She could be a sweet innocent child, or a sophisticated, elemental female who experimented and was well-versed in every facet of the art of love....
A naive, impulsive Puritan and an obscene, lewd imp of evil....
A normal woman who yearned for a husband, home and babies....
And an abnormal nymphomaniac with an insane itch for violence and the company of deviates. Her clothed body was unspectacular to the point of being dull....
But naked she was the goddess of love with seductive, magnificent hips, and a belly shaped by a master sculptor. With Wanda the most important man in her life was the one she was with at the moment....
"Destroy Me, Lover!" she moaned in ecstasy to Larry Krell....
But in the end it was Wanda who destroyed Larry, and everything fine and decent he had worked a whole lifetime to possess.
CHAPTER ONE
It rained on the day of the funeral. There weren't many people there and they all left quickly and he was standing alone by the grave.
He stood for quite a while in silence with no sounds around him but the steady splash of the rain in puddles; the swish of water hammering down out of the sky.
Was that where she had gone? Up there? His smile was a nervous reaction; the peeling back of his lips off his teeth while tears and rain blended to run down his cheeks.
"I'm sorry it had to be this way," he said. "I'm sick inside with sorrow. If you knew that maybe it would help. I hope you know it and I hope it helps."
He remained silent for a long time before he whispered, "Please forgive me. Please, please forgive me."
He turned away then but did not leave the grave. He stood there with the rain sweeping down on his bared head and thought, Good God in heaven? How did it happen? How could I let it happen when I knew we were doomed from the start?
But he hadn't known that at all.
Not at the start.
The start...?
It began the day he took the Willets assignment-the day he first set eyes on Wanda. He'd figured it would take about six months to straighten out Willets & Company. They occupied a whole floor at 502 Park Avenue-an imposing setup-but financially they were in a hell of a spot. With the elder Willets having dropped out, and Joe Jr. watching pennies while dollars Hew out the window, the firm-old and respected as it was-had less than a year of life left if things continued as they were.
So they called in Lawrence J. Krell, Efficiency Expert-top-ranking doctor to sick businesses.
And that was when it began....
She was Sam Taber's secretary, and Sam's office was the third one Larry Krell entered that morning. He had a procedure he always followed when taking on a new assignment. Secrecy, he felt, was stupid under the circumstances that usually confronted him when he started an assignment. At no time had he ever found personnel unaware of the situation. So if you came right out and laid it on the line, you usually got cooperation.
Thus his first chore always was to make the rounds, introduce himself, tell everyone who he was.
Sam Taber had charge of foreign sales but he wasn't in his office when Larry Krell entered. The girl at the desk against the far wall had black hair she wore parted just off center. It fell straight down all around and turned up at the ends.
She sat for a few moments with her back to Larry, then turned slowly on her swivel chair and smiled at him.
"I'm Larry Krell," he said. "I dropped in for a chat with you and your boss."
She smiled. She was not a pretty girl. She had sparkling white teeth and black eyes that were direct and challenging and frank. Her cheek bones were high and her face tended toward roundness. She was small; elfin would have been the term for her. Seated, she did not appear to have a particularly good figure and her ankles were a shade too slim to be called good.
Her thighs, however, were a different matter. Larry's eyes dropped to where her skirt cut across their center between knee and hip. They curved out lush and seductive from the knees, with half of them showing, making a man automatically visualize what was covered by the skirt.
Even a decent, honest, family man like Larry Krell.
"I'm flattered that you include me," the girl said.
"I'm Wanda Cole, Mr. Taber's executive secretary."
"In other words, the gal who does the work." She laughed easily, poise and self-assurance obviously an integral part of her. "Hardly that. Won't you sit down, Mr. Krell?"
He took the low comfortable chair she indicated, noticing without the fact actually recording itself in his mind that the chair was not beside Sam Taber's desk where it would have been expected to be. It was over toward the lounge-in a direct line with Wanda Cole's desk, so that when she turned her swivel chair a little further around an unobstructed view of the space between her beautiful thighs was difficult to avoid.
Larry noticed now that her feet didn't quite touch the floor. He said, "I suppose I'll get to be known as the devil's advocate around here for a while. You know what I was hired for, of course."
"I'd have to be blind and deaf not to," Wanda laughed. "You're here to find out what we're doing and tell us to stop."
"In a sense. Actually, if we all work together for the good of the company, everyone will profit."
"Foreign sales are very good," Wanda Cole said cautiously. "I suppose Sam could handle them alone."
"That's ridiculous. I'm not here to eliminate jobs. I'm here to save them."
Her dark eyes were covering him-frankly, openly, and with undisguised calculation. But there was no hostility. Later, Larry tried to go back and analyze that first meeting. In his more subjective moments, he read great impact into it. But when later bitterness cleared his mind during temporary depressions, he saw the meeting for what it was.
He'd walked into an office and met a girl who turned around in her chair and showed him half her thighs. They were interesting. He no doubt had deeply-seated flashes of wanting to raise the skirt to see what was hidden. But that was all. Just the objective interest of a man in a woman who revealed a rather intimate part of herself.
And not a very pretty girl, either. If he never again set eyes on Wanda Cole, he would have forgotten her in ten minutes.
As a matter-of-fact he did forget her. Sam didn't come back, so after a while he went on his next calls. The day passed swiftly and at five-thirty he walked out of the building glancing at his watch.
In truth, he was able later to tell himself honestly, he didn't like Wanda Cole much upon their first meeting; nor on the second. As he hurried out of the building that day he made a sharp turn after going through the revolving door, and skidded to a halt to keep from knocking a woman over.
It was Wanda Cole.
She looked up from her five-foot-three level into his six-foot high eyes and said, "I'm sorry. Oh, it's you, Mr. Krell. I'm afraid you're finding the employees of Willets clumsy as well as inefficient."
"It was entirely my fault," he apologized.
They fell into step and walked toward 58th Street, Larry measuring his pace to hers.
"Are you a suburbanite?" she asked pleasantly. "Larchmont. The usual bit. A wife, two kids. A dog...."
"I'm an ex-suburbanite. Westport. Breaking the family ties was difficult, but I've had my own apartment in Manhattan now for a year."
"The baby birds have to fly out of the nest sometime," Larry said. It sounded trite. But what difference did that make? Wasn't all casual chit-chat on the trite side?
"Hardly a baby bird," Wanda Cole replied with a composed laugh. "I'll be twenty-nine next February."
Sophisticated, that was the word for her. Petite, chic, thoroughly at home in the slick Park Avenue setting where Willets & Co. existed and functioned and had its being.
Two blocks down they came abreast of the glamorously fronted Madrid cocktail lounge. Wanda Cole stopped. Her elfin face was raised to his and her black eyes were cool and self-contained. "I'm stopping here for a cocktail, Mr. Krell. The one luxury I allow myself before I go home to my lonely little apartment. A girl can go in here alone and not feel out of place."
Larry dodged the open invitation without conscious thought. That-he told himself later-was how unimpressed initially he'd been by Wanda Cole.
He touched his hat and said, "There'll be a martini waiting for me when I get home, so I'll rush along."
He had his after-work quickie at the bar in the Biltmore while he waited for his train. And his thoughts were not on Sam Taber's executive secretary. He pondered Kathie's cough and wondered how much longer it would keep her out of school.
So there was nothing of doom foretold in the first meeting.
Yet the seeds of disaster had been planted....
The evening at home was just like any other. A martini while Fran told him about the happenings of the day. Billy threw a book at Kathie when they couldn't agree on a TV program, and had to be sternly spoken to. Dinner.
While he did what he considered his required reading in Business Week and Time, Larry looked up to suggest another TV set-perhaps a small portable so these arguments between the kids could be avoided.
Fran thought that was ridiculous, so he didn't press it. Around eleven o'clock he went up to get ready for bed.
Then, as he took his shower, he realized this was sex night.
And a kind of mild shock accompanied his recollection. Then, in turn, a shock brought on by the fact that the thought had shocked him in the first place.
This called for a little analysis. He got out of the shower, toweled himself vigorously and, for the first time in ages, he looked at himself objectively in the mirror. He saw a man who did not look his forty-eight years. This he could be objectively sure of. He'd never had weight trouble. He had eaten and drunk as he'd pleased all his life. So far as reaction was concerned, he had no stomach. His weight had stayed around one-seventy for years. This, distributed properly, left him on the slim side with no mark of skinniness nor any protruding bones. No knobs as Wanda put it later.
All in all he easily passed for forty or younger, dressed or undressed.
His hair had thinned somewhat, but it wasn't at all noticeable, and the few gray hairs at his temple were hardly visible to the naked eye.
Sex night.
He smiled amiably as he reached for his pajama bottoms. At that moment Fran tapped on the door and came into the bathroom. This seemed to be the night for thoughts to come out of nowhere. Because it suddenly occurred to him that in all their seventeen years of married life Fran had never entered the bathroom, while he occupied it, without knocking.
All right, what was wrong with that? It was common courtesy. But he hadn't been looking for anything wrong. So why was he questioning it? He wasn't. He hadn't been inviting an argument with himself. Good heavens! Couldn't a man comment mentally without-?
He almost chuckled aloud, but the mental sequence was pushed aside by another thought. Even before he turned he knew exactly what Fran would look like. She'd showered earlier, so she would be wearing a nightgown-just vaguely sheer-pink or blue. Pink or blue, vaguely sheer nightgowns down through the years. And yet Larry had never actually seen Fran in her nightgown and nothing else, because there was the robe that went with it. He supposed that was what it was called; a slightly less sheer garment that came, he believed, from Bergdorf Goodman and looked very intimate on the models in the windows.
Did it look intimate on Fran? But that wasn't the point he'd been making and-being instinctively orderly in all things-this mental wandering annoyed him. The point was that the robe invariably was donned with the nightgown, and stayed donned up to the moment Fran whipped it off and got into bed. It went back on the instant she got up. Even when she got up to take quick trips across the bedroom. Odd that he'd never thought of that before.
So what? It was a rather large bedroom. This brought the chuckle even closer to the surface, and a little surge of affection for his wife put a quick warm smile on his face.
He caught a glimpse of, her as he half turned, while she was reaching into the medicine cabinet.
Did the robe look intimate on Fran?
Of course. She was a beautiful woman. Five feet-six inches tall. One-twenty, he believed she'd said recently; that her poundage was excellently distributed went without saying. Fran could more than hold her own anywhere....
Fran, take off your robe and nightgown.
Do-What?
Take off your robe and nightgown.
And stand here naked?
Yes.
Larry. I don't understand,....
Take off your robe and nightgown and stand there naked. I'm your husband. I fathered your children, I pay the rent and provide the wherewithall for a good life. And in all the time I've known you, I've never seen you standing on your feet in front of me stark naked.
Why, Larry! What on earth had gotten into you? You only had your usual martini. You haven't been drinking-
What's that got to do with it? When did I ever get drunk and ask you to strip? When I get a martini too many at some gay local get-together we come home and I go to sleep.
Larry, it would be indecent. You can't ask me to-
Of course he couldn't. It was indecent. Weird, how a man's mind can drift into senseless fantasies. He'd noticed himself doing that sort of thing lately, slipping into a mental lapse where some business problem solved itself, or a trip to Hawaii with the family arose fully shaped out of the stuff of dreams.
Perhaps a little disciplinary reading was in order. Some philosophy or logic. He buttoned his pajama top and was ready for bed.
A sudden thought: Why did I put these fool things on? It's sex night! He shrugged, went out and got into bed.
Fran was always five minutes late on sex nights. Something she did in the bathroom; something private she had to do after Larry got clear. As he lay waiting with his fingers locked under his head, he wondered about diaphrams; who invented the damned things; how women put them in....
I'm Suzy Klotts. I work in Shmiggledorf's diaphram factory. I'd be delighted to go dancing with you....
Where the hell did Fran keep hers, anyhow? It occurred to Larry that he had never seen it, that he hadn't the least idea where Fran kept it, that he actually didn't know what a diaphram looked like.
He wondered if Kathie or Billy had ever found it while Fran was out shopping or something. Probably not, Fran was careful about things like that.
The bathroom light snapped off and the door opened. Fran always did it that way. Snap off the light, then open the door so that from the bed in the darkened room no shadow play of light against dark would reveal the outline of her legs through her robe and night gown. Probably an automatic procedure with most modest women.
Sex night.
Fran got into bed and they lay side by side for a full two minutes in complete silence. Nothing strained about it, just not thinking of anything to say.
Then Fran's hand stole casually across and lay on his chest as she said, "The Wilsons want us for bridge next Thursday."
"I suppose it will be all right. If Kathie's cold has cleared up by that time."
Fran unbuttoned one button, two, three. Her fingers played gently over his chest.
"I don't think that will be any problem."
Larry's arm dropped over in her direction, his fingers went lazily over her breast and found a nipple. He played with it.
"I guess that will be all right," he said.
Fran turned on her side, and Larry turned on his side. The move was automatically timed through long practice, and their mouths came together.
Fran's hand went around-his back, she continued the light caressing motion. Larry's hand, pressed now into her firm breast, gripped gently.
The kiss lasted quite a while, Fran's mouth gradually loosening. Her lips remained relatively firm, however, and in sudden experiment-something he hadn't done in years-he stiffened his own lips and pried hers open. He thought he felt a slight drawing back of her head, but he could not be sure. Her teeth were against the flesh of his lips in an unaccustomed feeling. The temptation to push his tongue forward came and went. He withdrew the pressure, and Fran's lips closed.
Her breath was slightly heavier now, her hands moved down his body and played gently over his lower belly. He ran his own hand lower until it came to the tight waist band of Fran's nightgown.
At this point he withdrew his hand. Whereupon Fran arched her body up off the bed and pulled the nightgown up as far as it would come.
He redirected his hand and the whole expanse of her belly was open to him. His other hand was on her thigh. He ran the tip of his index finger lightly along the inner side, touching both thighs as she held them pressed together.
Her hand was on him more intimately now-the same gentle, teasing touch.
A thought: What if nothing happened to me? What if she kept on doing that and nothing happened?
What if I just failed to react?
But that never happened. Once each week during all the busy happy years of their married life, with time out periodically, and longer periods of time out for Kathie and Billy, Fran always found him dutifully ready.
His hand pressed ever so lightly now and Fran's thighs parted with an obedience which, he thought, had become as automatic as digestion.
Boldly his hand followed the opening of the V, and Fran's body jerked slightly as it always jerked. She brought her arms up away from his lower body, put them around his neck and kissed him.
"Larry-I love you."
The whisper was warm, a trifle passionate, clearly sweet and sincere and trusting.
Her far knee bent as she drew her foot up. Larry rolled over, turning her as he moved, and when they were in position her other knee came up, locking him in.
She clung to him now and one of her hands moved down to direct him. He awaited the slight twist of her hips. When she brought her hand back to its original position, around his shoulders, it signalled that all was well.
Gently he began the mating. On command of love and habit, his passion stirred.
Fran's mouth found his for a k'sz. The kiss lasted several seconds before she turned her face away. Because as they approached the climax she always breathed swiftly and heavily through her open mouth, and she did not want offend him with possible bad breath.
"Larry-I love you-"
"I love you, darling-"
He said no more because his breath began coming irregularly too; and besides, he was doing most of the work.
Only as they neared the climax was he able to stir Fran to the point where she gripped him with a semblance of true need; the point where she pressed her hips up hard against him, pulled her knees up and up and lifted her feet off the bed.
The climax was mutual and entirely satisfactory.
For a time, Larry lay where he was, breathing heavily. Fran lay with her face still turned away, her eyes closed, her breath lessening in violence.
"Was it all right, dear?"
The automatic solicitous question; the question proving love and consideration that always came at this precise moment.
And his automatic reply: "It was fine, darling."
They lay for a few moments longer, then Fran said, "All right. I'll tell the Wilsons we'll come."
"Fine."
Fran slipped out of bed. Larry heard the robe swish in the dark. Her feet padded across the room, the bathroom door closed and light appeared under it.
Larry stretched and yawned. The bed was soft. He was pleasantly tired. Around him was a good home, asleep in its other rooms were his children.
In the bathroom his wife was removing her diaphram.
His grin faded into a contented smile. They'd made a good, safe, happy life out of it. He was a lucky man.
When Fran came back to bed he was already asleep....
CHAPTER TWO
He raised his head and looked up into the leaden sky. On the far side of the grave a neat, dark blue truck pulled up and two men began carrying the flowers away from the grave.
One of them stopped work and looked uncertainly in Larry's direction. Finally making up his mind, he came around the grave and put his hand on Larry's shoulder.
"Don't you think you'd better go home, Mr. Krell? You'll catch pneumonia out here in this weather."
"In a little while." The man turned away.
"Thank you, though," Larry said. But the rain probably washed the words down and hammered them into the grass before the man heard them.
Larry looked at the grave. Soon they would begin filling it, shoveling the dirt in over her. Then they would take the canopy away and she would be alone.
That would frighten her.
"' ... when you're away from me too long, darling, I get scared. I don't know why, but I do...."
Now he would be away from her forever. The pain of conscience ripped viciously. Away from her forever. Well, that was what he'd wanted, wasn't it? That was what he'd beaten his fists against the table and demanded.
His head dropped wearily. No, he couldn't honestly flay himself with that whip. "It hadn't been quite that way.
Not that way.
Exactly how. then?
Exactly when had he known...?
Known? Probably at no precise instant.
The next time he saw Wanda was in his own office.
A few days later she came in with some papers.
"Mr. Willets asked me to drop these off," she said.
"Thanks." He extended his hand and took them. Her eyes veered to the photos on his desk.
"Your children?"
"Billy and Kathie. They're two handfuls." Her smile was understanding and sympathetic. "They're beautiful children. How old are they?"
"Ten and twelve."
She sighed. "If I expect to have any I'd better get going, hadn't I?"
"You? Good Lord, you've got plenty of time."
"You forgot I told you my age. I'll be thirty soon."
"You certainly don't look it."
She had a way of smiling with only the corners of her mouth, and turning her head away at the same time, so that she would be looking at you at an angle with a kind of Mona Lisa smile.
"My ego thanks you."
There was no reason for her to stay but she showed no inclination to leave. For want of something else to say Larry asked, "Are you on the east side of Manhattan?"
"Upper east. I have a one room kitchenette on Eighty-second off Fifth. A hundred and forty dollars for one room. Can you imagine? And that was considered cheap! Keeps me broke paying for it."
"I'll be you've got it fixed up nicely."
"As nice as I can afford. I stayed home with my folks as long as I could after I got back from Europe. But then I just had to get away by myself."
"You were in Europe?"
"For six months." Her face changed subtly, her eyes brightened and her smile was soft from pleasant memories. "It was wonderful. I wasn't fit to live with for months after coming home. I hated it here, I wanted to go back. Why the other night when Vincent, a friend of mine was over-a gay friend-he got me started and I talked about France and Italy and Switzerland until four in the morning. Finally he went to sleep in his chair and I went to bed."
"Have you ever thought of going back?"
"Not as much as I used to. I'd still like to, though."
"I'm sure you could get a job there."
"Oh, I suppose so, but it wouldn't be the same. I was on vacation then. Living there would be different." She shuddered. "The housing is terrible. Freeze in the winter, bake in the summer."
There was something a little confusing about her sharp change in attitudes. But he got the idea. When you're on a vacation, everything is fun.
A gay friend. What did she mean by that? he wondered.
"Do you really think you can pull this place out of the hole?"
He didn't think he should discuss that with an executive secretary. Yet he didn't want to be rude. "I think perhaps some of the people here have the wrong idea. The company isn't in any real financial trouble."
She shrugged and the corners of her mouth twisted downward. "Actually I couldn't care less. I don't care much for this job anyhow."
"Sam Taber strikes me as a good man to work for."
"Oh, Sam's all right. Well, I guess I'd better be getting back or he'll start screaming."
Ten minutes later she looked in again. "Do you want coffee?"
He raised his eyes from the figures he'd been buried in and blinked. "Coffee?"
"The wagon's here. I'll bring it, if you want some."
"You bet."
"Regular?"
"That's right. Cream and sugar."
He fumbled toward his pocket but she was gone. When she returned, she pushed his quarter back. "You can buy tomorrow."
But still Larry Krell did not sense danger. To say this could, happen to a man over forty because of inexperience seems ridiculous-particularly a man who had spent a great many years on and about Madison Avenue where sophistication, cynicism, and amorality are ways of life.
In actual truth Larry Krell saw in Wanda Cole only a restless, self-contradictory, moody girl who brought him coffee and came in to chat.
Also she had nice thighs.
That was all.
The' first tightening of the relationship was insidiously slow and imperceptible. Wanda began dropping in oftener. Her mood could change half a dozen times a day, and Larry began wondering which face she would be wearing the next time he saw her.
Her most intriguing habit was to enter his office wearing her sullen, disillusioned mask, drop into his chair and sit there in silence.
"What's the trouble with you?"
"Oh, hell. It's nothing but a great big bind."
"Bad night?"
The corners of her mouth pulled down. "All men are bastards."
On these occasions she sat sloppily in the chair, her skirt high, her legs sometimes forked open and her thighs aglow with sex lure of which she seemed oblivious.
"Oh, I wouldn't say that," Larry laughed. "Not all of us."
He learned as she began coming in oftener that she could sneer: that her tongue could cut like a knife; that she had a vicious mask she often used.
She used the sneer now. "You think you're any different?"
If she had angered him during those first contacts, things might have been different. But she amused him.
"No, I guess I'm no different. But just what have you got against men in general?"
"You're so damned patronizing," she flared.
"I don't mean to be."
The black eyes turned slightly more sullen. "Last night we went to muscle beach."
"Muscle beach?"
"You know, where the gay boys congregate. Over on the other side of Central Park." She pushed her thighs out further and the sneer returned. "God! What a waste!"
Suddenly he realized what she meant by gay. "You refer to-"
She nodded. "They prefer to be called gay.
Larry Krell had never before discussed, even with men, the problem of homosexuality. "I never met any-"
"I have! Some of them are beautiful. But as I said before, God! What a waste."
He wondered if she might not be subtly ridiculing him. "Maybe," he said, "all they need is a good woman to take an interest in them."
"That's not true!"
"How do you know?"
"I know. Believe me, I know!"
There could be only one implication drawn from that, but Larry was not interested in drawing it. "As I said, I've had no contact with that type."
"I've gone to their parties. You'd be surprised."
"I am surprised. I thought they didn't care for women."
"They don't. That's what makes it interesting I guess." She got up, looked around the office restlessly. "I wish I were sitting in a Paris sidewalk cafe now. I met an Arabian there one afternoon. Man, what a sales talk!"
She smoothed her dress down her thighs. "I have to go."
And she left. To look in a moment later and say, "Sorry I said you were a bastard. You aren't...."
The drink together after work was inevitable. They first had it six weeks after Larry came to Willets. It wasn't planned. They walked out together as they'd done quite often before, but the routine varied in that when they reached the Madrid cocktail lounge, Larry didn't touch his hat and go on to Grand Central.
Was this forordained?
It seemed so, because there were no overtures. They just walked along the street, talking, and when they got to the cocktail lounge they went inside and sat down at a table.
It was as simple as that.
