In their book. Sex and Society, Kenneth Walker and Peter Fletcher write: "In another human being, man or woman, we see our own living image; another person who possesses an equal right to life, who claims the freedom we claim to make choices and decisions and to take action. For this reason, we cannot without betraying ourselves treat other people as things existing for the satisfaction of our appetites, or to be used as instruments of our private purposes." But it was a type of obsessive selfishness that permeated the faculty sanctums of the large Midwestern university. Pressured by the unwritten publish-or-perish rule, the academicians, male and female, sought solace and relief from tensions in each other's company-but always trying to take, never to give, human compassion.
CHAPTER ONE
Lee CUSHING, B.A., M.A.-and PH.D. AS of one year ago this morning-sat behind his desk, deep brown eyes dreamily focused on his mental image of a voluptuous woman writhing in the throes of wanton sexual passion. He was indulging in some markedly unacademic daydreaming, sipping his second cup of coffee and just beginning to feel it snap him into unconsciousness. Lee didn't often stare into space, especially when he had a fountain of papers to correct and an exam to map out for his Faulkner course, English 445.
But with a wife like Joan, it was hard not to. And, remembering the torrid sex-session they had had last night, it was just damned impossible not to indulge in a bit of mental skylarking, he thought. That woman brought out the beast in him at times. It was frightening!
He had come home from school, depressed. It had been a bum day-faculty meeting, horrible class, run-in with Cook, one of his colleagues. Terrible day. He'd walked into their rented house with a sour frown, thrown his brief case savagely on the couch. Joan had offered herself for a kiss, which he'd accepted dutifully rather than with any real enthusiasm.
"Bad day, darling?" she'd asked.
For reply, Lee had snorted, lit a cigarette, then answered, "My God, yes, the worst day imaginable."
Joan had smiled sympathetically. "Sit down, and I'll fix you a drink. You can tell me all about it"
Lee had nodded mutely, too tired and too disgusted to offer any argument.
"It's so damned silly," he'd said. "I shouldn't let things get to me like this.
"No, you shouldn't," , she agreed. "Lee, you're awfully tense these days. You should try to relax."
"Sure! A novel to finish, a new course to get off the ground, relax just like that."
"Lee, I'm your wife," she'd said plaintively, "and you haven't given me much chance to show it." He looked up from his drink, and their eyes met. Her meaning was clear enough. She didn't have to draw pictures.
It had been a hell of a long time since they'd made passionate love, and it was his fault. He laughed inwardly. If he kept going like this, he'd become a fossil like old man Stone, the department chairman. Joan was right, he should leave his problems at school and give her the attention she needed and deserved.
He slipped his arm around her, and she snuggled against him. A very warm, alive body, Joan's: sweetly redundant with curves, swelled with breasts that were creamy-white and firm, that defied any brassiere to hide those hemispheric tops-breasts that his hands could not completely surround, breasts whose nipples were pink, hard and pebble-like. The cleavage between the globes was deep enough to submerge his nose and lips in.
Before their marriage, Joan had been a dancer, and she still kept her body young by going through her old routines. Every inch of her body was firm, lithe, womanly. Her stomach was flat; waist, taper-thin; hips, full and rounded; thighs, strong and pillar-like. When she walked, her buttocks strained suggestively against her skirt, or her shorts, or whatever she wore. You could clothe the woman in a pup-tent, and her body would beckon underneath.
But after two years of marriage and increased responsibilities, one slipped, became careless in recognizing the signs of sexual need she was now reminding him of with her blue, flickering eyes; her full, sensuous lips that needed no paint to heighten their healthy red coloring; and the very warmth and vitality of her body leaning against him.
Lee felt her body move more firmly against his, her lush, compliant breast touching his shoulder.
"I've been thinking about ... us, all day," she whispered throatily. "It's been too long, darling." Her hand stroked his hair; every now and then, her fingertips sent electric currents into the back of his neck, streaking through his body. Her lips touched his cheek, his ear.
There was nothing academic about wanting your wife.
You didn't have to reason things out, didn't have to consult the PMLA for references. He put his arms around her, held her close against his hard body.
"You don't let a guy forget," he smiled; he nuzzled his lips against the white, soft skin of her neck and breathed hot air into the opening of her blouse so that it bathed the tops of her breasts. She gasped, pulled him closer still.
"You make me dizzy," she marveled, "absolutely dizzy." She felt his fingers deftly working at the blouse-buttons, one by one until his hand was resting against the warm, smooth skin of her stomach and ribcage. It was slightly awkward trying to unsnap the bra because of extra strain caused by her hill-sized breasts, but he managed. The breasts leaped free, pushing the bra defiantly out of the way; no doubt the garment would have catapulted across the living room had it not been for the straps that hung on her shoulders.
His hands roamed her breasts, cupped them, squeezed them. They were smooth, round, unbelievably full. His palms got the brunt of pebble-hard nipples that swelled in response to his touches.
"Lee, my God, Lee!" she gasped. He saw her jaw go suddenly slack, her lips open and pout moistly for a soul-kiss; he closed his eyes, moved his face toward hers, and their lips collided. There was the sweet, body-trembling collision of tongues. She searched the interior of his mouth with its white-hot tip, making him tremble and quake all over, while her hands moved deftly down his back, around to the front of his loins: wherever she touched him, his muscles tightened into little knots, until he became one collective bundle of painful need.
"Undress me," she whispered.
He looked at her. She had shrugged the shoulder straps loose, and through the completely opened blouse, he could see the mounding thrusts of perfect hemispheres, punctuated by the swollen, engorged nipples.
He gently removed the blouse and threw it on the floor beside the brassiere, then worked on the zipper to her skirt. His hand moved inside, next to silky sheer panties, pushing the skirt down her hips, thighs, finally past the knees.
Her legs were a wonder-long, lean, tight but meaty and sensuously, voluptuously, undeniably feminine. The thighs joined the hips with a perfect symmetry-a long, gentle, continual swelling and rounding of undulating white flesh.
They kissed again.
She felt good next to him, squirming with hot eagerness, her soft, yet firm belly flaring Us warmth through his shirt, while her hands frantically tore at his clothing, with a refreshing disregard for their well-being. A button popped loose, went across the room jet-propelled and hit a wall with a clicking sound. Her hands were inside, trembling against his downy-haired chest, seeking their way down, until they came to fitful rest against his belt line.
His belt was loosened.
His slacks were opened.
Her hand joined his flesh and moved slowly down, making his muscles cramp painfully.
"All the way, Lee, get them all off!" Her voice was now reduced to a grating rasp. A voice of raw sexual want. They separated limbs just long enough to divest themselves of all clothing, and embraced again, completely nude.
Now Lee felt her nipples scratch at his chest; an overwhelming urge to kiss those nipples, to feel them between his lips, took hold of him. He kissed them slowly, for long, excrutiatingly pleasurable moments.
Her response was rabid.
Every chord and muscle of her body snapped loose, and went haywire, until she moved against him with the fury of a lioness in heat, hands scratching his flesh raw.
Her thighs were dewy with wanting. Her flesh screamed for release; helpless, they fell back against the cushions of the couch and locked in embrace. The final embrace. The ultimate onslaught.
In his passion, he bit her lower lip and drew blood, while she whimpered with a sound hovering deliciously in pleasure-pain.
"God, I'm hot, take me hard!" she moaned, "Hard, hard, hard!" The word moved out of her lips with the force and rhythm of her body vibrating expectantly against his.
He took her.
Viciously.
Her hot readiness allowed their bodies to join in an embrace of hungry flesh with moans and gasps and violent words born of unslaked pleasure.
Lee jammed his hands under her buttocks, grasped her quivering cheeks. They worked together, struck up raging movement while her thighs spurred against his sides.
She drew him to her slowing his rapacious pace. She moved with maddening, deliberate slowness. Her body, her needs, dictated the tempo of the embrace, and he was sure he would go insane with anxiety and excitement, when blessedly, she picked up the beat and urged him on with her hands, which grasped the small of his back, near his buttocks, pushing, driving....
It hit him all at once.
It welled up inside him and swept through him until he saw bright, flickering lights; a warm liquid bubble increased in size until it pushed against the walls of his body, threatening to burst him wide open.
Then it happened.
It had not been one bubble at all, but two bubbles blended into one. It burst simultaneously; their bodies stiffened, their lips gasped out incoherent sounds of pleasure, and they were swept away by the force of their perfect lovemaking. Their pleasure spilled over with titantic, mutual force, lifting them into ecstasy.
His office was hardly conducive to passion-packed reminiscing. It was small, business-like, lined on two walls with books, mostly paperback texts. On one side of his desk was an office-sized typewriter, on the other the telephone. Between, the pile of papers to be corrected. Students would hound him, It was their right. He remembered his own undergraduate days, when an instructor or professor had taken months to return papers. It was annoying, frustrating. It created needless tension on the student's part.
Still, he could count his blessings-a wonderful, extremely sexy wife who loved him, his doctorate behind him, a novel well in progress, that if well received, would enhance his academic career and propel him into a literary career as well. He was young, the youngest in the department: twenty-six years old. He was on his way. In a few years, by virtue of his creative abilities he'd be up with Stone, the department chairman. Damned few academicians had it, he knew. They were critics, pedants, theorizers, everything except writers. They were unable to see that writing and literature were two distinctively different things. And he knew that people like Stone resented men who had attained a professor's ranking by virtue of their writing reputation. Hell, take Faulkner, Lee's specialty-a man with one year of college, flunked freshman English-they'd made him a professor at UVA. More immediate, John Hanley of their own department: a B. A. from some third-rate school, nothing more. But he had written a novel hailed as the greatest thing since The Ginger Man and Cantly. John had a light schedule. He held office hours three hours a week, and worked on his new novel under the auspices of the university. He had professor's rank and salary. Guys like Stone resented it. In fact, Lee was one of few people in the department who had befriended Hanley, had had him and his sex-pot wife over for dinner and drinks. It was all part of the stinking game. If you were a thinker, you ground out your degrees and your critical essays and your unassailable theories concerning writers who had been dead many years and were not around to defend themselves. Shakespearean critics were especially guilty of the error. On the other hand, if you were creative, you didn't need a degree; you merely needed a school hot for the prestige that your literary butt could ostensibly offer if it graced a chair in their English department. Lee did not want to be a pedant; nor did he wish to be a scholar. He wanted to be a teacher with utterly complete rapport between himself and the students he taught, and he wanted to be a writer. He knew he could write. He felt it in his bones; all those years of academic slavery had robbed him of the time required to try his talents. Now, he was doing it; he had shown his manuscript to Hanley, who had been visibly impressed.
Everything seemed to be working well for him. There was just a minor difficulty, one that hardly mattered, as long as he asserted himself. Joan was a bit ambitious for his sake, a bit too taken up with the idea that a wife should prod her husband, regardless of whether or not he possessed the essential ambition and drive. He had it. He didn't need anyone else to supply it for him, and he constantly reminded her of that fact. Last night had been an exception, really. It wasn't often that she urged him to relax, to lose himself by making love to her. Other than that, their marriage was as nearly perfect as marriages were meant to be.
He began looking over papers. Already, he was associating names with faces, with personalities. It was the second week of classes, but his Faulkner class was a small one by University standards, fourteen students all told. On the very first day of class, he had assigned them the first of the Snopes books, The Hamlet, thinking that he would slowly work them into monuments like Sound And The Fury and Absolom, Absolom! They were to have a short paper in by the beginning of the second week, without referring to critics or outside references. He'd told them that his main concern was their personal reaction to the book, to Faulkner.
He started reading the first one on the pile. It belonged to Brenda Wood, who had struck him as being exceptionally perceptive. Some of her comments had been astute, to say the least. He read the paper through for the first time. Each paper would be read twice, then corrected. It was a slow, but thorough process. It would take him all day; fortunately, he had no class today. All he had to do was correct papers and think of an exam for his Survey course.
Dr. Paul Stone III, B.A. at Harvard, M.A. at Yale and Ph. D. at Oxford awakened, and got out of bed, leaving Peggy (B.A. only) curled fetus-like, her even breathing disturbed by his movement. He heard her stir, quickened his steps toward the bathroom. Lately, it was hell getting up in the mornings. Jt was a sinister little game to see if he could get away without an argument. A game that he had absolutely no desire to play.
"Paul?" she called out. He stopped and grumbled, "Wait'll I come out of the bathroom," then proceeded forward again. He prolonged as many activities as possible, hoping that his wife would not argue when he came out, and perhaps by scantest possibility that she'd have some coffee ready. It was an old tactic, and seldom worked.
This morning it did not.
"Paul, could you get home early tonight?" Peggy asked. She was still lying in bed.
"You know I'm in the midst of meetings with the administration," he told her. "If I get out early, I'll be home early."
Peggy Stone sighed.
"Paul, did it ever occur to you that most of your colleagues entered the academic profession so they would not have to work such long hours?"
"Not true," he snapped. "Nobody in my department worth his salt has an attitude like that."
"I'll bet they have enough time for their wives." She looked at him archly; he averted his eyes.
"They're not chairmen, dear. They don't have my responsibilities."
"OK, Paul, it's too early to argue. You go to school and you do your work, and you impress everyone with your grand importance. Get old and dried up. Be the great scholar who can't give his wife five minutes' worth of sex!" With that, she slammed the bedroom door. From outside, he heard sobs, her body falling on the bed. He sighed and walked out with his brief case under his arm.
It wa? impossible for a man like Paul Stone III to understand a woman like Peggy. He had worked slavishly, diligently for years to achieve his status. Now that he was there, he had the long-awaited opportunity to go back into research. He was able to delegate responsibilities to other men in the department. Tne week before, he had applied for a year's leave of absence. In any other school, this was known as a sabbatical, but at this university, with an administration that wallowed in executive efficiency and red tape, it was simply a leave of absence. And, you had to apply for it. If granted, it would mean an entire year in which to complete a project he had been nurturing for fifteen years: a comprehensive critical study of American literature in the 20's, 30's 40's and 50's: an ambitious project, certainly, but one well under way. He could see it quite clearly in his mind; a year abroad somewhere, with a sensitive graduate student to assist him with typing, researching, and other chores-a year to escape meetings and students and instructors. It would be grand, indeed.
That was what Peggy was incapable of understanding-the fact that he had to get the department into perfect working order so that administration would consider his request. All she seemed to care about was sex, sex, sex! It made him sick.
Hence, the sudden, not-yet-announced opening for an associate professorship in the English department. He was going to post it today, and all who applied would be reviewed and interviewed accordingly. He could think of several men and a woman who might be eligible, as well as interested. They had excellent records for critical publications, which meant of course, they were true, competent scholars. He needed and wanted a department with a reputation. Reputations were born of scholars whose names and articles appeared consistently in journals and literary magazines, and an occasional book in the form of collected essays in criticism. Unfortunately, it was essential to have people like John Hanley around, who were anti-academe, but had reputations on the creative level. Personally, he thought Hanley's novel, Long-Gone Charlie, a redundant, poorly executed novel. It didn't begin to compare to the gems of Fitzgerald or Wolfe, or even Hemingway at his best. No underlying themes that he could see, no symbolic significance, no underplotting-as he saw it, a most invaluable book loaded with sex. Yet, the critics and reviewers had hailed the novel as the greatest thing since The Ginger Man and Young Adam. Pressure had been exerted on him, and he had contacted Hanky, hoping that he was obligated already and would be unable to come. He came.
And, Paul Stone III resented men like John Hanley with their lack of interest in the academic community, their preoccupation with themselves. But it was part of the overall structure; he needed at least one "Name" like Hanley around to round out the department roster.
He parked in the lot in front of annex B, the English department offices. As he walked down the corridor toward his office, he got several greetings from instructors, and graduate fellows, none of whom he knew personally. He had no time to know them. They were thrown assignments to teach freshman English to disinterested students, and that was that. There was more important business at hand than mere teaching and molding of young, impressionable minds. There was research, administrative duties, checks into his people's publication records, etc. The students-well, they had to be processed and run through as best as possible. It was a large university, with a student body exceeding ten thousand. He could hardly be expected to establish contact with such a horde. Theoretically, everv one of them had to run through his department in their freshman year, as English was a required subject. It kept his department busy, kept the budget requests high.
He called the secretary, and she came in.
"Good morning, Dr. Stone," she husked, pouting sensuous perky breasts to attention.
"Good morning," he said, "take this down, will you, and have it posted immediately. There is a depart mental opening for one qualified individual for the position of Associate Professor of English. All interested applicants indicate same to the department secretary, and arrange for interviews. Sincerely."
"Yes, sir."
"I want it up this morning."
"Yes, sir." She walked out, shutting the door behind her. Stone turned to the pile of papers on his desk and concentrated on them. He had an admirably discip-lined mind. He was able to shut out everything but those papers, including the image of his wife Peggy.
Peggy was not so disciplined. She was not able to shut out the memory of the unpleasant introduction to another day. It was becoming a standard prelude, but its repetitive quality didn't accustom her to it.
Peggy was a beautiful woman, and she knew it. She was in her prime. At thirty-four years of age, Peggy looked like most women of twenty-four would never look like if their lives depended on it. As if her looks were meant to serve a distinct function, she had a sexual desire to match them. She had always been endowed with the need for stud, lots of it, but in the past year or so, it had increased with uncomfortable frequency. It was uncomfortable because it remained unacknowledged and unsatisfied. Her husband did not know that she existed as a woman with woman's craving for sexual attention.
Peggy was everything that a normal man could want in a wife: devoted, loyal, uninterfering, yet interested, tender, passionate, good company, an object of quiet envy on the part of other men.
She had auburn hair that hung shoulder length when she chose to wear it down, a pretty oval, un-lined and unwrinkled face which it framed. Deep brown eyes, full body-a body that had not thickened with the onset of middle age. It was as rounded and curved and inviting as ever. It had in fact ripened and improved with age: breasts that stood firm, upthrust; waist, slender; legs, smooth; buttocks, massively heart-shaped. In a word, Peggy Stone was in good condition. Not that thirty-four is old. It is theoretically the pinnacle of female perfectibility, but most women let themselves go to hell as soon as they leave their twenties.
But not Peggy.
It was Paul, damn it.
He was a mere thirty-nine, young-looking, in good health, the envy of all the other faculty wives. She knew he was virile, but he was so preoccupied with his work that he had no time for her in bed. It had been weeks now, since they had made love, and the last time around had been a disappointing experience, to say the very least. He had merely done his duty, rolled away, gone to sleep. No words of love and passion, no exciting preliminaries, no tenderness afterward. He had left her tense and taut for the rest of the night.
It was nothing like it had been in the beginning, when Paul was a struggling instructor, working on his doctorate. They had lived in a furnished apartment. She had worked in the Bursar's office to bring in grocery money so that he could devote more time to his studies. Lacking leisure and comfort, their life had been a perfect one; in retrospect, it was quite better than their present life together. Then, a walk around the block, looking in store windows at things they had no business looking at, had been diversion for them. Casserole dinners, a radio program, a game of chess....
And bed. And sex. He simply couldn't get enough of her.
My God, she thought, they'd been at each other constantly. Their passions had been insatiable then. Just ten short years ago, she had been the happiest woman in the world, with no comforts, no money, a pocketful and headful of dreams for the future, and more sex than she could handle.
It had been marvelous.
Every night, they had made love, and never with any design: it had always "just happened." Paul had been a good lover at age twenty-nine, ten years ago, because he had been a youth. Now, he could still retain a youthful outlook, if only he weren't so tied up in his work. Ambition was a fine thing; she was grateful to be married to a man of his stature, his reputation, but she regretted his negligence of her.
It didn't have to be that way.
There was nothing organically wrong with the man.
Every now and then, Peggy had a dream. Tt was a dream born of pent-up desire. It wasn't a complicated dream at all. It consisted of her lying on her back, naked, with knees well-aimed at the ceiling. There was a man on top of her, straining, smashing a s oody with pleasurable violence against hers, bringing her to whimpering, sobbing completion. Then, the man disappeared. She'd had that same dream for several consecutive nights; awakening, she found that she had a very real feeling of release-it was a woman's wet dream, nothing more.
It disgusted her.
A woman of thirty-four, with a perfectly capable husband, subject to nocturnal dreams of that sort; there was no excuse for it. She didn't resent it on moral grounds, but instead harbored a grudge against Paul. It was a hard fact to face, but nevertheless she tried to accept the reality that her husband was all work and no lay.
Joan Cushing awakened, but kept her eyes closed. She knew that Lee was gone-there was a cold spot on the mattress where he had lain beside her. Looking at the clock, she saw that it was after nine.
There wasn't any reason to get out of bed just yet. She lay against the pillow, thought about her behavior with Lee the night before. You couldn't ask for a better husband, she thought. Their life together was a good one, for the most part. The only thing that disturbed her was Lee's refusal to do certain things. Oh, nothing major, just that he could do certain things that would further assure his future. Things like making an attempt to be friendlier with the Stones, or devoting a bit more time to writing critical articles.
If he'd just play the game.
They all did, and they all seemed to get ahead, but Lee adamantly refused to do those certain, apparently essential things. He was a teacher, he laid, and hopefully a writer, not a bundle of theories revolving around long-dead issues and people. It was the one weak link in their relationship, the only time he told her in no uncertain terms to keep her nose out of his affairs.
Perhaps he was right.
She was aware of male pride and self-confidence; but she was also deathly afraid that he would make a fatal error and lose everything they wanted so much, everything they'd built their dreams on.
Her mind switched to the voluptuous sexing of the previous night.
The two of them, lovemaking on the couch in the living room, not like two people tired of one another, but like young, fiery lovers hot for one another's bodies. It was something that neither of them tired of, a pleasure that enhanced itself with time.
When he'd sucked her breasts-her nipples swelling and surging against the sweet flips of his tongue-she had lost her breath in her wild grunts. A wildfire had burned inside her flesh, and she'd responded with joy, throwing all inhibitions to the wind. He never failed to affect her that way. A kiss, a look. It didn't take much for her to get hot.
I must be oversexed, she thought; maybe a nympho. It made her giggle to think of it: the professor's wife unable to get enough sex to satisfy her. Wouldn't that be a hell of a conversation at the next faculty tea? Certainly a welcome change from the usual patter about literature and critics.
She ran her hands over her lush breasts, felt the nipples begin to throb. Enough of this she thought I've got other things to do. She had to shop, pick up some dry cleaning, a host of chores that are never noticed unless neglected. And she wanted to cook something special for Lee. Perhaps, if she could find some decent looking lobsters, she'd buy a couple. Broiled lobster was one of his favorites.
Lee walked down the corridor, his brief-case stuffed with the corrected papers and a copy of The Hamlet. He was on his way to English 445. He could feel the youthful bounce in his footsteps. It was a class that excited him, one that he had worked hard to have listed in the catalogue. It had taken a certain amount of intellectual prostitution, but he'd achieved his goal.
He caught the words "Associate Professorship opening" almost out of the corner of his eye. He stopped quickly to read the notice just posted on the board, then walked hurriedly to his class.
CHAPTER TWO
Brenda Wood was beautiful-not voluptuous, nor attractive-just beautiful. Brenda was all things to all people. Vassar, Kansas, Manhattan, Paris-the girl would fit anywhere. Ait nineteen, she could easily pass for twenty-five, and when she became twenty-five, she would be able to palm herself off for nineteen with equal ease. All this was made possible by the rare combination of a girl's face and woman's passion-packed body. That Brenda Wood was the epitome of sexuality for every male who saw her as a foregone conclusion; she was that, and more-white, high-thrust breasts pushing against her sweater; tapered waist accentuating the soft, yet sudden curve of hips and buttocks ; thighs, solid and of generous length surging against the tight skirt. In essence, everybody wanted to boff Brenda Wood, everybody being the male population, and quite possibly certain females with good taste. It was too damned bad. For most males and females, a hopeless dream. She wasn't to be had under any circumstances by anyone, except for one: a handsome ex-marine-tough, smart, everything a woman could want in the gender.
His name was Bill Holloway, and he sat next to Brenda Wood at this moment, waiting for Dr. Cushing to arrive.
"He's a minute late," Bill said, looking at his wrist watch. Bill was not Rock Hudson-handsome, but more Richard Boone or Richard Burton-handsome, complete with craggy, rugged face. He was deceptively lean-six feet, a sparse hundred eighty pounds, every bit of it muscle and bone and guts.
Bill was a man's man.
He was also Brenda's man.
She looked at him lovingly, touched his hard thigh and said, "I think I hear him clattering down the hall now," and sure enough, it was Dr. Cushing, swinging his brief case against his long, solid legs. He was built very much like Bill, but his face was more on the pretty side.
"Good morning," he announced, opening his briefcase and spilling the contents on the desk, "I have your papers ready. Pick them up at the end of class."
He cleared his throat, looked at the class.
"Well, looks like we're all here. I'm improving, I guess. Two whole weeks, and I haven't bored you enough to drive you away." There was a polite, then sincere wave of laughter as Lee lit a cigarette.
Brenda Wood was excited about this class, more so than she'd been about any of her other literature courses. Cushing struck her as a rare phenomonen among teachers: dedicated to teaching, enthusiastic to share, rather than impose his subject. And he was good-looking; not a significant consideration, but mildly helpful, she thought.
"Has anybody not finished reading The Hamlet?" he asked. There were no hands; it didn't matter, it was on the agenda for discussion.
They talked animatedly, discussing the novel's plot, the stylistic twists and turns peculiar to Faulkner, and Lee found himself listening more than talking, a sure sign that enthusiasm was at a high level. He was doing his job the way he wanted to.
Miss Wood was especially sharp, he thought. Her hand went up more often, and what came out of her mouth was her own, well thought out and damned original thinking. Oh, he could shoot her down on a few counts, like other profs, but why should he? He'd give them some of his views and try them on for size. That was the fun part: creating a heated debate, which left not only him, but his students exhilarated.
The time passed quickly, too quickly as always, and they all started to leave. He smiled at Miss Wood and Mr. Holloway as they walked past his desk.
Brenda and Bill walked slowly to the car, a beatup TR-3 that needed a valve job desperately. Bill was silent, cigarette hanging out of his thin lips.
"That's going to be the greatest course," Brenda said.
"Uh-huh." Bill was not one for academic fervor. He was thinking abut the story he'd damned well better get cleaned up by Friday if he wanted to get a check in time; the editor had been hounding him for two weeks to get it completed.
"You sound like you care," Brenda quipped.
"Oh, I do," he said, "it's just that story. I've got to get it in the mail Friday morning or I don't eat. And it'll be getting on the wrong list with an editor, which I don't want."
Brenda squeezed his hand. He put his arm around her, pulled her close. Her breasts nudged his chest.
"Don't worry, Bill, you'll get it done," she said. "How'd you do on your paper?"
"Aced it."
"Me, too."
Stupid damned patter about grades, he thought bitterly. Writing academic jazz that no editor would touch, but right in the pedantic line with the profs. They dug it, they threw out the big A's for the stuff. So play the game, Bill, but don't get carried away, because these cats don't pay your salary, and they don't teach you a blessed thing about hack writing.
Bill had been scribbling pulp and slick fiction for a couple of years, with some success. He was good for four figures a year, in spite of his full load at the university; yet it was frustrating, because of the impossibility of being able to concentrate on any serious writing. Damned school made sure of that. The faculty members who knew him clucked their tongues admonishingly: Oh, you really shouldn't write such simple stuff, Bill, it degrades your talent. Why don't you try to come on like Bellow or Styron? You can do it, old man, we don't work you that hard. (Feeble smile)
Go to hell, stuffed shirts. I don't care how I make my money!
"Where're we going?" Brenda asked.
He grinned lewdly, squeezed her hand: "Where do you think, Miss Fly?"
"Again, Mr. Spider?"
"Again. That's what happens when you get engaged to a satyr."
"William Holloway, it's evil lechers like you who make young virgins such a remarkably rare item."
"Yes, it's the Bill Holloways of the world who so mercilessly annihilated Miss Grundy," he intoned with mock grief. Their voices were raised above the valve-clattering roar of the Triumph's engine.
Brenda felt good now, knowing that they were going to Bill's apartment; the place held a storehouse of fond memories for her, memories of them.
It was where Bill had pierced Miss Grundy to the quick, via the tender, aching virgin knot of one Brenda Wood, almost a year ago. She had succumbed to him because she loved him, and that, compounded with natural, healthy female horniness, made for an irresistible combination of events. A month later, Bill had put an engagement ring on her finger, and in June, when they graduated, they were to be married almost immediately after taking off their graduation gowns.
In a word, things were working wonderfully well for Holloway and Wood, soon to be shortened to Holloways.
