She dressed and polished off her breakfast in short order. Thoughtfully, she smoked a cigarette and took a long look out the breakfast-room window. The yard next door was a blaze of color, with roses climbing the sides of the garage and other flowers competing with them for her attention. It was funny, she thought. The people on Nottingham were lucky enough to have gardens and the time to work in them, and they sacrificed that pleasure by hiring a gardener to take care of all the work. It didn’t make much sense.
She wondered vaguely who the neighbors might be. Ronald had told her once but the name didn’t stick in her mind. That was the big trouble. She didn’t really know anyone, not even the people next door.
The cigarette burned down and she ground it out in the red beanbag ashtray. “Lizzie!” she called.
Lizzie hurried into the breakfast-room, looking stunning in her white uniform. Her eyes were very bright, and they held a perpetual expression of wisdom. Perhaps, Carla thought, the girl might be able to give her some help.
“Sit down for a minute, Lizzie.”
Lizzie hesitated for a minute, then took a seat across the table from Carla. “Is anything the matter?” she asked. “Was your breakfast all right, Mrs. Macon?”
“Everything’s fine. I just wanted to talk with you for a minute or two.”
The girl relaxed visibly and smiled.
“Lizzie, I— Do you go out much with boys?”
“Sometimes.”
“Well, do you ever — I mean—”
Lizzie smiled. “Mrs. Macon, are you trying to ask me if I ever sleep with a man?”
“Why, I—”
“That’s all right; I don’t mind talking, Mrs. Macon. I’m not a virgin, if that’s what you mean.”
Carla pulled another cigarette from the pack and lighted it, embarrassed and mildly envious of the ease with which the girl spoke. She tried to put herself in Lizzie’s position, realizing as she did so that she could never talk so freely to an employer.
“That’s not exactly what I meant,” she said, blowing out a cloud of smoke. “I just wondered how you felt about things between a man and woman.”
“About sex?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“I don’t spend too much time thinking about it, Mrs. Macon.”
Carla paused, searching for the right phrase. “How do you feel about it, though?” she asked. “I mean, do you think it’s right sometimes and wrong other times? That sometimes a man and woman have a right to sleep together and other times they shouldn’t?” She paused, expectantly.
Lizzie considered the question for a minute, her eyes narrowing in concentration. “I guess I don’t think much about right and wrong,” she admitted. “If I go out with a man, I just let things happen.”
“Let them happen? How do you mean?”
“Well, if I go out with a man and I have a good time, I’ll go up to his apartment or out parking with him in his car. I let him kiss me, and if I enjoy the way he kisses me I let him go farther. And as long as there’s nothing bothersome about it, I just let it go on.”
“Don’t you ever feel that it’s wrong?”
Lizzie shook her head. “I don’t feel that way about it,” she said. “If I have a good time with a man, how should it be wrong? Neither of us is getting hurt or anything like that. We aren’t hurting anybody else either. I just don’t think anything nice between two people can be wrong, Mrs. Macon.”
“I see. Do you believe in God, Lizzie?”
“Of course, Mrs. Macon.”
“Well, doesn’t that change the way you feel?”
“No — why should it? I just think God wants people to be good to each other, and sleeping with a man isn’t hurting anybody, is it?”
Carla nodded absently, wondering how to say more without giving herself away. She took another long drag on the cigarette and watched the smoke drift lazily to the ceiling.
“Lizzie,” she said finally, “what if one of the persons is married to somebody else? Would that make a difference?”
“I don’t know,” Lizzie said. Slowly a puzzled look came over her face, and Carla thought for a second that the girl had an inkling of the purpose of all the questions. She decided to end the conversation before revealing too much.
“I guess that’s all,” Carla said, standing up from the table. “I didn’t mean to pry, but I just wanted to chat a little. It’s always interesting to find out how different people feel about things,” she added lamely.
The puzzled expression vanished and there was no trace of perception on Lizzie’s face as she said, “Certainly, Mrs. Macon. Any time you want to ask me about anything, just go right ahead.”
Back in her bedroom, Carla went over the conversation in her mind. If only she had Lizzie’s attitude, things would be so much easier. She could imagine how the girl would handle herself in a situation like this one. First of all, she’d be clever enough to avoid getting so desperate that she would have to root around on a grease-room floor like some kind of animal. She’d do the sensible thing and get herself a lover, a man like Charles but not a person her husband knew. She’d be smart about it, and she’d be able to make Ronald a good wife without torturing herself in the process.
She giggled suddenly, getting a mental picture of Ronald’s face if he could know about the affair with the garage mechanic. She tried to guess how he would react to the sight of her writhing on the floor in the man’s embrace, her sweat mingling with his and her lips on his throat.
Oh, what was the matter with her? Maybe she had sex on the brain, just as some people had water on the knee. She wasn’t sex-starved any more, not after yesterday, but she still couldn’t get Charles out of her mind. She imagined being married to Charles instead of to Ronald. Charles was rich too, but he would be able to give her the satisfaction that Ronald couldn’t supply. She would still possess the necessary prestige and security without any of the great disadvantages of being the wife of an older man.
Being married to Charles would solve everything.
But she was dreaming. She wasn’t making any sense at all, getting off on tangents that had nothing to do with the situation. For all she knew, Charles wasn’t even interested in getting her into bed. Maybe she was reading far too much into a glance across the table and the touch of his hand at the door. It might be nothing more than his way of being polite. A man as sophisticated and smooth as Charles could probably order ham-and-eggs in a restaurant and let the waitress think he was propositioning her.
And, she reflected, he would probably be successful with the waitress — when he was just trying to order a plate of ham-and-eggs.
But she couldn’t be wrong. She sensed his desire with the intuition she had developed over the years, a sense of intuition which could spot the hunger in a man with no difficulty. She had never been wrong before. Charles must want her.
She had just finished lunch and returned to her room again when the telephone rang and Lizzie announced that it was for her. She jumped up from the bed, wondering who in the world it would be. It would have to be Ronald, she decided, but he rarely called in the afternoon unless he was going to be home late, and he had said last night that he definitely wouldn’t be working late. She hurried to the phone and held the receiver to her ear.
“Carla?”
“Yes — who is this?”
“This is Charles.”
Charles! Then he did want her, but how come he was calling so soon?
“Charles?”
“That’s right,” he went on, his voice as smooth as silk. “I wanted to talk to you.”