During their second martini, Larry thought of home and experienced a moment of benign rebellion. The hell with it, he hadn't missed a train in years. Let them wonder for one evening. It would be a good joke.
That was how he thought of it-a joke. But the immediate reaction was a sense of freedom. He had a whole evening to use as he pleased. Maybe he'd even take Wanda Cole to a movie.
They had two more martinis and the talk veered to music. He found Wanda Cole surprisingly well read on classical music, learned that she liked certain operas, and that her attitude toward popular music-especially anything that smacked of sentimentality-was one of open contempt.
When they were back on the sidewalk she said, "I've got a new recording of the London Symphony doing Beethoven's Fourth. Would you like to hear it?"
This seemed like a great idea ... of the next bus.
Her apartment was nothing special. In fact it was rather sparsely furnished, it seemed a trifle austere for a girl. No frills, no pinks, no soft effects.
There was a couch that probably opened into a bed. There was a coffee table, an impressive looking hi-fi set and several stacks of record albums.
There was a futuristic looking chair, but Larry sat down on the couch. He felt somewhat self-conscious and out of place. What was he doing here? Back in front of the Madrid it had seemed like an amusing adventure. Now it was ridiculous.
He would stay a few minutes in order not to be rude, and then leave. No time to listen to an album. He hoped she had forgotten and would not bring it up.
She seemed to forget. Without asking him, she went to the kitchenette nook and brought back two glasses filled with wine.
"Dry sherry," she said. "I'm sorry, it's all I have."
He could of course not refuse it on those terms. He took the glass and said thank you. She sat down beside him on the lounge and they touched glasses. He leaned forward and put his on the coffee table. She did likewise and they sat there for a few moments in silence, looking straight ahead.
Then she slowly turned her face toward him. There was only one light on, a dim table lamp on the other side of the room. Her eyes caught its glow, her lips seemed to invite his.
He put his hand behind her head and drew her mouth to his own. The pressure lasted a full, motionless thirty seconds. He released the pressure and she drew back.
Now she was wearing a new mask, one he had not seen before. Her eyes were half closed, her lips slightly parted.
A mask of sensual languor.
"I knew you wanted to kiss me."
"You did?"
"I knew it a long time ago back in the office."
She lay back on the lounge and he turned and bent over her, putting his arms around her. Her lips were slightly parted. As he kissed her, they drew back further and his lips were in her mouth, her tongue began playing with them.
Larry never knew whether he turned her in his arms and laid her lengthwise on the lounge, whether she turned under him and drew him down on top of her, or whether it was a mutual action.
But while the kiss was at its sensual height, while her tongue was exploring the inside of his mouth and he could see her eyes half closed, filled with sensuality, they went from a half erect embrace to where she was on her back. One arm was over his shoulders, one hand behind his head. Her nails dug into the thick hair at the base of his skull.
The kiss ended. He raised his head slightly.
"Don't talk," she said brusquely.
Then her hands went down under his lapels and peeled off his jacket. He raised himself slightly, took the jacket from her and laid it on the coffee table". She loosened and slipped off his necktie. Then she unbuttoned his shirt. It followed the jacket:
Still she was not satisfied. She pulled his undershirt out from under his belt and peeled it off. Throwing the undershirt aside, she pushed him up and away from her until he was supporting himself on his elbows. She ran her hands over his chest and back.
"Beautiful," she murmured. "So smooth-so warm."
She pressed her hand against his back and brought him closer. He felt warm dampness on his chest.
"You taste good," she whispered. "Salty."
Larry wasn't thinking very clearly. He realized this, blamed it on the martinis and turned his attention back to things of the moment.
Wanda was wearing a skirt and sweater. He pulled the sweater out of the skirt and felt the satiny, warm skin of her belly under his hand. It heaved up against his fingers then pulled away sharply. His hand moved upward, hit the lower edge of her bra. She straightened and lifted her shoulders off the lounge. "Unhook it."
He reached around and fumbled with the hook. Her face was close to his, their eyes just inches apart. Her tongue flicked and licked his cheek.
"You're clumsy." I'm sorry.
The hook gave, she raised her arms over her head and waited as he peeled the sweater and bra off over her head. Her breasts were pale in the dimness, the brown nipples and nipple seats darkly glowing. He pressed his mouth against this dark glow, it was hot and strange and wonderful. He felt the rising of the nipple against his tongue, the pounding of her heart shook the flesh of the breast and was a rhythm that went down through his body.
Neither of them used words. What was in Wanda Cole's mind would never be known. Larry Krell's mind was a mass of confusion supercharged with a wild sweetness, a stirring of latent emotions he'd never known he had.
There was comparison of course. There had to be. The comparison of this experience with which had transpired between him and Fran in the long gone days of courtship and early marriage.
That, to Larry Krell had been sex-all of it-as sex was practiced between man and woman. He had been eager with Fran, and she had seemed eager too. But there had been a barrier-the barrier of decency and decorum and propriety. Oh, for God's sake, use any name you wanted for it; but it amounted to the woman holding the man off. Never let him get too close.
Let his hands find the boundaries, but never cross them.
Be as eager as he. But what he wants is in your custody, and it is not made to be given. It is made to be protected.
It is your ticket to a wedding ring and a home and children.
It is your ticket to respect. Give it to him and you lose his respect, you have nothing.
Let him know it will all be his after marriage....
Somehow he and Wanda had changed position. She was on top now. he was on his back under her. She was on her knees with her legs spread and her buttocks high and her face close to his, her dark eyes filled with sensual pleasure or the anticipation of sensual pleasure.
Her skirt was gone. She wore a half slip and a soft girdle that also held up her stockings, and a pair of panties over the girdle.
The slip was now pulled high around her belly. He touched its edge, and the tip of his finger was in her deep navel. It moved and seemed to grip at his finger like a sensuous mouth.
Her girdle and panties like one garment had been pushed back, halfway over her buttocks, in a quick reckless move he jerked them completely down.
She tilted her body and he strained the dual garment off one leg. She kicked and the stocking came off.
His hands went down her belly. But at the last moment as she waited, her belly muscles trembling, he veered away from the center and ran his palms down the inner sides of her thighs.
Her mouth was against his ear, and as her tongue touched its lobe she whispered, "Oh, my God, this isn't Wanda Cole! What has happened to Wanda?"
Suddenly his hands verged in. Her body jerked. Not expecting any departure from finesse, her eyes opened wide from the shock of the contact. Her head jerked back, her teeth clenched. Then she forced her body down hard against his hands.
When she spoke her words were a kind of ecstatic agony wrenched from her throat by intense need.
"Oh lover, lover-destroy me!"
And from some depth of his being there arose both the ability and the desire. His eyes changed. A whole life-time of careful, passionless living was wiped away in an instant.
The next half hour was never very clear in his mind. There were only symbolic impressions later: the heady glory of taking a woman like a slave; strange, new exquisite possibilities of the flesh; nerves long dormant springing into glowing life.
He touched a nerve center in her body. Her torso jerked and pressed down hard against him as though trying to smash him into the lounge.
"Hurt me! Oh, God, hurt me!"
Could they hear in the next apartment? He thought of ears glued to the wall, listening to Wanda's long, ecstatic moans.
Her body was slippery. In a rainbow-tinted rage, he turned her on her back, took her in a ravenus fury, with a savagery borrowed from some insane god on a lost Olympus, because it could not have been his own.
He knew she was going to scream, put his hand over her mouth and felt her teeth close on his finger. The pain was like a new ecstasy.
Her eyes opened. She was not languorous now, her eyes were wide open and bright as twin stars. Her mouth was formed into a gleaming crescent, pure savage delight drooling from its corners.
He buried his face in the pillow beside hers, but she seized him by the hair and jerked his head back until his neck was arched.
"I want to see your face, I want to watch your expression. I want to see your neck muscles tighten. Oh, my beautiful, beautiful animal."
She screamed out the last word and tore at his hair. He cursed her in the mad new heart he had acquired, wanted to tear loose and smash his head against her vampire-grinning mouth. But he could only punisK her savagely, smash the borres of her pelvis.
Destroy her.
It had an end. The raging flame could have a life expectancy of only a few thousand years, and those years came to an end.
And he lay there asking himself, Where are my clothes? How did I get naked?
Sweat pouring from their bodies make them slippery. He lay for a little while breathing in all the heady animal smells of her; odors arising from the igniting of fires that cooled slowly. A rich, intoxicating smell.
Her mouth was pressed against his cheek, and while she clung to him her hot breath poured out against his neck.
Then somewhere back in his mental pattern there came a flash of Fran slipping ashamed and guilty out of bed into the darkness, snatching her robe. Wanda Cole took his head in her hands and turned his face to hers.
"Open your mouth."
His mouth was already open, an exhaust for the bellows of his pumping lungs. He tried to turn his head away.
"No! No! Breathe in my face!" Her demand was feverish, hungry. "Breathe into my mouth. I want your breath! I want all of you! Oh, lover, give me everything! Everything!"
A time of silence passed. He closed his eyes and must have slept because he seemed to awaken.
Now she was wearing a different mask.
First he saw her breast, the brown nipple standing erect like a sentinal of love. Then the length of her naked body: the knees bent, the legs lazily, cynicaly open; the dark joining where trouseled womanhood sent its strange, mad message to the animal that had slept for so long in the depths of Lawrence Krell.
She ran a light hand over his shoulder. "Oh lord, but you're beautiful!"
This seemed backwards to him. It should have been the other way, the man always told the woman that she was beautiful. He didn't know quite how to answer her.
He knew what he should be doing; getting up, putting on his clothes, getting out of her apartment.
But he knew that he was not going to do this.
An odd, lightheadedness assailed him. "I'll bet you tell that to all the boys." Satisfactorily trite at a time when words seemed dangerous.
"Not me! You'd be surprised how few men have nice bodies. They're too fat or too skinny or too hairy." She stopped and ran the tip of her finger over his chest. "Your hair is golden."
He was embarrassed and wanted to change the subject. Searching for something to say, his mind went back to earlier conversations.
"You started to tell me about an Arabian, was it? A man you met in Paris."
"Over there every man is trying to make you. You sit in a sidewalk cafe, strike up a conversation, and in ten minutes the man wants to be your lover. Over there love is taken very frankly. They're not Puritans the way they are over here."
"So the Arabian propositioned you?"
"They're real salesmen. He told me what I was missing and I didn't know what to say." She turned her head, looked at Larry and asked. "Do you think I should have gone to his room for a sample?"
"I don't know. I don't know how attractive he was."
"Actually, I soon learned how to avoid them. I told them I already had a lover."
"Did you?"
The question stirred something in her memory. "You know," she said suddenly. "I'd like to be able to tell my grandchildren how I lost my virginity."
He wondered vaguely if he'd heard her right. Then he knew he had and there was the sensation of being in some Never-Never land where all was surprise; where nothing that was said or done followed logical processes.
"When I told Ralph that, he laughed."
"Who is Ralph?"
"Oh, a boy I know," she said carelessly.
"Why would you want to tell your grandchildren-"
"Because it was so beautiful, I guess. I was a virgin when I left for Europe. That moment was the high point of my life."
"I don't quite understand. What moment?"-"On the boat. I'd been to parties that sent off so many people to Europe, and I always had to get off. But this time I stayed on, and they got off. It was wonderful."
"And you met a boy on the boat?"
"Kevin. He was two years younger than I. He was going to Europe to study art. He had a rich father in Chicago and he was going to be an artist or a mechanic. Can you imagine?"
"Was he good?"
"I posed for him when we got to Paris. A man across the court watched me. I remember how cold it was, naked in the studio. I don't think he was very good."
"You stayed with Kevin while you were in Europe?"
"For a while. I wanted to go to Switzerland, though, and he didn't want to go. So I went alone."
"He didn't like it?"
"He told me if I slept with any of those Swiss men not to come back."
She was fascinating. The setting, the incident, this glimpse into a world of new people.
"Did you?"
Casually, as though without conscious thought, she was moving closer to him again. Her hand traveled slowly down his body, caressing it, playing gently with his loins and thighs.
"I was on a tour with fifteen tourists," she said with disgust in her voice. "What chance did I have?"
"Then you stayed with Kevin while you were in Europe?"
"No. He wanted to stay in Paris, I wanted to travel."-In one of those quick transitions he would grow to expect, she turned and looked into his face. "How many women have you slept with?"
Again he was embarrassed. When he hesitated, she said, "It must have been a lot. A man of the world like you."
In cold fact there had been two. A girl he knew in college, a night of unskilled yearning on the part of both of them that ended in shame-faced embarrassment. And Fran. But that wasn't his answer. Through whim and amusement, more than anything else, he replied:
"Oh, fifteen or twenty, I'd say."
She was amazed. "Why, that's awful! I'll bet you can't even remember some of their names."
"How about you?"
She didn't answer and he realized she was counting. "Six-in Europe," she said.
He laid his own hand casually on her breast. The nipple rose. "But that was only in Europe. How about over here?"
"I only slept with three."
"Did Kevin stay in Europe?"
This annoyed her. "Why do you keep harping on Kevin? He was just a boy I knew. When I told Ralph about him, he-"
Ralph again. This intrigued Larry, but he didn't comment. He said, "You referred to losing your virginity, and I assumed it was with Kevin. You lived in Paris with him."
"I did not live with him!"
She snapped the denial back sharply, as though he'd insulted her.
"I'm sorry. I thought you did."
"We had adjoining rooms." Her smile was faint and subtle. "Of course the door was always open, but I paid for my own room."
"Oh, I see."
"Kevin came back later."
"Did you sleep with him?"
"That was when I was still home. I stayed at Grace's that night."
Name and identities interested Larry. They seemed the only real identifications in this unreal picture. "Grace? Who is she?"
"A girl friend of mine. She went to Europe at the same time I did."
It occurred to Larry that Grace was the first and only female friend Wanda had ever mentioned. One girl. And, as closely as he could recall, at least twelve men during the time of their office conversations.
Strange, but he'd never realized that before, realized that during their conversations all subjects invariably channeled into one: Men.
Wanda Cole and men appeared to be synonymous.
"Anyhow," Wanda was saying, "I stayed at Grace's that night and Kevin stayed there too. We slept in the living room. He wanted to sleep with me, but he didn't appeal to me any longer.
Instinctively Larry felt sorry for Kevin.
"Did you like Grace?"
Her mouth was close to his, her lips brushed his lips as she replied. "She was all right." She suddenly flared, defensively: "Grace slept with more men than I did in Europe." She pondered this a moment. "And you slept with a lot more women."
It seemed to have become a kind of game in which you had to defend yourself. He hunted for a rebuttal, then said, "Okay, but I'm older. How long were you in Europe?"
"Six months."
"Six months. That's a man a month. You're twenty-nine. There are one hundred and twenty-months in the next ten years. That will give you another hundred and twenty men. That will put you way ahead of me."
It seemed to frighten her. "Good lord, that would make me a tramp!"
Her lips were touching his. Her hand found his body and her eyes widened in surprise. "My god," she murmured, "you're a superman!"
She writhed sensuously against him. The new, wild, heady feeling hit Larry again. But it was different now he was taking the initiative. His kiss was authoritative in the subtle sense of the male dominating. He sought out the delight of their contact, rather than lying negatively and letting it find him.
And at the height of their binding and clinging and joining, while a long moan of pure pleasure flowed from Wanda's throat, Larry thought of a strange thing-strange indeed at the moment.
He thought of Fran at the height of her passion, chastely whispering, "I love you, darling I love you."
And coincidentally, just at that moment Wanda hurled her mouth against his body and cried:
"Oh, lover! Oh, my beautiful lover! Destroy me! Destroy me....'"
CHAPTER THREE
The rain was coming down harder now.
The sky was darkening as evening began falling on a bleak, hopeless afternoon. Still he stood there, looking at the grave.
The two men had taken shovels and were dropping lumps of mud down onto the coffin. He wanted to go close to the grave and look down into it. But he would not see her.
There would be mud and water, and the pain of looking.
She was beneath the mud and the water and the pain; safe in the bronze casket with its white satin and soft silk pillow.
He was oblivious of the rain and the chill of the lowering evening, oblivious of everything but the pain.
And the unbelief that was dawning in his mind. It could not have happened.
But it had. So slowly, so insidiously. Like a man going to bed free, and awakening in chains.
Awakening too late.
He had awakened.
In chains?
He had awakened that morning....
Dawn creeping in the window stirred him to consciousness. He opened his eyes and his first thought was of wonder. Where was he? What was this place? What was he doing here?
Slight panic.
Then he remembered. He turned his head fearfully and found himself alone on the lounge. There were vague memories of tossing and turning and struggling for sleep on a bed too small for two people; of the body of the other person, a soft warm female body that was presented to him in various twistings and turnings; an intimate winding together of legs; his face pressed against warm damp flesh that was waiting to flare into passion at a touch.
Twice it had flared into passion, they had awakened to seek and take each other as though by instinct.
But now it was morning, and as he turned, the bathroom door opened. The room was dimly lit by the first rays of early dawn, and as he watched, Wanda Cole tiptoed out. She glanced toward the bed and could not see his half open eyes, only his lack of movement. Concluding that he was asleep, she moved softly past the bed toward a chest of drawers beyond.
He was partially covered or she might have embarrassed him into movement. As it was he watched her slim naked body move toward him, past him, and out of his range of vision.
Wanda Cole. She had many masks and two bodies. Her clothed body was unspectacular to the point of being dull; to a point where an objective observer would automatically pick out its flaws rather than its good points. The ankles too thin. The proportions of the torso such that a dress or even a sweater gave the vague appearance of a hunchback. The type of feet upon which shoes never looked quite right.
But naked, Wanda Cole was a kind of goddess. The seductive, magnificent hips blended with her ankles to make legs that were perfect sex symbols. Naked, you could see the breathtaking curves and shadowy pockets of her groins, where her belly, shaped down by some master sculptor of chance or heredity, blended and flowed into the V of jet-black puberty to make it a hidden mystery even when it could be seen. Blatant and almost grossly feminine, yet a place of dark and subtle shadows.
She tiptoed back into the bathroom.
The closing of the door was a trigger that brought Larry Krell sharply and miserably awake.
What the living hell was he doing here?
He came off the lounge like a released spring. Desperately, he gathered up his scattered clothing. The shower had been turned on in the bathroom so the sound of his dressing could not be heard. He worked switfly.
Sending up a silent prayer of thanksgiving, he turned the knob of the outer door and escaped into the hallway before the shower was turned off.
He hurried along 82nd Street feeling like a bum off the Bowery, sure that every passer-by was contemptuously censoring his unshaven beard and rumpled collar.
He finally waved down a cab. As he closed the door and gave the address of the Benning Hotel, he thought:
My God! Fran and the kids! What will they think? What have they done, called the police?
Guilt, self-recrimination and disgust washed over him like a flood.
The Benning was on Madison near 37th Street. He maintained a small office there for New York contacts-more of an apartment really, as he used it mainly for client contact. It was luxuriously furnished, with a bedroom because he loaned it on occasion to visiting prospects and contacts. He kept extra clothes there.
But never in the long years of his married life had he stayed away from home overnight.
As he stripped to shower and shave, he glanced fearfully at the telephone several times. But when he was buttoning the collar of a clean shirt, a reaction set in.
What the hell, why was he acting like a criminal who had robbed a bank? So he'd stayed out all night. So he hadn't called home. Was that something to crawl through the front gate on his hands and knees and ask forgiveness for? After all, he paid the bills in Larchmont. He supported his family, and he did a damn good job of it. What right had they to call him to account?
He adjusted his tie clasp and jerked himself up mentally. If he hadn't been so worn and tense, he would have laughed. But the reaction cleared the air, and when the phone rang he answered it casually.
"Larry, Are you all right? I was worried."
"Certainly I'm all right."
"But you didn't call. I-"
"I'm sorry, I should have called. But I got involved with a prospective client from the coast-"
"Oh, Larry. You won't have to go out there, will you?"
"No. As a matter-of-fact, I don't think I want the assignment."
"I'm glad." There was relief in Fran's voice. "Did you get any sleep, dear?"
"A short nap. How is Kathie?"
"Better. I think I'll send her to school tomorrow. Can you come home early?"
"I'll try."
"All right dear. I'll have a good dinner ready. Be sure and eat lunch...." He put the phone down and took a deep breath.
That hadn't been so bad. In fact it hadn't been bad at all.
As he headed for Willets & Company, he was struck by how casual Fran's acceptance of his night out had been. The first time in his life, and she said nothing about walking the floor-seeing him lying in the street somewhere. No concern?
Maybe he'd been a fool all these years. Maybe he should have-He charged such petty thinking to nerves rubbed raw from lack of sleep, and turned his mind to Wanda Cole.
What would he say to her? What would she say to him?
How would they face each other?
He would play it by ear, leave it up to her. Probably, he thought, the embarrassment was all on his side. Taking men home to her apartment no doubt was a pretty common practice with her. She would take the morning in stride.
She would probably bring him his coffee and say, "It was fun." And that would be the end of it.
Definitely the end of it, he told himself grimly....
There was no coffee on his desk when he got to his office half an hour late. He tied right into the job-ran over some adjustments and changes he wanted to suggest to Joe jr., methods of tightening up some report procedures in the accounting department. Then he dictated a couple of letters into his machine.
Still no coffee. Still no lazy, provocative black eyes peering in at him. He got briskly up from his desk and headed for the men's washroom. At the far end of the hall he had to pass Sam Taber's door. He paused, reached for the knob, then resolutely opened it and went inside.
Wanda Cole wasn't there.
Sam Taber turned from what he was doing. "Oh, good morning Larry ... How's the reconstruction going?"
"Plodding along." Larry took out a cigarette and used Sam's lighter on it. "Much trouble with Joe jr.?"
""We get along all right. He's a little stubborn on some points."
"He would be," Sam said.
It was a tribute to Larry Krell that the key executives of Willets would air their dislike of Joe jr. so openly. But Larry was not concerned with that, he was concerned with Wanda Cole.
"You seem to be without a secretary this morning."
Sam frowned at the empty desk. "She called in sick."
"She seems to be a nice kid," Larry said casually. Or at least he hoped it would sound casual. "Good worker?"
The frown remained. "All right, I guess. The girls around here don't like Wanda much but I guess it's not her fault."
"She seems like kind of a moody person."
"She's a little mixed up in her personal life, I think. A girl who makes friends out of queers-"
Larry wanted to dodge any further discussion of Wanda. "By the way, Sam. Will you have those figures I asked for before long?"
"Didn't you get them?"
"No, I don't think so."
"Dammit, they were ready yesterday. I gave them to Wanda to hand to you instead of sending them through interoffice."
"She must have forgotten."
"I'll dig through her desk and see if I can find them."
"Don't bother. Tomorrow will be fine. When she comes back...."
He sat behind his desk and debated. Should he call her? After all, he had sneaked out of her apartment like a thief. That certainly hadn't been a very nice way to thank her for her hospitality. He smiled swiftly and without humor. Not the right way at all. And what hospitality!
Of course he should call. Common courtesy.
He debated how to go about getting her phone number. In his role as reorganizer he had access to all records in the company, but he never rode rough-shod over anybody. He was careful not to ruffle egos.
It would be all right to go into personnel and run through the cards. That shouldn't excite anybody.
