me an open-mouth kiss while patting my behind. In low heels I was at least a couple of inches taller. The greeting over, he asked me what I was drinking. I said vodka and tonic and he went to the bar.
I sat on the sofa with Roscoe. We held hands. Opposite us Jane slouched with one leg flung over an arm of the armchair. Fortunately she wore a slack suit. I had a sense of everybody waiting for something in particular to happen.
"You're a sweetheart," George told me when he brought me my drink. He turned his head to Jane. "We're going to like her, aren't we, beloved?"
"Oh, yes," Jane said. "I hope she likes us."
I would have preferred that they didn't like me and would get up and leave me alone with the man I had come here to make love with. I drank.
George must have made the drink very strong. My head started to swim before I had finished half of it. I drew my legs up on the sofa and snuggled to Roscoe and waited.
They laughed and drank and talked. The three of them were full of chit-chat about people who, like us, had only first names. I was out of it; there was nothing for me to do but keep drinking. From their conversation I learned that little George and big Jane were indeed married to each other and that he spent his days being a poet of sorts and that she was the one with the money, evidently lots of it. Actually all that I wanted to know about them was how long they intended to hang around.
"A refill, my sweet?" George asked, standing over me. I discovered that my glass was empty.
"No, thanks," I said.
I stood up and teetered. George grabbed my arm, holding it so that his knuckles pressed against my breast. "One drink," he said in awe. "You can't be stoned already."
"You made it at least a double," I said, defending myself. "Anybody for coffee?" "Put it up, honey," Roscoe said.
The kitchen was in applepie order. I wondered if Jane had cleaned it up or if Roscoe himself had because they were coming to visit. Why had he asked me here if he had expected company? They were ruining my day.
George came in as I was taking the can of coffee out of the refrigerator where Roscoe kept it. Without a word, he took the can from me and put it on the table and kissed me like an ardent lover.
My knees quivered. Partly it was the vodka, but only partly. I hung onto him and gave him the inside of my lips and then my tongue. His mouth was smaller than mine. It felt like a girl's.
I was wearing my blue tailored suit and white turtleneck blouse. I had hung the jacket up when I had come in, and as we kissed he pulled down the zipper in back of the blouse.
"What are you doing?" I said.
"A silly question," he said, baring one of my shoulders and fixing his mouth to it. He could do it without bending his head.
I had to laugh. The question was silly and I felt silly. Silly in a light-headed, pleasant way. I wanted to be kissed some more.
He pulled the long sleeves of my blouse off my arms. It didn't occur to me not to let him. Standing woozily against the refrigerator, it seemed to me that he was taking a long time at it. Then the blouse was over the top of a chair and he was pushing his face into the tops of my breasts swelling over my bra. I felt his tongue in the cleavage.
Suddenly my head cleared. I said, "Stop it. Your wife. Roscoe." "What about them?"
"What do you mean, what about them? They're right in the other room." "Maybe by now they're in the bedroom," he said as he began to push down my bra. From where I stood I couldn't see much of the living room. I sidled away from between George and the refrigerator and went to the kitchen doorway. They were both on the armchair. Jane again had one leg flung over the arm, but this time she was on Roscoe's lap. He had the zipper of her pants open. Most of her lacy pink panties were visible and so was the bulge of his hand inside them. That long-fingered bulge moving around in the way I knew so well. And she was doing what I would be doing in her place. She was chewing in a frenzy at the side of his neck.
I wasn't shocked. Of surprised. Or anything. After the threesome with that redheaded Louise a week ago this wasn't so much.
Behind me George unhooked my bra.
Roscoe looked up and saw me in nothing above the waist but the dangling bra. Without pausing in the least in what he was doing, he gave me his merriest grin. Jane's head flopped back and her pupils rolled out of sight.
If there was anything I was still capable of being shy about, it was being a spectator. I stepped back into the kitchen. George watched me with an insecure smile on his pretty face.
"So this is what's called swapping," I said.
"As they say, variety is the spice of sex. Roscoe says you're a girl that likes spice." "And he's making sure I get it," I said.
But I said it not at all angrily. If Roscoe had another woman in the living room, I had her husband in the kitchen. Fair was fair. I shrugged off my unhooked bra and took George's face between my hands and kissed him. In the living room Jane squeaked like a mouse.
George made a big fuss over my breasts. As I stood pressed against the sink, he shaped them and bounced them and slobbered over them. I didn't know this little man and I probably didn't like him an awful lot, but I liked having him to play with them. I helped him. I squeezed them to his face. I stuffed one nipple into his mouth; when it was rigid and aching I gave him the other. The fact that he was short helped in this instance; while he was doing all this, he could stand tight against me since he hardly had to bend his head. At that I thought of myself stretched out under him. This would be a man who could lie flat on me without smothering me or completely covering me. It would be like holding a pretty child on my naked flesh.
Over his head occupied with my breasts I looked around. At the table, at the chairs, at the hard plastic tile floor. No, not the kitchen.
"George, we can't here in the kitchen," I said thickly. "Sure we can. But all right, let's go to the bedroom." "We'll have to go through the living room and they are in there." "Don't tell me you're shy?" he said incredulously.
Me shy? I had to giggle. But shyness was comparative, and by their standards I still had plenty of it. I said with a show of indignation, "Of course not," and strode out to the living room.
It was empty and the bedroom door was closed. They had beaten us to the bed. That left the sofa. On it we would be on display if they came out to go to the bathroom or the bar or the kitchen, but I did not intend to be accused again of shyness. I went to the sofa and stepped out of my skirt.
George came up behind me and threw his arms around me and filled his dainty hands to overflowing with my breasts.
"Are all you care about breasts?" I said, tittering. Feeling gayly wanton with vodka and sex and with being wanted by a pretty little man.
"Yours I do," he said against the back of my neck. "Christ, how juicy!" "George, there are other parts of me."
His hands slid from my breasts down the front of me and came to rest on the crotch of my pantyhose. Over rather than inside the panty part. But that was all right; I liked the way he rubbed the sleazy mesh as he squirmed against my buttocks. When he got me so that I was gasping and jittering, he knelt and removed my shoes and peeled down my pantyhose. He stayed down there to kiss and bite my buttocks. Apparently he had a special taste for the soft parts of a woman. There was another part of me craving attention. I twisted away from him and lay down on the sofa with legs apart, taking delight in being brazen. Showing him how shy I was! Which inspired him to hurry out of his clothes. I waved my legs at him. He dove between them.
There was a particular enjoyment in the smallness of his body. I could wrap my legs completely around him. I could enfold him and toss him and bounce him, I thought of him and his strapping wife at it, like a mother and her young son, a kind of incest, and that image excited me even more than I already was. Voraciously I hugged my pretty boy who was proving himself masculine enough for the purpose.
Not great. Not Zorn and not Roscoe, but satisfying. Was there a man I couldn't find satisfying these days? Through the bedroom door I heard Jane groan and then cry out a number of times, and at that I let my voice go with the rest of me, being as noisy as I wished in a kind of unity with her.
They left a couple of hours later. Roscoe and I went to the door with them (he in his plaid robe, I in the diaphanous lime negligee) and we kissed good-bye. Jane said the four of us must get together again soon, and George, squeezing my behind, said the sooner the better.
It was only four o'clock when the door closed behind them. I had plenty of time yet, so Roscoe and I finished up the afternoon by going to bed, this time with each other.
Thursday, October 9 One hundred and twenty-eight pounds stripped!
Two pounds more than last week. Ten pounds over what I should weigh and did weigh at the beginning of the summer.
I stepped off the bathroom scale and went out to my bedroom and examined myself in the door mirror. I had a tendency to put any extra weight on my breasts and hips. My breasts, always rather full, were becoming almost heavy. I touched them. They felt swollen, the skin tight and erotically smooth. The nipples sprang up as hard under my fingers as in a man's mouth. I sucked in my belly.
Well, the men didn't complain. On the contrary, the other night, as we'd been getting ready for bed, Henry had taken a good look at me and then had said, "You know, something, baby, you're getting sexier every day." And Roscoe called me pneumatic as a great compliment, and the other afternoon George had kept burrowing his face in my breasts and moaning, "Christ, how juicy!"
In the mirror I saw myself hug myself.
All the same, enough of them was more than enough for me. I had to start dieting in earnest. As of right now.
Friday, October 10 I recognized Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F when I was on the second flight of stairs. As usual I opened the door without knocking, and there at the piano was not Roscoe but a heavily bearded young man.
He stopped playing at once (unlike Roscoe) and blankly looked at me over his shoulder. I closed the door behind me and said, "Hello."
He nodded and sat with his hands loose on the keys, politely waiting for me to state my business and go. His meshed, skin-tight shirt was black, like his beard and eyes.
"Is Roscoe in?" I asked.
"He went off somewhere." "Will he be back soon?" "I doubt it."
And I was all set for Roscoe in mind and body. And I had nowhere to go but back home. "But you're not sure," I said.
"No."
"Then I think I'll wait a while."
He shrugged and resumed playing.
I took off my coat and hung it up in the closet and sat down. Obviously he was practicing the concerto, going over passages again and again. He played without a score.
Quite young in spite of that full black beard. Or wearing it because he was so young, hardly out of his teens. Dark eyes intense in their concentration on what his hands were doing. He was an even better pianist than Roscoe.
Young, slender, intense, handsome. I sat watching him from the sofa on which last time I had been here I had made love with George, another stranger and less interesting than this boy.
He stopped playing to massage his fingers.
I rose from the sofa. "Would you like me to fix you a drink?" "I don't touch strong stuff."
"Coffee then?"
"No, thanks," he said impatiently, and started the concerto from the beginning.
I sat down beside him on the piano bench. It was long enough for two, but as he occupied the center of it there was scarcely room for me. Our hips and shoulders touched. I began to feel wanton.
He stopped and scowled at me.
"I hope you don't mind," I said. "I used to play the Concerto in F, and I'd like to watch somebody as good as you at close hand."
"Are you a pianist?" he asked, melting a bit.
"I was never very good, and like most people I don't play much since I stopped taking lessons. But I'm a good listener."
He nodded. And then, being after all a boy, he couldn't restrain himself from boasting. "I'm having a recital in New York in February. In Town Hall."
"Why, then you must be one of the very best!" I exclaimed, putting my hand on his knee. "Are you going to play the Gershwin?"
"I haven't made up my mind." He glanced at my bulging bosom and then quickly away. Staring down at the keyboard, he said, "Roscoe insists I do it. He has a thing, you know, about serious American music being based on jazz, and who did it better than Gershwin? Anyway, that's his opinion. I came here to practice because my sister is visiting with her three kids and the house is a bedlam."
