It was only seven in the morning, too early to get up, but I rolled off the bed anyway, felt my feet hit the thick rug and walked to the window. The sun was rising slowly, poking through the fog that we sometimes had in Castle High, the kind of fog that makes driving difficult if you're traveling along the river.
The house next door was pretty much like ours, a split-level with more rooms than necessary, except that Ben Carlton's house had green shingles on it and ours were white. There was also a difference in the attached garages. His was a double, needed because he now had two cars, and ours was a single which was adequate since we only had the Ford.
Nobody was moving around in Ben's house but that wasn't unusual. He was in the securities business in New York, loaded with money that had been left to him, and before his marriage he had only gone in about three days out of every week. Following his marriage to Sharon a month previously he had cut that down to one. I didn't blame him any. He had plenty to keep him busy at home and while there might not be any money in it I was pretty sure that it was more fun than working.
"You must have some kind of a compulsion," Linda said lazily from the bed. "You may not realize it, Roger, but you're always staring over there."
With a somewhat guilty feeling I turned from the window. Whenever I got the chance I stayed on this side of the house, looking across the short space that separated us, hoping to see Ben's blonde wife in those shorts and halters that she wore almost constantly. After I did see her I'd wonder why a girl of twenty-two and built the way she was would marry a man of forty.
"What other window would I use?" I asked innocently.
"Can't you count? There are three more and if you'd use the back one you'd learn that the grass needs cutting. Let it go and pretty soon we can mow hay and sell it to the farmers."
I smiled faintly and glanced down at her where she lay sprawled on the bed. She was nude, her brown hair spilling over the pillow, and as I studied her I told myself that I didn't need anybody else, that she was enough. She measured thirty-eight across the front and her breasts were high and proud and full, tipped with a much darker color than her red lips. Her stomach was flat and she only wore a girdle because a doctor had told her that at twenty-four she ought to give the muscles some support. Below that her hips flared out and I knew how they could be when she walked, moving with the same wildness that I had first noticed the day we had met. As for her face it was both beautiful and calm, her carefully plucked eyebrows arching out of habit prior to asking a question. They arched now as she lay there on the bed, lovely in all the ways a woman should be lovely.
"There's nobody over there to see," she said. "Or is there? How about the blonde?"
"I wasn't even thinking of her," I lied and moved over to the dresser. "She's Ben's wife and we're friends with Ben. He wouldn't bring her into our house every Saturday night unless we were. Maybe she's pretty sexy but I wouldn't let that ruin my marriage or a friendship."
"Stop kidding me, Roger. I've noticed you watching her. And those dresses she wears on Saturday night. I know Ben is showing her off but if she bent over to fix one of her shoes she'd tumble out into the open. That would be a thrill for you, wouldn't it?"
I made no reply and I began dressing, getting my six feet three inches and a hundred and ninety pounds ready to go to the office. Of course I'd wanted that to happen to Sharon Carlton but so far it hadn't. All I'd viewed had been her cleavage and the tremendous swells under her dress, her narrow waist that was nothing at all, and the lovely roundness of her hips and thighs as they seemed to sometimes fight to free themselves from the material. Having been married to Linda for four years it was the wrong way to think about another man's wife but I couldn't help that. If Sharon walked past a grave she's give a dead man ideas.
"Let's hope business gets better," Linda said, apparently forgetting about Ben's wife for the moment.
I shrugged and fastened my tie.
"Well, you know how the mail order racket is. Ope week it's up and the next week it's down and the week after that it's all over the lot."
"There's no security, is there?" She was sitting on the edge of the bed now. "I mean, you never can get it, can you?"
"Why not, Anything is possible if you stick at it long enough. like getting a girl to marry you and. then having a kid. If we..."
"Let's not talk about that, huh? It's the same song with the same tune and I'm tired of hearing it." She was annoyed but then she always got annoyed when the subject came up. "I think I'd die if I ever had a baby. Look at some of the other women on Chestnut Drive. They get so they can't walk or sit down or even stand up. Who could wish that on a woman?"
Again I said nothing but got my suit coat from a hanger and left the bedroom. The subject also annoyed me. We were in no financial position to afford a child at the moment but how many people are? They simply cut down on some of their expenses and work out the problem.
Once I reached the kitchen I put my coat over the back of a chair, threw coffee into the electric pot and checked the basket out front for the paper. It wasn't there and I swore softly. You couldn't depend on that guy. He worked for the railroad, once in a while overtime, and he delivered the paper when he felt like it. I doubt if anybody else on Chestnut Drive cared about his irregular schedule because most of them worked in New York and they bought the paper at the railroad station anyway. But for somebody like myself it was a way of passing the time while the coffee perked. I slammed the door closed and returned to the kitchen.
As I sat at the table smoking a cigarette I thought about my wife and my marriage. For almost a year my marriage had been a farce from the physical standpoint and although I had slept with her during that time she hadn't permitted me to touch her or have the rights of a husband. I had suggested that she see a doctor in an attempt to overcome her fear of getting pregnant but she had refused.
"Later," she would say.
Not tonight, not that night, but later. Only later never came and I had given up asking her. For what she was worth I had Jean Love, who was in charge of my office, taking care of everything from the checks to the other girls, and if she had been taught the word no in school she had completely forgotten it.
A lot of men, faced with a frigid wife, must have quit on the whole mess but I couldn't. No. not me. not Roger Barnes. I was tied to her just as much as though I was locked up in a jail and somebody had lost the key.
In a way, it was funny-and fortunate for me-how I met her. Almost everybody has seen ads in magazines and newspapers where you can get catalogs from a wholesale house, have your name imprinted on them and go out and earn a fortune. At twenty-one, and not having anything better to do, I'd gone for the pitch, ordering five hundred catalogs, pounding the streets of the city and selling the catalogs for a quarter to anybody who wanted them. Of course I had made some sales of items but collecting money in advance, or collecting it at all, had proved to be tough. Most of the people were installment buyers on anything over ten dollars and I couldn't afford to carry the accounts.
"I might buy something," Linda had said when I had made my first call at her home. "Buying what I can't see always fascinates me. I keep wondering how it's going to look when it's delivered."
I hadn't been attracted to her immediately but I'd sort of liked her easy going attitude and I'd delivered the lamp which she had purchased in person. I'd found her alone, had hooked up the lamp for her and we'd talked while she'd looked through the rest of the catalog. She hadn't given me an order but we'd made a date for the following night. I'd blown the money from the lamp on a movie and a couple of slow drinks. , Getting to know her hadn't been difficult and a month later we'd started going steady. During this time I met her parents, both nice people, and although her home had been neat I hadn't suspected that there was much money in the family.
"No." she had said about the fourth month. "No, Roger. I never have."
Well, she had that night, right there in the car, and she's cried afterward. But the next trip over the fence she hadn't cried and she'd clung to me in sheer passion. That night we decided to marry.
"I'd like to get into the mail order business if I can raise the money," I had told her father one evening. "This chasing from house to house is a job for an idiot."
"How much would it take?"
"A lot more than I can get my hands on. Why fool myself? How could I borrow from a bank? They even look twice at my checks."
The old man had sprung it then. He had a bundle of cash handy and he wanted his one and only daughter to be happy. A week later the money had been deposited to my account. I'd entered the mail order business in a blind manner and he'd put up the down payment for the house and furniture on Chestnut Drive.
"Now that I'm in mail order I don't know what to sell," I had said to Linda on our wedding night.
Evidently she had thought about it, too, and she'd come up with a good idea.
"What about lovely things for girls and women, Roger? Sell them undies they can't get in the stores and real seductive nightgowns. I bought some myself once and a lot of the girls I knew did the same once they saw how I looked in the stuff."
I'd grabbed onto the idea and ran with it like a football player going around left end. Linda had helped with the first catalog, working with me night and day and for a while she had even assisted in the office. Then her people had moved to Boston and she'd gone up there to be with them for a month. The ad agency had done a good job and the orders began to pour in. I'd been lost trying to sort out the different sizes of bras and other garments and I'd hired Jean Love to give me a hand. During her second week on the job she'd given me more than that.
The coffee was done and I poured out two cups. Four years. I reflected, had passed swiftly and much had changed. If it wasn't a new catalog that was due at the printers it was a fresh ad to be done and the more I grew the more money I had to put into the operation increasing the amount of help or paying overtime to those I had. So far I had repaid some of the money to Linda's father but not a great deal of it. I'd tell myself that I'd get out a thousand to him and then it would disappear into stock or other expenses that kept coming up. Still, his letters were friendly, he wasn't hurting for the money and he didn't press me, but I knew that if I ever split with Linda that the whole organization would fall down on top of me and crack my skull in a dozen pieces. True, I was successful to a certain degree but not to the extent that a bank was interested in me as a risk. Unless you have firm inventory control and are very big you can almost expect to go it alone if you're in the mail order business. Either you dig up private backing as I had or you ship the C.O.D.'s first, hold the paid orders to finance yourself and take care of the cash sales when the C.O.D. returns began coming in. That's not an uncommon practice and that's why people often have to wait a long time for their merchandise when they send along a check or a money order. Their money is used by the company for a fast turnover of items or, in some cases, the purchase of inventory isn't even made by the firm until their sales are nearly complete.
Linda came into the kitchen wearing one of the black gowns that we sold and she looked fine in it, the curves of her body liquid and flowing.
"Friday," she said and sat down to stir her coffee.
"Yeah, the end of the week."
"Which means you'll work late."
"I may. It depends."
"Sometimes I don't know what you find to do."
"Plenty. I've got a living to make."
"It could be better, Roger.", "Thanks for telling me."
We didn't get along very well in the morning. In fact we never got along very well unless we had been drinking, especially with Ben and his new wife on Saturday night, but no matter how looped she got she refused me if I made the slightest advance. Ben was a good drinking companion for her because he didn't seem to know where he started or when he should stop. Both Linda and Ben went for the hard stuff while Sharon and I stuck to beer, just getting a glow on and relaxing.
"You ought to draw more out of the business every week," she said.
"How can I? We're growing."
"Can't you think of another excuse?"
"I could but why should I? It's a fact I get fifteen thousand in the bank and then I need sixteen thousand to discount my bills. So we scramble for the morning mail to get what we can of the other thousand. Cripes, can't you be reasonable?"
"I'm trying but I know that everybody else on Chestnut Drive is ahead of us."
I pushed my cup aside.
"What if they are? Who cares? I don't and you shouldn't. Most of the men will work for twenty years, collect a gold watch and get kicked out of their jobs. That'll never happen to me. It just takes time and a lot of guts, plus luck. If you make a good buy and present the item correctly it moves. Guess wrong and you've got a shelf loaded with junk. Anyhow it's a tough field for a man. How do I know what these crazy women really want? On top of that some of them don't even know their own sizes and there are exchanges and refunds. You stay home all day and you don't know what it's like."
"I know what staying home is like." She began to pout. "I do it day in and day out."
I got up and put on my coat.
"So join a club or something. Stop looking at four walls and belting the bottle. You'll wind up
I seeing animals crawling all over the place."
"How would I go anywhere?" she wanted to know. "I need a car of my own."
"I'm working on it."
"For how long now? Two years? That's a joke. When you locate a car you can afford it'll be one without any wheels on it."
I kissed her briefly and walked outside, trying to see the blonde and not seeing anybody.
It was about a three mile drive to the office and I took my time, thinking about what I had to do but thinking mostly about Jean.
Jean Love.
Love was a good name for her.
And she was dangerous to my security. I knew that now but I hadn't known it in the beginning. The firm had been much smaller then, just the two of us working, taking care of everything, and the shipping table had been so short that we'd kept bumping together. With my wife in Boston her warm flesh had felt swell, smooth as ice on a slippery road but hot, and the black hair had tumbled down to her shoulders in long waves. She had filled the black sweater that matched her hair along with the tight black skirt and before we'd reached the last package for the day I'd gone for her, feeling her wet lips move under the pressure of my mouth, the front of her thrusting forward as she sucked air into her lungs.
"Does this go with the job, Roger?"
"That's your decision."
"But you're married."
"She isn't home."
"It doesn't make any difference. You're still married."
"You wanted me to kiss you, didn't you?"
"I-maybe. I don't know. Maybe I did and maybe I didn't. There are lots of things that a girl may want that aren't right."
The next kiss had turned out to be better, her eyes closing as her lips fought to crush my mouth, her body swinging around to come up hard and tight against mine.
We hadn't stopped after that until I'd taken her on a pile of shipping cartons, her legs strong and demanding, the fury of her desire leaving us both exhausted.
Wrong? Yes, wrong. And still wrong. Wrong because I depended on her for so much, because I was lost when she was off ill, because I could give her nothing but trouble and none of the things that a woman desired out of life.
"Don't ever give up on me," she had said a few days previously. "Once you do you'll think a hurricane hit your marriage. And, believe me, Roger, you won't get away from a hurricane called Jean."
So there was the danger, the one thing that could easily destroy me, but when she was in my arms I felt none of the danger. I felt only the need for her body, heard the moans deep in her throat, heard myself gasp as I took from her what my wife would no longer give me.
I continued driving, trying not to think about it, trying not to worry. She had a decent job, a nice apartment and I paid her well. Why should she seek more? It was an affair, one of those things that many people enter into either through stupidity or need and eventually it would end.
I crossed Pike Street, just beating the light, and continued toward the river.
Castle High wasn't a big city, only fifteen thousand, but it was a good location for a mail order business. Wages weren't as great as in larger places, most of them just within the law, and that made for cheap overhead as far as labor was concerned. A couple of the fellows in the shipping room were married and I didn't know how they got along on what I paid. More than once I had thought of pushing up the hourly rate but there was always pressure from some direction and I hadn't discovered a way of doing it. Jean...
And the blonde Sharon Carlton, one month a wife to a man who lived for his booze...
Add to this my wife and you had a combination.
I couldn't forget about any of them, couldn't kill the ache inside of me to know the blonde as a woman.
I grunted and thought about the night that would follow, deciding that I shouldn't dance with her as I had the week before. With Ben and Linda in the kitchen fixing drinks, the record player rolling out the music, she'd pressed her body to mine in the living room for a moment, her head resting on my chest while my hand had gone down past the small of her back to where it shouldn't have gone.
I grunted again and felt the sudden sweat breaking through my skin.
Somehow I had to leave her alone. And Jean, too.
They were both dynamite with a short fuse.
CHAPTER TWO
The first thing you do when you're in the mail order business each morning is to sort the mail because without that you're about as helpless as a duck frozen in a foot of ice.
It isn't as simple as you might think.
To begin with the paid and C.O.D. orders have to be separated but whatever the order may be it is, once the cash is balanced, assigned an invoice with a number on it. Our invoices were in triplicate-one copy for the customer, one for our regular files and one for the girl who checked our mailing list. If a customer had already ordered before that copy was destroyed after noting the purchase on the individual's index card, but if there wasn't any previous order a new index card was started and the copy went to the girl who stamped the name and address onto a metal plate. These plates were also filed in trays and when we issued a new catalog the plates were fed through a machine. All of this may sound like a lot of work but this, and more, is necessary if you're going to stay in business and expand. It costs money to get names from your advertising and you have to make the most of them. About every two years you clean your files and drop those who haven't been ordering. There's no sense of sending out offers to people who aren't interested.
I was early at the office and I let myself in. We were in an old building, hardly a fitting atmosphere for Glamour, Incorporated, but we were on the first floor and it was all we needed. Our catalog showed the picture of a very imagine shipping point but it was only a minor lie and had nothing to do with the quality of the things which we sold.
When I had rented the space I had taken the entire first floor, which had been too big at the time but at the present we were overcrowded. The outer office was in a constant state of confusion and the stock room to the rear was jammed to the ceiling. Even my own office, a rather small room, was littered with material from suppliers, samples of new bras that were being marketed, girdles that kept the tummy in, or were supposed to, and stockings with tops on them that could be worn for panties. I didn't think much of the stockings that were made this way. How could a girl who was in a hurry on a lonely country road get out of them quickly and not cause her male friend to become frustrated?
I closed the door of my office and sat down at the desk to go over some supply orders that had been brought in by the shipping room. We didn't have a running inventory but one of the fellows out there kept track of things pretty welL He deserved a raise but he hadn't asked for one and I was afraid that one raise would start a series of them. I know some concerns share their profits with their employees but for Glamour, Incorporated the profits were practically nil. Just as I had told Linda, I got a buck ahead at the bank and then it had to go back into growth. Our new catalog had only gone out a month before and some of the items hadn't arrived, causing us to back order and send out cards to our customers apologizing for the delay. That wasn't too important with the paid business because we already had the money but a C.O.D. is only good for about two or three weeks and after that you might as well kill it or write first before you ship. Of course if a person turned down a C.O.D. we billed them for the charges after it was returned to us but sending out the bills was usually a waste of time and postage. There was no way for us to collect and the people knew it. That's why most firms require a deposit on any order. I had intended to insert this in the catalog but in the rush of preparing the thing I had forgotten.
The girls came in and I could hear them laughing and working outside as well as the fellows shouting in the stock room. In the beginning the noise had bothered me, especially the hammering of the addressing machine stamping out plates, but I had gotten used to it and it no longer mattered.
Some of the factories we could get supplies from on credit but others required cash in advance and I put the ones for checks in a separate pile. That was Jean's work, along with a dozen other things, and since she had a power of attorney at the bank I didn't even have to concern myself with the checks.
About ten Jean came in and she had a cup of coffee for me. At one time we'd had a ten minute break so everybody could go to the diner down the street but some of the breaks had run as long as twenty or thirty minutes and now we made our own coffee in the shipping room on a hot plate. The help didn't mind because it saved them money and with them getting back to work in ten minutes it also saved me money.
"You look droopy," Jean said as she hitched herself up onto the edge of the desk.
She had on a tight skirt that outlined her thigh and the hem of it rode up high on her leg. She had a very lovely and serious face and her breasts under the red red sweater were tilted and proud. Of course the sweater was too small for her, possibly for a thirty-eight bust, but she knew I liked her that way and she bought them so they were snug.
"Aw, you know how it is," I said. "On Fridays I could shoot myself sometimes if I had a gun. Why do they put Friday and Monday in the week? I'll settle for Saturday and Sunday around the clock."
"You wouldn't make any money then."
"So I guess we'll leave the days just as they are." The coffee was strong and hot. "Some slob is always after dough. We should return to the Indian days and simply swap things around. You've got something that I want so I give you something you want."
She laughed low, her teeth white. "Isn't it a little early in the day for that, Roger?"
"I didn't mean what you think."
She swung her free leg back and forth, clicking her high heel on the floor.
"The mail was lousy this morning."
"Probably. You can't count on Friday. Monday is when you load up the basket. People get paid toward the end of the week in most jobs and they have the time to sit down and order." I yawned. "As long as we can straighten up with the help I don't care. Just have them not get their money once and nobody would want to work for us."
"We're safe this week."
"SwelL"
She fingered the stack of orders that were waiting for checks.
"These we don't have to worry about. It'll take a week or ten days for these checks to hit the bank and we'll be able to cover them." She frowned prettily. "I wonder how many companies operate on paper and don't have a dime to their name?"
"Plenty. If everybody had to have cash on the line hardly anybody would do anything."
She drank some of her coffee.
"Those new bras came in, Roger. The ones with the open centers."
"That's the best news I've heard all week. We've been back ordering them like crazy, crazy."
She helped herself to one of my cigarettes.
"I don't know why the girls buy them," she said.
"I do. We hammered away about the cups in the copy, how they lifted yet didn't bind and gave freedom of movement. The center openings was just a gimmick."
She smoked for a moment in silence.
"You know the new girl? The redhead?"
"I've seen her. Cute."
"I think we ought to let her go."
"That's up to you."
"Yes, but I wanted to mention it to you first. She can find a dozen excuses to go out to the shipping room and if there's one of those fellows who hasn't gotten at her he must be a freak. Every night she leaves with a different guy and I'll bet she doesn't go straight home."
"Pay her off," I said.
"You know I'd never do a thing like that, going out there."
"If you did it would be your business."
She leaned down suddenly and kissed me on the mouth.
"No, it isn't. It's yours. Because I'm yours."
The heat that had built up in my office immediately became worse. On the ride down I had promised myself to leave her alone but I realized if I did that I was only asking for trouble in a very big package. Linda didn't want me as a husband, but she wasn't the kind who would be willing to share her marriage partner and if she ran off to Boston her old man could call the notes I'd signed. I'd lose the business overnight and he'd get what I had built. At twenty-six I didn't want to start over again, knocking my head against unfriendly doors and getting kicked off of porches. Besides, figuring that I'd only had a high school education, this was all I knew. Instead of two hundred a week I'd go down to fifty. I wasn't anxious for any part of that.
"Shut those girls up out there," I said. "They don't have to squeal and scream. You'd think they were in some man's room to listen to them."
She promised she would and left the office but I knew she'd have her way before the day was finished. For a long time now it had been every Tuesday and Friday that we'd gone to her apartment and, once in a while, more often than that. You couldn't say that it was a fixed routine with us. What we did was sheer physical necessity as far as I was concerned but with Jean she gave every indication of seeking love.
There were moments, as it was then, when I wished that I had somebody to talk to, somebody who took a real interest in me outside of sex and who could reason things out. My parents would have been logical for this but they had both died in my teens, while I was still in school, and I'd gone to live with a bachelor uncle on my father's side. The week before my graduation a stroke had clobbered him and he hadn't pulled out of it. I'd started work in a gasoline station the day after his funeral and I hadn't attended the final exercises at the school. They'd mailed me the diploma sometime during August.
"I can't cook for both of us," Uncle Willie had said when I had moved in with him. "And I can't afford to take our meals out. Best thing to do is to get a girl who wants a home more than money."
I remembered meeting Rita the next week when I'd come home from school.
"I'm short, compared to you," she had said, smiling. "You're like the boys from the hills, big and strong."
I hadn't looked at her height. I'd looked at her jutting breasts under the tight, faded dress, her stomach that had just a little bulge below her navel and the heavy thickness of her hips. She had reminded me of a girl in school, although considerably more attractive, a girl who went out with any fellow and who never turned one down. I'd never dated the girl myself, partly because of my money situation, rough, and I hadn't gone out with a girl with that purpose in mind. Sure, I'd felt a certain amount of curiosity about the whole relationship between girls and boys but the vague and possibly distorted information I'd gathered had created more fear than desire.
My uncle worked all kinds of hours at the shop as a tool and die maker, loyal to an employer who didn't pay enough for his talents or occupation, and I'd seen a great deal of Rita during the next few weeks.
"It's all right," Rita had said when she had crawled into my bed one night, waking me up. "Hell, you have to live, don't you?"
I'd felt shock when I'd realized that she was naked, her body close to mine, moving steadily closer
"Say, now, Rita. I-"
"Oh, shut up. Don't be a stupid jerk. If there's anybody I can't stand it's a jerk. I left the mountains to get away from them, guys so dumb they fall over their own feet going upstairs. I-your uncle's having his fun so why not you? Keep it in the family, why don't you?"
I still recalled my initial experience, one of blundering and ignorance, but later on I looked forward to being with her. When my uncle died she moved out and went somewhere else. Since that time I hadn't seen her, perhaps wouldn't know her if I did.
My uncle hadn't owned the house, just rented, and the furniture had been so old that I couldn't see any reason to fight for it. Until I'd started selling I'd lived in rooming houses and worked at the gas station.
I got up from the desk and fingered a new girdle that somebody had sent me. A few people said that
I had come a long way, Ben Carlton in particular, but I couldn't claim having done it on my own. Without the money from Linda's father I'd be working at a job of some kind for whatever I could get. I couldn't see any percentage in trying to sell for the catalog houses. Most of them will send their catalogs to anybody who mails in a request. .They're out to sell bargain hunters and building up a sales force is only a switch to make the offer appear legitimate. Or, anyhow, that's what I thought of the whole effort.
I skipped eating during the lunch hour and I walked out to the shipping room to talk to the fellows. Eating in the diner wasn't within their budgets and they all brought sandwiches. There were five all together, young fellows only recently out of high school and they got a kick out of handling female garments, especially some of the very brief panties and net bras that we featured in the catalog as well as the falsies that cupped over the breasts and were supposed to look real. None of the fellows stayed with me too long, most of them searching and getting something with better pay, but there was always somebody who could show a new man what to do, how to select and pack items and read the parcel post zone chart. I hired them young because they came cheaper at that age. Older men were slower, more inclined to be sick, and any fellow who had reached thirty already had too much experience for me and demanded a higher wage.
