By then, she has already undergone an abortion in Miami.
The abortion is Davis’s idea.
So is the suggestion that she marry Harper.
“I told her he was a hard worker,” he says now. “Told her she’d be getting herself a free meal ticket and meanwhile, you know, we could pick up where we’d left off in Germany. No reason for us to stop seeing each other, I told her. Business as usual. Georgie was a fuckin dunce, he’d never know what was going on between us.”
It might have remained that way, George Harper might never have found out about the continuing love affair between his wife and Lloyd Davis, if “circumstances” (as Davis now defines them) had not changed somewhat.
“It was Michelle’s idea,” he says. “Michelle was always the one with the ideas.”
The idea, as it occurs to Michelle in the month following her wedding to Harper, is that it would be nice to give her lover Lloyd a birthday present. His birthday is on the eighteenth of July; wouldn’t it be nice to arrange a little present for him on the following weekend? She has by now become close friends with Sally Owen, and Sally has confessed to her several extramarital affairs that her husband Andrew is unaware of. Michelle, in turn, has revealed to her the continuing relationship with Lloyd, has shown her secret photographs of Lloyd, has described in detail what a fantastic lover he is, and now suggests — discreetly, to be sure — that it would be wonderful if the three of them could get together sometime, someplace away from Calusa and Miami, just the three of them. In the beginning, it is in fact, just the three of them — Sally, Michelle, and Lloyd, a white layer of icing between two chocolate wafers. This is the true start of The Oreo, as they secretly refer to their triad, and never mind the black hooker in Bonn. The Oreo — their Oreo — begins on the weekend following Lloyd’s twenty-ninth birthday, in a motel room in Palm Beach, where the women have told their respective husbands they will be on a shopping trip.
In August a year and more ago, Jerry Tolliver is shot to death by an overzealous cop, and a black woman married to a white doctor out on Fatback Key decides to form a protest committee. The committee later dissolves, and it is Michelle — again — who suggests at a social gathering one night late that month (her husband George conveniently off on one of his junk-selling trips) that it might be fun if the men present were to be blindfolded in turn and then asked to kiss each of the women in an attempt to identify which one is any given man’s own wife.
“Michelle’s idea,” Davis says again. “She was always the one with the ideas.”
Ironically, the socially concerned couple on Fatback Key join The Oreo several weeks later. Throughout the rest of the summer and fall, The Oreo continues to meet secretly. Kitty Reynolds is a part of the group by now. Sally Owen has begun making paintings symbolic of the sexual activity they share. No one can imagine that — with all this free-and-easy mind-blowing sexual exchange — any pair of partners might commit the unpardonable sin of actually forming a true relationship, actually falling in love! This is what happens to Kitty Reynolds and Andrew Owen. Sally, furious, drums them out of the circle of “friends,” and shortly after that, The Oreo itself begins to disintegrate, the cookie crumbling, the icing melting. It is back to just the three of them now, the way it was in the beginning — Sally, Lloyd, and Michelle. It continues that way for almost a year.
And then—
Sunday morning, November 15.
Harper finds a painting that puzzles him, and when he questions Michelle about it she confesses her love for Lloyd — but delicately manages to avoid the entire subject of the little orgies she herself originated and promoted and, in fact, misses with all her heart. Harper, in a rage, leaves the house at 2:00 A.M. and goes looking for Lloyd — to kill him.
“She called me there at Vero Beach,” Lloyd says, “warned me to watch out, he was on the way. When I got back to Miami, my wife told me he’d already been there. I had to split. I didn’t want to get in a fracas with that fuckin’ ape, he’da crushed my skull with his bare hands. I kept thinking about how Michelle could’ve been so dumb. I mean, we had it all going for us, didn’t we? The three of us? Sally... and her... and me? So why’d she have to spoil it? I figured she had to be taught a lesson. I mean, man, no damn hooker can put Lloyd Davis in danger and get away with it. No way! I went to Calusa...”
He goes to Calusa expressly to teach her a lesson. He lets himself into the Harper house with the key Michelle gave him months ago. He is half hoping he will find her in bed with yet another man, the white doctor from Fatback Key maybe, or anybody else who used to be in The Oreo when it was still in full flower. But she is alone in the house when he lets himself in at eleven-thirty that Sunday night. He hurls invective at her, tells her she’s nothing but a no-good whore, tells her she’s placed him in a position where he has to fear for his life — what the hell is he supposed to do when King Kong catches up with him? How the fuck could she have been so fuckin’ dumb?
“And then I beat the shit out of her,” he says.
The moment his rage cools, he recognizes that he has only compounded the felony. Once George Harper comes home, once Michelle tells him that Davis beat her up, the ape will go berserk. He goes up the street to Sally’s house, and tells her what he’s done. She soothes him, comforts him, and he is surprised to discover that his anger is rekindled in the form of “a raging hard-on” (as he recalls it now) and that he desires Sally with a passion he has never truly felt for her before. It is after they’ve made love that Sally comes up with an idea.
“It’s always the chicks who come up with the ideas,” Davis says.
What if — and this is only an idea, Sally tells him — but what if Michelle was to say George beat her up? What if she was to go to a lawyer, everything nice and legal, and tell him George did it? The cops would put him behind bars, wouldn’t they? I mean, for beating up a woman? Don’t they put you behind bars for that? Gain a little time, anyway, Lloyd, while you figure what to do next, am I right? Meanwhile, you better keep your ass out of sight. If George catches up with you—
It is Sally who calls Michelle early the next morning, to suggest that she first contact a lawyer she knows, and then go to the police to make the false complaint against Harper. By then, Davis — who has been hiding out in a Calusa motel room — is beginning to worry.
“I mean,” he says now, “what if they let Georgie go? Wife-beating isn’t such a big deal, is it? Suppose he got off, suppose he came looking for me again, what then?”