"Are you married?"
"No. I live with my parents."
My hand was trailing from his knee up his thigh when the phone rang. He drew in his breath. After the phone had rung several times, he said, "Aren't you going to answer it?" "I think you'd better."
He plucked my hand from his thighhappened to be my left handand glanced at my wedding ring. "I see," he murmured, and angrily flung my hand from him and went to the phone.
He said, "Hello?... Oh, hello, Jane. This is David... Yes, fine.... No, he's out... . I think he intends to go straight to work without coming home.... Well, there's a woman who came in a while ago looking for him. She's still here.... I don't know." He turned his head to me. "Is your name Amy?" I said it was, and he said into the phone, "That's right, she is," and then again to me, "Jane Bisson wants to speak to you."
So now I knew her second name and his first name, David. I took the phone from him. "How are you, Jane?" I said.
"Just fine," she said. "I thought you might be there. If you hadn't been, I was going to ask Roscoe how to get in touch with you. Amy, dear, we had such a wonderful time Tuesday George and I are dying for you to have dinner with us. How about tomorrow?"
I hated not being able to accept.
"Tomorrow is Saturday and I can't get away," I said. "I don't know if Roscoe told you why." "That you're very thoroughly married to a very conventional man? Yes, he did. But don't tell me you're tied hand and foot to him?"
"Well, I certainly can't go out on a Saturday night without taking him along." "Then during the week," she said. "Pick any evening."
"Weekday evenings are no better. Of course lunch is different. He's at work. Am I right in thinking that George is home during the day?"
"He's always home. But I prefer it to be for dinner."
I couldn't see why dinner and why not lunch. I had no doubt what was on their minds; it was on mine as well, and the fact was that an afternoon could be as long and full as an evening. I was about to tell her that when I remembered the stag dinner next Tuesday.
One of the men in Henry's department was being married and his friends and co-workers were giving him a stag dinner at a hotel. Henry never wanted to go anywhere without me (except to play golf) and was uncomfortable at drunken brawls, as any stag was bound to be, so he had decided not to go. And I had put it out of my mind till now. I was sure I could persuade him to change his mind and then I would be free to go on my own way.
"Hello, Amy? Are you still there?"
"Jane, I just realized that I can make it this coming Tuesday for dinner."
"That's splendid, dear. George is so very fond of you. He certainly demonstrated that. So am I, of course. We'll have a lovely, lovely time."
I said good-bye and hung up.
The boy sat watching me from the piano bench. His eyes drew blackness from his beard and his shirt; sunlight from the skylight glinted in them. He had sat motionless like that throughout my conversation with Jane, listening and waiting, and, I thought, wanting me and knowing he could have me. There was something about this apartment, this free and easy lovemaking place, that never made me reluctant.
"So your name is David," I said with the warmest smile I had.
He said nothing.
"I heard you tell Jane you didn't expect Roscoe at home at all today," I said.
David just sat. Waiting for something. Obviously for me to come back to the bench with him and resume doing to him what the ringing of the phone had interrupted.
When I reached the bench, he put his head back and said through his beard, "Look. Either you leave or I will."
I was flabbergasted. I stood with my hip against the piano and my chest thrust out. "Don't you like me?" I said.
"I don't want any part of Roscoe's and George Bisson's married sluts."
I opened my mouth to say something, but there was nothing I had to say. I closed my mouth and went to the closet and put on my coat and picked up my handbag and left without as much as another glance at him.
Who needed a snooty boy with a preposterous beard?
At night Henry and I had a particularly satisfactory time.
Tuesday, October 14 I wore the new dress I bought yesterday.
I hadn't set out to buy one. Edwina French and I had been making the rounds of the downtown stores, as we often did, when we had come across the dress and she had urged me to try it on. A slithery little shocking coral knit. Quarter sleeves and high neck and quite short. Starkly simple; I had a chain belt at home that would add the right touch. Edwina said it made me look dashing and sophisticated, which was exactly the way I wanted to look for the dinner party, so I bought it.
I didn't fuss with myself when today after lunch I put it on. First I was going to Roscoe's where I was sure to get all touseled. From there in due time we would go together (the first time we would go anywhere together) to the Bissons'.
I found Roscoe on the phone making arrangements for another piano player to take his place tonight on the band.
"We're going to make a long night of it," he told me when he hung up. "Not too long," I said. "I absolutely must be home by eleven."
"That's an hour earlier than Cinderella had." Those familiar lustful sparks leaped into his gray eyes as he looked me over front and back. "Beautiful!" he said. And came at me.
At five o'clock I soaked myself sensuously in a hot bath (while Roscoe stood at the basin shaving), and when I left it I leisurely worked on my hair and face and fingernails. I felt as domestic here as at homeexcept that at home there were all kinds of inhibitions, such as lounging around naked. For the second time I got into my coral dress and clipped on my chain belt.
In a neat blue suit with his shaggy hair combed, Roscoe looked less disorganized than I had ever seen him. His amiable, homely face roused in me a squashy kind of tenderness, as for a particularly appealing infant. I rose on my toes and kissed him and we started out.
I waited hidden in the vestibule while he went looking for a taxi. When he returned with one, I slipped quickly into it. It was still daylight, and throughout the ride I kept my head down and a hand to my face as if I had a headache.
George and Jane Bisson lived at the edge of the city in a big white colonial house on several acres of mostly wooded land. A good place for coming and going unobserved for somebody like me. They greeted us as effusively as when they had departed from us a week ago.
We were in a large center hall. On the left a sumptuous living room furnished in sensible modern. On the right a sumptuous dining room furnished in French Provincial. Although nobody had exactly said so, I'd gotten the idea that there would be others for dinner, but the table was set for only four.
"I've given the maid the night off," Jane told me as if I would be pleased to hear it. "I'm a rotten cook, but I can handle steak and potatoes. Do you mind, dear?"
"Of course not. You must let me help."
I would have liked a tour of the house, but we were steered directly into a room behind the staircase. What they called the library. Although there were some books in it, the dominating feature was a bar not smaller or less well-stocked than in most restaurants.
George mixed me a whiskey sour. Quite strong. I had had a vodka and tonic at Roscoe's and had refused a refill while in the bathtub, but this one I was eager for. I was in a reckless, anticipating mood, and on my empty stomach it quickly made me light-headed and gay.
Jane, leaning heavily in the circle of Roscoe's arm, told an interminable joke. Being tall, she looked more appropriate with gangling Roscoe than with her little husband. Which was the idea tonight, wasn't it?
My glass was empty. I put it down and took a pretzel stick from a bowl. George's face appeared before me. He grasped the other end of the pretzel in his teeth and nibbled. It was fun the way our chewing mouths came slowly together. Then there was nothing left between our lips. The salt of the pretzel was on his tongue flicking mine, and I felt his hand behind me on my zipper. Exactly like a week ago when he had pinned me against the refrigerator in Roscoe's kitchen and opened the zipper of my blouse.
Past his shoulder I saw Roscoe and Jane leave the room together. Hand in hand. A swap before dinner. "George," I said weakly, "don't be in such a rush."
"I've been waiting a whole week for this, my sweet." He was trying to tug the dress off my shoulders. "Amy, why are you fighting me?"
I hadn't been aware that I was fighting him. I felt too good in a woozy way to want to fight anybody, especially a dear old friend like George.
I said, "Haven't you at least got a bed, for heaven's sake?" "Lots of 'em," he said.
I floated up the stairs with him. A wide hall running in two directions. He said, "No doubt they have the master bedroom, so we'll take the guest room," and took me into a bedroom furnished all in bleached oak. Which was a lot more comfortable and more private than a narrow sofa in a living room, as last time.
I sat down on the bed. George went into the connecting bathroom and returned with a towel. He tossed it beside me and took off his jacket. The tufted bedspread must be protected, I thought, and tittered.
My head got heavy. I sank back on the bedspread. At once he was on me. "My lovely, lovely, lovely!" he moaned.
"My dress!" I cried. "You'll ruin it. Let me take it off."
He climbed to his feet and so did I. As I removed my dress he removed his pants. I stepped out of my shoes and unfastened my garters and squirmed out of my panty girdle. Then I sat down again. I had come all dressed up; I still had on a full slip and bra and stockings. It seemed to require too much effort to take them off. I lay back on the bedspread.
Seeing me prone again, George got too impatient to finish undressing. He lowered himself on me. He pulled up my slip from the bottom and pulled it down from the top and dug my breasts out of my bra. In stockings and clothes bunched around my middle I felt myself looking like one of the French whores in action I had seen on some dirty postcards Tilly Odom had once shown me.
George drove into me without help from me. Joined with him, I was at the same time alone with myself. I hardly seemed a participant under his slight heaving weight and his mouth drenching my breasts with his slobbering. Dusk seeped into the room. Through a window on my left I could see a string of cars on a nearby road. Late commuters coming home. I looked at the deep wave of hair on his head bouncing under my chin and tried to concentrate on pleasure. This was not like on Roscoe's sofa when the idea of swapping had been quite exciting. I began to try, going through the motions of cooperating with his frantic pumping. There was a stirring of an orgasm of sorts, but about then George had his, and I was just as glad as not to have him out of me.
From the bed I watched him pull on his pants. It was difficult for me to understand why I had let him. Why this dainty little man when I had real men like Roscoe, not to mention Henry?
"We'll be eating soon," he said, buckling his belt.
"Give me a few minutes to rest."
"Don't be long. They'll be arriving by eight." "Who will?"
"Didn't Jane tell you. She invited people to come over after dinner. That was why she wanted it Saturdayso they wouldn't have to leave early. She changed it to tonight because of you."
I said, "So you were in such a rush because you wouldn't be able to when the guests arrive." "My lovely, with you I want it any time I can get it." He bent over the bed to kiss me. "You're one swell kid, you know that?"
After George left the room, I lay on the bed telling myself I was sorry I had come. I could have made dinner with just Roscoe and me and spent the evening alone with him. A lot more satisfying than what had just happened, and on top of that running the risk of being recognized by a guest as the staid and respectable Mrs. Henry Kimball.
Meanwhile dinner. I washed up in the connecting bathroom, and for the third time in some six hours I got into my new dress.
In the dining room George was wrapping a napkin around a bottle of champagne. He blew me a kissa salute, I thought, for having served him well upstairsas I passed him on my way to the kitchen. In there Jane was turning a porterhouse steak on an infra-red broiler and Roscoe was tossing a salad. Apparently they had spent even less time on their part of the swap than George and I on ours. Quickies before dinner, sexual hors d'oeuvres. I set to work cutting grapefruit and mashing potatoes.
