She leaned forward slightly so he could slip his hands behind her and unhook the bra, and then gently he lifted the bra from her luscious breasts and gazed at them for a long silent moment in the moonlight.
“Kiss me,” she whispered. “Kiss me, Paul. There.”
He bent forward and kissed her breasts, cupping them in his hands, and she writhed softly in delight, her eyes closing, her head falling back on the top of the seat.
He didn’t remove her skirt. He put his hands on her legs and slowly slid them upward, pushing the skirt higher and higher. She lifted up from the seat and he pushed the skirt up almost to her waist. He touched her, then, in love and desire.
“I love you, Paul,” she whispered.
“I love you, Beth,” he answered.
She turned sideways in the seat, opening to him, and gently he lowered himself on her, being as careful as he could, knowing this was the beginning for her and wanting it to be good for her, wanting it to be better than her dreams could have imagined.
She sighed as they came together, and closed her eyes, and folded her arms around him, and slowly, gently, without haste or fury, they consummated their love, their passion rising gradually, building up for both of them at the same pace, building slowly but inexorably to a peak and then suddenly thundering, opening, and they gasped in unison and remained rigid for a long pulsing second together, and finally they sighed, their bodies relaxed, and a warm breeze seemed to waft over them, bringing with it the clean smell of pine trees from across the river.
That was how it had started, and it had been wonderful then for both of them. Paul supposed now that it was inevitable that they should gradually slide down the slope from that peak, but however inevitable it might have been it still saddened him.
And the decline had been so gradual. It had been so gradual that neither of them had ever noticed it, not for years, not until the other night when he’d been lying there awake thinking about the past, and he’d remembered that first night, in the convertible, beside the river.
And he’d suddenly realized how incredibly good that had been, and how little of that first gentle fire was still alive between them. Sex was still good with Beth, but somehow it was good in a perfunctory manner, they were going through the motions because they were married and they loved each other and this was supposed to be what they were doing.
And realizing that, seeing what their lives together had become, Paul was first saddened and then inspired. There was a moon that night, too, gleaming in through the bedroom windows, and in its pale light he could see his wife’s sleeping face, and he realized he did still love her and he did still want her just as much as ever, and that familiarity and habit had not changed his feelings but had merely disguised them.
Looking at her there in the moonlight he was suddenly taken with such a surge of love and desire that he kissed her on the lips. It wakened her, slowly, and her arms came around him, and he was back at the beginning again, with the same ways of touching her, the same murmuring love words to place in her ear, the same deep passion, calm within urgency, gentleness within fire.
And she responded. She responded the way she did in the old days, she too returned to what it had once been. They made love together, she smiling and soft and beautifully his, he gentle and strong and proud to have her and to deserve her.
That was the beginning, the new beginning. In the days since then it had just kept getting better and better, like a flower blossoming, opening, coming at last alive. The first time it had been flowerlike, but differently, starting with the flower already ripe and at its peak, the flower then going into its gradual decline, the aroma fading, the petals drooping, the stem bending, a bit more each day, withering slowly toward death.
But not this time. This time things were only getting better. Only getting better.
So that now, riding the homebound train, he smiled at his vague reflection in the window, and he thought happy sexy anticipatory thoughts about Beth, and when the train finally reached his station he was the first one off and down the platform and through the narrow station building and out to the blacktop lot where the wives waited, where Beth would be waiting in the family car to drive him home.
And she wasn’t there.
He didn’t believe it at first, he walked left, walked right, while the other men streamed by him, while the cars pulled away in a trickle, a stream, a trickle, and he was alone.
She wasn’t there.
He was afraid then of nothing worse than accident, automobile accident or maybe something with Edwina, maybe Beth had had to rush her to the hospital. It hadn’t occurred to him there might be anything else, anything worse than that sort of worry.
He went back into the station, rooted in his pockets for a dime, called home.
No answer.
He went back outside, and now he was really scared. He hurried across the blacktop to the cabstand, where two gray and yellow cabs waited as though lonely, as though not companions for each other. He got into the lead cab and gave his home address, and sat back in the cab with his brow furrowed and his worried eyes looking out the side window at the familiar scenes of the town. Because they were so familiar they should have reassured him, but they didn’t. The very banal familiarity and known quality of everything he saw seemed to imply some disaster, some horror, some unimaginable break in the fabric of his life, like the deceptively quiet village scenes in the opening minutes of science fiction movies about invasions from outer space.
The first thing he noticed when the cab pulled to a stop in front of his house was that the car was in its accustomed place in the driveway, and the second thing he noticed was that, even though twilight was darkening rapidly toward night, there were no lights on in the house.
What was wrong?
He paid the driver, got out of the cab, hurried up the walk to the house. The door was locked. He unlocked it, went in, switched on the living room light.
Well, she wasn’t dead on the living room floor, murdered by some prowler, some sex maniac.
He called, “Beth?” Thinking it could be a simple matter still, she could have taken a nap, overslept.
No answer.
He called her name again, stood listening to the silence. With the furniture and the drapes and the carpets, there was no echo of his call. Nothing. Silence.
He moved through the house.
There was nothing strange in the kitchen, nothing at all out of the ordinary. He opened the door connecting the kitchen with the garage, and everything was also as usual in there.
Looking out the dinette window, he switched on the outside light, the back yard springing into instant existence, empty and normal and unchanged. He switched off the light again and went to check the bedrooms.
Here he began to find the odd things. In the master bedroom first, the one he shared with Beth, there were dresser drawers open. And the closet door open. Were there things missing? He looked, and it seemed to him Beth’s drawers were usually fuller than that, though they were by no means empty now. And there seemed to be a few empty places on the rack in her closet.
The suitcase was missing.
The red suitcase with the gold handle. He’d bought it for her birthday the first year they were married, and it had stood on the shelf in the closet ever since they’d moved into this house, and now it was gone.
Gone.
What was the matter? What in the name of God was the matter?