She opened the door and entered her house, hoping desperately that Lizzie wouldn’t see the satisfaction in her eyes or hear it in her speech. She had heard or read somewhere that it showed in a woman’s eyes, that a person who knew what to look for could see that a woman was or was not sexually satisfied. Lizzie was sharp. Would she be sharp enough to notice?
If Lizzie did notice anything, she was clever enough to keep herself inscrutable. She only smiled a hello and told Carla that there had been a call for her.
“Who was it?”
“A man, Mrs. Macon,” Lizzie replied. “He wouldn’t tell me his name, but he said he’d call later.”
Carla walked into the living-room and sat down in a soft armchair, wondering who in the world the caller could be. It certainly wasn’t Charles; they had already decided that he would never call her again, but that she would be the one to phone him. But who could have called this afternoon?
She pushed the incident out of her mind, and in a few moments it was forgotten. Ronald was home for dinner and took her out for the evening to a Broadway show on tour. All through dinner and at the show afterwards she was especially careful to act the same as ever toward her husband.
At first she tended to be more affectionate than usual, to let her lips linger on his when he kissed her hello at the door. But she quickly realized that this would serve to arouse suspicion if anything. The best course of action was perfectly natural behavior, so that Ronald would have no cause to suspect she was deviating in any form from her normal activity.
That night she slept more perfectly than she had since she was married.
Ronald had told her about his latest case, one which promised to lead to a genuine courtroom battle. His client was involved in some charge of fraud in government contracts and the case looked like it would turn out to be one of Ronald’s biggest and most crucial. He emphasized that any one of a group of minor factors could be enough to sway the jury either way. A scandal involving any party would turn the trick.
Carla had listened eagerly as usual. Ronald’s cases always fascinated her, since his keen mind and quick wit was well shown off in his business activities, and because she knew how much he appreciated her interest in his work. But it was not until the following morning that she realized the full implications of what he had told her.
She realized later what this signified. If a scandal would sway the jury, she had to be more careful than ever to keep anyone from uncovering the affair she was having with Charles. If Ronald’s opponents discovered and let the news leak out, the case would be lost — and so would her marriage. In addition, she gathered that a good deal of Ronald’s capital was invested with his client — and the loss of the case would greatly cut down his fortune.
Besides all this, another of her hopes was dashed. She had thought from the beginning of the possibility of divorcing Ronald and marrying Charles. Ronald would give her a divorce; of that she was relatively certain. And, if she knew anything about men, Charles would marry her. But now a divorce was out of the question for the time being. It would ruin Ronald, and that was not her intention at all.
However, these facts didn’t worry her to any great extent. She had enjoyed her interlude with Charles tremendously and planned to repeat it regularly, but she could go on without marrying him.
At least that was what she thought.
That afternoon, however, she wasn’t so sure. She had expected to be more accustomed to Charles’ lovemaking and less moved by it the second time, but quite the reverse was true. Every touch, every measured caress was even newer and more thrilling than before. Her passion mounted to a new peak and the fulfillment came to her with an almost audible explosion, moving and shaking her and bringing her an overpowering sense of relaxation and joy.
Afterwards, she lay in the bed holding him to her breast. Suddenly struck with the desire to unburden herself, she found herself telling him everything about her. She talked of her slum childhood and of the first time she gave herself to a boy, and she spoke of every important event in her life from that time until they had met. All that she omitted was the one incident with the garage attendant. It seemed too trivial to mention, and the memory of it stirred her a little and frightened her.
Charles listened to it all without commenting. Then, when she had finished, he began to tell her about himself. The difference in their backgrounds was astounding. While she had been continually deprived, he had enjoyed an abundance of everything.
“How many women have you made love to?” she asked suddenly.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Too many, perhaps.”
“Tell me about the first time.”
“Well, I was terrible young at the time. Just 14. We had a frightfully attractive serving-girl, a brunette with sulky eyes and huge hips and breasts. I was just starting to think rather deeply about sex, and I suppose she noticed the way I kept looking at her from time to time.
“At any rate, she came to my room one evening when the rest of the family was sleeping. I was half asleep myself and I thought I was dreaming. God knows I dreamed enough about her! She walked right over to my bed, slipped off her robe, and climbed into bed with me. I thought I had died and gone to heaven.”
“Was it... good?”
He kissed her breast tenderly. “It was wonderful, Carla. She was much better than I was — I shudder to think how gauche and inept I must have been. But she was back the next night and the night after that, and I suppose I must have learned rather rapidly.”
“What happened to her?”
“She left after a while. I learned a few years later that Dad had hired her for that purpose and I hadn’t seduced her at all. He paid her a few hundred dollars a week to accommodate me and let her go when he figured I was broken in. Why are you laughing?”
“Because it’s funny. He must have been quite a man.”
“He was a fool,” Charles said softly. “But in some respects he was a very wise man.”
He fell silent then and began to kiss her with an increasing intensity, his hands roaming over her body and exciting her. And then he took her a second time, almost violent in his lovemaking, hurting her delightfully and driving her to the very limits of human pleasure.
As the days passed, Carla began to realize that she was falling in love with Charles. The realization came as no surprise. Bit by bit she was depending more and more upon him and responding still more fervently to the artistry of his lovemaking. For the first time in her life she felt that she was genuinely in love. She had given herself to men before and wanted men before, but she had never cared so deeply about an individual as she did about Charles. All of her being was wrapped up in him and all her day was centered around the few hours they were able to spend together each afternoon. She was unable to imagine living without him. The memory of the days without end when she did nothing but stay at home or ride around in the MG was unbearable. She couldn’t lose him.
At the same time, for the first three days of her affair with Charles she continued to receive phone calls when she was not at home. Each time it was a man calling, and each time the man refused to leave his name but said that he would call back. Probably some jerk selling something, she decided — but the jerk stood a good chance of getting her in trouble. If he called often enough Lizzie would begin to suspect something, and that would be pretty ironic — since Charles never called, and she would be discovered because of the phonecalls of someone else entirely.
She tried to figure out who the mysterious caller could be. Not one of her old friends, certainly, because she was never close enough to anyone back in her old neighborhood. Besides, they didn’t know she was now Mrs. Ronald Macon.