"I've gotta do something," one of the fellows said to me. "Honest, Mr. Barnes." Everybody except Jean was always formal. "Ain't no two ways about it. I only got married three months ago and already my wife's knocked up."
"I'll be glad to give you a reference for your next job."
His face dropped.
"Gee, I ought to be worth more than a buck and a quarter an hour, hadn't I."
"For this work."
"For any work."
"Okay. Find it."
I didn't like being rough with him but I couldn't raise one and not the others. Once you start that you only make everybody unhappy. As for the guy who kept check on the stock there was a reason. He had a responsibility. The rest just read orders and wrapped them up.
About one I got the checkbook from Jean and spent the afternoon in the office going over it. The figures were impressive until you took off the checks she had written that morning and then we were down to rock bottom. In a sense it was discouraging but there was nothing that I could do about it. A business can't stand still. It either slides backward or it increases too fast. Ours was on the increase and our income just couldn't keep up with it. More business meant more stock and more stock meant more money for investment. I concluded that I had given birth to a monster, a monster that could eat me alive.
Just before five the redhead knocked and came in. She was crying, her eyes wet with tears, her neat little shape testing the seams of her dress for strength.
"She fired me." the redhead said. "Miss Love. Jean. And I need the job."
"Sorry, but I can't do anything about it."
"Can't do anything about it? You're the owner, aren't you?"
"Yes, but I don't boss the girls. If she said you're done you're through. That's final. I've never crossed her and I won't start in now."
She rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands. She wasn't very pretty when she did that.
"But I was taking care of the complaints, Mr.
Barnes. People want to know what's happened with their orders and I write to them. I-I write a good letter."
"You should have stayed out of the shipping room. How can you work when you're always going in there?"
"It was only to find out what they had in stock and what was short. I couldn't answer a letter unless I knew. If I was going to promise the customer ten days delivery I wanted it to be ten days and not twenty. They'd only write again if I lied."
I guessed her to be about twenty, old enough to have had experience with men, smart enough to know better. Or anxious enough not to care.
"Sorry," I said again, meaning it because she appeared to be so upset. "We all have our work to do here and I don't jump in unless something goes wrong. From what I know you just don't fit. Maybe you can write the best letter in the world but we have fellows out there in the shipping room and they're human. I'd rather have a girl who couldn't type with but one finger than have somebody who might cause trouble. The people who buy from us give us enough trouble without our making our own."
She had stopped crying by this time, undoubtedly realizing that it wouldn't do any good, and she forced a brave little smile. It was the kind of a smile that you might see on some painting, a smile that caused you to glance at her lips twice.
"Maybe I'm wrong," she said. "Men are a habit with me."
"It's a habit to worry about when you're single."
She came closer to my desk, bringing her hands up along her sides and gently touching the tips of her breasts with them.
"I wouldn't worry with you, Mr. Barnes. Honest. And you'd like me if you gave yourself the chance. I-"
"You'd better go," I said.
She regarded me seriously for a moment.
"Aren't you a man?"
"A man, yes, but no fool."
It took a couple minutes more to get her out of there and I was pleased when the door closed behind her. She was just a silly girl without a brain in her head.
At five-thirty, as I always did on Tuesday and Friday, I left for the day. Everybody else had gone and I didn't have to be concerned about Linda calling the office. I had explained to her that I didn't answer the phone when I was working alone and for all I knew she believed me. Of course she could have hired a cab to drive down and investigate but by this time she would be high on booze, feeling sorry for herself, and she wouldn't think of doing such a thing.
Out on the street I got into the Ford and drove toward Jean's apartment in a nice section of the city. Just as I had decided that morning I wanted to get rid of her my opinion remained the same. Still, I couldn't bust up with a girl who was important to me in a hurry and not suffer the consequences. I had to take it slow and easy and go along with her.
We had a clever arrangement after working hours and I don't think anybody in the place had the faintest idea we were seeing each other. I never took her home and she restrained her affection unless we were in the privacy of my office. The only hint as to a possible relationship was the fact we were informal with each other but most folks would have expected that after our long association.
It only took ten minutes to get to her apartment house and I parked at the curb. I knew what was waiting for me inside but Jean wasn't the woman I yearned to have. The woman I wanted was Ben
Carlton's blonde wife and that, from the viewpoint of safety, was more stupid than this. Yet the difficulties which it presented didn't stop my longing. Yet, for all I knew, it could be just a passing dream. She was a bride, seemed to be in love with Ben, and new brides seldom run to another man's bed.
Jean's apartment was on the second floor, front, and I walked up the stairs. This was one of the better buildings on the street, made of brick and the brick kept out the noises of the cars going by. At one time trucks had used the street to cut off mileage but they were now prohibited.
I didn't knock on her door but went right on inside. The television set was on but the sound wasn't turned up. I watched it for a moment, saw that the Yankees were at bat and shut the thing off. Some people are nuts over baseball but I'm not. It's a lot easier to go out of your mind over a woman. The baseball season ends in October but the woman season doesn't.
She came out of the bedroom just then and something inside of me jumped, fanning the spark that every man has and turning it into fire.
"Cripes," I said thickly.
She wore a little net thing around her hips, hardly enough to cover her, and she had on one of the new bras that had been received that day. The bra was black net, the centers open, the lift of the bra making her look like she was a battleship with two sixteen inch guns that were ready to fire.
"This rig isn't so bad," she said. "On you it's pretty good." She smiled. "Just pretty good?"
"No. Terrific. Let's say you're outstanding."
"Lucky I could find my size. What happens if a girl is more than forty?"
"We refund the money. Anyhow we don't state that they come any bigger."
She crossed over to me, pulled my head down and kissed me on the mouth.
"Forget business," she said and dropped down onto the sofa. "Let's talk about something else."
I sat down beside her.
"Like what, for instance?"
"Us."
"Aw, hell, not again, Jean."
"Why not? Four years is a long time and I think I deserve more than only getting paid for working. We've had our fun but I'm growing older and how much is left for me?"
Because of the air conditioner it couldn't have been warm in the apartment but I thought it was.
"What do you want?"
"That's simple and you know the answer. I'm after marriage."
"Swell. I'm already married."
"Yes, and unhappily. You can end it."
"And have the ground go out from under me?"
She dug in one of my pockets for a cigarette, lit it with a lighter from the coffee table and leaned back.
"You're yellow," she said.
"Maybe," I admitted. "I'd call it using my head. You know what her old man can do to me if we ever broke up. I've hidden nothing from you. We've gotten along great for four years. How come we have to change it?"
"Wouldn't you want a change if you were a woman?"
"I'm stuck on that one," I said.
"You would. A woman needs a home and family and a love that isn't cheap. When you're here with me I don't think it's cheap but later I know that it is. We can't have a baby of our own and do right by the child. We-Roger, we've been fortunate but how long can it last?"
"There's no law that says we have to go on with this."
She leaned her head against my shoulder.
"You don't understand, do you? I'm anxious to go on and on and on. I don't want what we have to stop but it seems to me that we have to think of ourselves-and you have to think of me. About Linda's father-well, what could he do? Maybe you owe him money but you can pay him back. The business is there and it keeps coming in. You're established and you don't need him now."
"He'd take the firm away from me," I protested. "He's willing to wait for his dough and I can't pay him and expand at the same time. I've got to expand, to grow. Even though I was determined to call a halt to it I couldn't. The people won't let me. The orders come in and they have to be filled. But why tell you all this? You know."
"I also know that I'm in love with you." It was a simple statement, direct and honest.
"Well," I began. "Well, give me some time."
"How long? Until I'm thirty or thirty-five and you have no further use for me?"
"No, Jean, not that long."
"Then when?"
"I don't know."
I didn't want her, not as I had hungered for her before, but there was only one way to shut her up. I took care of that right there on the sofa. She shut up all right. But when I left her she was crying.
CHAPTER THREE
I hated mowing the lawn but Linda raised so much hell about it the next morning that I got the mower out. At the start of the summer I'd had a man who had taken care of the grass for me, charging a couple of bucks and doing a lousy job. However, he had found other work and I hadn't received one answer to the ad I had put in the paper.
It was a hot day, one of those humid days just before a storm, and I stripped to the waist, taking my time and looking over at Ben Carlton's house, hoping to see the blonde. I didn't.
By the time lunch was ready I was finished with the lawn and I entered the kitchen. My skin under the sweat burned from the sun and I got some orange juice from the refrigerator. Linda was already drinking but it wasn't orange juice. She was into scotch over the rocks and she looked cool in shoots d.nd hnltcr
"That didn't kill you, did it?" she asked as I sat down at the table.
"I'm still breathing."
"Don't be funny. If you did it every week it wouldn't be so hard."
"I'll get a guy somewhere."
"You'd do yourself a favor if you didn't. All you do is sit behind a desk and you can use the exercise."
"Yeah, but if you hadn't hollered at me I could have used the sleep more."
"I try to get some exercise when I think about it."
"How? By lifting a glass of scotch?"
"Oh, shut up. Sometimes you make me sick."
The sandwich was made of tuna fish and I liked that. The only thing missing was lettuce but she seldom bought any lettuce. She had no taste for the stuff and what pleased me didn't matter to her. The night before she had been slopped silly when I had gone to bed and I hadn't even kissed her goodnight. How she had recovered so fast was beyond me.
"We could go down to the river this afternoon," I said as I swallowed the last of the sandwich.
She had the bottle of scotch on the table and she poured more into her glass.
"What goes with the river?"
"Some fishing. I've got the gear and we can rent a boat."
"Thanks for nothing, Roger."
She could sting me when she put the words together in that sequence.
"There was a time when we fished," I reminded her.
"There was a time when we did a lot of things we don't do now."
"I'll buy that at double the asking price."
"Of course. You mind is stuck in the gutter."
I decided to have a beer and I got one from the refrigerator.
"Let's cut out the fighting," I said.
"Who's fighting?"
"We are. All the time. Over anything. Over nothing. Don't you think I get weary of it? Runing a business is bad enough but when a man has to choose weapons with his wife it's almost the same as getting kicked in the face."
Her eyes flashed.
"Why don't you stop crying?" she demanded.
"I'm not crying. I'm telling you the truth. Who said a man's home was his castle? It can be his own private hell."
"You aren't nailed to the floor."
I knew what she meant and I froze inside.
"We'll level off," I assured her but I was fairly certain that we wouldn't, also quite certain that I was merely putting off a major disaster that was bound to hit me. "Every couple goes through this stage," I went on. "Experts say these are the danger years and we have to accept that. There's nothing like kids to hold us-"
"Forget I even opened my mouth, will you?"
"No, I'm serious. People who have kids think several times before they start slamming into each other. They may fight, sure, but they have too much to lose, too great a responsibility, to go past that. With us there are no ties except what we feel for each other."
"It was a nice sermon," she said and reached for the bottle again. "Are you going to take up a collection?"
I had never struck her but I could have done it then without any regrets. She was impossible and getting more so every day. As I got up from the table I wondered about how long I could stand it. Man has his limits and I had mine.
"The Carlton's got another new car yesterday," she said, rubbing salt into an inside wound that was bleeding freely.
"Did they?"
"A Caddy. Why can't you be like him."
"Because I'm me."
"Sharon's riding high. She can have anything she wants."
"Yeah, and he probably gets anything he wants from her." Her eyes became stormy.
"I said your mind was in the gutter, Roger, but I was wrong. It just went down the sewer. Your brains aren't in your head. They're somewhere else."
I left the kitchen and looked in a closet for my fishing equipment. I hadn't used it since the pervious year and although I didn't actually care about fishing, especially with the river so low, I had to get away from her for a little while.
"Bring the drinks for tonight," was her only comment as I carried the equipment out to the car.
She didn't have to tell me. I bought the liquor and beer every Saturday and Ben split the cost of it with me afterward. I won't say that he was free with his money but he didn't chisel on anybody. Of course there were always other parties along the drive over the weekend but we never went to any of them. Some of the parties were too wild for my blood, what with stag movies being shown and husbands and wives separating for the night. If the people who did these things were poor they would be called slobs but because they had money the whole sordid mess was taken as a joke.
The only place to rent a boat for use on the river was at one of the beaches and it didn't take me long to get there. A retired policeman owned and operated the beach, a very nice guy, and he kept bait on hand for those who wanted it. I skipped the bait and paid for the boat. I had plugs and spinners in the tackle box and I didn't think that I would catch anything anyway.
A number of men and women lay on the sand and as I walked down toward the boat I saw the girl with the red hair who had lost her job. She saw me at the same time, got to her feet and came over to me. Her bathing suit was more revealing than concealing and she gave me the kind of a smile that I would like to get from my wife.
"I didn't know you fished," she said and stuck beside me as I continued on in the direction of the boat.
"There's no reason why you should know."
"Are you going alone?"
"I don't see anybody else."
"Then-well, could I go with you? It's kind of nice going up and down the river. I'd do it myself but I can't row against the current. It's all right here but further down you get into those rifts. I did once and I got stuck on a rock."
I could guess how it would end if I took her, not in the boat but up on the bank under some trees, and I told her I wanted to be alone. I could see that she was offended but she said it didn't make any difference and she left me.
A few minutes later I was upstream, out of sight of the beach, and I dropped the anchor. It drug along the bottom a short distance, then caught and held. After this I moved to the rear of the boat and just sprawled out in the boiling sun.
I must have slept for a long time because the shadows of evening were spilling across the river when I woke up. For a couple of moments I tried to think of where I was and why I had come there and when my mind cleared I pulled up the anchor, placing the oars into position and racing for the beach.
The night was with me by the time I got to the city and picked up the beer and the liquor but I was still early about getting home. The Carltons were generally late arrivals and they stayed long after the bars closed or until the drinks were gone.
I drove home, thinking about that blonde.
She could stay all night whenever she felt like it.
With me.
Linda was worse than I had ever seen her when I reached the house. Obviously she had run out oi scotch because she opened one of the bottles as soon as I put it on the table and she poured a drink big enough to throw a mule.
"Where have you been?" she demanded.
"In a boat. Sleeping."
"Do you have to rent a boat in order to sleep."
"I do as long as I'm living here. If I'd stayed home you'd have been on my back about something." She laughed.
"You'd like me on my back, wouldn't you?"
I just stared at her. She still wore the same shorts and halter.
"You're drunk," I said. It made me sore. "Why don't you smarten up for once? What are you going to find in one of those bottles? A hangover?"
"Mind your own business."
"Gladly."
I left her to shower and change and it didn't take me long. I've got a heavy beard and I should have shaved but I didn't. The only thing formal about our Saturday nights was the way Sharon dressed and that was because of Ben. He'd captured a prize and he wanted everybody else to know it.
I got a beer from the kitchen and carried it into the living room, turning on the lights, and looked at a copy of Life while I waited for them. Linda stayed in the kitchen. It was the usual procedure. She had a bottle and she was happy in her efforts to empty it.
Ben strangely enough, was the first to arrive, coming in without knocking, and he didn't seem to be in any better shape than Linda.
"Drinking all day," he explained and grinned. "But I've got space for more."
He was a pleasant featured man, starting to get bald, about five-ten and on the heavy side for his height, weighing about as much as I did but not having the build to carry it.
"Where's Sharon?" I asked.
"She's coming. Hang on when you see the dress she's wearing. It'll blast the eyes right out of your head. If it was any place but here I wouldn't let her wear it."
He walked on through to the kitchen and I heard a chair being pulled back from the table. It was a funny thing but most Saturday nights the two of them spent more than half of their time in the kitchen. I didn't know what they talked about but I supposed she complained of me being a failure as a husband and he bragged of his money. Before his marriage we'd had the same Saturday night parties and the pattern had been almost identical to what it was then. I guess I must have liked him as an individual to put up with it. Actually, we had no common ground, other than the fact that we were both men and we weren't interested in what the others on the drive did or who slept with who. For a man who was educated his depth of conversation was limited, except for securities and I knew very little about that field. Once I had asked him about issuing stock for my firm but I had learned that I wasn't big enough and, assuming I was, I'd have to get mixed up with investment bankers and reams of technical details.
She came in shortly and she didn't knock either. For my money, and in that dress, she didn't have to knock.
"Hi," she said, smiling.
The frankness of her smile shot into my blood stream and I got to my feet, most of the blood going to my head and making it pound.
She was a white blonde, her hair reaching down to her shoulders, and Ben hadn't lied about the dress. The dress was blue, somewhere near the color of her eyes, and it was split all the way down the front to her middle. The upper part of the opening was fairly wide and I could see the hint of the inner swells of her ripe breasts rising up from both sides of her cleavage, terminating in two giant mounds of womanhood.
"Hey," I said mostly because it was the only thing I could think of.
She laughed, low and soft, and swung across the room.
"Do I meet with your approval?"
"In more ways than one."
"Ben thought it was vulgar."
"Nothing beautiful is vulgar."
She lost her smile and sat down.
"Well, he's too drunk to know."
"I wouldn't say he was feeling any great pain."
Her nylons flashed as she crossed one leg over the other.
"Are they at it again?" she inquired.
I shrugged and fumbled for a cigarette.
"When do they miss?" I countered.
She nodded and I went out to get us some beer. Linda and Ben were sitting across from each other at the table and he wasn't fast enough to let go of her hand before I had seen it. For all I knew they had been doing this right along but it didn't bother me any. He'd learn in due time that she was as cold as a January morning with the temperature below zero. Anyway he couldn't be looking for something outside of his home. If Sharon was one third the woman she appeared to be she was more than plenty for any two men. Not one. Two. Two rugged men who hadn't seen a female in a year.
I poured the beer and took one in to her, choosing to drink my own from the can.
"Another Saturday night," she said and lifted her glass.
"Let her go. Luck and all that sort of junk."
I sat on the davenport, wishing that she was beside me-wishing and knowing that almost anything could happen if she was. Anything. All the way. Even with our respective mates in the kitchen. Yes. all the way.
"Ben drinks too much," she said.
"Linda and Ben belong to the same club."
"Why do they do it?"
"I couldn't tell you."
"He bought me a new car."
"So I heard."
"A big Caddy but-Roger, a car isn't everything. It's some kind of a status symbol but it doesn't make up for-oh, you know."
I didn't know what she meant but it came through to me that she had some gripe about her marriage which she couldn't seem to express clearly. My immediate thought was that she had awakened to the difference in ages, that a man of forty wasn't quite the proper man for a girl who was only twenty-two. However, it was merely a guess and I told myself that I could be way out in left field when I should be playing first base.
We had a few beers, talked about nothing that was important, and whenever I entered the kitchen and saw the two of them at the table, once openly holding hands and not letting go, I became more disgusted with them than ever. Maybe I wanted Ben's wife but I didn't like it as I realized he possibly wanted mine. Odd that you'll take what you can get but don't care to give up what you have, isn't it?
"Let's dance," she said after the fourth or fifth beer and kicked off her shoes, stretching her legs and curling her toes down into the rug. "The only time I dance is when I come over here. Ben can't and he won't try to learn."
I got up and put a record on the machine. Those two had a game going in the kitchen and if the game was good enough for two why couldn't four sit in on it? Besides, I'd be careful to stay away from her, just going through the motions and not holding her so tight that I wouldn't be able to release her. Could there be any harm in that?
I don't know what the number was but it was one of those dreamy things that had moonlight and roses in every beat, the kind of music that's intended for lovers.
Lovers....
Heady wine and the scent of the night....
Then the darkness for two, no one else to know the mystery of giving and receiving that love...
What happened wasn't my fault. I held her lightly, at a distance, almost as though she had a disease, but after a few steps she wouldn't tolerate that. She came in to me quickly, pressing tight, flattening the curves of her body against mine, making my head ache with a pound that almost blinded me.
"You're some dancer," I said but I meant that she was a terrific bundle of flesh. "I should be. I did enough of it."
"Where?"
"In a Baltimore cellar bar."
"Does Ben know about that."
"Why should I tell him? He married me for what I am, didn't he."
"Sure."
We were both breathing heavily when the dance ended-I'd only put on the one record-and I knew that my mouth had to crush down over her lips, bruising them, telling her of my need.
"No," she whispered. "We-shouldn't."
But all reason was gone and it was too late. Her lips were wet and smooth under the kiss, her arms going around me as far as she could put them, the quick passion of her making her bite against my mouth. She strained to me, lifting, her fingers digging with the violence of claws into my skin.
I was the one who broke the kiss, tearing myself from her, seeing that one breast was almost outside of the dress, wanting her no matter who was. in the house.
"Forgive me," I mumbled.
She smiled and fixed the front of her dress.
"Why, Roger? Didn't you mean it?"
"You know I did."
"So what's there to forgive?"
I didn't answer her.
"I'll get some beer," I said.
Linda and Ben weren't doing anything as I made my way to the refrigerator in the kitchen. Her lipstick was smeared and she had a vacant look in her eyes. She was stoned and although the bottle was nearly empty Ben was in better condition.
"I heard a joke the other day," he said.
"Some other time."
Back in the living room Sharon and I sat on the sofa.
"This is crazy," she said and moved close to me. "Yeah, I guess it is."
"Both of us married and we should have met before."
"But we didn't."
"They say it's better late than never."
"Once you're married it's pretty late." I lit cigarettes for us and she smiled her thanks. "You never told me but how did you meet Ben?"
"I had to go over to his office with some papers."
"I thought you were a dancer."
"Yes, but I gave it up. I hated working nights so I came up to New York."
"And he dated you?"
"Not the first day but the next trip when I saw him. By then, living on a clerk's pay, I was ready to be plucked. In the beginning it was for free dinners but later it went past that. He got serious and I had nothing to lose but I made him make it legal before I did what he figured all girls do without being asked twice."
My head still throbbed and I clutched the can of beer in both hands. I could feel the dents going into it from the pressure.
"What if I asked you, Sharon?"
"You don't strike me as the kind who asks."
"Sometimes I haven't. But with you-"
"Don't be silly. They're out there in the kitchen and they aren't that drunk. Anyhow he's going in to New York on Monday."
"Monday, huh?"
"Day after tomorrow."
"And?"
She hesitated for a moment.
"You're the man, Roger. It's up to you."
I put my can of beer down and her mouth was just as good this time as it had been before. She held my hand briefly when I started for the front of her dress but then she released it and I pushed my big fingers in under the material, placing my palm over the huge fullness of one breast. She moaned, turning toward me, and her mouth came all the way open. Her free hand, the one not holding the glass, wandered like a traveling salesman over me and my mounting desire turned into sheer desperation.
This time she broke the kiss, spilling some of her drink as she got to her feet. Her eyes were bright, her face flushed.
"I'll get Ben," she said. "We'd better go home."
She was being smart and I didn't protest. I didn't want her to go but I was well aware of the fact that we were on ice and that the ice was cracking in a dozen different directions.
Ben put up a yell but he finally went with her, stumbling through the door and banging it closed behind him. I sat there for a couple of minutes, longing for her or any woman, before going out to the kitchen.
Linda had a load on all right but she was able to talk.
"You have fun with that sexy slut?" she inquired.
I stepped behind her, grasped her hair and jerked her head back. She let out a cry of pain. "You should talk," I said savagely. "Holding hands with Ben and yes, kissing him. Do you think I was born this morning or that I died tonight? Well, I've got a lot of news for you. I'm very much alive and I'm still your husband. And, good or bad, you're my wife."
"Cheers," she said through her pain.
"Knock it off."
"I won't. He's a man and you're not. Now let go of my hair, will you?" I released my grip on her hair and she laughed. "What kind of a man are you? You draw two hundred a week and you think you're some sort of a king. Okay, so you're a king. You know where? Down in the city dump, that's where. King? Oh, you funny, funny man. Just a big boob who'd populate another country if I gave you the opportunity. Well, you're not getting it."
"Linda," I said tensely. "Linda, you're making me sore."
She lurched up from the table, upsetting her glass as she did so.
"Am I? Am I making you sore? Gee, that's tough, isn't it? It's-"
I shouldn't have done it but I did. I grabbed her, lifting her clear off the floor, tortured by the memory of the blonde who had been in my arms and a year of denial.
"I'll show you I'm a man," I growled. "All you have to do is prove to me that you're a woman."
She struggled frantically but soon gave up.
"I'll scream." she threatened.
"Go ahead. You're my wife."