Bill parked in the garage beneath the building, in the space reserved for him. The apartment had been a good find: Two bedrooms, kitchen, full dining room and living room, central air conditioning and full utilities for a hundred twenty-five a month, a sum easily swung with the money he was making. He was hardly the struggling student, living from hand to mouth. At twenty-four, he was making as "'"ch money as people who worked at their jobs full time.
"Here we are," he said.
"Yes, how about that?" she quipped. "Someday, I'd like to know how many other women you've had."
"Countless victims," he said. "Scattered from New York to Suji Bay and back from Tokyo to Frisco. Strewn, used bodies-horrible!"
"Ok, Attila, let's go upstairs." She grabbed his hand with a natural, easy air of possessiveness, and led him to the elevator. He lived on the second floor, and they usually walked it, but at this time of day the elevator would be empty and faster.
Inside, Brenda felt a quiver of excitement. The fact that it was all predictible did not detract from the anticipation: they were going to make love, and that, to her, was the most exciting thing in the world. They kissed in a leisurely manner, in no hurry; no deadlines, no fear of interruption-not the back-seat business for them, as for most of the girls she knew on campus. It was a marvelous prelude to how things would be when they were married.
Their kiss became less easy.
It became heated, urgent.
Their lips clung honey-like, and Bill felt the telltale jaw-slackening of her face, her lips loosening, moistening with increased passion, her body relaxing against his. His hands moved down to her buttocks and pressed her into him. A slight gasping sound escaped her red lips. He felt the gentle pressure of her teeth on his working up and down his body. Brenda heated up fast.
"Nice to be alone," she breathed.
"Ummm." His hands pressed, kneaded, delighted in the feel of her buttocks-soft, yet firm, wide and high-young, perfect buttocks that squirmed and pressed the rest of her femaleness into his body, exerting hot pressure against his male response.
"I must be oversexed," Brenda sighed. She wriggled delightedly against him, reveled in the electric sensation of his maleness pressed against her. Soon-she shuddered at the thought.
"Could be. We're not all perfect, Brenda dear." They both laughed, and pressed harder together, while he walked forward, she slowly backward, clinging to him, toward the big, firm sofa. He eased her onto the cushions, and with her arms around his neck, she pulled him down against her yearning body. It was a gentle, but dynamic collision.
Her breathing quickened, her heart pumped wildly as his fingers worked the buttons of her blouse open, revealing white tender flesh. She gasped hollowly when she felt the sudden release of her brassiere-an exhilarating sense of freedom, then his hands around her breasts-always an exciting prelude to the grande finale. His hands there, kneading, squeezing, thrilled her almost more than anything else, except for his lips. She anticipated each sweet caress in advance and worked herself into a rage of desire.
They were delicious breasts.
In a cannibal society, they would be fought over.
The flesh was tender and milky-white, a few freckles, sun-marks that never quite disappeared. Then, the nipples-hard and responsive, pink as coral pebbles. He touched them with his palm while he cupped the perfect globes apart from the deep, shadowy cleavage that separated them, and listened to her moanings grow louder and more intense.
"Ooooooh-!"
He broke it off with a kiss; her lips were completely relaxed, not with indifference, but with hopeless desire. They clung like honey as his fingers stroked quickly over the raspberry tips of her nipples, making them swell into bullet-like hardness. Brenda felt the old hot, dry feeling inside her; the cramping of muscles wherever his hands touched, the big bubble getting bigger, more insistent. The gentle biting along the smooth column of her neck made her shiver, as did the fingers all over her body, stroking, probing.
"I love you, baby," his voice came into her ear, accompanied by hot, insistent breath. It too, made her shiver. It was the way he said those words that excited her; they were invariably accompanied by a host of hot breath and caresses and kisses.
She felt herself being eased into a prone position. He was strong, usually surprisingly gentle, but sometimes violent. His sense of her needs was uncanny, she thought. He was savage only when she wanted it, and she never had to tell him. Her Bill knew how to please a woman! They taught you things like that in the Marines.
She stretched her lithe body out on the sofa. His hands pulled her shoes off, then her socks. A shiver went through her when his fingers ran up her leg, her thigh, settled for a moment against the hot, moist fabric of her panties-then walked up her belly, making it quiver, and moved below the waistband and settled against bare, trembling flesh.
"Bill!" It was a whimpering, pleading sound; yet jammed with demand. The fingers rolled the panties down over her waist, then pulled them over her wide, full hips and down her sumptuous thighs. Once past her knees, they came off with ease. Brenda kicked them off her ankles onto the floor.
Surprisingly, he didn't take off the skirt.
He pushed it up around her waist.
The bra was open, pushed up on her chest, the blouse spread wide to reveal the perfect pair of breasts, the skirt up around the slim, nipped-in waist to show bare hips, thighs and the thatch that hid woman's passion and mystery.
It was a pose that made her feel deliciously cheap.
For Bill, it was a pose that aroused him more than one of utter nudity. There was that element of raw lust, of primary sexuality, one that he knew excited Brenda. It was one of the things they saved for rare occasions, like an old Napoleon brandy. You didn't drink it down promiscuously.
His hands stroked her thighs in a delightful series of countermovements, up and down until one hand settled between her thighs, pressed them gently apart. They were warm, moist and musky: ready. He let one hand slide downward to feel the round hump of smooth buttocks; they were beginning to quiver with reflexive motion. For good measure, he bent his face down and tasted each swollen, pink nipple, and felt in every fiber of his consciousness that she was ready for him.
Very ready.
So ready that she ached.
Bill, let's do it now!" she whimpered, and her hands tugged and worked at his clothing with rapt impatience, tearing, making seams crooked, getting substantially nowhere.
He smiled gently, and undressed himself. It was faster-she, was too far gone with desire to be effective or efficient. In moments, he had undressed himself, and was standing over her, looking down on her beauty, her want, her readiness.
"God you're beautiful," he whispered; his voice came out sounding like a phlegmatic croak.
She stared up at him with large, smoky eyes.
There was nothing wanting in his physique. With clothes gone, she could see the familiar perfection.
Lean, plate-like muscularity, spare of hair on his chest, and a maleness that had once petrified her, had made her think of anatomical impossibilities that she now knew to be not only possible, but inevitable.
With surprising gentleness, he settled on top of her waiting body. She felt the increasing weight of him, the hands gently prying apart her thighs. She responded with breathless eagerness, throwing her legs around the small of his back, drawing him down, down, down, until they meshed with sweet impact. With a silky, rustling sound, their bellies scraped together, and his hands lifted her buttocks off the soft cushions of the couch, and they were doing it. Her mind shrieked, yes, yes, doing it, doing what she was meant to do, with him, and it was good, it was perfect.
She tried to move herself slowly.
That way, it was more excrutiating.
More unbearably delightful and pleasant.
But it was useless to try anything like controlled movement, when every chord in their bodies screamed for quick release of passion. Her hips revolved beneath his with a counter-pointed motion-brought instant, like response, and they drove at one another, whispering, then panting words of encouragement until they feU nothing except for the distinct feeling of being lifted off the ground, the feeling of flight, of indescribable pleasure-pangs, a long period of being airborne, before settling back into the cushions.
Then the words of tenderness, and the shared cigarette. Her day was blissfully complete.
Lee had made an appointment with Dr. Stone for two in the afternoon, wondering what in hell Stone would want to know about him that he didn't already know. He had his records. Had milked everything out of him when they'd had the initial interview that had led to his being hired in the first place. What else was there, he wondered. Almost immediately after his 445 class, he had made an appointment with Stone's secretary, and now it was after one. He had just enough time for a bite of lunch at the faculty club.
When he got there, he saw John Hanley sitting alone, drinking a cup of coffee. Hanley spotted him, his eyes lit up with welcome recognition.
"Hey, Lee boy, come on over here!" John was from Chrisfield, in the Eastern Shore region of Maryland, and spoke with that peculiar brand of Southern dialect.
"Hi, John, how's it going?" He sat down at the table, and when the waiter came over, he said, "Egg salad sandwich and coffee."
"Fine. The outlander's making progress. He has two friends. You and Ainsley."
"Real progress," Lee grunted. These creeps resent you because of your ability. They're a petty bunch."
"I know, I know," John said impatiently, "I remember when Wilson was a writer-in-residence at my alma mater. Same old jazz, Lee."
"It's too bad. How long is your contract?"
"Two miserable years, but I can use the dough, frankly. The royalties on Long-Gone Charlie aren't what I thought they'd be, you know."
"By the way, I read it finally. A helluva fine job, John."
"Thank you. Hope you went to your favorite bookstore and paid money for the book. It'll help yours truly."
"I did."
"How's your book coming? I had an idea, want to hear it?"
"Sure." Lee leaned forward, almost put his elbow into the coffee that the waiter put quite unexpectedly in front of him.
'When you finish it, let me read it. I'll give you suggestions on rewriting and so forth, and if it stands up for me, I'll send it to my publisher. He'll have to consider it if I send it."
"That's kind of sticking your neck out, isn't it?" Lee asked.
"I said, if it stands up; if you sustain the quality that I've seen so far; it has to hang together, Lee."
"I sure as hell appreciate it, John."
"Skip it. I'd like to see a nice fella like you get out of the academic grind. If you go my route, you might not have a lot of friends, but at least you'll get away from the phonies. You know."
"Yeah. Speaking of that, I have an appointment with Stone at two."
"That associate professor thing?" John fired up his pipe, blew a cloud of smoke at the ceiling. "What for?"
"To get ahead. Why else?"
Hanley shrugged his shoulders, blew another cloud of aromatic smoke out of his pipe-a big, unadorned corn-cob, forty-nine cents in your favorite drug store.
"Just keep at that book, boy. Otherwise, you'll be writing you-know-what."
Lee nodded.
"Yeah, I know. I have to run now, John. I'll bring the manuscript around when I get it done." John waved, and took a sip of coffee. He didn't look up when Lee turned back to look at him.
Stone pondered over the momentous issue of Lee Cushing. Like a ledger, he mentally wrote in red and black figures concerning the young instructor: he was young-red column. Had his doctorate in American literature-black column. Was reportedly working on a novel-questionable, depending on outcome. Had not written any critical articles for scholarly publication in over eight months-decidedly red.
He was still manipulating figures when the door resounded with a knock.
"Come in."
Lee walked in, shook hands with Stone, who waved him into a chair without ceremony.
"How are you, Lee? Courses going all right?"
"Fine, sir. I have a promising crop of students this semester."
"Glad to hear that. You know, sometimes I miss the teaching game. I get an occasional itch to be confronted by those eager faces."
Lee thought he noted sarcasm in the sonorous voice. Stone was a good-looking guy, young and distinguished in appearance; but hell, he acted old. He had ivy growing in his pores.
"Well, now, suppose we talk about this associate professorship I've opened?"
"Wonderful," Lee grinned. It was an attempt to hide his discomfort. Stone did not come off as a long-lost buddy, he was devoid of warmth.
"First of all, Lee, there are two strikes against you, one you have absolutely no control over, the second you can control. If you did something about the latter, I'd be willing to overlook the former."
Get it out, damn it, Lee thought, spit it out!
"You're young. Middle twenties-only had your doctorate for a year. You have, as I said before, no way of controlling this factor.
"But this other, Lee, this business of producing published criticism; it's expected in any English department; it's of mutual benefit to everyone concerned. It increases the stature of the individual scholar and the department with which he is associated. Why have you been lax in this end of things?"
"I've been awfully busy with my novel, Dr. Stone. I thought that it too would be of mutual benefit. I feel that it's going to be a good book. Mr. Hanley agrees, too."
Stone cleared his throat.
"Hanley has read your manuscript, and thinks well of it?"
"He's read what I've done. Just a few minutes ago, he offered to read it in its entirety, and submit it to his publisher. I'd say he's a much better judge than anyone out of the creative end, wouldn't you?" Uncomfortable silence.
Wrong damned thing to say, Lee boy. Critics are gods, they know everything about literature. You just ranked out one of the gods, man.
"Yes, well-by all means continue with that project, Cushing." Change in name; back to stiff formality. Wrong move, Lee, wrong move altogether.
"Doctor, I want to be an asset to this department while I further my own career. I hope you believe that. But I also want to further it in the best way possible, and I think it lies in writing novels, rather than critical essays. I think ultimately, it'll be more valuable."
"I have others to see, Dr. Cushing. Then, I need time to think. You see, I have to be sure in my selection, because that man is going to take over some of my duties so that I can go away next year with a clear, uncluttered mind. I plan to finish a long-nurtured project of mine."
For the first time, Lee was able to discern a trace of warmth and humanity in Stone's eyes. It startled him.
"Well, thanks for seeing me, Dr. Stone."
"Thank you. I'll be in touch. Think about what I said, Lee."
"Yes, sir, I will."
It was over.
Just like that, over.
He walked quickly to the parking lot, got inside the car and started it. Angrily, he pulled out of the space, leaving twin strips of rubber, and went through the stop sign without bothering to stop or even slow down.
By the time he pulled into his driveway, he had worked himself into a cold rage. He hoped that Joan was out; he didn't want her to see him like this; besides, when he told her about the interview, she would give the old, "I told you so, you don't play it their way" routine. Well, damn it, he didn't want to play it Stone's way. He didn't want to turn into a walking dictionary of empty, passionless theories, when it was guts and warmth and feeling that mattered in literature. And what better way to get inside it than creating it yourself, provided he had the talent? He felt that he did. Hanley evidently felt the same way. And, as he'd suggested to Stone, a man like Hanley was an infinitely better judge of ability than any critic who never wrote a piece of fiction. It was probably like Hanley had once told him: critics were for the most part frustrated authors.
Joan was home.
He heard her rustling busily in the kitchen when he came inside, and hurled his brief case onto a chair.
Usually, he tossed it. It bounced against the cushion and hit the floor with a heavy thud.
"Lee, is that you?" Joan called from the kitchen.
"Yes, it is!" he yelled back, and loosened his tie as he walked in to see her.
She wore a pair of second-skin paisley slacks that showed her clean, curved limbs to perfection. Inside the fabric sheath, her buttocks strained and moved easily, naturally-like the unhurried, languid movements of a dancer. Joan was infinitely provocative, even when she diced carrots and peeled potatoes, as she was doing now.
"Hi, darling." She put down the paring knife and turned to be kissed. "Home early, aren't you?"
They kissed. Her lips clung like top-grade honey.
"Yes. Are you almost through in here?" Lee asked, his voice tight.
"Through right now," she said. "Let's have a drink in the living room." Her eyes were bright with suggestion.
"I don't know if I want one," Lee told her. Joan laughed and said she didn't need one, that it was just a waste of perfectly good liquor.
"Then come on, girl, get out of this KP ward." Lee felt better already. When you had a woman like Joan to come home to and look at, you couldn't help feeling elated. She was euphoria wrapped in slacks and blouse.
He made small talk, avoiding the subject of his interview with Stone. Instead, he told her of his conversation with John Hanley.
"He's a helluva nice guy, you know? I wish we were friendlier with them."
"His wife's nice, too," Joan said, "and I also feel we've tried to show our friendliness toward them by inviting them here a couple of times. Friendship's a two-way street, Lee."
Lee nodded his agreement.
"I know. John's pretty busy with his book now, and I guess there isn't much energy left over for charm at the end of a day. It's something you have to understand about writers."
"What else happened today?" Joan asked.
Lee didn't want to tell her, not now, not before he made love to her. He had been thinking, quite consciously, all day of just that: coming home and making love to his wife.
Having sex.
Call a spade a spade, Lee; don't hide in semantics like the rest of them. Definition was a moot point. The fact remained that he wanted to take his wife to bed in the worst way.
He put his arm around her, felt his heart pound when she snuggled close against him, sweet warmth mingling with his.
"Better than a drink," he murmured, pulling her closer.
"Ummmmm," she agreed.
His hand rested almost idly on her breast, felt its soft rising curve like so much preserved cream that no brassiere could squash or contain. At the moment, he felt like a teen-ager about to entice his date into the back seat of a car; an exciting feeling. It was akin to the pioneer spirit, and it never ceased to amaze him that he could experience it with his own wife.
Joan liked the unexpected.
The expected move would have been to kiss her on the lips, to hold her a bit closer, whisper sweetnesses in her ear, and what-have-you.
He didn't do it.
Not then.
He started at the opposite end, instead, by releasing the catch at the top of her slacks and pulling the zipper down so that his hand could make contact with panties made warm by her flesh. It occurred to him that he could strip her and have her, without caresses, without customary buildup. Foreplay, when you came right down to it, was like putting one foot in front of the other when you walked. You did it without really thinking, without savoring the component parts that constituted the whole.
The slacks were annoyingly tight-fitting, and it took effort to work them over the full buttocks and hips; more, it was work all the way down the long, sumptuous legs.
Joan felt herself respond to the sudden, unexpected turn of events. Her heartbeat reverberated in her throat, a tight, hot feeling gripped her. She realized, at that moment, how badly she wanted sex. Hell, she always wanted sex, constantly, around the clock. It amazed her that she needed no soft, sweet buildup in preparation for the final onslaught. She was like a man: just take off your drawers and do it. She thought excitedly, My God, I must be a nymphomaniac.
If it weren't for her husband's appetite, one that at least matched her own, she might conceivably entice the iceman, milkman, salesmen, dog-catcher, and any other male who knocked on her door. The thought of latent promiscuity elated her, made her respond more savagely to her husband's caresses.
Lee's hand tore the panties from her flesh.
The ripping noise sent a shiver of excitement coursing through her. She wanted her flesh pinched and scraped, wanted to be thrown on the floor without ceremony or consideration. She wanted to be had.
Had, used, enjoyed.
Strictly the passive bit.
"Love me very hard, Lee," she heard herself say. It sounded like a hoarse, throaty croak. She let herself relax against the cushions and closed her eyes. His hands on her felt good, they felt fine on her hips and breasts and thighs and soft, yielding hump of belly-it always melted and softened when she made love; otherwise, it was firm and flat.
Lee stared down at his wife through slitted, smoky eyes.
Her pupils were dilated with passion. She had that telltale dazed expression, complete with slack mouth, moist, pouted lips and flared nostrils through which hot air was expelled. A wave of savage elation went through him when he touched the smooth, swollen curve of hips; it was flesh that longed to be pinched, hurt, teased into animal pleasure.
He pinched.
Softly at first, then harder, until she squealed and whimpered with savage joy, moving erotically up at him with short, jerky thrusts. Her head was thrown back, eyes closed now, lips trembling. Her hand reached out for him, found him. At the touch, he stiffened with pleasure, felt his muscles curl into knots. He was well beyond restraint. It was time to have her. God, she was ready, really ready, why wait? He began to loosen his clothing.
"No," she gasped, "take me with your clothes on!" Slowly, through desire-clouded brain, seeped the true nature of her need.
His hand grabbed the collar of her blouse.
Pulled.
Buttons flew machine-gun-fashion away from her, and he ripped the perfectly serviceable blouse off her body, his sense of wantonness increasing with her gasping, encouraging sounds. He quickly unsnapped the bra and pushed it up toward her collarbone, and watched her tremble to the sound of his own zipper opening.
He took her quickly.
Joan felt rough material of man's clothing against her, man merely exposed, rather than undressed. Oh, it was delicious! So marvelously primal and ele mental, devoid of civilized trappings!
His hands savagely kneaded her bare buttocks, pulled her abruptly against his straining body, now meshing with hers, moving piston-like without regard for her needs or desires, and it was how she wanted it now, like that, yes like that, hard, brutal, no words unless they were vile and suggestive or instructive-
Her heart skipped a beat when he stopped.
No, Lee, please don't stop now, she thought desperately, and even while she felt her heart sinking with disappointment, it jumped in her throat as she felt herself being rudely, unceremoniously turned over onto her stomach.
His hands were all over her.
Bending her legs, her arms, making her crouch with buttocks raised toward the ceiling, head down against the cushions so that the blood rushed into it and made her face turn beet-red with pleasure and exertion.
When he took her again, Joan screamed. It was a scream of utter joy and savage glee. "Use me, oh, yes! Use me!" she panted, feeling deliciously like a bitch dog at the hands of a randy St. Bernard. His hands reached under her, cupped her breasts, his body strained. There was the heart-stopping sensation of her buttocks working his abdomen, the feeling of her own passion on her thighs. She panted and cursed and worked with him, her face red, lips hanging open with animal lust.
Hard, inconsiderate hands grabbed her fleshy thighs and pushed them tightly together. She almost lost her balance. She closed them tightly and became dizzy with sensation. It was good like that: she felt him working, straining, gorging, and she knew it was unbearably good for him....
And it was over.
She slumped to the couch, totally exhausted. Wonderfully used.
Her husband was a bull, a stallion, a wonderful lover who knew how to treat a woman like a woman and not some powdered statuette that you were afraid to touch for fear of breaking.
"Are you OK?" he asked her.
Through closed, contented eyes, she smiled. He was considerate, worried about her, loved her. She knew she had the logically impossible joy of being able to have her cake and eat it.
Her cake was the best husband any woman could ask for.
There was just one sore area in their relationship, and she chose at this moment not to irritate it. Perhaps he'd write tonight. She hoped fervently that he, of his own initiative, would sit down to write.
CHAPTER THREE
Paul Stone was disturbed by his interview with Lee Cushing. Here was a young man, he thought, with obvious gifts for teaching-in short, for the academic way of life, who expressed a manifest unwillingness to do things that were expected of him. He had read Lee's doctoral thesis, and it had been an excellent one. One of the finest he had read, to be sure; full of good solid documentation and allusion and connection and cross-reference. It was the work of a scholar. Why did Lee Cushing choose to rebel against established policy?
He was working on a novel. Fine. Wonderful.
But it was a conjectural enterprise at best, one that might fail dismally. And John Hanley did not help matters greatly with his encouragement of the project. Hanley was a writer, made his living at it, but in no way was he a scholar. He unhesitatingly admitted that he couldn't be bothered with "academic hogwash." Yet, Stone had chosen to hire Hanley, because of the very real prestige that the man could give to the Department.
He was a currently discussed writer, one who had the critics whirling. It was a decidedly rare thing for writers to arouse so much attention in their own time. But damn it, Hanley was making his job more difficult. A man Lee's age was especially impressionable, subject to Wind idealism. He wanted to be a teacher and a writer, two very fine ambitions; but he failed to accept the reality of current requirements: that of establishing himself on scholarly grounds.
It was disturbing, because his hands were tied. Cushing had a two year contract with the university, a contract unbreakable at either end; he couldn't be fired, and he couldn't resign. It boiled down to the uncomfortable fact that they had to live with one another for two years-but Stone was determined to turn Lee around. There were ways, many ways to achieve the turn-around. As an administrator, he was well-versed in those ways, indeed, he thought.
Peggy Stone addressed the last of her invitations and put them out front, under the mailbox, where the mailman could pick them up.
Another silly faculty party.
A brain-picking session, where they spoke to one another like vultures awaiting death so they could pounce on helpless gray matter. It would follow the customary pattern, of course: cocktails, pre-made, pre-chilled whiskey sours, manhattans or daquiris. Everybody drank the same thing. It was part of the uniform process. They talked; God, how they talked. It sounded invariably like an oral dissertation. Every now and then, they would talk about the same thing, a remarkably rare occurrence. It was standard for one to talk into mentally closed ears; when he was through, the other talked immediately, and expounded his unsolicited theories. Years of these affairs had taught Peggy that original thinking was unwelcome. It upset the apple cart, blew the pattern all to hell. Yet, if it did happen on occasion-if someone did have the audacity to strike out in new directions; it was listened to, secretly dissected, weighed, mentally visualized in print, and if academically marketable, used in different, barely disguised language.
It was all a waste.
But Paul insisted on these parties as a working part of his responsibilities. It enabled him (so he claimed) to keep attuned to the members of the department, his subordinates. It helped him to evaluate each individual member, something he hardly had time for during a working day.
And like a good faculty wife, Peggy did her best to make these parties a success. She made what she thought to be interesting, yet acceptable hors d' oeuvres; paired people off as best she could; and introduced new people around, people such as the Hanleys, trying to get them into the swim as quickly and painlessly as possible because there was no mistaking or evading the fact that it was, for the uninitiated, a highly painful undertaking.
Everything done, she went to the kitchen and poured herself another cup of coffee. She was drinking too much of the stuff these days. Her nerves were keyed to a screaming, potentially explosive pitch. She was randy as a brood mare from Paul's lack of attention, and the sexual frustration created tension that overlapped into every other part of her life.
She had never even contemplated infidelity until very recently. Lately, it had begun to erode her brain like an insistent little termite eating into rotting wood. It had started in dreams; faceless, for the most part unidentifiable men had had her, had used her in delicious forbidden ways; and when she awakened, it was with a horrified sense of physical release.
It upset her, it was a damned waste. Why did husbands and wives in their prime sleep together? Just to sleep, and nothing else? Why couldn't Paul give her a fraction of the attention he gave to his job, to his critical project? She wasn't asking, had never asked, that he neglect his career for her sake. She knew that men were ultimately married to their careers. That was what made careers successful enterprises. All she wanted was a little attention, some acknowledgement on his part that she existed as a human being, as his wife, a woman with needs to be enjoyed and fulfilled.
But he wouldn't listen, however she broached the subject. She could see his ears close tight, his mind throw up a roadblock of concentrated deafness that nothing on earth could penetrate.
She had tried everything.
She had humiliated herself in incredible ways.
Like the time last year when she had done herself up in that bizarre fashion in an attempt to make herself irresistibly attractive to Paul. One of her supermarket-friends, the checkout girl, had told her how men were easily enticed by visual aids. She had gone home, thinking of a way to make herself especially attractive.
A pair of black mesh stockings.
Held up with a pair of garter bands: pink ones.
Coral-pink lipstick around the breast nipples.
Heavy, lewd-looking eye shadow.
Nothing else but her perfect body. She had stood in front of the full length mirror, working, practicing, experimenting, until she was satisfied with the effect. When she honestly felt that she could walk outside and be raped by the first passing male, she stopped. Paul had come home.
She had greeted him, like that, lying full-length on the sofa, arms stretched behind her and holding onto the end, so that the twin hillocks that were her breasts rose and fell in sharp contrast to her concave, hollowed stomach. She had arched her thighs so that hip curves swelled in symphony with the rest of her. It was a picture that would make any man forget where he was or who he was, and fall quickly to the business of utilizing that body. She had done it, thinking possibly she hadn't made herself appealing enough. After all, she remembered thinking, when two people live together day after day, a little more effort, a lot more imagination is required.
His reaction stunned her.
"For God's sake, Peggy, stop acting like a doped up teenager!"
For something like a full minute, she had remained stunned, speechless. Then, as the result of built up, nurtured desire, she had thrown herself at him in a last-ditch attempt to succeed in a long-absent sex bout.
He had shoved her aside, almost brutally.
"I'm very busy, Peggy. Please change into more presentable attire, if you will."
At that moment, she knew hate in all its manifestations. In a symbolic, but altogether real way, she had humiliated herself on his account; and he had flouted it, rejected it like yesterday's newspaper.
After that, and ever since, things were markedly strained between them. Perhaps three times, they had made love. It had been mechanical, dutiful and detached on his part; desperate and furiously futile on hers. It simply did not work with them any more. The old carefree days were gone forever, it seemed.
Now that she had given up any hope of a successful emotional and physical relationship between them, her mind insiduously, inevitably turned to irreverent thoughts. Physically, she was a bundle of sexual desire, that accumulated over a period of months, manifested itself in emotional frenzy. She went through the other motions of being a wife: she cooked meals, shopped, kept a house, organized social functions, paid bills-all empty, purely dutiful acts. They had long since been stripped of any real significance.
Brenda told Bill the next morning that she wanted to speak to Dr. Cushing, and that it might take a while.
"OK, sweetie, I've got that story to get off, anyway. I'll give you a call tonight." They squeezed hands, and Bill left.
Lee looked up when Brenda approached his desk.
"Hello, Brenda. Good class today. I enjoyed your contributions."
"Thanks. Could I talk to you-when it's convenient, I mean?"
"It's convenient right now," Lee smiled, "come on to the office. I have two hours before my next class." She followed him out; he stopped at the coffee machine.
"How do you take your coffee?" he asked.
"Black with sugar," she replied. Brenda watched him put money into the machine; it went through the cold mechanics of delivering the watered-down beverage.
When they reached his office and went inside, he shut the door; the noises of students outside were remote, dimly unreal.
"What's on your mind?" he asked, motioning her into a chair.
"I want to do something extra for your course."
"Not necessary," he said. "People like you don't have to." Her paper had been extraordinary, and her class discussion was beyond belief, he thought.
"I don't mean for a better grade," she said, leaning forward in her chair; Lee could not help noticing the gentle swing of her breasts, the young voluptuousness of her body. Quickly, he stopped looking at her and let his eyes meet hers.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
Just keep in mind I'm not brown-nosing, Dr. Cushing."