During dinner I had three glasses of champagne. My head had trouble staying on my shoulders. The men cleared the table while Jane and I scraped the dishes and stacked them in the dishwasher. The guests were due to arrive any minute. And we still had to get into our costumes, Jane said.
"A costume party?" I said, drying a pot. "That sounds like fun." The way I felt, everything would sound like fun. "But I haven't a costume."
"I'm supplying them for everybody," she said.
The four of us went upstairs to change into our costumes, the men in the guest room and Jane and I in the master bedroom.
It was the size of my living room at home. Lush white wall-to-wall carpeting and white paneled walls. Ornate mahogany furniture, including the twin beds, each full size.
An upholstered chaise on which to lounge seductively. A room for two couples like us to romp in, I thought wickedly, if there hadn't been this party.
Jane lifted a suitcase to the bed and opened it and dug into it.
"Amy, how about this?" She handed me something black. "It's made for a figure like yours. If it's a bit tight, all the better."
A wisp of gauze netting, that was all. I could hold it squeezed together in my fist; I could see through it as if it weren't there.
"What goes with it?" I asked.
"Not another thing. That's your costume, Amy. Put it on over your skin." She started to undress.
I said, "But it's positively indecent."
She turned to me with a great big smile from a closet in which she was hanging up her dress. "That's exactly the idea," she said.
"Are you going to wear a costume like this?"
"Naturally. It's to be that kind of party. You can put your clothes on the other bed." I took off my coral party dressmeant for a different kind of partyand spread it neatly on the bed. When I looked up, Jane had all her clothes off. She had a big rear and heavy thighs, but her breasts were narrow and low-slung with immense aureoles pointing straight down. I saw why George made so much fuss over mine.
Seeing me just standing there in my slip, she gave me an encouraging smile. I smiled back, and in the alcoholic haze in which I drifted from act to act I stripped to my skin. Jane put on a scant beaded skirt. From a drawer she scooped out with both hands bead necklaces. I watched her hang them one by one around her neck. I roused myself and tugged the black gauze up on my torso like a stretch stocking.
It started at my crotch and came up to under my arms where it clung by a thin elastic hem like a strapless sundress. I looked at myself in the triple mirror of her dressing table. I had seen such saucy undergarments in certain store windows, but at least they had had patches of solid material at the proper spots. This adhering gauze also showed patches, but the dark triangle below and the two small brown circles above were very distinctly all me.
I thought I had never looked more sexy, even when wholly naked, and I tingled at the sight of me. "No masks?" I said.
"Why, when nothing else is hidden?" Jane stepped to my side. "You're gorgeous," she said, and we beamed at our triple images standing hip to hip. Aside from her tiny skirt, there were only those strands of beads on her.
Giggling, I said, "I can't imagine what the men's costumes are."
"What can you do with men? They all wear the sameloinclothsto protect them from the obvious without hampering them."
Since she didn't put on shoes, I didn't either.
Roscoe and George were in the library, in loincloths like abbreviated aprons, drinking brandy at the bar. They looked us over as if they hadn't seen us in even less and made pleasantly lewd comments. Roscoe poured me cognac in a snifter glass. I had had more than enough, I wasn't a hardened drinker like Roscoe and the other two who seemed hardly effected as yet, and I didn't care for the taste of it, but perched on his knees I sipped away at it. I began to wish that just the four of us could spend the evening together.
The doorbell rang. Jane, the beads bobbing on her bare breasts went to answer it. A couple named Bill and Billy (the woman named Billy) came into the library. They wanted drinks right away, but Jane made them go at once to put on costumes.
Guests kept arrivingat least a dozen. Everybody crowded into the library (after having changed upstairs) because that was where the bar was. To these people the one thing more important than sex was whiskey.
I was the only one who didn't know everybody else. My outfit hardly made me conspicuous in that roomful of bare skin and everything in addition to skin. Jane and George were occupied being hosts; Roscoe, towering over everybody, stood across the room giving a statuesque blonde in tassels as revealing as gauze the full treatment of his charm. I stood isolated and unknown amid smoke and noise and shrieking laughter, drinking brandy because it gave me something to do.
Somebody whooped, "Amy, darling!" and grabbed me.
It was Louise, the slender redheaded model I had metmore aptly, I had been together withat Roscoe's a couple of weeks ago. Her outfit was an embroidered hostess apron that came down to just about the tops of her thighs and above the waist consisted of two narrow straps running up over her tight breasts. Two bows behindone at the back of her neck and the other dangling to her hard buttocks. She kissed me like a lover. Kissed my eyes and throat and shoulders as well as my lips.
"Louise, let me go," I said weakly.
"You're delicious," she said. "Darling, let me look at you. Um, you make my mouth water." George rescued me. He swooped down on her. Evidently he hadn't yet done his duty as host by greeting her, and as they embraced I slipped out into the hall.
A man stood against the wall. Drinking like everybody else. His eyes were bleary. Mine probably looked like that too. Immense shoulders and chest. Exuding virility like a bull.
"Who're you?" he demanded.
"Amy."
"I'm Shep." Carefully he set his glass down on the floor. I watched him. His head was small for that body. He stood erect and said thickly, "You're for me," and shoved me against the opposite wall with his full weight.
At least somebody paid attention to me. And not a girl.
Shep got right to the point. He didn't bother with kid stuff like kissing. He yanked my gauze down to my waist. Filling huge hands with my bare breasts, he concentrated on grinding against me. His loincloth didn't impede him in any way. The trouble was that he was too rough, too urgent. At this rate he wasn't going to do me any good, only himself. And the pressure of his stomach against mine made the alcohol in it swoosh.
I said somewhat desperately, "Shep, listen! Will you get me a brandy?"
He ceased grinding. He frowned to marshal his thoughts. Then he leered close to my face. "Good idea," he declared. "We take our drinks upstairs and have us a time. Okay by you?" I nodded. He lurched into the library. I tugged the gauze into placefutile gesture!and went on to the entrance hall.
I heard a piano. That couldn't be Roscoe; he was in the library. I looked into the living room. Only one couple in there. Dancing. Her outfit an open bolero jacket to the hips; if anything belonged below, she no longer had it on. Torsos swaying to slow music while their feet didn't move.
I turned my head to the piano. Over the keyboard hovered a full black beard. "David!" I cried joyfully.
His intense dark eyes watched me come to him. I hoped I was tantalizing enough for him in this gauze. I sat down beside him on the bench, as I had on the bench at Roscoe's piano.
He was the only one in the house who was fully dressed. Dark-blue slacks and pale-blue open-neck shirt. His hands went on moving over the keys, playing an old-time torch song.
"David, don't you even say hello?"
"Hello, Amy."
"Why aren't you in costume like everybody else?" "Costume!" he snorted.
I pressed to his side. He was so young, such a clean, desirable boy. I unbuttoned his shirt and rubbed my hand on his bare chest. He let me, but he didn't stop playing.
"Come on, David," I said. "What's the matter with you?" "How many already?" he said bitterly.
"How many what?"
"How many men today?"
"What's the difference?" I worked my hand down under his belt. His bare belly jumped, but he didn't look at me or stop playing. Stretching my fingers to the thick short curls, I said, "You're the one I want, David."
"How many today?" he insisted.
"Well, if you must know, Roscoe this afternoon. So what?" "And here this evening?"
"Only George."
"Only George!" he said.
He annoyed me. I said, "If you're so holy, why did you come to a party like this?" "Because I'm a fool."
"I know why you came. You heard I would be here." I ran my mouth along the ridge of his jaw. "Isn't that true, David?"
He stopped playing. He made fists of his hands. "Let me alone, you slut bitch!"
I didn't have to take that from him. He was only a bearded boy. There were real men in the house. Eager, virile men.
I shrieked, "The hell with you!" and jumped off the bench. Almost falling on my face at the sudden movement.
I grabbed at the piano to steady myself. The whiskey and champagne and brandy swirled round and round. I gulped air and let go of the piano. I could walk well enough. I walked past the couple still glued together swaying though there was now no music. I felt David's eyes on my back, intense and brooding and despising me. Who cared? I walked very stiffly, holding myself together.
Shep sat on one of the lower steps of the carpeted staircase. A snifter glass in each hand. "There you are," he said brightly. "I was beginning to think you went with another guy." I sank down beside him on the step and took one of the glasses from him. We drank. Again he pulled down the top of my outfit. He nuzzled my breasts. All men had the same taste as George. Pretty soon I was floating up the stairs with him.
He opened a door. We peered into the bleached oak bedroom where I had been with George before dinner. Tangled bodies on the bed. Shep slammed the door and we moved on down the hall.
He found an empty room. A study. Desk, filing cabinet, typewriter, chairs. No sofa or anything to lie on; no carpet on the floor. All the same, he drew me into the room and closed the door.
"But where?" I said, leaning heavily against him because I had to lean on something. "Simple."
Shep finished his brandy. Most of mine was left in my glass; I couldn't stand the thought of any more. I put the glass on the desk and threw my arms about his neck. As I clung to him, he pushed off his loincloth. Then he dropped down on the straight-back chair and tugged at the gauze bunched at my waist.
"Take it off," he said thickly.
I took it off. I got dizzy bending to roll it down my legs. I sat on his knees, facing him, and drooped on his shoulder.
"Jesus, don't you know where to put it?" he said.
I tittered. That was awfully funny. Who knew better than I these days? I rose and fumbled under me and a bit at a time engulfed him.
Movement made my stomach heave. I sagged against his massive chest. "Do something!" he said, slapping my rump. "Come on, come on, come on!"
I made short little wiggling bounces. That pleased him and began to please me, and suddenly somebody else was in the room. Somebody very soft pressed against my back.
I looked up and over my shoulder. Louise's face shimmered behind me like a ghost's. Her hands slipped in between him and me to my breasts. Shep smiled happily at her, perfectly willing to share me.
There I was sandwiched between the seated writhing man and the standing writhing girl. I didn't prefer it, but for a minute it was all right. Then the alcohol asserted itself. A spasm of nausea gripped me, and suddenly I was stifled by the flesh pressing me front and back. I felt him in me up to my throat. I strove to free myself, but arms and torsos held me clamped. I heard myself beg them to let me go; my whining voice mingled with her whimpers and his wheezing gasps; they were too centered on themselves to hear or understand or give a damn about me except as an instrument.
Shep shuddered, clawed my hips, bit my neck, then slumped on the chair, his arms falling away from me. I rose from him, shoving hard against Louise, and slipped past her to the door.
"Amy, wait for me!" she said.
In the hall I paused, holding one hand to my mouth, the other to my stomach. I didn't want her near me, but I had no resistance. I told her I was about to throw up.