"Roger-"
I paid no attention to what she said as I carried her up to the bedroom. Somehow the halter came undone and fell onto the floor and I dropped her into bed like a sack of potatoes. She lay there whimpering, attempting to cover some of her nakedness with her hands.
No, I shouldn't have done it, shouldn't have treated her so roughly, but I forced myself to halt before I did the one thing for which she would have rightfully hated me.
I left her lying there, still whimpering, and slept that night in one of the guest rooms.
The room we had thought of turning into a nursery.
For the baby who'd never be born. It was, to put it mildly, a lonely room.
CHAPTER FOUR
Linda was feeling miserable the next morning and she was in no shape to get dinner. I suppose I could have put the roast in the oven but I always burn everything anyway and nobody, including me, can eat what I fix.
I spent the time until noon reading the papers, putting them down every once in a while to walk to one of the windows and look across at the Carlton's house. What Sharon had said the night before continued to haunt me. Ben was going into the city the next day and the move was mine. She hadn't said yes exactly but she hadn't said no either. I flipped a coin and it came up yes. It was encouraging but far from definite.
Linda came down at twelve and she was very beautiful in a red dress with her lips freshly painted and her hair on one side pulled back over one ear.
"Thanks for last night," she said, her eyes avoiding my face.
"You're welcome."
"I don't suppose you cooked dinner?"
"Are you kidding? If I boil water the pan goes dry and I melt the bottom out of it. On top of that you didn't take a roast out of the freezer so it could thaw."
"No, I didn't. I forgot."
"You didn't forget. Your brain was soaked in liquor."
She reached inside her dress and adjusted her bra strap. I'd often seen her do that in public and she thought nothing of it. Because of her attitude toward me that seemed to be strange. However, I suppose if a girl has to do something she has to do it.
"Must we fight?' she wanted to know. "It wouldn't be Sunday if we didn't."
"And where does it get us."
"Nowhere."
She poured coffee for herself but she didn't sit down to drink it. She stood with her back to the cabinet next to the sink and her hand shook as she lifted, the cup to her mouth.
"I'm getting fed up with it," she announced. "I never go anywhere, never do anything. Why wouldn't I drink? Don't you think I get lonely in this house while you're at the office? And some nights you don't come home until late. That's even worse. It seems as though you have your life and there's none for me."
"That's because you don't want a normal marriage," I said.
Her eyes searched my face.
"So we get onto the same thing again, do we?"
"Some things are normal," I insisted. "When I sleep with you, you won't let me touch you. That's not normal. Maybe if you're sixty years old you don't care, don't feel the refusal, but when you're young you do."
She placed, her cup in the sink.
"Roger, I just don't care for that part of marriage. And well, it never meant very much to me, only fear." She frowned and looked down at the floor. "You don't have to tell me," she went on. "I should be a wife to you and I'm not. Last night, drunk as I was, I just knew that anything you did to me would be horrible. At least you were a gentleman. You've got your rights but you didn't take advantage of them. I have to respect you for that."
"It wasn't easy."
"I know you wouldn't look at other girls the wav you do, like the blonde next door, if I was different. The trouble is I'm not different. When
I'm alone here during the day I tell myself it'll be all right that night, but it isn't. Even the scotch doesn't help. There isn't anything I do that helps."
"A doctor could."
She left the sink and sat down at the table. There was part of a bottle of scotch on the table and although she started to reach for it she didn't touch the thing. I suppose, for her, it was a minor victory of sorts.
"I'd die if I ever talked to a doctor," she said. She tilted her head and smiled up at me. "You just have to be patient with me and try to understand, Roger."
"I am trying."
She thought for a moment.
"Maybe if I got away for a day or so it would change everything."
"Maybe, but I doubt it. What's bothering you took three years to build up inside and you aren't going to kill that with just a couple of days."
"I could go up to Boston," she decided. "I know you need the car so I'd have to take the bus. I don't mind that and the folks would be glad to see me. You could manage until Tuesday, couldn't you?"
I thought of the blonde and how easy this would make it for me but I didn't really want her to go. Our marriage was clinging to the edge of a cliff and if she decided to stay on the marriage would stop. Most likely she'd blame me and the old man would put up a yell about my loan.
"Yeah, I can manage," I agreed, knowing I had to agree, that if we argued she'd go anyway.
"There's a bus at four."
"Which goes to New York."
"So? You have to go to New York to make connections for Boston. How do you get out of this" dumpy town without going a hundred miles out of your way?"
"You could fly," I suggested. "On what? My looks?"
I don't know why she kept digging at me all the time but she did. As soon as we approached the discussion of money she became almost savage. She saw things that other people had and she wanted them, too. I came to the conclusion that it was natural enough.
"They'll take a check," I said. "All you need is some identification. Lots of people pay by check."
"Well-"
"And I've got enough money for you to carry along. Pick up a box of cigars for your father if you get the chance. He'll like that."
While she went up to pack I had a can of beer and phoned New York, arranging for a flight that wouldn't delay her in the city more than twenty minutes.
"I could drive you in," I said when she came down.
"No, just let me go alone and think."
"Suit yourself but you should call your parents. They might meet you at the airport.'
"I'd rather surprise them." She put her bag near the kitchen door. "You know how it is. The one and only daughter comes breezing in and the old folks have a ball."
I gave her a hundred in cash and a blank check. Our account was a joint one and we could both draw on it.
There was nothing to do around the house so we loaded her stuff in the car and drove downtown for dinner, selecting a quiet place that had a little service bar. You couldn't sit at the bar but the guy behind it was kept busy.
"You hadn't ought to drink much if you're going to fly," I said when she ordered a double scotch on the rocks. "You get up there and the old stomach can heave."
"It'll wear off."
"Sure. If it's only one."
We had roast turkey because it was quick, although there wasn't any real hurry, and she drank more than she ate. Once I protested mildly but it didn't do any good. She seemed more interested in the scotch than she did in her dinner.
"Tell your father I'll send him some on the loan," I said.
She shook her head.
"You tell him yourself, Roger. I did that before and you didn't even write him an apology when you couldn't."
"Granted that wasn't right but I think he is aware of the facts."
"You married smart, didn't you?" She was getting slightly drunk. "You got the girl and most of his money."
"Most of his money? He didn't act as though it was that much."
"No, because he didn't tell you. He's too big hearted for that and he had confidence. If he hadn't backed you they could have lived on their interest but now they have to go into their savings every so often. That means less interest and more trips to the bank. Pretty soon he'll need what you owe and you'll have to do something about it."
"I wish you had mentioned this before."
"It's something you should have guessed and I didn't think about it."
The money business and Linda getting drunk ruined my afternoon but I was used to that. No matter what we tried together turned out to be a failure and this, of course, included our marriage.
Shortly before four I drove her down to the bus station, bought a ticket for her and helped her onto the bus.
"She going to get sick?" the bus driver asked me.
"What makes you believe that."
"Her. I don't like drunken passengers."
"Don't worry. She can hold her own."
"That we'll find out."
I waited until the bus pulled off down the street and then drove back to the house. Strangely enough, it wasn't the same without her after I got inside. There was nobody to fight with, nothing except silence. Even a drunken wife who refuses you is better than no woman at all.
The money and her condition at departure worried me and I put in a call to her father. We hadn't talked in months and he was glad to hear from me. As for the money he was slightly concerned but he said he thought I would work things out.
"There's one thing I'd like," he said.
"Name it and I'll do what I can."
"A grandchild. We've waited four years no, three for one and that's a long time."
"You can't always ring the bell."
"No, but it's almost impossible to miss all the time."
Maybe I shouldn't have done it but I told him that Linda was arriving and I asked him not to let on that I'd given him advance notice. He agreed and as I hung up I hoped she would be able to walk on both legs when she reached Boston. Or, for that matter, know when she got to her destination.
I tried to read the papers again but nothing that I read sunk into my brain. All of my thoughts were about the next day and the blonde and the potential danger which she presented. A man can sleep with a girl, as I did with Jean, but when be bolts the marital bed for the wife next door he's apt to start a fire that even the fire company can't put out.
About six I left the house and wandered around the bars. Well, I asked myself, why not? I had a marriage that was the next thing to being hopeless and Sharon had indicated that she hadn't found what she sought with Ben. A status symbol she had called the Caddy but not enough. And we seemed drawn to each other, two fairly normal people in a somewhat miserable world.
Sunday night is usually a slow night for the bars in Castle High. Most of the people have shot their dough by that time and they're sitting home, wishing they hadn't thought a five could be stretched into a ten. There were those who bought their groceries and paid their bills before they drank but there were also others who didn't. What they lived on throughout the week was anybody's guess. About Thursday you'd see people fishing in the river, not for the sport of it but because they couldn't afford to buy meat. When the fish were biting they ate but if the fish ignored the bait they went hungry.
I don't know exactly what time it was when I ran into the redhead Jean had fired at the office but it must have been close to eleven. This was in a bar that sold ten cent beer and thirty cent shots with double shots going for a nickel less than twice the price. I had often stopped at the bar, not because of the prices but because the people who came in there were decent and honest, hard working people who deserved better than what they had. Several times I had been asked to join the country club and while I had gone out there twice I didn't believe I was in a class with the general membership.
"You sure wander," the redhead, said when I sat down beside her. "Until now I've been the only customer and I was getting a little disgusted with my own company."
"Maybe that's why I wander." I had just enough beer inside of me not to care who or what she was.
She laughed and it was a good laugh, low and intimate.
"You've got a wife, haven't you."
"She took a trip."
She moved her leg over against mine.
"And you're out on the town to take what you can get?'
"Not exactly."
"Don't lie. What man isn't?"
"All right. What man isn't? But you can't blame the man. A man wouldn't get anything if the girls and women stayed home."
She wrinkled her nose.
"Home? What's home when you've just got a room where the plumbing gets clogged up all the time?"
"Funny, but I thought you lived with your parents."
"Not recently. I don't approve of them and they don't approve of me. I date a guy and have a little fun and they yell. But it's okay for my mother to do what she wants when my father's working. And he's no slouch either. He's got somebody young and he doesn't give a damn. Still, with me aw, there are different rules. I'm supposed to know these things and be everything that they aren't? I'll buy that during the fifty-third week of the year."
I noticed she was drinking beer and that was all right with me. The hundred for Linda had hurt where I carried my money and when you're out prowling money doesn't last long.
In a way it was strange that I took any interest in her, considering my previous lack of it, but when the time is right almost any girl will do. And she looked pretty good. Her white sweater was tight over her high and thrusting breasts, her leg following mine whenever I took it away.
"I don't even know your name," I said.
"It's Cindy. Cindy Hart. The Cindy is for sin and I've got a big heart."
She was outspoken and so was I.
"Just make sure you don't get big somewhere else."
She placed a hand on one of my arms. "Can I call you Roger."
"Sure. Go ahead."
"Thanks. I well, what if I did have a baby? Shouldn't a girl want a baby."
"After she's married."
"Yes, that's an advantage," she admitted. "But what am I to do between now and then."
"Use your head."
"Maybe I am."
"Not when you dated all the guys in the shipping room. A different fellow every night and the same risk. That's crazy."
"Is it? A guy drives me to my room. What does he want? A quarter tip?"
"Probably not but the other way is being a pig. You're pretty. You have a nice shape. Find somebody decent and play it square. The right man should be willing to wait."
She looked at me with big eyes, her lips smiling.
"I've got a yen," she said. "You might as well try to stop a train with your bare hands."
I knew I shouldn't take her home with me but I did. She wanted to go and all the way up to the house she sat close to me, getting my right arm around her and guiding my hand to one of her breasts.
"That satisfy you?" she wanted to know. "It gives me ideas."
"Do me a favor, Roger."
"Sure."
"Let me be with you in your wife's bed." My fingers clawed at the sweater. "Why?"
She pushed herself out against my hand.
"Because she may be good but I'm better."
Good? Nobody had to be very good to be better than Linda. No girl had to be anything at all to pass Linda in the physical race that almost any man runs.
When we got into the house she admired how it was furnished, especially the modern kitchen, and she came into my arms like a tornado out of Texas or wherever tornadoes come from.
Her lips were wild with jungle fury, her body straining, her fingers as they sank into my hair bringing pain.
There was only one thing to do after that.
We went up to the bedroom.
"She didn't even make the bed," Cindy said.
"Probably she didn't expect that I'd have company."
Cindy laughed.
"Why be lonesome, Roger?"
"You've got me."
We undressed together and while she had a wonderful body I felt none of the terrific pound in my head that I had with the blonde, wanting her as a woman the night before on the sofa, caring nothing about our mates in the kitchen.
"You're slow," she said as she stretched out nude upon the bed.
She must have changed her mind after that because I was far from being slow. She was like an animal in my arms, her moans coming up into her throat and dying there, and I was a beast of male desire, a refugee from sanity that became lost in a jungle of flesh and lust.
Later she lay beside me, breathing heavily, and I wiped the sweat away from my forehead.
"I want my job back," she said finally. "I can use that job, Roger."
I sighed and reached for a cigarette.
"You know how it is, Cindy."
"I do but you don't."
"Meaning?"
She crawled over me and began to dress.
"Meaning that I'm not yet eighteen. Two months before I am. Meaning that I'd better have that job or you won't be around to run a business."
The cigarette suddenly tasted terrible and I put it out.
"Hell," I said.
I didn't take her back to the city and after she had gone I went into the bathroom to be sick. Not sick because of the beer. Sick because of what I had done. Which was plenty.
CHAPTER FIVE
Monday morning was a rough time to try and do anything except sort the mail, which built up over the weekend, but that girl was out there, looking kind of smug, and I called Jean into my office.
"I don't like this," Jean said. "I fired her and now she says you want her back."
I wanted the redhead back about as much as I wanted the mail to stop moving but I knew when I was in a corner. A corner I had found because of lack of reason and desire but a pretty small corner whatever the cause.
"Look at it this way," I said at the same time looking at how Jean filled out her dress. "I wasn't aware of it but I know her parents," I lied. "They've had it bad and I'm willing to take a risk on her to help them."
"Her parents?" Jean laughed. "She doesn't even live at home. Who'd ask to have the little slut around? They'd have to be bums to put up with her."
I rubbed my forehead with my hand.
"I know all that," I said. "She's mixed up and a little nuts but I feel if she gets a break she'll straighten out."
"Sure. Flat on a bed for any man."
"Give her a chance," I suggested. "Lots of girls go through the same stage and they come out of it all right."
Jean frowned.
"I thought you weren't going to stick your nose into what goes on out there. Now you're changing the rules."
"That's wrong. I'm not changing any rules. It's just an attempt to do a favor in the proper direction. Once she sees how the other girls are, settled and happy, she might take the hint. I don't know. Maybe she won't but I'm not the one to take the opportunity away from her."
Jean stood close to me and adjusted my tie.
"Did you find her pretty good, Roger?"
"Oh, cut it out. How many women do you think I need?"
"I'm wondering about that."
"Well, don't. She's just a kid and that means trouble. Troubles I've got by the pound. And I examined the copies of some of the letters that she's written when I came in this morning. They aren't bad and she doesn't lie to the customers. Anybody handling complaints could write anything but she sticks to the facts. Give her credit for that, won't you?"
Jean moved away from me.
"It's your business," she said. "But if she kicks up a stink don't blame me. Blame yourself."
She went out, closing the door behind her and I sat down behind the desk. It was a rotten mess and there were no two ways about that. Her application for employment, which I had studied, bore out the fact that she wasn't quite eighteen. She acted older but there was no way of proving this wasn't so. Even though she was of legal age she had me. She could say that I had forced her and that alone would wreck my marriage if it didn't do anything else. For the first time I began to see how careless I had been in the past and came to the conclusion that being smart was a promise that I ought to make.
I lit a cigarette and grinned. The blonde. The wife next door. That was a different type of a situation, wasn't it? No danger there which I couldn't avoid, nothing other than an affair that would either last or die. Why not take advantage of the circumstances? I was basically a lonely and frustrated man and perhaps she was just as lonely. Ben couldn't be much of a husband to her considering how he drank and her age was ripe for needing a man. If it wasn't me it would be somebody else. The thought didn't please me. All that female glory going to same strange man. No, not even once. I'd take her and I'd know her and we'd find something real together.
There was work to do and I wandered through it, noticing that our dollar value of shipments had jumped because of the new bras that had come in. A large number of girls would be pleased and when their husbands or steadies saw them the roofs would start flying off of houses.
At noon I had things cleaned up and I was iust getting ready to go for the day when Cindy Hart came in.
"Thanks for the job," she said.
"The pleasure was all mine."
"Not last night. It was all right for me, too."
"Forget it."
She ran her hands down over her hips.
"You're sore, aren't you?"
"No. I'm shouting with joy."
She came over to the desk and, before I could duck, kissed me on the cheek.
"Oh. don't be angry with me, Roger. Or is it Mr. Barnes during working hours? Anyway don't be mad. I'm doing my iob and I like it here. How else could I get what I wanted?" She mussed up my hair with her fingers. "Besides, I'll always be ready when you are. I'm not saving myself for my old age."
I pushed her away from me.
"I guess you're not," I said. "If you are it's only money."
"To hell with it. Not even that."
Jean was mildly surprised when I told her I was leaving and wouldn't return for the rest of the day. "Tonight?" she asked me. "This isn't Tuesday."
"We aren't any train running on a schedule." I gave her a smile.
"The longer you wait the better it is," I said. "Very funny."
Out on the street I got into the Ford but I didn't start it right away. The blonde would be waiting up there on Chestnut Drive she had told me it was my move but I had the strange feeling, a new feeling, that once I plunged into a relationship with her it was highly possible I wouldn't be able to free myself. As for women, seeking physical pleasure, I had about enough of them. There was Jean who wouldn't let me go and that redhead slut who was a constant threat. On top of this I had a frigid wife and a bank balance which rose and fell like a Trite on the end of a string a balance that was high one day and determined to crash into nothing the next. Add to this a loan which I couldn't repay if the notes were called and it added up to a total that showed I was far from being a success.
The storm I had sensed in the air on Saturday was rolling in and the sky was dark. It was a miserable day with the weather as depressing as the twisted facts of my life. Cold facts. Brutal facts. And they began with Linda and ended with her. If Linda was a wife who enjoyed or even tolerated the joys of married sex so many of these problems wouldn't exist. They say one out of every three or four marriages end in divorce and while most of the couples won't admit it half of these divorces are considered to be the result of poor sexual adjustment. Sometimes the divorce comes early, within months of the marriage, but if there are children sensible people try to put off the separation until the kids are grown up. Then it's almost too late to start over again, to build what has already been torn down.
I started the Ford and pulled out into traffic. There was nothing I could do just by thinking about it. Linda had established her own code and I had to accept it. If my normal desires couldn't be satisfied with her then I had to go on as I had, cheating and lying and making the kind of mistake I had with Cindy Hart. I knew, too, that Linda wasn't happy. There were too many things which she wanted that I couldn't give her. She lacked the patience to work with me, to help in any way except for that brief period following our wedding, and her uncontrolled drinking was a demon, the root of her unhappiness. Frankly, I didn't see how it could go on and without her I was finished.
As I crossed Pike Street I hoped that the trip to Boston would do her some good but I doubted it strongly. When she returned it would probably be the same thing all over again sleeping un-moving beside her, finding my sex with others, feeling only pity for her when she was close to passing out at the kitchen table.
At that time of the day Chestnut Drive was quiet. Because of the weather none of the women were outside as usual, some of them wearing the briefest creations, and only a few kids played in the yards. For some reason kids always bothered me. I'd pick out one that I liked and wish that he or she was my own, wondered how it would be if our marriage had guts to it and wasn't just a shell in which two people hid and almost hated each other.
I parked in the driveway but I didn't get out immediately. The blonde...
Longing, temptation and loneliness the gigantic forces that create or smash futures, leaving an imprint that never wears off.
I shrugged and pushed the car door open. Maybe I was wrong about her. Maybe her marriage was too strong and nothing would happen. Seeing her, talking to her, was no worse than a salesman entering her living room.
My legs were heavy as I walked to the rear of Ben's house. This, I realized, was a mile away from being a casual thing. This, to me, was necessary and deliberate. The memory of her lips clung to my mouth in a torment of fire and the touch of her body still lingered upon my hands. No, this was no idle gesture, a method of killing time. This was the raw search of the male seeking out the treasures of the female.
I knocked and she came to the door, her blonde hair all the way down to her shoulders, the band of her halter twin swells that rose like mountains on either side of a lush valley. The shorts, matching red, were high on her thighs and too low to conceal her navel. At that point she was only inches, the smallness of her flowing down to the roundness of her hips.
"Are you going to stand there all afternoon?" she asked me, smiling.
"No. That wouldn't make much sense, would it?"
"Perhaps you coming here doesn't make sense either."
I walked past her into the kitchen, catching the odor of her perfume and the equally exciting smell of woman.
"You invited me," I reminded her.
"Did I? I thought it was just a hint."
"A hint is all I need."
"But your wife-"
"She's away, Boston. She won't be able to drink up there."
Sharon laughed.
"Rut we can drink here."
"I'll take a beer if you have it."
Her hip motion almost blinded me as she crossed to the refrigerator.
"There's always beer. It's the only thing I can keep that Ben will leave alone."
I sat down at the table.
"He should, be more active in his business and stop soaking his brain in booze," I said. "Try and tell him that."
"Why should I?"
"No reason, I guess. I've talked to him about it but I might just as well talk to myself. He's rich and money doesn't worry him." The cans spit foam as she opened them. "He could be dead drunk for a week and the money would keep rolling in."
"Of course you knew that when you married him?"
She brought the beer over to the table. "Is that a crack or something, Roger?" She wasn't smiling.
"No, but it's practical."
She poured the beer into glasses and sat down.
"Sometimes a girl has to be practical. If you don't look out for yourself nobody else will." She sat down opposite me. "When you crave a better life you don't go into the question of whether or not it's love. Love, if you get it, can come later." She shrugged, her front moving with the lift and fall of her shoulders. "If you don't find it what have you lost?"
"There has to be more to marriage than that," I said and lit a cigarette. "Marriage is for two people, not just one. That's half a marriage and it does nobody any good."
Her eyes were blue and moody.
"You should say a thing like that, Roger. If you were happy you wouldn't be here. Linda's pretty and she's probably quite a woman. But you aren't happy any more than I am. You beat your brains out to make a living and your wife pours the profits out of a bottle. It isn't quite the same with me because Ben has the money but even a nice new Caddy doesn't make up for what a wife really needs." She shrugged again. "I said a girl didn't lose anything if she couldn't find love but you don't know how important that is until you've tried and failed. I'm a pretty good cook and I fix a fine dinner. It's almost all right if he hasn't been drinking too much, sort of like knowing you have a home and belonging, but later he ruins it and most of the time I leave him on the sofa and go to bed. alone."
"We've got problems," I said. "Both of us."
"One of yours is because you don't make enough."
"I could take that for a slam."
The beer went in a hurry and she got more. Somehow the halter had slid down a little bit and I didn't care about trading words with her. There was one thing we could trade that didn't require any words, the one thing that either brings a man and a girl closer together or chases them apart.
"Take it however you want," she said. "Ben said you got money from her father and that you still owe it to him. That binds you to her, no matter how unfortunate your marriage."
"I never told Ben that."
"No, but your wife did. They tear us apart when they're sitting out there in your kitchen on Saturday night. It's some kind of a joke with them, to think that they own us."
"If you married him for money he bought you," I told her.
Her smile was fresh and alive.
"Would you say he got fair value for his dollar, Roger?"
My sweat glands started working on a double shift.
"He got some package," I admitted. "It must have been like Christmas in the slums and finding a great big package under the tree."
She adjusted her halter and I sipped my beer. Being in that kitchen with her was almost the same as being with all of the beautiful girls who had ever been born at one time. There wasn't anything about her that I didn't admire, or want. Had it been a few years before there wouldn't now be Linda or anybody else. She was the kind of a female that a man could walk through hell for and be glad he did. It wasn't just that afternoon with nobody to bother us. It was all the times I'd seen her put together, the need bursting just as a dam lets go before a swollen lake.
"You're quiet," she said.
"Yeah. I oh, hell."
"Are you afraid of me?"
"Not of you but for us."
"We haven't done anything wrong,' she objected. "What's a few beers and the chance to let your hair down? I can't stand half of these people along the drive. Hubby works himself into an ulcer and the wife belongs to some bitchy club where they tell dirty stories that would shock the average man. And they call it marriage. I'd say it was a waste of time."