Lee nodded, thumbed some tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. "Okay." He grinned. That expression was still alive from his own undergrad days.
"Faulkner fascinates me, pure and simple. I want to know a lot more, and no class on earth at undergraduate level can do any subject justice. Right?
Lee nodded agreement, and again his eyes roved over her abundant breasts, shapely thighs.
"Right. So, I want to read ahead, get a good grasp of his overall work, and do a paper; a very comprehensive, all-embracing paper."
"That's a big order, Brenda. You're talking about a thesis, maybe even a dissertation. Are you ready for that kind of thing, do you think? You have to be realistic, too. Why don't you save a project like this for graduate school, where it'll really count?"
"I plan to use it as a draft, or skeleton for my thesis. What I want is some independent study, Dr. Cushing. I don't mean not going to classes, but some outside discussion with you. Like they do at Oxford."
Lee had to laugh.
The girl wanted the impossible. The whole American educational system of grades, numbers, statistical data, averages and exams, the system that said do the least for the most, and conceal lack of quality in vast quantities: and she wanted summarily to buck all of it.
Good girl.
"Brenda, you are a hopeless, wonderfully rare idealist."
"All I'm asking, and it's a lot, I'll admit, is extra time on your part."
"But what do you ultimately expect to get out of this, Brenda? We've established the fact that you don't need anything of this sort for grade's sake."
"Something that I have yet to get in college."
"What's that, Brenda?"
"An honest-to-God education. A chance to do some creative thinking and writing. I'm a little sick of paraphrasing, of throwing back information in different words. Your course is nice and small, and I just want to do it." She smiled and crossed her lovely legs, giving him a quick flash of hot, creamy thigh.
Lee thought of his short supply of time. There was the novel, the outside preparation for classes, so many things.
She was asking something of him that no student of his had ever asked, something that he himself had not asked during his student days.
Which meant that he had to give it to her.
"When do you want to start?" he asked.
"I've read the whole Snopes trilogy and The Bear. I'll be finished with The Sound And The Fury by next week. Is that enough ammunition?"
Lee thought with idle, mild alarm that she had nearly covered an entire semester's work in three weeks; what, he wondered, did she do with her other classes? Certainly, she didn't neglect them.
"Okay. I usually have a couple of free hours after our class. We'll use an hour of the time then to discuss things, and maybe once in awhile you can come to my house in the evenings. We'll find time."
Brenda stood up and smiled, straightening her skirt. Again, Lee was aware of her ripeness. She had a younger, less mature version of his wife's body, a thought that set off a host of other thoughts concerning last night's torrid sexcapade with Joan. He forced it out of his mind and said good-bye to Brenda, who stood at the door.
Well, Stone, he thought, try that for size, you know where! How's that for independent thinking on the part of one of your student numbers? An undegraduate at that? Undergraduates were traditionally last on the totem pole of consideration; graduates, after all, were the future scholars and teachers, whereas undergrads were somehow far removed as objects of value, beings worthy of development.
Brenda Wood sensed that something was going to change in her life. What, how and when, she did not know; but sitting in Dr. Cushing's office, the sense of change, some kind of metamorphosis had surrendered her like an invisible vapor.
She liked Dr. Cushing.
He was so young, so alive.
And yes, damn it, good-looking. But that was not a consideration as far as a young woman of Brenda's caliber was concerned. She was only aware of her response to his presence, his strength. Dr. Cushing was anything but a non-entity, she decided. He would somehow stand out in any room with any number of people.
He was compelling, magnetic. Every pore of his being exuded dynamism, a silent, surging demand to be known and acknowledged.
He was very much like Bill. Her Bill, the Bill she was going to marry in June. Cushing lacked Bill's hard quality, that ex-marine hardness; and Bill seemed to lack Cushing's razor-sharp empathy, an empathy that radiated like electronic waves from him.
Languidly, as one in half-sleep, she wondered what Dr. Cushing would be like in bed, as a sex mate, a lover. It was a silly, irrelevant thought, but one that seeped into her brain anyway. Sometimes irrelevant thoughts are the most significant thoughts, the thoughts that we would rather not face.
Skip it, she thought.
With not much difficulty, she conjured up a big, fat image of Bill, standing with male readiness over the bed where she lay naked, moist and trembling with anticipation. It was a picture she dwelled on, reveled in, until she felt a hot, dry wave roll through her body.
Bill would not call until evening.
Such a long, long time to wait for it!
She would study; read; write, anything to erase the long gap of time that remained between her and Bill. When he called, she would make known her wishes-would convey the reality of her horniness to him via the impersonal network of wires and electronic components. She would do anything to get them together in bed this evening.
Idly, she thought of her paper, the one she was to do for Cushing. The more she thought about it, the more it excited her. It would undoubtedly be the first truly original thing she had done in three years of college. Cushing was the first teacher who had given her a chance to demonstrate her talents as an individual thinker, rather than as a tape in playback phase. And, most ironic and damning, she had had to ask him; and he had been visibly surprised. But he had come through too. That was rare, she decided, vary rare. A teacher like that could very easily spoil you.
It was going to be nice working so closely with Dr. Cushing.
On the following afternoon, Joan Cushing went for the mail. It was after two; their mailman was incredibly slow, preposterously devoid of any zest for his work. The mail was erratic because of the man's basic lack of motivation and drive-sometimes it arrived at noon, other times at three, other days not at all. It was maddening.
She threw it all on the kitchen table and gave it a cursory glance. Most of the envelopes contained bills, as it was the first of the month. She didn't bother opening them, as Lee didn't get paid for another week-why ask for aggravation? It was a mental form of masochism, one that every suburban housewife indulged in frequently. She had learned to avoid it.
After deciding not to open the bills, and after throwing away the sucker mail addressed Resident, there was remarkably little to open. A letter from her mother, one from her sister in Tucson, and a small envelope from Mrs. Paul Stone III.
Judging from the size of the envelope, it was an invitation. It couldn't be a thank-you note, since the Cushings had not given the Stones one damned thing.
Lee had been adamant on that score. He had made a wry remark that they could score brownie points in other, more subtle ways. It was an invitation.
A faculty cocktail party, to be held at the Stone residence at seven-thirty o'clock on the fifteenth, exactly one week from now-please come, we can't survive without you. Peggy Stone wrote astoundingly clever notes, Joan thought. This was something that she did not bother consulting Lee about. She simply sent off an acknowledgement, stating that the Cushings would be there, come hell or high water. And that was that, except for the idle woman-thoughts of what dress shall I wear, and gee, I'd better call Helene at the beauty parlor and see if she can squeeze me in, and on it went, until she found herself looking forward to the damned thing-Faculty parties were Joan's form of masochistic entertainment. As an ex-dancer, a decidedly anti-intellectual (she was merely well-educated, well-read) and a mistress of inwardly voiced quips, she was not the most popular of faculty wives. Rather, she was the antithesis of faculty wifelihood: She exuded too much sex-appeal. Stone especially seemed to secretly hold his nose when he saw her, but that could be her imagination rather than a working reality, she thought. In a word, she felt uncomfortable in these gatherings, until she saw through the facade of what they stood for; after that, she had an evening's worth of laughs. Someday, she would have the courage to indulge herself a little by putting those stuffed shirts on in a big way. She would have done it long ago had it not been for her concern about Lee's career.
Speaking of that, she was disturbed.
Very disturbed.
No, not disturbed: angry: seething, as a matter-of-fact. Lee had come home last night aglow with good news. Her heart had leaped. It could be nothing less than his being appointed to the Associate Professorship, or perhaps a publisher's acceptance of his novel, based on cnapters plus synopsis.
But it was none of those things.
He had poured them each a drink, and told her about one of his students, a bright young lady who wanted to do some independent study, with his help. He'd told Joan of the arrangement.
"You don't have enough time to work now, and and you take that on?" she had asked, disappointment evident in her face.
"I'll find the time. It's just such a wonderful feeling to find a student who cares that much. A teacher'll knock himself out for a student like that, honey."
"I wish you'd knock yourself out for Lee Cushing a bit more," she'd replied, sorry as soon as the words fired out of her mouth.
"Joan, I'm not a chronic unemployed member of our society, nor am I an alienated soul who needs outside help in planning his destiny. We've been through it before, and I don't want to go through it again. I'll clue you in one more time. A novel is not a letter to Mother, nor is it like writing checks. A writer works all the time, even while he eats dinner or makes love to his wife. I'm always thinking, and when the thoughts get, I write."
"I'm sorry," she'd replied. The had left it at that, but she hadn't been able to forget Lee's self-imposed commitment, one that would no doubt act to suck him dry, time-wise and thought-wise. It was extra, extraneous work that would do nothing for him by way of promotion or added prestige. It bothered her; she wished that her husband would be more willing to play the game Stone's way.
Bill Holloway threw the plastic cover over his typewriter and gathered up the pages. He dashed a quick letter off to his agent in New York and stuffed the whole works into a large manila envelope. Through.
Tomorrow, he'd mail it off in plenty of time to make the deadline. Everybody would be happy except for himself. It was a hurried, slipshod job that he had not had time to rewrite or revise. It upset him to send off sloppy manuscripts, but everyone screamed about deadlines, and there was nothing he could do except break his hump to meet them.
School was a handicap to him, to his career. School and its demands conspired to rob him of time and thought power, and consequently, more money. If he were out of school, he could write more junk, think about more junk, and climb the ladder more rapidly. But hell, he had too much time invested in college to quit at this point. There was no choice but to ride it out. Unlike Brenda, he was just serving time; it was the Marine Corps all over again. You counted time in terms of papers and exams and class meetings and credit hours consumed. At the end of it all he would have a B. A. degree in English. Big deal.
No publisher would ever ask him about his education; it would not help one iota with his writing career. Yet if it ever came to pass that he had a dry spell-the writer's occupational malady-he would have an insurance policy to cash in, to get an interim-type job. Other than that, the degree would be a useless piece of paper to remind himself of the fact that he had delayed his writing success by approximately two years.
He remembered it was time to call Brenda. He picked up the phone and dialed the dormitory number. As always, another girl answered and he had to ask for Brenda.
Eons later, Brenda came to the phone.
"I was in the John," she explained.
"There should be a phone in there," Bill said. "Every John should have a phone, a radio and a stack of maeazines."
"True. Finish your story?"
"Yep. All ready to mail. Finish your work?"
"Not really, but I'm not about to do any more tonight."
A moment of silence, sound of quiet breathing over the distance of wires. Brenda's mind raced wildly. It was seven o'clock, she could stay out until eleven, the curfew imposed on week nights. Four hours to be with Bill, four hours of fun and games and talk, if he would come bv and pick her up.
"Feel like coming over for awhile?" he asked.
"I was wondering when you'd fret around to asking the big question," she replied with a laugh. "I'm as ready as a nanny goat, Bill Holloway."
He laughed raucously into the phone.
Brenda's candor never failed to amuse him. When they'd first met, she had been a truly shy, inhibited girl; now she talked as he did, as he had from the beginning with her. Her humorous lapses into vulgarity was one of her endearing qualities.
"You need fixing, girl," he said.
"And you're the repairman. I know."
"Believe it."
"Oh, I do, I do, but we're wasting time. I'll be waiting out front for you."
He hung up, changed his shirt, put on his wind-breaker and left the house.
Outside, he breathed the early autumn air, the first hint of frost. It was invigorating, cleanly brisk. It filled him with a sense of being alive, of every pore of his body being ready for action. It reminded him of tropic nights in Suji Bay, where after a stinking day of one hundred thirty in the shade, the temperature would plunge down to sixty-five degrees, and you had to sleep in long underwear beneath blankets. You felt alive, when all the sluggishness of heat and humidity went out of you. On those jungle nights, though, there hadn't been any women; there hadn't been Brenda; there hadn't been the comfort of someone to love, a body to enjoy.
He skipped the analogies and started up the Triumph. The plugs were wet, and the car patently refused to start until he almost exhausted the battery. It was a tired car, a car ready for the junk heap. He could afford a new one, and planned to buy one during Christmas vacation when he had time to look around.
The damned thing finally started, kicking over with a valve-clattering commotion, and he pulled out of the space and wound out first gear going up the ramp. By the time he was in the street, he was in second; with a whip-like motion, he snapped it into third, then high gear. Once the car was going over thirty, it ran all right. It was especially designed for fast driving, rather than clanking around in the city.
Brenda was waiting in front.
She heard the unmistakable sound of his car, and walked to the curb. When she was inside the car, she kissed Bill, then leaned back in the seat.
"Hi."
In the half-light of the dash instruments, he could see the twin bulges of her breasts, the sweet curve of hip and thigh, slight roundness of lower belly....
"Hi." He leaned over and kissed her again; her lips clung to his with a cloying, sumptuous insistence, he felt himself responding. "Come on, let's go," he said with a dry sound.
He flicked through the gears quickly, took the turns faster than the balding tires were capable of negotiating, and managed to get back to his apartment in seven minutes flat. He threw the car into the ramp, and hurriedly got out.
"See what you've done to me, Bill Holloway? You've made a wanton woman out of an essentially pure maiden."
"I can see you're all eaten up with regret." Her hip nudged against his coquetishly.
"I am. I'm an outcast."
"You're a conformist, dear girl. Show me a virgin under sixteen years of age in this contemporary culture of ours, and I'll show you a museum piece."
"Why are men so damned skeptical about female morality?"
"Realistic is the word you're seeking, darling. You're surrounded by sex in an inherently Puritanical society; it makes for insurmountable hang-ups if you dwell on it. But let's skip the semantics and get on with our investigation. We empiricists have no room in our arguments for idle conjecture, as it were."
They didn't wait for the elevator, but walked up the stairs instead.
"You're going to wear me out," Brenda said.
"I'm warming you up, dear girl. A good sweat always releases untold amounts of energy and vitality."
"Damn, not only a scientist, lover and philosopher, but a gym coach as well."
"Admittedly, a man of many and diverse gifts," he agreed.
In the apartment, with the door locked, he led her to the couch. "The bedroom is an unholy mess. I've been working in there, and it's like a smoke factory."
"Always the couch, she grumbled. "I'm not good enough for your bed."
"Can't beat the status system, girl. I'm afraid my bed's reserved for unexpected guests-Sophia Loren, Bardot; they drop in to see me from time to time, and they detest used beds. Very immaculate girls, those two."
"Fix me a drink and stop the patter. You're punchy."
He threw her a grin and poured out some bourbon on the rocks for both of them. Brenda didn't care what she drank, as long as she got there. The taste of liquor held no charm for her whatever.
They drank.
"I love you, you know that?" Bill said, putting his arm around her.
"I love you too, thank goodness."
"What's goodness got to do with it?" he asked.
"Nothing, really." She laughed. "It really doesn't have the first damned thing to do with it, does it?"
"No."
She told him about her plans for Cushing's class. It was conversation that would last the duration of the drink she held in her hand.
"You're nuts. What for?" She told him the same thing she had told Dr. Cushing, and Bill nodded. She knew he understood; if he didn't agree, he at least understood, and let it go at that.
"Let's have sex."
"Okay. If you really want to."
"I sure do want to. And so do you."
"I just tolerate my woman's burden," she sighed. "Part of my wifely duties."
"Hell, we're not married yet."
"As far as I'm concerned, we have a better relationship than any married couple alive," she said with a new note of seriousness.
Bill sobered, put his arm around her, and held her close against him. "We sure do, kitten. There's nothing on earth that can take it from us, either."
"No. Nothing." She held her mouth up to be kissed; a pretty, petulant, pouting mouth. He kissed it. Her lips grew warm and pliant, then moist with readiness to respond; they parted, and their tongues met, sending a shiver of delight through each of their bodies.
Brenda sighed, leaned back.
The atmosphere had been established by previous conversation; ground rules were laid and in effect: no words, just action. She had come over to have sex, and he was going to give her sex on a man-to-woman basis.
He peeled her sweater over her head and unsnapped her brassiere. Breasts poured out like half-solidified (lava, with a flowing, leaping motion, and he surrounded the hemispheres of flesh with his big, powerful hands and hefted their feathery weight. Such warmth, such soft vivaciousness! They were fine breasts, perfect breasts, the epitome of mammary development in homo sapiens female. He cupped them, tried to sway them. There was a little give, but essentially they were firm and solid, resplendent with youthful fullness. Chances were, Brenda's breasts would never take on that middle-aged sag.
He rubbed her seashell-pink nipples into swollen little pebbles, rolled them between his fingers like tiny marbles, and heard her breath whoosh out of her mouth in gulping chunks; she leaned her body backward, arched her back to make them more accessible.
Hands, magnificent male hands on her breasts. Warmth born of growing desire spread through her body in huge waves; every now and then he hurt her. It added nicely to the pleasure.
Very nicely.
"Ooooooh!" Her thighs dropped limply off to the sides, parting, pulling her tight skirt up past her knees so that white, moist flesh showed shadow-like. She was a woman, a pleasure instrument, being manipulated and aroused and about to be used. It was pure raw sex, nothing else.
Precisely what she had asked for.
His breath came hotly into the deep cleavage, spread gently over her white flesh, touched her nipples and made her quiver with joy.
"Kiss them, darling," she shuddered, "bite them, love them!" She made a high, whimpering noise when his lips took a nipple and squeezed it; his other hand cupped an entire breast, squeezed it. She moaned and shook and sighed with ecstasy.
She pulled her legs farther apart, into a sprawling attitude. It made her skirt hike up to her thigh tops where hips and legs joined almost imperceptibly.
His fingers touched the sensitized flesh.
Crept upward, to the hem of her silken panties. They were tight; her thighs filled them completely, forced his hand to move up over her hot silk-covered belly until it found naked skin around the navel. Something like a high-voltage shock traveled through her when his fingers crept beneath the waistband and encountered bare flesh, poised momentarily above the silky, rough-hewn fluff-
And then plunged in. Probing, seeking, finding.
Her body responded with instant acceleration of hips driving forward, up and down, in timeless prehistoric movements of passion. Her body accepted his probing, sucked him inward, held him with clamped, possessive thighs while he kissed her naked breasts and smooth hot flesh, worked the zipper of her skirt downward while she moaned and held her head back against the top of the couch, eyes smoky, lips hanging limp and pouting with passion. She was too far gone with desire to be aware of time or space; nothing could snap her back into the present except release, a blessed journey upward into the realm of head-blasting sensations engendered by their meshing.
A sudden sense of freedom around her waist told her the skirt was unzipped. Half consciously, she lifted her buttocks a half-inch off the couch to aid Bill in pulling them down over her full hips. Then they were off, and his hands were drinking in the splendor of full buttocks and ample thighs, running hectically over her.
She shuddered, then cried.
It was unbearable.
Unbearably delicious and sweet, like forbidden lotus fruit, making her drugged and sleepy with passion that warmed her body until it. grew hot and aching with lust.
Her hand reached out, trembling and small, and found what it sought. Him.
The essence of him."
The him that mingled with her.
She found him, felt his body uncoil like a tightly wound spring. She touched him in ways she knew he liked to be touched: gentle, all-consuming, with a soft, rubbing motion of delicate fingers. He gasped, and she gently worked the zipper of his khakis down, plunged her hand inside Jockey shorts, and felt him, heard him lapse into delirium.
He was huge.
Long ago, his hugeness had frightened her, but not any more. Now it just excited her, thrilled her with knowledge born of experience that she was capable of containing that maleness, of bringing it to a state of satisfied exhaustion while it did the same for her.
He doused the living room lamp while she finished undressing herself; she saw the room fall into darkness, heard the rustle of his clothing while he removed it all from his body. They didn't always do it in the dark; in fact, they seldom did. They delighted in seeing one another-passion-tight faces, physical manifestations of desire; but tonight, somehow, they wanted darkness to be their silent companion.
She felt his weight on the couch.
He was sitting beside her, reaching out to caress her warm musky body, brushing his hands over her breasts, her belly, her hips and thighs, and between the thighs. She shuddered, moaned under her breath. He was able to feel her unconscious pelvic movements.
Brenda felt herself being lifted.
His hands were strong.
They lifted her body as if it were a feather, and placed her on his lap, facing him. His hands shifted up to her breasts, cupped them possessively.
A grunt escaped her lips-an animal grunt of pleasure-as she became aware of what was about to happen. Her full, heart-shaped buttocks ground smoothly against the tops of his legs as he pulled her close.
She lifted herself, breathing hard, grunting nonstop.
Then, suddenly, swiftly, they meshed. With an excited whinny, she clamped her full, sumptuous thighs shut and heard him croak.
There were no words.
Words were impossible. They choked and cried and sobbed and laughed like two hysterical people, driving piston-like against one another. Her buttocks slapped suggestively against his thighs, and she felt his hands against her buttocks when they lifted, urging her on.
They hit the top together.
It was more violent, more tremulous than usual. It had the intensity of a volcano erupting. Her hands lashed out helplessly, flailing the air while she moaned and sobbed and drove herself up and down, and then it was suddenly over.
Exhaustion.
Utter, complete exhaustion.
They slept on the couch, and a sixth sense awakened them in time for Bill to take her back to the dorm. On the way back, they were silent. They exchanged glances, smiled at each other.
She would sleep well tonight.
She would curl up beneath the blankets and fall off to sleep with sweet, uninterrupted dreams.
CHAPTER FOUR
At page 219 Lee bogged down. His protagonist hung from a figurative cliff, waiting for the author to do something, anything with him. For minutes Lee's fingers remained poised above the keys in a state of suspension; he read what he'd written-read it again. He couldn't kill him.
If he did that, the book would be over for all practical purposes, and he had projected it for slightly over 300 pages. On the other hand, he couldn't resolve the man's conflict, because that too would end the book. Something had to be done; something that would carry the story at a fast pace toward a tenable conclusion. He must avoid anti-climaxes.
He lit his pipe.
Creaking sounds, everywhere, in the quiet of night, with Joan asleep and his typewriter silent. It was his favorite part of the day-a time for thought, for dreams, even for the occasional but rare profundities.
He had learned one cardinal rule with The Plunge, which was quite simply to stop writing when you got bogged down; it had happened to him once or twice before, and like a fool, he had gone on writing, only to tear up what he had written on rereading it-so now he stopped, threw the cover over the typewriter.
He tried reading.
His mind returned to the faculty party at Stone's house-another night of insipid intrigue, as he privately thought of them. He didn't want to attend. He saw no discernible percentage in attending, but Joan insisted that it was good for him to go, and he didn't want an argument; an evening of torture was infinitely preferable to days of sullenness on his wife's part.
He had passed Stone several times in the corridors at school, and the older man had merely nodded perfunctorily in his direction, a bare acknowledgement of his existence. Lee was quite sure that Stone had murdered him in his mind. Funny, he thought-you go into the enchanted ivory tower of academe to get away from the politics and jungle warfare of the business world, and in the end you wind up with precisely the same situation. Get more than one person together, and there is competition, vested interests and a host of other interactive inconsistencies: the old sociological axiom that holds true in all cases. Yet he loved teaching; he knew that he was what was commonly referred to as a dedicated teacher. He had been a fool to think that teaching itself was the primary end-the truth was that you had to dig through the muck to find the gold, and damned little at that.
Joan heard the typewriter stop. After several minutes of listening to Lee walk around, she knew he had finished writing for the evening. Glancing at the luminous dial of the alarm clock, she saw that it was a little after twelve. He would probably be coming to bed soon, and she wanted desperately to fall asleep. To pretend sleep was a mild, but nevertheless real form of deceit, and she didn't want to deceive Lee on any count.
But her mind would not permit sleep.
She tried every sleeping position, and after a minute or so, found that she was uncomfortable. A sure symptom of insomnia, she decided. Things flitted through her mind like blips on a radar screen, with unrelenting regularity. The blips centered around Stone's gathering, and Lee's reluctance to go, It seemed strange to her that a man with Lee's love for his job was not willing to do the necessary little things to enhance his future. Attending a party given by your department chairman was a simple matter; yet Lee balked like a mule, making it necessary for her to prod and urge and cajole, and finally, in a fit of desperation, demand. She knew it was good for his career, and it was her job as his wife to see that he did the right thing. It was one of the unpleasant responsibilities of wifehood, to help your husband with his career.
Every time she asked Lee about the results of his interview with Stone, he was evasive and vague. He told her that nothing had happened. She trusted her husband; yet it seemed absurd to her that nothing had come of it. It had been over a week. Lee came home every afternoon, graded papers, planned classes or wrote. Lately, he had been holding meetings with that prize student of his, what's-her-name-Brenda something or other. She was supposed to come to the house tomorrow evening, which meant of course that he wouldn't be able to work on his novel. Joan couldn't see why he did things like that, got himself involved. It did nothing for his career, did not raise him in Stone's eyes.
She heard Lee's footsteps.
Rolling over, she pretended sleep.
He was very quiet. She heard him take off his shoes, put them gently on the floor; there was a rustling sound of clothes being removed, and finally the sag of extra weight against the mattress, his body next to hers.
She was silent.
He was silent, and she sensed his agitated state of sleeplessness. Without seeing him, she knew he was lying on his back with his hands locked behind his head, staring up at the invisible ceiling. He had been preoccupied lately; there were things on his mind, and she hadn't the vaguest notion of what they were. At times, Lee was brooding and uncommunicative: still another strike against him. If only he were a little more outgoing and gregarious like Al Cook, for instance. The man was thirty-two years old and was already a full professor, simply because he had managed to catch Stone's attention by dint of critical publication and faculty meetings and gatherings. Cook played the game with vigor, and benefited there from, while her husband, more intelligent than Cook by far, was still struggling along with an instructor's ranking, despite his Ph.D. Of course, Lee was nowhere near thirty-two years old, but he made no effort to play the game.
"Lee, are you awake?" she asked in the dark. His tension made her tense.
"Yes."
"How much writing did you get done tonight?"
"Five pages," he said. "Five good pages; then I got stuck."
Five pages did not seem like very much production to Joan.
"At this rate, you'll never finish." She heard Lee sigh impatiently.
"Look, I'll explain it to you again, Joan. A novel, especially a first novel, is not a ledger book. It's slow, careful, usually painful going. When you start balking, you quit, or just tear it up the next time around. Give me credit for knowing what I'm doing, huh?"
She sighed.
"Sometimes I don't think you care one way or the other about your future, Lee-our future."
"I care very much, and you know it," he said heatedly. "But just let me do it my way, huh? I'm reasonably intelligent and ambitious and I have a clean-cut appearance that people just love. As a matter-of-fact, some people think I'll go a helluva long way. I wish you'd share that faith."
"I'm sorry," she grumbled. There was no use trying to help him; he resented every effort to be helped. Why couldn't he see that she was trying to help him, and not make his life miserable? It was the one, the only sore spot in their marriage, everything else was perfect.
"Just let me do it my way," he continued, "let me be Lee Cushing and not one of Stone's lackeys. I know what I'm doing."
"But Paul's your boss," she reminded him, "and you have to please him"
"I also have to do what's best for me, and brown-nosing Stone isn't one of those best things."
"He hired you. He can fire you when your contract runs out."
"And somebody else hired him, and if Stone makes the gross error of firing one of the most popular teachers and a writer with potential, Dr. Stone will make his life very troublesome. And Dr. Stone knows that. You see, I play my own sort of game, Joan, risky at times, but one that could pay great dividends in time."
"It just seems sometimes that you're purposely antagonistic toward Paul, that you're waving a red flag in his face."
"Sometimes I am," Lee replied. "And stop calling him Paul, for God's sake. At least in bed."
"Well, let's go to sleep," Joan said. There was a note of finality that told Lee she was angry. He hadn't convinced her; there would be other times, other arguments, other interferences. Nothing less than tangible results would keep her off his back.
What was she afraid of? "
Why didn't she trust him, have faith in him? These were all questions that bothered him more than the interference itself: the implications of that interference were what upset him. It was like her saying I don't trust you, you idiot, so I have to see that you do the right thing.
He had wanted to make love.
He had smelled her, woman's odor, a mingling of soap and sweat-it excited him, tingled his senses. Usually, when he came to bed late, Joan would be waiting; or if she were asleep, a sixth sense would awaken her, and in a delightful state of semi-consciousness, she would rollover and press her warm body against his. The nightgown would rise up her legs and gather around her waist. His hands would stroke her thighs and buttocks while his lips sought the swollen nipples of her breasts, all under the warm, drowsy spell of blankets.
Her small gentle hand would reach out and seek him.
It would touch him, intimately, in many different ways. His response would make her shiver and moan with eager anticipation, and his hand would run to the inside of her thighs and move upward, seeking her.
And she would be ready.
Deliciously ready for the final embrace.
Sometimes, she would roll on top of him and scrape her hard nipples down the length of his chest and belly, kissing him as she did, seeking his flesh, finding it....