She took me to a bathroomthe guest bathroom which had a second door opening to the hall. She held my head as I sat on a bathmat vomiting into the toilet bowl.
"Poor Amy!" she cooed. "You're no drinker, that's for sure."
Didn't I know it!
I felt better. I drank water from the tap and rinsed my mouth with mouthwash Louise found in the medicine cabinet. She turned on the water in the stall shower and got into it with me.
"Men are no good," she said as we stood face to face under the cool spray. "How could you let a beast like Shep touch you?"
"It would have been all right if not for you."
"I saw you go up the stairs with him and couldn't bear it," she said. "Here, darling, let me make you clean and sweet again."
She took soap and put out her hands to lather me. Her cheeks were taut, her eyes luminouslike a lover's in passion. Clean and sweet for her, she meant.
I yelped, "No!" and stepped out of the shower stall.
She followed me. She took a towel from the wall rack and started to dry me. "I can do it myself," I said angrily, snatching the towel from her.
As I dried myself, she dropped to her knees and threw her arms about my thighs and pressed her mouth to my mound. I clamped my legs together, but she refused to be discouraged. Her fingers dug in like claws between my buttocks as her tongue sought to reach further down the crack.
"Stop that!" I said. "I don't like it."
Kneeling, she looked up at me like a pleading dog. She now the white poodle! "You liked it at Roscoe's." "I didn't. Anyway, Roscoe was there with us. He was the one who excited me." "Amy, I love you!"
"No, no, no!" I shoved at her with my knees.
Limply she allowed herself to fall away from me. She sat huddled on the floor tile, a pathetic naked heap. "Can't you understand?" I shouted down at her. "I like men, not women."
"Amy, please, I love you!"
I got out of there.
Halfway down the stairs I stopped. Listening to the piano in the living room. Something classic and intricate. Was it Bach? Only Roscoe and David could play that well, and Roscoe would be having other things to keep him busy.
That sweet boy David, beard and all. Not a girl. Not a drunken sot like Shep or an absurdly dainty little man like George, neither one having given me much if anything in return. Here I was at a real live orgy, and what good had it done me?
I descended a few more steps and stopped again, realizing that I was stark naked. I ought to go back to the study for my costume. Why? What was so modest about it? And who needed even a pretense of modesty here any more than at Roscoe's and at Zorn's? I floated toward the music. If my stomach had settled, my head hadn't.
David at the piano, all right. He looked up at me standing in the doorway. His eyes seemed to darken, that was all. He didn't miss a note. He had buttoned his shirt which I had unbuttoned.
More people than before in the living room. A place to lounge half-stupefied with whiskey and well on the way to being sated with sex. Jane was among them, sprawling on Bill, the husband of Billy. They had exchanged costumes, she now in his loincloth and he in her skirt and beads. One man, curled up alone on the carpet, had no more on him than I did.
I went all the way into the room. Hardly anybody paid particular attention to a merely naked woman. But David did.
Never taking his eyes off me as he played. Burning eyes despising me and scorning me. Who did he think he was? A boy with a man's beard. As I'd told him, there were other men. Right in this room.
"I need a man," I announced. "Is there a man in the house?"
There was a stirring around me. I pushed up my breasts with my palms. If these were what they all wanted, here they were. I felt wanton and vulnerable. The music stopped.
"I mean a real man," I said. "No boys or besotted beasts or lesbians need apply."
Bill separated himself from Jane. Preposterous in skirt and beads, he stumbled toward me. He flung his arms about me and bore me down to the carpeted floor. I fell the last foot or two and he fell on me. Crushed under his weight, I lay breathless. He raised himself to hitch up his skirt, and between our bodies I glimpsed the brute maleness of him point down at me. Another one like Shep, the rampant male to whom I was nothing but a receptacle.
All right, I had asked for it. But not here. I hadn't meant here on the floor in a circle of strangers. And not before David. David whom I hated because he was responsible for me doing this. Why not before David? Let him see. Let the whole damn world see. It was fun being watched. A new kick. Closing my eyes, I let my legs fall apart, waiting to be impaled as by a knife in my flesh.
Why was Bill fumbling at me so much? Couldn't he make it? Had the other women depleted him? He hadn't looked it. Damn it, Bill, get it over with!
There was a disturbance above me. Shouting. Suddenly Bill was off me. My eyes opened. David stood over me. A few feet away Bill sprawled on the floor, his silly skirt up over his bare behind. I giggled with relief. I wanted to jump up and kiss David for having pulled Bill off me. If he would let me. I sat up, and I would have covered my nakedness if there had been anything to cover it with. But of course there was nothing. Absurdly I crossed my arms over my breasts.
"All right, you bitch!" David said.
And he got down on one knee and put his arms under me and rose to his feet with me. Content and smug and triumphant, I nestled to him. He carried me out of the living room and up the stairs.
I was no easy burden for him: I helped by clinging to his neck. I kissed his ear. He ignored that.
Upstairs he opened one door and then another. The beds were occupied. I hoped it wouldn't have to be the study again. He went in the opposite direction, and at the end of that hall he found an empty bedroom. A smallish room.
Probably a maid's room. He dropped me on the bed like somebody discarding something. I smiled happily up at him as he tore off his clothes. "David, I didn't want him. I wanted you. David, I'm so glad."
"Shut up, you whore bitch!" he said furiously.
The fury remained in him as he took me. He plunged right into me. As direct and single-minded as Shep had been and Bill would have been. His fury was contagious. We slammed against each other as if to hurt each other, punish each other, and David came in a fit of shuddering rage. Then he lay sobbing on me while I clawed at him and achieved my own relief.
Side by side we lay on the narrow bed. I wished he would speak to me, but he wouldn't. I waited and waited and then I said, "David, do you still despise me?"
He didn't answer, but what he did was better. He leaned over me and kissed me. The very first time. Then he caressed me. His mouth discovered my breasts. I stroked him and at once he swelled in the circle of my hand. He was again ready for me, and I was very much ready for him. The tenderness of a lover had replaced the fury in him. He was, after all, very much a boy. A baby, really. All men were babies. Every one I had made love with.
Except, of course, Zorn.
I rocked David in my arms as well as with my hips as the intoxicating solidity of him filled me. It was like steeping in a tub of hot water, luxurious and soothing. Even my orgasm, when at long last it came, had a kind of peacefulness. I drifted off to sleep.
I awoke halfway, telling myself it was urgent that I awake all the way. I forced my sticky eyes open. David sat against the headboard looking moodily at my body.
"What time is it?" I asked anxiously.
He wore a watch if nothing else. "Twenty past eleven."
"That late?" I scrambled off the bed. I had a splitting headache, the beginning of my hangover. "I have to find Roscoe to take me home."
"I'll take you. I have a car."
"Thanks. I'll get my clothes. We'll meet downstairs."
I ran to the master bedroom. On one of the full-size twin beds pretty little George was nibbling at the statuesque blonde I had seen earlier in a costume of tassels at the bar with Roscoe. Apparently George liked big womenor, in my case, busty ones. On the other bed was Roscoe, alone under a blanket and fast asleep.
George raised his head from the blonde's chest. "Hi, Amy. There's room here for you." The blonde gave me a drunken welcoming smile.
"I want my clothes," I said.
They were on the floor, along with other women's clothes, thrown off the bed by Roscoe and whatever companion he had had at the moment or by another couple. Piece by piece I located my underwear and stockings and shoes. Propped up on an elbow George watched my clothes go on me, as if a clad woman held more fascination in this house than a naked woman, including the one with him. My coral dress was halfway under the chaise. I couldn't find my chain belt.
On the way out I paused at the foot of Roscoe's bed to look down at him. I would have liked to say good-night to him, but he was clearly out to the world. Even he could drink too much. I went to the door.
"Be seeing you, my lovely," George said.
I supposed he would; at the moment I couldn't care one way or the other. I said good-night. Downstairs David rose from the bottom step when I appeared. In the living room a woman laughed like a wire snapping. I didn't as much as glance in there. I got my coat and handbag from the closet under the stairs and hurried David out.
He had a convertible. The top was down; the rush of air as we drove felt good in my face. We had nothing to say to each other till we neared my building. I told him to pull up around the corner from the entrance.
"Amy, will I see you soon?" he asked as I opened the car door.
"I don't know."
"What does that mean?"
"My head aches too much for me to think. Maybe we'll be in touch through Roscoe." I got out of the car. "You're a sweet boy, David. Good-night."
When I let myself into my apartment, my mother-in-law was sitting at the television. "Isn't Henry home yet?" I said, hoping he wasn't.
"No, and it's almost midnight, and tomorrow is a workday. Where have you been this late?" "With the girls," I said vaguely. "I knew he wouldn't be home early."
She looked at me with pursed lips. Did she know anything? How could she? At the worst she would be guessing.
"I'm going to bed," I said to get out of her sight. "Good-night, Mother."
In my bedroom I took off my coral dress for the fourth time since early afternoon. Actually I had hardly had it on me. I stood under the showermy second of the evening and before that a bath at Roscoe's. I scrubbed my teeth with a toothpaste advertised to sweeten the breath. My head was killing me. I took a couple of aspirins and put on a nightgown vastly less revealing than the gauze costume and got into bed. My own bed this time.
I was dozing off when Henry came home. He whispered, "Are you awake, baby?" I opened my eyes and stretched out an arm to him. He sat on the bed and kissed me. Like everybody else who had kissed me today (except David), he smelled of whiskey.
"Did you drink much?" I said.
"Too much. I have a headache to beat all headaches."
Of course I didn't mention my headache. I said, "Take something for it, darling, and come to bed." He undressed to his shorts (the most modest man I had seen today) and went into the bathroom. The fifth man today, not counting Bill, who didn't really count, I thought as I waited for him. The worst of it was that the thought didn't really bother me.
Henry came out looking weary and miserable. As he climbed into his pajamas, I asked him how the stag dinner had been.
"The usual," he said. "Lavish food, but hardly anybody ate it. They were too busy getting stoned." "Were there women?"
"It was a stag," he said. Then he grinned sheepishly. "Well, a couple. Somebody hired them." "What did they do?"
"Well, they danced. They were topless. Only a tiny G-string. What dancing!"
"With the guests?"
"After a while. When everybody was sky high." He slipped into bed and turned off the light. "Did they dance with you?" I asked him in the dark. "Well, they grabbed everybody. One of them grabbed me."
He sounded embarrassed. I could have laughed. What I did was to shift to his side of the bed. "Did you enjoy holding a strange, naked girl in your arms?" I said mischievously. "I couldn't break away from her fast enough." He gathered me to him. "Sweetheart, you're the only woman I ever want to as much as touch. You know that, don't you?"