I didn't think she'd resist me but I stayed on my side of the table. Many girls are shallow, easy to figure, but when you find one with depth you can't really be sure of her motives. She had a rich marriage and she certainly wasn't going to spoil that with a man who had next to nothing. For just a moment I wished I wasn't in the mail order business, that I had managed in some manner to rise up into an executive capacity with a solid firm. So you got a watch in twenty years. So what? So the twenty years were years of security. But, being realistic, I didn't have it and I'd never be in that class. For all I knew I could be digging ditches in a year.
"You're no more company than Ben," Sharon accused me. "What are you doing? Bringing the office home with you in your head?"
"Can a man help it?"
"You should. The whole thing is silly. When you work you work and when you play you play."
"That makes sense."
"And I said it was up to you."
I dented the beer can with my hand.
"How much is up to me?" I wanted to know.
"Well, coming here."
"Beyond that, I mean."
She got fresh beer from the refrigerator.
"Nothing beyond it,' she said. "I know where my marriage is and I intend to keep it. Ben's square with me and I have to be square with him."
"What about Ben and. my wife?"
She shook her head.
"There's nothing to it, Roger. They talk some and maybe they kiss but you can't stretch it beyond that. I won't say that it pleases me but before I get mad I go out and look at the Caddy." She paused. "The Caddy isn't any good in bed but it makes up for a lot. "He gave it to me. It's mine. And those dresses-"
"Yeah those dresses." I cut in. "Give you a scarf and the scarf would cover you just as much."
"I like them and so does Ben-except the one Saturday night."
"That was a honey."
"He's proud of my figure."
"Just proud?'
She lowered her eyes and I thought a faint flush came into her face.
"Well, he looks but he doesn't do much more than that. I blame it on his drinking. Most of the time he isn't capable. I've tried-"
Heat suddenly filled the kitchen. Of course I didn't know what she'd tried, couldn't be less interested, but I knew what I wanted to try. I wanted to try her as a woman and bend her to my will, to learn of her passion and experience the wonders of what we could mean to each other. We were two people with the wrong mates, both of us finding in our marriages an empty space that had to be filled.
The next time she got up for beer I followed her and caught her in the middle of the floor. I came at her from behind, my arms circling her, my body pressing in tight. My hands are big but I filled them with either side of the halter as I groaned and kissed her low on the neck, not the kind of a kiss I would give her on the mouth but one that traveled over her skin and reached the lobe of her ear. She relaxed, twisting her head and then I was able to kiss her on the mouth. For a second her lips parted but only for a second. She broke the kiss and fought with my hands over her breasts.
"Roger, let's not be foolish," she implored.
"This isn't foolish." I was breathing heavily, almost blinded by the pound in my head.
"How can we be certain?" she asked and spun out of my arms. "How can anybody be certain when they know it's wrong?"
I wiped the sweat away from my eyes.
"You made sort of a promise, Sharon. I wouldn't be here if you hadn't suggested it."
"I was drinking Saturday night. You have to allow for that."
"Well-"
"I'm not buying sin, Roger. I'll buy love if I'm positive but I won't settle for less than that. What I have is less and I'm not going down to the bottom of the ladder. I've been there and it's a long way up. We're like a couple of painters working ten stories off the ground. One slip and we break our necks. We have to decide whether or not it's worth the risk."
I had another drink with her before I left. She was good to me, running to catch me at the door and coming in warm and tight as we kissed.
"Don't rush me," she whispered.
"I won't."
Perhaps I could have had her if I'd stayed but I knew of her fears and this was the one time in my life it had to be all the way for love or nothing at all. She was no bar ass who wouldn't be able to remember the name of the man who had slept with her. She was soft and full, lifting to me with an intense fury that she couldn't prevent, and if I touched her before she was ready she'd never forgive me.
Over in my own house I couldn't find any beer and I had a scotch and water. I don't have any taste for the stuff but right then I needed something. My hands shook and my legs were no better and I told myself that I couldn't stand the strain of going to her again, that she had to come to me. She knew how I felt, what I wanted and the decision belonged to her.
The phone rang and I walked into the living room to answer it. Naturally, I hoped it was Sharon, that her need was as great as mine, but it wasn't her.
"I'm worried," Linda's father said. "I've been trying all afternoon to reach you and couldn't."
"Worried? About what?"
"Linda."
"Why? Is she sick or something?"
"How do I know what it is? She never did show up here. We waited and waited and the only person we've seen is the man who collects the garbage. I-Roger, are you sure she was planning to visit us?"
I didn't have to think about it. I had to lie for her.
. "Maybe I was wrong," I said. "I was under the impression she was flying up to Boston but I was busy at the time and it's possible I misunderstood her."
The old man sighed.
"Now I feel better. Only Roger, the next trip she makes don't scare the hell out of us." I said so long and returned to the kitchen. She was old enough to take care of herself. Which left just one explanation. She was with another man.
CHAPTER SIX
Nobody could get along with me the next day. I was in one of those moods as black as any night I'd ever seen.
"Don't yell at me," Jean said.
"Sorry."
"Can I help it if the mail is bad?"
"No, I guess not. Tuesday always stinks. Doesn't anybody ever order on Monday?"
"I don't know but I know what Tuesday night is. So do you."
"Yeah. All right."
"Shall I fix dinner?"
"I think not."
"Doesn't my cooking suit you?"
"Look," I said, trying to be patient. "I've got things to do."
"What kind of things?"
"Just things. Hell, can't a guy be busy?"
"Not for you on Tuesday night. On Tuesday night you can be busy in just one way. With me."
I fumbled through the morning and drank my lunch in a bar. All I could see was Linda going for some other man, her father calling the notes and the business folding up like a gypsy tent in a sand storm.
"We've got a baseball pool," the bartender said to me.
"Keep it."
Yes, I was in a bad mood. I didn't think of the times that I'd cheated on her but only that she was cheating on me. It pointed up her refusal for a normal marriage relationship, kicked me in the guts as I thought of another man taking what rightfully belonged to me. And there was only one man who seemed to be a possibility. Ben Carlton.
It was a two and two combination and it added up to four. Both of them away for the same day and her not going to Boston. The Saturday nights in our kitchen, Linda's lipstick smeared, Ben holding hands with her, perhaps holding something else I didn't know about. Being honest about it I could almost see it from her side but I couldn't see it from his. She was always asking for things and I generally had to refuse. A girl, any girl, would feel that, but Ben had plenty of female body at home and from what I understood he wasn't doing much about it.
I stayed in the bar until three and then I started meeting the busses that began arriving from New York. The bus line had a peculiar schedule. During the morning nothing came into Castle High, only a chartered trip now and then, but after three the terminal was busy.
She was on the four forty-five and she got off the bus on one leg and a prayer that she wouldn't tumble down the steps. I was disgusted with her and I told her to get in the car while I waited for the luggage. The car was handy and she showed off one leg almost up to her thigh as she climbed into the front seat.
"Some nylon," a man who was standing nearby said. "When a dame lets her dress get that high she's willing to take it off."
We didn't talk much on the way up to the house and she had to have a drink as soon as she got inside.
"I should fill up the bathtub with scotch," I said. "Then you could take a bath in it." She sank down onto a chair at the table. "Oh, shut up, Roger." I sat down opposite her.
"How were your parents?" I inquired casually.
She drank most of the scotch from the glass before she replied.
"Fine," she said. "They look about the same and they're well."
"Funny you would know that."
"Funny? All right, so I'm laughing. You asked a question and I told you. What am I supposed to do? Present a written report?"
I rested my elbows on the top of the table.
"You weren't even there," I said.
Her eyes flashed and she reached for the bottle.
"A lot you know, Roger."
"You're correct. I know a lot. In fact I know more than you think."
Her lips curled.
"Always clever, aren't you?"
"No, not clever. And it was a mistake that I know anything at all. The money worried me and I called your father about it. I was also worried about you being loaded. It seems that you were so loaded that you never got there."
She sat there thinking for a long moment.
"Can't a wife do anything on her own?" she asked.
"It depends on who she does it with."
"There goes your rotten mind again. Try to give you a good reason and it would come out covered with slime. But I guess you can't expect much more from a guy who sold junk from door to door."
"I'm listening," I said, attempting to control my temper which, believe me, was difficult.
"Listening for what? The sound of my father's money?"
"That's not fair."
"You'd take more if you could get it."
"No. Sometimes our bank balance is close but I wouldn't think of that."
I didn't think she was going to tell me and there was no way I could force it out of her unless I kicked her around. Maybe she had it coming to her but if I did that I'd be as stupid as the man who sawed the tree limb off while he was standing on it.
"Roger, I'm sorry," she said at last. "Nothing has been right for us and it's getting worse all the time. I feel the duty to be a wife to you, to be like other wives, but there's something inside of me that freezes up and won't let go. I-well, I didn't go to Boston. No, I didn't. I went to New York, stayed at a hotel and got drunk and sick. I hoped I could think this out between us but I couldn't."
"Ben was down there yesterday," I said gently.
"Ben? I don't know. I don't know anything about Ben. I just know I had to get away for a little while and it was a waste of money. I'm the same. You're the same. Nothing changed and nothing will."
I wanted to believe her but I didn't. It was too obvious but I didn't press the issue. She held everything I had worked for in her hands and she could crush it with a phone call to her father. I supposed that we were no different than many couples. During the first year of marriage everything had been new but now it was old. The danger years. The years when you suddenly realize there must be more to living together than a double bed in a dark room. Later on the man develops a stomach, the woman sags where she has been high and proud and then the physical attraction simply isn't enough. These are the years when you must believe in each other, when you almost find yourselves thinking alike, when an agreement is so much trouble that you'd don't bother with it. But before this are the years of adjustment, of discovering faults and overlooking them, the years of adjustment which had somehow escaped us. Was it her fault or mine? Who could say? Much of the fault, I supposed, belonged to me. Jean had come too soon after our marriage, either out of lust or need, and she was still with me. I couldn't shake her. She hung like a dark cloud over everything I owned.
"I wish we could start out all over again," I said as the memory of the blonde next door churned through me, the male desire inside of me foaming in my blood. "I wish we could."
"Can anybody do that?"
"Some people try."
"Why?"
"Because they hate to have anything lick them. It's a challenge and if you don't throw the torch down you carry it. Given half a chance you carry it all your life. Just because everything isn't perfect doesn't say you should let it go out."
"You missed your calling,' she said as she got up from the table. "Some people get paid for telling others what to do."
"Where are you going?" I inquired, ignoring her statement.
"Over to the Cabinet on the end. I've got a fresh bottle hidden in it."
"Cripes, can't you leave the stuff alone?"
"Once I get myself straightened out I will."
"Yeah, and by then your mind will be scrambled up like a dozen broken eggs."
She opened the bottle and returned to the table.
"I suppose you saw Sharon while I was gone," she said.
"No," I lied.
Linda laughed.
"I'll believe that the day hell freezes over."
"Believe what you want."
The phone rang and I lost no time getting into the living room and answering it. Jean was on the other end and she was mad because I hadn't shown up. She was even madder when I told her I wouldn't, that I was tied up with some details that couldn't wait.
"I'm getting tired of living by your rules," she said. "You'd better do something about me and your wife."
"Yeah."
"Just remember that, Roger."
"You can bet your money on it."
I stood there after I hung up. She was as painful as a knife in my side that I couldn't remove. Still, I knew that I would go back to her again and again, finding my pleasure with her, running out the string until the string was all gone.
After I returned to the kitchen I poured a light scotch and water.
"Some girl," Linda said.
"Looking for a job."
"Where? In her bedroom?"
"Now whose mind is in the gutter?"
"Mine because I know men." She laughed. "You aren't getting what you want at home and. you can't convince me you're doing without." Her next laugh was low and deadly. "Just don't let me catch you, that's all. But I will, Roger. You aren't a man. You're an animal. You had three years of me. What more do you want?"
"What any husband wants to enjoy with his wife."
"Getting her pregnant. Is that what you mean."
"We don't have to discuss it."
"I can't talk about these things very well when I'm sober."
"Or drunk,' I added. "So what's the object?"
"Because of you and me and what we are." She frowned. "Do you know what we are? We're two people living in an open hole without any lid on it."
"You dug the hole. I didn't. You dug it a year ago and every day you make it deeper. How do you think I feel when I come home to a drunken wife?"
"I don't know," she admitted.
"I feel lousy. There's always a bottle on the table and you only cook when you get around to it. If I'm lucky I get one of those frozen food dinners that's been thawed out three or four times before it ever reached the house. Generally you're too looped to even do that right."
"The plea is guilty," she said. "Don't put me on trial. Just sentence me to the chain gang."
"That isn't too original."
"So? I'm a genius?"
"No. You're drunk again."
"Guilty for the second time in a row. Drunk and disorderly and a slob." Tears formed in her eyes. "Drunk in New York. Drunk here. Drunk all over the place." Oddly, she pushed her glass of scotch aside. "Help me, Roger. Do something, can't you?"
"What can I do?"
"I don't know. You're the man and I'm the girl. They say men are smarter. Maybe they are when it comes to this. And New York Roger, forgive me.
"Anything," I assured her but I wasn't at all positive about that. "People make mistakes."
"Horrible ones."
"Yes, both big and little. Get something in the middle and it may not be a mistake."
She lurched up from the table and, half smiling, she jerked down the zipper on her dress.
"You'd like to have a little mistake, wouldn't you?"
There was something glowing in her face then, something that was almost wild.
"We'd make ideal parents," I said. "You'd be so stoned you wouldn't hear the kid cry and I'm struggling to build a business. Leave the kid in your care and he'd starve to death."
"I could quit my drinking, Roger."
"They all say that. Words are cheap."
"As cheap as our marriage?"
I shook my head, wanting to understand her and unable to do so.
"I don't get it, Linda. For a year I've been an outsider and now this. Thanks anyway but I'm not interested. You don't know what you're saying."
"Maybe I do."
"Yes, and maybe you don't."
She caught the hem of her dress and pulled it up over her head, all the while telling me that I wasn't anxious to be a husband to her. I still didn't understand her but I understood what I saw when she threw the dress over the back of a chair. The girdle the doctor had suggested was missing but she didn't really need one. The nylons were high on her legs, fastened to a garter belt, a black garter belt that came into view as she stepped out of what she had on down below.
"Do the other girls do this for you, Roger?"
"Shut up."
"But I thought-"
"You thought wrong. I don't care about you this way because you don't know what it's all about."
She laughed at me.
"Are they better than I am? Is Sharon better?"
She had me thoroughly confused.
"Shut up," I said again and this time I meant it more than before.
She refused to pay any attention to me and the bra came off next. Her breasts were jutting, tipped with flesh fire. All that remained were the stockings and the garter belt.
"Roger," she said and came over to me.
"Go to bed."
"With you."
"No. Not this way. Not now."
Mouthing an oath she slapped me hard across the side of my face.
"Pig!" she screamed loud enough to be heard up and down the drive. "Man pig!"
"Slut!" I hurled at her. My mind was clear, working rapidly. "Afraid of what you did in New York with somebody else, aren't you? Scared that something happened and I won't know if I sleep with you. Come away from it, Linda. It's a trick that Eve didn't use because there was no other man except Adam but it's been used plenty since then."
She struck me a second time and I grabbed her arm, twisting it. She moaned, her eyes closing with the pain and dropped onto my lap.
"Don't," she whimpered. "You're hurting me.
I let up on some of the pressure. "You think I like getting belted in the face, huh."
"Roger, please."
"Do you?"
"I I didn't mean it. It was only that you-"
I released her arm and she sat there, sobbing on my lap. I could feel the warmth of her through my clothing and I was terribly aware of her nearly nude body. Still sobbing she kissed me on the mouth and I knew then with a shattering explosion that possibly I would never again desire her as a woman or a wife. She ran from cold to hot and a man can't take much of that. To me, physical desire in marriage was a progressive thing, a yearning that must be shared mutually and not taking the shape of a skeleton dragged out of a closet.
"You don't love me," she said when I failed to return her kiss.
"Maybe your change jarred the devil out of me. You claimed there wasn't any and now it's just the opposite."
She pulled her head back and looked into my eyes.
"Can't you men understand a girl?"
"Not when the girl doesn't understand herself."
She kissed me with more passion.
"Let's go to bed, Roger." It was a plea.
"Run along. I'll follow."
She arose from my lap.
"Am I that repulsive?"
"No, you're beautiful. But I don't think you mean what you say. When I'm positive that you do you won't have to ask me. I'll know then and so will you. Once we know-"
Turning, she fled from the kitchen and I realized she was hurt. I heard her stumble and fall going up the stairs and I reached for the remains of her scotch. What, I asked myself, do you do with a girl like that? I couldn't find any answer to this question, unless-
Yes, another man. There had to be another man, some man who had brought her to her knees where I had failed.
I left the chair and walked to one of the kitchen windows. Ben? Of course it was Ben. But why and how long had it been going on.
Ben who was my friend.
Ben the stinker.
Linda was asleep when I went to bed. For a long while I lay there staring up into the darkness.
After I slept I had a dream about blonde Sharon Carlton. Blonde and beautiful and all that was woman locked firmly in my arms.
When the alarm awakened me in the morning I discovered that I was covered with sweat. There had been more to the night than just a dream. The details weren't clear but I recalled that I had paid for something that I'd done.
Something pretty terrible.
CHAPTER SEVEN
As soon as I could get away from the office I drove down to the bank that morning, knowing even before I saw one of the bank officers and told him what I wanted that it was a waste of time. However, he was considerate and he made a few notes while I talked.
"You've got notes against you?" he asked.
"I just said I did."
"And you've paid nothing on them?"
"No, I'm afraid I haven't."
"What about the interest?"
"It wasn't mentioned that I recall."
"I'd say you're very fortunate."
"Perhaps."
"I well, Mr. Barnes, I don't see how we could fit into your picture. If we had to take over a grocery store we might have a dozen potential buyers but you're in a highly specialized field and the market would be limited. No one can stop you from trying the other banks but it's reasonable to assume that they would feel the same way about it. However, if you insist on applying for a loan I'll-"
"No. Never mind."
I thanked him and walked on outside. I wasn't sore or anything like that. Hundreds come and go in the mail order business every year, either making a profit or going broke. A bank had to worry about the investment of other people's money and they couldn't shell it out like dried peas in a famine.
On the way back to the office I tried to think of somebody I knew who had enough money to buy up the notes from Linda's father but the only one I knew was Ben Carlton. Linda had been cool at breakfast and I sensed that something was going to break apart. The visit to the bank had only been a half-hearted way of trying to protect myself.
As soon as I returned I checked the mail returns and they weren't too bad.
"Tonight," Jean said as she followed me into my office.
"I can't be two places at once."
"No, but you can't go the other place and get away from me."
"You're too possessive."
"Am I? Well, after nearly four years I'm staking out my claim."
"Luck. When you strike a gold mine let me know."
"Stupid, this is a gold mine. What you need to do is work it." She laughed as she went out. "Along with all the other work that somebody by the name of Jean might want you to do."
The door closed behind her. I studied the polish on my shoes and remembered a time when there hadn't been any polish.
They say you should feel secure when you're in business for yourself but it was one of the many things which I didn't have. And it wasn't just the notes that could do it. A series of bad ads have ruined more than one mail order house and a poor catalog adds wreckage to the disaster. What I required was a female consultant, somebody to guide me in selecting the items which we offered, but so far I hadn't found one who was capable. We had to cater to the unusual and the exotic and the bugs who dominate the fashion world had little or no knowledge of our needs. To them what we did was a joke and perhaps they were right. I only knew we had to give our customers something different than what they could buy in the stores.
My buzzer rang and I picked up the phone. Only personal or important calls got through the outside office.
"I want to buy something sexy," a familiar voice said.
"Sure, Sharon."
"For those two things about me that attracted you so much yesterday."
"We only go up to a forty." I looked at the knuckles of my hand that held the phone. They were white. Why was she phoning me? "Forty and not an inch to spare."
"Oh-well, damn. Forty two is tight enough so I wouldn't fit into one of those. Anyway it isn't important. What I want to know is whether or not you can light a gas hot water heater?"
I longed to see her but not with Ben in the house.
"Tell Ben the directions ought to be on the side of the tank."
"How do I tell him? He isn't here."
"Then when he gets back."
"From where?"
"I couldn't say. I'm not married to him." She laughed.
"Linda left your house and walked down the road. Roger."
"Yeah? I didn't know she had that much ambition. She hasn't walked into town since the day she couldn't get a cab and the Ford was broken."
"I doubt if she walked. Ben left right after she did. He stood at the window, watching, like he expected her to do that. So he can't light the heater and I want to take a bath."
I still wasn't sure that I ought to go up there. I'd decided that she had to come to me the next time and perhaps this was her way of doing it.
"Cold water is okay at this time of the year," I said.
"Not for this gal. When I want cold water I'll swim in the river or a pool."
I thought about it for the fraction of a second.
"Well, all right, Sharon. As soon as I wind things up here."
We said so long and I sat there staring at the blank wall. So she was in the market for a new bra, was she? One wouldn't be big enough for her but she could have two, tie them together and use one on either side. I grinned and scratched on a pad with a pencil, drawing nothing that made any sense to it. She could have two bras if she desired and I'd even fit them to her. Or take off what she was already wearing. That would be better, a whole lot better. That would put her naked flesh against my hands and if Ben walked in with a shotgun I wouldn't quit until he blew me apart.
I used the intercom and asked for the redhead to come in. She responded immediately, her hips swaying across the office like a drunk crossing the street. If she was under eighteen, I reflected, she didn't look it and she didn't act that young. However, Rita had been young, too, and she'd kept herself available for my uncle when she wasn't with me. You couldn't tell, could you? Seventeen or twenty-two a lot of them appeared to be the same age.
"You're messing up the works," I told her. "I could do your job with my eyes closed and not make so many mistakes."
She merely smiled and sat down on the edge of my desk. Her skirt was tight over her thigh, the calf of her leg full.
"There's one thing I can do with my eyes closed," she countered.
"Oh, cut it out, will you? I didn't bring you in here to discuss that."
"Then what's the matter? I'm doing the complaints. I don't just send out your form cards but
I sit down and write letters. I tell the girls this stuff is out of the world."
"Fine, but you also pull the back orders, don't you?"
"Yes, because that's where the complaints come from and I'm supposed to be familiar with them." I nodded.
"Great up to that point. The thing is that too many old C.O.D.s are getting by you and being shipped. I saw a few that were a month in the past. Add a week for the package to get to the customer and it'll get turned down at the post office. This means we're stuck for shipping charges both ways and not a dime to show for it. When we've had a C.O.D. for ten days or two weeks I want you to write to the customer before you process the order for shipment. The guys out there don't care. They send out whatever is handed to them."
She got down from the desk. 'Say, how many hands do you think I've got?" she demanded. "Two, of course."
"Tell that to Jane. She thinks I'm a freak because I haven't got three hands and can't use two typewriters at one time."
"She's burdened with responsibility, Cindy."
"Is that my worry? Get her off my back, will' you?"
"You wanted the job," I reminded her.
"I did. Now how about some more money?"
"I can't do that."
"You'd be wise if you did."
I saw the threat and accepted it at face value.
"I can't," I repeated. "There are other girls out there who have been with me much longer, some for a couple of years, and they'd become so disgusted if I did that they'd slack off."
Her lips curled.
"What's fifty bucks a week, Roger? When you're single you know what you draw a little more than forty and you're supposed to be rich. Besides, you don't have any hospital insurance for your help. Why not? Other firms do. Don't they call it a fringe benefit?"
I arose from my chair. I regretted having met her that night in the bar, of going too far with her and creating a problem. Jane had been a worry and now this redhead was another one.
"Maybe it's a good idea," I admitted.
"Everybody would appreciate some kind of protection.'
I had to be nice to her so I tilted her chin and kissed her on the mouth.
"When you go to the hospital they won't pay you for what you have," I said. "You have to be married to collect that."
She made the kiss linger.
"You'd pay," she said firmly.
"Sure, with dollars I shake out of the trees."
"You'd pay," she repeated. "Because it could be yours."
She left me and I walked around the office, feeling disgusted with myself. A guy gets lonely, can't think of anything else to do and he has to tie up with something like that. Who said animals were dumb? Whoever made that statement forget about the human male in the grip of a female.