Then, he would take her.
The mattress would rock to the tempo of their bodies working in primitive, perfect unison while their hands stroked and caressed, their lips seeking and finding. Her breasts would fill his hands, her thighs would surround him and drag him down into the hungry core of her being, and it was invariably, without exception a perfect meshing of bodies and souls and hearts.
But it would not be tonight.
It would not be because Joan was angry. She was angry for such a patently absurd reason, that he was angry with her anger. It was a childishly petulant anger. And she was doing something she had promised never to do: use her body as an ultimate weapon; use sex as a repressive agent. Now, she was doing just that. True, he hadn't attempted to make love to her yet, hadn't even touched her, but she had turned herself away from him, had moved her buttocks so that they touched no part of him. Her body was stiffened in an attitude of remote coldness. It was a silent, devastating way of saying, "Don't try your luck tonight, Charlie."
And he didn't try.
As much as his body cried out for release, his pride overrode any attempt?, to make love. A refusal would be like a slap in the face. He knew she was awake, knew that if he gave in she would turn over and they would fall into one another's arms, press their bodies together in hot, breathless intimacy. All he had to do was resort to a bit of emotional and idealistic prostitution. Well, let her lie there stiff as a board, he thought. Let her hold out. I am going to be a man first and foremost, even if a stupid man. But I am going to be a man.
Paul crawled into bed at one-thirty. Peggy knew the time, because she had just looked at the clock several minutes before. He had been writing his critical essay for Wisconsin Review, a leading academic magazine devoted to literary criticism. It was to be his monthly publication. Paul Stone III, she thought, would decidedly not perish, because he published in such astounding abundance.
But his marriage, their marriage was definitely perishing from lack of contact, lack of attention on his part. One-thirty in the morning! He had been home since five-thirty, had eaten a hurried dinner and left immediately for his study; she had not seen him since. Thus it went, night after night, weekend after weekend. He never stopped, never smiled tenderly at her, never patted her hand, or whispered three simple words-never made advances toward her, which in time becomes a slap in the face for any woman. It is a silent statement of disinterest and unconcern.
Now he was in bed, still awake.
"Did you finish your article, Paul?" Peggy asked.
"Yes. All finished. I can start planning the next one tomorrow."
"Everyone's coming over Friday night, incidentally; they all accepted our invitation."
"The Cushings. They coming?"
"Yes, why do you ask?"
"Just wondered. Lee Cushing is not my idea of an enthusiastic member of the academic community."
Peggy did not want to discuss it.
She wanted to vomit from shop talk.
She wanted to tell him about a dress she'd seen on sale, a movie she'd heard good things about, a juicy incident concerning the couple next door they never talked to. But this was small talk, idle patter, and her husband had no time, no room, no capacity to indulge in it. Her husband was a big, noxious bundle of profound thoughts, a reeking paragon of intellectuality.
All those dreams, dried up and dead.
Those dreams of togetherness.
Those nights of constant lovemaking.
It seemed now as though those things had never occurred, they were so remote and blurred in her memory. It was like a hazy dream, so indistinct that you cannot separate it from reality. Her need surpassed that of a husband. It had degenerated into a primitive need, a basic biological drive for sexual gratification. He wouldn't have to talk now, or whisper sweet words, or reassure her that he loved her and needed her....
No.
If he would just boff her. It would be enough.
She would survive by aid of physical release alone, since her emotions, her compassion was all dried up by months and even years of half-use.
It had reduced itself to that level. At thirty-four years of age, after ten years of marriage, no children (she had given up on that too) and now no relationship, Peggy Stone decided that she had nothing except a hollow shell that could be loosely called existence. Money, prestige-neither could buy or replace what their marriage lacked.
Peggy was naked.
She seldom slept without a nightgown, having heard that men reacted more violently to suggestiveness and allusion than to nakedness itself. But tonight, she decided to be blatant about the thing; certainly he would get the message?
Evidently not.
He was lying there, log-like.
"Paul." Her voice was hushed, strained in the dark.
"Yes?" Already the creeping note of impatience in his voice, the note that said, "You have committed the sin of interrupting my profound thinking."
Screw your profound thinking, she thought. Better yet....
"Make love to me, Paul. I need to be made love to."
"I'm awfully tired, Peggy."
"Make an effort, Paul. Exert yourself. I don't make many demands on your time, do I? Make an honest-to-God effort at being a man, won't you?"
"That's hardly a mature criterion of manhood-"
"Spare me the theorizing, please! Don't talk! Act! For once in your life, stop hiding behind the facade of intellectuality, and do something human."
"Animals are capable of that," he said.
"And I'm an animal, Paul. Being an animal is part of the human condition you're always writing about, but it escapes me how you can discuss something that you don't know a damned thing about."
Her voice was growing ugly.
"No need to get vehement about it," he said stiffly.
"For God's sake, will you stop being civilized and just have me? Most men complain about not having enough sex, and I'm throwing myself at you!"
Sigh.
"You make it damned difficult to get in the mood, with your argumentive attitude," he grumbled.
"Then hit me. Work me over a bit." Her voice was calm outwardly, with a faintly tremulous note running close under the surface. She was approaching hysteria.
Dr. Paul Stone III, B.A., M.A. and Ph.D., man of much intellectual renown, couldn't cut it. He could not evoke anything like physical desire toward his wife. Paul Stone campus wonder, was a bedtime failure. His wife aroused antagonism in him rather than anything like physical or emotional sympatico.
It was embarrassing.
Humiliating.
Maddening.
At one time, she would have been embarrassed for him, but not any more. She felt sorry for herself. He lacked desire, therefore missed nothing. She was a seething mass of desire, therefore missed everything.
"You impotent creep," she rasped, turning over. There was a horrid note of finality, of dire pronouncement in that evaluation. Paul sighed wearily, and rolled over, their bodies almost a foot apart in the king-sized bed.
He thought of his article for next month, and fell asleep; his last conscious thought was Whom do I promote to associate professor?
CHAPTER FIVE
The next day it rained. It WAS one of those FALL rains, when you look out of the window, and become very depressed. You think of summer, long dead, and of approaching winter. It is the season of limbo, which seems to go essentially nowhere. Lee was depressed.
There was last night; the argument, tense bodies, refusal of flesh to touch in familiar intimacy. The glare of fluorescent lights overhead, the gray misty rain outside-he stood with his hands in his pockets, pipe thrust in his teeth, and looked out into the soup.
It was the only thing they argued about.
It was all so silly.
Why did she do it, he wondered. Was it because of insecurity underneath, insecurity that she did not realize was hers? Was it because of an alcoholic father who left it to a mother to see that she and her younger brothers and sisters ate regularly? Whatever, however, it was becoming serious. It was threatening to undermine a good marriage, one that both of them valued above all else in life. Yet it seemed beyond Joan's control. She would promise, express regrets, then repeat the behavior.
He looked at his watch, saw that it was ten o'clock. Brenda Wood was due to see him, and he knew she would not be late, so he walked out of his office, leaving the door open, and went to the coffee machine. As he was walking gingerly back with two cups balanced in his hands, she came down the corridor, from the other direction. Her eyes lit up in recognition; a glad, happy expression. They were funny eyes, he thought-not quite brown, not quite amber-something in between, something very beautiful.
"Good morning," he greeted.
"Hi," she said; Lee handed her a cup and she took it. Together, they walked back to the end of the corridor, where his office was. Once inside, he shut the door. It left them in a sound-vacuum.
They sat down.
He regarded her perfect breasts with steady, quiet eyes.
"Are you making progress?" he asked. She nodded. "What do you want to talk about?"
"I have an idea," she said, "that I'd like to run on at some length with in my paper. It seems like Faulkner saw a decaying society in Mississippi. The Snopes, Jason Compson, Henry Bon-Sutpin. All people in decay."
"Just in Mississippi?" Lee asked.
"Oh, you can apply it to the world," she said, "that's the marvel of Faulkner, but then you get into a bunch of critical verbosity that I'd just as soon avoid if I could."
"Why?"
"Because he wrote from his own life-experience, and that was where he lived. He was as regional as Twain or Harte. He was a storyteller, not a preacher. Whenever he overtly preached, his writing suffered.
Don't you agree? He was just writing about the decay of the South, their inability to create a new, dynamic world."
"You've really thought about it, haven't you?"
"Yes, I have." She crossed her long, luscious legs, then continued. "I don't want to make the mistake of finding false meanings just for the sake of going on at tedious length. I'd like to interpret as much from an intuitive level as I can."
"You realize of course, that in most cases that kind of treatment wouldn't be acceptable?"
"But this paper is for you, Dr. Cushing, and for me. I think you understand what I want, what I need."
Lee was silent for a brief moment, then simply said "Yes." What else was there for him to say?
She was fighting his battle.
A lonely, seemingly futile battle that she wanted to fight as unrelentingly in her way as he was fighting in his.
"Okay. You have something good here, something real, but don't fall into traps, Brenda. Remember people like Sam Fathers and Isaac, the boy."
"Yes, you're right. I almost made the mistake of putting on those damned critical blinders, didn't I?" She smiled broadly when she said it, and he had to .:mile with her. It was a mutual exchange of smiles, one that made their alliance a perfectly understood thing.
She handed him two sheets of typewritten copy; it was an outline for her paper. Lee studied it carefully, nodded, gave her a couple of suggestions, said that what she had planned was excellent, if she could just put it into execution. It was a thoroughly unacademic approach. It was creative, intuitive.
"How's Bill coming along?" Lee asked; their discussion was over. She would not need him until she did some more reading and writing.
"Fine. He gets discouraged sometimes, a little cynical, but he'll make it." She began arranging the hem of her dress, then reached down to run long fingers over her bare legs.
"I heard from someone that he's a professional writer."
"Yes, he makes a lot of money, but he's not satisfied. He wants to write higher level things. School keeps him from doing that."
"But he wants a degree?"
"It's funny-he knows he'll never use it, that nobody in his field will ever ask him for it, but he has too much time invested to quit. In a lot of ways, he's very much like you, I think."
"Considering your relationship to Bill, I take that as a compliment."
"It is." Their eyes met, held one another's gaze. Lee felt flushed, self-conscious. It was stupid, he thought. Very stupid.
"How's your novel coming?" Brenda inquired. "Getting there slowly. If it doesn't get published, I'm in a bit of trouble. "Why so?"
For some totally unaccountable reason, Lee told her everything, went on at great length about himself.
He forgot that she was younger, that she was one of his students; she became a very important person. It was absolutely necessary that she understand.
"It's all so stupid," she said at the end.
"What's stupid?" Lee asked.
"That they don't let you utilize your talents, that they insist on that damn silly game."
"Yes, I suppose. It's an occupational hazard, Brenda. If you're planning to teach, give it some serious thought."
For a still more unaccountable reason, one that he was not to know until later, he touched her hand-just touched it, and felt an electric current of strange recognition run through him. She didn't move away. She looked at him steadily, calmly. He thought he saw quiet wisdom and acquiescence in her eyes, those peculiar not-quite-brown, not-quite-amber eyes.
They were silent.
The room seemed to close in on him. Invisible eyes stared accusingly at him. He got up.
"Thanks for listening," he said. "Any time," she heard herself say, "any time at all, Lee."
Then she was gone, and he was alone in the office, his mind swimming crazily with half-images, fragments of thoughts, sexual hunger.
Peggy Stone rolled up the cord to the vacuum cleaner and put the machine in the utility closet where she kept it. It was eleven o'clock, and the rain outside made her feel lethargic and depressed. But underneath the dullness, she was very tense. Her skin felt jumpy, and her nerves crawled like little snakes inside her. Noises made her jump, like when the washing machine kicked into rinse cycle; a completely anticipated noise that her keyed nerves refused to tolerate.
Finally, she could stand it no longer.
She knew what the trouble was.
She also knew what she had to do.
Self revulsion was strong in her, but not so strong as the need that screamed for satisfaction, however temporary and imperfect. She went to Paul's study, where all the books were. She let her eyes flick hurriedly down the rows, and when they came to rest on an original translation of Ovid, she pulled it out, and took it with her-To the John.
Even though she was alone, she closed and locked the door from the inside, then stood before the mirror. She examined her body, unbuttoned her housecoat slowly. She shrugged it off, and stood naked. Her hands moved slowly up the length of her sides, her ribcage, and came to rest on her full breasts; she cupped them, held them up, and finally let her fingers roll the nipples like marbles.
They swelled with excitement.
She felt the blood fill them.
Fill her whole body.
Her skin was fine-grained and perfectly smooth, felt good under her hands that ran the length of swollen hips, moved over long, packed thighs. It was more difficult to breathe now, as excitement filled her with frightened expectation, a vague sense of what she was about to do.
She had to do it.
Every ounce of her being demanded that it be done. Paul was not even in her mind as she sat on the fluff-covered toilet seat cover and opened the book to a familiar page, a page that he had long since committed to memory.
It was a scene with a man and woman, lying in a clover-covered field away from the city; they were quite alone, lying on their backs and staring up at an incredibly blue sky.
The man's hand rested on the round, shapely breast of his lover.
She turned to him, and said, "I love to have your lips touch my body that burns with heat for you. I must have your lips upon me, as I shall have my lips upon you."
The woman opens her robe, and reveals fleshy, moist thighs.
Her lover's hand strokes them fondly.
"My love, I burn and itch for you!" Her hand rests upon the back of his hand, guides it insistently up her leg until he touches her. The cool freshness of clover tickles her buttocks, the backs of her legs, and she wiggles luxuriantly in it while his hand makes her move in another way. She becomes a bundle of responses to varied sensations.
His lips cover her beautiful breasts, make the nipples stand erect and firm as rosebuds, while his hands run downward over her legs, pushing them open-
Peggy's breath came in short gasps.
Her fingers sought herself.
"Kiss me as the temple goddesses kiss one another," the woman tells her lover, guiding his face down over her body....
The lover understands.
Their bodies shift.
Smells of clover and sex tingle their nostrils.
The poet tells of how the woman's buttocks tremble expectantly as warm male hands grasp each smooth cheek, pulling her closer to him. He seeks with his lips. She screams ecstatically, moved rhythmically against him as he gives her the ultimate kiss. A vacant, preoccupied smile crosses her lips as she bends downward to seek him, and then they are in mutual forbidden embrace, one so pleasurable that it is done in secret ritual by the temple goddesses of Lesbos-a kiss now transferred between man and woman.
The ecstasy is indescribable, the poet says.
Peggy's eyes closed. Her buttocks rustled and whispered against the satiny material of the seat cover as her hand moved. Images, greatly magnified and distorted clouded her mind. It was not her hand evoking the pleasure, it was the hand of another, faceless, nameless, but nevertheless another's hand that cared enough to instill great pleasure in her hot. thirsty body.
Her head swam dizzily as the peak stormed and surged through her, any it was several moments before she snapped into the immediacy of her surroundings: the bathroom, alone with herself, disgusted, tears streaming into her eyes, and blind, feverish hatred for her husband who had so indifferently driven her to this.
After she had vomited into the toilet, her knees touching the cold tile floor, she felt somewhat better. But the disgust and helpless revulsion persisted, long into the afternoon.
Paul Stone sat in his office, thinking what an absolute fool his wife had become. She was thirty-four years old, a mature, grown woman; yet she insisted in behaving like a young bride. It was true, perhaps, that he had been neglecting her. But did she have to create such embarrassing situations as last night? Her hostility had made response on his part utterly impossible. How could a man become aroused under such circumstances?
There were times when he thought of having sex with Peggy; but they were such damned inconvenient times, occurring when he was writing or thinking or outlining, times when he could not leave his work. If only it happened while they were in bed together! Nevertheless, he thought, Peggy placed far too much emphasis on the physical manifestations of love. When they were young they had sown their wild, youthful oats; now they were no longer young, but responsible people approaching middle age.
He projected into the future, something he frequently did, and thought that when they went abroad together, things would be much more conducive. He would work in the mornings only; in the afternoons and evenings, they would be together. He would relax, unwind considerably, and then, perhaps, he would be a more suitable marriage partner. She asked the impossible, the unreasonable of him now. His mind was cluttered with responsibilities and concerns. Spain would be good for both of them. It would clear his mind, relax him, make him feel young again. The nightmare of the past months would evaporate like magic, and all would be well again.
The dream of the future snapped him into the present, since the two were intimately connected. For his sabbatical to become a working reality, he had to be certain of leaving the department in good administrative hands.
That meant selecting an associate professor, one who would be the acting depart mental chairman.
There was Cook, Cushing and Smith to consider. It boiled down to those choices; he detested Smith, didn't trust Cook, and was apprehensive about Cushing, factors which didn't do a thing to aid him in his decision, which must be submitted by no latter than the first of the month. It was now the fourteenth. He had approximately two weeks to consider and make a final decision, that once made, would be irrevocable.
Somehow the party crept into his mind, and he decided to watch these three men very closely. Perhaps there would be a clue of some sort to help him. In a social, semi-alcoholic atmosphere, certain barriers would be lowered. A man's behavior in such conditions went a long way to indicate his true character and capabilities, Paul decided. Under the guise of laughter, drinking and relaxed conversation, a man forgot that he was on trial. It would be a good opportunity.
Peggy would be the perfect hostess, as always. He was grateful for that: she knew hot to act, how to plan, how to organize. In that respect, she was an invaluable aid to his career. A moment of something akin to tenderness washed through him as he thought of his wife, the aid.
Bill Holloway, for all his outward toughness, was a man of thought, one who weighed the pros and cons of his existence. Men like Bill are always trying to peek over the next hill to see what's there. Bill's fits of restlessness did not occur often-the Marines, a construction job in the Rockies and thumb trip across the country and back had taken most of that out of him-but there were times when he itched.
He loved Brenda, and he fully appreciated her lush body.
But Bill Holloway was not one to accept facts at face value; he knew that faces could be highly deceptive. For instance, guys like Lee Cushing, with clean-cut, wholesome appearances, guys who at an earlier age had joined the Scouts, and had undoubtedly sent their Cheerios box-tops in with two bits to get their atom bomb rings that exploded in dark rooms.
Appearances could be deceptive as hell.
Brenda had been seeing a lot of Cushing lately. and in spite of the strictly academic purpose of the constant get-togethers, he had his doubts.
Cushing was too friendly.
Brenda was too anxious to see him.
It was beginning to add up to something profoundly unpleasant, and although Bill was not given to unreasonable fits of jealousy, he did have a highly developed sense of the macabre. Experience had taught him that people were stable until something came along to upset the balance of that stability. Hell, hadn't he boffed more than one happily married woman in his younger days? Hadn't he had more than one virgin who had been saving it for the mysterious husband?
He knew what could happen.
It happened to the best of people, in the best of families. At this point, he wasn't overly concerned with Cushing's pedigree, nor with Brenda's; he was just looking out for his interests, because they appeared to be threatened, however mildly. Cushing smiled, Brenda saw him frequently, and it was obvious that they had a sweet little rapport going between them. More often than not, when he called Brenda, she was working on her project for Cushing, or else she was out. Out with him Repetition is the mother of annoyance in much the same way that necessity is the mother of invention.
It was especially frustrating not to be able to put his finger on anything, to take direct action. All his life, Bill had reacted to situations, had acted upon them with quick thought and instant execution. But now he could only conjecture and wonder and be annoyed. It bothered him. He could tell himself that if Brenda wanted to be friends with one of her professors, it was her prerogative. But with a good-looking young man like Lee Cushing, it didn't work. Bill had no illusions about marriage; bonds were as easily broken as made when sex was involved.
He paced around the apartment for a while, smoked several cigarettes, each one more foul than the one before, and finally put on his jacket and went outside.
He walked.
Whenever things bothered him, he walked. Direction or destination didn't matter. He walked hurriedly toward the shopping plaza only because of habit. In the opposite direction, there was nothing except more apartments and homes. The plaza was a quarter of a mile away from his apartment building, and he walked rapidly toward it, thinking of Brenda. Should he talk to her? Bring his suspicions in the open? When he thought about an actual confrontation with her, he began to feel silly, like the archetype of the jealous lover. It didn't come off sounding very mature. But the fact remained that she was seeing less of him, not because of studying or other obligations, but because of that paper which was connected with Cushing.
He went into the drug store and bought a carton of cigarettes. He came outside, tearing the cellophane off one of the packs, and saw a woman across the street trying to start her car. The engine whirred without catching, and Bill heard the distinct sound of a battery growing weaker and weaker by the second. At the rate she was turning it, it would soon be dead, and there were no gas stations for at least half a mile.
Give me a gold medal and wreath, he thought wryly as he crossed the street and walked toward the distressed automobile. It was a small Mercedes.
The woman sitting behind the wheel, looking more than a little piqued, had a rich, well-kept pile of auburn hair on her head, with angry-snapping brown eyes. A coat concealed her body, but Bill had enough imagination to project beyond the furry wrap and come to the conclusion that she had a body to go with the face: interesting. It was all thought out half-consciously, by way of reflex.
"You're going to kill that battery dead if you keep trying to turn it," he said. The woman stopped, looked up at him. There was anger, but not desperation in her face.
"What do you suggest?" she asked. Her voice was rich, vibrantly female.
"What's your battery's age?"
"Ancient."
"Unlock the hood, and I'll have a peek." She leaned down under the dash, and Bill heard the lock unsnap. Raising the hood, he saw an incredibly dirty engine with an acid-coated battery. Typical. A woman with no concern for the car, thinking maybe it was immortal and indestructible, with a husband that had no time to keep track, if in fact she did have a husband....
The car was parked at the top of a slight hill, facing the bottom. If he could roll it, gain enough momentum, he could jump-start the thing in second gear and drive it to the gas station. There, she could get a new battery. Her old one was beyond charging.
"Your battery's gone. You need a new one."
"Can't I get it charged?" she asked, moving slightly on the seat, exposing her shapely knees.
"Too much acid. Batterys are like people. They become obsolete."
The woman smiled. She had a sense of humor.
"What do you suggest?"
"Move over." She did as he told her, and Bill slid behind the wheel. After fishing around for the seat lever, he pushed it back so he could operate the clutch and brake pedals. Releasing the emergency brake, he put the car in second gear and let it roll. Slowly, the car picked up speed. When he popped the clutch, there was a lurch, a cough-he popped it again, and it caught. He pulled out the choke, and watched the ampere gauge; it wasn't charging at all.
"See your gauge? It isn't moving." She nodded.
"I'll drive it to the gas station down the road; from there, you can get a new battery." Traffic was heavy, and he had to inch along slowly, constantly gunning the engine to keep it alive.
"I'm certainly grateful that you came along."
"It's okay."
"I'll get a new battery, and drop you off. It's the least I can do. You look a little old for me to offer a dollar bill to."
Bill grinned.
"I'd feel pretty embarrassed if you did. You don't have to drive me home, either. The walk will do me good."
"No, I insist on that much."
"Okay. You can drive me home."
He pulled the car into the station, left the engine running. The attendant came over, eyed the car suspiciously. A furrin' job, he was thinking. Bill knew the look common to all gas jockeys without the first bit of mechanical ability.
"What's th' trouble?" the guy asked.
Bill told him. "Battery's had it. Needs a new one."
"Ain't got any for this car. Don't get no call for 'em."
"It's a twelve volt, like any other battery. Look on your little chart, and you'll find it," Bill told him. The guy looked like he was going to say something nasty, but Bill got out of the car, stretched his long, lean body. The attendant let the words freeze, then die.
Bill went inside the station, flipped through the wall chart, found the battery for a Mercedes 190 sedan and gave the guy the number. He was not surprised that the jerk had the battery.
"Put it in," Bill said. "Your car?"
"The lady's."
The guy leered. BiD stared him down while the kid scurried into the service bay where he kept the batteries and staggered outside, carrying one with him.
Bill sauntered out to the car, eyeing the woman's pert breasts. "He's putting one in now," he said.
"If you hadn't been along, he'd have told me he didn't have one, and I would've been stuck. I really appreciate this, Mr. ... I don't even know your name."
"Bill Holloway."
"Mr. Holloway. Thanks so much."
"Bill. I'm a bit young to be called mister."
"Bill. Not just plain Bill. You don't look the type."
"Thanks. Miss, Mrs. ... see, I don't even know the right salutation for you. Gloves make it difficult."
"Mrs. Stone. Call me Peggy, and consider us friends."
"No relation to Dr. Stone; that would be too much of a coincidence. It wouldn't be real."
"His wife."
"How about that? After two years, I'm finally getting to see one Stone."
"You're associated with the University?"
"In a most unrewarding way. I'm a student in your husband's department."
"You look older."
"I am older. I'm a late starter."
"You're going to teach?" Peggy asked. It was not a stupid question, most English majors went on to graduate school and taught.
"Haven't got the stomach for it. No, I'll just do what I'm doing now and do a little better at it."
"What do you do?"
"Write. Free lance. I don't want to crush you, Peggy, but academe and getting out a manuscript are in no way compatible. I'M be glad when June's here."
It occurred to Peggy Stone that Bill Holloway was an interesting young man. He was at least twenty-four or five, old enough to know better and young enough to do something about it. He was a fresh gust of air, a new face on the sitting-duck horizon of her life.
"Do you know John Hanley at the University?"
"We're friends," Bill said. "Together, shoulder to shoulder, we wage our unsung war against the legions of conformity. Sure, John and I collaborated on an article last month."
"Your views coincide with his in a remarkable way."
"Nothing remarkable. Writers and critics just don't mix, any more than oil and water. We're misunderstood, they're underrated. It's a tough life."
"You made a remark about seeing at least one Stone. Don't you ever see Dr. Stone?"
"He's a busy man, I'm sure."
The attendant had put the battery in the car. He told her eighteen dollars, and she paid it with a grimace.
"I'm freezing," she said.
"If it doesn't sound forward, let's have a cup of coffee," Bill said. "You can leave the car here, and we can go down a couple of doors." Peggy nodded agreeably, and they walked quickly down the street into the Colony House, a greasy spoon made more palatable by paneled walls and new formica tables. The food was abominable, the coffee excellent.
He helped her off with her coat, carefully appraising her breast-line. When the waitress came over, they ordered coffee.
"You do well with your writing?" Peggy asked. "Very well, if you're talking about financial-well."
"I was. It's hard to visualize a college student with affluence."
"It happens."
"You're fortunate."
"I worked hard for that good fortune."
"Of course you did. I'm sorry," she said. Bill waved his hand in dismissal, took a sip of coffee.
With her coat removed, Peggy Stone looked even better than her appearance had suggested. Her breasts were ripe and firm as melons, and from the quick glimpse he'd caught of her hips and thighs when she had stood, there was nothing lacking in that department either. How an old relic like Stone could keep someone like Peggy serviced properly was something of an enigma. Yet it occurred to Bill that Stone was not really an old man-he was extremely good-looking, and apparently in good condition. It was just that he usually acted old. In all probability, he was a snorting, cavorting stallion at home with his whinnying, frolicsome mare of a wife.
"Do you have a girl, Bill?" Peggy asked.
"Now you sound like the housemother trying to work down to a fraternity boy's level. Yes, I have a girl."
"I seem to say the wrong things," she said. She was appealing when that already-sensuous lower lip formed a pout. It was a cute little gesture, affectation or not.
"I react the wrong way," Bill said. "I've never had to be tactful, so I haven't had much practice."
"There's too much tact in the world," Peggy said. "It gets in the way of sincerity."
Good-looking, quick mind and capable of profound thought-Stone had a woman and a half there, Bill thought. He hoped that the professor was appreciative of his good blessing.
Peggy saw Bill looking at her breasts, her face. It was not a leer. There was nothing lewd or covetous; it was simple appraisal, done calmly and matter-of-factly. It was a glance that made her feel very warm, glad to be looked at. Their eyes met briefly, frankly.
No illusions on either side.
"I guess you have things to do," Bill said. "I didn't mean to keep you."
"I was just thinking the same thing," Peggy answered, "that I didn't want to keep you. I'll drive you home."
"I don't live far."
The attendant had parked the car off to the side, away from the gas pumps and service bay. Bill held the door open for Peggy, and watched her climb behind the wheel. Her legs were extraordinarily good-strong, firm, smooth. Legs made for loving. An involuntary, warm liquid feeling welled up in him. With an effort, he squelched it.
He directed her to his building, and when she stopped in front, he opened the door, pausing for a moment.
"Thanks for the lift. And it was nice meeting you."
"I enjoyed it, Bill. I hope I see you again." Again, their eyes met.
"It's a tiny little world."
"I hope so. Thank you so much for everything. If you ever need any help, call me. I mean it."
"Thanks." He got out of the car and slammed the door; she drove off, and he kept his eyes on the car until it disappeared. Turning around, he reviewed his own thoughts, his own reactions, realized that they had been unconscious, the product of conditioned sexual reflex.