"Yes, I know that."
I kissed him good-night and wiggled myself close to his muscular warmth. And actually he wasn't the fifth man today. Because more often than not with your own husband, even when there was no problem of headaches, all you did when you got into bed together was settle down to sleep. Which was what we did.
Friday, October 17 Roscoe phoned while I was rinsing out my stockings in my bathroom. It was only ten in the morningunusually early for him to be up.
"I'd like a speak to Mr. Roscoe," he said.
I had told him to stop being Mr. Jones, the upholsterer, when he called because by this time he would have had to come to take the sofa to his shop. This was a new code.
Leslie hadn't come in yet, but my snoopy mother-in-law was somewhere in the apartment with two other phones at hand. So I said, "You have the wrong number," and hung up. Half an hour later I called him back from the drugstore booth.
"What is it, Roscoe?" I said. "I have to see you."
"That's no problem. I intended anyway to come over at noon to make you lunch." "You'd better not. Let's meet somewhere."
"But why? Is there somebody at your place? That hasn't stopped you before."
"There's nobody here, honey. I'll explain later. How about that park near you? You know, where you and Arthurahgot acquainted."
"What do you think we'll do in the park?" I said tartly.
"Talk, honey, that's all. How about twenty minutes from now. I'll hop in a cab. Give me a spot to meet." "There's a wading pool. Signs point to it."
"Right. See you there."
I walked slowly to the park. The wading pool was drained at this time of the year, and as the day was blustery only two indomitable mothers with baby carriages were at the circle of benches around it. I chose a bench as far from them as possible and sat huddled in the wind.
Roscoe appeared like a bowed scarecrow in a topcoat. His wild hair blew in every direction. At the sight of me he showed all his teeth in his best smile, and when he sat down I feared he was going to kiss me there in the open. He had the sense not to.
"How are you, honey?" he started off. "All right now. I had a terrible hangover."
"I bet. That was some brawl. I hear you were quite something. One of the things you did was make David fall head over heels in love with you."
"I'm sorry."
"I agree. A boy genius in love can be a hell of a pest."
"Roscoe, never take me to that kind of affair again. I'm not like that. Or if I'm becoming like that, I don't want to be."
He nodded solemnly. "The fact is, Amy, I'm not taking you anywhere any more. We're not seeing each other againI mean not as lovers. We're saying good-bye here and now."
"Good-bye?" I echoed in a small voice. "Because of the way I acted at the party?" I sounded bitter to myself. "I wanted only you. All the othersLouise, George, Shep, even Davidit was you who"
"Hold on, honey. The whole thing was kicksfrom the time you came to my place. Nobody should complain. It was beautiful. But" He touched my knee. "Amy, Arthur Zorn is home."
"Oh," I said.
"He returned Wednesday. His consulting work in India ended sooner than he expected. I spent yesterday with him."
All of a sudden none of the others mattered in the least. Not even Roscoe. "And he wants me back," I said.
"He'd be out of his mind if he didn't. He mentioned he'll probably see you Monday. So that's it." "Yes, that's it," I said. "I was out for loan and now he's reclaiming me. And you, Roscoe, don't you care?" "Honey, I care a hell of a lot. But that was the arrangement."
"Yes," I said, "that was the arrangement."
He studied my profile. "You are going back to him, aren't you?" "Didn't you both take it for granted?"
"I guess we did. You don't sound happy."
"I don't know if I'm happy. But, yes, I'm going back to him." I laughed a little. "It's ironical that Zorn should be rescuing me."
"Rescuing you from what?"
"From you and your friends. From utter corruption. At least with him there's only he and maybe now and then Kurt."
He had no comment. The wind swirled and he dug himself deeper into his topcoat. "Tell me, Roscoe," I said. "Why couldn't we have said good-bye in your apartment?" "Because you're so damn tempting, honey. I might have succumbed to a last roll with you. That wouldn't have been right after Arthur is back."
"Honor among gentlemen," I said. "I wouldn't know about the ethical principles of a surrogate." I rose from the bench and pulled my coat tight about me. "Well, there's nothing to keep me here. I hope one day I'll hear your symphony played."
He stood up too and grinned in his affable way. "You have to admit, honey, it was loads of fun." And with Zorn, I thought, there would be not much fun. But I had never doubted that at a word from him I would rush back to him.
"Good-bye, Roscoe," I said. "Good-bye, Amy."
We shook hands. Then I walked out of the park in one direction and he in another.
Part Four. THE THREE
Sunday, October 19
Nothing like a rainy Sunday for being thoroughly lazy. My mother-in-law was away for the day, leaving the apartment to ourselves and making it more like home. We read the paper and did the crossword puzzle together and watched a football game on television, and at five o'clock I served a grand dinner for two. With candles to make it real festive.
In the evening my mother-in-law came home quite upset. She looked as if she had been crying. I had never known her to cry; I wouldn't have thought her capable of it. Yet here she was with eyes red and face crumpled as she got out of her raincoat and boots in the entry hall. I asked her what was wrong.
"Nothing!" she flung at me like a knife. And rushed by us to her room.
Henry started to worry, as he did whenever his mother so much as sneezed or frowned. He knocked at her door. She refused to answer. He came back to the living room.
"What do you think that can be about?" he said.
"She probably had a fight with her lover," I said blithely.
"Mother?" Henry had an adequate sense of humor, but not about her. "You can't be serious." "Why not?" I said, teasing him. "She's still under fifty by a whole year and she has those gorgeous legs. On the other hand, in a way she already has a lover in you."
"I don't think that's funny," he growled.
I hadn't meant it to be funny. I clamped my mouth shut to avoid even a tiny quarrel. Things were pleasant at the moment with the rain outside and his mother shut away in her room, and my husband and I settled back on the sofa to resume watching a television movie.
If I couldn't imagine her having a lover any more than he could, I could tremulously think of my own back from India. Surely he would send for me tomorrow morning, and surely after his absence he would be particularly kind to me.
Monday, October 20 It was like a homecoming, an automatic resumption of routine after a month and two days. At ten in the morning the eagerly awaited phone call from Gertrude. An hour later slipping into Joseph Dunwald's taxi. Then the drive out of the city and up the hill to that house on the cliff, and the back door for me, and being admitted by Kurt in his invariable black suit.
"It's good to see you, Mrs. Kimball," he said. Not in the tone of a man who had enjoyed my body the last time I had been here, but with the stiff politeness of a proper servant.
At the door of the den I paused. "Kurt, will anything be different?" "I do not understand, madam."
"For one thing, do I still have to undress down here?" "Certainly, madam."
Had I expected anything to change? For that matter, did I want it to?
So I left my clothes in the den, and ahead of him I went up the hall and up the steep stairs as self-conscious as when I had been new at being naked here and all aflutter. He opened the door, and with thumping heart I entered the octagonal room.
Zorn sat in the lounge chair. He stood up at my appearancea good sightbut nothing in his thin aristocratic encouraged me to run to his arms. And no greeting, even after a month apart. He bent to crush out his cigarette, and I stood where I was awaiting my master's pleasure.
"Come here, Amy," he said when he straightened up.
The lush red carpet felt sensuous under my bare feet as I moved to him. My flesh was tumid, straining for his touch.
"Stop where you are," he ordered. "I want to look at you."
I stopped ten feet from him. I felt as trembly as a virgin. I pulled in my middle and thrust out my shoulders, and I watched his eyes for them to crinkle, for his face to soften.
He said, "You got fat."
He had various ways of being cruel. But why now when we had been apart for so long? "Not really," I defended myself. "Just a few extra pounds, and I'm dieting to take them off." He came to me. His mouth was like a trap, and I flinched as his hand shot out. He grabbed my belly, taking a handful of the soft flesh.
"Look at that gut!" he said. He pushed my breasts up almost to my chin and let them flop back. "Look at these tits! A cow's. What did it, all those men pouring their sperm into you?"
Roscoe had told him. Roscoe who had merely been my lover but who was Zorn's friend. "Who sent me to Roscoe?" I retorted.
"I didn't send you to screw every man he knew." "There weren't many."
"What do you call not manyless than an army? I understand there was also a lesbian." His hands returned to my breasts, those graceful fingers I adored constricting viciously. "You're a slut at heart. You always were."
It wasn't fair. He of all people had no right to say that.
"You made me that way!" I wailed. And his fingers hurt more and more, twisting the tender flesh, and in my pain and resentment I had to hurt him back in the only way I could. "You deliberately made me into somebody like your wife."
Which was a dreadful mistake. The look on his satanic face terrified me.
"Who told you about her? Roscoe, of course!" Brutally he drew me to him by my breasts. "What did you pry out of him?"
"II didn't p-pry," I blubbered. "Once he ha-happened to mention you had a wife and she left you." Desperately I hoped that at the least Roscoe had kept his promise not to tell him of that long conversation about him in the kitchen. "Please! My breasts will be sore for days!"
Zorn thrust me from him as if discarding something repellent. I let myself fall to the floor and lay there looking fearfully up at him.
He stood over me. He took a deep breath, and when he spoke his voice was again under control. "Amy, I will not have you prying into my life. That's one thing. The other thing is that I will not have you whoring. Aside from your husbandI am utterly indifferent to himI will be the only one. Unless, of course, I specifically designate somebody. Those others while I was awaythat pianist David Marshall, the lesbian, whoever elsethey are completely out of your life. Is that clear?"
"Oh, yes! I never meant to see them once you were back. Not even Roscoe." "Roscoe is also out."
He had come home jealous. Zorn caring enough for me to be jealous!
"Of course he's out," I said, sniffling. "He and I agreed at once. If he hadn't told me it was over, I would have told him." I crawled to Zorn and hugged his legs. The pain in my punished breasts increased when I pressed them against him, but there was something pleasurable in the pain. "I'm as sorry as can be," I said. "I didn't know you'd feel that way about Roscoe's friends. I thought because you'd told me to with Kurt and Roscoe"
"You are not to think. You are to do only what I order or permit." "Yes, I understand now." I threw back my head. "Please be nice to me." He said like a stern parent, "I ought to send you downstairs to Kurt to be whipped." My arms slipped from his legs as if abruptly losing their bones. I sank down on the floor and sobbed against the carpet.
There was a long pause, an interlude during which I was alone with my tears and my fears. Then Zorn was on the floor with me. I felt him as naked as I, and avidly I turned to him.
He kissed my wet eyes and trembling mouth, as tender as only he could be when he wanted. How wonderful to be forgiven and comforted by my master!