"You must be having fun at home," Jane declared when I told her I was leaving for the day.
"Don't bet any of your money on it."
"Then what's so important?"
"A little chore I've got to do."
She followed me to the door.
"Tonight," she said again.
"If I can."
"Well, if you can't your phone at home is going to ring and it won't be for you."
"Don't do that," I said.
"You know how to prevent it, Roger. You may be married to her but you're mine. You're-"
I closed the door to her words and moved down the street to my car. For a long time I had enjoyed her convenience and now I had arrived at a period when I no longer desired her. However, I wasn't forgetting that a girl scorned was a dangerous girl. Out of sheer necessity I had to maintain the relationship as it had existed until I could discover an escape. Some men buy off a mistress but I didn't have the money for that I didn't believe that she was interested in the money anyway. What she desired was to become a part of my life, a fixture that would last through the years ahead. Yet I had to be frank about it. Without Linda I might have married Jane, settled into a cold water flat and walloped doors with my fist for sales. But, no, she wouldn't have accepted that kind of an existence. She saw the same possibility in the business which I saw and she wanted a share of it. If anybody had earned the right she had but a man doesn't always do what's right in business or about a girl.
Traffic was light and I pushed the Ford, crossing Pike Street and blasting the car up the hill, cruising through a thirty mile an hour zone with the needle at fifty. At that time of the year none of the cops were apt to bother but during the school term they handed out tickets as freely as the soap coupons you get in the mail.
But I slowed suddenly and pulled over to the curb. I came to a stop and sat there, knowing that this was no good and that I shouldn't be doing it. If it was any other wife along the drive, and I was acquainted with only a few of them, I could light her heater or rip off the ceiling of her bedroom and it wouldn't bother me a bit. But there was a vast difference between the blonde Sharon and some wife who was wearing from breeding kids and cleaning house. She represented the ultimate of desire, promised a satisfaction that would be both complete and beautiful. Once I knew her fully there could never be anybody else. Never.
I drove on.
A fool seeking beauty and heading straight for the jaws of hell.
When I reached the house I parked in the driveway and got out. My throat was thick and dry, closing up as the air sucked unevenly down into my lungs. I told myself I wouldn't pay any attention to her. I'd light the heater and go home or I'd take a ride to Jean's apartment, getting there as soon as she arrived home from work. I'd need somebody after this, Jean or anybody, need the love that came from a girl with a terrible desperation. But it wouldn't be the other girl who submitted, not really. In my own mind it would be the blonde, her body anxious for mine, her breasts aching as I crushed her to my chest.
Sharon met me at the kitchen door and I noticed that she was wearing a pale blue robe that was about two sizes too small for what it was trying to cover.
"You must think I'm a nuisance," she said, smiling.
I moved past her, smelling the strength of her perfume, feeling the impact of her nearness. "Not at all, Sharon."
"I couldn't get a plumber."
"They take their own sweet time. You could have a cellar full of water but the guy would have to finish his beer and ten others before he ever got here."
She touched my arm with her hand.
"I'm sorry, Roger. You were probably busy."
"Not with anything that can't wait." I gave her a grin. "What you don't do today you do tomorrow."
She squeezed my arm.
"Does that go for everything?"
"No," I replied, knowing what she meant. "Not everything."
Ben's house was almost like mine but she had to show me how to get down there. She walked ahead of me, the robe like a tight skin across her hips, her hair giving the impression she was a young kid because of the red band around her head. But she wasn't any kid. She was a friend's wife and I wanted her with a hunger that shot pains through my stomach.
Ben had said something about making a party room in the cellar, using knotty pine for the walls, but he hadn't finished the job. One wall was complete, another partly done and nothing on the other two. With all of his money he could easily hire a dozen carpenters but that room was the one thing he was a nut about. He was doing it himself and he took pride in nailing up the boards.
I checked the heater and the pilot light was on.
"Is the water warm at all?" I asked her.
"Not now. It was a little bit when I started my bath but then it stopped."
I carried my inspection further.
"No wonder,' I said and turned the temperature control dial. The gas fire puffed into life. "Somebody set that thing all the way back."
"Who could have done that? And why?"
"I wouldn't know."
She sighed.
"That makes me feel foolish, Roger. Honest. I looked at the tank but I don't know anything about these gadgets."
"Most girls don't. I'm no expert myself although these heaters are simple enough. If you don't see the pilot light burning, that blue flame in the middle, you shut the gas off down here and wait a minute. Then you turn the valve to where it says pilot and press down on the red button. After you've lit the pilot keep the red button down until she'll burn by herself. Then you move the valve to the on position and you're all set."
She laughed as I stood up and bumped into her.
"Thanks for the explanation but I couldn't do it in a million years. I'd blow up the house and myself along with it."
There was a work bench near one wall and I directed my attention toward that. like most people with money Ben was equipped with a saw and all of the power tools that made a job easy.
"Has Ben taken care of anything down here lately?" I inquired.
"Almost every day."
"It doesn't look it."
"What would you expect when he gets half plastered and he doesn't know one end of a board from the other?"
"I hope he doesn't use that saw when he's looped."
"He does."
"That's dangerous. It's got a big blade and there's no guard. One mistake and he could cut off an arm."
"I know and I'm tired of warning him. Once he's been into the booze he won't listen to anybody. He says he can think when he's doing this but he's got rocks in his head if he believes that. Look at what he's done. He can't even cut the boards the same length. Most men could do a neater job in the dark." She pulled me toward the stairs. "So who cares, huh? If he wants to foul it up let him go ahead. When he's all finished he'll have to get somebody to straighten it up. Or," she suggested, "you could help him."
"When?"
"Nights and Saturdays. At least I'd know somebody was watching him."
"We'll see," I said. "If he asks me. Lots of nights I couldn't and Saturdays I'm too lazy."
I intended to leave her as soon as we got to the kitchen but I didn't. She was quick about getting out the beer and I didn't have anything so urgent to do that it would go stale. If Ben walked in on us there was a perfect excuse for my presence but I was more in favor of him staying away.
We sat at the kitchen table and she was careless about how the robe covered her in front. Or maybe she wasn't careless. Perhaps there wasn't enough material.
"Ben was pretty mean this morning,' she said. "About what."
"About me."
"You do something wrong?"
"I didn't do anything except fix breakfast and try to get him to eat it. He must have been up at five and he started his drinking that early. I had coffee and he had scotch or some other booze. I threw my coffee out. He was too ugly for me to drink it."
The beer tasted fine.
"And so soon after being married," I said. "Hardly more than a month and he's tearing up the garden of love."
"It's our ages."
"He knew that before."
"Yes, but he didn't think of it then. He was like some kid yelling for a toy and then not wanting it afterward. He claims I make him drink worse than ever because he's afraid he can't hold me. Get him slopped and he starts talking about when he'll become sixty and I'll be just a couple of years past forty."
"Which puts any kids you may have only in their teens."
"What kids?" Her eyes were big and blue. "The ones you'll most likely get."
"Didn't you know that well, he can't."
"No."
"Something to do with mumps a few years ago. I didn't learn of that until after I married him."
I followed the sway of her hips as she went to the refrigerator for more beer.
"Would that have stopped you if he'd told you in advance?"
She made no response until she was again seated at the table. The opening in her robe had shifted and the inner swell of one breast presented a very interesting sight.
"I don't know what I would have done, Roger. Maybe you marry for money, hoping that love will come later, but almost any girl wants that much out of life. I worked with a girl in a strip act in Baltimore and she had two kids, no husband. She worshiped those kids and there wasn't anything she wouldn't do for them. They were all she had gotten out of life, all she expected to get, all that she wanted. But she was selfish, too. She wasn't thinking of them, of what she would tell them later, how they might despise her if they ever discovered the truth."
I thought of Ben coming in and finding us, possibly drunk and angry, but it didn't stop me from going around the table to her. like a game of cards, she was the queen and I was the king and there wasn't anything to keep us apart.
"Friendly, aren't you?" She smiled as I sat down close to her.
"That robe is driving me crazy."
"The robe? It cost-"
"I don't care what it cost. And it isn't the robe. It's you. Right from the start it's been you, all the way and every minute of the day. I-Sharon, there's something going on between Ben and Linda.
I can't prove it but I know."
She rested her head against my shoulder.
"Funny, but I've thought the same thing. I-well, why, Roger? Can you tell me why?
"Because he represents all that I'm not and he can give her everything that I can't."
Her voice same out low and sensual.
"What can't you give her?"
"Money."
"I didn't mean that. I know how it is for you with money."
My arm crept around her shoulders. "What did you mean?"
"The other. Nights. Weekends. Maybe in the morning."
"You know," I said. "It hasn't been for a year. But last night-last night she said she hadn't changed but then she did. She was afraid about something and I could only guess in one direction. Ben was with her in New York and it scared her. Most likely she didn't know about him and she was worried."
"Let her worry."
"I did."
My hand found the opening in her robe and she didn't resist.
"What about others, Roger?"
"I'm human," I admitted.
"Just human with them or serious?"
"Human."
"We're all human, I guess."
"At times. It's either somebody or nobody."
My hand was over her breast now and that pound thundered in my head the same as it had before. The closest thing to the pound was a hangover and I was a long way from that.
"And me, Roger? Is it somebody or nobody or human or serious?"
"Serious," I assured her.
"Much?"
"As far down as my feet."
She leaned against me silently for a long moment. Touching her, holding her was as jolting as an electric shock from a high tension wire.
"What do we do now?" she asked.
"That's your decision."
"No, not mine alone."
"Ours then."
She turned her head so I could kiss her on the mouth. Her lips cried for love with the tears of the ages.
"It's a tough decision," she said. "Yes, it is."
"Wouldn't it be simple if we weren't married? Or just one of us?"
"We're married all right."
"But not to each other."
I kissed her again, the fingers of my hand hurting her until she moaned.
"No, not to each other, Sharon. That's where the trouble lies-you with a husband and me with a wife. Two peas out of the same pod and we got stuck."
She broke away from me for a second and reached for her beer. Then she settled back. "You married for money, didn't you, Roger."
"I thought it was love."
"But the money didn't stop you any."
"No, it didn't hurt."
She put her glass down without drinking any of the beer.
I'm serious about you, Roger," she said. "Those Saturday night dresses weren't for Ben. They were for you. I only had to see you once and I knew we ought to be living in another state."
"That pleases me." It did and my hand wandered down as far as the belt on the robe.
"And I did marry for money. I don't deny it.
The chance was there, a chance I might never get again. I didn't think it was wrong. Other girls have done the same thing. I was willing to bear his children, his and mine, for the security offered." She moved under my arm. "He can't have any. It's all right . I-I never intended to fall in love with anybody, to want another man and still want what I have now. It's-oh, it's so mixed up. You sell yourself on the idea that love isn't important, that money can buy anything, but all at once you come to know that love is the most vital thing in the world to a girl. She's born with the instinct to love, to create new life, not with the same instinct that a man has. A man can find his pleasure with almost any woman but unless a female is a tramp she has to feel, at least at the time, that it's love or close to it. She-"
We kissed a long time, my hands pushing her robe aside, finding her body, her mouth open and hot and violently demanding. I untied her robe, explored the fullness of one thigh, drove the kiss in until she began to tremble and twist on the chair.
"There's always upstairs," I said hopefully. "This kitchen is no place-"
"Roger, there's too much risk."
"Yeah," I agreed, disappointed. "Yeah, I guess there is."
"What if Ben came in?"
"I don't know."
"I'd lose him and you'd lose your wife."
"Somebody would lose and that's for sure."
"It would be us. Us, Roger, and we can't afford it." She strained against my roaming hands. "Please. Please don't make it difficult for me. Iyes, it would be wonderful but we have to think. We've been sensible this long. We can wait. Weoh, I know. Just have one bottle Saturday night and not the stuff. You'll have to go for it and I'll say I'll ride along. They won't suspect. They won't know. They'll sit there in your kitchen and time won't mean anything to them. But it will to us. That will be our time, our first. Our first but not the last. Always afterward and whenever we can." Her lips were briefly wild upon my mouth. "They'll find the opportunity and so will we. While the mice play the cats will clean house."
I didn't want to go but I couldn't stay there, fighting down a desire that screamed out we should have no limits, that the fires of our love should be realized to the fullest extent.
"Saturday night," she said when I reached the door. More than a promise in her voice was the overpowering need which she felt as much as I did. "Saturday night."
"Yeah," was all I could say. "Sure."
I went outside and down the steps.
On the way into town I met Ben driving toward home.
He wasn't alone.
Of course he wasn't.
My wife was with him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I was early getting to Jean's apartment and I let myself in with the key which she had given me. After looking into her refrigerator and not finding any beer I hunted through her supply of liquor. She had a lot of cordials which she sometimes used to mix a drink called "The Squirrel" but I stayed away from that junk. The drink was well named. After a few of those you could climb a tree backward and maybe even jump from limb to limb.
At last I decided on a rye and ginger, using two shots of rye and just a dash of ginger ale to smooth out the taste of the liquor.
I sat on the sofa and waited for her, sipping the drink and wishing it was Saturday night. She had come up with a neat plan for us and it couldn't miss the way our mates drank. Just thinking about it made me feel good but the good feeling soon left me for one of utter despair.
Jean was part of the despair and I didn't know how Sharon would take it if she ever became aware of all of the facts concerning my outside relationship with this girl from my office. Perhaps she would understand but a man can't wager his money with any degree of accuracy on the reactions of a girl. Almost all of them are different and hardly any of them think the same. One female twin may pose in the nude and get a thrill out of it while the other twin would, feel degraded simply being asked to do such a thing. About all a man can do is hope and trust to luck, knowing as he does that luck is almost as uncertain as a good day in the mail order business.
I tried sitting still for a while but I finally gave up on it and paced the floor. My situation was delicate and nobody had to tell me that. In love with my friend's wife, married to another girl, threatened in various ways by two more, operating a growing business close to the cuff well, nobody could envy me. If they did they were either crazy or downright stupid. Not because of the blonde any normal male would envy me for her love-but the rest of the whole mess was something that only a long odds player would want to have confront him.
Putting the drink down I lit a cigarette and continued pacing. Sharon had brought it up about us having a lot to lose and we did. The money.
My business that was almost always jammed up with some sort of a financial crisis. She had the tips of her fingers deep into a fortune and if we both lost we would be a couple of nobodies. Perhaps love meant more than money but you that would belong to her if Ben wasn't around, couldn't overlook the money factor. Even if we divorced and were free to marry I couldn't expect to get much of a job once I was out of the mail order racket. Sixty a week would be about right and we'd grow to hate each other on that amount of income. She'd be worse off than swinging her body in a cellar club and I wouldn't be able to keep up with the expenses. No, we couldn't give up what we had, love or no love. The love could wait, or marriage could anyway, and if we jumped too soon we'd strangle our love in near poverty. Almost any couple could manage the first year but then there might be a kid and the edge of poverty would reach out for us. I'd had that before, gone without things I needed, and I wasn't willing to go back to it. Fools go back. Anybody with a brain moves ahead.
Jean came in presently, panting a little from the stairs. The door clicked shut behind her and she threw her pocketbook onto the sofa.
"I knew you were here," she said, smiling. "I saw your car parked on the street."
"Naturally. Where else would I leave it? Drag it up the steps and into the hall?"
She lost her smile.
"Don't take it out on me, Roger. Maybe your wife gave you a bad time but don't bring it down here with you.
"Okay. Excuse it."
"You've done that before, coming in here like a bear with a sore nose and bitching about her. You're getting what you deserve. Any man who lives with a girl under those conditions is providing his own trouble. Or aren't you a man after all? Most men would slap the hell out of a wife for that. What if I told you no?"
I shrugged and picked up my drink.
"It's a free country."
"Isn't it though? A free country and that's all you think about something for free. Sometimes I think you're half rabbit or a whole lot more male than your wife expected."
"I haven't heard you object."
She poured a drink for herself, pushed the glass aside and then mixed a Squirrel. After three of of those she'd walk across the ceiling and not know up from down.
"You haven't been listening to me," she said. "I object plenty. Twice a week, once in a while three, I'm your private property. Where do you go the other nights?"
"Home."
"For what?"
"To relax and get in shape for the next time."
She wrinkled her nose and she was pretty when she did that. In fact, she was a very pretty girl anyway. It was just the strings she had tied to me that I didn't like. You've seen puppets? All right. She pulled one of those strings and I jumped all over the stage. One way to end it was to drown her or something but they send you to the chair for that.
"I notice we're close on money down at the place." I said.
"Close is not the word for it." The palms of my hands were wet. "How close?"
"Enough so that we can't discount some of our bills."
I got another drink for myself. "I don't follow you," I said. "The money has been coming in, hasn't it?"
"Coming in and going right out again. The bank called after you left today and made a mild protest about some of our checks they were clearing. They were clearing them against uncollected funds, checks that haven't yet been honored by other banks, and there's some rule they have about doing that."
"Where's the skin coming off of their shins?"
"Nowhere but they've got laws. What if a bank inspector walked into the bank? He wouldn't pay them any compliments. On the other hand, they were nice enough about it. They weren't nasty."
I said nothing. The catalog and mailing out the copies had come to a lot of money but I had assumed we were prepared for it. Obviously this wasn't the case. I'd tried to stretch out the payments to the printing firm that had done the catalog but they hadn't seen it my way. Cash, they'd said, or no catalog. So we'd paid cash, then sat and waited while the printer played guess-when-you're-going-to-get-it with us.
"Here's an idea for you," Jean said.
"I'm listening."
"You know about those shortie nightgowns."
"I've had advertising copy about them."
"They're real sexy."
"That's a matter of viewpoint. Half of sex is what you don't see. The other half is what you get and when you get what you want you don't concern yourself with looking."
"Oh, don't be silly. The gowns come with briefs."
"Go on." I wasn't very interested.
"Come off of it, Roger. Where's your imagination?"
"I must have left it home."
"You did something with it. Anyhow any girl would go crazy over that rig with her name on the briefs. Or the name of her man friend."
I didn't think a great deal of the idea but of course in our line you never knew what would sell and what wouldn't. I'd added the bras without centers as a gimmick, deciding in advance that they might be uncomfortable for the girls, but the item had caught on heavily.
"We can try it," I said, still not convinced.
"Want me to model a set for you?" She nudged me in the ribs with her elbow. "Like I have with some of the other stuff?"
"Not right now."
"Roger, you're getting old."
"No, I'm not getting old but I'm worried. Anybody would be worried in this rat race. Who can say what a bunch of crazy girls are apt to buy? Nobody, that's who. Give them a dress that's decent and the dresses rot on the racks. But offer them a dress that's split all the way down the front to their stomachs and they can't wait to show the gang."
"I know what would sell. I've known it all along."
"Well, if you do you're in a class all by yourself. Look at those housecoats we brought in black and slinky and hugging the body. Where are they now? You know. In the stockroom and if we get rid of them they'll have to go as free premiums on big orders."
She began putting together another Squirrel. That was all right with me. I was so used to seeing my wife drunk that I didn't mind it with her or anybody else.
"A book on sex would bring in orders," she said. "You could give it as a gift to good customers."
"Let's not foul up the air, Jean."
Her eyebrows arched.
"So what's wrong with sex?"
"Nothing but most of these girls have received their training in the back seat of a car."
"And it frightens them to death."
"They get over it"
"Then you don't approve."
"Not in the least."
"I guess you don't approve of anything tonight."
"It must be the weather."
"No. It's something else."
I walked over to the sofa and sat down.
"It's plenty else," I agreed. "We've been seeing each other for a long time now and I think it's smart for us to shove the wreck over the bank and get it off the road."
She came over to sit beside me.
"You know how I feel," she said. "I juggle money and sweat and bleed bullets for you all day long." She laughed. "Don't the wise people tell you not to take less than the best?"
"I've heard that but this isn't the best."
"There's such a thing as having faith in you and the business, Roger."
She was making me squirm. She always did.
"You're crazy," I said. "I have to maintain my marriage to keep the firm running." It was my turn to laugh. "Glamour, Incorporated, huh? Well, there's no glamour to it but I'm stuck in a jam I can't get out. I-"
"I'm not going to let you out," she interrupted. "I've been your woman long enough to know my own mind."
"You don't. You're like a kid out in his back yard who's trying to make a rocket shot at the moon and power the rocket with water. It won't work. It can't work. Take Linda's old man's money away from me and I'll sink. What if the bank called me tomorrow and said we were overdrawn? Could I do anything? Sure. Hold my head and weep."
She slid across the sofa and came in against me. "I've got some money, Roger."
"Saved? On your salary? And in this apartment?"
"No. It goes back a long time. It was left to me."
"I don't want it." She'd never mentioned having any money before.
"Money would help you right now."
"Believe me, Jean, I don't want it. The money is yours so hang onto what you've got. I know we're at a critical stage. That last catalog was the biggest chance we've taken and we either go over the hump or down the drain. Play it sensible and stay out of the drain."
She talked, trying to sway me, to dig her claws in deeper, but I wouldn't permit myself to be swayed. My hands still tingled from having touched the blonde that afternoon and I told myself that Jean wouldn't ruin me, that if she did that she, in part, ruined herself. I clubbed her with a verbal hammer, pointing out that she had been more than willing the first time, the pile of shipping cartons good enough for her, that the affair was actually more hers than mine. Of course she was hurt but I couldn't help that. I needed her at the office but I didn't need her in any other way. She could keep the books, make up the tax forms, boss the girls. Beyond this I no longer required her services in a personal way. Saturday night and the blonde would more than compensate for the loss.
I watched her as she got up and made another drink, not pausing once as she gulped it down. Without a word she entered the bedroom, reaching for the zipper on her dress, and I knew what she was going to do. Jean was a girl who couldn't wait, who believed that her body could achieve any goal.
No, I shouldn't have waited. But I did.
I waited to break off the hook that I'd thrown into her, to stop what we had known together, to smash her as I'd never smashed another girl.
Maybe her body was great, one of the best, but she was too greedy, demanding from me so much that I couldn't give. Even if she went to Linda I'd fight those notes. It would take time for her father to bring any pressure to bear upon me. Why hadn't I thought of that before? A note could be called overnight for payment but it didn't have to be settled. I'd cut corners in business expenses, do something. Anything. Something, no matter what it was.
She came out of the bedroom and she had on that shortie nightgown. The hem of it was high on her thighs, her legs strong and tapered beneath. The material was white, her breasts thrusting, the color of her face almost as pale as the gown.
"What's under this is yours," she said quietly and stopped in the middle of the floor. "Yours, Roger. Just as it has always been from the moment that I began to care."
Of course I started to sweat. Any man would. She could have been the biggest slut in the state but she wasn't without appeal.
Slowly, I shook my head and got out a cigarette. I had been with her too many times, times when all my desires had been pure animal, too many times when I hadn't felt love. Pure need, I told myself, had little if anything to do with love. Love does not invade the hunger pains of a starving man but the hunger a man feels is a need. There is also a physical need in man, the urge to possess and conquer, the blind need for which the prostitute, satisfying this need, would laugh at love.
"I'm sorry," I told her. I was, truly. I saw the pale color of her face, the anxiety in her eyes that faded away into hopeless acceptance. With an effort I got to my feet. I knew now that I should have left while she was in the bedroom. I didn't want to hurt her more. I didn't want to smash her. I simply wanted her to understand if she could. "This doesn't make logic, Jean. It hasn't for a long time. It can't again. We should realize that."
She stood there, unmoving.
"Then this is it?" she asked.
"Yes, I'm afraid it is. There's nothing else, no solid ground where we can walk. I well, I've cheapened you and I regret that. I think you're a good person but I know this is wrong. You can't bring about daylight with a candle and that forgive me is what you've tried to do. Call me a beast if you want. Say what you feel."
She looked down at her bare feet.
"I don't know what to say, Roger." She was nervous, shaking. "What does a girl say? How does she face life? Or love? How does she love when she shouldn't and pay the price for that love?"
"You forget, start over again. There are men, thousands of them. Men who don't have to sneak out of the house or cheat or lie."
Now her eyes lifted and searched my face.
"I can't forget. There's something that won't let me." She was almost crying. "Something. Yes, Roger, there's something that won't let me forget."
What did she mean? Our nights together? She was wrong, confused, ripped, by her emotions.
It took guts to walk to the door. I should have had them before, as long ago as that day in the shipping room.
"I can't stop you," I said and opened the door. "You've got a phone and my wife may be home. Destroy my marriage if you feel you must, but it's my business and your job that goes along with it. At least it's your job. Maybe I can save the business."