Which made him worry about Brenda.
Hell, she was human too.
If he could react to a woman like Peggy Stone, there was no earthly reason why she couldn't react to a man like Lee Cushing; and if she did, he would be more than a hypocrite to condemn her. The inevitability of the situation appalled him. It wasn't like in the movies at all, or like in his stories, with a grandly contrived design to make such things happen. Damn it, it happened. If two active chemicals got together, they reacted, for better or for worse. He did not believe in fate. This was a small, a very small town. Yet it seemed incredible that he had bumped into the wife of the English department chairman. If he had spent months planning the encounter, it couldn't have happened more easily.
It occurred to him that if Peggy Stone ever offered herself to him, he would have a most difficult time saying no. If those magnificent breasts were ever offered to him-if that long, sumptuous body ever lay naked on a bed, thighs spread and lifted, waiting for his body to meet....
He rushed toward the telephone to try reaching Brenda. He wanted her very, very much. And if she were out, or if she said she couldn't make it over, he would be outrageously angry with her.
CHAPTER SIX
She was there, and she said yes, come pick me up. He did, and on the way over, he thought how very badly he needed to be fixed. It was more than desire; it was compulsion, almost animal lust. And all from the physical presence of Peggy Stone, a very attractive woman with loads and loads of sexual appeal. Brenda was waiting.
In the car, she said: '"Guess what, darling?"
"What, darling?"
"I'm out of commission. Right on time, too."
Bill's face fell with disappointment. Actually, he decided, he should be happy. It was her intention to make him happy by telling him in her cute way that another month had gone by without her getting impregnated. But the way he felt now, it was hardly welcome news.
"I'm sorry, Bill," she said, seeing his face. When she said that, he felt like a heel.
"I'm sorry for making you sorry," he said, reaching out with his hand to pat her on the shoulder.
"I can ... make you okay," she said. "You know."
He knew all right. "You don't have to, baby. It isn't any kick for you. We'll listen to some records and relax."
"After I do something for you. You might not believe it, darling, but it'll make me happy to see you happy."
"I am happy."
"I mean I'll get a kick giving you a kick. Hurry up."
He drove faster, thinking he really shouldn't let her do whatever she was going to do, because it wasn't mutual, it wasn't lovemaking, it wasn't something that could conceivably satisfy her.
But he picked up speed.
He even ran a stop sign.
In the apartment, as soon as he closed the door, she came into his arms, and they kissed, their lips hanging and clinging together. Brenda had opened her heavy coat, and he could feel the warmth emanating from her breasts, the pleasing roundness of her lower belly. A warm animal-in the physical sense, all women were.
"Take off your coat before you catch cold," he said, removing it from her shoulders. He hung it in the closet with his. "How about a drink to warm you?"
"Some of that rum," she said. "That's good when you're cold." She was right One-hundred-fifty-proof rum would melt down an iceberg. It was smooth, delicious and had the kick of a low-megaton atom bomb. An old marine buddy had brought him several bottles back from Panama last year.
He poured out two large glasses, went into the kitchen and got some ice cubes. He ran them through the electric crusher and put the shaved slivers in the glasses. Cold as it was outside, the rum would still have a stomach-warming effect.
"Here. Drink it slowly; remember what it did the last time." She had gotten miserably, helplessly drunk. He had had to undress her and let her sleep it off.
Worse, he had to call the dormitory and cook up some fantastic story as to why she couldn't come back. Brenda grinned.
"Don't worry, you won't have to put me to bed again. Just sit next to me." She patted the couch with her hand. He sat, and they drank, their hips touching lightly. "This gives you a nice feeling."
"So does Sterno, if you ever drank it."
"Have you?"
"No. I drank after-shave lotion once, though. It was terrible." He told her about the time on Okinawa when they drank a quart's worth of Palmolive aftershave and got very sick, mostly because of the heat.
When he kissed her, he tasted rum mingled with the sweetness of lipstick. Her lips had that cloying, sticky quality that comes of thickly applied lipstick. She seldom painted herself so heavily, but today she had. Bill felt the tip of her tongue running and flicking against his lip, making the inside of his mouth tingle.
"Stop torturing us," he said.
"No torture meant, dear. Honest." She touched his tongue with hers, and he felt a tremulous wave of desire surge through him. He held her tighter, closer against his body. Her heartbeat was tripping madly, like his own. .
"Undress me, darling."
"But you're driving yourself crazy, Brenda."
"I know what I'm doing. Undress me."
His hands trembled as he worked at the buttons of her blouse. Her breasts were soft under the material. She wore no brassiere, so when he parted the buttons from their buttonholes, there they were, two hemispheres of perfect flesh, with their exciting little pink-colored nipples. He ran his hands over them briefly, then stopped when he heard her breathing change to gasping.
Poor kid.
"All of me, Bill. All of me." There was urgency in her voice now, and her gasps were becoming more hoarse and throaty. His hands unzipped and yanked her skirt off. Then her pants. She stood in black wool knee socks and loafers.
The rest of Brenda was very bereft of clothing. Her voluptuous body was made more exciting to look at by the knee-high black socks; it all reminded Bill vaguely of whips and raw-fleshed, squirming buttocks.
She came into his arms.
She was musky and warm.
Her body exuded sex.
"Love me like always," she said softly, and when he hesitated, Brenda guided his hands to her naked breasts, even placed his fingers around her nipples. Blood surged into them, and they swelled into hard pebble-like tips. She leaned her head back, her eyes narrowed into smoky slits of passion.
Bill felt her naked pelvis grind against him, spreading its warmth through his clothing, getting to him fast. He knew that she could feel his response, and that it caused her to grind with more intensity and eagerness.
There was a peculiar look in her eyes, her lips.
"Let me see you," she said. Her voice came out in chunks of something that should have been solid. He began to undress, but she stopped him with her hand.
"No-I just want to see you!" Her fingers pulled the zipper of his khakis down, found him.
Exposed him.
"Like that." Her body shook now.
He felt her fingers searching him. They were clever, dextrous fingers, roaming on familiar ground. His body began to tremble as hers did. They kissed for a moment, then he saw her, felt her slide downward, her hands against the sides of her swollen breasts.
It was very warm.
Warmer than anything he had ever felt.
And with Brenda, it was a brand new, never-experienced sort of contact, one that filled him with an almost sickening desire. She moved slowly, pressing her soft, smooth breasts against him, surrounding him.
Slowly.
He was reaching the explosion point, and she knew it. She stopped. When her face was level with his, her eyes were closed, and her lips had fallen into telltale slackness. He let her hands shove him gently but insistently against the couch, onto his back, and once more, her head disappeared from his view.
It was enough to tear the top of his head off.
"Ummm," a moaning, languid sound. A choking sound.
"Brenda-" Her name was a barely articulate sound, coming from his strangled, tight throat out of dry lips.
"Umm, good. So good." Her head bobbed gently, like a buoy in gently flowing water. His hands came to rest on top of her silk-haired head, encouraging, pushing, prodding....
Then she stopped.
It was agony.
It was Hell.
"I love you, darling Bill. Do you love me?" Her lips were deep red and thick-painted, shining with moisture.
"God, yes!" he heard himself gasp.
"Then do something for me, please?" It was a plea, but a command too, and Bill knew damned good and well that he would do it, whatever it was.
"Yeah." Damn right. Anything, anything at all, but quick.
"Take me. Do it Greek! I want you like that, bad."
Gods! What was happening to her? What was happening to him? All very profound questions that he stopped asking when she turned a pair of white, shaking buttocks toward him for his inspection.
"Let me lie down," she said. It was more a gasping whimper than a flat statement. Bill got up off the couch, let her lie down on her tummy.
God, what magnificence!
Almost as good from the back as from the front. His hands stroked her buttocks eagerly, feeling their curvature, their smooth-grained texture, their female warmth. He liked the way they separated, the way the cleavage continued down to the shadowy depths of thighs and silk-haired womanhood.
"Now," she whispered tensely, "do it now." He removed his khakis, and lay on top of her. It was a funny, wonderful feeling, the way her buttock'-: arched upward and lifted his body at the stomach. He felt her tremble expectantly under him.
It was slow.
Excrutiatingly delicious.
He sensed her pain, her pleasure, her ambivalence of sensation, which melted slowly into pleasure created by the new, the bizarre-accompanied by a host of psychic twists and turns of her passion-clouded mind.
Her buttocks moved gently, swayingly against his stomach, and their meshing was complete. Her gasps came in quick, hot bursts, and she raised herself on her naked, firm haunches and thrust back and forth at him, forcing him to hold on to her swelled hips with his hands.
"Oooh God!" she screamed, and accelerated her movements against him. It was heaven from the back door. It was the rear entrance to paradise, an infinitely better entrance on Brenda than many women have in the more acceptable sense.
And what went on inside Brenda's throbbing, pretty little head? Simple. A choking sense of the pleasure that she was exciting in her lover, especially now that her thighs were clamped tightly together, which in turn sent a cascade of ecstasy coursing through her.
She achieved the seemingly impossible by having an orgasm, and when she felt Bill surging inside her, the novelty of the embrace made her lose her breath. So hot. So delightful!
"Darling," she moaned into the couch, "darling, darling, it was wonderful."
They slept for a couple of hours, and Bill kept seeing the events in his mind, even while sleeping soundly. He remembered describing her buttocks as a sensualist's paradise, hardly realizing that one day he was to know just how true that was.
Idly, he wondered if Paul Stone did things like that with Peggy.
Hazily, Brenda wondered if Lee Cushing's wife liked it that way.
Dreamily, they slept on, lost in their private, semiconscious thoughts, clinging to one another, while the sun sank and plunged the room into shadowy darkness.
Lee drove home, wondering if Joan would be in a better mood, if this time she really would climb off his back and let him shape his own destiny.
Joan wondered what to wear to the party the next night. As important as brains were among the men, clothes still remained important among the women. Joan did not have closets overflowing and choked with dresses, but what she had was good, some even elegant.
Lee seldom went out, and when he did, Joan always seemed to have the proper dress to suit the occasion.
For some reason, her clothes always looked flashy and in poor taste to her whenever she reviewed them for a Stone party. In her mind's imaginative eye, she could see Paul Stone III, giving her the hypercritical fish-eye. It was ridiculous. Paul Stone was not an old man, or anywhere near it. Perhaps it was his authority, Joan decided. Whatever it was, she wanted to please Stone. It was important for her to secure his approval and notice, for Lee's sake. Since Lee seemed totally disinterested in what Stone thought of him, Joan felt compelled to take over that function.
God knows it would be difficult enough just to make Lee amiable company-to convince him that he had to put up a good pretense of enjoying himself, of being charming. Lee was not the least bit hesitant in revealing his true sentiments.
Lee called it honesty.
Joan called it indifference, rudeness.
It didn't matter. Definitions were relatively unimportant, she thought, choosing an unadorned black dress with a straight line that did more for her curves and lines than she realized. The dress tended to accentuate the soft round curves of buttocks, the long gracefully muscled thighs and legs. It showed her. The real her.
When Paul Stone came home, Peggy had already prepared everything, given instructions to the serving girl, and was in the shower. He could hear the soft hiss of water coming from the bathroom.
One thing about Peggy, he thought. She was a damned efficient woman, someone he could depend on in the final analysis. A man needed a wife like that. If there were one bit of advice he could give to a young man about to get married, or considering doing so, it would be to look at the woman objectively, shut out all illusions of romantic attraction and ask, "Is this woman going to be an asset to my career, or a hinderance? Or nothing, one way or the other?" Thank God Peggy was an asset. She knew how to act as a hostess, knew how to dress, how to conduct herself at other functions, and had a certain charming air about her wherever they were seen together. Except for her occasional rantings-about "Woman's needs," she was a good wife.
In these infrequent moments of evaluation, Paul Stone felt vague, almost indefinable pangs of guilt. There was a certain amount of truth in Peggy's accusations that could not be ignored. And there was that semi-conscious feeling of obligation toward her, due to the fact that they had no children after ten years of being married. In the beginning, he had discouraged a family, as it would make his career attainments that much more difficult to achieve. Peggy had gone along with him.
Years melted away, and still no children.
Now, Peggy was thirty-four, he almost forty, and children seemed out of the question. Besides, he was busier, if anything, than he had been in those early, comparatively carefree days. God, he remembered them! A wave of something like nostalgia or regret swept through Paul, then. They were good days. Insane, highly impractical, but a certain basic goodness....
No time for that now.
He put his brief case inside the study and trudged to the bedroom. It was Friday evening, and he was not going to work, there was the entire weekend for that. No, he would shower and lie down for an hour before dressing. And Peggy seemed to have done everything necessary for the party. Perhaps she would lie down as well.
Then he could make up for the other night. He had been stupid.
Granted, she had behaved irrationally, but he had been undeniably stupid not to appease her. It would have gone a long way toward cementing the growing breach in their relationship. Paul Stone felt something of an obligation to his wife, and having sex with her was a part of it. Somewhere along the line, over the course of years, he had lost interest in her. God knows she tries, he thought, but something's missing somewhere.
There were times when he felt old.
But other times, most of the time, he was full of the veritable juices of desire. He had always been faithful to Peggy, not without temptation. Several young female students, a secretary, all were choice morsels of the past who had made it plain enough that they were available for Dr. Stone.
The shower turned off.
Peggy came out of the bathroom.
A white nappy towel covered her from the breast-tops to patches of thigh two inches above the knee. Her skin was aglow from being rubbed down by the towel, and her hair hung loosely over her shoulders. It struck Paul that he had a desirable wife. At moments like this, it was not too difficult to evoke desire within himself.
"Hello, didn't hear you come in," Peggy said. She stepped lightly across the carpeted bedroom floor, breasts pushing strongly against the towel.
"You were in the shower," he answered. "The table looks nice, dear."
"Thank you. Alice'll be here at seven to get things set up for serving. I don't think there's anything left to do but wait."
There wasn't.
Paul had checked.
He was a thorough man, to an annoying degree. The food was in the refrigerator, waiting to be heated; the hois d' oeuvres were out, and the liquor was out, complete with ice, glasses and mixers. He started to say, "I know," but stopped himself in time.
"You're a dear. I'm going to shower and shave. Then suppose we rest? We have a couple of hours."
Peggy looked at him.
He looked at her.
She nodded.
"Yes, Paul, that would be nice. I'll fix you a drink while you're shaving."
She heard him run the water, then close the shower curtain. It was hard to believe: her husband actually suggesting that they have a roll in the hay before the company arrived. It was totally unlike him. Perhaps it was his way of saying he was sorry, or even more incredible, maybe he was just plain horny. It was hard to conceive of Paul having such human needs as sex. After a while, you started thinking of him as a flawlessly functioning, sterile, antiseptic unit of some kind or another. When he did or said something that smacked of human weakness, it knocked you for a loop.
But now he was going to have her.
God, she thought, it's like going to the Bahamas. It's a real big deal, like the old joke tonight's the night. If those other academic sterile units who called themselves wives knew how important sex was to her, they'd probably nominate her for a community witch burning. But it was better to be burned than to burn constantly, inside.
While the needle-spray beat down on his back, Paul felt his muscles and nerves slowly uncoil into relaxation. The warmth of the water had a drug-like effect, lulling him so that everything seemed distant and pleasantly unreal. It was like being in a vacuum of blessed indifference.
Even Peggy, out there, waiting, was an unreal prospect.
He could quite easily forget her, in here.
He looked at his body. His stomach was flat, his chest hard, his legs firm; not the remotest trace of middle-age spread or decay. Considering the pitifully small amount of physical exercise he got, it was incredible. Finally, he turned off the shower, and stepped out of the tub; as soon as he did, reality came rushing back-choosing a man for the associate professorship, next month's article, the board meeting with the administration, all of it. Sometimes it all seemed like a chore. It was ironic how you sweated and compromised to attain a certain plateau of success, and when you were there, you looked down, and envied those below you, with their blissful absence of man-killing responsibilities and obligations.
He shaved extra close to the skin, finished off with a cold rinse and a handful of Canoe after-shave. It burned. It was expensive. It was profoundly good stuff that he had received last year from a colleague at another university.
When he came out of the bathroom, Peggy was waiting for him. She still wore the towel.
"Here's your drink, Paul." It sat on the night table on his side of the bed. He sat down on the edge of the bed and reached for it. Frozen daquiri. A good one, that went down like silk and hit your stomach like warm, liquid fire. Nice.
"Thanks."
"How was your day?" Peggy asked.
"Fine. How was yours? And yesterday? I didn't see you long enough to talk."
"Today there was the party business. You know. Yesterday, I met a student in your department. The battery went dead in the car, and he was most helpful, not even knowing who I was until I happened to introduce myself."
"Really?" Paul was polite, only mildly interested.
"Bill Holloway. That was his name. Older, about twenty-four or five."
"Oh yes. I believe he's in Cushing's 445 class. I seem to remember the name." Paul took a swallow of his drink. "I have so little contact with students any more."
"Want another drink?" Peggy asked, taking the glass from him.
"No, that's fine. Thanks."
The conversation ground to a halt. They sat on the edge of the bed, looking at one another, and each realized how uncomfortable they felt. Such a wide impasse between them....
Perhaps closable, or the illusion of such, in the depths of physical togetherness, in the clutches of one another's arms, their lips together, searching, clinging, exploring.
Perhaps.
Paul closed his eyes, and with his hands yanked at the towel. It came off, and Peggy Stone was quite naked.
Extremely naked.
As naked as one can get.
Peggy, with her rich abundance of breasts and hips and thighs, Peggy with her groping hands all over Paul's body, gasping for contact, love-starved, sex-starved, Peggy who had lately been given to solitary bathroom fantasies....
"Ahhh God I" she gasped. She squirmed hotly against Paul, drinking in the long-absent sensation of a naked male against her, a naked male with a degree of enthusiasm.
Her hands cupped him tenderly, possessively, and he fell against the mattress dizzily, while she touched him in an infinite number of ways.
Clever ways.
Paul was being caressed by the hands of experience, instinct and hunger. Peggy was a damned resourceful girl, and he was beginning to like it just fine.
She fell on top of him.
Her nipples dug into his chest.
Her stomach rubbed evocatively against his, and her whole body became a flurry of sensuous movement. With a heaving movement, she hiked up until her breast dangled over his lips like offered fruit.
He took it.
Ran his tongue lovingly over the raspberry tip, felt it swell and fill with longing, while his hand instinctively reached for the other breast and held it, cupped it, hefted it for weight and substance.
Now, in late afternoon, he was young again.
Her hands brought his youth into bloom.
The warm liquor worked inside, while her hands worked outside, and their bodies cavorted fitfully on the bed. The lush abundance of her body surprised him. He hadn't thought of it in those terms for a long, long time, and wherever his hands searched, they found flesh. Good solid female flesh. Flesh that seemed much younger than its thirty-four years.
"Paul!" It was a high, piercing whimper that started down in her chest and escaped through moist, red lips. He kissed her. Her tongue searched the back of his mouth while his teeth nibbled gently at her lower lip. She moaned gently into his mouth, filling him with her sighs and pants, while his hands warmed to the task of exciting her.
It wasn't much of a task.
But Peggy was a lot of woman, and there was a lot of ground to cover. It was pleasurable ground, to be sure. His lips traveled along the length of one leg, kissed the hard calves and worked up to the firm, but softer, more yielding thigh. The nerves and muscles quivered to his touch. Higher up, she was dewy with readiness, musky with woman's passion. Awareness of that fact filled him with a butterfly feeling of excitement.
His hands were still fluttering when she guided him slowly, lined him up for the final embrace, her hips and buttocks working rhythmically, his hands on them now, pushing prodding....
"Ooooh PAUL! PAUL! PAUL!" His name forced itself out of her lips with the same rhythm with which her body moved over his. Slow, grinding, revolving. Deliberate. Heated, but calculated.
She was good.
Her thighs were good against his ribs, her buttocks good in his hands as he pushed them down, her breasts good against his chest. It was good. Paul let his head relax against the pillow while her body smacked flesh-ily against his, her thighs holding him with sweet possessiveness. They closed and opened, and his gasps began to match hers with intensity and tempo. It was all done rhythmically-sounds, movements, caresses.
Slow.
Damnably slow. Deliciously slow.
"Paul, hard, Paul, now Paul!" He heard the mattress creak beneath him as their bodies accelerated against one another, as Peggy's gasps softened into inward sighs and that moment of utter loneliness, of solitary reaching for sublimity took them.
Then it was together again.
His fingers kneaded, then pinched the wealth of buttocks-flesh under them. He pulled the cheeks apart, reveled in the splendor of their smoothness, in the thigh's working against him, opening and closing, with a spasmodic gasping motion. He was aware of being surrounded by warm moist passion, of gorging it hungrily with himself.
Then he was aware of only oblivion.
Her screams of pleasure were warm, distant, and only the quickening of their bodie" wa" real. Her palms were hot against his buttocks while his palms were hot against hers, a mutual embrace that brought them close together.
It was a simultaneous explosion.
He saw stars.
If they weren't actually stars, they were something damned close to them, he thought. He tingled, exploded, felt warm, drifting, going somewhere into deep, languorous slumber, and then it was over. He became aware of the weight of her body; it was burdensome, heavy, uncomfortable.
"Thank you, Paul," he heard her sigh, "thank you so much." Then she was asleep.
He looked into her face The eves were shut tight and there was a shadow of a smile on her face, as though she were reliving the pleasure of their act all over again. Quite possibly, she was.
He looked at the clock.
Almost six. Pretty soon, he would have to get dressed and pick up the serving girl, Alice's assistant, at six-thirty. Alice had her own car, but catagorically refused lo pick up the girl who worked with her, and who thus had no way of getting to the Stones' house unless Paul picked her up. It was annoying, because it smacked of inefficiency. And anything inefficient was back there in the bedroom. He had enjoyed her. Efficiency was always possible, even in very human situations. There was no reason why people felt compelled to excuse their incompetence by resorting to pleas of human error and humanity.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lee breathed a sigh of relief when he saw john and Naomi Hanley in the Stone's living room. There was no doubt in his mind that Hanley shared that sense of relief. To lone it with Stone was no picnic, and Hanley had an extra strike against him. He was human. Being a creative human raised still another strike. If you were an IBM unit, you'd have it made with Stone, Lee decided; you could punch holes together all day dong.
Peggy came rushing over to them, pert breasts bouncing, gushing with hostessy remarks, like "Joan, how are you, dear, and oh, Lee. you're looking marvelous!" She knew how to play the role. Or more precisely, she knew how to play Stone's role for him. She augmented the predetermined pattern.
Alice's assistant took their coats and Peggy guided them into the living room.
Paid was there, talking to Hanley. Naomi pretended to be interested in an ash tray. He saw Lee and Joan approaching, turned to face them.
"Lee, nice to see you. Joan." He shook hands with Lee, and smiled wanly at Joan. He gave her a smile that could almost pass as friendly. For Stone, it was exuberant. "How about a drink?"
"Good. I could use one," Lee said, firing up his pipe. Irish aromatic tobacco hovered in the air around them. They all walked over to the bar together, Hanley and his wife following. While Stone was taking orders and pouring drinks, John stood close beside Lee.
"Welcome to happiness land, old buddy."
"Then how come you're not smiling?" Lee demanded, throwing a smile Naomi's way. "Hi, Naomi."
A big exchange of hi's. Rather late at that.
After the Cooks and four or five other couples, all from the English department, came in, it began to look like a party, or at least a social gathering. There was talk, laughter, cigarette smoke, much liquor consumed.
If you looked through the window, it would appear that they were having fun.
Sharks have fun when they eat themselves.
It's all relative.
There was a lot of noise that sounded like conversation, and it was all one-sided. People talked to themselves, pretending that everyone else was listening raptly to what they had to say. Stone held a lengthy monologue on literary trends over the decades, while Cook went on at length about Chaucer and the profundity of medieval writers in England.
Hanley took Lee aside and said, "Let's talk, old buddy, you know what I mean-one talks, the other listens, and you contribute back and forth?"
Lee picked up the cue.
"Why hell yes, I remember! Let's see, it was back when I was a student, before I was a teacher. We used to do it like that. But you know, things change, all for the better, of course."
"Of course, but you have to think if you do it your way," Naomi said.
"Heaven forbid!" Joan exclaimed, throwing up her hands. "Think! You'll undermine everything if you do that."
"So what do you want to talk about?" Lee asked John.
"You. How's your book doing? Haven't seen you for a while."
"Good. I'm through with the first writing, as a matter-of-fact."
"How do you know it needs rewriting?" John demanded.
"Don't all worthwhile books?"
John sighed, threw up his hands in a helpless gesture.
"Why in the hell don't they teach you guys the facts? Lee, it just depends. I never rewrote anything. I plan so well in advance that I don't have to. I look on myself as a writer, not a rewrite man on some newspaper. How well did you plan your book?"
CHAPTER
"Did it come off? Did the ending make sense to you?"
"Yes, but...."
"Bring it over tomorrow morning. At the house. I want to read it over the weekend." Lee nodded, thanked him.
"You coming along okay on your book?" Lee asked.
"It'll be a splendid book," Naomi said.
"You're not writing it, dear," John said between clenched teeth.
"No, dear, but I might as well be. When I have to throw food into the study like I'm feeding a lion, and when you scream to the kids to shut up from the third floor and they're in the basement, I know you're working very diligently, dear. That's how you judge great writing, Lee."
"Tell Stone about it," Joan said. "He'd be thrilled to death to hear such a refreshing approach."
It was preposterously funny. They all laughed very hard, but stopped when Cook, number one spy and fink in the English department, came over.
Alone.
He was noted for the way he treated his wife, too.
"A joke I haven't heard?" he asked. The way he asked it sounded more like an order. Tell me or else. Hanley gave him an undisguised go-to-hell look.
"About noon tomorrow, Lee?"
"Okay."
"Let's get a drink. The air's foul in this corner of the room."
Cook's mouth dropped open with unabashed astonishment. Hanley looked at him mildly, or rather through him, and walked away. "See you around, Cook, if I should be so lucky." Lee threw Cook a beseeching, What-can-I-do glance, and followed Hanley, Joan and Naomi.
"What in hell did you do that for, John?"
"The jerk annoys me. He's a fink and a yes-man for Stone, a veritable modern-day Brutus. He's another academic vacuum of mediocrity."
"True, but what the hell, you didn't have to hit him in the face with it?"
"Why not? I'm not about to say one thing and mean another. I don't have to, Lee."
"Like me."
"Like you think you have to. You're a nice guy. I hate to see you play their stinking game. Why do you think I want to help you out with your writing? Because I'm a Samaritan?"
"Yes."
"Maybe. But don't go puking and gushing all over them, Lee. They're not worth it, your job's not worth it. Believe me it's not."
"Maybe I'm not a writer, John. Maybe the book won't make it."
"It'll make it. Maybe not right away, but it will. You can write, whether you realize it or not. Once I make you realize it, there won't be anything that'll be able to stop you."
"You're pretty confident on my account."
"Damn right. And I'm no optimist. If you don't believe that, ask Naomi."
Naomi nodded.
"The most pessimistic idealist that ever lived," she said sagely.
Lee Cushing was a much handsomer young man than Peggy Stone had realized. From a profile view, with the black briar pipe in his mouth, he was very handsome indeed, she decided-a peculiarly perfect blend between distinction and virility. Just a damned good-looking guy. A guy she would like to help, if he needed and wanted it. A guy worth being friends with.
Later in the evening, when almost everyone was in an alcoholic fog, she found Lee in the den, looking out the window. He posed an interesting picture of loneliness and consternation. The thinking man, the man of depth.
He turned when he heard her heels clattering across the linoleum.
"Hello. Bored with the party?" she asked.
"No," he smiled, "it's a lovely party, I just needed some air."
"You needed time to think. Time to get away from all that phony garbage. You don't have to be polite with me, Lee."
"That's a bit harsh, Peggy."
"The truth is harsh, dear. And the truth is that all these parties are the same. You're on review. Why, who knows, you might be passing up that big juicy associate professorship because you had the audacity to come in here by yourself and think."
"That is audacious, isn't it?" he grinned. It didn't take a Holmes to conclude that Peggy Stone was not enchanted with her husband's world. "We're not all pedants, Peg. Some of us even realize that we're at a disadvantage because we prefer teaching to everything else."
"How's your book coming?"
"Fine, I guess. I'll know pretty soon."
"I admire you for that, Lee I think it's wonderful, and I hope you do something with it." Her voice was thick with liquor; she was not uncontrollably drunk, was probably at that transitional stage where you know what you're doing but just don't give a damn.
"Thanks." It struck him as strange that a gorgeous woman like her could marrv such a deadbeat like Stone, good-looking as he was. But then perhaps Stone had something that he just didn't reveal outside his home. Or bedroom. Maybe Peggy liked men of Stone's ilk.