He took me to the red divan. Those beautiful hands turned me into quivering, rapturous jelly. Exquisite as were his sliding, strumming fingers at the core of my sex, I needed all he had to give in a hurry. I burrowed under him. Enveloping him with my legs, I drew him with one frenzied thrust into the moist opening of me. At the feel of him palpitating as part of me I detonated. I screamed with the fury of my orgasm. Clawed his hard buttocks. Bit his shoulder. And told him, as I had only once before, that I loved him.
Because how did you distinguish agony from ecstasy? Cruelty from lasciviousness? Subjugation from concupiscence? There were all one. To me they were all Zorn.
Not many minutes laterten, fifteen, I don't knowI was at him again. It had been weeks since the last time with him and nobody in between had really counted. He lay on his back half dozing. I knelt over him and kissed him. His eyes opened, crinkling, and encouraged I kissed the crinkles.
"I love you," I said.
He had no comment. Didn't even touch me. Lying flat, he kept his hands at his sides and his body quiet. But he let me have him. He let me, first of all, let me have him with my breasts.
They were so sore from what he had done to them that needles pierced them when they made contact. I had hardly paid attention when we had bucked and thrashed together because of the agony that was ecstasy at such a time. Now deliberately I rubbed them against his face. Whimpering with the exquisite pain, I swung them dangling and heavy with charged lust against his chest, his belly, his reroused sex. I crawled all over the lean length of him. Now my mouth was having him. Every tiny bit of him, starting from the gray widow's peak at his brow and running voraciously down to his feet. Stroking and nuzzling. Kissing and licking. Finally sucking his toes as if each were a separate sex organ. Then I turned him over and my mouth went up the back of him, calves, thighs, buttocks, spine, shoulder. When I had driven him half out of his mind, I absorbed him once more into myself and drained him.
How, I thought as we lay resting snuggled together, could he be anything but pleased with me now? He untangled himself from me and got off the divan. He looked pale and shaken. He went into the bathroom and came out in his red robe.
"Amy, you will leave now," he said as he tied the cord. "Now?" I sat up. "Aren't we going to have lunch?" "Gertrude will bring you something to eat if you wish." "I meant lunch with you. I looked forward to spending the afternoon." "Evidently your whoring has made you insatiable," he said dryly. "I'll be perfectly content just to eat with you and be with you. Must you really go?" "I must do nothing. I prefer to occupy myself otherwise for the rest of the day."
Looking at him still fumbling with the cord of his robeincredibly nervous!I understood what it was. He was afraid of me!
Brutal and jealous and tender and affectionateand now fleeing from me. During his absence he had discovered that I had come to mean more to him than innocence mastered and abused and handed around to servants and friends. Roscoe had suggested that this was happeningand didn't all that Zorn had said and done from the moment I had entered today bear this out?
And the thought frightened me. Because what would he do not to defend himself from me? Would he go as far as to separate himself from me, not only for this afternoon but for all time?
"Wait, please!" I cried.
He was opening the middle door. He looked around to me. "You'll send for me again soon, won't you?" I said. "I see no reason not to."
I was immensely relieved.
"But soon?" I begged. "In a day or two?" He said crisply, "When I want you." and went out. And I was happy.
Wednesday, October 22 The bathroom scale was good to me this morning. My weight was down to one hundred and twenty-four. Six pounds to go.
My breasts didn't seem affected by my loss of weight.
Still that swollen look they had acquired in recent months. As if they had expanded to contain a constant sexual hunger, with the nipples feeling ready at any moment to stiffen and reach out for a caress.
Certainly not a cow's tits, as Zorn had so crassly and unreasonably put it in his jealous rage. They were firm enough, high enough, round enough. He couldn't fool me. His hands and eyes and mouth loved them as much as anybody did.
In the bathroom mirror I watched my hands spread over them. They were still sore from his mauling. My hands tightened on their tumid tenderness, deliberately increasing the pain. As if my hands were Zorn's hands.
Thursday, October 23 I had given up hope for today when, at eleven-thirty, Gertrude called. She told me to meet the taxi at one. "Will I have lunch with Mr. Zorn?" I asked.
I was home alone, my mother-in-law having gone off somewhere after breakfast, and so I could speak freely.
"Not today," Gertrude said. "You better have a bite at home before you leave."
I had a lot of time to kill; in my impatience I left the apartment twenty minutes too early. Waiting at the corner of Pine and Third, I kept telling myself that today would be very good. I felt it in my blood.
And when I was there and came out of the den and went up the stairs ahead of Kurt, I was tingling with anticipation. I hurried through the door he held open for me.
Another naked woman was in the octagonal room.
She stood with her back to me as she looked out at the city through one of the walls of glass. My first reaction to her was a stab of resentment.
She heard Kurt close the door behind me and turned. "Mother!" I cried.
My mother-in-law wasn't surprised. Obviously she had expected me. "Hello, Amy," she said, wetting her lips.
The fact that she was here at all was incredible. But being here, her nakedness was as normal a thing as minebecause that was what this octagonal room was all about, wasn't it?
I managed to find my voice. "Have you known him long?" "I have known Arthur many years."
Arthur. She could call Zorn by his first name; I hadn't even known it till Roscoe had told me. If I was special, as Roscoe had said, was she more special? She was, after all, only two years older than Zorn, and still quite attractive if you thought of her in that way.
"So you knew about me all along," I said. "You let me create a friend named Gertrude and worry constantly about your snooping and suspicions."
"Don't you see why?" She clasped her hands in front of her, as when she was being severe and prissy, but her hands against her bare belly over the thick pubic patch could only be pathetic. "Amy, I had to protect myself. If Henry found out about me"
Her face began to break up. This confrontation was harder on her than on me. I could even gloat if I had a mind to.
"And now?" I said. "Why this now?" "Arthur decided it was time."
Most of the room remained between us. She looked away from me, but I kept looking at her. As if discovering her whom I had never seen in the apartment in less than a bathing suit. A tall, handsome woman with fine skin and those beautiful legs. Thickening at the waist, but no real sag anywhere. Smallish breastsan advantage as one grew older, for they maintained their firmness. And she would be, since Zorn had kept her on though he had me and whoever else, as full of strange lusts as I.
My mother-in-law. Only last Sunday I had made some teasing joke about the fantastic idea that she could have a lover.
I said, "Mother" and stopped. How could I continue to call her that in our shared nakedness and all it signified?
She turned her face to me, and I saw that she was weeping silently. And I knew that we had been brought together here because something terrible was about to happen.
"Bertha," I said, using her name for the first time ever. "What's on his mind? Why is he" In panic I choked off my voice as the middle door opened. Zorn came in.
He was in the usual outfit he wore at homepolo shirt and slacks. Taking the inevitable cigarette from between his tight lips, he looked from one of us to the other. Our lord and master. We stood humbly waiting.
"Now then," he said briskly. "You two are to make peace."
She must have told him. Complained about me. I had hardly mentioned her to him. Neither of us spoke.
"In my house at least I will find it annoying if you are not on the best of terms," he went on. "Kiss and make up."
He had said kiss, so we went to each other. We met in the middle of the room. Our lips brushed. "Kiss each other as if you meant it!" he ordered. "I fully intend that you mean it."
Mine not to wonder why this was important to him. Ours to obey. Bertha and I put our mouths together, holding each other by the shoulders. Our bare breasts touched. Instinctively I started to draw back. She clung to me fingers digging into my shoulders, and I realized that she dared not break it up too soon. She knew more than I. Kiss as if you meant it, he had said, and to show him I leaned into her. Our breasts flattened against each other. And our bellies. Her lips partedthe mouth I had always thought of as harsh now surprisingly soft and tender. And so my mother-in-law and I stood naked together like lovers in a passionate embrace.
She was the one to end it, yanking away from me as if horrified by what she was doing. But that wasn't the reason. Staring to her left, she whimpered.
Kurt had entered the room. He had that narrow box containing the ghastly whip. He put the box on the table.
I heard my own voice dribble out of me in terror. For whom was it intendedfor me or her or both of us? "Must you, Arthur?" she wailed. "It's unnecessary! Arthur, you know it's unnecessary!" "I'll decide what's necessary," he snapped.
So she knew that the whip was for her. I should have been relieved, but how could I be when so much of my heart went out to her?
Zorn took me to his lounge chair and had me sit on his lap. I kept my knees pressed together against the arm of the chair. A cruel squeeze of my thigh made it clear to me that even in the presence of others I was to assume the usual position when on his lapone leg flung over the arm so that I would be open to his fingers.
On your knees, Bertha," he said as he casually caressed me.
She knew wherefacing us between the chair and the divan. Where I had knelt the first time I had been here. I had been whipped twice during that period. How often had she been whipped in the years she had known him? She bowed her head, and her hair fell over her face, and her vulnerable flesh heaved with her sobbing.
Kurt came from the table with those terrible wires dancing along his leg. He paused at our chair. "Six, sir?" he asked.
"Six."
Kurt moved on. She raised her head and started to scream when he was still a few feet from her. He stepped to her side. His arm went up.
I dug my face into Zorn's shoulder. He had his thumb hooked into me. Best of his fingers I loved his thumb playing with me, and that part of me arched to it while my ears were shattered by Bertha's voice rising to nerve-rasping shrillness.
Zorn's other hand tugged my head from his shoulder by my hair. "Amy, there's no point in you being present if you don't watch."
Through a shimmer of tears I saw that she had pitched forward to the floor. Laboriously she pushed herself up, resuming her position on her knees. Her pain was gone, I knew, but the memory of it and the anticipation of its return was hardly more endurable. Again the wires flicked at that poor bare back.
And I had to be a spectator. Zorn's hand stayed in my hair while the thumb of his other hand squirmed in my like a lust-crazed worm. I wept as she howled, and I asked God to forgive me for having hated her.
Six at long last! There would be no more. She did not have to climb up to her feet again; she could remain face-down on the floor, her groans half-muffled by the thick carpet. And I could snuggle closer to Zorn and give myself over completely to his love-play.
He said, "Amy, you enjoy to watch pain as much as to receive it. You're sopping wet." He put his thumb to my lips. "Here, taste yourself."
I squeezed my lips tight and dug my face into the side of his neck and waited for him to hit me or love me or whatever he was in the mood for. Very soon there was no doubt what he was in the mood for. Laughing at me, he rose from the chair with me in his arms. I thought he would carry me to the divan, but before he reached it he put me down on the floor, not half a dozen feet from where Bertha lay in a semi-stupor. He undressed.
When he was as naked as we, he stood between us, so very rampant, and paused as if making a choice. Kurt and his whip were gone. Only we three now. Anxiously I looked up at him, and I signed with gratitude when he dropped down beside me.
