He said: “I know what you mean.”
“It’s a feeling of building something,” she went on. “It makes a difference, a tremendous difference. Sometimes I get the feeling that my life is just a waste, that I’m not doing anything important and I might as well not be alive at all. But then I put on a smock and go in the workroom behind the shop and put some clay on the wheel and throw a pot and bake it and glaze it and… it just makes me feel a lot better, Ralph. As if I’ve accomplished something. As if I have a… a reason for existing, if you can understand what I’m trying to say.”
“I understand.”
They fell silent. He took a last drag on his cigarette and ground it out in the glass ashtray on the table. He felt very comfortable with her, more comfortable than he had felt with a woman in years. There was a definite feeling of ease between them, as if they understood and appreciated and respected each other, thinking the same things and experiencing the same emotions. Why, her attitude about her ceramics work was damned similar to his own feelings about his painting.
As if she were reading his mind she asked: “What do you do, Ralph?”
“Not much of anything.”
She waited for him to explain.
“I’m a painter,” he said at length. “Or at least I was a painter. I haven’t done anything in months.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been in an awful slump, Susan. I just haven’t had the slightest desire to do any work. My brushes don’t even feel right in my hand anymore. Not too long ago I set up the easel in my front room and hauled out the paints and brushes. And I stood there looking at the canvas and I didn’t know what to do or where to begin. I felt like a damned fool, just standing there pretending to be an artist and not even getting a drop of paint on the canvas.”
“That’s awful.”
“It’s a weird sort of feeling. Guys I’ve talked to say it can happen in any line of work. There’s even a term for it — a writer friend of mine calls it writer’s block. He says it happens to him every once in a while and there’s not a damn thing he can do about it.”
“I guess you just have to ride it out, huh?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “In my case I think it’s something different. It’s not just that I can’t paint, it’s that I don’t even want to paint anymore.”
“You’ll probably snap out of it.”
“I guess so.”
“You will, Ralph. All you have to do is keep trying. I think you’ll make it.”
He smiled at her.
Stella woke up like a cat. First her eyes opened slowly and closed again. Then she opened her eyes a second time and stretched herself slightly, tensing the muscles in her legs and reaching up over her head with her arms.
She yawned, her mouth opening wide and the air rushing into her lungs. She stretched again, her whole body tensing and flexing to send the blood coursing through veins and arteries.
The waking-up process took almost five minutes and by the time she clambered out of bed she was fully awake with her eyes wide open. She wondered where in hell Ralph might be.
It would have been nice to have him around, she decided. She loved sex in the morning, especially when you were still half awake and half asleep. Then you came together without preliminaries, almost like animals, two bodies reaching and straining for each other and possessing each other without the brains getting in the way.
It was good in the morning.
But Ralph wasn’t around — and, unfortunately, neither was anyone else. She hurried into the bathroom for a shower and turned on the water. Then she kicked off her slippers and climbed into the small bathtub.
A shower, like everything else she enjoyed, was a sensual experience for Stella. She didn’t just soap her body and rinse it. Instead she caressed herself with the soap, loving the smooth and slippery way it passed over her body.
She loved to soap her breasts. She kneaded the lather into the soft smooth skin in a manner that was almost physically arousing. She did the same for all the erogenous zones of her perfect body.
Then, when she was through, she turned on the cold shower full blast. Needles of icy liquid pain pelted her all over and hurt her in a deliciously invigorating way. The freezing water lashed at her breasts and belly and made her even more aware of herself.
When she had stepped out of the tub and toweled herself dry she stood for almost fifteen minutes before her mirror. She loved to spend time at her mirror; she had done so since she was a small child.
Stella had developed early. Her breasts began to grow when she was only eleven years old and reached their full size by the time she was fourteen. She was never physically awkward the way so many adolescent girls are. She grew from a pretty child to a beautiful woman with no unpleasant period of transition.
And since she was eleven she would spend time before the mirror, looking at her reflection and admiring it. She would cup her breasts and squeeze them gently, telling herself that they were beautiful. She would strike poses before the mirror and study the effect at great length.
Both her early development and her strong basic sex drives had a good deal to do with the course of her life. Stella’s father had been a doctor in Bay Shore and he had made a good deal of money. Her mother, who was a few years older than her husband, died of throat cancer while Stella was still in grade school. Her parents had been very close to one another and the shock ruined her father. He tended to blame himself for it. Since he was a doctor himself, he argued that he should have made certain his wife had periodic physical examinations which might have caught the disease in time, before it was too late.
And so he began to drink. His practice went quietly to hell and he spent all his time by himself in the room where he and Stella’s mother had lived, drinking bonded bourbon from an Old Fashioned glass and talking softly to himself. Stella was on her own by the time she was twelve — not on her own like a slum child, for she had plenty of money and a good home. On her own in that there was no one to take care of her, no one to talk to her, no one to love her.
And she needed love, needed it desperately. She sought love wherever it was available, but the empty, vacant atmosphere that was her home turned love to sex and emotion to passion. Love fell by the wayside; Stella never did find out what it really meant.
But she slept with a lot of people.
She approached sex the way that she approached life in general — bluntly, directly, and solely in her own self-interest. She took whatever she wanted and she wanted nearly everything.
Her father died shortly after she entered high school. Both high school and the three years she spent in college were a chore for her. She already knew precisely how she wanted to spend the rest of her life, and she didn’t need a college diploma in order to carry through with her plans.
The income from her father’s estate came to a little over twelve thousand dollars a year. While this didn’t make her really wealthy, it meant that she could lead a life of complete and total leisure, never working and never doing anything other than what she wanted to do. And this was fine with Stella James.
She moved to the Village, the one place where she was sure she could live as she pleased with no outside interference. She took lovers when she wanted them. That was her life and she enjoyed it.
Sometimes — but not very often — a vague feeling would pass through her mind that she was missing something, that her life was a waste and that the world she lived in was an empty one. The thought was essentially disturbing, and she fought that thought as she fought anything which threatened to disturb the relative security of her existence.