"How important is the promotion to you? I mean, honestly?"
"Pretty important. Important enough so that I've had to do a lot of serious thinking about myself."
"In what connection?" she prompted.
"In connection with what I'd foe willing to sacrifice to get it. I'm not the nice guy I thought I was, Peggy." Lee faced the window, letting the smoke drift heavily from his pipe.
She stood next to him.
He smelled perfume and liquor.
Her face was inches from his when she said, "You're honest, and I like you, Lee. I have a lot of influence with my husband, and...." her hand touched his; it was warm, knowing, " ... not a bit hard to get along with. Remember that." He felt very uncomfortable. "Thanks, Peggy."
"And Paul never gets home before five," she said with a flourish, walking out the room. She trounced, so that her hips and buttocks swished from side to side. God almighty, she was all woman, Lee thought. If he didn't have a wife like Joan, he'd be more than a little tempted to play it her way.
Joan Cushing was a damned charming woman, thought Paul Stone. It was simply amazing how a woman her age could understand what drove, what motivated a man in his work. Why, she understood perfectly. She was complaining how Lee didn't have the experience to channel his ambitions, while an older, wiser man such as himself, knew exactly how to achieve his ends. A damned perceptive, understanding woman who made his wife, in spite of her added years, look like a sophomore.
"You're so right, Joan. But Lee will learn. Tell me, how's his book coming along?"
"He's finished with the first writing. He's going to show the manuscript to John Hanley in the morning."
"Ah, good. Good. Where is Lee? I don't see him around."
"He has a bit of a headache. Maybe he went to the den or to the John."
"Yes. Well, how about a drink?"
"Fine. Will you be going abroad next year, Dr. Stone?"
"I hope so. Call me Paul, please. I'm not the stuffed shirt my colleagues seem to think I am, honestly."
"I know you're not," Joan said. Her smile was warm. Her eyes twinkled with her upturned lips, which made it real and not mechanically pretty, like that of a frozen expression in a picture.
"Scotch?" Paul asked, taking her glass. When she nodded, he took a bottle of Cutty Sark and poured some over the ice in her glass.
"So, you think a man has to do anything necessary to attain his ambitions, do you?"
"Yes, as long as it's honest. A woman should be willing to accept the price of that success. I'm sure your wife does."
"No, she doesn't," he said icily. "She doesn't at all."
"I'm surprised to hear that," Joan said, and she honestly was.
"No, she expects me to leave my work at the office as though I were an assembly man at a plant, working on a time clock. She expects it all to happen magically."
"Maybe you should explain things to her more specifically. I appreciate the way Lee discusses his plans with me. It puts me in a position to help him."
"You're a very smart woman, Joan. I could kick myself for not getting to know you better before."
"We haven't had much chance, have we, Paul? We've been busy, all of us. You with your work, Lee with his. It's unfortunate."
"Yes, it is. He looked at her intently, studied her face, as though trying to read something that he had perhaps overlooked.
He had overlooked nothing.
She was a perceptive, rarely dedicated woman. She was a woman who could understand, who could sympathize, who could sublimate her demands on a man....
A woman who was attractive.
A woman who could let a man forget.
Peggy never let you forget that she could make you forget, he thought; but this girl definitely was not like that. She would do virtually anything for a man, in or out of bed. In all areas of endeavor, she was well versed, understanding.
Not like Peggy at all.
"Does your husband want that promotion?" Paul asked. He knew it was an inherently ridiculous question; of course, Lee wanted that promotion. It meant more money and prestige. Any man wanted it. Even John Hanley, who hadn't applied, wouldn't refuse an offer like that.
"Yes, very much. But you have to understand Lee, Paul. He has certain values, a certain esteem for his talents."
"I know. I'm a great admirer of your husband, believe me."
"Good. He feels he's a much better novelist than critic, and that's the direction he wants to go in. I've been encouraging him as best I can."
"You're a wise and wonderful woman, Joan. And if you need any help on Lee's account, you come see me. Any time at all."
"Thank you. Paul?"
"Yes?"
"This might sound awfully presumptuous, but if you ever need woman-help, you come see me. I'm almost always at home."
"Thank you very, very much, Joan. I might do it." He smiled, put his hand on her shoulder. Joan did not move. The hand was warm, a heavy weight that she was overly-conscious of. Then it became alive, felt good there.
He kept it on her shoulder a long time, kneading the smooth skin. The smooth, bare skin that her husband knew so well. Paul wanted to know it. It was as though Peggy had never existed for him, as though he had never felt the magnetic pull of lust before. Joan Cushing became at that moment a very desirable woman, a woman he would be willing to do devious, not-so Kosher things for. She was a woman who could raise him to great heights or hurl him to yawning depths. She was a Cleopatra, a Siren, a....
She understood.
He wanted her, badly, not just for bed, God knows, but there was that wonderful warm sympathy. No, it was empathy, a real true understanding. Moments like he'd had with Peggy this evening were almost nonexistent. With a woman like Joan Cushing they could be deliciously abundant.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Driving home with Joan sitting beside him, LEE felt like the villain of a soap opera. He felt as though he had been caught at some odious, devious sexual game that he had no business playing. It is hard to detect mental gymnastics. His game was on that level.
Joan had been in the living room, and he had been in the den with the honest intention of just taking a breather when Peggy Stone had come in and made that flagrantly clear offer. Offer, hell. A proposition. So that hidden quality that Stone was supposedly blessed with didn't exist in the first place.
He wondered how much influence she really did exert on Paul Stone.
"Tired, Lee?" Joan asked.
"Pooped. It must be after three. I have to get that manuscript together to show John tomorrow."
"Is there any part of it you have to clean up or revise?"
"He wants to see it as it is."
"But it might make a better impression on John if you...."
"Damn it, will you mind your own business!" he exploded. His hands gripped the steering wheel tightly, his jaw tensed into muscular rigidity.
"I'm sorry, I was just trying to be helpful," she said sullenly. In her mind's eye, Joan saw the sympathetic face, heard the sympathetic voice of Paul Stone. Why, he was hungry for the very thing Lee resented! "You must have a guilty conscience, the way you bite my head off if I so much as suggest that you try to improve yourself."
"I don't have a guilty conscience, and I'm damned sick of your interference! It's based on absolutely nothing intelligent."
"Nothing, Lee?"
"Nothing. Now drop it." There was tense silence. He yanked the car savagely into the driveway and cut off the engine. He got out and walked abruptly to the door, without coming around to Joan's side as he usually did.
They spent the night in taut, tired silence, watched the dawn come without exchanging a single word. Lee's nerves jumped every time he accidentally touched Joan's body, an unavoidable circumstance. He gave up fighting the image of Peggy Stone. With amazing clarity, he could see the bare shoulders, what the flesh beneath the evening dress must look like.
And there was Brenda Wood.
Like two persistent reminders, the two females stayed in his mind, enticing, beckoning, while Joan slept fitfully beside him, her voice still nagging and unrelenting in his memory.
Saturday morning held every indication that the day, as it progressed, would become increasingly boring and unrewarding. Brenda had told Bill that she was going to spend the day working on her paper for Cushing, and he was in between writing projects.
Studying was out of the question.
What the hell, it was Saturday, and you just didn't waste it buried in the books. The immediate problem, then, became one of occupation, of how to fill one's time. Bill Holloway was a reasonably resourceful soul, one given to full imaginative flights.
Just for the pure hell of it, he'd drive by the Stones. On what pretext, he had no idea, but he remembered distinctly that you didn't need a pretext for Peggy. She was starved for male companionship, and the way things had been going between him and Brenda, he was damn well ready to give it to her.
Brenda was drifting.
Getting real thick with Cushing. Bill was no fool, he could read the handwriting that spelled out the obvious: wide-eyed girl flips for young instructor, made more enticing by his marital status and good looks. He was not going to be the one to throw fits, to display the rather juvenile emotion of jealousy. He'd just play the game, and keep it in the good old academic community.
Why not?
Peggy Stone seemed hot to trot, eager to play the horizontal game. So why the hell not? Make Brenda sweat a little, let her see how it felt to be exposed to doubt and mental agony.
First he called the school and found out that Stone was in his office. It was not an unusual occurrence. He was always there, all day long. Bill just wanted to be certain that he had clear entrance.
Next, he drove to the Stone residence, parked the car around the corner. He didn't want to create an embarrassing situation. By this time of course, he had gone beyond the proverbial point of no return. He threw away last-minute reservations.
Peggy Stone was going to have something to pant about.
She answered the door almost as soon as he rang the bell. An oriental-tyne robs was wrapped around her, the belt loosely knotted. The hem came a little below her knees, and he could see the promise of perfection that the calves held: strong, firm and finely shaped.
"Hello," Bill said, feeling a sudden tremor nf uncertainty. He felt like an idiot. What was he doing here, anyway? What possible reason could he offer for being here?
"Hi, how are you? Have you saved any damsels in distress lately?" she asked, smiling. Peggy acted as though it were the most natural, expected occurrence in the world for Bill to come see her. "Come inside, Bill." She stepped aside to make the entrance possible, and when he walked inside, he saw that professors decidedly do not qualify for the Poverty Program, at least not men of Stone's rank. It was a damned plush joint, about thirty-five or forty thou's worth. Well furnished, well decorated. Nice.
"Not lately," he said. "Women seem too independent for that sort of thing."
"Not as much as you think," she answered. "Sit down. Have you had breakfast?"
"Yes."
"Coffee?"
"That I'll have." He watched her as she moved. She walked as though she were used to having him around, as though she had absolutely no impression to make, no illusions to create.
She didn't.
Peggy was well able to stand on what she had, which was plenty. Sensualty constructed body, consisting of breasts that were high and firm and defiantly out-thrust; swollen, firm hips and heart-shaped buttocks that had all the animation of a teen-ager's, and with a distinct difference: it was no effort. It was unconscious, unknowing, uncalculated. She was just a broad with a magnificently put together body that said Come and get it, it's jun.
"Why did you come over?" Peggy asked. She studied him with an air of mild amusement, as though expecting him to squirm like a piece of live bait on a hook.
"I wanted to," he replied. "Does there have to be a reason?"
"There always is, Bill. Nobody acts in a vacuum. And I'm not talking academic clap-trap, just common sense."
"True. I was lonesome. I wanted to see you, thought you might want to see me. If I was wrong, say so, and I'll leave."
"Such marvelous defiance," she marveled. "Truly a spirited soul."
"What's that supposed to mean?" he snapped, on his guard now, with the distinct, uncomfortable feeling that he was being manipulated like that same piece of live bait.
"It's a compliment," she replied quickly. "It means that you have the admirable quality of net giving a damn how you get what you want. You've got guts, Bill."
"And what do I want?" Now it was becoming a game, a silly transparent game.
They both knew what they were playing. "Me."
"True. I'm male, and I'm alive. Do me something."
"Suppose I don't want you? Suppose I throw marriage and happiness at you? What then?" Her smile was challenging. It said, Come on, man, think.
"I'd say you're either a remarkable liar or a remarkable tease. Neither assumption would be very complimentary, would it?"
"No, I guess not. So you know an invitation when you hear one?" Her heart was pounding rapidly, her throat was tight and dry. The thrill of the chase had her on edge, it was an exhilarating feeling that she hadn't known in a long, long time.
It was sensational, she thought.
"Is that so amazing? Come on, Peggy, we're both adults, and we know the score, right? So why go on playing? You want me, I want you. It's a bond between us-we have something right from the start."
"Do you write as convincingly as you speak?"
"I'm not trying to be convincing. I'm just giving you facts as I see them."
"Okay."
"Okay, what?"
"Okay, let's stop talking and start playing" There was a hardness in her voice that jarred Bill's nerves.
"I'm not forcing you. I have no intentions of raping you," he said.
"I'm sorry," she said. "It's just so hard to start without some kind of manufactured justification."
"Stop being academic, Peggy," he told her, and she was unable to reply because you cannot speak through another pair of lips, especially when they are blocking yours.
He kissed her.
It was a passionate kiss.
It had fervor, desire, intention, all the rest of what goes into a good kiss. It was a kiss that made her lips open and moisten, one that made her jaw go slack with sudden, overpowering desire. Their lips reacted violently: warm, panting, breathless contact between them.
"Nice," she murmured, settling against him. "Encore." He kissed her again, and it was nicer. Familiarity does not always breed contempt; sometimes, it can breed excited anticipation, as it did now. Her heart pumped wildly against her breasts while his hands ran down her back in fluttering motions, exciting the nerves with light-fingered touches. It was nothing at all like with Paul, she decided. Oh, sure, in the beginning, way back when ... but that was nine, ten years ago, back in the Middle Ages sometime. The important time Was now. His lips, his caresses obliterated the importance of the future and the past.
Only now was important.
Only his maleness mattered.
"God!" she moaned, "God almighty!" Her voice was high-pitched with incredulity, as though she were experiencing love for the first time.
Her breasts were ripe and warm to the touch. The silk robe made them all the more enticing, and when his hand finally plunged beneath, touching bare flesh, their reaction was electrifying. She quivered and gasped. He trembled. With an impatient yank, he pushed the robe away; the belt loosened of its own accord.
They were marvelous breasts.
They were breasts you kissed, loved, caressed until the nipples swelled and filled with heat-propelled blood. They were breasts you bit and reveled in with animal-like enthusiasm.
From their owner's viewpoint, they were organs of excitement, vessels of titillation and pleasure. They were two lumps of flesh, perfectly rendered and shaped, that attracted man to you, woman. They were made to be toyed with, to be centers of excitement: what the self-appointed experts called erogenous zones. Peggy Stone had no distinctly isolated zones: she was one vast erogenous center, from head to toe. Her breasts were contact points that jumped to life and awareness when touched and kissed.
Bill, then, was reduced to a generator.
She made sure that he had sufficient juice with which to operate. Her hands were very thorough. In minutes, Bill Holloway was a quivering mass of flesh, screaming for release and gratification. Her hand? sought him, found him, retreated in gesture of pleasant surprise-such wonderful, huge maleness, they said.
Her whole body said it well.
Bill let his hand follow its own inclinations, which was up. Way up. Up past the smooth knee, against the smooth, warm skin of her thigh. A good thigh. A perfect thigh. A thigh that parted itself from the other, while Peggy let herself fall backward against the cushion, succumbing to his insistent onslaught that would result in blissful touch.
"Ooooooh!" she gasped, "oooh! Yessssssss!" Her hips trundled into a slow, rocking motion that brought them closer together, that drew his exploring fingers deep inside her hungry flesh, while her mind crackled with images of final contact, the grande finale itself: the meshing that would strike the core of her being.
Her fingers were light and exciting on his body. He wanted her to undress him quickly, but she did not give in to their mutual compulsion. She took her sweet time, unbuttoning one button at a time, unlacing the sneakers, pulling out the shirt.
It was agony.
It was hell.
It was great. He had never experienced or sensed such hunger in a woman, such insane desire, not even in Brenda. Brenda was packed with woman's passion-she had a healthy, inexhaustible sexual appetite, but it hardly approached the quality of Peggy's. There was not the gasping, whimpering, semi-paranoiac drive that was Peggy's. There was not the frightening absence of inhibitions, the necessity for forbidden contacts.
All of which Peggy displayed.
Her hands undressed him slowly while her body promised, while her lips culled up a seething torrent of uncontrollable desire in him. No, Brenda did not have that. Nor was her body one of promise, a body that said I've been around, I know more cute tricks than you'll ever know, my body has a hunger that younger women can't know....
His teeth sank into a red, swollen nipple. It was a gesture born of savage frustration. The woman had flesh that you just wanted to pinch and violate and make crawl.
"Harder!" she begged. He bit down, tasted blood, felt a sickening yielding of tender flesh. "Harder, baby, harder! Love me hard, baby, hard, hard, hard!" It was an intonation, possessed with a tempo that reminded him of some primitive fertility rite. The hard, hard, hard matched the tempo and intensity with which her hips rocked back and forth. Her fingers squeezed the sides of his skull tightly, drew him closer to the breast, then yanked his head away, against the other one.
"Hurt me, you beast, kill me!"
She was psycho. Really out of it.
He bit her as hard as he had the stomach for, tried not to visualize the damage he was doing to those beautiful little nipples. Then he moved down to her heaving, panting belly. There, it was softness. Not flabby, gone-to-hell softness; nice yielding, come-and-have-a-ball softness. The kind of softness that women with only the most perfect bodies have. It is the kind of softness that fits in the briefest bathing suit, in the tightest pair of slacks, a softness that appeals to the beholder under the harshest lights.
It was a softness he nipped at with his teeth.
She jumped and meowed with a strangely feline sound, her hands fluttering ecstatically in the air over her head while she drove her hips with wild abandonment. Her buttocks swished against the cushions. Hers was a body gone haywire, dancing to the tune his fingers and lips played upon it.
Bill was wailing, and Peggy was swinging with it.
Swinging hard, running with the whole bit.
When they were both naked, their bodies came together with an incredulous feeling of sweet collision-such warmth, such sensational shock, unbelievably delicious.
"God, take me, pleeeease!" she pleaded, "please now!" Bill was no fool. She had already surpassed the intensity that most women, that most people feel as the result of foreplay. To prolong the ultimate embrace would only key her up to an impossible pitch.
The time was now.
Her hands, both of them, devoured and surrounded him like two greedy plants drinking up water. The caress made his eyes snap shut, then open, rolling hysterically. She squeezed him hard, with all her strength.
"Now! Now, dammit, now!"
Pain brought tears to his eyes. With savage desperation, he pushed her onto the floor with a suddenness that made her relinquish her hold. He piled on top of her, without bothering about the fact that his two hundred pounds might crush her. She wanted bestial love, she would damn well get a bellyful of it, he thought.
Their bodies collided.
All the breath went out of her, left her gasping hungrily for air. With brutal disregard, he yanked her thighs apart and forced his way into position.
Then, he took her.
Hard.
Grunting, hitting, pounding. Of all the nerve, he thought wildly, her thinking she could coerce him with a move like that. She wanted to get rough-he'd get rough!
He threw her legs up over his shoulders and slammed himself hard against her, his hands rocking her face back and forth with open-handed slaps. He saw her teeth clamp tightly together, her jaw set, her eyes grow narrow. Pride, stubborn pride. She won't scream unless I damn near kill her.
"Oh yes, lover, hard, hard, hard!" Her lips drove against his with piston-like regularity, her hands played up and down his back as though it were an invisible fingerboard of some stringed instrument. On her face was an expression of complete ecstasy.
She likes it this way! he thought. She wants to be roughed up. It became clear to Bill that she had purposely aroused enough animosity in his breast to precipitate violence on his part. It was no longer revenge, and he, the hunter, was the hunted. There was no discernible way he could stop himself: she had pulled a cork, unleashed a strain in him that he had never known to exist. Now he wanted to take her savagely, without consideration or compassion. Just savagely. Make it a purely physical, lustful act. devoid of any relationship except a pair of bodies blindly seeking gratification.
Peggy Stone was not conscious of anything except the male body riding roughshod over her, the male body buried deep inside her hungry flesh. It was a faceless, unidentifiable body; merely male, merely expedient and available. It was a unit designed to satisfy her hunger.
It was a unit.
A good unit.
Lots of stamina and durability that pounded and drove and hit and bit with unrelenting regularity against her until the intolerably large, liquid, hot bubble inside her broke loose and ejected the passion within her outside, into the open somewhere. A great, hollow feeling replaced the hunger, and she lay back and sighed, exhausted as she had never been before in her life. For the first time in years, she was truly gratified.
"Holy God!" she sighed incredulously. Her eyes were empty of all but grudging admiration.
"Feel better?" Bill asked. He wanted to be tender, wanted to stroke her, but her eyes silently forbade such familiarity. He had served his purpose. He had serviced her, had fixed her, and there was nothing else she wanted from him.
"Get out," she said flatly.
He knew the bit. Regrets, sorrow, all turned inward and adding up to one big blob of guilt directed at the other person. Sure. He'd been there himself.
"Okay, Peggy. But you know where I am if you ever need me again." His voice jarred, made her set her teeth: such damned annoying confidence. A bland assumption that she would throw herself at him or at any other man now that the cork had been pulled out of her inhibitions.
She had gotten a good introductory dose to a good, good thing, and he knew damned well that a woman like her would have an endless demand for it. Her rage was born of his confidence and her acquiescence.
The truth hurt.
Hurt very, very much.
From now on, it would be one encounter after another. Oh, not just with this guy, this kid. There would be others, a long line of them, until it became town legend that she was a compulsive, promiscuous nymphomaniac.
How had it started? Where did it all begin? With Paul's negligence? No, hell no, she thought, it went deeper than that, beyond that single ready-made alibi. It went farther back than anything she could put her finger on. What, how and why were beyond her. All she knew was that there would be no stopping her impulses. There would be no reining them in.
Pathetic.
What kind of world do we live in, she thought, where we feel guilty for having experienced something so damned good, so undeniably delicious? She had just had a sex bout with one of the best-had had the kind of dose that every woman who is a woman needs. Yet, she felt compelled to feel guilty, to conjure up some sense of regret.
It wasn't there.
She didn't feel guilty. She felt only sadness, a sadness born of her dependency, an addiction to that good thing. That hurt, the de facto element of it hurt more than any moral considerations. Infidelity' Nothing of the sort, she decided. Expediency. Emotional therapy.
Paul Stone could go to hell.
CHAPTER NINE
THE QUESTION OF HELL DID NOT OCCUR TO PAUL Stone that day. By twelve o'clock, nothing else did, either; nothing that would have ordinarily occupied his mind: work, and all relating to it.
He thought exclusively of Joan Cushing.
He kept seeing her as a continual figure; deep, understanding, sympathetic eyes, sadly profound smile capable of becoming a thoroughly bemused smile....
Then he got over illusions of sympatico, and just concentrated on the body. It was a young body. Strictly speaking, her body was not as ripe or developed as Peggy's, but that was the thing that attracted him most. It was a young, young body that exuded the illusion of perennial youth.
That was what interested Paul Stone.
And not in what could be called a paternal way, either.
Warm currents of sensuous feeling coursed through him for the first time in many years. He felt young when he thought of ravishing that body. It amazed him that the mere imagining of Joan could excite him more than the living, breathing fact of Peggy's body.
It was a fact with many implications, though he did not care to explore them. It was hardly worth that; what was worthwhile, was that Joan's body and knowledge of same became a fact.
And he had the wedge.
A very sharp wedge that could open big holes.
Joan Cushing was a very ambitious woman, ambitious for her husband; and inhibitions aside, she would be a comparatively easy nut to crack with that wedge, if handled and wielded properly.
He had handled such wedges before.
A long time ago, but he remembered. You didn't forget old skills, however long they were out of use, he thought.
As the day wore on, it became more and more an obsessive thing. Tt boiled down to a heart-quickening, body-warming desire for that young body full of the illusion of innocence; a ripe, unplucked virginal vessel of pleasure. Paul Stone considered the issue, then gave in to the truth as he saw it: he needed sex with a woman like Joan, married or not. He needed it, wanted, had to have it. Period. It was a completely non-academic consideration. It would be so simple, that it would be akin to taking candy from a placid baby, he decided. Oh, there would be token resistance, pretensions of fidelity and guilt, but in the end, that wedge would crack her wide open. He would try not to use it too severely-just a little thrust and stab at a time, until she was wholly accessible. Subtle, subtle Paul.
When Lee awakened in the morning, that curtain of hostility still lay thick between him and his wife. He could feel it, taste it. Looking at the clock, he saw that it was a little after nine; lying in bed with her was a form of masochism, he decided. Getting up and about was infinitely preferable.
He showered and dressed, then walked quietly out of the house, taking his manuscript with him. He did not want to face Joan this morning; he was not up to recriminating glances, accusing words; he had lost his stomach for such encounters. So he drove to the Toddle House, a modernistic, formica-laden greasy spoon that amazingly enough served the best cup of coffee in town, and breakfasts that one could be reasonably certain of holding down. No doubt he would run into someone there-a student, a colleague-somebody who wouldn't be hostile, someone who he wouldn't have to be on his guard with.
Nine thirty-five.
Two and a half hours to kill. He was angry; if it weren't for that damned sullen woman at home, he could have stayed and accomplished something, instead of running away like the proverbial thief in the night. Now he had to sit around and waste precious time, When the counterman stood in front of him, he ordered coffee right away and two eggs over light, bacon, juice, toast. The counterman repeated the order to the cook in incomprehensible terms-he was a young man with a wise-guy countenance.
"Two flipped chicks with," he shouted, and Lee saw his eggs being cracked into a frying pan, the bacon thrown on the hissing-hot grill. Meanwhile, a cun of coffee was slammed down in front of him. He picked up the steaming cup and sipped greedily, letting the hot strong liquid warm his guts, snap his senses into focus. Slowly, he came out of his pre-caffeine daze, became wary of what was around him. Spinning around idly on the stool, he looked around, and his eyes settled on Brenda Wood, who was sitting alone in a booth.
"Bring my eggs and stuff to that booth, will you?" he told the counterman, and pointed to the booth where Brenda sat.
"Sure." It was a leer, rather than a straightforward reply. Lee walked over to the booth. Brenda didn't see him at first, as she was busy looking at the titles in the juke box on the wall.
"Morning," he said quietly.
She turned. Her eyes lit up with gladness, gladness to see him. His heart leaped up and beat more rapidly. What a wonderful feeling, he thought, to have someone glad to see you.
"Hi, Dr. Cushing, how are you?" she said. "Sit down."
"I already took the liberty. Is Bill here with you?"
"No. He called, and I decided to spend the day working on the paper, so I'll see him tonight instead."
"Work, on Saturday? You are an incredible specimen, Brenda."
"Hardly that," she laughed. "There's nothing incredible about working on something that interests you, is there?"
"No, of course there isn't." Breakfast came, was plopped rudely in front of him. "How about something to eat?" he asked her, while the counterman hovered over them impatiently.
"No. Just some more coffee, please," she said. The guy hustled away, shouting like a mess sergeant. "So, what brings you here?" she asked.
"Just killing time until an appointment," he said.
"Oh."
Lee ate his eggs before they got cold, then started in on his bacon. "Say, how about some bacon?" he asked, "it's real good."
"No thanks."
"Come on." He put some on a saucer and shoved it over in front of her.
"Thank you. I hate to steal food out of your mouth."
"You're not stealing anything from anybody," he insisted. "Surely friends can share a little thing like food, can't they?"
The remark surprised them both.
It brought something into the open, something that lay buried, only vaguely acknowledged. They looked steadily, unhurriedly at one another.
"I guess so, Doctor." Her voice had a slight catch in it
"Lee, under these circumstances," he said. "We have a pretty fine relationship, Brenda. I'm proud of it, really. It means a lot to me."
She didn't say anything.
"Sorry if I embarrassed you," he said.
"No, no," she said, and laid her hand on top of his beseechingly. "I'm glad you said it, Lee. T ... never would have had the courage to say it myself." Their eyes locked, said a million things that needed more saying.
Brenda's hand remained where it was.
Lee became highly conscious of it. It was more than a hand, more than a woman's hand. It was a warm, wonderful living presence, one that became very necessary for him to hold onto.
"You look upset about something, Lee. What's the matter?"
It poured out of him like a dam that had been dynamited. He told her about the wife who didn't understand him. the conflict between playing Stone's game, the University's game and just being himself. By the time he finished, he realized that he had articulated his dilemma for the first time. Things were more clear-cut, more definable. It was beginning to make sense to him.
"It's so good to have someone to unload on," he said. "I'm sorry you had to take that burden."
"I'm glad you told me," she answered. "That's what ... friends are for."
It was the classic approach, so much so, that Lee wasn't even aware of the fact that he was using it. The wife who didn't understnad, the world who closed in unremittingly-all classic, time-worn stuff, as effective as ever when the people involved want a belief, however tenuous, to cling to.
Her eyes were clouded with sympathy, with transmuted sadness for him that worked itself inside her young bosom.
"When you get that novel finished, you'll be on your own, Lee. You'll be able to be you."
"I hope so. It's funny how you can get into something with a head full of dreams, and get disillusioned so quickly. It's a good thing I didn't go into business with my father, like he wanted."
"You wouldn't make much of a businessman. You're too gentle, too full of understanding."
"Thanks for that much, Brenda."
In the silence that followed, he became conscious of Brenda Wood as a woman: a woman with a body. He noticed how her breasts pushed youthfully against her sweater; by the look of softness, of pliancy, he saw that she wore no brassiere. She could get away with it, he decided. It was a shame to hide such beautiful anatomy with artificial devices like brassieres. The skin on her neck and face was soft, close-grained. No flaws anywhere, that he could see. The hair was brushed to a high sheen; her lips were young, smiling, yet full of womanly understanding and sensuality. Highly expressive lips, he thought.