The fact that my mother-in-law lay a few feet from us didn't inhibit him in the least. Why would it? We were fellow slaves of his. And who cared how I felt? He wanted me at once, and dutifully my legs encompassed his torso.
Hearing mefor his long, slow strokes tore moans from my throat-my mother-in-law raised her head. She stared at us thrashing on the carpet. Even then it was too late for me even to think about her mattering, because he was where I liked him best, where I loved him to be, filling all of my being, possessing me as no other man had, as only the master of my body and soul could.
She turned to us on her side. Her face was ravaged from the whipping, but her eyes no longer held pain. All three of us, after all, were stimulated by brutality, by giving or receiving or observing, and she watched my rapture with naked envy.
Zorn paused over me. "You may join us, Bertha," he said in a gentle tone.
She crawled to us on arms and legs of rubber. Our eyes met and at once she looked away. We were ashamed before each other, but shame could be another stimulant. She came on.
Zorn resumed. Meeting his thrusts with thrusts of my own, I ceased having time or thought for her. Then I heard her cry out, not at all in the voice of pain, and then she was moaning as I was. Past his heaving shoulder I saw that he had her with that thumb of his, as a few minutes ago he had had me on the chair, and her thighs were opening and closing around his hand. His thumb was like a second sex organ.
So he had us both at once. To prove something, probably; he usually had a purpose for what he did. To show me, I supposed, that we were a kind of trinity. The master and his two slave mistresses.
I came with a clawing rush. But that finished nothing for me. More orgasms gathered in me, and happily he continued going strong. Bertha, full of his thumb, sounded demented. She writhed against his side and against mine. She wriggled and shoved to get completely into the act. He was again high over me, holding himself up by his free arm, and she had a bit of space. My head tossing from side to side saw her breast swing over me. By itself my mouth rose to it, seizing a nipple. Often she had told me that she had nursed Henry as a baby. Now I was suckling at that same breast. It crushed down on me, spreading its soft warmth over my face. That was too much. I exploded again, wildly, and that set the others off. Male and female flesh collapsed on me, stifling me.
We rolled apart, On my left Bertha lay pale and drawn and twitching. Zorn rose from the floor and went to an end table for a cigarette. Emotional as well as sexual fatigue overwhelmed me. My eyes closed.
I must have dozed off for a few minutes. When I opened my eyes, Zorn was no longer in the room. Gertrude squatted beside Bertha who lay as if in a faint.
"Gertrude, how is she?" I asked.
"She'll be all right. Exhaustion and nerves. Sex on top of the whipping. She's not as young as you. This will help."
She had a glass in her hand. Cloudy liquidthe stuff that tasted like rotten eggs. "I'll take care of her," I said. "You can go, Gertrude."
She rose and gave me the glass and shuffled off on feet that constantly hurt her.
Alone with my mother-in-law, I helped her up. We sat together on the thick red carpet with our backs against the divan. I held the glass to her mouth. I practically had to force it down her throat. Her mouth was slack and her eyes were dull.
I slipped an arm about her. She put her face to my breasts. Two naked waifs, I thought, cuddled together on the floor for the comfort of each other's flesh.
She slept. My arm almost fell off, but I didn't take it away.
She awoke feeling better. I went into the bathroom and drew a bath for her. While she soaked her agonized nerves in the tub, I took a shower in the stall. I gave her a hand out of the tub and we dried ourselves. Then, in the octagonal room, I sat in Zorn's chair and she in the other armchair and we waited to be told what to do next.
"Bertha," I said after a long silence, "this was your idea from the start." Her head came up. Like me she sat with legs tucked under her. "What idea?" she said in a voice husky with weariness.
"You told Arthur Zorn about me. You said you would help him become my master, like he already was yours.
That was in July. You told him I would be at that concert in Municipal Hall with you and Henry, and that he could take a good look at me there, and if I pleased him"
"Amy!" She stared at me as if I were out of my mind. "Why on earth would I want to do anything like that?"
"To break up my marriage." "How can you think that?"
"What else am I to think?" I said. "Arthur Zorn was with a friend named Roscoe Jones. He came back from intermission and told Roscoe that he had seen a woman he intended to have. I was the woman. He seemed very confident. You must have offered me to him."
"How could I offer you? How could I make you?"
"You could help him. You could tell him I was having lunch in Schiller's restaurant when you heard me make a date with Edwina. You could tell him when I had a dentist appointment so he could be at the bus stop. You could tell him when I left to go marketing or take a walk in the park. Do you deny this?"
"It's true. But not all true." She was at the point of crying again. "I didn't want any of this to happen. Believe me, Amy. Yes, he saw you at the concert, but I hadn't known he would be there. He saw you with me in the lobby and guessed you were my daughter-in-law. Next day he sent for me and told me what he planned to do. I begged him not to. How I begged him, Amy! It was horrible. My son's wife!"
"Yet you did it."
"Could I help it? Can you say no to him?" I was silent.
"And how much help did he need?" she went on. "I told him everything about you, yes. The rest you did to yourself." She reverted to her old nasty self. "He found you very, very easy, Amy."
"Did he find you very, very easy, Bertha?" "It was different with me." She shrank into herself. "I don't want to talk," she murmured, and tiredly closed her eyes.
Poor Henry's mother! Poor Henry's wife! Presently Gertrude came in and said we could leave. "I put your clothes downstairs in the den," she told Bertha.
I was envious. Evidently Bertha was admitted into other parts of the house, where she had undressed. Was that the privilege of a long bondage?
Together we went down to the den and together we dressed. Outside Joseph Dunwald's taxi waited for us. "Well, well, both Missus Kimballs at once!" the old man said.
No word was spoken during the ride. In the apartment she went right to bed. When Henry came home from work, I told him his mother wasn't feeling well. That worried him all evening.
Friday, October 24 My mother-in-lawBertha to me nowseldom missed getting up as early as Henry and I so that she could have breakfast with her darling son. This morning she stayed in bed, which made him go on worrying. I told him that sleep was the best thing for whatever ailed her. He nodded glumly and kissed me and left for work.
I gave her another hour before going into her room. I found her wide awake in bed. Though she wore a nightgown, she instinctively snatched the cover up to her chin. The two Bertha Kimballs. Here at home she remained the old one.
"Modest, aren't you?" I said.
Her mouth quivered. "Amy, do you intend to keep on being cruel?" "Look who's talking!" I said.
She sniffled and turned her face to the pillow. And I was sorry. The old Amy Kimball wasn't much better than the old Bertha Kimball. Since yesterday we had no right to be anything but kind to each other.
I said in a different tone, "Would you like me to bring in your breakfast?"
"I'm not sick. I'll get up when I'm hungry."
"I know how it is," I said. "You're lying there telling yourself you have to break away from Arthur Zorn and knowing that you can't."
"Break away!" She bridled as if I had said an outrageous thing, "Why would I want to break away? What else have I got?"
I pulled a chair over to the side of her bed and sat down. "Do you want to tell me about it? When did it start?"
"The first year Henry went to college," she said. "Twelve years ago. I went to Europe that fall. I'd been lonely since my husband died seven years before when I was only thirty. But at least I had had Henry. Then suddenly he was grown up and away at college and I couldn't just sit home looking at myself. Abroad I was still lonely. London, Paris, Romenowhere was much better for a widow who had never found it easy to make friends."
Not even years later with her daughter-in-law, I thought. Or especially not with her daughter-in-law. "Zurich," she was saying. "There's nothing in Zurich but coffee houses and jewelry stores and banks. It was simply a place to spend time. That was where I met Arthur. We were both staying at a quiet little hotel near the station, and he heard from the clerk that we both came from the same city. At breakfast he introduced himself and asked if he could sit at my table. He was quite handsome. I said yes. I had been married at eighteen and had Henry at nineteen and there had never been anybody but my husband. I was thirty-seven, but you never saw anybody so shy. Yes, and so innocent."
I said, "He prefers us shy and innocent at the beginning."
"Arthur was different in those days. It's hard to imagine now, but he was also shy and innocent. And as lonely as I. He had been terribly hurt by his wife."
"I know about that."
"So we were two lonely people who needed each other. We spent the winter and spring traveling together." "No whip then?"
"Nothing like that. Later, yes. But" She chewed on her lower lip. "At the beginning of June, when the college year ended, I came back to the States and spent the summer with Henry. In the fall I went to Mexico because Arthur was there. Acapulco. I had hoped at the beginning that he would marry me, but he said he would never marry again. So I had to settle for the next best thing. Very well, I was willing. But what happened that winter in Acapulco was that I had to settle more and more for less and less. I stopped being the only one, He made no attempt to hide from me that there were other women. He said he would never again be tied in any way to anybody. Well, you know."
"I certainly do."
"I could take it or leave it. By then I couldn't leave it. You know about that too." "Yes."
She lay flat on her back, staring up at the ceiling as if watching up there the years passing by. "I went to meet him in various places in the world for a very few weeks at a time," she said. "Then he would send me home because there was somebody elsesomebody younger or merely newand I'd wait for months, once for a whole year, for him to let me know where he was and let me come to him. Then at last he returned home and reopened his house. And I was very happy. Here we were in the same city and I would be near him all the time. It was betterand worse. He had changed and changed. He made that wire whip; he invented it himself. The whip became the symbol of everything else. I had long before that accepted him as my absolute master."
"As I did later."
"Yes." Abruptly her head came up from the pillow. Triumph possessed her face. "No, I'm not like you and the others. I never was. I had been the first. Oh, I was getting older, but I was the one he never discarded. All right, he let me come to him less and less. But let me tell you something. When he's tired of you, Amy, I'll still be there. I come and go through the front door. There's a bedroom for me. You can't say that, Amy."
"I'm afraid I can't."
"Afraid! You enjoy every bit of it. The humiliation as well as the sex. Even the whip." "You and me both," I said with a touch of anger.
"But at least I'm not married. I don't have an adoring husband I'm betraying." "You have an adoring son whose wife you betrayed."
She glared at me. "You betrayed yourself!"
We were slipping back into our pre-yesterday relationship. There was no point to it, so I spared us both any further retort. Wearily she sank back on the pillow.
"Why did he whip you yesterday?" I asked after a silence.
"He hardly ever does these days. He's hardly ever real mean to me any more." She smiled, suddenly happy. "In fact he wants me to move in for good. As his housekeeper. Then I'll be with him all the time."
"What about Gertrude?"
"She has been wanting to leave. She's not well, and her daughter, who's a widow and has two children, has been after her to come live with her. In July it was all arranged. But about then Arthur saw you at the concert and soon you began to come to his house. That changed things. It was bad enough knowing what you were doing and keeping up the pretense of not knowing. But having you find out about me and being involved with your visits, like taking over Gertrude's duty to phone you at my son's house to come to Arthur and serving you while you were naked with him in that room, and all the restno, it was impossible. I told Arthur I couldn't."