But first there was the telephone book. He opened it and found Wanda Cole on 82nd Street without any trouble at all. He dialed the number and her voice, cool, throaty, poised, came back over the wire.
"This is Larry Krell."
There was a pause and it flashed through his mind that she must be trying to recall the name. "Oh-yes. How are you?"
"Fine. I was just a little worried about you. Are you all right?"
"I'm fine." There was the sound of a yawn that distorted her next words. "I was sleepy, so I went back to bed."
He wanted to say something about his boorish flight, but while he was hunting the words she said, "I won't be in for three days-I think it will be about three days."
"Trouble?"
"No, a friend of mine wants a favor from me. You know-Ralph."
"Oh, I think you've mentioned his name."
The mysterious Ralph again. Who the hell was he? Then it dawned on Larry that aside from logical, casual interest, he didn't give a damn.
"I'm going to have to report in sick every day to do this favor," Wanda said. "You won't give me away will you?"
This angered him. A form of blackmail, what else? Already, she was imposing on a completely accidental incident. Perhaps a letter to Fran would be the next threat.
But then Wanda Cole speaking in a lazy, faintly mocking voice said, "Actually, I don't care one way or another. If Sam finds out, he can fire me." She paused. "Or you can fire me. You're the efficiency expert, aren't you?"
"Your relations with Sam Taber are out of my realm," he said stiffly. At the same time, he cursed himself for getting involved in this mess. God damn it, he was a decent family man. And here he was, dickering with a cheap little tart who'd slept with dozens of....
"I've got to hang up now, there's someone at the door."
"Goodbye."
The phone clicked with no answering farewell.
Larry leaned back in his chair and breathed a sigh of relief. When she came back he'd keep her at a distance. This extramarital nonsense was over so far as he was concerned.
Scowling, he forgot Wanda Cole and plunged into his job.
With one final thought. He wondered who had been at her door. The bed partner who was taking the day shift...?
A slow, deceptive process of involvement with no exact moment he could look back and say, That was when the trap was sprung.
As it worked out, the three days of Wanda's mysterious favor to the shadowy Ralph passed in due course. Wanda returned to her job. How she had covered it with Sam Taber, Larry did not know or care. Yet when she walked in on the fourth day and put his coffee on his desk, his first question was:
"Well, how did it work out?"
Perhaps Wanda's reply indicated that a rapport had already been set up. Because she knew exactly what he referred to and replied quickly:
"Fine. I had a friend call Sam every day and say I was still sick. I was scared to death that he would drop over to the apartment to check-he's been there a couple of times-but he didn't." She laughed. "If he did I guess I'd have had to hide Ralph under the bathtub."
Larry studied her as she tore open a packet and poured sugar in his coffee. She looked rested and refreshed, her dark eyes were glowing with a kind of contentment.
An annoyance stirred deep in Larry and an uninvited mental image of her thighs refused to fade even after she left.
Two weeks went by. The office routine remained unchanged. Coffee every morning, quick irregular visits during the day, with Larry neither encouraging nor discouraging them. He told himself that the incident was over. It had never been again referred to; a casual escapade, and it was finished.
But just a week later, seated in the smoker of the last train to Larchmont-the 2:10-he was asking himself why he'd let it happen a second time. There'd been no martini to blame, so he could only accuse himself.
Wanda had substituted literature for record albums...." It's a fascinating story. I started reading it around seven last night and couldn't put it down until four this morning."
"Sounds fascinating."
"Would you like to read it?"
"It would probably show up at home. We subscribe to the Book-of-the-Month Club."
She stirred his coffee and shook her head. "Not this one. It's not even for sale in this country. Not that it's dirty-well, not very-but it's awfully hard to get."
"Nice of you to offer me a chance to read it."
And that was all. Until Larry walked out of the office and met Wanda Cole in the lobby. She smiled and held up the pack of cigarettes she'd just bought. "My one vice," she smiled. "A pack a week."
They walked out into the street together.
"If you want that book," Wanda said, "why not swing around and pick it up on the way to your train?"
It was the way she said it, as though accusing him of not wanting it. This was his reaction as he said, "All right. We'll grab a cab here...."
The apartment hadn't changed. The same sparse furnishings, the same air of austere mystery. That was the only way he could describe the mood of the place.
Wanda slipped off her coat and laid it over a chair. Then she unbuttoned his coat. She moved inside it, put her arms around him and raised her face.
The kiss was a warm, sensual, greeting. It said, Hello, lover.-Where have you been?
Her mouth coming up to his; opening, her tongue reaching in to search intimately. Her body pressing; her hips grinding harder and harder against him; the lazy, exciting half-closing of her eyes.
An impression sequence, fully formed, flashed through Larry's mind. The quality a person takes on when they move into their element. Some women were natural cooks. In the drawing room, on the patio, in the rumpus room, they were colorless and obscure. But when they stepped into a kitchen, their personalities changed. They became confident and at ease. They were in their element.
That was the way of Wanda Cole in the arms of a man. She turned instantly from a rather drab, colorless person into a kind of magic.
Larry answered the kiss hungrily.
Wanda tilted her head back. She closed her eyes and sighed. "Oh, lover, it's been so long."
"It has been a long time," he answered huskily.
She ran a possessive hand over his cheek. "My beautiful man." He felt the quick inward pull of her belly, her pelvic bones pressing hard against him. A woman with a talent for love and nothing else. A woman whose every instinctive movement was an invitation to take her body.
She stepped back, the look of lazy delight aglow on her face.
"Undress me, lover."
Larry unbuttoned her blouse and removed it. She raised her arms high, he reached around and unhooked her bra, the dark gleam of her nipples invited him.
The skirt zipped on the side. It's sound was that of the snake in the garden of Eden to Larry Krell: a hiss that both warned and lured.
He pulled the skirt down and she stepped out of it. He reached now for the slip-a flashing red, purple and orange mixture that reminded him of crushed flowers, with the smell of Wanda Cole as their fragrance. Evil, gorgeous flowers, an evil, compelling odor that was of the mind and spirit as well as the body.
Wanda gestured his hands away with impatience and he looked up at her questioningly. It was only then that he realized he'd dropped to his knees.
Then he understood. He reached down and grasped her slightly spread knees. He held them loosely and moved his hands upward. She shivered as he touched the naked flesh of her thighs.
His own sensations as his hands played intimately with her body were not definable even in his own mind. Except perhaps in the knowing that he could not have turned away from what he had there in his grasp; not even if all he'd ever built were at stake.
And though he wasn't aware of the fact, it was at stake.
He pushed trembling fingers under the lower edges of the panties on either thigh. Wanda moved slowly backward and he followed her on his knees. Now she was close enough to the wall to use it for support. She spread her legs wider, spread her arms also and pressed her hands against the wall. Her head was thrown back, her mouth open in the feline manner-an expression in which her white teeth looked sharp and predatory.
"Oh lover, lover-" she breathed.
He said nothing and the intimacy of her, the warmth and wonder of what she offered his searching hands, held his whole attention.
Her body shivered and he realized with a fierce pleasure that he had caused the shiver. He repeated the accidental contact he'd found, and her hips jerked. She gritted her teeth and murmured, "You bastard! Oh, you bastard!"
But it was a term of savage endearment, not a curse.
He pressed his face against the flaming slip and breathed deeply. Then he withdrew his hands and pulled her panties down her legs.
There was something so obscene and lewd and beautiful in the way she now reacted. She pushed her belly and legs far forward and the contour of her nakedness under the slip was in itself the height of passionate nakedness.
With her eyes closed, her teeth tight together, she put her hands far down on her legs and began to straighten up, bringing the slip higher and higher.
Later all this-every slow seductive move-fell under Larry Krell's analysis and provided fuel for the misery and agony to come. Even now it impressed him as being beyond the physical. The hot, sweet reactions he was experiencing seemed to transcend the flesh and fix themselves like ecstatic daggers into the body of his spirit.
Slowly the slip came higher-inch by slow inch upward-off her gorgeous thighs. Higher, higher-exposing her navel, deep, dark and mysterious. Until she was holding the slip hard against her breasts.
Larry took a deep tortured breath and smashed his face hard into her flesh.
She cried out in pain, but her tight, gleaming expression showed that it was a form of delight. She pulled her teeth apart and forced out words:
"Oh God damn you, damn you! It's too late for that! I'm too far gone. Take me, damn you! Take me quick-"
He took her in a wild delirious frenzy that stunned him and turned him into something that he was not, but something he was fast learning to be.
It became a struggle rather than a mating-a battle in which they savagely wrested delight from each other like two animals fighting over the carcass of a kill in some multi-colored jungle.
Then it was over....
Aftermath: the pressed-together nakedness, the sweat, the searching after crumbs of the exploded delight with their tongues and hands, the post-climatic clinging as though both were afraid to face the angry gods of reality after a stolen trip into a poison paradise.
Then the brittle mask of sophisticated realism pulled on over the face of ecstasy.
Not after did Larry Krell acknowledge that this was a step toward ultimate surrender:
There is nothing ordinary about this. I'm not just finding something that run-of-the-mill philanderers experience every time they score with some woman. This is more than that. It's not just a good physical relationship, it's something more. But what...?
He didn't know. And at the moment, he didn't care.
They lay naked, tight together on the lounge, their breathing mingled. .
"You smell so wonderful." Her tongue licked out. "You taste so wonderful."
He kissed her.
She drew her lips back and said, "You're the first married man I ever slept with."
A reckless urge for vulgarity was behind his question. "Am I as good as single men?"
"Oh, God!" She used her hand to indicate what she was referring to and said, "I never did that before to any man."
She was lying, of course. He took this for granted, but said nothing. What would be the use in bringing that up? He asked, "Am I as good in bed as Ralph?"
She stiffened, her eyes blazed. "That's none of your business!"
And of course it wasn't. He was annoyed with himself for asking the question. Yet he refused to blame it entirely upon himself. If she hadn't brought up her past with men, if she hadn't originally opened the subject in its broadest sense, it would never have occurred to him to pry.
"Sorry. Of course you're right."
"You're better than Kevin was though," she said in a practical, matter-of-fact way that somehow made him think of Fran comparing one dry-cleaning establishment with another."
"Thank you."
"Oh, I don't see where that's any credit to you. After all, Kevin was only twenty-one years old. He hadn't had much experience. You're older. And you've been married."
The statement stirred faint hostilities in him, but he didn't know exactly why: enough hostility to make him ask: "How about your other men-outside Ralph? Do I stack up well there?"
She gave it honest thought before answering. "Situations are different," she said. "Like in a romantic garden, or on a beach, or-well, in a car after a date."
"You said you'd only slept with three men since you got back."
"That's right," she defended quickly.
Comparisons suddenly intrigued him. Obviously this was an area in which semantics were employed. "By sleeping with a man you mean-"
"Sex, what else?"
"But unless he stays all night, actually sleeps with you. it isn't sex?"
"That's silly. I think you're trying to make me out a tramp."
I'm doing nothing of the sort. I'm just asking-" Her look was sly, even as she moved a questing hand over his abdomen. "Why are you asking?"
"Because it's interesting, I suppose."
Whether she accepted this as sufficient reason, or whether she felt she had to make the somewhat coy gesture, he never knew. But she seemed satisfied.
"It all depends," she said.
"On what?"
"On a lot of things. On who your date is, whether you like him and want to be generous, or whether he's a bore and you feel hostile to him."
"What do you do with a date you feel hostile to?"
She smiled. "That's mean, but it's fun. You can get a man excited and then watch him writhe. Of course you have to know your man. You can't let some of them get past a certain point."
"I guess a girl has a tough time judging men."
"Oh, men are easy to handle. Sometimes you get into an unavoidable situation where the only way to get out is-
Larry's mood suddenly changed. 'My train," he said. "I've got to get out of here."
If he'd expected any objections from her, he was disappointed. She was silent while he got up and dressed, watching him inscrutably from the lounge. He tried to keep his eyes off her lazily posed, naked body.
As he knotted his tie, she smiled and said, "Hello, beautiful man."
His answering smile was quick and perfunctory. He said nothing as he slipped into his topcoat. She did not move from the lounge. As he went to the door, she turned slowly over on her belly so that her eyes could follow him. They were half-hooded and languorous and faintly mocking as he turned the knob, an expression that stirred more hostility.
He opened the door and turned. "Shall I leave it unlocked?"
"Why?"
"Skip it," he said brusquely.
Out in the street he kicked himself mentally for that last question. What right had he to show contempt for her? Wasn't he getting his share, along with all the other men?"
He hurried to the train to Larchmont ... The slow, closing of the trap.
There were a half dozen other sojourns to Wanda Cole's apartment over the next three months. They fell into a kind of routine. For the first time in his career, Larry began staying down late for conferences and various business obligations. Up to this time he had always handled his business affairs during business hours. Now it had become necessary to extend these activities into the evening. Twice, he was required to remain in the city overnight....
"... There's some trouble tying up that new contract. A West Coast principal is arguing over clauses. We're having dinner tonight and I may be pretty late, so I'll stay over."
"All right, dear. I'll miss you...."
Such wistful little statements annoyed him. Why should Fran miss him? Good lord, he'd only be gone for one night. Women were so damned possessive. Had Fran ever bothered to show her love in bed?
You just had to face it. Women demanded tthat marriages go their way. They had ways of enforcing their demands. They could make a man feel cheap and dirty if he tried to assert his sexual needs. Satisfying a husband in this respect was not a wife's obligation.
But let a man neglect any of his obligations to the home and family, and look out!
When frustrations of this nature hit Larry, he seemed to drift into a morass of unjust accusation and childish recriminations. And when this dawned on him consciously, he always pulled himself out of it promptly.
Just nerves, he would tell himself. This Willets thing was a tough job.
Then one day Wanda Cole, whose attendance on her job had been exemplary for many weeks, did not show up at work. When Larry discovered this his hand went automatically to the phone. But he pulled it back. Why should he call her? Why couldn't she call him and let him know?
At that instant, the phone rang.
"Larry?"
"Yes. How are you Wanda? Why aren't you down?"
He sensed the lazy, cat-like stretching at the other end of the phone. The contented, sensuous yawn blurred her answer. "I am just tired. I was awake all night."
"Anything wrong?"
"Oh no, I feel fine."
The annoyance. The indefinable feeling that no doubt was nothing more than a guilt complex. But it didn't rationalize that way. He saw Wanda mocking him. Sure of her body, sure of her hold on him. Content and triumphant in the knowledge that she had added him to her string of men.
"Why don't you drop over tonight, sweetie?"
His rebellion was an inarticulate one. While he searched for words of refusal, she said, "Do you realize this will be the first week-day in months we haven't seen each other? If you don't come over, that is."
"I have some work here," he said brusquely. "Perhaps I'll drop over around seven, on the way to the train."
"I'll be here, darling."
She hung up without saying goodbye.
The offices of Willets & Company cleared out early that afternoon. Larry pounded away at his desk and looked at his watch to discover that it was five-thirty. He wondered where the afternoon had gone.
He got up from his chair, stretched and went out into the hall. There was no sound of activity. He moved toward the washroom, and when he came to Sam Taber's office he opened the door. The office was empty.
He moved on in and went to Wanda Cole's desk. As he stood looking dwn at the empty chair, it somehow exuded the aura of her personality. If she were in it now, he would be looking down over her shoulder at the half-lengths of her expanding thighs that would show below her skirt.
He reached down and opened the middle drawer of her desk. A long, thick address book caught his eye. He picked it up and flipped through the pages. Every index section was generously filled with names.
He flicked through again. Then he dropped into Wanda Cole's chair and began to read.
Frowning slightly, completely immersed in what he was doing, oblivious of the moral aspects of prying into someone else's property, he began taking notes.
A little while later he summed up. There were three hundred and ten names in the address book. Fifty, he judged, had to do with business.
The rest seemed personal.
Of the balance, only four were feminine names. The rest were men.
Thirty, he noted, bore New York City addresses and telephone numbers. Most of these noted business phone, home phone, and in many cases apartment numbers.
Larry sat back and pondered. Wanda Cole had a very broad male acquaintanceship. Thirty in New York City alone. The rest were spread over Europe and the forty-eight states.
Of the names bearing New York addresses, many were vaguely familiar to Larry. Wanda, with her compulsion to turn all channels of conversation in one direction-toward men-had casually dropped many of the 50 names in accounts of relationships completely innocent to anyone listening objectively:...." The plane to Puerto Rico carried a group of travel agents. Can you imagine that on a ten day vacation! I got to chatting with one of them. He was very nice, he got me a better room at less money. His name was Fred Spence and he goes to Puerto Rico every year....
Who would care? Who would be interested in reading anything into that? It wouldn't matter-
-Except to a man like Larry Krell who was fast being hopelessly enmeshed in the chains of jealousy.
He put the address book back into the drawer and left the building. He stopped for a drink at the nearest bar and men pointed himself toward Grand Central.
But halfway there, he hailed a cab and gave Wanda Cole's address.
CHAPTER FOUR
Larry rang the bell and Wanda opened the door. When Larry entered a pleasant-faced young man of perhaps twenty-eight looked up from where he was sprawled in front of the hi-fi and smiled casually. "Ralph dropped in," Wanda said.
Larry wished that he had stayed away, but-it didn't seem to make a bit of difference to Ralph. He turned back to the copy he was reading off the back of an album. "The guy that wrote this knows music like I know the Einstein theory," he said.
Wanda slapped him affectionately and playfully on the shoulder. "Show-off," she said. "I want you to meet Larry Krell. He's reorganizing the salt mine where I work."
Ralph turned again, repeated his smile, and in answer to Larry's gesture raised a limp hand. Larry shook it and let go, and it dropped back to where it had beenlying gracefully on the floor beside the album.
Ralph wore a green, open-collar sport shirt, slacks that appeared to Larry to be a little too tight and dirty tennis shoes. His most arresting affectation, if it could be called that, were his square Benjamin Franklin glasses; black tortoise shell rectangles that gave him the appearance of peering through two small windows.
Larry sat down on the lounge. Ralph, back at his reading, fumbled a cigarette from the pack on the floor beside him. He put it between his lips. Instantly Wanda picked up the matches that had lain beside the pack, lit one and held it in front of his face. He drew on the cigarette without breaking the rhythmic sweep of his eyes.
Wanda dropped the match into an ash tray and leaned down to read over Ralph's shoulder. For thirty seconds there was total silence. Then she sprang guiltily to her feet and turned to Larry.
"Let me take your coat."
"No-no. I can't stay."
She frowned and was on the point of protesting when Ralph rolled over on his back and said, "I'm going to buy a new hi-fi. Instead of giving me a Christmas present this year, give me money."
Wanda seemed about to protest this too, but Ralph reached out and grabbed her playfully by the wrist. He pulled her down to her knees. She lost her balance and fell over him. He laughed and for a few moments they rolled back and forth before Wanda came free. She straightened to her knees and frowned at him.
"That's not like you," she said. "What do you mean? Mustn't touch?"
"Asking for money. You never did that sort of thing."
But Ralph was back reading his album.
Wanda got to her feet. "Can I get you a glass of sherry?"
Larry shook his head, attempted a smile. "No thanks. I must run along."
This did not please her. The sullen look came to her face.
Larry had never felt so out of place in his life, like a middle-aged philanderer trapped where he did not belong. What was he doing here? By what impossible chain of circumstance had he come into the same room with a young couple who had a complete understanding, a perfect working relationship? He was such an obvious intruder that his skin crawled and he was sure his face was beet red.
At that moment Larry Krell came to his senses. Disgusted with himself, he looked back to see how on earth this situation came about.
Logically he would have gotten up to leave, but Wanda had again turned her attention to Ralph and Larry would have had to interrupt in order to take his leave. They were discussing classical music and Wanda was lost in Ralph's explanation of the difference between an ordinary hi-fi set and the combination of electronic trickery he contemplated acquiring.
So Larry sat and looked at the wall and reassessed himself.
Ralph had a casual hand on Wanda's hip while they talked. She seemed unaware of it as the spirited conversation went on.
After a while, she glanced up at Larry and he used this moment to get to his feet and say, "I've got to run."
Ralph slapped the album shut. "Cripes. I'm half an hour late myself." He slapped Wanda on the hip as he scrambled to his feet. He threw Larry a brilliant smile on the way past him, was halfway out the door then glanced back and said, "Be seeing you, chick." And he was gone.
Wanda stared after him for a moment. Then she got to her feet and said, "Are you sure I can't get you a glass of sherry?"
"No thanks. I'll miss my train."
She sat down on the lounge, making no move to get his coat. He waited while she stared at the wall in a strange kind of abstraction Larry couldn't interpret.
"I'll get it," he said, and when she made no move to protest he moved toward the closet.
The closet was at the entrance to the bathroom, in a short passageway that cut him off momentarily from sight of the lounge. He got his coat and returned.
Wanda was lying full length on the lounge, her face buried in her arms. He stared at her for a few moments before he realized that she was crying.
"Wanda! What's the matter?"
"You! I saw your face. I know what you were thinking."
His first reaction was a question. He wondered how she'd seen this when she had scarcely looked at him the whole time Ralph was in the apartment.
"I don't understand you, Wanda."
"You think there's something between us."
Again the blind, frustrated anger. How did you reply to an accusation of believing the obvious?
"Wanda, that's not fair. It's none of my business your relations are with him-or with any other man."
She sat up and looked at him pleadingly through tear-filled eyes. "But it's not what you think. I've known Ralph a long time. He doesn't care what I do."
"Isn't that personal-between you and him?"
The embarrassment of all this made Larry's skin crawl. "It concerns you and me as long as you think what you're thinking."
"Good Lord! You can't criticize a man for the thoughts that come into his head. It's none of my business, but when you say there's nothing between you and Ralph you're insulting my intelligence. Don't be childish. After all, even though we might not be recognized as such, we are adults."
Her face worked desperately. "It's a unique relationship. There are things behind it. Ralph has problems which he's fighting."
"What problems?"
"I can't tell you!" she said furiously. "I just can't."
It was inevitable that his mind would hunt for an answer. All he had to go on was what he had seen, and what Wanda had revealed through the course of their conversations. These things, and a hazy idea of what a homosexual's struggle might be like.
By the superficial standard of observation, he had identified Ralph instantly as a homosexual. Admitting that he knew little about the subject, he granted many shades of the condition. To rationalize a picture to fit the circumstances, it was necessary for him to assume that certain of these unfortunates were on the border line where physical contact with a female might be classified as therapeutic-a cure for the condition.
Therefore in this logic structure, false or true, Wanda was the female helping Ralph fight the strange malady.
The fact that he certainly didn't care whom she slept with supported this theory. A man who has no sexual rapport with a woman certainly can't be jealous of the men she knows sexually.
The conclusion flashed full-blown into Larry's mind, the logic having been worked out in his subconscious during the awful half hour he'd spent sitting on the lounge.
But regardless of whether this was right or wrong, Ralph obviously looked on Wanda as his private property.
Larry shook himself mentally. What had she just said? Oh, yes. "Of course you can't tell me. I wouldn't listen if you did. I'm sure you haven't told Ralph about us."
A quick look of fright that she couldn't hide flashed across her face. "That's none of his business!"
"Of course it isn't."
Rage flared in her eyes. "Will you quit being so God damned logical?"