The rest of her was hidden by the table, but he could imagine. He had seen her closely before, had watched her walking the corridors in the English building, and knew how that young butt pushed against the tight skirts and slacks, how the hips swelled and tapered into strong, straight thighs. It required no more than minimum imagination to know what was beneath those clothes that society demanded be worn. It all came back to him.
He swallowed, thinking of Joan, probably still lying in bed. He was learning something about himself that didn't particularly delight him: last night, he had harbored forbidden little thoughts concerning himself and Peggy Stone. Now, he was indulging in the same sort of game with Brenda Wood as the other half of the board. He had never thought in such terms before. Now, he seemed suddenly surrounded by temptation, temptation that was almost too good, too overwhelming to pass up.
There were differences, of course. Peggy Stone was a potential stepping-stone, a middleman between her husband and that promotion. Brenda was different. He thought perhaps that he might be in love with her, which brought up the question of emotional maturity in his mind. Married men were not to fall in love with other women. If worse came to worse, you could commit adultery, as long as you did it discreetly. As long as you didn't get caught-contemporary morality hard at work, he thought. Just don't pet caught. And make sure that you can live with yourself. But falling in love was out of the question. It would not be tolerated, because it implied that you had made a wrong choice the first time around. It implied failure of a sort, and to fail in twentieth century America is anathema. It is a psychic form of dying.
"What are you thinking about?" Brenda asked. Her voice interrupted his thoughts, cut into them abruptly.
"Just things," he smiled. "It might sound vague, or evasive, but that's about it."
"It is evasive, Lee. Are you thinking about us?"
"Yes. I suppose I am, and I have no right."
Someone fed the juke-box, and raucous, guitar-twanging music flooded the room. It was annoying, a shouting voice that seemed to say NO, YOU CAN'T HAVE ANY PRIVACY, NOT EVEN THIS! They ignored it, merely raised their voices above the music.
"Maybe not, but we're both thinking about the same thing."
"What about Bill?" Lee heard himself ask.
"Right now, he doesn't seem important," she shrugged. "It's as though I made a mistake right from the beginning. Maybe that's hard to understand or believe."
"God, no it isn't," he choked.
"Lee, can we go somewhere? Somewhere where we can be alone?" Desperation in her voice, now. Desperation born of wanting.
"Do you realize what it can mean?" he asked.
"Yes. Pain, lots and lots of pain. I don't care, Lee."
"Okay, Brenda." When he stood up, he was dizzy; everything was unreal, as though in another world, in another dimension. This wasn't happening to him, was it? This only happened in movies, on TV, in books and romance comics. This couldn't possibly be real, could it?
It was.
He paid the check, and they walked outside, to his car. They got into the car, with him holding the door for her to enter. He shut it, walked over to the other side and climbed in behind the wheel. Drove off.
" Toward the motel area several miles out of town. It was real, all right. Lee kept his eyes fixedly on the road, afraid to look over at Brenda, who sat almost against the door. Already, guilt was enveloping them like a gaseous shroud, he thought. They hadn't even gone beyond intention, and already it was beginning to close in on them.
"It'll be right, Lee. You'll see." Her voice was soft, caught in her throat. She moved next to him, took one hand off the wheel and put it around her shoulder.
"You'll see," she said again.
It was the last motel on the strip, and it was moderately priced. He signed in as Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Cummings from downstate, so that when he entered his license plate number on the form, it wouldn't look fishy. He paid the man in advance, then walked back outside to the car.
"Okay," he said, and climbed in. He parked in front of their room, which was in back. It was a large motel; there were probably a hundred units or more-the kind of place where questions were never asked, strictly a volume operation.
The inside didn't matter to either of them.
There was a bed.
Nothing else was important.
Brenda, too, thought that this was somehow distant from her. It was like looking at someone else, perhaps on television. The reality had not yet penetrated.
"Nice room," she said shakily.
"Brenda, we can leave right now," Lee said. "If either of us have qualms, it's no good. You know that."
"I don't have any, Lee."
It was a final pronouncement that said, Let's finish what we've started. Brenda turned, looked at the wall. It was paneled she noticed wit a common-looking sort of plywood that gave it an anonymity like all other motels. There was nothing that proclaimed the thing they were about to do, nothing that shouted with threats to point them out to the world.
It was private.
When he kissed her, she trembled, and he knew that it was partly from uncertainty, from delayed shock. She was not promiscuous. He had an idea of what she had at stake.
"Brenda, I wouldn't hurt you for the world. Believe that."
"I do, Lee, I do," she said, and returned the kiss, throwing her arms around him, clinging against his body with her body, and then it was all right. It felt right, the way their lips and bodies clung tenaciously, warmly together, seeking one another out.
Lee ran his fingers gently through the luxuriant hair, caressed her while his lips ground insistently against hers. She sighed, held him tightly. He became conscious of her breasts poking into his chest, and wanted to remove the tweed sport jacket that he wore. It was a heavy, cumbersome, highly annoying inconvenience.
"I feel better," she said. She kissed him again, with more passion, and he let his tongue flick gently against her lower, pouting lip. Her jaw went slack with desire, with open-mouthed wanting, and their tongues collided and mingled with one another's hot breath. Their sighs harmonized with gathering intensity.
"Much, much better," she breathed, and clung to him like a live weight, pulling him down, down, until they glided in embrace toward the bed. She fell back against the mattress, pulling him down on top of her. The tight, short skirt hiked up her legs and gathered around full hips-the sweet white meat of thighs lay exposed. His hand caressed them, rubbed them, and he knew, by her breathing, by her crescendoed whimpers, that there was no turning back. They had already gone beyond that point, in a matter of minutes. Their wanting was insatiable.
Her thighs parted, letting his hand wander upward; her pants were moist and hot with her desire; his fingers moved up, stroked the soft smooth belly-flesh, which quivered and jumped with instant, heated response.
"Oooooh," she whimpered, "I need you so badly, Lee, darling!" Her body rocked gently to and fro, in that ageless movement known to all female flesh.
Brenda cursed herself for having worn a pullover sweater. It was a damned annoyance. It meant breaking the embrace, sitting up, and pulling it off, all of which she did with alarming speed, but still, it acted as an unlooked-for contrivance, and interruption that was not needed.
In an instant, it was off.
Her breasts were bare, lush, waiting.
Breathlessly, he fondled them, hefted the globes in his hands, and felt their feathery weight, their young fullness, the burgeoning red nipples swelling against his palms. He bent down and kissed them. The nipples grew like little raspberries in his mouth, and she whimpered, moaned, and thrashed her body hotly back and forth against his lips to encourage the caress, to heighten the pleasure of it. Her hands clung to the back of his neck possessively, pulled his head forward, while her body shot forward to meet it.
A head-on collision.
A miraculous contact.
Her mouth was completely slack now, tongue lolling inside as though it had nothing to cling to, as though it were a free, unencumbered agent.
"Ahhhh," she panted, thrusting her body back and forth. Her hand sought him, found him, clung to him with sweet possession. Lee felt the burn of desire flash through him, felt his groin tighten, cramp painfully-then a continuous wave of building, intensified pleasure as she caressed him, delighted in his maleness and its response.
He lay down beside her, his body moving against hers with agonized wanting. Her bare thighs and breasts suggested heat, intimated the ultimate beauty of complete nudity. His hands pulled at her panties, forced them down over swollen, lush hips and full sumptuous thighs. Then they were off.
Her core seethed with heat.
White-hot, ready heat that screamed and begged for a man to fill it, fulfill it, gratifying it. His hand caressed stroked, probed, carrier her to the heights of lust. Her thighs shot apart, encouraged continuation, while her hands worked feverishly at his clothing, tearing it away from his body. It was a flurry of disorganized motion-his stroking, her pulling of clothes, his kicking off of shoes without bothering to untie them. Then they settled into slow, langurous movements, sighing, panting, whimpering.
Their bodies making contact was like an electric shock. Their minds exploded with the lushness of it, transmitting the information to their senses, which reveled and rejoiced. His large hands covered a good portion of her breasts while his hips and flat, hard stomach maintained their contact with her. Their lips joined, and it was a perfect symphony of bodies preparing for the grand finale of pleasure.
He bit her lower lip.
She gasped, bit his.
His hand dug tightly into abundantly pliant buttocks' flesh, while her hand stroked him, clung to him desperately. Now he could smell the muskiness of passion and desire that emanated from her thighs, from every pore of her body. It was the unmistakable smell of sex, mingling with cologne or perfume, he didn't know which. Nor did he give a damn. It was a moot point.
"Now," she insisted, "now, Lee darling!" Her hands coaxed, tried to roll him into position on top of her.
"Don't make it so quick," he pleaded. "Make it a lasting thing, Brenda, a thing that we'll always remember."
She knew what he meant.
Of course, she thought; why should she finish them all at once, and make the whole thing just another quick roll in the hay? It would be more than that, considering their emotional involvement, but it could be so much better, so much more memorable, if she used a little imagination, a little daring....
If she let herself go, as she had done with Bill. What the hell, she told herself, it wasn't as though she were adverse to borderline tactics. Hardly!
Whatever they did, it would not be sordid.
Brenda quivered with this new knowledge; the certainty of utter, uninhibited freedom between them. A laissez faire of sex; hell, it was a brand-new cultural concept that should shock the sociologists. It was beautiful, highly workable.
"Lee, can we-?"
"Anything, anything at all," he said in a voice he could not recognize as his own. His hands held her tightly, stroked her thighs and belly.
She quivered.
"Would you kiss me?" She showed him what she meant. More than anything, she wanted to feel a man's lips there, delivering the forbidden kiss that is said to have originated in the temples of Lesbos, long, long ago. Only this wasn't Lesbos, it was straight all the way, between man and woman.
Lee saw no discernible reason for hesitation.
He pushed her back against the mattress, pulled her by the legs so that her knees and calves hung over the edge of the bed. He looked at her, in that position. He saw smoky, clouded eyes, disarrayed hair, wet, limp lips-a face depicting pure lust. He saw a trembling, eager body with heaving breasts that rose and fell, nipples burgeoning. He saw lush hips working up and down with piston-like precision.
He saw a woman waiting.
Never keep a lady waiting. Her flesh was soft and warm against his face, and the shaking of her body, the spur-like grip of her nails in the back of his head urged him on, drove him. She responded with equal verve and enthusiasm, as she was the recipient of this grand stroke-she screamed. It was a scream of incredulous delight, punctuated with Yes ... ooooh! Yes! He closed his eyes, let himself become lost in the dark world of woman's hungry, yearning flesh.
She pulled him up, practically forced him on top of her body, held him with her strong thighs, and their bodies meshed in final embrace.
It was insanely delightful.
Body against body, they became one body, one movement, a movement in precise counterpoint. His hands held her buttocks while her hands pressed tightly into the small of his back; they were as close as two people can be.
Brenda fainted. Perhaps it was only for seconds; the eyes fluttered, closed, opened again, while her body continued its dynamo motion.
Then, they exploded.
It was a peak, a culmination of pleasure that poets have been trying to describe for thousands of years, without success. It was a climax that can only be felt, then forgotten, until the next one. It is a fleeting, precious moment in human experience.
Exhaustion.
Silence.
Twelve o'clock, according to his watch, and time to be at John Hanley's house. Yet he hated to run like that. It would destroy the illusion of tenderness, of quiet contentment that should ideally follow an experience of such intensity.
"You have an appointment," she said.
"Yes, I'm afraid I do," he replied.
"Must you hurry?" she asked.
"Yes. I'm supposed to be there now," he replied, and looked at her beseechingly. "I hate to leave. It's so quiet here, so peaceful."
"That's the trouble when you leave the world," she said. "It's always hell getting back into it again."
They got dressed, and entered that world. To most people, it was a world consisting of trees and buildings and peoples and automobiles, somehow related, somehow belonging. To Lee Cushing, it was a world of hardship. It was a world that demanded he have after-hours sex with another woman outside of its eves rind ears. It was a world that demanded loyalty to his wife, compromise in his beliefs and values.
Yet, it was a world that he couldn't deny. He had to fit into it, somehow. Still, there was the dream that he could fit in on his own terms. There was still that illusion, and now, as he drove Brenda to her dormitory, he tried to cling to it fiercely.
CHAPTER TEN
Joan awakened again, this time with a resolve to get out of bed. She had awakened before, when Lee had gotten up, then gone back to sleep again, in a fitful sort of way. But now she looked at the clock, felt a slight tinge of guilt. It was time. She stretched her supple limbs, letting the blood stir through her. After a moment of dizziness, her head was clear. When her feet touched the floor, she did a quick series of knee-bends, then went to the bathroom. It was a daily ritual, one that took perhaps five minutes, and kept her shape. What coffee did for most people, exercise did for Joan Cushing.
Lee had left quite early. She wondered where he had gone, and what he had done with himself, knowing that his appointment with Hanley was at noon, which it was right now, looking at another clock. The house was full of clocks. Something unwholesome about a lot of clocks-a definite attempt to compensate for some deep-rooted insecure feeling. Like, clocks can remind you that you still exist from point to point in time.
Lee was not one to wander aimlessly about, so it stood to reason that he had done something to occupy himself, she decided. Well, it wasn't important. What was important was the tact that they had gone to sleep in an argumentive frame of mind, something they seldom did. Usually, if they had differences, they argued and talked, even if it took all night. It was healthier, a much better way to go to sleep. This morning, there was a bad taste that ran deep inside her, the kind of bad taste that GL-70 and all the rest of it could do absolutely nothing to alleviate. It went down into the guts, and lingered. It was her fault.
She knew that, and if Lee were here with her now, she would be more than willing to apologize. It was her damned impatience, her inescapable feeling of insecurity, that prodded her to nagging. She knew he was working hard, had enough ambition and drive for ten men. Yet, she persisted in nagging, in treating him like a mother threatening a child. It was the weak link in their relationship, and she was that link. Joan knew that. It hurt. Now, when Lee returned, she would make it up to him, and do her damnedest not to interfere with his pride and male prerogatives. "I swear I won't bug him anymore," she said quietly to herself.
It was almost twelve-thirty when Lee pulled into the Hanleys' driveway. Picking the manuscript off the front seat, he hurried up the walk toward the front door and rang the bell. Naomi, looking disgustingly fresh and well-rested, answered it, with a smile that said All's right with the world and all that jazz-
"Hiya Lee. C'mon in!" All flashing white teeth and clear skin, and she'd probably had more to drink than he had: with less disastrous results.
"Hi, Naomi, sorry I'm late. John mad?"
"No, in fact he's probably still writing. He's been up right around the clock. Felt creative when we came home, so he just never went to bed."
"Sonofagun."
"Claims that Stone's parties bring out his satirical vein, and it's just a damned shame not to exploit it." She laughed richly, and Lee laughed too, picturing John's expression as he wrote: there, fella, that takes care of you! Like most serious writers, John probably used the printed word for personal therapeutic purposes from time to time. "How about some coffee, Lee?"
"Okay, fine." He followed her into the kitchen, watched her pull the plug out of the electric coffee-maker, and pour out two cups of extraordinarily strong coffee.
"Black as hell and strong as sin; hope you like it that way."
"Fine."
"Here, take a cup into John. He won't mind the interruption, I'm sure."
"Thanks, Naomi. See you later." John's wife smiled and Lee felt warmed by it. A fine human being, he thought, and a darting little quiver of bitterness went through him as he thought I bet she doesn't hound hell out of him the way my wife does me. Then the feeling passed completely as he thought of what he had done with Brenda Wood.
He had no right to complain.
What he had just done liberated him from the responsibility of male independence-guilt swept through him until he felt sick, sick enough to throw up. Quickly, he walked back to the study where John was typing furiously.
He went inside, sat in the chair.
"Well, hi there, Lee boy!" John greeted. His eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep, and a pile of typewritten pages lay on the desk beside him. "Got a lot of work done today," he said, nodding toward the pages. "And I'm not going to do one damned bit of rewriting. Let's see what youve got here, Lee."
"Here goes nothing," Lee said, and handed over the manila envelope full of manuscript.
"Leave it. I'll bring it in Monday with a diagnosis, okay?"
"Sure. John, how did you feel when you were writing your first book, not knowing whether it'd be published or not? I mean, did you ever want to give up?"
John laughed.
"Want to give up? Hell, I did give up, a lotta times. I threw out two novels that I'd started before I settled down to my first one. And that was a bad book, you know."
"It wasn't like Long-Gone Charlie" Lee admitted, but for a first novel, it was excellent, he thought. And now, John Hanley had skyrocketed to literary prominence, seemingly overnight, which was substantially an illusion. It represented months and years of lonely, mind-twisting work. Anyone who thought writers, even established authors, had it made, were sadly mistaken, and Lee knew it instinctively.
"It's an awful feeling," Lee said. "I've wanted to junk this book a hundred times, which I sort of take to mean that it's not worth a damn."
"Very misleading to think like that," John said, his eyes dreamy with reminiscence. "You just never know how a book stacks up until you're all finished with it. And then, you'll write one that you're deadly ashamed of and that's the one that sells over a million copies and makes the book clubs. Hell, you never know."
"Encouraging."
"Facts. You've got to have that confidence," he told Lee. "It's the writer's secret weapon."
"What'd you think of last night's little get-together?" Lee asked.
"Hell, it was a riot like all the time. Lee, I can't believe you want to go up that ladder. You're much too nice a guy."
"Not as nice as you think, John," Lee said, averting the other man's eyes.
"I don't know what your image of yourself is, but I think you're basically a good guy with lots of talent and ambition besides. Why blow by playing Stone's stupid game?"
"It's not just Stone," Lee sighed, "it's the whole damned setup. I love teaching. I'd hate to leave it. The higher up that ladder you are, the more teaching you can do, if you're so inclined."
"Like Stone?" John asked sarcastically. "He does just loads of teaching, doesn't he?"
"He chooses not to."
"Damn right, and when you've got a boss-man like that, he isn't going to let you choose to the contrary. Don't you see?"
"I don't know, John. I'm confused at this point, to say the least."
"Well, just promise me one thing, will you Lee?"
"Depends."
"If this book goes; if it does anything at all, will you seriously consider telling Stone to go shove it?"
"I'll consider it, of course."
"Good. I feel better. Now beat it and go back home. See you Monday morning."
"Thanks, John. Thanks a lot."
"Thanks, hell. I haven't done anything yet"
He said good-bye to Naomi at the door, and climbed into his car. His heart beat rapidly; he had that excited-sick feeling of being on the threshold of something, and the tension inside him, the waiting for it to break, was intolerable. He felt keyed to a high, taut-wired pitch.
Everything was happening so fast....
Making his head whirl-confusion gripped him like nausea. It was less important whether or not Joan found out about him and Brenda than the fact that he himself knew. It stuck in his gut like a gallstone. Yet, even now, thinking back on the scene, he knew he had a very special feeling for Brenda, one that he had for her alone. It couldn't properly be called love, but still, it was something, something that explained his actions. He backed out of the driveway, turned the car toward home and aimed it.
Monday morning.
Today is it, Paul Stone thought. Today is the day that I'm going to call Joan Cushing, and yes, damn it, take the afternoon off.
He smiled faintly, folded the schedule that listed all the instructors in the department, and when they held classes. Cushing had a class in the morning-445-two survey sophomore classes in the afternoon. He finished the last one at four-thirty, which gave Paul plenty of time. The only thing that concerned him was that he might create a mild furor by leaving his office unexpectedly. It simply was not like him; ns a rule, the lights in his office burned long after the others were turned off. But, it would be relatively easy to fabricate some pretext.
He leaned back in the chair, and thought of Joan Cushing.
Young.
Younger by at least ten years than his wife. It made his blood pound, his mouth go dry. An excitement that started butterflies in his stomach persisted in his guts, made him grip the edge of the desk tightly. It was a reaction that caught him utterly off guard. He wasn't prepared for such violent feelings within himself, having spent his adult life controlling them with careful, disciplined thought. He was accustomed to thinking in channels, in specific, well-defined directions. Now, his mind was churning, and that, for Paul Stone III, was a catastrophe.
He picked up the telephone, hit the outside line button, and dialed the Cushing number with a trembling hand.
Buzzzzzz.
Pause.
Another buzzzzzz.
"Hello?" Her voice, mildly questioning, inquiring. Sweet, young sounding.
"Joan, Paul Stone. Good morning."
"Hello ... Paul." His name stuck slightly in her throat, those vocal chords in her pretty young throat being more accustomed to articulating the words Dr. Stone.
"I didn't really get a chance to talk to you over the weekend, about Lee. I think I should have a long talk with you before I come to any definite decision. Are you busy this afternoon?"
"Why no. When would you like me to come to your office?"
For a fleeting instant, Stone's brain lashed wildly, looking for a plausible argument against her coming to see him; that would not work out at all.
"I was thinking, if you wouldn't mind, that I'd come see you. There'll just be a million interruptions around here, and I don't think it would be wise if it were known that Lee Cushing's wife came to see his department chairman."
"Very good, Paul."
"It makes a good deal of sense."
"You're right, of course. But Lee will be home about five, and I know you usually work even later...."
"I'm more than willing to take part of the afternoon off," he said. "How about one o'clock? Would that be convenient?"
"That'd be fine, Paul. I'll make some lunch for you."
"Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Nothing fancy, though."
"Don't worry."
He hung up, and tried to go back to his work, but could not. Strange things were happening to him. He was unable to concentrate. His mind flitted around like that of a restless beetle. It was very disconcerting for a man of Paul Stone's ilk. Very.
Bill and Brenda did not sit next to one another in Lee's class, as they always did. In fact, they did not even sit in the same row. From his vantage point in the back, Bill could see Brenda leaning forward in an attitude of rapt attention.
He hardly listened to what was going on.
What he saw in Brenda's attitude, in Lee's constant quick glances toward her, then toward him, alarmed him. There was something so secretive, so guilty.
Not that he could bitch.
When you banged the department chairman's wife, you were hardly in a moral or practical position to do any worthwhile bitching, but that didn't negate the fact that he was highly annoyed by what he saw. He was annoyed enough to punch Cushing right in the mouth. The satisfaction of feeling his fist crunch against bone would be immense.
But there had to be another way.
He was a big boy now, and violence was a temporary measure at best. You didn't go around hitting people because you were mad at them.
Lee's voice droned in his ears.
After class was over, he got up, gathering his books, and walked by the front row where Brenda sat, between her and Lee. For a long, uncomfortable moment, he stood looking down at her.
"Good morning."
"Good morning," she answered.
"Want some coffee?"
"I can't. I have an appointment with Doctor Cushing."
"Sure. Excuse me for being so presumptuous. See you around the campus."
He walked, back erect and stiff, out of the room. Lee saw him go, and felt a mild, hardly perceptible trace of panic. Did he know something? Or just suspect something? Either one would be damnable. Suspicions would keep him wary, would arouse a vindictive attitude in him. It could be awfully damned uncomfortable.
Brenda thought much the same thing, but not for herself. For Lee. She had nothing to lose, except Bill, a prospect that seemed to be of increasingly less importance to her. But Lee could lose everything, she thought-his job, his career, his wife. Everything. And if that happened, she would be responsible. It would be she who would have destroyed him.
She smiled ruefully, and looked at Lee, who looked at her quizically.
"What's the matter, Brenda?" he asked.
"Nothing. Nothing that a jump off Niagra Falls wouldn't cure." Now, now, stop feeling sorry for yourself, Brenda-girl. Be an adult. You love a married man who can't, won't divorce, who likes you very much and wouldn't hurt you for all the tea in China; but he doesn't love you. Tough beans-he won't hurt you; he'll just kill you. Inside, where it hurts.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Simplicity is a relative term. What is elegance to one can quite conceivably be utter peasantry to another.
To Paul Stone, it was not simplicity, or anything like it, that Joan had ready when he entered her living room. A pitcher of martinis were made and chilling, accompanied by shrimp cocktail, quite a feat, considering shrimp were in short supply at that time of year.
"A real Madison Avenue lunch," Paul beamed as Joan took his overcoat and hung it in the closet.
"This is hardly a routine occasion, Paul. I thought that tuna fish sandwiches might falsify my sentiments. It's the little things that express the most adequately, you know."
He smiled and said, "You're a remarkably perceptive woman, you know that?" She returned the smile.
"Thanks. Now, let's have a drink and talk, shall we?"
"Perceptive and efficient. A rare combination in any individual."
"Flattery, flattery-keep it up, it'll get you far," she laughed.
Let's hope so, Paul said silently.
"Well," he said aloud, sitting down with a martini glass in his hand, "we were supposed to talk about Lee, were we not?"
"Yes." Joan felt her throat getting tight. Instinct put her on her guard, but Stone invariably lowered that guard, putting her at ease. He had a soothing,' reassuring way about him, she decided. It would be nice if he extended the same flattering remarks toward Lee. Then her stomach would settle back down where it belonged instead of lingering in her throat.
"Now," Stone said, twirling the glass in his hand, "I've done a lot of thinking about Lee, Joan. More than you could realize. I hold him in pretty high esteem-considering his age and experience, he's accomplished an impressive amount of work.
"But there is one thing."
"Yes?" Joan held her breath.
"I'm only his superior, and I haven't been able to know him on a more personal level. That's where I can use your help. Tell me, how serious is he about his novel?"
Joan brightened. Now she could loose a barrage.
"John Hanley read it over the weekend. If he sees that it's salable, he'll work with Lee all the way."
"I have no doubts about that. But how much literary value will it have? Will it show promise?"
"What you really mean," Joan smiled, "is what will it do for the university?"
"I'm afraid so, in large part."
"Well, Paul, that's a rather speculative question, don't you think? I mean after all, Dickens was always a commercial success, but it took a while fo the critics to discover him. Same with Melville, Hawthorne, Faulkner and our mutual friend John Hanley."
"Right you are. But talent is partly measurable in a more immediate sense."
Now we're getting into the game, Joan thought.
The game that Lee cannot, will not play.
It occurred to her that since Lee would not go overboard, she would have to in her own unique way: a way unique to all reasonably appealing women. And her appeal was far more than reasonable.
"I think Lee has a great deal of talent. I've read part of the manuscript in rough form, and so has John. Time will tell the rest."
"But he is serious? He does have an artistically successful literary career in mind?"
"More than anything else, next to teaching, that's what he wants. And he'll do nearly anything within his power to get it."
Paul moved closer to her.
She felt butterflies.
"Another drink, Paul?" she asked. Damn it, why am I so nervous, she wondered. It is for Lee, for us, that I'm going to do it.
"If you think you need one, Joan." Their eyes met and locked.
It was understood.
He knew that she knew, and she knew that he knew, and thus it went through the chain of perception. Paul's work was virtually eliminated; she knew what the stakes were, and she was nervous, but willing to pay the price.
Her body!
Her fidelity, her peace of mind, everything.
"Yes I do need a drink," she said shakily. He watched her pour out the liquid from the pitcher; it looked like water. Innocently bland, in a deceptive way, like Paul Stone III, man of distinctive good looks and good mind and good scholarly reputation. Hell, she thought, he was just like the rest of them. She'd known her share of the breed during her old dancing days, when it wasn't so much a question of what you knew as who you went down for and let know you better. Noble ideals! If Lee only knew what you had to do, the game you had to play. He didn't know. It meant that she had to play it for him. He wouldn't prostitute what he considered his integrity, so she was doing a little for both of them.
Why, Lee, why? Are you worth it, really? she wondered. What would his reaction be if he ever found out about this? It was a rhetorical question that defied any ready-made answers, she realized. It was like asking How high is Up? Stupid, hollow, insoluble.
"Are you disappointed with me, Joan?" he asked, taking the drink. When she sat down again, he slipped his arm around her. "Are you sorry about our understanding Friday?"
"What-?"
"We made a more or less intangible agreement, but I think we both understood the terms. You didn't disagree or dissent in any way, did you?" His arm tightened around her shoulder, and she tried not to stiffen her body. She wondered whether Stone used multi-syllabic words in bed?
Or on the couch.
On the floor.
She didn't much give a damn at this point, so long as it got done. She would take off her clothes, let him fondle her breasts, her thighs, tweak her belly or whatever the hell he liked by way of foreplay. She would lie down, point her knees toward the ceiling, and let him mount her, drive himself home against her, into her, boff her to the proverbial hilt and dump his passion inside her like some kind of human garbage disposal.
It would be turning a trick.
You didn't think about it, didn't even really react to it: you just did it, wriggling hips and buttocks enough to impart the illusion of pleasure-let the jerk think he was getting to you. That was all. Period.