"He accepted your refusal?" I said incredulously.
"He didn't insist as long as Gertrude stayed on. She said she would for a while longer. Then he left for India and she went to her daughter's for a month. When he returned last week, she came back, but said it would be for only two more weeks. So he told me that now I had to."
"Did he tell you this Sunday when you came home with your eyes red from crying?" "Yes. I begged him to give you up before I moved in. That made him very angry. You know what he's like when angry."
"Do I! But why did he wait till yesterday to have you whipped?"
"Isn't it plain?" she said bitterly. "Yesterday was the day it was convenient for him to confront you with me."
I nodded. "And he did it in his own inimitable way. From bringing us together naked to having us as a threesome with him on the floor."
She flushed. Remembering, she tugged the blanket still higher over the breast that yesterday had been in my avid mouth. She turned her face from me.
Funny, I thought. I had not only been sharing Henry with her. All along I had been sharing Zorn with her too.
I said as if to myself, "I can't leave Arthur Zorn. Any more than you can." "And Henry?" she said without looking at me.
"I can't leave Henry either. He'll have nobody else. He needs me." "Yes," she said listlessly. "I suppose so."
There was nothing more to say to each other. I stood up to leave her room. "Amy," she said.
I turned and looked down at her in bed. Tears shimmered in her eyes. Suddenly I bent and kissed her on the mouth. This time without having been ordered to by our master. "God help us!" she said, and threw her arms around my neck. And we who had hated each other clung to each other as we had yesterday in the octagonal room after the whipping and the lovemaking.
Monday, October 27 Now when I heard Gertrude's voice on the phone I didn't have to worry that my mother-in-law might be listening. In fact, we had a three-way conversation, I on the kitchen phone and Bertha on her bedroom extension. Gertrude said she was moving to her daughter's this Friday and that Mr. Zorn expected Bertha to move into his house about then.
"But that's so soon," Bertha said. "I haven't even told my son yet."
"Well, I'm definitely leaving Friday," Gertrude said. "You can speak to Mr. Zorn about it in person today. He wants you both to come out this morning. You're to meet the taxi at eleven."
"Both of us together?" I said.
"That's right," Gertrude said. "It's after ten-thirty, so you haven't much time."
I hung up the phone and went to Bertha's room. She was changing from a housedress to her green knit. I considered my sweater and skirt adequate as an outfit I would anyway have to take off as soon as I got there.
"Why both of us at the same time?" I said.
"How should I know?" she said irritably. "He must have a reason. He always has." She patted her dress into place; over a girdle and uplift bra and with those fine legs of hers the clinging knit gave her a rather sexy figure. "Amy, what can I tell Henry? I've been thinking and thinking. What excuse can I give him for moving out?"
"Tell him a tiny bit of the truth," I said. "That you're taking a job as a housekeeper, but say it's with a highly respectable family."
"He wouldn't stand for me working," she said. "And as a housekeeper! He'll think it demeaning." "I suggest that we avoid such words as demeaning," I said.
At that she threw me her old look of hatred and turned to the dresser to brush her hair. I knew that gesture. This was her room till she left and I was being dismissed from it like a sassy girl.
But I didn't leave. I licked my suddenly dry lips and said, "Bertha, I've also been doing some thinking. One of us has to give up Arthur Zorn, and of course I should be the one. I have a husband I love. I think I'll be able to do it once you're out of here and I have Henry all to myself."
"Oh, I'm so glad!" Her face lit up. "Why don't you start right now? Simply don't come with me." "I didn't mean today." My lips felt feverish; my tongue kept running over them. "I can't just like that," I told her. "I have to get used to the idea. Maybe after today."
"Humph!" she said skeptically and put down the hairbrush. It was about time for us to start out.
When we stepped out of the taxi at Zorn's house, I automatically went to the ground-level door and she to the stone steps leading up to the front door.
Kurt appeared at my door before I could ring the bell. He frowned at me there by myself and came out and looked up at Bertha halfway up the steps.
"Mrs. Kimball," he called. "Mrs. Bertha Kimball, this door, please." She said, "But I always"
"Please, madam!" he said.
So she had to come down and go with me into the den. As together we undressed, she was plainly disconcerted by being put in my class. We came out naked, and as I followed Kurt up the hall and up the steep stairs, she tagged along a distance behind to assert her separation from me while doing what of course she had to.
Zorn was already in the octagonal room when we entered. Waiting for us in his red robethis time with a pale-blue ascot at his throat and a pale-blue handkerchief in the breast pocket. As for a festive occasion. For the first time ever he said hello to meand had another hello for Berthaand came over and kissed me and then her. He seemed to be in a very good mood, which immediately put us in a very good mood.
"And how have you girls been getting along?" he asked cheerfully. "Have you become very good friends since Thursday?"
We assured him that we had. Which was almost true.
"Really?" he said, smiling. "Show me how fond you are of each other."
We knew what we had to do. Standing together naked, we kissed, as we had at the very beginning Thursday.
"Come, come," he chided us like a critical teacher. "You can be more affectionate than that." Our mouths spread, gulping with lips and tongues. Her hands dropped from my shoulders to my buttocks, clutching them as she pressed herself to me as tightly as possible. My fuller breasts gobbled hers up. The soft curve of her belly began to roll salaciously against mine. She was ahead of me in putting on a display of what he called affection; because of her many years with him she was more experienced in what he demanded of us. But that wasn't all of it. Having begun because we were ordered to, we were soon caught up in sensuality. It was not only the contact of fleshof breasts and bellies and mons and thighs. It was the invidious concupiscence of that octagonal room; it was the fact that she was Henry's mother and I was Henry's wife; it was our master watching. My hips turned lascivious, grinding. I clawed at her buttocks as she clawed at mine. Sweat oiled our agitated torsos. Moaning into my mouth, she began to sag. I held her fiercely, needing more of her.
"All right, girls, you've convinced me," Zorn said.
Laughing, he tore us apart. He put an arm about the waist of each of us. Panting and twitching, we leaned heavily to him. I fumbled to open his robe.
"Easy, Amy," he said. "You'll get it soon enough."
In the circles of his arms he took us to the divan. There he let go of us and removed his robe and ascot. We watched him greedily. He lay on his back on the divan and smiled up at us standing quivering like a pair of bitches in heat waiting to be unleashed. I could hardly restrain myself from throwing myself at him, but I was too well-trained.
Unlike us, he was in no hurry, though he was as rampant as I had ever seen him. He looked at his wristwatch, which was all he wore. Then he looked at us, at Bertha pushing her breasts together and apart, at me hugging myself to contain the turbulence in me, and I uttered a silent prayer that he choose me first. It wouldn't be fair if he didn't. He had made me get into this state. Bertha too, but what did I care about her? I wouldn't be able to endure standing by while he and she "All right, girls," he said, his hands thumping the spaces on either side of him. "Both of you." But when we were on the divan with him he wouldn't let us touch him. We had to lie beside him, also on our backs, I on his left and she on his right, not as close as we wanted but close enough for him to be able to reach down and put his hands between our outflung thighs. And then his fingers! His marvelous stroking, gliding fingers! Having his fingers, I could manage to wait a while for the rest of him.
On the other side of him I heard Bertha carrying on. I was a moaner and at my climaxes a screamer; she was a talker, wildly babbling how she loved what he was doing. I raised my head to see her eyes roll, her hips heave, her legs jerk in the air. My prissy, stern-faced mother-in-law. What a great big joke!
Zorn took his hand from me to look again at his watch. As if on schedule. Then he said briskly, "Girls, let's set up an interesting combination."
We were gluttonous for anything. On the round divan he arranged us in a triangle. Strictly oral. My mouth on him and his on Bertha and hers on me. Three links of a single sexual chain.
I was glad it was this way. I had tasted one woman before, the redhead Louise at Roscoe's place, and I knew that I much preferred a man. Not that I would have hesitated an instant if I was told to change positions, and probably the way things were going we soon would and my mouth would have Bertha instead of him, repaying her for the wonderful sensations her nibbling lips and sliding- We were too intensely occupied, she and I, to hear a door open, but we heard that outcry. The soft palpitating weight of Bertha yanked away from my legs, and she gasped, "Dear God!" and I looked up and saw Henry.
He had come through the middle door with Kurt, and he was gawking in stunned horror at his wife and his mother naked on the divan with a naked man. Worseif anything could be worsehe had seen what we had been doing.
Zorn sat up. "Kurt, you idiot!" he said rather calmly. "I'm sorry, sir. I didn't knowI didn't realize"
An enormous lie, of course. A bit of pre-arranged play acting.
Curled up on the divan like a fetus to cover my nakedness, I stared at Henry. His face was that of a man destroyed within a moment. Kurt stood behind him, his bulk making Henry look almost small, ready for any show of violence. Kurt needn't have worried. There could be no violence from a man with eyes so dead as Henry's.
And nobody spoke. What could be said? Each second stretched out, and the only sound was Bertha whimpering on a single demented note. I glanced at her. Hands to her face, she huddled among the cushions. I looked back at Henry and he was no longer there. He had plunged through the middle door. Kurt, the proper servant, followed him to show him out of the house.
Zorn got off the divan. I found my voice. I said, "You brought him here."
"Of course," he said with that crinkly smile of the devil himself. "It was simple. Gertrude phoned him at his office and told him that she was your well-known friend of that name and that you had just had a serious accident in her house. As expected, he dropped everything and rushed to the address she gave him."
Bertha's whimpers went on and on. I couldn't bear to look at her, Zorn was putting a cigarette between his thin lips.
"But why?" I said. "Why did you?"
"I decided it was time to get that poor bastard out of our lives." He snapped on his lighter. Bringing the flame to his cigarette, he added casually, "Because, you see, you as well as Bertha are coming here to live."
Not long after he permitted mefor the first timeto enter the other parts of his house.
Monday, October 27 Today Bertha and I moved our things from the apartment to Zorn's house.
We didn't see Henry, of course. He had packed a couple of bags and driven off in the car. I didn't try to find out where he had gone; there was no point in knowing. I did learn that he had resigned from his city job and that he had withdrawn every cent from our joint checking and savings account.
I had no more need for money than I had for the apartment and the furniture in it. Where Bertha and I were going everything would be taken care of for us.
Kurt had come with us. He carried our clothes and our other personal possessions down to Zorn's big green sedan and drove us back to the house on the cliff. Where we would live with our master in pleasure and pain.