"How do you want me to be?"
Her hands went over her face again. "I don't know! I don't know!"
There was more to it than that. It wasn't just a confused girl crying out a protest. It was a triggering of much that had been patterned in Larry's mind concerning Wanda Cole. He knew that her problems were serious. Some inner festering had eaten deep and was gnawing at the delicate structures, and the disturbance was about to cause a mental breakdown.
"I think I'd better go, Wanda. We aren't getting anywhere." He smiled quickly and without humor. "Not that there's anywhere to get, really." He fumbled for something more to say, but could only repeat himself. "I think I'd better go."
A new mask shaped over her face. The anger and confusion faded. Her eyes and mouth and her whole being became a silent, eloquent plea as she reached out and took his hand. She stroked it gently and even her fingers were pleading tongues begging:
Please don't leave me!"
The reaction to their plea came from deep within Larry's mind:
My God! What's happening here?
Wanda took his hand, turned it over and placed a tender, yearning kiss in the palm.
"I won't hold you now. I know you want to go. But when I see you at the office, I'll have something to tell you."
He withdrew his hand and moved toward the door. Her eyes followed him, asking, clinging. He closed the door behind him, he went out into the street where he took a deep breath as he waved at a passing cab.
Something to tell him when she saw him again at the office....
But she didn't tell him anything. The next morning she appeared on schedule with his coffee. She tore open the sugar envelope, poured the sugar in and said, "I went to a concert last night."
"Did you enjoy it?"
"It was very good. A gay friend of mine called after you left. He had tickets to hear this young pianist and asked if I wanted to go. I threw on some clothes and we just made it."
Larry sipped the coffee. It occurred to him how strange it was that never in his life had he been ill at ease with any person except Wanda Cole.
Not ill at ease exactly, that wasn't quite the term. But always just a little on edge; always a shade tense, always hunting for something to say. That was the reason, he supposed, why they talked so much about her men. It was in this area that she gave him leads. To lead her into romantic reminiscences, he had only to pick up the first lead she gave him, ask a question or two, and then listen. Another question now and then kept her going indefinitely.
At such times he noticed a weird change in Wanda. After a few minutes of conversation she seemed actually to go back to the time and the place, to relive rather than relate the incident involved:
"It was on my trip to California that I really saw mountains. Have you ever been out there?"
"A couple of times. The Rockies can make you feel that you've never seen a mountain before in your life."
"We drove out, another girl and I, and we took our time."
"It must have been fun. Which way did you go?"
"The southern route, I guess they called it. The first night on the desert was weird."
Wanda stopped suddenly, her eyes filling with that strange abstract light. "I'll never forget that night at the ferry."
"Was there a ferry in the desert?"
"Oh, no. That was later. I was referring to the first night we used our camping equipment. We got the tent set up, and burned the bacon cooking supper, and then it got dark. Out on the desert in the dark-well, you can imagine."
"Pretty spooky?"
"Are you kidding? Coyotes yelping. Not a man, not a soul within miles. And were we inexperienced greenhorns!"
"How so?"
"Well, we'd heard it was hot on the desert. And it was. The car boiled a couple of times and we had to stop and cool it off. But at night-good lord! It went down to zero, I'll bet. And the two of us, shivering there in each other's arms without sense enough to get up and put our pajamas on."
That was one of Wanda's talents. She had a genius for innuendo, an ability to state something without actually saying it. As Larry grew more subjective, the habit became more maddening.
In the case of the first-night-in-the-desert incident, he'd become annoyed to the point of challenging her:
"Then you've tried Lesbianism, too."
Seemingly righteous indignation flared in her face. "Are you kidding?"
"You said, you lay there shivering in each other's arms without sense enough to get up and put your pajamas on."
Her eyes honestly questioned.
"So-?"
"So the natural question is, what were you doing naked in another girl's arms in the first place?"
Here eyes widened in amazement at the implication spelled out. "You think-! Oh, that's terrible! We were just scared, that's all. And like I told you, we thought it was going td be hot."
At such time Larry questioned the context of his own mind, so completely honest did Wanda's protestations seem to be. Was his thinking just plain dirty? Another thing: Was he so subjective about Wanda that he magnified and distorted every incident she related?
He gave this brutally fair consideration but even in his most desperate moments he conceded himself every right to believe what he believed.
But he always accepted her explanation.
"Oh, I see."
"Lesbianism, ugh. It turns my stomach.'"
Larry thought of some of the sex practices that he and Wanda had worked out. Two questions came into his mind in this connection: How could one woman's body mean so much to any man? How could elemental, animal instincts be aroused in him by Wanda Cole's body, when he was unable to respond in the same way to any other woman?
He tried to think objectively of making love to Fran the way he and Wanda made love. The thought was revolting. Yet with Wanda it seemed not only natural, but as inevitable as taking her in his arms. It was the compelling direction in which love-making automatically pushed them.
And it did not seem dirty or obscene.
Another question: Did Wanda feel the same way about other men? He could only believe that she did not, although he had no proof. Time after time in the midst of passion, upon initiating some new love-making technique, Wanda would moan, "Oh, God! I never did that before'"
Or after completion of a particularly elemental gambit, her face would show a touch of panic and she would cry, "Wanda Cole! What's happened to you? What are you turning onto?"
And her fright seemed sincere.
But Larry could not get rid of the feeling that these protestations fell into the same category as her first: Oh my God! This isn't Wanda Cole. What has happened to Wanda Cole?-a. guilt-salving defense she used in the course of the first physical contacts with a new man.
He could not suspend his belief-turn from what common sense told him-that Wanda had learned her love making from experts. That rather than he and she moving together into new sexual discoveries, she carefully led him stage by stage into completely uninhibited practices that she had been taught, and had found delightful.
But if he censured her for these practices, he would have been a hypocrite, because they delighted him too.
No, he thought, delight wasn't the word. They filled a need, assuaged a hunger he had never before felt. It was more than delight. It was a compulsion springing from the very depths of him-from the hidden, smoldering places within his being that morality, civilization, culture had sealed down tight in the human animal.
And the last question Wanda's expression of disgust generated: Why did she find disgusting-when she practiced with a female-the things she did with Larry in love making? In the dark would it have made any difference?
This question was clearly abstract because-and he realized this truth with an inner jolt-if she did practice Lesbianism, he was not the least jealous of her partner.
Wanda's eyes took on that look he'd begun to iden-nance. Now she said, "I only came close to that sort of thing once. And I didn't have the least idea the girl was that way."
Wanda's eyes took on that look he'd begun to identify and he knew she'd gone back; knew that a bridging remark or question would not be necessary. He had only to wait.
And while he waited, he wondered about the compulsion to talk to him about the sexual aspects of her past life. What did she represent to him? Certainly not a lover, even though they made love. The first instinct of a girl emotionally involved with a man is to hide from him any past she might have.
In this respect, Larry recalled with amusement, his efforts to pry a secret out of Fran: What had actually happened the night of a party when she'd gone off with another man into the garden, and stayed there until Larry went looking for her? That had been during their engagement, and his curiosity was more of a joke than otherwise because he knew Fran completely. In fact-he felt a little sorry for the other man as he visualized the difficulty involved in getting even a kiss from the beautiful girl who became his wife.
He had never been jealous of Fran.
But Wanda was another matter. Did he fill a father-need in her life? That didn't make sense. "What girl tells her father that she's been a thorough-going tramp?
Did she look on Larry as some kind of an enuch? That didn't hold water either.
It seemed an unanswerable question.
"... It was a girl who works at Willets," Wanda was saying. "I won't tell you her name. Honestly, you'd never suspect....
Larry had no desire whatever to know the girl's name.
"I went over to her apartment for the evening. It was a lovely place. We had dinner and were in the living room. She sat down beside me and kissed me."
The look of surprise that came up on Wanda's face. She stared at the wall and Larry felt sure she'd forgotten his presence. No revulsion, but no hint of passionate languor, either. More a kind of abstract surprise, Larry could visualize a Lesbian experiment being relived with all its new and tense effects upon her body.
Now revulsion did reappear on her face. "Ugh! It was awful! When I left the next morning I wanted to throw my arms around the first man I met! I was glad that she got only a kiss."
Again the stating without stating. Again the obvious unasked question in Larry's mind: You left the next morning. Did the kiss take all night?
But all this-his close analysis of everything Wanda said was so utterly unfair! What right had he to analyze? What claim did he have on her? What right had he to judge her in any manner whatever?
None.
Yet he analyzed.
Yet he kept on judging, then fighting the judgments with an effort at subjective suspension of belief.
Was he a masochist?
And such is the slow, insiduous trap into which a man can fall that Larry, while classifying Wanda endlessly and mercilessly, was not able to look at himself-at what he was doing, at the change coming over him.
He was blaming his sudden restlessness upon everything but its true cause....
CHAPTER FIVE
The rain continued. The two grave diggers went stoically on with their work. The brown lumps of wet mud thudded one after another down into the grave.
From where he stood he could now see the earth over her rising higher. Soon the grave would be refilled. Soon it would be over.
Over?
It would never be over. A future as empty and gray as that of a man moving toward the death house lay-before him. But this was even more terrible because there was no quick, sharp, clean end to it. His fate was that of a man moving always toward the death chair while carrying the death chair on his back.
The death chair of guilt and conscience which he had built himself, piece by piece.
Guilt-a black blanket formed from echoes of the past....
The past-Minute by guilty minute it paraded by. Word by guilty word ... Destroy me, lover! Oh my God, destroy me!
The words had come to have a meaning between them; a sort of slogan, the identification of their entanglement.
"It's only a smooth dating relationship," Wanda protested. "I told you the truth. I met him on a train when I was in Europe. We sat and talked all night. When he came over here, he looked me up."
"All right. I didn't complain about that. It's none of my business."
"The way you talk, you'd think it was. After all, Larry, you're a married man. I don't think you realize the anguish this has caused me."
"The anguish it's caused you?"
She squeezed her eyes shut and doubled her fists. "You're so selfish!" She opened her eyes and two tears rolled down her cheeks. "Do you realize what it means to a single girl-going around with a married man? Her reputation? I couldn't tell anyone about you. I can't tell my parents."
"Your parents! What do they matter to you? You've said they were always interfering with your life."
She was wearing the stricken mask. "A girl likes to be proud of the man she's going with."
"You're not proud of me?"
"You just don't understand. A girl has to be careful of what people think of her."
"Good God! When did you ever give a damn about what people think of you? Haven't you discussed your relationships with homosexuals in front of people at the office? Didn't you go to bed with a Lesbian who works there? Haven't you brought men home from the office to sleep with?"
Her eyes widened. "No man from the office has ever been in this apartment!"
"I've been here."
"You're different."
"Sam Taber's been here."
Wanda eyes fell. "Oh, Sam. He-well, he was here a couple of times. But I didn't sleep with him."
"That's a matter of semantics isn't it?"
"What do you mean?"
"A defensive phrasing. If a man goes home before morning he doesn't count, you haven't slept with him. It doesn't matter what happens before he goes home."
"Well, Sam took me to dinner."
"Then he brought you home and you repaid him."
Her anger was intense and real. "Don't you ever say that!" She sprang to her feet and pounded on his chest in a frenzy of anger. "Don't you ever call me a prostitute! Have I ever taken a dime from you?"
He had to concede that. "All right. To go back to this Vincent-this smooth date you met on a train in Europe, who looked you up the minute he got over here."
"He did not look me up the minute he got over here."
"That's right. An hour after he got off the boat your telephone rang. His willpower was tremendous."
"You're implying that he came over here to go to bed with me and that's why he called me. It's not true. He liked me as a person. We had a long, long conversation on the train."
"Can you tell me point blank you never made love to him in Europe?"
Wanda had lied to Larry several times. He'd caught her in lies. But oddly, in the realm of the men in her past and her relations with them she could not directly lie. She could answer defensively, she could try to mislead. But when called on for a direct answer, she had to speak the truth.
"Well, if you call holding hands and kissing a little making love-"
He smiled without humor. "Light petting?"
"Well, all right-"
This was a definition she'd given him earlier. Light petting was above the belt, heavy petting was down below. The objective of light petting was to tease or to invite a man and hold him off until later. Heavy petting had but one objective. A climax, mutual if possible.
"All right-what?"
"We did a little heavy petting. But it was an unavoidable situation. There were people in the car, if I'd protested there would have been a scene."
"So you had to sit there and take it. It must have been terrible."
"Terrible? I know how to handle men."
"Of course. Give them what they want."
"That's-not-true!" She punctuated each word with angry poundings against his chest.
"All right, all right! We'll concede that he liked you and wanted only your intellectual company. I'll admit your contention that he had no physical interest in you whatsoever."
"Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say that."
"He's the one you went to the beach with for the weekend, wasn't he?"
"Yes. But I paid my own way."
"And you didn't sleep with him then?"
"I told you-I've slept with him twice in the four years I've known him. That was one of the times."
"How many times have you dated him?"
"I can't even count them. Why should I?"
"So when you have a date he brings you home and leaves you at the door?"
"Of course not. I ask him in for coffee."
"But nothing happens."
"Larry, what right have you to ask these questions? Did I ever ask you what goes on between you and your wife?"
"And did I ever ask you what goes on between you and Ralph?"
"That's different. That's a unique relationship."
He dropped wearily down on the lounge. "You've no idea how unique the relationship between Fran and me has become...."
The relationship between Larry Krell and his wife had gone downhill.
Fran in bed beside him on sex night. He'd honestly striven to fulfill his obligation to her in this direction. By dint of pure determination he had carried through to the stereotyped end, but it had become harder and harder to keep up the masquerade.
Gradually the mild anticipation he had previously felt dwindled, as he was forced to compare it each time with the wild, hot, incredible thing that he had with Wanda.
Finally the inevitable happened. Fran's gentle, sterile efforts to rouse him had no result.
"Guess I'm tired, hon. Rough day at the office."
At first he sensed a relief in Fran, which may or may not have been there. Perhaps it was only wifely understanding.
"Of course, dear. You've been working too hard. Get a good night's sleep."
She would turn away, and he would stare at the ceiling wondering why on earth she didn't suspect the truth. The only reason he could think of was that he had always been so openly honest with her that she automatically believed his mounting lies and evasions.
"Things seem to get heavier and heavier. I always get home as early as I can. God knows I want to be with you and the kids."
And the strange truth was that he did. In the early stages of his affair with Wanda, he'd rigidly spent Saturday and Sunday at home. It had corresponded to his work week: five days on, two days off.
But one Friday afternoon he suddenly wondered what Wanda did on weekends. He'd never asked her, and she'd never told him. They had a drink at the station that day before he went home, and he brought the subject up.
"Saturday and Sunday? Oh, I see my friends. Ralph may drop in or I might get invited to a party."
"You get invited to a lot of parties, don't you?"
"Not very many." She put on the hurt mask. "After all, you're having fun with your family. You wouldn't want me to sit home in my lonely apartment, would you?"
Fat chance of that, he thought. "Of course not."
"We do have our code, darling."
Their code. It had been worked out one brave night over cocktails.
"I wouldn't want you to forsake your friends-even your men friends, Wanda. That wouldn't be fair."
"You do have your wife and children. I have nobody."
"Of course."
So that was the way it was formulated and ordained to be.
But it didn't quite work out that way.
The first major crisis came on a Monday morning, as the result of certain occurrences at the end of the previous week.
Larry stayed over on the Thursday night of that week. He held Wanda in his arms, and as their naked bodies pressed together she whispered, "Oh, lover! It's been so long!"
It had been four days, to be exact.
Larry, his sexual powers in respect to Wanda appearing to increase with each contact, felt a rising surge of need and desire and hunger that drove him to her like a ravening animal.
She grasped his hair and pulled his head high. Her eyes were wide and blazing and her Circe's mouth was a crescent of crimson lips and white teeth. She cried, "Your face! Your face! I want to see your beautiful face while you're doing that to me!"
His neck arched and the blood pounded like hot wine through his veins as strength ripped and screamed for release.
Her mouth was wet and hot on his ear, her tongue a frantic red snake.
"Destroy me, lover! Oh, my God, destroy me!"
Viciously, insanely, he tried to destroy her and to destroy himself as well.
The shuddering climax, and suddenly she was weeping hysterically in his arms. "Oh, lover! It was never like that before. Something new happened. I can't find words...." then they went to sleep.
She cried for a while as he held her tenderly, and....
The next day she left work at noon to visit her dentist. Larry did not expect to see her again until Monday morning.
But as he walked toward his train at Grand Central that afternoon, Wanda was waiting for him.
"What on earth are you doing here, darling?"
Her eyes were starry. "I had to see you before you went home. I just had to."
"Is anything wrong?"
"No, I just had to see you. Can I ride part way with you?'
"I suppose so." The idea was so sudden. The thought occurred to him that friends might-"
"Tell you what we'll do, I'll catch a later train. Come on, we'll go have a drink."
At the table in the cocktail lounge her eyes were still starry. "It was just-oh, I don't know, darling. As though I really surrendered to you last night."
"You were wonderful."
"And now you're going home to sleep with your wife, and I'll be here all alone-"
Larry was vaguely uneasy. References to Fran were coming more often. This new development bothered him.
"I'll be back Monday, hon. We'll go to a show and then have dinner."
"Wonderful!" Her eyes glowed. "My beautiful man! You are beautiful, you know."
"Sure. A regular Greek god."
"Don't laugh, it's true. Your body is so smooth and powerful. You are beautiful."
He glanced at his watch. "I'd better get the next train, darling."
"I'll walk to the car with you."
"All right."
They left the cocktail lounge and started across the waiting room of Grand Central. He stopped at the cigarette counter for a fresh pack, laid a dollar on the counter. A young man passing nearby stopped dead as he caught sight of Wanda. He turned and came straight toward them.
"Why, hello there."
Wanda's face froze. "Hello," she muttered vaguely, and turned away from him.
The clerk handed Larry his change. Wanda moved on ahead toward the train, and Larry followed. When they were halfway across the train shed he asked, "Who on earth was that?"
"Just a boy I used to go to school with. Come on, darling, you'll miss your train."
They went through the entrance gate and Wanda stopped. "Goodbye, dear. I'll be waiting for you on Monday."
He was surprised. "Didn't you want to walk-?"
"You go ahead. You're late, I'd only hold you back."
Larry moved down the ramp. As he passed the first car he turned.
Wanda was gone.
That had been on Thursday. The following Monday morning she was not at work. She had become increasingly lax so far as her job was concerned. Sam Taber was getting more and more annoyed. Perhaps he'd had a casual love bout with Wanda-curiosity as to the potential of an older man?-but he didn't consider it grounds for slack work on her part.
But Larry, as soon as he discovered her absence, picked up the phone.
The lazy cat yawn distorting her words. "Good morning, Larry. Have a nice week end?"
"Okay. But how about you? Anything wrong?"
"No. I just couldn't make it out of bed this morning, so I decided to sleep. I give Sam his money's worth on that job."
So subjective had Larry become that he instantly questioned the statement. Did she mean at the office, or at home on the lounge? He drove the thought from his mind.
"Larry, why don't you drop over and have a cup of coffee with me? Then I'll ride back with you in a cab. You can drop me a block from the office."
"I do want to see you."
Her voice turned seductively teasing. "I know what you want. I just don't know how to wrap it up."
This was another facet of the relationship that had changed, showing how tightly he'd become enmeshed in possessive jealousy.
After they'd begun to know each other, Wanda's conversation had become rife with jokes, references, innuendoes and cleverly risque bon mots. These Larry had enjoyed. Also she imparted a great deal of information bearing on sex-the most intimate details of homosexual love.
All in all, her conversation revealed a broad, deep, intimate knowledge of all things sexual. But Larry took this objectively, classified it as knowledge common to all sophisticated young career women in Manhattan. He defended it in his own mind with the assertion that in today's broad-minded world a girl could not be a prude.
But this changed. As the ties that bound him to Wanda strengthened, he began to doubt and to ask himself painful questions. You had to be on pretty intimate terms with a homosexual to be told some of the things Wanda knew.
"But darling, why is that so strange? I know gay people, what's wrong with that? I go to their parties because I'm interested in them psychologically. They talk to me, they trust me."
"Is that so? The thing you told me about Willard."
Willard was a gay friend whose name had been dropped dozens of times, so many times that Larry had a pretty complete picture of the contact.
Willard originally had been a friend of Ralph. A young, talented homosexual, he and Wanda spent a great deal of time together. He still visited her, although Larry had never met him.
The thing Larry had referred to was an account of why Willard was going to the hospital. An operation of a highly intimate nature, which Wanda had described in minutest detail.
"What thing about Willard?"
"His trouble."
"What about his trouble?"
"You described it to me."
"So-"
"I'm wondering how he could have been so graphic, how he was able to communicate with you so completely-"
The horrified mask. "You think I looked!"
"Of course you looked."
"He told me! A man can tell you something, can't he?"
Yes, Larry's jealousy-poisoned mind screamed. A man can tell you. He can describe in minutest detail the filthy love-act between himself and another man. He can degrade a girl viciously by imparting lawd' details, because, he knows the girl is cheap and contemptible in the first place.
He visualized Fran slapping a homosexual's face if he'd even dared to introduce such a conversation.
Yes, a man can tell you....
"But Willard didn't, and you know it. You lived with him, didn't you? You slept with him."
"I did not!" Wanda screamed.
"You said he used to stay overnight."
"But that isn't sleeping with him. I slept on this side. He pulled the other half of the bed over there, and slept on that side."
In the midst of these tirades, Larry would claw suddenly at his own mind. Why was he doing this? How did he invariably get involved with Wanda in these stupid, childish charges and accusations? What difference did it make? What difference if she actually experimented sexually with Willard, tried to find out if he could respond to a woman? He was sure she had witnessed homosexual love as a spectator.
In an attempt to analyze the nature of his emotions in these things, he had questioned his own hostilities to Wanda in the realm of homosexual contacts.
And he decided that it was a device of his own to avoid dwelling on the contacts that brought more than hostility, that brought pure jealousy-anguish.
The mental pictures of Wanda in the arms of normal men.
Yet some deadly fascination forced him to view these also. The ferry incident....
"The tire went flat just as we got to this river in Arkansas. We had a spare, but it was flat too. We were certainly lucky that there were men around."
"Men?"
"This other car. In the first place, the ferry was on the other side of the river and it had broken down. The man over there yelled across that we would have to wait until morning. We were awfully disappointed. Especially when this car with the three men in it drove up. My girl friend was a little scared."
"But you weren't scared?"
"They turned out to be very nice. They fixed our tire for us."
"You camped there that night?"
"There was nothing else to do. They camped too. One of them was very nice-or I thought so."
Larry watched the transition he'd grown to know-Wanda's move from the present into the past.
"You thought?"
"He invited us to dinner and wouldn't let us do a thing. It was a good dinner, too. This man was a little older than the other two-about thirty-eight or nine, I guess. I took a walk down the river with him after dinner."
Back in his helpless mind, Larry wondered and marveled at the compulsion that forced Wanda to recount her experiences with men. What was the drive behind it? A self-destruction complex? A deep, hidden need to degrade herself?
"That was when you found he wasn't quite a gentleman?"
The lowering of the eyes, the odd slanting look. "The bastard!"