She let her lips loosen when he kissed her, put her arms tentatively around him, and for all practical purposes it was an embrace, although the mutuality was questionable. At least she didn't keep her lips tight and stiff. His lips were warm, moving things against hers. Relax, Joan, relax, she kept telling herself, while she felt the warmth of lips, the persistent stroking of hands up and down her back, from shoulders to small of buttocks.
Relax.
You can tell yourself you're in the twilight zone if you exert the effort of will and self-conviction. In view of that, it was relatively easy for Joan to tell herself to relax, and for her body and nerves to react accordingly.
His hand fondled a breast. It crept beneath the brassiere, fingers closing tightly around the tender flesh, the nipples. It was as though they had been injected with Novocain. Whatever he did, she would not respond.
If she did, she was finished.
Then she would have betrayed Lee in every single respect. As long as she could maintain physical and emotional distance, she would have something, however tiny, to hold on to.
He fondled her breasts, both of them. Numbness. They couldn't be hers, she thought idly. She was watching someone else who looked like her.
Paul Stone TIT had a quite opposite set of reactions. They were the antithesis of numbness and indifference. To put it rather succinctly, he had never known such a vast bombardment of erogenous evocations. He couldn't remember ever having been this excited over any bouts with his own wife. Youth, he thought, he was holding the spheres of youth in his hands; twin, perfect, burgeoning spheres of perennial youth!
He lost control, and began attacking buttons and zippers and snaps, peeled away layers of clothing, growing more and more excited by the feel of hot flesh against his hands. It was not enthusiastically hot flesh, but Paul Stone hardly knew the difference. It was warm, womanly, and above all, young flesh. He found breathing a major chore. Everything gathered in his throat at once. His hands sought blindly to render this bundle of youth in his possession naked.
Easy.
Just keep attacking the buttons and zippers and snaps, and you've got it, he thought wildly.
"Joan, I've always wanted you," he gasped. His voice was a dry, crackling croak, completely unfamiliar to his ears.
Joan only heard the words.
With her eyes closed, she finished the job he had started, pushed the panties over her hips and down until they caught at her ankles.
"You've got me, Paul." She lay back. The sofa was strangely cool against her back and buttocks, in contrast to his hot sweaty hands on her breasts and stomach.
"In the bedroom," he croaked again, "let's do it in there." Something degrading in the couch, he thought. Like knocking off a quickie. And God knew he didn't want it to be like that. He wanted to make it last and last, until the youth in her was gone forever. Panting like an overworked dog, he followed her into the bedroom, watching the sway and roll of naked, smooth buttocks-twenty-four years old! Again, he found breathing difficult.
On the bed that belonged to Lee and Joan Cushing, he had the young woman, who in his demented mind's eye, was even younger.
Sweet.
Infinitely sweet.
Cushing, you can have your promotion, he thought-you've paid for it.
At one o'clock, Lee walked back to his office to put away his brief case full of books. He felt slightly weak and dizzy from hunger. A whole hour to sit in the Faculty Club and eat. Hanley would be there, eating. It had developed that if Lee weren't able to join him at lunch, they would have to get together the next day. Hanlev had an unexpectedly full schedule. He threw the brief-case on the chair, and shut the door behind him. When he was no more than a couple of feet from the door, the phone rang.
Cursing, he walked back and unlocked the door, picked up the telephone.
"Hello, Doctor Cushing," he announced tersely. Damned inopportune moment, he thought savagely.
"It sounds as though T caught the professor at a bad time," the soft feminine voice tinkled. Lee softened as soon as he recognized it.
"Hello, Peggy, how are you?"
"Fine. But I can call back if-"
"No, no, what can I do for you?" Lee asked.
"Have you had your lunch?"
"No. I was just going out to get some, as a matter-of-fact."
"That's why you sounded irritable. Well, I thought we might eat together. Why don't you buzz over here?"
"I've only got an hour. It wouldn't be particularly leisurely, I'm afraid. I have a class at two."
"You're three minutes from here-that's six minutes' driving time, plus valuable time you're wasting on the phone. I'll be waiting for you, Lee, with a nice, nice luncn. 'Bye."
"But-" Too late. She had already hung up. With a sigh, he walked outside toward the parking lot, thinking What the hell, I'll have plenty of time, what's the big rush? Earlier, he had seen Stone leave the office, passing by his on the way to the parking lot. It wasn't like Stone to go off campus during the day, even for lunch. He couldn't be at home. That was a cinch. After starting the car, he forgot about Stone; the man's comings and goings were of no import to him, except one.
When Peggy greeted him at the front door, he felt as though he had seen the whole scene unfold before. Then it hit him: he'd dreamed about it, countless times, since Friday night, when Peggy had thrown a hint at him with all the subtlety of a bulldozer hitting a stone wall.
Only he didn't have a stone wall's density.
He had known exactly what she was referring to.
And now he was going for it. Once, twice, a hundred times, what does it matter, he thought. You do it, that's the end. And this time, it's for a gain.
It's the game.
Roundabout, but the game.
"Hi, Lee. It didn't take three minutes; it took two and a half."
"You timed it?" he asked with a grin. Funny, how he could grin even while feeling a heavy, depressing weight in the bottom of his stomach.
"I sure did. Come on, let's have a drink. Are you hungry?"
"You did mention the word lunch, I believe."
"I didn't mean that kind of hungry, Lee. And I didn't mean meat and potatoes before ... you know what I mean." If he'd had any doubts, she was doing a marvelous job of dispelling them, shaking that precious butt of hers. And it was precious. Preciously shaped, precious, he felt certain, to hold onto in that hurricane frenzy of lovemaking.
She was wearing tightly clinging leather slacks, $65.00 at Anita Ames' little store in the village, loose but revealing (like all well-fitted women's clothes); vest-sweater, $48.50 at Anita's; and a simple Lady Manhattan blouse, $6.95 at your leading department store. Shoes by I. Miller-open-toed, flat, dainty-looking at $25.00 on sale.
Nice clothes to compliment a nice body.
Her figure was much like Joan's, he thought, but it lacked the refined grace. Instead, it was definitely lewd, definitely suggestive, and even more definitely the type that caused more than one rape in the national figures. Women built like Peggy Stone who walked down a dark street had to be begging for it. Well turned out, well clothed, and damn well worth taking a dive off the high board for.
"I guess I do."
"Tell me honestly, Lee; if the stakes weren't what they were, would you still want me?"
"Any man would want you," he said quietly.
"I'm glad you said that. I was beginning to feel awfully much like a tramp. Do you hate me an awful lot? It must present all sorts of horrid conflicts."
"Let's not discuss it." he snapped. She smiled, excused herself, and was gone. He didn't know where, nor did he care, but with any luck at all, she would waste enough time to allow him to bow out gracefully. He knew that once it started, there would be no stopping. She was too much woman for that.
He poured himself another drink. He needed it. It went down like a jolt of hot lead, warmed his belly. He tried not to think about it. Only one thing was certain, he decided: and that was that you could never, under any circumstances, be smug and secure, thinking you could never become involved in anything reproachful. Reproachful? Hell, unbelievable was more the proper word. Circumstances, fate, everything uncontrollable and unpredictable could gather forces and rip the floor right out from under you with absolutely no difficulty.
So never believe in yourself, Lee Cushing.
"Don't let the daylight bother you," Joan's voice said behind him. He had been staring moodily out of the window. "Pretend it's night, and everything's cozy. Before you turn around, draw the drapes. will you?"
He did. The room fell into semi-darkness. Then, he turned, and saw Peggy Stone. But really saw her, in almost all her natural splendor.
She was wearing a nightie, if wearing can be properly applied. It was a wisp of a thing, enough to evoke more excitement in a man than if she had been altogether naked. The nipples of her breasts showed deep, shadow-pink through the gauze, as did the deep dark cleavage between her breasts. Her hips and buttocks were perfectly out-lined in shadow, and the dark patch of fluff between those statuesque thighs showed-all enough to make the mouth water, to make the male determination rise to new heights. The nightie stopped just below the buttocks, so that when she walked, he could see fleeting glimpses of buttocks and topmost thighs.
"Well, you like?" she asked, her voice thick and guttural with a nuance he hadn't heard before not even when she had propositioned him at the cocktail party.
"Peggy, it's getting late...."
"Thirty minutes, darling. Exactly thirty minutes, twenty-seven of which will be the sweetest, most delectible minutes you ever sampled."
Lee swallowed.
He damn well believed her.
Peggy moved toward him slowly, resolutely, while he stood rooted to the plush-carpeted floor. As she advanced, the details of her body took on a stark clarity: breasts more full, swinging indolently with her footsteps; nipples brushing against the gauze; navel showing now, suggesting sweet, warm flesh ready to be excited by his touches.
"Twenty-seven minutes," she whispered heavily, "don't blow 'em, Lee."
Then she was against him.
It was too late. He couldn't move forward, he couldn't retreat. There was nothing for him to do but stay glued in position. He felt his arms close around her, felt the engulfment of her body as it clung cloyingly to his, and it was over. As he closed his eyes, and felt the sweet white heat of her, he knew there was no turning back. Nor could he stay where he was.
He had to move forward.
Against her, arms around her, hands slithering down the warm, almost bare back to naked, swishing buttocks. His response grew until it was painful. It was far more intense than anything he had ever before experienced. Like the old cowboy heroes say, if you had to go, going this way was the best way. He firmly believed that.
Her hands stroked him feverishly. His body rocked back and forth while uncontrollable moans wrenched through his lips. It was impossible to remain still, not to the hot rhythms of lust and passion that played through him.
A savage growl came out of him, and he tore the nightie from her body. There wasn't much to tear-two narrow straps at the shoulders, and that was essentially it. It fell down her body, clinging loosely at the melony breasts for a moment before it continued its journey. Then she was naked. In all her splendor.
It was no time for literary allusion, but Lee was changing into a Mr. Hyde. Even though no hair grew an his face, he did feel a savage impulse rise in him, traces of a strength that he never knew himself to possess. He tore off his own clothing quickly, leaving them strewn on the floor.
Peggy gasped.
"Magnificent!" she said with a tremulous shudder. Her eyes were focused in a fairly specific spot, and it was altogether plain what she was labelling magnificent. And if any woman had large demands on magnificence, it was Peggy Stone, who had for the most part received less than adequate from her husband. She fell against him in a swoon, her eyes going smoky-slitty with passion, her hands stroking his back, his plane-like hips and flat hard stomach.
Down.
"So beautiful!" she whispered, "so-oooh, it's all mine!" She grasped him firmly, touched him so that his knees turned to jelly, and let her knee go limp and loose between his legs. When he kissed her, she emitted a breathy, echo-like sound into his throat. Her teeth nibbled demandingly at his lower Up, while her nails scratched at the spare skin at the nape of his neck.
"My God," she moaned, going loose in his arms. There was nothing for him to do but follow her descent, holding her cradled in his arms. He found himself bent over her-her nipples stared at him like two red eyes, winking, challenging, arousing his desire. His lips surrounded one.
It was enough.
Peggy made a hissing sound between her teeth, thrust herself at the mouth that excited her so. Gently, he lowered her all the way to the floor and flung himself astride, ready for the final onslaught that would carry them to infinite heights of ecstasy.
"Not yet," she whimpered, "so much to do, so much to show you, not yet!"
Not yet.
But something, anything, his nerves screamed. Her fingers closed around him, he felt weak-kneed again, ready to go into a swoon.
"Use me!" she shouted. It was a shout; it had the hot demand, the ultimate gracelessness of a shout. "Use me hard! Pleasure me!"
Hell, it was a gold mine, where a man could let his imagination and inclinations run wild, he thought. More: a guy could discover inclinations within himself that he never dreamed were there.
And he'd do just that.
Why not?
It didn't matter at this point how he played the game. The disheartening fact remained that he was in fact playing that unsavory game known as Cop On Your Wife. Like the three time loser, he had virtually nothing to lose.
But there was a difficulty that could be annoying, and in fact was. Lee Cushing had never merely used a woman. He had always entered lovemaking with the idea that it was a reciprocal relationship. You both derived mutual satisfaction, physically and emotionally. But now he was being asked and prodded to indulge his whims, his savage perversions, whatever they might be. And alas, to a man who had never thought of looking for such beasts within his breast, it was a rather demanding request.
"Bite me!" Peggy said, shoving her nipple into his mouth, "bite me hard." It was a beginning. He bit down slightly. She told him, "Harder, oh much much harder than that, darling."
"And by slow degrees, he let his teeth grind together, with the thinnest layer of pink bleeding flesh between them for a cushion.
The results were astounding.
She squirmed, moaned, cursed hot words of encouragement, and it was like a tamed wolf tasting blood. He went wild for the first time, and thought of lots of things he might like to do by way of torturing that pretty hunk of flesh who was just begging for it.
He hit her.
Across the face, so that her teeth chattered, and her head rocked from side to side. Through it all, she smiled impishly, encouraged by his sudden response.
"Again, Lee." He hit her again, and a sudden, exhilarating sense of physical strength coursed through his veins. He didn't want to hurt her, but he wanted to exert his superiority, wanted to see her pant and beg for something, anything, whether for mercy or more of the same.
In the heat of necessity, ideas are quickly transferred into direct action. Dragging her by that pretty hair, he took her with him to the sofa. Sat down. Pulled her on top of him, across the knee.
The buttocks trembled eagerly, while the pretty mouth moaned incoherent little sounds. He let his hand come down on a bare, rounded cheek, and watched it color slightly pink. Then again. Pinker, pinker, red, redder, in sweet, hot progression perfectly timed to the intensity of his blows upon her. Tt cave him an immense degree of pleasure, and she returned it in spades, wriggling hotly against him, female against male.
Somewhere inside him, something snapped.
It was inside, deeply hidden, but now scattered to the winds. Lee pushed her back brutally, into sitting position, and took the end-pillows and stuffed them under her buttocks.
Sobbing, she waited.
"Huhhh!" Like that.
Her buttocks squirmed against the pillows, and she sat there, staring glassily, sumptuous thighs sprawled. Waiting! Ready for him.
Her bod'-"coiled as though a high-powered rifle bullet had smacked into it when he took her. Back and forth, back and forth, their bodies not touching-yet more sense of contact than either of them had ever felt. Lee let himself fall forward and put his hands against her hilly breasts for support as his hips ground out the lust-tempo.
When it was over, she shreiked, then sighed, then closed her eyes. A dreamy smile played on her lips.
"You sure know your way around the campus," she murmured. Now that it was over, there seemed to be nothing to say to one another. Lee felt hollow-sick with remorse, as the useless relationship hit home. He had traded a few sweet moments of pleasure for-Joan, and everything their marriage was based on. Peggy registered zero in his feelings and sensibilities; in short, she was just a thirty-four-year-old woman with hot pants that had to be cooled somehow. And he had been the best available tool.
"I have to go. It's getting late." He watched her watch him get dressed; neither of them said anything for awhile.
Until: "Lee, don't worry about that associate job. Believe me, sweetie, you've got it hands down."
"Sure."
"Well, isn't that what you wanted?" she demanded, sensing his indifference.
"I don't know what I want any more," he said. "I just don't know." He finished dressing, turned to look at her once again. There was nothing in her eyes. No warmth, no acknowledgement of him. nothing that said, We did something for one another, Lee, gave something to each other that we didn't have before.
Her eyes were hollow, maybe a bit disgusted.
Not at all like it had been with Brenda Wood, who had looked at him starry-eyed, tears of happy-sadness, which made him feel just as rotten and just as sick as he felt now.
"Good-bye, Peggy."
"Good-bye, sweetie. You'll be hearing from my distinguished husband any day now." It was obviously a taunt, but Lee was too tired and too sick to respond. Instead, he just walked out.
Joan had no illusions of violated maidenhood, shorn innocence and all those concerns of a long-gone age. Instead, she felt anger. It was a widely diffused anger, directed at pretty nearly everyone.
It was directed at Lee, who refused to play the necessary game. It was also directed at Paul Stone III for having the damned, unmitigated gall of using her to his advantage. Lastly, it was directed at herself for having to resort to such vulgar tactics in order to insure success, which rightfully should have been assured by her husband's own hard work and ability. Annoying, cruddy, stinking: all adjectives that Joan readily applied to her past action. Most dismal was the fact that she hadn't enjoyed it. Although she had made up her mind not to enjoy their roll in the feathers, she had clung to the hope that her resistance would be broken at the last moment, that he would become a man, and she a woman, in the most primal of all relationships.
But it hadn't worked that way.
He had been too tormented with shaky lust, too overeager to ravage, too ... something, something at the tip of her tongue, but not quite definable.
Then it hit her.
Hard.
The jerk had treated her like a little girl. In the end, after the convulsions of lust, he had done everything except give her a lollipop and a dollar bill. A dirty, creepy old man was Dr. Stone!
CHAPTER TWELVE
Dr. Paul Stone III returned to his office before three-thirty, although he hardly noticed the time. He hardly noticed anything around him. He whirled dizzily, crazily in his own world, caught up in a floating fantasy that moved with him.
Joan Cushing had broken something in him. A previously undiscovered vein-an insatiable lust for young flesh that became increasingly inflamed as he thought of Joan's body, submitting-and of his own inexplicable feelings of tenderness afterward. But the tenderness had not lasted more than several moments. Almost as soon as he had been out in the street, walking toward his car, the choking desire had returned within him.
Our man Paul was a veritable lion in the streets.
He was a lion who couldn't explain himself. It didn't even occur to him that he should attempt to explain the newly discovered phenomenon. Now he sat in his office, figeting restlessly. Energy surged through him. It was energy he could neither explain nor control, but which definitely did exasperate him beyond endurance.
He rang for his secretary, who came in immediate ly.
"Yes, Doctor Stone?"
"Put through the following announcement: Doctor Paul Stone has chosen Doctor Lee Cushing as newest Associate Professor of the English Department. During Doctor Stone's absence, Doctor Cushing will no doubt be acting Department Chairman. Today's date, and put it right through."
"Yes, sir."
"I think that does it...."
"Then there is nothing else?"
"No, that's all. Except I want no phone calls," he snapped. "I don't exist." The secretary smiled wanly, uttered another yessir, but seemingly forgot the salute and about-face, and walked out. He was alone. He was trying to think, while energy and indefinable lust raged inside his academic breast.
Lee was stopped in his busy progress down the hallway by Bill Holloway. He had returned to school just in time for his two o'clock class, which had just ended. Heading toward his office, Bill's imposing bulk stopped him.
"Doctor Cushing? We have some talking to do, I believe." His face was quiet, contained, but Lee noticed the eyes snapping. Contained rage.
"Oh? I wasn't aware of it, Bill, but come to the office." They walked the short distance together, and the hollow, steady thud of their footsteps reminded Lee of a movie he had once seen concerning a prisoner walking to the gas chamber.
Inside the office, now.
"Well, Bill?"
"Congratulations on your new promotion."
"My what?" Lee asked, his heart stopping. "What did you say?"
"Didn't you see the big announcement? You're an Associate Prof, old buddy and next year you will probably be Acting Department Chairman. That is, you would have been."
"I wasn't aware of it," Lee said hollowly. He tried extremely hard to ignore the last few things Bill had told him.
"It doesn't matter, anyway. You're going to have to resign, decline, or give up whatever it is you brain-boys do."
"I don't understand."
"You don't? That's amazing, Professor, truly amazing! Seven years of college, and you don't understand a simple little concept that any idiot could. Where have our institutions gone wrong?" he asked with a mocking sigh.
"I'll spell it out for you, then, like you jerks spell it out for us! You've wrecked the engagement to the girl I was going to marry by taking her to that motel last Saturday, not to mention her emotional stability. You're really quite a jerk, Doctor. You get a girl who you know damned well worships the ground you walk on, and take advantage. Is that one of the fringe benefits of your job?"
How did he know?
It didn't matter, Lee decided. It was evident that he did know, and that that look he had received from Bill previously had meant something very ominous, after all. There was no point in trying to deny it To do so would be to give up the remaining shreds of manhood and self-respect.
"In case you're interested in how I found out, Brenda broke down and told me. She's really quite a decent girl, you know, even if she does go off the deep end with venerable profs from time to time."
Lee nodded. Of course, she would tell Bill. She owed it to him, and was the kind of person who would live up to her obligations.
"So you're going to resign, Doctor, or I'm going to make a big ugly mess. The ugliest mess imaginable. I have hardly anything to lose that I haven't lost already.
Again, Lee nodded.
"All right, Bill. I'll do it."
"You're damn right, you'll do it, doc. And you'll do it today, by five o'clock."
For Lee Cushing, B.A., M.A., Ph. D., the game was over. Funny, he thought. He had never compromised his academic principles. He had clung tenaciously to his ideals concerning teaching, about devoting his time to students rather than to hollow, meaningless literary criticism. The only thing he had forgotten was how to conduct himself as an ethical human being.
C'est la vive, Lee.
Cook was appointed in Lee's place, and of course he accepted the appointment. It was fitting enough. The scholar, critic and sometime-teacher had played the game all the way down the line. If anyone deserved the post, it was good old Dr. Cook. Shakespeare himself would benefit immensely from the elevation of the appointment.
When Lee came home that evening, Joan sobbingly told him what she had done. Lee listened, but reacted numbly. It didn't matter, nothing mattered.
"It's okay," he said, patting her shoulder, which she took for a comforting gesture, but Lee's mind was away from her and everything connected with her. Yon played the game and lost, he thought.
After dinner, Dr. Stone did something entirely unprecedented. He went out alone.
"I'm taking a ride downtown," he told Peggy, who sullenly nodded. She was still thinking about her encounter with Lee, and what had taken place afterward. She knew that he hated her now, as much as she hated herself. Sex seemed so unimportant. It was such a minor issue, really. Bathroom sessions with Ovid, at least, did not have the painful aftermath that this afternoon had had.
She watched him throw on his overcoat and hat, and walk outside toward the garage. He had been fitful, behaving quite strangely. She wondered if he suspected this afternoon's activities, and surmised that she did not care one way or the other.
Stone headed the car downtown. It was dark, so he drove slowly, while he looked for Huron Street, which is a street that offers virtually anything in the way of illegal activities. He was not a frequenter of Huron Street. In fact, he had never before had any desire to see it, even in the daytime. But students talked about it, and the university had several addresses and names of "undesirable characters," whom the students were urged to avoid at all costs. One name stuck in his mind, and that was the particular name he was seeking now.
Paul Jones III seemed to know just exactly what he wanted.
Nicholas Kalvatinos was his best bet, in fact, his only bet, and Kalvatinos was the man whom he had to find.
Kalvatinos was a man who made certain that he could be found, and Stone found him at home, which was an astonishingly plush apartment (inside) over a somewhat shabby-looking book store. Stone knocked, Kalvatinos answered.
"Yes?" he asked inquiringly. A black-haired, oily man, who with a haircut could be handsome, but was not. "What do you want?"
"I need one of your girls."
"Ah? And who are you, my friend? A cop, perhaps, from the vice squad?"
"No. Danny Faber sent me." Faber was a student who had been bounced out of school for dealing with Kalvatinos.
"Ah yes. Well, sir, won't you sit down?"
Paul sat.
"I need someone very, very young. Young and tender."
"Ah." Kalvatinos smiled with a long-coined expression of understanding. "That will be easy. The price of such pleasures are high, sir. Can you, will you pay it?"
"How much?" Paul asked. Something wild was clawing at the inside of his stomach.
"Two hundred dollars for the night. I will give you the address. The name you are to ask for is Leslie."
Paul paid it.
Gladly. With trembling hands.
"And now, sir, here is the address. Remember, the name is Leslie."
"Yes, yes, thank you." Paul took the address and hurried out of the apartment, down onto the street where he had left his car.
The address was located on the waterfront, amidst the dismal, lonely honks of the Lake Erie barges. Looking out into the water, he felt the chill and filth of the place. Yet, this was the end of the road, the beginning of what he really wanted.
Leslie was the sweetest, tenderest thing he had ever seen. Leslie was soft, with gentle nut-brown eyes and flowing dark blonde hair. Leslie made his heart leap into his throat.
"Leslie, a Mr. Kalvatinos sent me," he stammered, looking at a definite answer, the final answer, to his dreams.
"Yes, my dear, come in." Paul went inside. This apartment, too, was lush, with seductive lighting and low-slung, modern furniture, and expensive carpetings. Paintings on the wall, all masterpieces, all treating sensual subject matter. Beautiful. A perfect backdrop for a sweet young thing like Leslie.
Exceedingly young.
Scrumptuously soft and very tender and extremely pleasing.
"Leslie, darling," Paul Stone crooned, "you're so good to me." Leslie stroked him intimately, fondled him until he saw bright, explosive lights going off in his brain, before his eyes. So much better than Joan, so much nicer, so soft a voice, so tender, such a delightful touch.
"I like you, Paul," Leslie's sweet voice said. The hands touched him, then left altogether, and Paul felt hot breath where the hands had been. He lay back dreamily, tremulously to enjoy the most sublime of kisses.
"Ummmm, darling, you are magnificent!" Leslie squealed, and went about the business of sending Paul into new dimensions of pleasure.
Leslie was young.
Tender.
Neat appearing.
Sweet-breathed, sympathetic, understanding, and above all a delightful lover, one who could titillate his flesh as it never had been.
Oh, my God, he sighed inside himself.
His peak rose and fell, and Leslie licked satisfied, sensuous lips.
"Did I please you, darling lover?"
"Yes, Leslie, you did, as I have never been pleased before."
"You must come back often, then."
"I will, I will," Paul sobbed. He knew what was in store for him, now. Repeated trips back to Leslie, his new, his only lover, and eventual exposure. It would be the end of his precious career, the end of his marriage, the end of everything that he had ever worked for. But Leslie was worth it. Leslie was one who could make a man forget, who could please a man, inflame his mind, make a raging beast of him. So tender. So young!
Paul stroked the flesh gently, and said, "next time, darling, I'll bring you a gift of some sort."
Leslie giggled delightedly.
"That would be wonderful, darling, but you don't have to, you know.
"But I want to, lover."
Leslie smiled seductively, ran a tender, knowing hand tenderly over Paul, arousing him again to heights unknown.
Soothed him again, more deliciously than before, and Paul knew that he had at last found that understanding, that tenderness, that source of inspiration he had always sought blindly, without really knowing. But he knew now, and would cling to it preciously, even though it virtually spelled the very end of everything else.
It didn't seem to matter to him at all, that Leslie was a boy.
Two months later.
Lee could awaken in the morning, silently acknowledge that Joan was no longer living in the same house with him, and look at it with something like acceptance. In another month, the Reno divorce would be final.
Now he had no wife, a wife whom he loved very much.
He had altogether resigned his position at the University, as Hanley had launched him into a literary career. His publisher had bought the book, giving a 7,000 dollar advance with a low, very low royalty schedule, explaining to Lee that as a new writer he needed quick operating cash as a new writer. And, there was an option for two other novels, to be completed at the end of two years' time.
He was a writer. There was so much to write about. Hanley and he were close friends now, part of the same fraternity. When all the vicious scandal had broken loose, Hanley and his wife, Naomi, had been the only ones to see him through it all, and to remain his unconditional friends.
So you might say that Lee Cushing had everything while he had virtually nothing. It would be a long time before he himself was to know whether he had what he truly wanted. But he did go on to become one of the most successful authors on the contemporary scene, and he did go on to remain a close friend, perhaps the best friend, the Hanleys had.
Brenda Wood finished up the year, graduated, and went on a very long trip. She did not go alone. Now she leaned back in the comfortable bucket seat of the newly renovated Triumph, and hummed softly to herself.
"Pray tell me, what's the name of that one?" Bill asked.
"I don't know. Just sort of made it up; maybe I heard it somewhere before."
"Umm."
"Bill? Do you mind if I read Lee Cushing's new novel? It's received tremendous reviews."
"Honey, you can read anything you want. Why ask?"
"You know."
"We hashed it all out, didn't we? It's all settled, right?" He reached across with his hand, and laid it on her bare knee. "Hell, let's knock off and stop. We've been going for over nine hours."
"Yes, let's do. And tonight, please don't drop so many quarters into the mattress-massager."
Bill grinned.
"It was a kick, wasn't it?"
"Yes darling, but you must have used at least five quarters."
"We won't use any today, baby. We'll do it all manually." His hand slid up her knee, touched bare, moist thigh. "And we'll stop right now," he added, pulling into a motel parking lot.
Brenda trembled.
It had been a delightful trip.
The north country was far behind, and they were in South Carolina now. Soon, perhaps the day after tomorrow, they would be in the Florida Keys, where Bill would do his work, and they would live, as the old corny jargon goes, happily ever after.
But since they had reconciled the past, and had decided to work hard at shaping the future, it looked very much as they would. Though the lessons had been painful, they had both learned well and knew they would be able to resolve any future problems. Particularly because they would face those problems together.