Her laugh was high pitched, verging on hysteria. It sent a shudder all through me. "I'll never see you again!" she screamed and turned toward the bedroom. "Never, you filthy swine!"
I stepped into the hall, shutting off her sobs as I closed the door with a loud crash. But I wasn't angry as I went down the stairs. I had broken her and I felt as badly as she did. I didn't know why. I just did.
CHAPTER NINE
Linda got up with me the next morning and although she had been asleep when I'd come in the night before her mouth covered a lot of ground over coffee that was too weak.
"For a big guy you're a weakling," she said.
"Have it your way." I don't like to argue just after climbing out of bed and I was so sick of her that I didn't want to fight. "You most generally do."
"Liar. I offered myself to you as a wife and you turned me down."
"Yeah, and I'm wondering why you did."
"Maybe I had my reasons."
"Sure." No matter how I felt I couldn't help striking back at her. "Another guy in New York and feeling guilty afterward. I'll go along with that on the second Tuesday of next week. Or the third Wednesday."
I thought she was going to throw her cup of coffee at me and I was ready to move out of the way if she did.
"You're impossible," she fumed. "Why would I do a thing like that?"
"I don't know why. You tell me."
"I'll tell you nothing."
I finished my coffee.
"You were with Ben in his car yesterday," I reminded her. "What of it? He gave me a ride." I laughed in her face.
"Yes," I said. "Yes, I imagine he did give you a ride. Most likely he-"
The cup came at me then but it was empty. I jerked my head out of the way and the cup banged into the wall, just missing one of the windows. It was one of those plastic things and it didn't smash, merely bouncing off the wall and rattling around on the floor.
"That does it," I grumbled, getting up from the table. "You being sober is no improvement over you being drunk."
She swore at me as I left the house and walked to the car. For a second I wanted to return to the kitchen, to apologize for what I'd said, but I didn't.
The day was clear but it felt like storm, not a storm carrying rain but a storm inside of my house. I'd gone after her about Ben, implying what might not be true, and that wasn't fair. Considering my own cheating I shouldn't have cared what she did but almost any man who cheats doesn't desire to have his wife do the same thing.
I was early arriving at the office and I worked at my desk for a while, checking the shipping total from the previous day and going over the orders for stuff that we needed. I cut down on a few of the orders and placed them in a pile. The fellow out there was doing all right for what I paid him but he went nuts when he saw the stock running low on any one item. Just because half slips sold like mad in any particular week wasn't an indication the heavy sale would repeat itself. One week we'd sell these half slips by the dozen and the next week you'd think there wasn't a girl alive who wore them. People who drop ship in the mail order business, that is provide their own labels and have somebody else do the job for them, are generally more stable than a small firm that's loaded with inventory. However, when you have the merchandise on hand your service to your customers is faster. I don't know why it is but people will wait for weeks to buy from a catalog and then they want it the next day. Anyway, some of them do.
The girls came in and I sensed something was wrong. They were making too much noise out there and Jean would seldom permit that. She picked up the mail on her way to work and she kept the girls busy. Oh, they talked as girls will in an open office but that outside sounded more like a riot than a bunch of girls taking care of their duties.
Cindy came in before I could investigate the situation.
"There's no mail," she said. "And no Jean."
"No Jean?" She was always on time. "She must be sick." I reached into my pocket. "Here. Take this key and go down to the post office. Straight up the street and two blocks to the left. The box number is on the tag. Use one of those wire baskets. You'll lose half of the letters if you don't."
"Is this a promotion?"
"Naturally. For fifteen minutes."
She left and I reached for the phone, finally having a girl come on at the board and getting the outside line. I lit a cigarette as I dialed Jean's number. She'd been sore at me and perhaps she'd quit. Or was going to see my wife.
Her phone rang for a long time but there wasn't any answer. I hung up and lit a cigarette, continued to sit at the desk while everything inside of me hit a new low. Getting rough with her, as I had, could very easily prove to be a grave mistake both for the business and my personal life. The only excuse for saying what I had was to get rid of her as a lover and that, I realized, after nearly four years wasn't quite the thing to do. There was a nice way of parting and a lousy way. I groaned and chewed on the filter of the cigarette. Leave it to me to do it wrong.
I went outside to quiet the girls and when Cindy returned with the mail they tore into their jobs. Jean generally separated the orders and I took her place. I was far from being efficient but it was something to do, something that wouldn't permit me to think about my personal problems, and I managed to get along. It was pleasing to note that the mail was big, the C.O.D. returns big. Each C.O.D. had a number on it, the same number we used when shipping, and I had wanted Jean to mark these off in the book as they came in. However, she had claimed it was a nuisance and nothing had ever been done about it. This was an error because a shipment can get lost and we had no way of tracing it.
"This must be bra week," one of the girls said.
"Swell," I told her. "We'll declare a National Bra Month, dedicated to every girl having six bras and two places to use them."
Maybe I sounded light and gay but I wasn't. As we finished the mail I thought about Jean and I got cold all over. More than one girl has wrecked a man because she couldn't have him. There was little about her to show she was different. She was the discarded female and that made me somewhat of a slob.
At noon I had a light lunch and a bottle of beer. I almost dreaded to return to the office, fearing that the phone would leap right off my desk and that Linda would be on the other end of the line.
But nothing like that happened.
Only something that was as bad or worse.
We had a radio in the shipping room, tuned to the local station, and some of the help listened to the area news at twelve-fifteen while they were eating their sandwiches. For the most part the news coverage was miserable. They billed the program as Castle High News, which was sponsored by some feed company, but for the most part the news was so national in content that the title was a joke.
"She did it," Cindy said when I came in, her eyes wide.
"Who did what?"
"Jean. It was on the news. Somebody smelled gas coming from her apartment. She was dead when they got to her."
Stunned, I leaned weakly against a desk. Dead. Jean was dead. Jean was dead and my hands felt sticky with her blood.
Cripes," I said. "Well, cripes."
"It's a shame, isn't it?"
"Yes, it is. A shame. A rotten shame."
"She why would she have done it? There was no note, no nothing. Just her naked body in the kitchen and all the gas jets turned on."
I guess I stumbled into my office. I don't know. One moment I was with Cindy and the next moment I was alone at my desk, sweating, almost crying. Dead, Jean was dead, and the fault was mine. I couldn't deny that. She had reached for the sky, lost the stars and it had been too much for her to take.
Then, suddenly, I did cry.
A man isn't supposed to cry but he can. The difference between a man and a woman is that the man usually cries too late.
I held my head in my hands. She must have loved me. The fact that she hadn't gone to Linda proved that. Alive I had recognized her love, feared it, but in death I recognized it even more, her death washing away the fear, turning the love she had given me into a thing of beauty.
At last I tried to do some work that was fairly important but I couldn't. I needed a bar and a drink but I couldn't do that either. Somebody had to take charge of the firm's affairs. Jean was beyond that now and I only hoped she found in death all that had escaped her in life.
Cindy entered without knocking and I was glad she had waited until then. My tears, which could do nobody any good, were gone and I'd stopped shaking. I could even light a cigarette without wasting two matches.
"The girls want to know who runs the office from here on out," she said. "Somebody has to be boss."
"I haven't thought about it." Cindy sat on the edge of the desk and helped herself to one of my cigarettes.
"Jean did a lot for you, didn't she."
"She was my right hand."
"Kept the books and all that besides seeing that things got done."
"Yeah. I'll miss her."
She inhaled the smoke and let it curl out through her nose. 'I took a business course, Roger."
"I wasn't aware of that."
"Sure. And I'm a whiz at figures." She laughed. "Even my own is pretty good but that's something you found out for yourself."
"Please," I said. I didn't want to be bothered.
'Do the books and running the office pay more than fifty a week?"
"It did for her but-"
"Then count me in."
I looked up at her, smiling because, right or wrong, she had so much drive behind her.
"That's impossible," I decided. "You're new and I have to consider the other girls. Jean didn't care for you and maybe they don't."
"I can do the job," she insisted.
"I didn't say you couldn't. You may be a genius but I can't go along with the idea of giving somebody new so much authority."
She crushed out her cigarette.
"Remember that night at your house?" she asked.
"Don't remind me."
"And what I told you afterward."
"How could I forget?"
"You couldn't. It's well, it's the same now. You've got this job open and I'm after it. You explained why you couldn't give me a raise and I understood that. But this afternoon there's something else that I understand. Somebody will take Jean's place and it's going to be me. It's me, Roger, or I start yelling."
What could I do? What could any man do with disgrace staring him in the face? Just one thing. Give in to her demands.
"Okay," I said lamely. "It's eighty-five a week."
"I'll take ninety."
"When you show me you can produce."
She swung down off the desk.
"I can produce. I'm no fool and I used to watch her. I went over to talk to her one day and she had the checkbook on her desk. I don't think she noticed but I didn't miss anything. The check stub was made out to some company but the check itself was for cash. Why would she do that?"
"I don't know."
"And she cashed the money orders from the C.O.D.s at the post office every morning, didn't she?"
"That was her job."
"Yes, and she made her own entries in the checkbook."
"Which was also her job."
"Who verified the amounts."
"Nobody."
"That's the point, Roger. Nobody checked anything. The first thing I'm going to do is rip into those books and see just what she did. I can I tell the girls?"
"Yeah. Tell them. Say you were hired with this change in mind. They won't swallow it but it's an excuse."
She left me and I shook my head. It was obvious she thought Jean had been dishonest but I didn't believe that. Why would she knock down on me? Still, she had offered money the night before. If she had inherited it why had she waited until then to mention it? I didn't know what to think. My bank account was low and I needed money. Had she tried to force me? Again I didn't know.
At four the buzzer sounded and I switched on the intercom.
"A policeman to see you, Mr. Barnes," the girl said.
I glanced up at the ceiling. "What does he want with me."
"I asked and he wouldn't say."
"Then oh, all right."
I waited. I wasn't nervous. Once in a while we forgot to leave a light on out front and the department complained because the officer on duty couldn't see inside. It was for our own protection and it didn't amount to any more than a complaint.
The policeman came in and he seemed young and friendly. He was in civilian clothes and he showed me his card after we'd shaken hands.
"Hate to bother you," he said.
"It's okay. No bother. Sit down."
He sat down and placed a small notebook on the desk.
"You heard about Jean Love?" he asked.
Again I looked up at the ceiling. I should have expected something like this.
"Yes, I heard. Tragic."
"She worked for you, didn't she?"
"For several years. She had charge of the office. She knew as much or more about the business than I do."
"Then you were quite close to her?" I let my eyes find his.
"Well, people can't work together and not become friendly."
"What do you know about her family?"
"Not a great deal. She lived alone so they must not have gotten along. It was none of my affair."
"And her personal life? Did she ever discuss it with you?"
"No," I lied. The truth could serve no useful purpose. "No, officer, she didn't. When she was through for the day she was on her own."
"What about men?"
My insides crawled.
"Men? I suppose there were some. Isn't there always? I suppose her neighbors would know."
"I tried that but they know very little. She was only friendly with one, a woman who used to borrow her steam iron, and the girl did mention to her that she planned on getting married. No name was given so it could have been almost anybody."
"Why the interest in a man?" I inquired. "I thought she killed herself."
"She did and there's no doubt about that. We're merely attempting to fill in her background for the record. As for her burial that's no problem. We learned very quickly that she had a considerable amount of money in the bank, enough to make us wonder. Whoever she knew must have been very generous with her. Her deposits were steady and rather large. I doubt if she could have done that on her salary here."
"That's true," I said, remembering the check Cindy had seen, the check made out to cash.
"I wish you could help me more, Mr. Barnes."
"I wish I could, too."
"Because she killed herself for a very old reason. The woman who borrowed the iron did say that she called at Miss Love's apartment one Sunday and there was a short man in there who was only wearing his pants. Of course she didn't know the man and she wasn't introduced."
On a weekend. Well, I had never seen her on a weekend.
"You said her reason for killing herself was an old one. Can I ask what that might be?"
"Of course you can ask, Mr. Barnes. The radio and the newspaper picked it up and it should be common knowledge by now. She was pregnant. Probably the man couldn't or wouldn't marry her and she saw no other way out. But, naturally, there's nothing against him. What she did she did on her own."
I had been stunned before but now I reeled under that blow, fighting to breathe and beginning to shake again. Pregnant! Christ! That must be the vague something she had brought up the last time I'd seen her alive. The last time I'd ever see her.
"Thanks for your information," the officer said. "You're welcome."
He went out and I felt like throwing up. Had she died with my kid inside of her or had the kid belonged to some other man? A short man, with her that one Sunday. I didn't know and I'd never know.
When I left at five Cindy was still working and. she said she'd snap the lock on the door after she quit.
"I'll be late. And what I'm finding you won't like, Roger."
"Probably not."
"You're to the wall."
"That's wrong. Somebody just pushed me through it."
Outside I got into the Ford and drove toward home. There were several bars in the area but I no longer felt in need of a drink. I just wanted to be alone, to live with the misery that pounded at my guts and brain, to hate myself for having been a careless, stupid male.
But I didn't find any quiet when I reached home.
I found a drunken wife with a sharp tongue. "So she's dead," Linda said and poured a belt of scotch.
"Yeah, she's dead."
"And she died pregnant."
"So I heard."
"Or so you knew?"
I sat down at the table. I could see a wave washing over my marriage and it was getting higher every second.
"No, I didn't know," I replied, truthfully. "Some policeman came to the office to inquire about her and he told me."
She spilled some of the scotch down over the front of her blouse. The blouse was white and thin and she wasn't wearing a bra.
"Was it your baby, Roger?"
"That's a hell of a thing to suggest."
Her laugh was one of contempt.
"Is it? Not in the way I look at it. Working nights, were you? Where did you do your work? In her bed?"
"Aw, shut up," I said savagely.
"I won't shut up. Not for a second. How many times do you think I tried to call you when you were supposed to be working?"
"I never answered the phone when I was busy."
"No, because you weren't there. Twice does this surprise you? twice I got a cab and rode down to the place. Your car was gone but I found it parked near her apartment building. Did you think I was that dumb? Wake up, Roger. I've known it for over a year. So I refused you. Why should I share you with some other girl? Is that one of the duties of a wife?"
Trapped.
I got a glass and splashed scotch into it. Trapped and no way out. Yes, the waves were flooding my marriage and it was rocking dangerously.
"What do you want to do?" I asked finally.
"If you were a man you'd be ready to shoot yourself."
"Other than that?"
She frowned darkly.
"I don't know, Roger. I've thought about it and I simply don't know. If there's a divorce you can take your pick of what my father will do."
"I'm sure about what I can expect."
"And. the other night well, I suddenly decided that I'd been wrong, that you needed me, that somehow I'd failed you. I gave you a chance here in the kitchen but you didn't want me. I could tell."
"You were drunk."
"Drunk or sober I meant it. I forced myself to mean it, to almost beg you, to cheapen myself as a woman. But it was Jean all the time and you killed her, Roger."
I hunched my shoulders.
"Is there anything I can say, Linda?"
"No. Nothing. You have to live with yourself."
"And you have to live with your trip to New York."
Her eyes flashed.
"I can do that. I did nothing wrong other than drink too much. I left here with the intention of going to Boston and of never coming back. But I didn't go and I did come back. I'm sorry I did. I came back to this, to to this horrible mess."
We sat up until eleven, drinking and not talking much. I guess we were both somewhat living in our own private hell.
"Take one of the guest rooms," she said when we went upstairs.
"Sure. And goodnight."
"Goodnight? What's good about it?" I didn't answer her. There was nothing good.
CHAPTER TEN
The door to the office was unlocked the next morning. At first I thought Cindy had forgotten to snap the catch but when I got inside I found her working at the same desk where I had left her the night before.
"You're early," I said.
She laughed.
"Early? I'm late."
"But-"
"I've been here all night." She leaned back in the chair, her breasts thrusting forward, and yawned. "While you pounded your ear I was going half blind. You need some better lights in here."
"No sense of you doing that," I said.
"Maybe not but I was fascinated with what I discovered. You'll need a money transfusion, Roger. That bitch bled you dry and I do mean dry. She even kept the balance in the checkbook inflated so that you wouldn't become curious if you looked at it. Unless your mail is big you may find yourself with an overdraft today."
I had just about conditioned myself to this news, or that she might discover some errors, but I was astonished when she gave me the approximate total of the shortage. It was high up into the five figure bracket and she explained that it could go much higher.
"Rough," I admitted. "What do we do now?"
"Try to get some of it returned."
"She's dead."
"Did she put it in the bank?';
"That policeman said so but he didn't give me the amount and I didn't ask him. It's a little hard to swallow."
"Then the money goes into her estate."
"I suppose so."
"Unless she had a will."
"Yeah, a will. I never thought of that."
"Well, chances are she didn't have one. I wouldn't depend on it. What you need is a lawyer and a certified public accountant to go over these books so that what you present in court can be accepted as evidence."
"You're just a kid, Cindy. How do you know all this stuff?"
"I don't. I'm merely guessing but isn't it a solid guess? Most likely she deposited what she took and the amounts will match up pretty close. You may have to fight for it but I said you were to the wall and you are."
"Through it," I corrected her.
She nodded.
"Yes. I'll buy that. On top of that, there are bills that haven't been paid. The stubs are in the checkbook but there are letters from the companies demanding payment. I found the letters hidden in a bottom drawer."
"What about the checks?"
"Made out to cash and since she had a right to sign them no endorsement was required"
"Is there enough to pay the help this week?"
"I don't know. Just pray that the mail is good.'
I left her and walked on into my office. I was praying all right, just as hard as a farmer prays for rain during a hot spell. Praying and, yes, hating Jean a little bit. Through her stealing she'd brought me to my knees and now she couldn't do anything to help me. I'd slept with her but I'd kept up my marriage and she must have stolen in the hope that she could use the money to win what she wanted. But, assuming that, why had she quit on her plan and killed herself? Just at a time when I was ripe to fall she'd given up.
Thinking about her was like driving up a dead end street I got nowhere in a hurry.
Before the fellows came to work in the shipping room I toured the stock section, touching a few things here and there. I was finished and I knew it. Finished in business and finished with my marriage. Perhaps I could sue to recover the theft from her estate but it would, take too long and I didn't have the time to wait. I had trusted her and she had betrayed me. What more could be said? Trusted her and made love to her and then kicked her in the teeth. No, I decided, I shouldn't hate her. It was better for me to hate myself.
I stayed in my office that morning and I didn't help with the mail, just sitting at my desk feeling desperate and defeated. The suppliers who had trusted me were screaming for their money, money which I had thought had been paid, and my credit with them was shot. Add to this the money we had accepted from customers on orders which would be difficult to fill, money which I didn't have to return, and the future was as gloomy as a rainy day in February. AH the customers had to do was to write to the postal authorities and I'd find myself nailed to the floor.
At eleven, taking a chance, I called Ben's house. Instead of Ben I got Sharon.
"He's in the cellar," she said when I asked for him. "Can't you hear the saw running?"
"No. Is he sober?"
"Do you know any more funny questions?"
"Not today. Can I talk to Ben?"
"If you promise about Saturday night." Her voice was husky, throbbing.
"What you've got I'll have a yen for by Saturday night."
"Fresh. So I'll be fresh. What I've got you can take."
It required a few minutes for her to shout down the cellar and for Ben to get on the phone.
"Roger," he said. "You're calling the wrong number. We don't want any of that crap you sell."
"Are we friends?" I inquired.
"Friends? Oh, hell, yes. We get loaded every Saturday night while you talk to my wife and I talk to yours. Nothing wrong. No harm done. Just friends."
"Friends enough to talk business."
"Sure. All the time." I scowled, not wanting to ask him. "I need some money," I said. "Whenever you stop for it. How about a hundred?"
"A hundred? Ben, this runs into a lot of thousands. I'm down and I either get a lift or I fold."
"So fold. Fold fast, grab your tent and run. I no, I don't loan thousands. Banks do that, Roger."
"I've tried and they won't."
"Great. Now you put the bite on me. Friends, you wanted to know. Friends, yes, but money breaks up friends. Loan a friend money and he becomes your enemy. Why?"
"Forget that I bothered you." That hurt. He had the dough and he wouldn't even talk to me about it. "Just forget it, Ben."
"Aw, it's no bother. A guy needs money so he runs up the flag. I you all done, Roger?"
"Absolutely."
"Nervous, aren't you? I can tell. All right. Do something to quiet your nerves. like me, working in the cellar. I get a hammer in my hand and I don't think about anything."
"Maybe I'll try it."
"Why not? If you've got nothing at home you could help me with the wall."
"We'll see."
"It be a help if you would. Once it's set in the cellar I'll put in some furniture and invite the gang from my office. They drink like thirsty camels. You come, too. Do you good."
"Thanks, Ben."
I hung up and worked on my fingernails with a file that had belonged to Jean. If Ben wouldn't listen to me why should I scratch around in his cellar? It was generous of him to offer me a hundred bucks. I might just as well have nothing. .
Cindy came in a few minutes after twelve and asked me about lunch.
"I'm not hungry," I said.
"But, Roger, you have to eat," she protested.
"I don't have to do anything."
"Aren't you in the mood for a drink?"
"Of course, I was born that way."
"So?"
At last I agreed and I took her down the street to one of the bars. It was an average bar that featured cheap sandwiches, beer for a dime and shots that were priced according to the brand of the drink. There was space at the bar and we sat on stools. She ordered a ham on rye along with beer and I had just the beer.
"You must think I'm a slut," she said to me.
"Well, you're pretty clever about using the one weapon that was given to you. More than one girl has gotten a job because she took off her clothes."
She laughed.
"Be honest with me. I was a slut that night, wasn't I?"
"There's no sense of digging up the past. I was looking for almost anything and I got trouble for my efforts."
She ate her sandwich slowly and I had some more beer.
"I know a guy," she said. "He drives a truck and he's got a steady job. Not driving here in town but down to the city. Five trips a week and he clears better than a hundred. I've dated him for about three months now and all he talks about is marriage."
"You could do worse. Trucking is fairly steady. You always know where you stand."
"Know something, Roger?" She shoved the plate away from her. "Do you know something that isn't a lie?"
"Not until you tell me."
"I well, he's just about the only fellow I ever went out with who didn't bed down with me."
"That's being smart."
"Is it?"
"Yes. If he makes it with you he knows others are doing the same. Only you ought to be particular if you think anything of him. What if some man gives you a stomach? This truck driver counts himself out and you're left alone."
She had a fresh beer.
"I wouldn't do what Jean did," she declared.
"How do you know? It wasn't just the baby she was expecting. It was all the rest put together."
"And what did she solve?"
"Nothing."
At one I told her we should be getting back to the office.
"Unless you're tired," I added. "All night and all day, plus yesterday. You ought to take a sleep and rewind your motor."
I got down from the stool but she remained sitting.
"I'm going to level with you," she said. "After I do I might not have a job. I-Roger, I care about that but I care some about you, too. You've been hurt enough. Next week you may be out of business and we'll all lose our jobs."
"You're more than eighteen," I said, stabbing at the truth.
She regarded me seriously. "How do you know?"
"Because you know too much to be less than that. I'd say it was a deliberate lie on your part so that you always have a club to use on a man. It's no good, Cindy. You can't gain in one way and not lose in another. If you spend a year making a fortune you've got the fortune but you've lost the year."
When she saw I wasn't angry with her she lowered herself to the floor as her skirt crawled up her legs.
"I'm twenty," she said. "Almost. My problem is that I like men. All kinds of men. I like what they can do to me and I like them when they're doing it. But afterward I want something from them, not their brats or their slobbering or their words of love they don't mean but something I can sink my teeth into. I oh, you don't understand."
"Perhaps I do."
We walked out to the street.
"Which way do I go?" she asked and stopped. "Up or down?"
"To the office if you feel like it."
"You're not angry with me?"
"No, but I'm relieved. It's one weight gone from around my neck."
She took my arm.
"Thanks, Roger. There's a hotel in the next block. I've been there before and they know me. A room is just three dollars and-"
"I'll pass it up for now."
"Why? Don't you think I'm-"
"It isn't that. It's for your own good. Twenty, you said. Twenty and the first time was probably when you were around sixteen. That's four years of luck, Cindy. Four years of using your body but you can put those four years behind you. You must like that truck driver or you wouldn't keep on seeing him, wouldn't deny him what others have had. You don't want him to know what you are so maybe you love him. So stick to the guy and keep your clothes on."