"What happened?"
"Oh, I guess it was my fault for getting into that position."
"What position?"
"I'm not going to tell you what happened!"
"All right. But you brought it up."
She didn't seem to hear his retort. She was still back at the ferry.
"He was a pretty fast talker, I guess. He told me how he'd helped another girl to a climax once, and then before it-well, there was nothing I could do. I was in an untenable position. Afterwards he laughed at me.
The bastard."
"What happened?"
"I think men like that are sick, I really do. Just sick. We went on the next morning. But when I met him again in Los Angeles, I showed him that I wasn't that kind of a girl."
"You made a date with him later?"
"Yes, and he didn't get to first base. He found out I wasn't that kind of a girl."
"Good God! He knew you were that kind of a girl from the first time, didn't he?"
"How can you say that, when you don't know what happened?"
"You just told me what happened. He talked you into something you started and didn't want to finish. He made you finish it. He treated you like a tramp, and you made another date with him."
"But in Los Angeles I met another man who-" Wanda stopped. Her eyes widened. "Oh, my God, that did make me a tramp, didn't it?" She stared at the wall as though stunned by the realization. Her shoulders drooped. "My father would throw me out of the house if he knew!"
"You don't plan to tell your father, do you?" Larry spoke sarcastically, even while trying to hide the bitterness and pain of self-flagelation.
"Do you think I'm crazy? Tell Dad? Good God!"
"Not that crazy."
He was seated on the lounge. Suddenly she dropped to her knees before him. "Larry! You don't respect me!"
He gritted his teeth tight together, felt like getting up and kicking a hole through the wall.
"How can you ask a thing like that?"
"Because I've told you all these things about myself."
"But darling, all girls have innocent little escapades."
The mask of child-like innocence. "Is that true?"
"Of course it's true."
Good God, was she really serious? Had she actually asked that question in honesty? Frustration whipped around in his mind like a high pressure hose torn loose from its moorings. Why? Why did he sit here and-?
Wanda's face was pressed against his thigh. He reached down and ran his hand lightly over her silky hair.
"Oh, Larry, when you touch me that way, I know everything is all right."
He glanced at his watch as he struggled back to reality, back to this time and place. It was almost noon.
Since he'd entered the door, three hours had flashed by.
She came up into his arms and he kissed her. The need, the hunger, flamed up, but he pushed it from his consciousness. "We've killed the whole morning. I've got to get back."
"Oh, good lord. Sam will be furious. I'll get dressed."
She ran into the bathroom, the practical young career girl now. Even her voice changed with this particular mask. It hardened a little.
Larry lit a cigarette. "By the way," he said, "You shouldn't have snubbed that boy in the station Friday night."
"I didn't. When I left you I met him again by the information counter."
"You mean you'd made a date with him?"
Wanda came from the bathroom. She stood at the entrance pulling on her panties. "No, I just happened to meet him again."
Unbidden, the recollection came into Larry's mind. Wanda rushing back to catch the boy before he got away. He said nothing.
She picked up her bra. "That was why I slept all day Saturday."
Larry looked up, frowning. "Because you met this boy again Friday night at the information counter?"
"No. But we had a cup of coffee, got to talking. One thing led to another, and I spent the night with him."
A core tightened inside Larry. He got up from the lounge, walked to the door and opened it.
Wanda pulled her dress down over her. head. "Aren't you going to wait for me?"
"No."
She was completely mystified. "Why not?"
Larry spoke carefully, slowly, distinctly. "I'll spell it out for you, darling. We spent last Thursday night together. You surrendered to me, if you'll recall. It was so precious and important that you had to come to the station to tell me about it-then you couldn't get rid of me fast enough to get to another boy you'd passed on the way to my train. You spent Friday night with him."
She stood transfixed in amazement.
He said, "Darling, you surrender to too goddam many men without even a breather in between. I'm stepping out. You move too fast for me."
"You think I slept with him? I didn't! I told you we had coffee! We went to the Village and I showed him a coffee shop. We talked. Then we went to another coffee shop. We went to several, and then about eight o'clock Saturday morning we bought some rolls and came here."
"And had coffee no doubt!"
"Yes!"
"I don't believe you. I think you're a liar!"
He slammed the door. Striding down the street toward Fifth Avenue, he breathed like a man who had been recently strangled.
CHAPTER SIX
The grave was now filled and mounded over. The men put their shovels down and started bringing the flowers back from the truck.
Why had they done that? Why had they put the flowers in the truck while filling the grave, only to take them out again to put them on the grave?
He pondered the question bleakly; a respite for his mind, an inconsequential to hide behind for a few brief moments.
The men paid no more attention to him. He supposed that in the business of digging and filling graves they were used to seeing people do strange things, things like standing in the rain staring at a pile of flowers.
They heaped the flowers expertly with a minimum of effort. They knew their business, those two grave diggers.
They knew their business a lot better, he hoped, than he'd known his. Their obligation was to the dead, to place flowers carefully; his obligation was to his family, to his own decency, to his own self-respect.
To his children....
"I wanted to ask you how to do it, but you don't get home much anymore."
Billy was a boy with a fine, alert mind. He had beautiful dark eyes, like his mother's. His fingers were long and artistic. Larry noticed them as Billy turned the wing of the plane over.
"It says the struts are supposed to go here, but-"
"I think maybe the struts are a little out of line. If you bend that one a little and open the hole more with a pin, it will probably go in."
Billy went at it very carefully and the strut went in. But his mind wasn't on it. Keeping his eyes glued to his work, he said, "how come things have changed so, Dad?"
"Have they changed?"
"You know what I mean. You used to come home every night. Now it's got so that-"
"My business is getting bigger, son."
Lying to his own child. Guilt swept him, but he'd lied so much lately that the sting was hardly noticeable through the shell he'd built around his conscience.
Why? So often, lately, he'd been questioning his every move. It was quite natural, he supposed; the environment he'd moved into, the people he'd met.
Ralph was under psychiatric therapy. Margaret, Wanda's sister, went regularly twice a week. Three of Wanda's friends that she'd mentioned and God knew how many more. Talk about crazy, mixed-up lives-
"Maybe we don't need as much money as you think," Billy said.
"Son, everybody needs money."
"What for Dad? Why so much that you can never be home with us anymore?"
"Well, there's insurance for one thing-money to take care of you when I'm dead and gone."
"But we don't care about money for then. What about now? Isn't today important?"
Why couldn't they understand? he asked himself desperately. Didn't they know his obligation was to support them? To give them more? Didn't they know how much money it took these days?
He shivered inwardly. God! He was beginning to lie even to himself. He'd started to believe his own falsehood. Maybe he needed psychiatric help. Maybe he needed someone to tell him why a situation that had been so perfect and so fulfilling, a few short months ago, had become a trap-a dull-gray, bleak prison he could not bear to stay in even Saturdays and Sundays anymore?
Perhaps someone could explain why the pull and magnetism of an ordinary-looking girl, as erratic as a ball of mercury, could fill his every waking thought? The physical relationship? He honestly doubted it. That was the core, the key and without it he knew there would be nothing. But this he was certain he could have walked away from.
It was more: an intricate, bewildering, complex set of emotions that had grown up in his mind like a mass of toadstools in a dark basement.
It was easy to destroy the whole trap with the axe of intellectual logic. Comparing Wanda Cole with Fran should have been enough. Fran was as solid as a rock. He never knew which face Wanda would be wearing when he next saw her. Fran's love for him was deep and genuine, as much a part of her as her glowing beauty. Put them side by side, and Wanda Cole faded into insignificance.
If any fair-minded, objective person had looked into the situation, made the comparison, weighed the advantages on both sides, he would regard Larry as out of his mind. What was there in Wanda Cole that could even begin to compare with what he was giving up for her?
Giving up?
Actually, he'd given up nothing. What was the true situation, really? Was this insinuation of giving up a subconscous admission that things could not go on this way? That he was going to have to choose between his family and Wanda-and that he already knew what his choice would be? Perhaps.
He'd tried several times to break it off, and not succeeded. That day he stormed out of her apartment. The first time it had been "over"....
... He'd gone back to his office that day and worked straight through with a single-minded fanaticism that blocked out the world.
In controlled inner rage and self-disgust, he tried to cleanse himself in his job.
There was something else, too. The certainty that he could do it. The whole tawdry affair had been a disgrace. It was entirely logical that he should come to his senses, and he certainly had.
He paid no attention to time, driving on and on. When he finally broke the sequence of his labors, he glanced at his watch.
It was nine-thirty.
He went out into the hall. The offices were all deserted. He went toward the washroom, turned instead into Sam Taber's office.
Wanda had not come to work. She had not been there and gone. Had that been the case, she would have formed an excuse to visit him. Probably she'd called up Ralph, and they were lying in bed together laughing at the old sucker who'd stormed out in such high indignation.
He jammed a hand into his pockets and his fingers struck something hard.
Keys.
He stood looking down at them. Wanda had given them to him a month earlier, but he'd never used them. He wondered bitterly how many other sets were spread around town.
He went into the washroom and got ready to leave. He thought for a moment of calling Fran, telling her to pile the kids on the train and come down for dinner.
No, it was too late for that. He'd head home, the kids would be in bed, he and Fran would raid the refrigerator. He'd make it all up to them, by God!
Down in the street he waved down a cab and gave Grand Central station.
But a block away his fingers hit the keys again. "Change that, will you? Make the turn and take me up to Eighty-Second Street."
He gave the number and sat back grimly. There would be a satisfaction in handing her the keys. No doubt there would be a man there, and that would be an added satisfaction. Leaving, and visualizing her trying to explain it to the other one.
With Wanda, the most important man in her life was the one she happened to be with at the moment.
The cab jerked to a stop at a light, and Larry's mind jerked at the same time.
Why am I so hostile toward her? She hasn't been untrue to me. There was never any promise of fidelity involved. We both knew the score.
And all of it had not been bad, either. There'd been some good days. The day they went to the Frick museum and then walked back down through Central Park. She'd been a wonderful companion that day. An educated young Manhattan sophisticate; a smart young career girl any man would be proud of.
Actually, he told himself, he wasn't hostile to Wanda at all. She was what she was. She had her own problems. He had his. And that was that.
Of course he wouldn't humiliate her. If Ralph was there he would be polite. He would see that she got the keys privately, when he was leaving. Because this was the end. To show her there were no hard feelings, he might even drink a glass of sherry if she offered it.
He paid the driver and went in to punch the bell.
But a lady with her dog came out at just that moment, so he held the door for her and then went on in. He raised his knuckles to knock, then paused to listen. The doors in the building were thin and you could hear ordinary voices.
There were none.
He knocked.
There was no response.
He knocked again but already his disappointment was keen. He'd expected her to be home. He debated a moment, then decided to go in and leave the keys.
He unlocked the door and pushed it open. The apartment was dark. It had not occurred to him that Wanda might be in bed with someone and he cursed himself for not taking that as a possibility; this when, by the light from the hall, he saw that someone was on the lounge under a blanket.
He stopped ready to back away.
"Larry."
"Yes."
"You've come back."
"I came to bring-"
"Larry-I'm cold-"
He could tell that she'd been crying. He closed the door and fumbled for the lamp.
She was huddled under a blanket and her face was turned toward him. It was tear-stained. Her eyes were puffed and swollen-as thought she'd been beaten. Her hair was matted and gnarled.
"Larry-you left me-now you've come back."
"Wanda. What on earth?"
"I was afraid. I though you'd left me for good! I didn't know what to do! I've been so cold-so cold. Larry-lover-warm me!"
He walked around the lounge and her arms went out to him like the arms of a child. He drew her to him. She clung, sobbing: "Oh, lover! Lover! I've been lying here and I just couldn't see the future without you."
"Darling! Stop crying. It's all right! I'm here!" She raised her swollen eyes. "I must look a fright."
"You look wonderful."
"Honest, darling. That's all there was to it. We stayed out all night and then I asked him in for breakfast. I didn't even kiss him when he left."
"Darling! Stop! You don't have to account to me."
"But I do! I do! You have to believe me."
'I do believe you." He stroked her hair.
She lowered her eyes and turned and the angular Mona Lisa smile glowed.
And he thought, Not beautiful? She's the most beautiful thing on earth!
"I must look a sight."
"Stop saying that."
Her mouth found his. It opened hungrily, sensuously. She turned her head in a kind of quivering ecstasy, rubbing her open mouth across his cheek. He felt her wet tongue.
"Oh, lover-you taste so good."
And even in the old fire of need that was rising in him, he had a new feeling about her-one he'd never had before.
The paradox of Wanda as a lover.
So completely uninhibited and sensual.
Yet so totally innocent. She made animal love with the innocence of a child.
She unbuttoned his shirt and slipped her hand in around him. "Oh, you're so warm. Lie down and warm me, lover."
She had taken off the dress but she still wore her bra and panties. He laid her down on the bed. She twisted around.
"Unhook it."
He took off the bra and laid her down and knelt on the floor beside her. He put his hand on her belly and pushed it lower, under her panties. Her head went back and her eyes closed in delight at the contact.
"Your hand! Your wonderful hand."
Her legs opened. His hand went down around her body and his finger came out under the panties on her back. He took off the panties in this manner, pulling them down with his arm from between her legs.
She lay waiting.
"Undress, lover! Undress!"
He stropped as he looked down at her, seeing her in a glow as she lay there in the darkness; a love-symbol for which he could find no definition-a need made into flesh-the answer to a compulsion that poured like molten lava through his veins.
By force of will, he came gently down to her. He ran his hands slowly over her body, savoring the electric contact and the tense trembling of her body under his touch. "Oh, lover-lover-"
He laid gentle fingers on her face along her quivering eye lids, down her cheeks. Her lips were soft, pliable. He outlined them with his finger tip; then he drew them apart. Her mouth opened and his fingers went in to touch the roof of her mouth.
Slowly, her teeth tightened on his finger; harder; harder. Her eyes opened and she drew his head down close so that she could look into his face, and as her sharp teeth clamped down with all the force of her jaws, she avidly studied his expression of pain. Her eyes brightened as she saw the pain reflected, her own expression one of fierce satisfaction.
The pain became sharper and sharper. The muscles of his whole body tightened against it. He gritted his teeth and threw his head back. With one supreme effort that twisted his whole body, she released her grip and pulled his face down to hers.
"Oh, lover-lover. You're so beautiful in pain. Your neck! The muscles go hard like an animal under torture!"
She pulled her mouth hard across his. "Larry! Sometime make me do something I don't want to do! Make me do it, Larry-something you think of that you want! Make me do it!"
He thought: My God! What is there left? What depths of physical contact have we not explored. How can I make her do things she does so willingly?
This was a kind of madness. This was danger. This was a slow poison of ecstasy that was consuming them in a joint fire. There was both fear and savage delight and these two forces battled within him.
With a choked cry, he attacked her; savagely he tore open her thighs and functioned like a lynch mob hammering a battering ram at a locked door.
"She cried out and clawed at him in instinctive self-defense. Also in the grip of the ecstatic madness, she drove her teeth into his neck. With his free hand, he seized her hair and jerked her head back so that her teeth could not reach him.
She squeezed her eyes tight shut. Her lips came back in a snarl off clenched teeth. He watched her pain image and tried to heighten it.
But in a few moment she was clinging to him, driving against him; straining toward the now-accomplished penetration:
"Destroy me! Oh, lover-destroy me!...."
... Again it was over. Exhausted, they clung to each other.
He stayed that night, not even bothering to call Larchmont. They slept fitfully, tangled in each other's arms. During these interludes, of exhaustion, he tried several times to turn away to a more comfortable position. Each time, instantly, her arms and her body sought him out and pulled him back; sighing in contentment when their mouths were again locked together, when her breath and his breath mingled and became one breath jointly giving them life.
But these were only spaces between; moments of exhausted rest. Each time he awoke he attacked her savagely-again and again. Her moans continued through the night.
When dawn drew near there was a moment when he took her tenderly in his arms and whispered, "I love you, Wanda."
Her eyes were half open, she was not asleep. But she did not answer him. As dawn broke, they slept.
Larry went home to Larchmont early Tuesday night. As he came up the front walk after paying off the cab, he saw Billy engaged in his eternal building-working with some thin plywood sticks on the floor of the patio.
"Hi, son."
"Hi, Dad."
Larry swung around and stopped in front of the French doors. "What are you making?"
Billy seemed ill at ease-embarrassed. "Oh, just fussing. I haven't decided yet."
"Need any help?"
"I guess not."
Larry went on inside, acutely aware of the tension, the new state of affairs in the Krell household.
So Daddy stayed away for the night, his raw ego growled. That's loo had.
But logic still functioned in the background. Common sense coldly stated that this new atmosphere was a milestone in the progressive deterioration of his family relations. A change had solidified and was now a permanent condition.
He found Fran in the kitchen, transferring a plant to a larger pot. "Hello, dear?"
"Hello Fran. Sorry I didn't get a chance to phone."
Fran pulled off her gloves and regarded him with neither hostility nor warmth. Her expression was hard to interpret. Larry wasn't in the mood for puzzles, so he ignored it.
"Are you hungry? Would you care for a snack?"
"No, I'll wait for dinner."
"It will be quite a while. You're early."
"All right, I'm early. Can't a man come home to his own house without-oh, hell!"
"Without what, Larry?"
"Skip it."
"Would you like a drink?"
"No. I'm going to take a shower and relax for a while. New York City gets a man down. T can take only so much."
"I could bring a drink up to you later."
"No, I'll take a nap."
Fran went back to her work. Larry paused awkwardly for a few moments, then went upstairs.
The house, the surroundings blended in with his mood-bleak, gray restlessness. Strange, he thought, how a forty-thousand-dollar Larchmont home, furnished tastefully with no expense spared, could look drab and boring in contrast to an honestly bleak, sparsely-furnished, one-room apartment.
Strange how an ordinary, almost homely girl could glow to the point of completely obscuring Fran's classic beauty.
But most terrifying of all, how could a man walk past his unhappy son because he had nothing to say to him?
Larry sat down on the edge of the bed and doubled his fists. He straightened up, leaned back on the heels of his hands and stared at the ceiling.
After a while he lifted one hand and looked at it. The hand was damp. He angled his eyes over and saw that it had been braced on Fran's pillow. The pillow was damp. He picked it up. This was a large wet spot in the center.
He sat for some time holding the pillow, looking into space. Then he put it back, went in and took his shower.
The evening passed quietly. There was little conversation. At times, Lam' felt like lashing out:
All right, say it. Get it over with. I'm a had husband and a bad father. Let's get it out into the open.
But nobody did.
Kathie was a blessing as she prattled on about teenage trivia, completely oblivious of any tension in the air. That was Kathie, still a child, and they used her as a foil to fence off reality. Laughing with her, desperately trying to keep it light.
Larry roamed the yard and the flower garden for a while after dinner, then went straight up to bed.
He'd dozed off grimly driving a vision of Wanda's glowing face from his mind, fell into a deep sleep.
Then a touch awoke him.
He lay still, not moving, and realized Fran was in bed beside him. He didn't understand her actions for a moment. Then he realized she was making love to him. She had unbuttoned his pajama top and was using her hands with all the skill she possessed.
He lay there feeling trapped. If his reaction could have been defined with one word, that word would have been horror.
Horror with a touch of panic.
Her questing hand slipped down below the elastic of his waist band. It quested with gentle desperation.
He wanted to cry out: Stop it! Stop it! It's too late! There's nothing there! You're being obscene! Stop it!
But he took the easy way. He lay perfectly still.
After a while Fran stopped trying. A quiet sob signalled the end of her hope. She got out of bed, snatched up her robe and fled.
Larry lay there rigid for a long time. Sleep was gone. It would not return.
He cursed, took a cigarette from the night table and lit it with a vicious lashing of his thumb at the lever of the lighter.
Then he had to know where she had gone, what she was doing. He jerked on his robe and went downstairs.
She was sitting on the lounge looking out the French windows onto the patio.
Larry yawned. "I couldn't sleep either," he said. "I guess it's one of those nights."
"I guess so."
She was like a stranger. He wanted desperately to slide down close to her, take her hands in his and explain to her, make her understand that he didn't want to hurt her. He loved his kids and he didn't want to hurt them. He wanted the best for everybody. He wanted to plead with her to understand.
He went to the window, looked out and said, "The lawn should be resodded down there by the old hitching rack. I guess it doesn't get enough sun."
"Maybe one of the elms should come down."
"I wonder how much it would cost?"
"I don't know. There are telephone and light wires there."
"We'd probably have to get permission from the town."
"I suppose so."
His cigarette was getting very short. Another drag and he would be smoking the filter. He watched the last glow die from its tip. Then he raised his eyes, doubled his fist and wanted to put it through the paneled glass in front of him.
The glass would slash his hand, that might bring relief.
"Larry. There's something I'd like to talk to you about."
"Yes, I guess we should have a talk." God. Here it was. Here, after all these weeks, it finally was. He waited. "I've been very tired lately."
"I can understand. This place is a chore to keep up. Two growing kids-"
"Larry, I-"
He couldn't face it. Having come head-on into it, he knew he was not ready to discuss the injustice he was doing her. He could not stand up in court and face the indictment.
"God, Fran. I'm dog tired. Let's not go into it now. Let me get clear of a few things, get my head back on my shoulders."
He did not wait for her answer. Dropping his dead cigarette butt on the carpet, he lunged toward the stairs.
When he got to the bedroom he closed the door and stood there leaning against the knob. He lit another cigarette, snubbed it out immediately and threw himself on the bed.
He slept.
When he awoke, dawn was just breaking through. He had not moved.
Fran had not returned to the bedroom.
He was not in the least tired. He felt fresh, alert, rested, filled with force and power.
But as he showered and shaved, he realized the vitality upon which he was riding did not come from reliable sources. The feeling of being rested was not the result of sleep's normal rebuilding.
While potent and exhilerating, it sprang from a treacherous source. It was not to be trusted.
Still it could be used. He adjusted the jacket on his shoulders with a snap and walked briskly into the hall.
Then his mood changed subtly. Standing motionless for a few moments, he tiptoed into Billy's room. He stood by the bed, looked down at his son, and had no name for the mixed emotion that ran through him. He extended a hand, but drew it back as Billy stirred.
He repeated this rite in Kathie's room. He reached down and stroked her dark head, felt the warm, soft hair under his fingers.
Then he stooped, kissed her and left quickly.
Fran was asleep on the lounge where he'd left her. He pondered the fragile beauty of her tired face; his eyes dwelt in the deep shadows beneath her closed lids; the tired, sensitive mouth....
A few minutes later he was striding down the street toward the station. He looked like a well-turned-out executive, hurrying off to keep an early appointment.
The tragedy element was invisible.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The grave diggers had finished their work. They stacked their shovels under the canopy and got into the truck. But one of them climbed out a few moments later and approached Larry.
"Don't you think you ought to go home now, Mr. Krell?"
"In a little while."
"If you stepped in under the canopy, you could keep dry."
"Thanks."
But he did not move as the lights of the truck went on and it turned off down the lane. At the far end of the cemetery it turned to head for the gate, and its lights picked him out.
He threw a long shadow, but as the truck came closer the shadow grew shorter along with the shadows of all the monuments. And as the truck passed him he could have been a monument himself, so still, so completely motionless there in the mournful rain.
There was no point in this; nothing could be gained by his waiting there beside the grave. Nothing would change. He was keeping no vigil that would benefit anyone not even himself.
Still he could not leave. There was nowhere to go.
No, that was not true. There was something to go to.
The coming years of his life.
But the rain and the dark seemed a shield against them. Walking out the front gate would be the end of something that had already ended.
A final end in a series of ends.
But endings had always been beginnings on the downward path he'd taken....
There had been another ending a week after Wanda stayed out all night with the boy she met in the station....
Larry met one of Wanda's girl friends that week. A novel experience indeed. He also met Willard for the first time.
Wanda came into his office shortly after lunch wearing her bright, excited mask.
"Joyce is coming in from California!"
"That's great. Who's Joyce?"
"A girl I went to school with. She's so sweet, so innocent, so-Well, she'd been sheltered by a doting mother."
Wanda put her opinion of such mothers into the tone of her voice.
"What's she doing in New York?"
"She's going to Europe for a month. Oh, gosh how I envy her! She'll be here four days."
"When's she due?"
"Tomorrow morning. I want to get a man for her. It's time she blossomed out. I'm sure she's still a virgin. And at twenty-five!"
"Probably "the only one in existence. Fortunately you've got plenty of men for her."
Wanda's look of anger was superficial. "She can't have any of mine. I can't spare any.""
"Suppose we take her out to dinner? That is, unless you'd rather go out with her alone."
"Would you do that, Larry?"
"Why not? But if she's the way you say she is, we'd better not tell her I'm married."
"We won't have to say anything about that."
Wanda opened the door and looked out into the hall. She closed it quickly, came around Larry's desk and kissed him. "Thanks, lover," she said, and hurried back to her own office.
Joyce arrived the next morning, and Wanda brought her into Larry's office. She was a quietly pretty, dark-haired girl whose background was revealed in her manner and bearing. Quiet, shy, trying to hide her excitement.
"I'm taking the rest of the day off," Wanda said. "Joyce has some shopping to do and I've got to help her find the right clothes."
Wanda was the efficient New York career girl now, the Manhattan sophisticate, and it was easy to see that she was almost a goddess in Joyce's eyes.
Larry grinned. "Want me to cover you with Sam?"
"I can take care of Sam. You just be at the apartment about six. You can get acquainted with Joyce and we'll have cocktails before we go out."
Wanda was playing the sophisticate to the hilt and Larry could see that he had become a part of the picture she was creating. He was cast in the role of the mysterious older man.
He arrived at the apartment a little after six with a bottle of scotch.
Wanda was bright and glowing and gay as a child. She wore a pair of purple slacks that seemed moulded to her magnificent thighs. Joyce's eyes followed her everywhere.
Wanda poured scotch on the rocks and said, "We've got forty minutes. I made a reservation at 21. Larry is taking us out, Joyce, we want you to have fun." She glanced at her watch. "It's for eight. We must be sure and leave on time."
Her air was completely patronizing. It wasn't difficult to see that she did not consider Joyce competition in any sense. She looked her ex-school mate over critically.
"I called Blake, a friend of mine who works in a travel agency. He's coming over tomorrow night to lay out a complete itinerary for you. I met Blake in Europe when I was over there. Later he came here to work and looked me up."
Larry wondered how many of the men she'd met in Europe had looked Wanda up in the States; and how many had gotten what they'd come after.
"It's so wonderful of you, Wanda." Joyce's eyes turned starry. "My, but you look wonderful. A career girl's life certainly agrees with you."
"I'm going to see that you're not lonesome in Europe, either. I'm writing friends I met over there to be on the lookout for you-when you arrive there."
"But you're doing so much, Wanda."
"Baby," Wanda protested affectionately. "What are friends for?"
Ten minutes later, while Joyce was in the bathroom, the phone rang. Wanda answered it.
"Oh, hello, Willard." She listened a while and then said, "Okay. But you'd better hurry."
She put the phone down and turned to Larry. "Willard wants .to come over. You don't mind do you, darling?"
So long as Willard was already on the way, Larry didn't see that it made any difference. "Of course not."
Willard arrived fifteen minutes later. He sprawled wearily on the lounge as Wanda made the introductions. He raised a hand, both times in a tired gesture. "It's just too much, pet," he said, directing his words at Wanda. "That store is killing me."
She was sympathetic. "Poor baby. Is your uncle riding you again."
"It's poison, absolutely poison! I work my fingers to the bone for that man, and what thanks do I get?"
"Why don't you quit?"
"And starve? Please, angel-!"
Wanda set her glass down and headed for the bathroom. "I'll make you a drink right away," she said, half-closing the door behind her.
Willard got to his feet and followed her. He went inside. Larry heard him say, "Angel, when you go down to the Village again and see Dominique, will you please-"
The door closed.
Joyce stared in wonder. Embarrassed, Larry glanced at his watch. They were scheduled to leave in ten minutes.
He smiled at Joyce. "I imagine you're excited about your trip."
Relieved at the break in the silence, she turned to him and smiled. He could see now that she was much prettier than he'd thought. The dull, mouse-like quality came from lack of grooming. A little expert attention, and Joyce would have been a real beauty.
"I'm so thrilled, I can hardly sleep."
"A little scared too?"
"A little, maybe. But when a girl has a friend like Wanda, there's nothing to really be afraid of. She's so sweet. Writing people in Europe to meet me!"
"With the itinerary her travel agency friend lays out, you shouldn't have much trouble."
Larry was curious as to why a "doting" mother would let a daughter go to Europe alone. Then he realized Joyce was twenty-five years old. She was no longer a child. Going had probably been her idea.
Larry looked at his watch. They were now five minutes late. He looked at the bathroom door. It showed no sign of opening.
He inquired as to Joyce's background. She worked in a law office in Los Angeles. Also she was not greatly impressed by Hollywood, would give a great deal to have a job in Manhattan and an apartment on the upper east side.
"It's the most wonderful city in the world!"
"Wait until you see Paris and Rome and London," Larry smiled. "Maybe you'll change your mind."
They discussed the United Nations.
Joyce thought it would be nice to join the Peace Corps.
Larry looked at his watch. They'were twenty minutes late.
He told Joyce what little he knew about Greenwich Village and suggested she ask Wanda to take her down there during her stay.
Joyce thought that would be great.
Larry looked at his watch. They were thirty-five minutes late.
His lips stiffened, he got to his feet. "Come on," he said. "We're going to 21."
"But-" Joyce gestured helplessly toward the bathroom.
"Never mind them. We're leaving."
"But don't you think-"
"I think it's getting late."
Overpowered by Larry's grim insistence, Joyce allowed herself to be piloted out into the hall. Larry slammed the door.
He had just ushered Joyce out of the narrow foyer when the door to Wanda's apartment flew open. "Larry! Where are you going?" Larry turned. "We made reservations to take Joyce to dinner, remember? I decided it was time to go."
"But-"
He followed Joyce into the street and waved down a passing cab.
It wasn't the pleasantest evening he'd ever spent. He made a great effort to be a good host, to entertain Joyce, but she sensed his anger and wasn't much help.
He managed to keep the conversation going and after a few drinks, things went a little easier.
Later, when Joyce saw the size of the check, her eyes widened in amazement. "Is this where you and Wanda dine all the time?"
Larry laughed. Joyce was remarkably naive for her age, and for having lived in a city. He attributed this to a protected home upbringing and let it go at that. Actually, he couldn't have cared less.
They got home at one-thirty. Larry rang the bell. The door opened, Wanda was wearing her sullen mask.
I'll at ease, Joyce did not take off her coat. "I think I really ought to get back to the hotel," she said. She looked uncertainly at Larry. "It was a lovely evening. Thank you."
Wanda's eyes did not leave Larry's face. "I'll call you," she said, speaking obviously to Joyce. The words sound more like beat it than what they said.
"I'll take you to a cab," Larry said.
He put Joyce in a cab and returned to the apartment. Wanda, making like a sullen child, sat on the lounge staring at the wall. "I hope you had a good time."
"A delightful time."
"Did you make her?"
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"Well, you certainly wanted to be alone with her."
"I sensed the same thing about you. You were in such a hurry to be alone with Willard that you took him into the bathroom."
"I didn't. He followed me in."
"And closed the door."
"So what? It wasn't as if I'd gone into the bathroom with a man. He's gay"
"So you tell me."
"Don't you believe me?"
"No."
Her eyes widened. "You're jealous! You're jealous of a gay boy. Oh, my God!"
His face darkened with anger. He could not find words. Wanda gave him the side-long look, her smile faintly vicious. She came close to him and carressed his face with a sensuous palm. "Poor, jealous baby."
Anger turned to rage in Larry and the rage took over. He seized her wrist and twisted it sharply. She cried out in pain and went to her knees.
"Larry! You're hurting me."
"You lied to me about Willard, didn't you!"
"No. I didn't!"
"You lied! All you ever have on your mind is sex. Every time you look at a man on the street you're wondering what it would be like to go to bed with him, aren't you?"
"No. No, Larry. That isn't true."
He held her arm rigid against her struggles. With a final twisting effort to get free, Wanda cowered there on her knees. She looked appealingly into his face. She was frightened for the first time since she'd known him because now he was different. Before, his anger had been explosive. But now he did not raise his voice as he made his accusations. He spoke slowly and softly and distinctly. She had never seen this man before.
'You're a tramp, Wanda. A grade-A tramp!"
"I'm not!"
"And you're a liar on top of it. You lied to me about Willard, and about your other relations with those characters. Didn't you?"
"No, I didn't! Please, Larry. You're hurting me."
"I'll hurt you more. I'll-"
Wanda's eyes changed now. Her own anger asserted itself.
"Damn you, leave me alone! I'm not afraid of you."
"You lied to me, didn't you? You're a pushover for every man you met!"
"I'll never be a pushover for you again, you can bet your life on that. I wouldn't touch you with gloves on."
"Is that so?"
"Yes, that's so!"
He gripped her blouse by its neck and jerked it The blouse ripped like paper. He tore it off her in strips. She was fighting him now, tears of rage in her eyes. He smiled in contempt as he took her bra in his fist, snapped the hook with a single twisting jerk. Then he reached down and took the band of her slacks in a vise-like grip, his knuckles punching deep in her navel. Still grinning, he lifted her by this handle. Cursing and flailing, she hung there in space.
The zipper gave and she fell out of the slacks as they tore. Her feet were entangled in the legs, and as she tried to fight loose Larry calmly stripped off most of his own clothing.
As he moved toward her she was still prone on the floor. She came to her hands and knees, crouched warily. "Oh no, you don't. You don't rape me, mister."
He said nothing. One downward lunge and he had her by the wrists.
She twisted and fought. "God damn you! God damn you-"
He threw her to the floor, knocking the breath from her body. Then, as though he'd done this sort of thing all his life, he proceeded to rape her.
As he lowered himself to the floor, he kept his grip on her wrists. She was cool now, no panic. Her eyes were narrowed and her lips drawn back off her teeth.
"You SOB!"
"Is that what you said to all your lovers?"
He toyed with her. Her strength nonexistent beside his, he lay with his thighs across hers. She kicked her near leg loose and tried to use it to inflict punishment on him, but it only nailed helplessly in the air.
Then she lifted her far leg and he locked it hard between his thighs, high up.
Suddenly she realized she was trapped. Her fight to get loose became a frenzy. Sweat poured from her face, her curses came in gasps.
As he took her she stopped fighting, stared down at herself as though she couldn't believe this to be possible, could not believe she was trapped and helpless.
"Why, you're raping me-!"
He did not have to exert much energy because of the unique leverage that he had achieved. Wanda continued to struggle. "You're just doing it to yourself," he taunted.
"What do you want?"
"What every other man wants from you. You give it to them. I have to take it away from you."
"God damn you!" She lay back, panting. "I want more than I'm getting, though."
"What else do you want?"
"The truth!"
A look of fright flashed in her eyes. "I told you the truth."
"You lied. What were you and Willard doing in the bathroom?"
"That was completely innocent. He had a fight with a friend of his. Somebody you don't know."
"You lie!"
"I'm not lying!" She bent her head far backward as she began to react to his attentions. Her body quivered, she closed her eyes and gripped her lower lip with her teeth.
"Oh, God-"
"Go on talking," Larry gritted, his own breath com ing heavy now.
"There's nothing to talk about. I wouldn't admit there was anything there even if there were. But there isn't. He had a fight with this friend. Dominique wanted him to-"
"I don't give a damn what went on between your little queer and Dominique. I'm interested in what went on between you two."
"Nothing. He wouldn't do what Dominique wanted, and he got thrown out. He wants me to make peace for him so he can go back."
"That's the truth?"
Wanda didn't answer. She was not being raped now. In the throes of delight, her arms were loose in Larry's grip. She heaved her body up to meet his and her eyes went wide as ecstasy gripped her. In a desperate effort to heighten the pure delight of what he brought her, she raised her upper body and tried to reach his face with hers. She extended her tongue toward him in a mute plea.
His own face was cold. He was in a peculiar state of sexual preparedness, yet remained far from the climax usually sought after.
With a final lunge Wanda moaned in pure ecstasy. Then her body went limp.
But Larry did not stop. Coldly, mechanically, he went on with what he was doing.
"No, lover, stop a while. I can't take any more."
"A while ago you said, 'That was completely innocent.' You put inflection on the that. Obviously, some other situation wasn't. Tell me the truth. You've had sex relations with Willard and with others of his kind, haven't you?"
And at the same time, Larry asked himself why this knowledge had become such a mania with him. From whence had sprung this compulsion to know the truth? An escape? Did he subconsciously know that if he could be certain Wanda had been intimate with men of that type, it would revolt him to the point where she would no longer attract him?
This was merely a thought flashing through the sane part of his mind as he tortured her there on the apartment floor.
"I asked you a question. Answer me." Wanda was writhing in discomfort now as ravaged nerves whined protest through her body.
"I won't tell you!"
"You will tell me!"
"It wasn't anything. I had a few drinks one night was all."
"That wasn't all."
"Larry, please-I can't stand it."
"Then tell the truth?"
"All right. I tried, but it didn't do any good. I let him see me with my clothes off. I thought I'd be helping him. Please, stop! Oh God! I can't stand it!"
Larry lessened the ordeal he was putting her through, eased upon the activity that was causing her a kind of agony.
"That's what you did for Ralph too, wasn't it?"
"Ralph is different."
"In what way?"
"He isn't naturally-Willard's kind. It happened to him because of-he had a trauma."
"Then that favor was to sleep with him."
"He came here and stayed. I tried to help him."
"A three-day sex binge. That was a real favor."
He had stopped torturing her. She lay still, locked there in his grip. He pulled his hand hard across his eyes and took a deep, sobbing breath. He loosened his grip on Wanda's thigh. He pushed her leg off his and rolled away.
Wanda lay motionless, her eyes closed. Only her breasts rose and fell as she breathed. Her arms were outstretched, lax on the carpet, her legs spread wide apart. At times her belly heaved spasmodically in reaction to the punishment she'd taken.
Larry lay with his back to her, on his side. His chest was heaving. The muscles of his legs quivered from weariness. Where in God's name, he wondered vaguely, had he gotten the strength to do that? What devil's well of vitality had been opened to him? His mind hazed over. He slept.
How long, he didn't know, but when he awoke and turned over, Wanda still hadn't moved. He straightened to a sitting position and looked at her.
There was a sense of weary defeat within him because nothing had changed. If that had been the idea behind torturing those admissions from her, it had failed.
"Larry."
"Yes?"
"What about your wife?"
"What about her?"
"Do you sleep with her?"
"That's none, of your business."
"You made me tell you what I do."
"I don't sleep with her anymore."
"Why not?"
"I don't know. I just don't know."
"Was she-good in bed?"
"That's none of your business."
"Larry-"
"Yes?"
"Am I better?"
He sat there naked with his face resting in his open hands. He said nothing for a long time. Then he answered wearily, like a man who had just become resigned to a fatal disease.
"Yes, you're better."
"Is that why you don't sleep with her any more?"
"I guess so."
Wanda lay silent for a while. Her eyes were open now and she seemed lost in thought. She smiled lazily. "I'm better than she is." The words were a whisper and were not spoken to Larry. She was congratulating herself.
"Larry-"
"Yes."
"Will you divorce her and marry me?"
"No."
"Why not? You said I was better than she is in bed."
"Is that all you think there is to marriage?"
"I'd be as good a wife as she is in the other things. I can cook. I'd like to live in your house in Larchmont."
There was a vicious whip in his voice as he said: "It wouldn't be like that. I'd leave the house to Fran and my children. We'd live in a kitchenette here in Manhattan. That would be all I could afford."
"That wouldn't be fair," Wanda pouted.
"Why not, darling," he retorted acidly. "All we care about is each other."
"Yes, but I'm entitled to as much as she got."
Passion was rising in him. Even as he looked, her body began to take on that allure that had been his downfall. The pure animal glory of her as she lay there exposed to him. The magnificent thighs opened to reveal the magic that was as potent to him as when he'd first taken her.
Why doesn't it wear off? Why don't I come to my senses?
He crawled over and looked down into her face. Her eyes were half open, her lips parted, raised at the corners. She turned her head, the slanted Mona Lisa smile threw mystery into her face and made it beautiful.
She raised her arms.
"Lover, I'm ready again...."
With a cry of hopelessness, he plunged down to her. She winced from the pain of the violent contact but the smile did not leave her face. She stared at the ceiling, her eyes became eloquent banners glorifying her triumph. Her arms went around him. She caught her lower lip in her teeth and her eyes now rolled upward as she sucked breath in with a hissing sound. She lunged her torso up to meet him, and moaned.
"Oh, lover, destroy me. Destroy me...."
He took her as savagely as though he hadn't had her in days. And it was as though she had been without a man for an infinite time. They ravened at each other with their mouths and clawed with their nails as their bodies hammered brutally toward the engulfing ecstasy that was always new.
Wanda screamed as she reached climax.
"Lover-Oh, lover!"
He kissed her with a tenderness he hadn't shown for a long time. "You will divorce her and marry me, won't you?" He disengaged himself gently and got to his feet. "No," he said.
His quiet, firm tone threw her off balance. Her lazy, languorous mood evaporated. When she opened her eyes they were clear and alert.
"But you said-"
He was dressing. "Do you think I'm crazy?" She sat up. "Larry, lover-"
"Tell me, did you ever break off a male relationship in your life?"
"I don't understand?"
"Did you ever in your life-even when the man at the ferry degraded you like an animal-did you ever break a relationship with a man? Look him in the eye and say, 'I don't want to see you again. I don't want you to call me?"
"It never became necessary."
"Of course not. Nor expedient. All those names in your address book at the office-"
"You looked in my address book!" It was an accusation of deepest shame.
"Yes. I looked in your address book. Who were all those men?"
"Business addresses. A secretary has to keep track of the people her boss-"
"Does Sam need home phones and apartment numbers of his business acquaintances?"
"There are a few-"
"Wanda, quit lying. There are over two dozen intimate men friends of yours listed in that book. Not to mention hundreds-"
"I always take the name and address of people I meet. I've got a thing. I like to send Christmas cards. I send hundreds to people I haven't seen in years."
"And you write a lot of letters, too, don't you?"
"A few."
"You must write more than a few. You never get less than half a dozen a week. I see you take that many out of the mail box." He gestured toward the chest of drawers with a jerk of his head. "They're all locked up in there, aren't they?"
"All right, I have a few friends I correspond with."
"Friends that come through town once in a while?"
"Some of them, but-"
"And you go out with them."
"Yes, sometimes. For dinner, or dancing."
"Well, that's the point. I wouldn't want a few hundred-"
She gasped. "You're saying I've slept with hundreds of men."
"I wasn't saying that!"
"All right, I'm social. I like company. Can I help it if men like to spend an evening with me, if they find me intellectually stimulating?"
"That's the way you keep men coming back again and again? With your brilliant intellect?"
"Do you think I haven't any personality?"
"Oh, you've got that! Right where they want it, and they all come after it."
Her face was pale. There was a stricken look on her face. "Larry, please-"
"They get it, too, don't they, Wanda?"
"Not always," she choked. "Larry, I'm not a-"
"I'm not saying you're anything, Wanda. I'm just explaining something to you. Maybe I'm in love with you, I don't know. I do know there's something in you that holds me, and I don't think it's just your body. Maybe it is love. But I'm no fool-"
"I never said you were a fool."
"Shut up. I'm just telling you that I wouldn't want an indefinite number of strangers winging into town and calling my wife up."
"Larry! When we get married all that will be over!"
"Like hell it would. There's nothing magic in a marriage license."
"I'd have security then. I'd have you."
"Me and a regiment. Do you think a marriage license would stop guys like that man at the ferry?"
"But you're saying I'm-I'm nobody! You're saying that any man who wants me has only to-"
"Wanda, how many times have you been raped?"
"Never!"
"All right, how many times have you maneuvered yourself into the 'untenable position' where you have to give it to a man? How often have you gotten a man exactly where he wants you?"
Wanda sat stiff and frozen faced, as though she were going through a completely new experience. Her eyes changed, mirroring tragic amazement.
"It's as though my stomach is sinking. My ribs are closing in. Like all my guts were being pushed right down out of me!"
"The hell with that," he said, controlled savagery making his voice brittle. "Tell me goddam it!"
There was no resistance left in her. She stared straight ahead and talked like a person under hypnotism. "It's not true."
"It isn't? Let's find out. That Italian you told me about. The one that stopped you and told you that you shouldn't swing your bag on that street in Rome or you'd be taken for a prostitute. You told me you didn't sleep with him."
"I didn't."
"By that you meant he didn't stay all night with you. What did happen exactly?"
"We talked."
"I know, I know. He was a gentleman and he was giving you pointers."
"That's right. We sat in a sidewalk cafe and talked."
"All night?"
"No. After a while, we walked."
"Where to?"
"He wanted me to meet a friend of his, a man who taught music in a school there."
"What time was that?"
"About one in the morning."
"Where was the teacher?"
"At his apartment. Michel assured me of that. I'd given him to understand I was a nice girl and that I wouldn't go to his apartment alone. But going to see his friend was all right. It was all right."
"Did you wake his friend up?"
"His friend wasn't there. His friend had a room in the apartment of some other friends but he wasn't there. We had to tiptoe in so as not to disturb anybody. Then when we got into the friend's room we found he wasn't home yet."
"Then what happened?"
"Michel tried to make love to me. I wanted to leave, but he said if I didn't make love he wouldn't be able to control himself. The people in the apartment would hear and there would be a scene."
"So-?"
"I didn't want a scene, so I let him make love to me-a little. I thought that would satisfy him. But he got excited."
"He wanted it all."
"Yes."
Wanda sat holding her hands hard against her belly. The look of panic-charged amazement was on her face. "It's like everything's getting ready to run right out of me."
"So you held still for him."
"I tried to keep it as quiet as I could. I didn't let him talk."
"Once you said a man almost choked you to death. Was he the man? Was that the time?"
"Yes." She looked up eagerly. "That proves it doesn't it? That proves that I didn't really want to. I'd just been naive and got myself into that position, and-"
"He held his hand over your mouth and almost strangled you, right?"