We walked for a moment in silence.
"I guess you're right," she said.
"I'm not guessing. I know."
I wasn't lying.
I did know and what I knew had come the hard way.
Somehow I plowed through the afternoon, picking up the phone for the outside line twice and putting it down twice. The blonde, I thought, and Ben would be in the cellar or knocked silly from too much booze. The blonde who could set the fires raging inside of me with just the sound of her voice, a husky voice, real low, dripping with desire. But, no, I had to wait for Saturday night, had to tell her the truth as her body pressed close and yielded to mine.
Just before closing Cindy came in with a long, white envelope.
"Some man left this for you and ran out," she said. "Kind of a fat man of about forty. He looked scared, like he was holding the place up and afraid of getting caught."
"That's strange. Everybody must be going nuts."
She laughed before she closed the door behind her.
"Yes, they're going nuts, Roger. Everybody. But aren't they happier that way."
I sat there staring at the door, smelling the scent of her perfume that lingered in the office. Cindy was crazy all right, plunging off the deep end with any man she could find. Crazy and. bound to find trouble, nine months of trouble that would change her life, creating a new life that would have to carry her sin. Her one chance was to play it square with that truck driver, to marry him and make the best of what she had. That didn't mean her body. She had that, more than she should, the chemicals of three girls pulled tight in a bundle of curves. It meant a home and a family and the responsibility of growing up.
Somebody had really sealed that envelope and I slit it open with an opener that a salesman had given me the past Christmas. The first thing I saw was the money and I counted that. Ten hundred dollar bills. A thousand bucks. But that was all. No note. Nothing except the money.
I sat there, not knowing what to make of it. Yeah, people were going nuts all right. Who ran around giving a thousand dollars away? Even the rich didn't do that. Only the government gave money away. They raised taxes and then sank the old bucks into some jungle that had a name which was impossible to pronounce. Or maybe it wasn't wasted. Who could say? Those who were supposed to know said there was a cold war and you fought it with money, lots of money and lots of ideas.
I got up from the desk and walked to the window. I didn't know anything about that stuff. All I knew was that I had a thousand dollars from some mysterious man.
A couple of minutes later the phone rang and I crossed, to get it. No doubt it was Linda, drunk by this hour and spewing curses.
"You get the money?" a man's voice asked me.
"I did and it bothers me."
"Bothers you, Mr. Barnes? It shouldn't but I guess I should have put in a note. I forgot that so that's why I'm calling. It's for her funeral."
"Oh," I said. "Jean's funeral?"
"Yes. Jean. It's the least I can do and feel decent."
I fingered the money.
"Then you were the other man," I inquired.
"That's correct. The other man and the kid's father. But it was a mistake, one of those things, and she didn't love me. Anyway I'm married and she was in love with you. I it didn't work out for her, did it?" His words became uneven. "Gas. A hell of a thing. Gas and dying alone. Just a girl who could have been nice. Real nice. Then the kid inside of her and the gas."
"I wish my wife knew this," I said.
"Tell her."
"She'd laugh at me."
"Well-"
He hung up and I sat there with a dead phone in my hand, a phone that was just as dead as Jean. Finally I replaced it.
I took the money with me when I left the office but I didn't drive over to the undertaker's. There was time for that later and I was anxious to get home.
Just before pulling into my driveway I noticed that Sharon's car was gone from the garage. Probably she was showing off her Caddy. I didn't blame her for that. In fact I was reaching the stage where I didn't blame anybody for anything.
Linda was in the kitchen, wearing a thin negligee. She stood at the refrigerator, banging the door.
"Damn thing," she said. "The whole works is going to pieces in this house."
I pushed her out of the way.
"It's the handle," I said, catching the odor of scotch on her breath. "You jerk it out. See?"
The door closed perfectly.
"Cheap junk," she said and walked to the table.
After she sat down I took out the thousand dollars, moved over to the table and threw it in front of her.
"What's that?" she wanted to know.
"Money. From some guy. For Jean's funeral. He's the one who got her pregnant."
She shoved the bills off the table and they fell onto the floor.
"Liar," she said bitterly.
I bent and picked up the bills.
"It's no lie."
"You can't prove that it isn't, can you."
"No."
"Then it's a lie." She examined the almost empty bottle. "You didn't bring me any scotch."
"You've had enough. Too much."
"Let me judge that."
Just so she couldn't get at it I found a glass and poured out the rest of the scotch. She glared at me as I took a chair opposite her.
"I've got to talk to you," I said.
She laughed and tried to squeeze a drop out of the bottle.
"More lies, huh?"
"I'm not lying."
I told her about the shortage in the firm's accounts, tried to explain how desperate the situation really was. I hid nothing but it was like talking to a corpse. She made no comment when I was finished, simply shrugged her shoulders and walked in to the phone.
"Ben's bringing over a bottle," she said after she returned to the table.
"Can't you think of anything else?" I was disgusted with her.
She gave me a long, hard look.
"Yes, I can think of something else, Roger. You and how you're a poor excuse for a husband. You claim you're going broke. Where does that leave my father?"
"I don't know but if Ben is coming you'd better put a robe on over that thing. Get drunk if you want but don't be a pig about it."
"I don't care what he sees," she said stubbornly.
That made me sore and I went up to the bedroom to get a robe. I thought she would yell as I draped it over her shoulders, pulling it around in front across her breasts, but she didn't.
Ben came in with a bottle and he was in no better condition than Linda. He offered me a slug but I refused. Two drunks in the place were enough.
"Sorry about the money," he said as he joined us at the table. "I had the feeling you'd call about a loan one of these days."
Linda screamed at me because I'd asked him and I shouted back at her.
"Hey," Ben cut in. "I came over here to drink, not to have a preview of the Third World War."
"Roger's stupid," she declared. "If nobody else has got the nerve to tell him I will. Stupid. The east end of a horse going west. I should have my head examined."
"It wouldn't do any harm," I agreed.
"Oh, drop dead. Go to bed or chase some other girl. Get one of them pregnant and then push her into her grave. But don't come to me with any more of your lies, crawling on your belly and expecting me to believe you. Don't well, I won't be here anyway. I'll find a man who's somebody and forget the nobody I married. Have you got that, Roger?"
"Perfectly."
I stayed with them for an hour, listening to Ben brag about his securities business, watching Linda drink it in along with the scotch, and then I went to bed.
But I didn't go to sleep right away.
I even heard her fall up the stairs long after midnight.
You can't sleep when you've been beaten.
And I was beaten. Everything was lost.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jean's funeral was on Saturday afternoon and all of us from Glamour, Incorporated showed up. I hadn't intended to go but I knew it wouldn't look right if I didn't. Staring down at her lying in the casket was the most difficult part. It left me weak.
The minister hadn't known her but he did his best, trying to praise a girl in death who had been so selfish during her life. As he talked I wondered what he'd say if he knew about the money she'd stolen. Perhaps the same thing. Perhaps not. It' hardly mattered.
Cindy rode with me as we followed the hearse out to the grave. She wore a black dress with white initials over her left breast.
"Her last trip," Cindy said.
I turned in at the iron gates.
"Yeah. Her last trip."
"I think about the kid."
"Anybody would."
"And when I think about the kid I think about my truck driver friend. Maybe marriage is what I need. The same guy every night. No worries at the end of the month except for bills. No fear that you went too far at the wrong time and that it's finally happened to you."
The services at the grave were short, the sun too hot for comfort, and after we returned to town all of us stopped off at a bar for a drink. I guess everybody felt the impact of her death because there wasn't any dancing or loud talk.
The bar was crowded and I sat in a booth with Cindy. It was a small booth and we were on the same side, our bodies touching.
"It was nice of that man to give you a thousand," she said.
Cindy was the only one in the office who knew about it. In a very short time I had learned I could trust her.
"Nice? He was just trying to buy his way out of his guilt."
"After all the money she took from you, you should have kept it and not paid the undertaker."
"I couldn't do that. It was all that really belonged to her."
The waitress brought us another round of beer.
"I don't look forward to next week," Cindy said.
"You're not alone."
"People calling and asking for money. The stock going down and no way of replacing it. Refunds due and not enough cash in the bank to make them."
"It could be worse," I said. "We could be in jail."
"You. Not me. And it might happen. It's taking money when you shouldn't, refunds that you can't meet. Creditors can only sue you but a customer has the law behind him. I asked."
"So have I."
"It's serious."
"Yes. Very serious."
She had a date with the truck driver and she didn't stay long. I saw an empty stool and moved up to the bar. Some of my help wanted to talk shop but I didn't feel like it. Between a drunken wife at home and a business that was disappearing I was in no mood to discuss anything which could add to my worries. Of course the help wasn't aware of the circumstances, didn't know how Cindy and I had struggled to come up with their pay for the week. Some shipments had been halted by my suppliers and the back orders were piling up faster than we were sending things out. I had thought of returning the orders we couldn't fill, not depositing the money advanced, but our bank balance was so critical I had to run the risk that I would find some way to get out of a hole that became deeper every day.
Only there wasn't any way out.
None.
If I had Jean's money....
But I didn't and I couldn't afford to hire a lawyer or a reliable accountant. I had trusted her, taken my pleasures from her body and now I was paying for it. The price was high but it wasn't as high as hers. At least I was alive. And-
Well, there was something else.
The blonde. Sharon. Sharon with the body that would explode the fury of desire in any man.
"Another?" the bartender asked.
"Sure."
I wanted her with a want that was animal desperation. Wanted her in my arms, surrendering, her lips burning against my mouth. For this, I concluded, I would do anything. My marriage was smashed, beyond repair, but what could I offer a girl who had so much. There was only one thing I could offer her, one thing I could give. My love. My love and devotion and a promise that I would kill myself with work in an effort to make her happy. But what kind of work? And where? What I had built was destroyed and it was about all I knew. I had to hope that she had faith in me, that she would understand and be willing to sacrifice.
I stayed at the bar until seven and all I took home with me was a bottle of scotch.
"The beer," Linda said as I put the bottle upon the table. "What's the matter? You quit the stuff?"
"No. I forgot it."
"What will Mrs. Cow drink?"
"That's not a nice name for Sharon."
"Skip it if your feelings are hurt."
"They're not hurt but I object to the term. As for the beer I can get it later."
She must have been out of booze because she lost no time opening the bottle.
"Did you go to your pregnant girl friend's funeral?"
"I went but I keep telling you I wasn't responsible."
"You must be proud of yourself."
"Not exactly."
There was nothing else to do so I sat down. My eyes wandered over my wife's figure. I had to admit that she looked good in shorts and halter, nothing too tight or too loose.
"Ben isn't happy," she said. "He isn't any happier than I am."
"That follows. He's never sober long enough to be happy."
"You're wrong. It's that bitch he married. She drives him to drink just as you drove me to it."
"You didn't have to be driven. You could have found your way in the dark. If I hid a jug in the hills you'd find it quicker than a hound can flush a rabbit."
"How many times do I have to say for you to drop dead."
"Maybe I will."
The phone rang and she got it but it was long distance for me.
"My father," she said. 'He only wants you so I guess he's sore at me because I didn't get up there. You and your big mouth."
Although the old man was polite he was also firm. Because of some poor advice he had suffered a heavy loss in a couple of stocks. The only way he had of covering himself was for me to pay the notes.
"I'll get right onto it," I said.
"Yesterday couldn't be soon enough."
I returned to the kitchen and sat down heavily.
"He's after his dough," I told Linda.
"Naturally. It wasn't a gift."
I thought she was smiling but to me it wasn't very funny.
"You did it," I said.
"Go ahead and think it's my fault."
"I do. I think you wrote to them about Jean. Or you phoned him. He was never one to play with stocks. You set this thing up."
Her eyes narrowed.
"What if I did?"
"Plenty. Couldn't you have given me a chance?"
"You had one chance. More you don't get."
I stormed into the living room so that I could be alone. First Jean, then my creditors and now this. Licked? No, it went beyond that. In just a few days a combination of events had buried my future.
Ben and Sharon came in about nine. If he was drunk he didn't show it but I didn't pay much attention to him. She was dressed the same as Linda, shorts and halter, and her curves swelled out against the material.
"Great night," Ben said as he entered the kitchen. "I'll bet the catfish would bite."
Right then I wouldn't have given a nickel for all of the catfish in the river.
She swayed over to me. And I do mean she swayed. Not where she was thrusting and tilted but down below where a girl changes into a woman.
"Did you get the beer?" she inquired.
I grabbed the opportunity to kiss her on the mouth. She lifted to me, returning the kiss.
"No," I said.
"What are we waiting for?"
"Just to get out of here. It's been a long wait." I ran one hand over her bare shoulders. "Too long for any man."
We stopped in the kitchen before leaving. Linda either understood or didn't care about the beer and Ben only nodded when Sharon said she needed a breath of air after being in the house all day.
"The Caddy has more room in it," she said after we got outside.
"Let's stick to the Ford."
"Okay. It's the same no matter what you're in."
"I disagree. It's not always the same."
I backed the car out onto the drive and I felt that pound in my head again. The pound came fast this time and it was difficult for me to focus my eyes on the road.
"Ben tells me you're going broke," she said.
"As flat as rain on a tin roof."
"Can't you do anything?"
"No. There was this girl-"
"Your wife told Ben about that."
"She would. But it wasn't my kid. The only thing she had that was mine was my money. I can't get at it soon enough even though I robbed the bank."
She moved close to me.
"I know how you can come by some money."
"Yeah. I'll take up gold prospecting."
"Don't be silly."
I found a road that led up into the hills and I turned off onto that. Lots of couples went up there and nobody bothered them except maybe some guy who got his kicks by peeking in parked cars. It seemed to me like a strange way to find a thrill.
"Ben and Linda have been seeing each other," she said. "Every chance they get."
"That figures."
"What you're not getting from her he does."
"A real friend." I made another turn. "Friends like that keep the liftfe wife from getting lonely. Why should she scrub a floor when she can tear a bed apart."
" I could live without him. Drunk all the time, pawing me, getting sore and punching me with his fists."
"Punching you?"
"Sure."
I gripped the steering wheel. "The bastard," I said. "I can't go on, Roger."
"Of course not."
"But I want what he's got. I want it for me and for you. For us."
We came to a cozy spot under some trees and I pulled in there, stopping the motor and turning off the lights.
"Just the night and you and me," I said as I reached for her.
"Lovers, Roger."
"Yeah. Wild lovers."
It was wonderful to hold her, to find her eager lips with my mouth, to taste her lipstick and feel her lips move as we kissed. Groaning as I lost myself in a torment of need, I searched for the tie on the halter, jerking the bow loose and tearing it from her.
"You like?" she wanted to know.
My hand hurt her and she gasped.
"Every inch," I assured her.
We melted together, kissing fiercely, her teeth bringing salt blood into my mouth as her hands became the hands of a woman in love, seeking to express that love.
"Give me a moment," she whispered. "Just a moment and-"
I sat back, knowing what she was doing, going all the way naked there in the car, and I shook my head against the jarring pound that now was centered between my eyes.
"Make it right," she begged as I went for her again. "Make it right and fine and all that it should be . Make it-"
She was helpful and impatient, wonderful and savage. She lifted to me, her legs demanding, her teeth now grinding into my shoulder as we spent our passion to the fullest.
"We can't go on this way," she said later, her breathing ragged.
"No, I guess not." I could hardly breathe myself.
"And we belong together, not only for what we just had but for what love means." I kissed her tenderly.
"You tell me how," I said. "You're married to money and I'm broke. There could be more, maybe a trial and then jail."
"We can avoid all of that and have each other."
"I guess I will rob that bank. Some guys get away with it."
"Yes, and they get away with other things, too."
"Such as what?"
She guided my hand to one naked breast. "Ben could kill himself," she said quietly. "If he falls into that saw in your cellar he will," I agreed.
She laughed.
"Wouldn't that be a mess? And nine times out of ten he wouldn't be killed. All he'd do is lose a finger or an arm." She pressed herself tight to me. "I don't want that, Roger. I all right, I'll shoot square with you. I want him dead. I want him dead and buried and I want to collect his money. He-"
"Well," I murmured, so shaken that I couldn't say any more.
"He's no good, Roger. The only thing he has is money but past that he isn't a man. What man would be married to a girl for such a short time and chase another man's wife? Not many. He'd stay home where he belonged. Well, he doesn't stay home. He goes over to see Linda when he can and when he comes back he punches me around. I Roger, you'd think he was training for a fight or something." She touched my hand that rested upon her breast. "And he hits me here. Anybody knows you shouldn't do that to a girl. She can have any number of things go wrong because of it. I beg him to stop but he thinks it's a joke. He says that he bought me and that I'm his. He's wrong. I'm not his. I'm yours."
Maybe I had sensed some of this before, only slightly aware of what I was plunging into, but now I realized the whole thing. Ben. Ben and my unfaithful wife. Ben with so much money that whoever got it would never have to work again. Florida or Mexico with just the sun and a cool drink in your hand. Add having the blonde in your arms, the same as I was holding her then, and few men could ask for more.
I said nothing and looked out into the darkness of the night. I'd done some pretty bad things during my life, especially since my marriage, but not once had I thought of murder. Oh, you get mad at somebody and say you feel like killing them but you don't really mean it. You're angry when you make that kind of a statement and the anger fades almost as fast as it comes. This was different. She was pointing toward the deliberate destruction of a human life. I blinked my eyes against the sweat that crept down into them.
"You've got to help me do it," she said and forced my head down so I had to kiss her on the mouth. "We've got to do it together, Roger."
I guess I shook some.
"There must be another way, Sharon."
"Not and get what's coming to us."
"It's his money. It isn't ours. Sure, it would be great to have a fortune but we can live without it."
She stirred in my arms.
"Then skip the money. What about your marriage? Has he had any respect for that?"
"I haven't had much respect for it myself."
"Yes, I know about the girl from your office. The one who was going to have a baby and killed herself."
I wiped the sweat from my forehead.
"The baby wasn't mine. I don't know the guy's name but he was big enough to pay for the funeral. Of course it jammed me up with Linda. There's no marriage left."
"Ben had a lot to do with it."
"I don't know. Perhaps."
Her breast rose under my hand.
"I said to skip the money, Roger, but we can't. It isn't only what we can have with it. It's you. Do you want to run the risk of going to jail Ben said you could and of being disgraced?"
"That's an unhappy thought," I agreed. "If it wasn't for you I'd be tempted to run. I can't lick this thing. I know I can't."
"You'd run and they'd catch you."
"I suppose they would. I can't run. I can't pay. I can't do anything."
Her kiss was feverish.
"You can help me kill Ben," she said simply.
There are a few who claim that killers are born but I didn't think I was one of them. Just speculating about killing him left me cold inside. Still, there are powerful forces that change a man, that push him into considering something he would not normally consider. To get and keep another woman is one of these forces and the pressing need for money is almost as strong. And then there is hate. I didn't honestly believe that I hated Ben but I was convinced he had undermined my marriage long before Sharon and for this I couldn't respect him. Then, too, he seemed to be laughing at me, looking down at me as a nobody, and that stung. This last, added to the others, made me want to destroy him.
"I can't imagine how it could be done," I heard myself saying. "Sometimes you can rig a car so there'll be an accident but you have to have an opportunity to do the job and not everybody gets killed in an accident. He'd have to be going at a high rate of speed, demolish the car, or we'd be caught. As for using a gun-"
"Roger," she said. "Roger, listen to me."
I kissed her. Desperately.
"I'm listening." It didn't sound like my own voice.
She sat up a little bit.
"Follow this, Roger. He gets drunk and then what does he do."
"Go to. bed."
"Maybe with your wife but something else?" Suddenly it came to me. "Yeah," I said. "The cellar."
"Yes. The cellar. And how many steps going down?"
"I never counted them but it's a deep cellar."
"Well, I've never counted them either but it's-a real fall to the bottom. I I've already put in the hooks for the wire. At the top. They can be taken out later and nobody would notice the holes."
"I get it." I did. "He trips on the wire and goes flying. "Exactly."
I turned it over in my mind.
"You're overlooking something," I said. "What if he only broke an arm or a leg? That's possible and he'd know what you tried to do to him., You'd never get a second chance. You talk about me going to jail. That's where they'd put you."
"Yes," she agreed slowly. "Yes, they'd lock me up but this is where you come in. I couldn't do it alone because I don't have the strength you come in through the outside entrance and he won't know you're there. Just as you start down the steps you'll find a baseball bat. Of course if he killed himself in the fall you wouldn't use it but if he didn't kill himself you'd wallop him over the head. Nobody will suspect. They'll think he cracked his skull on the cement."
I let out a long breath. There it was the whole business, the violent plan for death. She'd set the wire and I'd finish him off with the baseball bat. In spite of the warmth of her body in my arms, I shuddered. This design for killing was a hell of a thing for a man to endure.
"Well, damn," I said and stopped.
Her lips roamed my face, fastened upon my mouth.
"If you want me it has to be that way, Roger."
Want her? Of course I wanted her. I'd taken her once but once wasn't enough. I closed my eyes, seeing red, seeing a man lying dead. A thousand times wouldn't be enough. There was too much female to her, too many thrills to know, too much to love. And of course the money entered into it as well as Ben's affair with Linda. These things piled up and became a mountain. I opened my eyes as she kissed me again. I was afraid to climb the mountain but she seemed to be right when she said there was no other way.
"That outside door faces my house," I said, remembering.
"So?"
"What if Linda saw me going in there?"
"She probably won't but what of it if she did? You'd only pretend to be a witness to his fall and that might be better yet. The police can't prove what nobody except the two of us know. They-"
But it was too late for her to go on talking, too late for either one of us to do anything other than what we had to do. As I took her the mountain to be climbed disappeared. I was only aware of the pleasures of her flesh, willing flesh that became a torrid fire of response and need. Her fingers clawed into my back at the final moment and she broke the kiss as she let out a long cry of delight.
Naturally, we wanted to stay there, to live a night of love, but we couldn't. Ben and Linda were waiting for us and we had to be careful about being too obvious. Once Ben was dead and I was divorced we could casually resume our affair openly and no one would have reason to doubt but that it was a most natural thing for us to do.
"Tomorrow," she said as she completed dressing as we drove toward town.
"Yeah, let's not put it off."
"About eleven. I can fix the wire and you can get yourself set. He won't know what hit him."
On the way up to the house I picked up beer and another bottle of scotch. I tried not to think about what I was going to do but it was difficult.
Linda and Ben were still in the kitchen when we arrived.
"You must have brewed that stuff," Linda said.
"No, I just had to shop around to get some that was cold. It's Saturday night, isn't it? People have parties and the beer goes fast. You'd think the bars and stores would plan ahead but try and tell them that."
"It's your own fault."
"Granted. Isn't everything my fault?"
Linda laughed drunkenly.
"It certainly is."
Ben and Sharon didn't stay very long and I was glad about that. The pressure of being near her and unable to love her was too much.
I got a fresh beer from the refrigerator after the door closed behind them.
"You lying slob," Linda said savagely. "That she devil didn't lose her lipstick while you were looking for any beer."
"She didn't like the color so she took it off."
"Yes. On your shirt."
I looked down. Some of it was there all right. It was just one of those things that you sometimes overlook.
"Who cares?" I asked and took a seat at the table. "You don't."
"If I didn't care would I continue to live with you?"
"You certainly demonstrated how much you care by pulling the string on me with your father."
"I was hurt, Roger. Terribly."
"Well, swell. You hurt me, too."
"It's his money anyway."
"I don't deny that but you knew of the jam I was in. That just makes it worse."
"And now it's worse yet," she said. "Impossible."
"Because of Ben's wife. I know what you did with her. You don't have to tell me. She didn't want any fresh air. She wanted something else. You wouldn't be one to deny her."
"Cut it out," I told Linda sharply.
"No, I won't cut it out. I may despise you but you're still my husband and she's no good. If you have to chase get somebody decent."
"You're a fine one to talk. What about Ben?"
"Ben? We're just friends."
I sneered at her. I couldn't help it. She could have what was left of Ben when we were done with him. My debts would be paid and I'd have a new wife who loved me. Maybe we'd buy a trailer and tour the country. Just a small trailer with a bed. And we'd make a lot of stops along the road. By the time we reached California we'd wear out the bed.
"That's an old one," I said. "You only sleep with your friends and you haven't got an enemy in the world."