"Yes. He made love to me and choked me at the same time."
If Larry was getting any pleasure out of this savage questioning, it was the perverse kind of a man lashing himself cruelly, a self-destructionist.
"Because you were enjoying it so much you couldn't keep from screaming, wasn't that it?"
Her look was appealing. "Larry, I'm cold-so cold-"
He ignored this. "And the time you went out in the country on a motor bike with another friend you met there, and a friend of his. You and the two of them. You got way out in the country and they didn't want to bring you back."
"Yes."
"But they did bring you back."
"Yes-"
"After you gave them what they wanted."
"Yes."
"Both of them?"
"Larry, please. I'm so cold-"
"Both of them, Wanda?"
"Yes."
"One after another?"
"Yes, yes. But it wasn't the way you think. It was my fault for getting myself into that position. I was naive! They were really nice men. They took me back."
"And you dated one of them later. Right?"
"I wanted to show him I wasn't that kind of a girl.
I never let him touch me again."
Larry was dressed. He pulled on his top coat. "Okay, Wanda. You've got my answer. I won't marry a tramp."
I'm not a tramp, Larry. I'm not!"
"It doesn't matter how much I love you. I won't have a wife at home that the baker, the milkman and any ether man can come in and back into a corner and lay because if she resisted it might wake the baby."
"Larry, Larry, for God's sake-"
"Goodbye, Wanda. It was fun." He lunged out the door, out of the building. He began walking and walked blindly until dawn.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Was she crying there in her grave? The question came unbidden into his mind and he realized he was getting a little light-headed from the tension, the weariness and the despair that had been locked inside him and were looking for escape.
The rain had slowed to a fine drizzle and the chill in the air was probably false, he thought, a chill he alone felt because his legs were numb from standing.
Yet he was comfortable. He couldn't feel his legs too well, so there was no weariness in them and they weren't any bother. They just held him up. In a strange way, he was very comfortable and did not want to move. He wanted to stand there forever, just as she would lie there forever.
The heaped flowers glowed dimly in light that was reflected from somewhere in the low sky. It was not pitch dark around him, there was light. Only in the grave was there utter darkness. Was she crying?
He closed his eyes and opened them again. His mind wouldn't go anywhere. It was rebelling. It had gone around and around, dashing itself against the rocks of guilt and despair like a gray ocean trying to escape onto the land. And now it didn't want to fight anymore. It wanted to crouch there and wait. Wait for what?
He laughed inside where it could not be heard. If he knew that, he wouldn't have to wait. He could go ahead and do it and get it over with.
He had tried to do several things lately that hadn't gotten done. Now he was afraid to try again because the things he had done-the judgements he'd made-had been wrong.
He'd made a decision after the orgy of rape and questioning ... He got home late the following night. He hadn't done much work that day. He'd spent most of it analyzing the situation, assessing the trap he was in and wondering how long it would take him to get out of it.
He'd made his resolutions. He would not see Wanda again. He solved the office-contact problem by transferring his activities to his own office. He could work there just as well, he had all his data.
He would not see her again and time would take care of the wound. But in the meantime he would have to live with himself. First he needed a week or so to get the smell and taste of her out of his flesh, and out of his mind. Having learned much about his own personality, he knew he wasn't going to be fit to live with for a while. No use inflicting himself on Fran and the kids during that tme. In the end it would be better for them, because when he cleared his mind and could return home somewhat more nearly on the old basis, they would have less hurt to remember.
Or at least that was the way he rationalized it. So long as everything was going to be all right in the end, he wouldn't have to explain too much to Fran. He was just going to stay in town for a week. He'd call her.
And he was going to need that week because-now-walking up to the front door was like approaching the gates of a prison. He would pack a bag with a few things he needed, write Fran a check and get back to town.
The week wouldn't be so bad because he would have his work. He'd fallen behind on a lot of things. Eighteen, twenty hours of sheer effort a day, that was the cure.
Fran was at the desk in the living room writing a letter. She looked up as he entered. There was neither hostility nor welcome in her eyes. She was merely acknowledging his arrival.
"The kids in bed?" he asked.
Fran shook her head. "No. I sent them to Mother's for a week."
Fran's mother and father, both still living, had an ideal place for kids up in northwestern New York State. A big house in a small town. They doted on the children.
Larry raised his eyebrows slightly. "Without telling me?"
"I tried to call you a couple of times, but you weren't available."
She wasn't accusing him, nor criticizing him. Only informing him of the facts.
He took out a cigarette and asked silent questions: Why don't you fight? Why weren't you a good wife? A good wife knows what's going on in her husband's mind, and helps him. A good wife fights to hold her husband against another woman-against a thief who moves into her home and steals what holds it together....
"I've been pretty busy," he muttered lamely. "You don't look at all well."
He sat down on the lounge and faced her, but his eyes were on the carpet at her feet. He took a deep breath and said, "Fran, the other night you said you had something to tell me, remember? That night neither of us could sleep?"
"That was quite a while ago."
"Yes, yes it was. The weeks race by so fast. But let's talk about it now."
"It isn't really important now."
He recognized his own cowardice, rationalized it by saying a postponement of explanations-of any discussion at all-was probably better. Another week, another two weeks, and he'd be more prepared psychologically.
Then he'd make it up to the three of them.
"Sending the kids north was a good idea," he said. "They need a change."
"I thought so."
He frowned at the carpet. "Fran, things are getting pretty hectic in town. I'm coming to the end of it though; another week or ten days."
"I'm glad."
"The way it shapes up, I think I'll stay in town for the week. Being right there, not taking time to go back and forth, I can get more done."
"If you think best."
"Then we'll-we'll get back to normal around here. In the meantime I'll keep in touch, of course. And if anything comes up-"
"I'll call."
"Swell."
He wanted to go to her, touch her, tell her it would be all right. But he didn't dare.
We just can't communicate now. Later. Later we'll be able to talk it all over, get back to where we were. Go bring the kids home together....
Later.
"I'll pack a few things," he said.
She half arose, but he held up a protesting hand.
"That's all right. There isn't much I need."
He packed a bag and left with a quick goodbye.
She was still seated at the desk.
Larry had his office phone connected to the hotel switchboard. The first thing he did when he got there was to call the girl. "I'd like you to check me on all calls," he said. "I'm going to be very busy and I don't want to take time except for the important ones."
Then he settled down to work.
The operator signalled him half an hour later.
"There is a Miss Cole calling."
"I'm not in."
He went on with his work. The hours went by. Eventually he looked up, yawned, and cheeked his watch.
Eleven-ten. Time for a bite.
He put on his coat, went downstairs and bought a pack of cigarettes while he debated eating in the hotel dining room. He decided against it and went out into the street.
"Larry-"
He turned. A shadow disengaged from the shelter of a dark shop door and moved forward. "Wanda!"
She looked like a ghost. She wore a black raincoat. Her hands were deep in the pockets and she was hunched down into the upturned collar. As she moved closer he saw her white, pinched, tragic face. Her eyes were like black holes in a sheet.
"Wanda! What on earth's the matter?"
"I had to see you, Larry. I had to hear your voice."
"But Wanda! Standing out here! Why didn't you come up?"
Her smile was a tired twisting of her lips. "You wouldn't take my call. I thought maybe you wouldn't let me in."
"But what happened? What have you been doing to yourself?"
"I've been home. After you left, I got sick. I was in the bathroom a long time. I went to bed, but I couldn't get my body warm." She looked up at him as though she were seeing a god. "Oh, darling! It's so wonderful to hear your voice."
"But Wanda, that was two days ago!"
"Ive been lying in bed thinking about you, trying to keep the panic down."
He put his arm around her and drew her toward the curb. He signalled a cab standing up the block and bundled her into it. He gave the address and as the cab pulled out, she snuggled into his arms with a soft sigh.
"Oh, Larry, warm me. I'm so cold...."
In the apartment, she sat down on the lounge, hunched into her coat, looking up at him. "What's wrong with me, Larry?"
"You're worn out. You've got to get some sleep."
He peeled off her coat, unzipped the side of her dress, and pulled it over her head. She stood there, waiting like a child in her bra and gaily painted slip. So alone, so forlorn. A wave of choking tenderness engulfed him.
He pulled the slip down and she stepped out of it. The blankets were still on the bed. He smoothed them out and laid her down after unsnapping her bra. She held her arms out obediently while he lifted the bra off. Her breasts were like ivory tipped in brown.
She lowered her arms with a sigh and closed her eyes. She did not open them as he ungartered her stockings, lifting each leg obediently as he pulled them off. She raised her hips to allow him to remove her garter belt and panties.
As he moved to pull the blanket over her she opened her eyes and looked down at herself. "I lost weight."
"You didn't. You haven't had time."
"Rut I did. Look-"
She raised one leg and showed him where the pocket of her groin had deepened.
It was incredible. "You have lost some weight." Her belly, though it never bulged perceptibly, had definitely sunk in. Her hip bones protruded slightly. Her breasts too seemed smaller.
"My thighs," she said, raising her leg. "See? They're soft and flabby."
"That's ridiculous. Under the covers now. Have you had anything to eat?"
"No, I'm not hungry."
"You've got to eat."
He rummaged in the kitchenette, found a can of soup and opened it. He brought it to the bed. She sat up and he fed it to her.
Five minutes later her face turned ashen, she got up and ran for the bathroom. He followed and held her head while she threw the soup up.
He tried to lead her back to bed, but she protested. "No, let me stay here. There's more."
He got a blanket and put it round her as she knelt in front of the bowl. After a while, he picked her up and carried her back to bed.
Her teeth chattered and she shivered there under the covers. "Warm me, Larry."
He lay down beside her, held her in his arms, and she drifted off to sleep. After a while she moaned fretfully and tried to kick the covers off. She raised a flushed face to him.
He put his hand on her forehead, then on her breast. "Why, you're burning up!"
"I'm so hot, Larry. Open a window."
He headed for the phone. "I'm calling a doctor."
He called a doctors and physicians pool he knew. Taking the address, the girl said she would have a doctor there in half an hour.
He turned out to be a middle-aged, rather tired-looking man who checked Wanda over while Larry walked two blocks to a late restaurant for a pack of cigarettes.
When he got back, the doctor had his bag repacked and was rechecking Wandas temperature.
"She'll sleep for a while," he said. "That's the best thing for her."
"What's wrong with her, doctor?"
He eyed Larry with some speculation, but he didn't ask any questions. "Nothing serious that I can find in preliminary examination."
"Some kind of a virus?"
"That's a catchall term these days," the doctor frowned. "It may be true, but it doesn't seem to have localized any place." He handed Larry a card. "Here is my number. I left some sleeping tablets there on the table. Give her one when she wakes up. If it doesn't do any good, you'd better call me. I think she'll be all right, but I'd like to have her come to my office tomorrow or next day. A complete check-up might reveal something."
"Doctor, could it be psychosomatic?"
He was slow in answering. "Has she had some kind of a shock?"
"After a manner of speaking." Larry snubbed out the cigarette he was smoking. As he occupied himself with this task, he said, "I walked out on her."
The doctor considered this and spoke carefully. "Of course I'd have to know more about her background, more of her past history."
"Do you think she needs psychiatry?"
He shrugged. "I'm really not in a position to say." He hefted his case, obviously reluctant to discuss the matter further.
"Just a minute," Larry said. "No need to send a bill. I'll write you a check."
"That will be thirty dollars," the doctor said.
Larry gave him a check and he left.
Alone with the sleeping Wanda, Larry paced the floor. He was stunned by the turn of events. He went to the bed and looked down at her. She sleot like a tired child, and now there was the look of a child about her, a look of innocence. It seemed impossible to conceive of her functioning like a wanton in bed with a man, to think of her discussing sex practices-normal and abnormal-with the matter-of-fact attitude of an expert in the field.
Moaning, she sleepily fought the covers, turning onto her stomach, dragging the blanket with her, thus stripping it away and leaving her body naked. She twisted her pillow for more comfort and then her legs pushed gradually apart into a wide V. Her lips moved although her eyes did not open.
"No, no ... don't make me do it ... you bastard--oh you bastard!"
Her beautiful thighs flexed and tightened, her lips writhed.
"Oh, you bastard. You SOB...."
She seemed to be gagging, choking. Her hands flexed into fists, then opened and clawed vaguely at the bed.
A cold, sick chill went down-Larry's spine. She was dreaming, reliving some experience she'd had with a man. How many men, he wondered? How many men had experienced that wanton body writhing naked in their arms?
How many had come back again and again for more?
"I'm a good girl, a good girl...." She drifted back into sleep, her open mouth pressed out of shape against the pillow. A weary, weary child.
He gently laid the blanket over her and went on with his pacing.
What was the answer now? Where was it all going to end? Would Wanda eventually crack up? Without experience in this strange area of human behavior, he felt like a man wandering in a dark forest.
I can't leave her, and I can't stay with her. I can't get along with her or without her. What's the, answer? Where is it going? Where will it end?
He felt like a man hurtling along into darkness on a wild toboggan ride, with disaster foreordained.
"Larry."
He jerked around, looked at her and realized though he didn't know quite how-that she had been awake and watching him for some time.
"You ought to be asleep."
"The doctor was here, wasn't he?"
"Yes. Don't you remember?"
"I remember, but it seems like a dream now."
"It wasn't a dream."
"Did you pay him, Larry?"
"I paid him."
"How much?"
"It doesn't matter."
"But I can't take money from you. I never took money from a man."
He wanted to lash out at something, find relief from this ridiculous situation in violence. But there was nothing to hit.
"Call it a dinner," he said gently. "I've spent money taking you out. That was all right, wasn't it?"
"Yes."
"Then figure this the same way."
"Larry-" She reached out her aims. He came to the bed and knelt beside it. She put one arm around his neck and stroked his face with her fingertips. "My beautiful, beautiful man."
"I want you to go back to sleep."
"Nobody ever really loved me before. Nobody ever cared."
"Yes, they did."
"You do love me, don't you, Larry?"
"Yes, I guess I do."
"Do I love you, Larry?"
"I don't know either. Somehow I can't say it. I've tried, but I can't say it."
This was a new face, bewilderment and confusion in her eyes. "I don't know whether I could really marry you or not, Larry. I've had chances to marry. I panicked. I couldn't face it."
"Why not, Wanda?"
"I don't know. Ralph wanted me to marry him."
"Do you love Ralph?"
"I don't know." She looked into Larry's eyes. 'You said I'd have to do him a favor if he asked me-even after I married you."
"Never mind what I said. What do you think?"
"I don't know."
She drew back a little and looked at his face, caressed it with her eyes as she fondled it. She ran a finger along his lips, pushed through and touched the root of his tongue.
"Bite me."
The word he got out meant no.
She was changing. The paleness was gone, her eyes were half-lidded, her lips open, the corners of her mouth turned up ever so slightly.
"Coward."
He pressed down gently on her finger. She put her face to his and licked his cheek. "You taste good, lover."
His fingers were pressing into her breast. The nipple against his palm was hard and unyielding. "Undress, lover," she whispered. When he made no move, she began unbuttoning her shirt. He drew back.
"No! No, let me."
A different person now, she got out of bed, dropped to her knees in front of him and unzipped his trousers. She pulled them down, then drew his shorts slowly and sensuously down off his hips and thighs.
"My beautiful, beautiful man-"
Suddenly she gripped the sides of his shirt at the bottom. She ripoed outward and the buttons flew in all directions. She pushed it back over his shoulders, and while he was trapped in the sleeves she wrapped her arms around his hips and sank her teeth into his belly.
Pain and surprise brought a roar from him. She clung, grinding her teeth down, ravening for a mouthful of his skin. He jerked back and hurled her away.
"You crazy little bitch!'
She rolled across the floor and came up on her knees. There was a smear of blood on her upper lip. Her mouth curved in delight and her teeth were the gleaming white teeth of a vampire as she licked the spot of blood away.
Relief in violence. With the feeling of a damned soul plunging down into the pit, he lunged at her. She tried to avoid him, but he caught her by the ankles. As she lay there on her belly, writhing, he began bending her legs outward.
She came up on her knees to relieve the strain in her groin. He jerked and she went down on her belly again. lie strained her legs wider.
"No, lover, no!"
"The hell with you," he gritted. "Co ahead and scream. Maybe the neighbors will come and help you."
"Oh, you bastard!"
The words automatically brought the strange, spiritual sickness that had wracked him every time he thought of her in the arms of another man.
"Did somebody else do this to you?"
"Oh, Larry, please! Not that again."
He hurled himself down on her before she could close her legs. "You cheap, rotten little bitch! I'll-"
Trapped on her belly, Wanda's eyes suddenly widened' with fear. She waited a few seconds, then cried, "No, Larry-no!"
He paid no attention. Relief in violence. His breath coming heavily, he hooked a hand around her mouth. She tried to open her mouth as she struggled, tried to fight him with her teeth, but he would not allow her to get a grip.
Fiercely, viciously he took her. She lay with her ear against the carpet. He could see her profile. He saw the wild panic in her eye. Then, gradually, as his own passion arose to almost unbearable delight, her eye lid drooped sensuously, her double fists opened and her nails clawed at the carpet.
Her hands fell away from her mouth. She tried to get one of his fingers between her teeth, but he entwined that hand in her hair and pulled her head hack until her neck was taut.
"Oh, lover," she croaked. "Destroy me! Destroy me!"
His climax was an explosion that left him limp and helpless.
She pushed him off, and turned. The devil's light was in her eyes. She came lo her hands and knees and looked down at him, her lips drawn back, her teeth white and predatory.
But then suddenly she too collapsed. She came down on him, but her mouth gently to his. "Oh, lover," she breathed. "My beautiful lover!"
"We're doomed," he whispered back. "We're doomed."
She was crying. He tasted the salt of her tears, and consigned his soul to hell....
CHAPTER NINE
He turned toward the gate. His legs were numb and he almost fell. He put one foot out tentatively and it was strange, not knowing when it touched the ground. He put his weight on it. The leg held.
This was the death of the body. When you no longer could feel it or know it was there. But what about the death of the mind, what woidd that feel like? He took anther step, reeled like a drunken man and regained his balance.
Was there anything beyond the grave, really? Heaven or hell, were they necessary? Good or bad, pain or pleasure, right or wrong, heaven or hell. Weren't they all just words in the end?
Heaven and hell was right here. There'd been e little heaven and much hell. And now it was over.
Over?
His mind had retreated into the sterile realms of abstract ramblings. Now it returned to the dark cemetery.
Over? The masquerade of heaven was over. The hell had just begun....
He'd known that the morning Wanda finally got to sleep, with dawn breaking faintly through the window, a smile in her lips and her hand in his.
He'd disengaged his hand to dress. She slept on, exhausted, as he put on his clothes and turned up his coat collar to hide the fact that he wasn't wearing a shirt.
He went out quietly into the silent gray morning and took a cab back t the office. He sat down at his desk, not in least wear)', his mind like a block of clear, cold ice through which he looked out at the world.
What now?
Where now?
Could he leave her? Could he walk away, hide from her, block her off, and still live with the wondering? He looked back, dazed, at the hours and the weeks and the months that had gone to form this trap.
The phone rang. He picked it up. "Yes?"
"Darling, I woke up. You weren't here."
"You were sleeping like a log. I had to come to the office."
"After a new shirt?" Her voice was sly, intimate.
He was struck by the contrast. No panic now, no fear. After the quick first accent of doubt in her voice, it steadied and became light, confident. It said, everything is all right note. We've weathered the storm.
"Yes," he said. "A new shirt."
"I cost you a lot of money, don't I?"
He wanted to tell her how much she'd really cost him, but there was no sense to that. Besides, he would never have been able to put it into words. "Don't let that worry you."
"Yes?"
"I don't think I'll come to work today."
"It might be a good idea to rest."
"Oh, I feel fine. But I just can't face that dull desk. Let's go to Porto Rico and lie on the sand and make love."
"That would be pretty public, wouldn't it?"
Wanda chuckled throatily. All the volatile warmth of her, all the intangible allure seemed to flash out from the phone to touch his nerve-ends. "I made love on a beach once."
"You did?"
"In Italy. I met this boy-a peasant type, really. But he was amusing. We were on the beach one day and before I knew it, zongo! I was underneath."
The weird, sick, undefinable feeling hit him with a thud. The voice with which he answered her did not seem to be his own. It came from a stranger that was crouching somewhere inside him. "It must have been quick."
"Well, he was a nice boy and we'd been fooling around a little. He was kind of shy, really."
"Weren't you embarrassed?"
"No, I don't think so."
"Did anyone see you?"
"Maybe from a long ways away. It was isolated. I had on a two piece bathing suit and we were necking a little and I thought I had the situation under control. I was kissing him and then before I knew it he had me against a rock and, well-"
"Well, what?"
The chuckle again. "It was kind of sweet, really, lie was a peasant type, as I said, and you'd be surprised about the Italians. They're very formal about it."
I see. They very formally lay a girl on a public beach. But he did not say this. He asked, "It was in broad daylight?"
"Uh-huh. High noon. When men get hot for a girl they don't look at their watches, the bastards."
"He got you into an impossible situation."
"That's right. There was nothing to do but lie there and take it. I wanted to get it over with as soon as possible."
"I'll bet that was the last time you went out with him."
"No. It happened twice. He was very clever, even if he was a peasant-"
She stopped suddenly. He could see her eyes widening in that shocked look. "Larry! You think I-"
"Think you what?"
"You think I arranged it on purpose!"
That was totally and completely incredible. It flashed through his mind that she knew. She had to know. She could not be so utterly stupid as not to know that these references back into her sex life ripped him to pieces. She had seen his reactions. She had to sense the sick feeling he got in his stomach when he visualized her naked and wanton under another man; when his imagination showed him a picture of her, ravening at another man's body, giving another man the intimacy of her own body in any way the man could think of to possess it. "Did you arrange it, Wanda?"
"But darling, that was a long time ago. I'm different now. I've changed. And that wasn't much, really. The bottoms of my bathing suit even stayed on one leg. And he didn't undress. He just-Oh hell, why can't I keep my mouth shut?"
Weird, strange, terrible. An innocent child berating herself for telling a secret to another innocent child.
"As you said," Larry reminded her. "It was a long time ago. And you've changed."
She took this as forgiveness and said, "Darling, let's roam around the Village tonight. We've never gone there together."
They'd never discussed Greenwich Village, either. "Do you know it pretty well?"
"Inside and out, sweetie. For months I used to go down to the Village every night to Guido's coffee shop. I'd sit and read and then go home to my lonely little apartment all by myself.
"I understand it's a great place to pick up men."
"I suppose so."
"I guess it could be dangerous though."
"You never pick up a man and go to his place or bring him to your place. I wouldn't anyhow. Maybe some cheap girls do."
Wise, experienced, sensible. A girl to be admired.
"All right, let's go down there tonight."
"Maybe we'll meet Jeremy Slade. You'd like him."
He wanted to ask who Jeremy Slade was, but he didn't feel up to whatever the answer might be. "Okay, take it easy today. I'll be around after work."
He found her glowing, sophisticated, petite-one of her more attractive masks.
"A drink first, sweetie?"
"I don't think so."
She was wearing tight-fitting black slacks, a black sweater, and a red scarf cravatted smoothly around her neck. They got a cab and rode to 3rd Street and 6th Avenue. As he turned from paying the driver, he found Wanda following two male passersby with her eyes.
"They're gay," she said. "How can you tell?"
"Oh, it isn't hard. You get to know them."
The subject was now opened and he sensed that she would be disappointed if he didn't pursue it. As they walked on south, weaving through the colorful crowd, he said:
"You got interested in homosexuals because of Ralph's problem, I suppose."
"Yes. There was a real bastard trying to get Ralph. God, how I hate him! A real creep. I won't let him into my apartment, even at parties."
"T suppose he was jealous of you."
"You're not kidding."
They crossed 6th to go down Bleecker and as they mounted the curb, Larry saw sudden recognition dawn on the face of a young man when he caught sight of Wanda. The young man was walking with a male companion. His elbow went out in a nudge, and then Wanda saw him. He grinned.
Wanda tossed her head in contempt and passed on.
Larry glanced back from fifty feet on down the street. Both youths had turned. Their eyes were on Wanda's back. The one who had recognized her was talking avidly to the other, who obviously appreciated what was said.
"Did you know that man?" Larry asked.
Wanda's eyes flashed up in complete surprise and innocence, a gesture she always used when she was about to lie.
"Of course not. How would I know him? They're all very fresh down here. I girl has to get used to it. You just freeze them and go on your way."
She steered Larry into a place on the next block. It was dim and dirty looking. As they paused in the doorway, Wanda unconsciously struck a pose that he recognized. It was the pose used by models in top ads like Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, and the like.
It was accomplished by the model pointing one foot straight ahead and angling the other out to forty-five degrees, with the heel of the angled foot against the instep of the other. This straightened her back. A hand placed on the hip completed the sophisticated, poised illusion.
Larry realized he was waiting for someone else to recognize Wanda, waiting as for a blow in the face. But no one did.
It was a slack time evidently, and the place was comparatively empty. There were two girls in avid conversation over one of the tables on the right side, a lone girl seated in the center, and three young men occupying a table in the far left corner.
Wanda headed in that direction. There were at least ten empty tables in the vicinity but she went straight to the one next to where the two youths were seated. Larry followed.
It was a table for four and the young man with his back to it had thrown his coat over the chair behind him.
Wanda waited, calmly regarding each of the three in turn. The young man stopped talking and looked around, his eyes questioning the interruption. Then he understood and removed his coat.
"Thank you," Wanda said coolly and pushed her way into the chair, jarring that of the young man in the process.
Larry sat down opposite her. From this vantage 'point, he was able to see the reaction of the four young men. The one who had been forced to move his coat, leaned forward and whispered to those on the other side of the table. One reacted with a knowing leer. The other whispered back.
Larry felt like getting up and running out of the place. But now the young men had gone back to their conversation and Wanda seemed to have forgotten about them.
Larry felt like a fool. Was he wrong? Had he been unfair to Wanda? Was he so subjective that each little inconsequential thing she did had to he analyzed and twisted in the wrong direction?
Something inside him said that he was. But something else that seemed suspiciously like common sense said that he wasn't.
He tried to analyze the incident of crowding in on the three youths. Had it been premeditated on Wanda's part? Common sense said not. Common sense said that it had been to a great extent unconscious-a projection of her habit pattern. Where men were concerned, Wanda automatically got as close to them as possible. It was a process of making herself available for the pass, the approach, the proposition.
Obviously to Wanda the contact, social or otherwise, between the male and the female was a contest, a game, with sex as the prize and ultimate objective of all such relations. Her part of the game consisted of giving herself to any man she met who interested her, at the same time making it appear that she was resisting hm.
Not every man, of course. There had been occasions when she turned even from men who had attracted her, although Larry felt these instances were few and far between.
"Actually, I think some of them study anatomy."
"Why do you say that?"
"Good lord. Some of them can get their fingers in there while a girl is crossing her legs."
"Did this happen to you?"
"I guess I was stupid to let it. I went dancing with this date. We left, and it happened in the back seat of the car. And me with my best black dress on."
"What did you do?"
"There wasn't anything I could do. When you get yourself into a position like that--"
"I know. The black dress was ruined?"
"I was too ashamed to even send it to the cleaners. I tried to wash it myself, and ruined it."
Larry didn't need further details. Obviously in the process of reaching his climax the date made a mess of Wanda's clothes.
But the interesting point here was Wanda's resentment. "You can bet I never dated him again."
And Larry believed her. Thus there had been at least one male relationship that Wanda had been able to terminate, proving that every ride has its exception.
But why, Larry asked himself bleakly, was he himself trapped in this punishing compulsion of analyzing, dissecting, judgng? Why was he condemned to this slelf-torture?
There had to be a way out of this frightened trap....
"Larry, I want you to meet Jeremy Slade."
Larry looked up from his brown study to see a bearded giant of a man looking down at him.
"Pleased to meet you," Larry said automatically and extended his hand.
The giant took it, shook it, dropped it. "The same, friend," he said. But he didn't take his eyes off Wanda.
"Where have you been, pet?"
Jeremy Slade asked the question softly, chidingly, as though he had every right to he personally aggrieved.
"Oh, I've been busy. How are things in the Village?"
"We've missed you."
Wanda shrugged. "Not too much. You never called."
"I sent you notes telling you when the parties were being staged. You didn't show, pet."
"Maybe I like a personal telephone call. Maybe I don't like just being on your mailing list."
"You know me, pet. We understand each other. I'm Jeremy Slade. I've got enough love for all the chicks."
She laughed. "You're a sketch."
"I'll call you," he said softly. Then he went on his way without a glance at Wanda's companion.
She turned almost defiant eyes on Larry. "Well, there's one man I didn't sleep with."
Larry's anger flared senselessly. "He looks very attractive. How come you passed him up?"
It was as though she hadn't heard his question. "Jeremy's a riot at a party."
"He's quite a party giver?"
"Every week. He has to have people around him."
"Did you ever go out with him?"
"Oh, we get together every three or four months." She leaned close, her eyes bright with interest. "Do you know? Jeremy's a defrocked priest!"
"A priest?"
"That's right."
The revelation hit Larry far harder than it had any right to. "You slept with a defrocked priest?"
Wanda's expression questioned. "I didn't sleep with him. But what's the difference? That's his problem, not mine."
"I suppose you're right."
"And I didn't sleep with him. I never let it go that far."
"Because of what he is?"
"Yes. He's such a giant."
"And you're rather small."
"He got very excited when we necked, while I was kissing him."
"Making love to a priest must be a feather in any girl's cap."
"If he hadn't been so big," Wanda said dreamily.
"And hadn't gotten so excited. I suppose you could not go through with it because you were afraid he might lose his head and hurt you."
"You can never tell. A really big man-"
She jerked her mind back, frowned at Larry accusingly as though she blamed him for her revelations.
"You're doing it again! You're making me talk!"
"Be that as it may," he said softly, "I'm not the only one listening. You have a rapt audience right behind you."
Wanda slanted her eyes momentarily in that direction. The young men had suspended their own conversation to listen to Wanda.
"I hope they got an earful," she said. "Let's get out of here."
"Sorry," Larry said getting to his feet. "I seem to have cramped your style."
She looked at him venomously. "Sometimes you make me so mad!"
But by the time they readied the door her good humor had returned. Her eyes narrowed and she threw Larry the slanted Mona Lisa look.
"How would you like to go to an exciting place?"
"Why not?"
"A lounge joint. I know one."
"I'm afraid I never heard of a lounge joint."
"It's a place you can get a little more informal than in most." Wanda steered him up the street and as they moved through the crowds said, virtuously, "I was only there once-with a gay friend." She glanced at Larry again. "I told you that so you'd know nothing happened."
Larry didn't comment. There didn't seem to be any point in commenting.
The place was called Eden Lounge. It consisted of a large, dimly-lit, low-ceilinged room with thick pillars cutting it here and there in what gave the illusion of private rooms. Although there were no curtains or doors cutting off any portion of the area.
Long-legged girls in very short, black skirts were moving about with trays.
As Larry's eyes accustomed themselves to the dimness, he saw that there were no tables here as commonly defined in a cocktail lounge. The accommodations for customers consisted of lounges with small coffee tables beside them.
Wanda took his hand and led him familiarly and surely-too much so, he thought for a girl who had been here only once-toward the rear.
The trip to their destination took Larry past some intriguing sights, men and girls stretched on the lounges in complete informality. Entwined in each other's arms, most of the couples were completely oblivious of the world around them. Most of the skirts were high. Many knees were bent and widely separated.
From somewhere Larry heard a soft moan of pleasure. As he passed one of the pilared-off niches, he caught a glimpse of a practically naked girl. She was prone on one of the lounges.
He stopped to look, in spite of himself. There were two men in there with her. One was stretched out beside her and the other sat on the edge of the lounge. While Larry could not see exactly what was going on, it appeared that the seated man was holding the girl. The other man's hands were cut off from sight by the body of the seated man. Something was being done to the girl because she was writhing, both her feet were in the air, she was curling her toes and uncurling them in some kind of nervous tension.
Wanda turned and grasped Larry's arm.
"Come on, darling. You aren't supposed to gape. They'll take you for a tourist."
As they moved on, Larry was able to see the girl's face. It gave no hint, from the expression, that she was being molested against her will. Her lips were parted and her eyes narrowed voluptuously. Evidently she liked whatever was being done to her. "In here, darling."
Larry followed her into another of these fantastic niches. Sitting down beside her on the lounge, he felt as out-of-place and awkward as a man in a Turkish bath on lady's day.
A long-legged blonde appeared.
"Scotch, darling?" Wanda asked.
Larry nodded and the blonde left.
Automatically he took out a cigarette. Wanda scratched a match for him and held it. She said, "This is a very vulgar place, really. But it's amusing. People who don't care about their reputations come here, I guess."
"It would seem so."
Wanda lay back on the lounge. "But it is restful."
"It certainly is."
The blonde returned with the drinks, put a check on the coffee table and left. Larry glanced at the check. It read: $10.00
"She won't bother us again until we ring for her," Wanda said. She took a sip of her drink, and stretched out on the lounge. "Lie down, lover," she whispered.
She pulled Larry down beside, her. From somewhere a soft moan of pleasure added to the heady atmosphere of the place.
"When in Rome," Wanda whispered, "do as the Romans do. Isn't that what they say?"
Her head was close to his. Her tongue darted out and touched his ear, her hand slid inside his shirt. The tip of her tongue was teasing his ear expertly now. Then she turned his face to hers and put her open mouth against his lips.
"I'm going to seduce you, lover," she murmured dreamily. "Maybe I'll rape you." She turned on her back and raised her knees until her now-bare heels touched her buttocks. She straightened out her legs, in the process leaving her skirt in her lap.
"If you investigate," she whispered, "you'll get a surprise."
She drew back, her eyes almost closed in langvorous anticipation. She put her finger into his mouth and ran its tip over his tongue.
"Lover, lover," she whispered.
"Wanda, do you think?"
She closed his mouth with hers and whispered into his throat. "Lover, lover, it's been so long-"
"But Wanda-"
"Nobody cares, darling. Nobody at all. We're alone here in our own world."
That didn't seem true to Larry. Especially when a couple stopped on the way past, and the man gaped at where Wanda's hand was, what she was doing, and the instantaneous effect it was having.
Then the man's escort pulled him on his way and Larry's hand went to Wanda's body.
"That's right, lover," she whispered with her voice choking up. "I didn't wear panties. I thought I might get lucky, and I did. Here we are."
She turned over on her back. Larry went into the V of her opened knees and they closed on him, the way his own destiny had closed on him.
Time stopped for him. Heavy, irregular breathing, almost a sobbing, of breath, came from some lounge nearby. It seemed the trigger that broke Larry's last thread of reserve.
In a desperate mood of hopeless ecstasy, he took Wanda.
He took her, there in that madhouse; took her savagely until her moans were added to others and blended into the pattern of impossible things in impossible places....
They got back to Wanda's apartment at 4 a.m. but Larry did not stay. He pleaded weariness, used the excuse that they would get no sleep. She conceded this with sidelong smile. He left and went back to his office. He showered and shaved and lay down, going into a strange, disturbed sleep that seemed more like wakefulness-a vague, hazy nightmare, the details of which he could not remember when he awoke.
It was daylight. He ordered coffee and went to work at his desk. This gave him some relief, served as a blessed sanctuary for his tortured mind.
Wanda called at ten o'clock. "Are you all right, darling?" Im fane.
"I thought you'd probably be exhausted."
"Not at all."
"My virile, beautiful man," she yawned affectionately. "Do you know what happened?"
"Tell me."
"Darling, I got fired."
"You what? That can't be. You didn't go to work."
"Sam just called. He said not to bother to come back."
"You don't seem very worried."
"I'm not. When I hear your voice, nothing worries me."
"I can't, sweetie. Ralph's here. He woke me up. He took the day off and wants me to go to the Frick museum with him."
"Are you going?"
"I might as well. There's nothing else to do, no job to go to." She paused. "You don't mind, do you?"
"Of course not."
"I'll call you later."
"I'll be here."
He hung up and sat looking at the phone. Perhaps he was more tired than he'd thought, because his mind just didn't grasp this. It just didn't make sense. He couldn't break it open. He felt like a tired fox trying to find its way into an impenetrable chicken coop.
Automatic questions entered his mind. Had Wanda received Ralph stark naked? Had she been rested up and ready for another sex bout when he arrived?
He let his mind form the picture of Ralph and Wanda writhing in passion on the lounge. Did it hurt? He wasn't sure. Did he give a damn? His mind was so numb that he couldn't get a reaction one way or another. Somehow it all seemed like pages out of a play that would never open anywhere.
He got up from his chair, stripped off the clothes he was wearing and took a shower. He shaved, enjoying the sting of the after-shave lotion on his face. He began to feel better.
He picked up the phone and called Larchmont.
It rang seven or eight times but there was no answer. Fran was probably out in the garden. He put the phone down, then picked it up again, and sixty seconds later was talking to Billy.
"Hello, son. This is Dad."
"Hello, Dad."
"Having a good time?" I guess so.
"Billy, I've been thinking. How would you like to take a vacation?"
Billy's voice reflected no great enthusiasm but the tone was polite. "That would be fun."
"Do you think Kathie would like it?"
"I think so."
"Well, this load I've been under is about cleared up down here. So suppose-say the first of next week-you and Kathie and Mom and I head for Hawaii."
"That would be fun."
"We could stay two or three weeks and you kids could still get home in time for school."
"Gosh-a jet across the Pacific!"
"Tell you what, we'll keep it a secret for a few days. Just the two of us. Then we'll spring it on the women when we get it all set. Okay?"
"Okay, Dad."
"It's a deal. I'll call you. What's Kathie doing?"
"She's out in the yard up a tree."
Larry laughed. It was a good feeling to laugh. He hadn't had the feeling for a long time.
"Okay, I'll call later. Take care of your sister, son."
He broke the connection and dialed Larchmont again. Still no answer. Perhaps Fran had gone to the store.
He was ferociously hungry. Feeling like a new man he passed up the elevator, went down the stairs into the dining room and ordered ham and eggs. He drank three cups of coffee and went back to the office.
He sat down at his desk, reached into his pocket, and swore softly.
The telephone rang. He picked it up.
Wanda's voice came soft and throaty over the wire. "Darling, would you mind if I went home for a couple of days?"
"Why, no," he replied crisply. He almost said, I couldn't care less. But why hurt her? "That would be a good idea."
"I'll try to call you from there, darling. And I'll call you when I get back."
"That will be fine," he said indifferently.
"We're leaving right this minute. Ralph is driving me up."
"Good, have fun."
"Darling! I don't really enjoy myself with anybody but you."
"I'm sure of that."
He broke the connection and sat for a few moments testing his new reaction. It was good. He was sure it was solid. He smiled.
Then he patted his pocket again and remembered his note book. He'd meant to ask Wanda about it, and forgotten. He was sure it must have dropped from his pocket when he threw his jacket aside the night before. He picked up the phone and dialed Wanda's number, but there was no answer.
He scowled at the phone for a moment, then headed for the street and a cab. He had to have the note book, there was important data in it. As the cab rolled north he hoped he had dropped it in Wanda's apartment. If not, he would have to reassemble a lot of figures.
He paid the cab, went into the building and unlocked Wanda's door....
Ralph looked up from the work he was engaged in. He was naked. Wanda was naked. He raised himself from her prone body and stared at Larry.
"What in the hell-!"
Wanda twisted around, jammed a clenched fist against her mouth. "Larry, oh Larry!"
"The trip home off?" Larry asked pleasantly. "We-we-"
"So I see," He scanned the room. "I think I dropped my notebook here last night. If I hadn't believed your home story, I certainly wouldn't have embarrassed you this way. As it is, I may as well take the note book."
It was lying on the floor beside the chest of drawers. As Larry picked it up and put it into his pocket, Ralph got off the lounge and started to dress.
Wanda paid no attention to him. Her stricken eyes followed Larry toward the door. "Larry! You'll call me won't you?"
He stopped only long enough to look down at her and answer. "I guess you really are mad. So was I, but it's over. You wanted two uninterrupted days. As far as I'm concerned you've got the rest of your life."
He closed the door quietly as he left.
CHAPTER TEN
He moved toward the cemetery gate and let his mind ram head-on with the memory he'd avoided all during that day and that night. The moment when the phone rang there in his office....
He picked the phone up. Sam Taber was on the other end.
"What can I do for you, Sam?"
The veteran Willets executive was slow in answering. "It's what I hope I can do for you, Larry. I'm just checking to see that you're in. Stay there, I'll be right over."
Sam broke the connection. Larry put his end down slowly. Good lord! Had something gone sour on the Willets assignment? He'd neglected his work lately, sure. But so far as he knew, the operation was under control. Where could it have broken down? He did have a contract-Probably nothing important. Sam Taber was inclined to be a little over-serious about things. Probably something he could straighten out in a few minutes with Joe Jr.
Sam came in five minutes later. His face was grim, even cold. Which was not natural for Sam. Larry got up to greet him and Sam said, "Better sit down, Larry. This is going to be rough."
"For Christ's sake, Sam. Quit being so dramatic. Let me have it."
Sam pushed Larry into a chair and looked at him for a moment before he took a letter from his pocket. He laid the letter on the desk. Larry glanced down, saw the handwriting and frowned up at Sam.
In answer to the wordless question, Sam said, "I don't know why they picked me for this job. I guess it's because nobody else wanted it."
Still frowning, Larry reached for the letter.
But before he could touch it, Sam reached out and put his own hand on it. "Just a minute, Larry. Give me a break. I'm trying to do this the easiest way, and maybe I'll be wrong but I think it's best. Before you read that, let me tell you straight out."
"Tell me what, for God's sake?"
Sam gestured toward the letter with his eyes. "She killed herself, Larry. Sleeping tablets. She was just found. They phoned Willets, thinking you'd be there. I talked to them and told them to hold off calling here, I'd bring you the news."
"Killed herself-"
"There's lots I could say. But it would sound wrong at a time like this. So all I will say is, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry I could cry. If there is anything I can do, let me know."
Larry sat frozen. It just didn't penetrate. Suicide. It was impossible. Why just-
"Sam, it's some kind of cruel joke. No, Sam-no!"
Sam Tatfer laid a hand on Larry's shoulder. "You know that isn't true, Larry. Read your letter now. I'll go back to the office. I think you probably want to be alone for a while."
Larry didn't answer. He picked the letter up and read it. After he laid it down he realized he'd been nowhere near hell until that moment.
Up to then, he hadn't known what hell was.
He went through the cemetery gate. There were street lights there. He heard footsteps, looked up, saw a shadow disengage itself from the haze and move forward. r
"Larry-"
She wore the same black raincoat. Her hands were thrust into the pockets, her shoulders hunched down into the upturned collar.
Her face was dead white. There were great black circles under her haunted eyes.
"Hello, Wanda."
"They wouldn't let me talk to you. I called. I wanted to tell you-I wanted to hear your voice. There was nothing in the world for me until I heard your voice."
His face completely devoid of expression, he looked at her. "How long have you been here?"...." somehow, darling, we lost communication. So this letter is the only way left. It's very simple to put down what I have to say. It's just that I didn't realize. I thought things were all right. In my own selfishness....
Your selfishness. Fran darling. Fran-olf my God... I didn't see that our love had become a perfunctory thing. I thought-oh, I guess it doesn't make any difference what I thought. That doesn't matter now. I wanted to tell you about the cancer. The doctor told me I needed an operation. Otherwise, he said it would be fatal. So I'm taking this way out. I'm a coward, but that's no worse than being a failure, and that's what I've been. I don't want to go through the operation icithout you at my side. Goodby, my darling. Take care of the children.
Fran
That terrible letter he'd learned by heart.
He began walking. Wanda fell into step beside him. "I'm so cold, Larry."
Without thought he put his arm around her, she came in and walked close beside him.
"How long did you say you'd been here?"
"I was waiting when the funeral drove in. I wanted to go inside but I couldn't. So I waited out here. I watched the cars as they pulled out and you weren't in any of them. Then I saw you inside, but I was afraid to go in. So I waited out here."
He was only vaguely aware of what she'd said. Billy. Kathie. They hadn't been told yet. Their grandfather had stayed with them, forsaking attendance at his own daughter's funeral for her children.
Fran's mother came, but she stayed away from Larry and left without saying a word to him.
"Larry...."
"Yes?"
"What can I say to comfort you?"
"There's nothing to say."
"What can I do."
"There's nothing to do."
"The children. What about them?"
"I'll have to tell them. I've got to go up and see them and their grandparents. There's a lot to be done."
"Larry-"
"Yes."
"Do you love me?"
He felt like laughing. It was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. A question like that at a time like this.
But he didn't laugh. He walked on and she walked beside him. "I'm cold, Larry."
I m sorry.
They walked for a long time, not saying anything. Walking side by side and clinging to each other because there was nothing left in the world for either of them except each other.
"We deserve each other," he said.
"I guess we do."
"Larry, did-did she suffer?"
"I don't think so."
"I sent Ralph away, Larry. I sent him away ten minutes after you left."
He felt like slapping her face. He felt like taking her by the throat and pushing her down to her knees and watching her eyes as he choked her.
The far arm of her raincoat was wet under his hand. He stiffened his fingers and squeezed her arm tighter, tighter.
"Larry-you're hurting me."
"I want to hurt you."
"That's the way it is with us, isn't it Larry? All the time we showed our love by hurting each other. That's not the right way to show love, is it?"
"I don't know."
He wanted to kill her, there in the darkness. He wanted to kill her and even everything up.
.But that wasn't what he wanted to do at all. He knew that even as he told himself he did. Even as he lied to himself.
He wanted to rape her.
He wanted to throw her on the ground, rip her clothes off and bore into her with all the savagery that had built up inside him.
That was what he wanted to do.
He wanted to feel her hot body against his, her mouth and her tongue on his body, get the taste of her with his tongue.
He wanted the madness she represented.
God help me, God help me. No. It's too late.
"Larry...."
"Yes?"
"Whatever happens from now on, we'll always be together, won't we?"
He stared bleakly into the night.
"Yes, my darling. Whatever happens from now on, we'll always be together."