I expected her glass to come sailing my way and it did. Her aim was lousy and it broke a window on the way outside.
"You're a miserable creep, Roger. I'm not that kind and I never was. You were the first and you've been the only one." She brushed away a tear. "Why shouldn't I be friendly with him? He was a lonely man before he married and he's just as lonely now. When he gets fed up with her he comes over here and we talk. Is that a sin?"
"You don't know the half of it," I said, thinking of how Ben beat Sharon. A man shouldn't do that. No man.
"I know more than you think. Can't you imagine how I felt when you said you were working and instead of that you were having your fun with that cheap slut from the office?"
"Why did you stick to the marriage?"
She used Ben's glass and poured out a drink.
"Pride. I've got that but you never took the trouble to see it. I married you because I loved you and you can't kill love overnight. Even when I suspected what you were doing I tried to go on being a wife to you but after I knew the truth I couldn't. I didn't want you coming to me when you'd already been with another girl. That's sharing and no wife who believes in her marriage can share her husband. He has to make a choice and I waited for you to make yours. Then-well, that night here in the kitchen I wanted to forgive you. I wanted to win you back and I lost. I know now why I lost. You had that girl pregnant and there wasn't anything you could do for her. If you left me you knew my father would call those notes and you couldn't afford that. So she killed herself. Aren't you happy? No mess, no bother, no nothing. Just a girl who took the hard way out. Now she's dead and you're free."
"I told you it was another man. I showed you the money."
"Yes, you did both but I don't believe you and I'm going to give you your freedom from me." More tears came into her eyes. "It hasn't got anything to do with love, Roger. Sometimes people divorce even when they are in love. There are things that go deeper than love, things that you come to learn about somebody that you can't tolerate. With you it's because you're not a man."
"I'm a man," I protested, grinning. "But of course you haven't been willing to let me prove it for a long time."
The drink sat untouched in front of her.
"You're no man. Physically maybe but not inside where a girl finds respect. I-oh, I took the wrong attitude. I thought I could bring you to me but I only encouraged you to go in the other direction. It ended with you getting her into trouble. This was when you showed that you weren't a man. If you had been honest with me about her condition I might have forgiven you eventually. But you weren't honest with her or me or with yourself."
"I didn't even know about the baby," I said. "The first I knew was when I talked with that policeman."
"Am I supposed to believe that?"
"Believe what you want."
"And it doesn't matter to you?"
"A lot of things don't matter any more. The whole business comes all at once, crowding you into a comer. Why fight fate? I tell you the truth and you say I lie. That's logical, I guess. So I say you lie about Ben. That's logical, too."
Linda got up from the table.
"We're miles apart," she said.
"I know he's kissed you."
"That was a mistake and we've stopped it."
"Something else must be more pleasing to you."
She paused before leaving the kitchen.
"You're rotten," she said.
I sat there long after she had gone upstairs.
I was rotten all right.
Rotten clear through.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I was tired the next morning when I came downstairs at eight. I hadn't slept and I was nervous. I shrugged. Probably anybody would be nervous during the few hours prior to taking a human life. It's not something you can undo if you regret it later.
The coffee came out weak but I drank it anyway. I asked myself for about the hundredth time if I had to go through with this thing. The answer was more than obvious. To get all that I wanted he had to die.
I brought the papers in from the front porch and glanced at them. There was an article about bomb shelters for the home. The article said every family should have one with enough supplies and water to last for a couple of weeks. By then, it went on, there was a chance that it would be safe to go outside. I wondered what would happen if a second bomb was dropped toward the end of the two week period. Nobody seemed to consider the possibility. Well, Ben wouldn't have to worry about it. He wouldn't be around when they started letting things fly.
Linda joined me. Her face glowed from a shower and she smelled delightful. But the best part was the black negligee that clung to her body. My wife, I thought. My wife in name only.
"I think I'll leave today," she said, her voice! trembling.
"That's up to you."
"Dreams." She stirred her coffee. "Dreams that I once had and now they're gone." She reached for a cigarette. "I know the house is in both our names but you can have it. I want nothing to remind me of you."
"I'm sorry you feel this way." I was sorry and it brought a lump up into my throat. "Damned sorry."
"Don't be. We tried and made a flop out of it."
"Yes, we certainly did."
"Maybe you can sell the house."
"Maybe."
"And the furniture. You won't want that. What do you need with a house? You wouldn't sweep or keep it clean. A room ought to be the best for you."
"Yeah."
"In some house where you can bring your women." Her laugh was strained. "No more excuses to worry about and all the women you want."
Women? No, not a lot of them. Just one. The blonde. The blonde with her naked body accepting me, holding me tight in mounting passion. And the money, too. That would help. Money and the blonde and the world in front of us. No tomorrow. Only today.
"Some of my clothes will have to be shipped," she said. "Will you take care of that for me."
"I'd be a heel if I didn't."
"You are a heel, Roger."
"Must we fight?"
"No. What's the sense of fighting?" She smoked in silence for a moment. "Last night I said you were rotten and I meant it. I still do. But there's something else you should know. You're as rotten as they come and yet I can't stop loving you. II'm ashamed to admit it."
"You'll get over it," I assured her.
"I hope I do-and then I don't. I know you have." She picked up our cups and took them over to the sink. "I'm inclined to think you were right in wanting me to have a baby but-well, it might be better the way it is. We're adults. We've got nobody to think about except ourselves. There are no support payments for you to meet, no child for me to bring up alone. I was afraid to have one but I might have gone on with it except that I doubted you. It wasn't fair after that."
Sitting there I saw a new side of her, one that had escaped me, and I recognized the inner turmoil which she had kept so well concealed. About four years of marriage and for almost the whole time, I had been unfaithful to her.
"It must have been rough for you," I said.
"Rough? It was horrible."
She went up to pack and I decided to help her. It was then nine. Two hours to go.
As soon as I entered her bedroom I walked to the window. Over there was the outside cellar door to Ben's house. Waiting for me was the baseball bat. Waiting for Ben was the wire and the long plunge down the stairs. And then I'd be upon him, finding out whether or not he was dead, finishing him off if he wasn't.
Feeling sick I turned from the window.
"The things I'm putting on the bed I don't want," Linda said. "Give them to some charity."
"All right."
She held up a gray skirt.
"This ring a bell with you."
"No."
"It's first thing I bought after we were married."
"And that goes on the bed, too?"
"Yes. Memories. Why try to hang onto them?"
I made an attempt to help her pack but I didn't know where to put the stuff and I sat down on a chair, watching her. When she bent over she hung open in front and there was enough bright light in the room so that I could see through the thin material. She was crying some and I remembered the man and his phone call about Jean. I'd mentioned my wife to him and I'd hoped he'd call her and square it for me but he hadn't. I realized that it was difficult for her to go, to give up her home, and I didn't want her going feeling the way she did.
"I'll need some money," she said. "How much."
"Just enough to get there."
"What will you do after that."
"Look for a job and try to forget. What else can I do."
"And the divorce?"
"I don't know until I see a lawyer. You won't be able to pay for it so that part is up to me."
"Tell your people that I didn't mean for this to happen."
She examined a bra and threw it upon the bed. I recalled that she'd complained about the wire cups hurting her.
"I don't think you did, Roger. I just think you were weak and unhappy. Some of it must have been my fault. Or my father's. He made it too easy for us and not much that's easy is any good."
"Probably," I agreed.
I got up and walked over to the window again.
"Looking for the blonde, Roger?"
"No."
"You're a liar."
"Fine. I'm a liar."
I swung away from the window just as she was closing a suitcase.
"Do you mind?" she asked. " I want to dress."
"Am I stopping you?" She smiled faintly.
"Under present conditions I don't think it's proper with you here in the room."
She looked good in that black thing and I knew she could be capable when she was willing. Something animal inside of me made me cross over to her. This was my last opportunity. Once she crept out of my life there would never be another time.
"No," she said as I reached for her.
"Why not?"
"Because."
"That's no reason."
"It is. I-"
She was the one who made the approach. I didn't. She came in against me solid, sobbing and trembling. I held her as you would somebody who was injured, somebody who was beyond any cure for the injury but who needed comfort in the last moments of life.
"I don't want to go," she said and clung to me. "Roger, I don't want to go."
"Well?"
"But I have to. I know that. For your sake and for mine."
I tried to think of Sharon, of all that we would know together, but I cried with Linda anyway. I wasn't ashamed of my tears. A man can't hurt a girl who loves him and not feel sorrow. Four years out of her life and mine and we had done this to each other. She had struggled to save our marriage the best way she knew how, understanding what I was, saying nothing until she could go longer keep it inside. And what had I done? Plenty, almost all that a man could do. Sure, I'd worked but that didn't make up for my cheating. Even when I told her the truth she doubted me. Why wouldn't she? Why wouldn't any wife?"
"Ben got to you," I said as my tears dried, trying to force her to admit this so I wouldn't feel so lousy. "He got to you whenever he wanted, didn't he?"
She clung to me harder.
"No. Honest, Roger. He-yes, he asked for the limit. We were two lonely people. Two unhappy people. But-I couldn't. He was fair. He didn't press me. I kissed him and that was all."
She resisted feebly as I pushed her down onto the clothes piled upon the bed.
"You're spoiling anything that's left," she said.
"It's already spoiled. like me. Spoiled. Rotten. Time to throw it out but not until after this."
I had no trouble with the negligee and in a matter of seconds she was lying nude and whimpering before me, her eyes closed, her breasts heaving.
"Something to remember me for," I said.
"Roger, please-"
And then I couldn't. I simply couldn't violate what was no longer mine. It was wrong and I knew it was wrong.
On heavy legs I left the room and walked downstairs.
I looked at the clock.
An hour.
I had a can of beer but it wouldn't stay in my stomach. I threw up in the sink, getting rid of the stuff. Sweat poured down my arms and legs and I had another beer. The same thing happened.
A few minutes before eleven I left the kitchen and the door slammed shut behind me. I swore softly. Making so much noise was a careless thing to do.
It was only fifty or sixty feet to Ben's house but it seemed like a quarter of a mile. The door was open and I found the bat just as Sharon had said I would. It wasn't a very big bat and I wondered if it would break when I struck him.
The cellar smelled of fresh lumber and some kind of finish he had put on the knotty pine that was already up. I stepped to the right of the stairs where I wouldn't be seen, resting the end of the bat on the cement floor.
My knees lost their strength and I wanted to sit down but there wasn't anywhere to sit. Five minutes? Ten minutes? Well, not more than fifteen. In the next fifteen minutes I would take part in a murder.
Roger Barnes...
Roger Barnes who had sought success and who now had to get it the fast way ... Yes, Roger Barnes ... The killer...
I heard voices upstairs but I wasn't really listening to them. I was thinking of the years behind me, of raw sex that had been easy to get, of money that had been tough to come by. I thought, too, of a marriage in which I had merely assumed the role of husband, of a girl who now lay dead, of my lack of appreciation for a wife who had done her best to be tolerant.
Killer Roger Barnes...
Why had I ever consented to this? Wanting a girl was normal but the lust to kill belonged to animals. A soldier was flung into combat, killing as he plunged ahead, but his reasons for killing were far more complex and necessary than the sole gain of love and money. Killing was his job. This type of killing was for a madman and outside the law.
The chair...
There was no guarantee that I wouldn't sit in it. Didn't they shave your head and slit the legs of your trousers. Yes, they did that. They also gave you a big meal and you took it to hell with you.
I stood there, almost like a man who himself was facing death. I remembered the first time I had ever seen a picture of a naked girl, of a day in school when one of the girls had popped her bra and nearly gone into hysterics. The years of living with my uncle came back to me, of Rita coming to me out of the night, her body mine to take, of my fear, which I had forgotten until now, of her becoming pregnant. Following this was work which had proved to be unsatisfactory, the girl who was eager but who also wanted a good time before a man received his reward. And my first call with one of the catalogs, the woman asking me what kind of junk I had and the words of explanation fighting their way off the tip of my tongue. Then the light Linda ordered, our initial date, her eventual surrender. What of all these things until then? Normal, weren't they? Thousands of fellows, thousand of girls doing the same. But after that? Well, a long cry from being normal, blasting a marriage apart because enough had never been enough.
I looked down at the baseball bat. Where was the necessity for killing? So she would get nothing from him and I had nothing except myself to give her. What if I was blind or missing a leg? Wouldn't that be worse? We were young, we had our health, but even with his money all of this would cease to be important when we looked at our hands and saw his blood upon them. No amount of scrubbing would, wash off that blood.
Wearily, I shook my head.
Killers, both of us.
Regardless of who he was, what he had done, what we could get the price for knowing that we were killers would be too much.
Placing the bat aside I moved around to the foot of the stairs. It didn't have to happen. The wire was up there and I could remove it. She would thank me later and if I killed him I had to live not only with her but with myself. But I was too late.
The door opened and I heard what they were saying. Or, to be more accurate, what he was saying to Sharon.
"A divorce." His voice was even, tense. "I can twist you out of my life like a cork from a bottle, twist you out of it the same as you twisted yourself into it. I know what you are. You're-"
"Not now, Ben. Honey, not now."
"Yes. Now. To hell with you. Worked for an investment firm, did you? You did hut only to appear respectable. I guessed what you were when the shine wore off and I didn't pay that private detective agency for nothing. Down in Baltimore-"
"All right. All right, Ben. I danced in Baltimore. Any number of girls do that."
I remained rigid and frozen at the bottom of the stairs.
"Baltimore?" He laughed. "Who cares about Baltimore? At eighteen you had a bastard kid and gave it away. Until you married me you had already been arrested for prostitution three times. I-so it's done between us. I married you for your body and I got something that probably hundreds of men have used. I'll-"
"Ben!" she screamed. "Oh, damn you!"
I saw it then, saw more than I had ever seen before, and I also saw him come out onto the landing. I guess I tried to shout. I don't know. Anyway I didn't and he was tripped by the wire, pitching forward and down.
I'm big enough but he came into me hard. Fortunately, I had gone into a crouch and although I was able to catch him I couldn't hang on. Grunting we both fell to the hard floor and he landed flat upon me. I rolled over, gasping for air. shoving him away, knowing in some manner that he hadn't hurt himself.
She was mouthing oaths, cursing me, and I looked up. She lunged for the stairs, swearing that she'd kill him and then me, but because of her anger she must have forgotten about the wire. It put her into orbit, shooting her down the stairs, and while I tried to get to her, to break the plunge, I wasn't quick enough. I saw her hit and closed my eyes to the horror of it. Right on her head, just as she had wanted Ben to land.
"Christ," I said as I reached her. "Sweet Daniel, mow the grass and get ready for winter."
I found her pulse and felt the last beat leave her body. Dropping her wrist I stood up and looked down at her. Blonde. Beautiful. Dangerous....
"She's dead," I told Ben in a flat tone.
He was sitting on the floor, rubbing the back of his ncck
"The wire," he said. "What a fool I was."
"No more than me."
He had trouble getting to his feet and I helped him.
"You knew?" he asked. "Yes."
"And the baseball bat lying over there?"
"For you. Just in case."
"Just in case the fall didn't do it?"
"Yes."
Ben brushed the dust from his clothes, silent as he did this and glanced at the twisted body lying near the foot of the stairs.
"I thought you were my friend, Roger."
"Some friendship." I couldn't stop shaking. "One of those friendships out of nowhere. What about you and my wife? Getting slopped together, holding hands, kissing her and-who knows what else?"
"Nothing else. Believe me. I felt sorry for her.
Sorry for myself when I realized the kind of marriage I'd gotten into."
"You bought her," I said.
"I don't deny it."
"And you got a bad deal but that was no excuse for hitting her."
"That's one of her. lies if she claimed I did. I never hit her, haven't even slept with her since I found out for sure what she was this past week. It was only bad luck on her part that I ever hired a detective agency. Just before that a letter of hers was returned from a man in New York because he had moved. I opened it, wondering why she had written to a strange man. That wasn't exactly the right thing to do but we weren't getting along the way we should and I was curious. The letter was a promise that she would come to him as soon as she could and that when she did she'd have a fortune."
"So you hired some detectives?"
"For a imagine fee but they came up with the truth about her and the man. She was never any good, in and out of trouble, and she was playing for the easy life. As for the man he was her kind, promoting women wherever he could, but he didn't wait for her. He ran off with another girl and that's all I know about him. His life wasn't my business. Hers was."
I managed to steady my hand long enough to light a cigarette.
"You'd better call the police," I said. "Why?"
"Because of me being down here in the cellar and because of what we had planned together."
"You saved my life or at least you saved me from getting seriously injured."
"Perhaps I did."
"And you weren't going through with it, were you?"
"I-couldn't. I was just coming up when-"
"Then let's forget it. I-well, you can see I'm not drunk this morning. I know what I'm talking about. She led you on with her body but you were man enough to turn back. That takes some kind of guts when you've been fed the promises of a beautiful female. I-frankly, I loved her. I loved her and she wanted me dead. I'll never forget that. I went with a nice girl once but she wouldn't marry me because I can't father children. This time I didn't mention it until after I was married. She seemed to understand and I loved her more for it. But it wasn't understanding, Roger. Neither love nor understanding. She was determined to have my money and she came within an inch of getting it."
"Look what it cost her," I said.
"Yes. It cost her everything she had. Her life. You never get that back."
I turned and walked past him to the door. I was steadier now, able to think clearly and I knew there was nothing for me in that cellar. There was nothing for me anywhere. No wife. No business that could last. Two girls, Jean and Sharon, dead. No, nothing at all.
Linda met me in the yard. She hadn't dressed and I doubted if she had anything on under the robe.
"I saw you go into Ben's cellar," she said. "I heard the kitchen door slam and I knew you'd gone out. I was coming after you, not certain about what you might do, but the phone rang and I had to answer it."
I didn't say anything until we were in the house and I told her about the whole sorry affair as I had a can of beer.
"That day she called me at the office," I said. "It was a trick to get me up here, to jar my interest. She must have known about the heater and she set it back. I should have seen then but I didn't. All I saw was her blonde hair and her curves."
I offered Linda a beer but she shook her head. "This is crazy," she said. "You were going to kill Ben-for her."
"Plus money."
"But mostly for her?" I put the beer aside.
"Cripes, I don't know. Who can say? I knew our marriage was shot and she convinced me. I haven't any excuses. I accepted her favors and I wanted her probably because there was nobody else who cared." I laughed. "You said I was weak. Maybe I am. I was weak there in the cellar and I didn't have the courage to kill him. Not for her. Not for you. Not for anybody. I-"
"It's all right, Roger."
I laughed again but there was no humor to the laugh.
"You also just said that this is crazy. It is. And it isn't all right. It's all wrong. Everything."
We were standing close together near the sink and she pulled my head down to kiss me on the mouth. It wasn't her usual passive kiss. This was a kiss that hung to my lips like glue to a blotter.
"I told you there was a phone call, Roger. It was for you. Some man. He wanted to know if you paid for Jean's funeral. I was desperate to follow you but I had to talk to him then. I-I'm sorry I didn't believe you about her. It was his baby and not yours."
As I kissed her I ran my hands up and down her arms.
"At least something good happened today," I said.
"She must have loved you."
"Perhaps."
"Of course she did. Jean could have blamed you for her condition but she was too honest for that."
"She wasn't honest with my money."
"We discussed that, too. He was decent about it and quite shocked. He said he saw something in her apartment once, a brown folder, and he's sending somebody there to look."
"He must be important if he can do that."
"He doesn't have to be important. He happens to have a key."
"I've got a key myself."
"No doubt but you're not going to use it. You've been in enough trouble already for one Sunday."
She left me to go upstairs and I walked over to one of the windows. The police hadn't lost any time and they were already at Ben's house. I didn't know whether or not they'd come for me and I waited. However, they didn't come and I turned from the window when they carried her out.
I put a hundred dollars on the kitchen table, wrote a short farewell note and left the house. She could get a cab to reach the bus and I didn't want to experience the last tears of a final parting.
As I drove toward town the knowledge that I actually loved Linda slammed me in the belly with the sharp force of a knife thrust into me by an unseen hand. I loved her and I had destroyed our marriage, probably wrecked her father financially. Whatever I touched became slop, changed fresh milk into swill.
Why?
I knew why. Too much hunger to get ahead, too many women, too much of the things that a married man has to learn to ignore. So you fought with your wife over bills. All right, you fought. Lots of people did that but it didn't throw them. You also saw a pretty girl. Fine. Any man does. A pretty girl but you don't chase her. You go home where you belong. Home? I hadn't helped her to make a home and all this time, knowing me for what I was, she'd suffered.
I drove to the bar where Cindy sometimes went and she was there. I had nothing on my mind about her. I just wanted to talk to somebody. Anybody as long as it wasn't my wife. What I'd done to Linda would last her forever.
"See?" Cindy said and held out her left hand.
"Yeah. A ring. That's swell."
"See anything else.'
"I do. You're drinking orange soda. Maybe I'll try one."
We sat there for a long time and the orange soda wasn't bad. The man behind the bar was annoyed with us but I didn't know why. Nobody gives you soda and there's a profit in it.
"He's a great guy," she said in describing her future husband.
"Treat him right."
"Don't worry. I will. That'll be some wedding night."
She left the bar about five but I continued to sit, bothering the bartender for orange soda and getting a hard frown with each round.
I knew she was beside me even before I looked. Her perfume was strong but not too strong, the scent of fresh roses in the spring.
"You must have missed your bus," I said.
"Did you want me to catch it, Roger?"
"I can't tell you what to do."
"Why not? You're my husband, aren't you?"
"On paper but I gave up my rights somewhere along the way."
She sighed.
"There are a lot of bars in this town. I've been in almost every darned one of them looking for you. The cab driver thought I had lost my mind."
"Sorry. I've been here all the time."
"Drinking orange soda?"
"It's okay. Have one."
She did.. She looked very chic in a red dress, looked like an average wife spending her time with a guy who wasn't quite so average.
"That man called back," she said. "He changed his mind and went to the police. He told me he couldn't sleep and that he had to face the facts. They didn't do anything to him but they did go to the apartment. The folder was there and so was a piece of paper which he says is legal. Jean left everything she had to you and considering the evidence in your books you'll get the money eventually."
"More good news," I decided. "It comes in bunches."
"There's some other good news I'd like to hear."
"Such as what?"
"Such as we can forget our mistakes and start out all over again."
She left me before I could reply and I heard the cab pull away from in front of the bar.
I guess I drove too fast going home.
But I beat them there.
She smiled when she came in.
I knew how she felt and now she knew how I felt.
It was pretty wonderful.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Glamour, Incorporated is growing these days but I don't expect the firm to become a giant in the field. In fact I don't want it to get too big. It's just a reasonable operation that shows a fair profit and I haven't lost anything by paying my help more. They take greater interest in their jobs and that's a dividend you can't count in dollars.
Of course the money came to me from Jean's estate but I only kept what was rightfully mine. The rest was donated to a home for unwed mothers and they even put a little bronze thing on the wall with her name engraved in letters large enough for everybody to see it.
I met the man who was responsible for Jean's condition and I guess he won't wander any more. He had a mess to straighten out at home and whenever I see him he seems to relive the tragedy of her death all over again. He isn't alone. Some of it returns to me, too.
Everything is all squared off with Linda's father but of course I still owe money on the business. However, this is a sensible arrangement and I make regular monthly payments to Ben. Loaning money to me was his idea and I couldn't ask to be associated with a nicer fellow. I also like his present wife who is a gentle woman about his own age. His cellar is finished and we go over there on Saturday nights. We drink a little but we don't get drunk and there's none of the unhealthy romantic desires which invaded our lives previously. We're just four ordinary people who enjoy getting together for a few hours. As for Sharon we don't mention her. She's dead and that's all there is to it.
During the past week I've had trouble trying to locate a replacement for Cindy. She's willing to stick until I do get somebody but she's the size of a house and I don't want her to do anything that will endanger her health or the health of her expected baby. Anyway she doesn't need the job. That husband of hers works like a fool and they're doing fine on his pay.
Yes. Cindy is huge but she's no bigger than Linda.
"I hope it's a boy," Linda says but I can tell that she's neutral, that she only says this to please me.
"I don't care what it is," I tell her. I don't.
We've got each other, a decent income and in a little while we'll meet the result of our love. I can't ask for more. If I did I'd be a fool. I've been one of those already. Once is enough.
And I think I'm just the guy to know all about that.