“I’m a careful person.”
“I’m not kidding,” he went on. “All you have to do is tip your hand before she’s ready to play ball and we’ve had it. The odds are about eighty-three to one that she’ll tell all the world just how gay you are. You know what that would mean?”
“Leaving Cheshire Point, I suppose.”
“Leaving the country,” he said, “would be more like it. We’d be in a pretty little spot. I frankly wish you’d stick to New York lesbians instead of trying to make converts. There’s a maxim — Don’t crap where you eat.”
“You don’t have to worry.”
“Don’t I?”
“No,” Maggie said. “I can be very subtle, David.”
“You’ll have to be.”
“Very subtle. Elly will be the one who thinks she’s dragging me to bed, not the other way around. You want to know something? I think she’s one of those gals who’s gay without knowing it. I was cruising her gently today, giving her big eyes without being obvious about it. She didn’t figure out what I was doing, but I think I was reaching her. It shouldn’t be hard to let her wind up in bed with me.”
“Just be very careful, Mag.”
She told him again not to worry, that she would be tremendously careful. Then they were at their home, a streamlined ranch decorated in perfect modern taste by a homosexual interior decorator who managed to spend two weeks with Mag and Dave without guessing that they were gay. She stepped out of the car, stood for a moment on the sidewalk while the big Buick hardtop pulled away from the curb, then turned and headed up the walk to the front door.
The night was cool, clear. The air had a crisp edge to it and she waited for a few seconds, her key in the lock, filling her lungs with fresh air and letting herself unwind. Then she turned the key, pushed open the door and went inside.
She made herself a drink, putting one large ice cube in a highball glass and covering it with a lot of Scotch and a splash of soda. She sat down with her drink on the long low couch and thought about Elly Carr.
Elly, she thought, was not going to be anywhere near as easy as she had made her sound to Dave. You had to make sex a simple matter for David, because his own attitude toward sexual activity was, in essence, a simple one. Love never entered into his concept of the overall scheme of things, and a permanent or semi-permanent relationship with a homosexual partner was something he could not possibly desire. He was fully satisfied with hit-and-run sex, in which his partner did not know his name and the two of them were together only long enough to arrive at their desperate little orgasms.
She was not built that way. Anonymous pickups and quickie affairs were not her dish of tea, and that was all there was to it. She had tried them — she remembered all too vividly the evening when Rhonda Michaels, her love-of-the-moment, had failed to put in an appearance at the Partial Dome on Cornelia Street. So, oversexed and overtired, she had permitted a butchy type named Jo to pick her up. Jo had small breasts and broad shoulders and a deep voice, and she swore like an unhappy truckdriver. She took Maggie to a filthy apartment on the Lower East Side, filled her with rotgut wine, peeled off her clothes, played with her breasts, and spent about two hours kissing her. She had never seen Jo again. And, if she never did, that was fine.
From a purely physical standpoint, the experience with Jo had been satisfying enough. She’d been extremely excited, and she’d reached orgasm, and that much was fine. But it was sex in a vacuum, meaningless and pointless sex that made Maggie Whitcomb feel cheap and dirty inside. When you were thirsty you drank a glass of water; when you were itchy you picked up someone else who was itchy and you went to bed. That was Dave’s philosophy and Jo’s philosophy as well. It did not work for Maggie.
She needed love, or some reasonable facsimile thereof. She needed affection and understanding and a genuine emotional attachment. She needed a relationship that exceeded the bounds of the bed, a relationship that satisfied more urges than the purely pubic ones. She did not need, or want, a genuinely enduring relationship, a genuinely sincere love. She did not need or want anything that would make her want to leave Dave Whitcomb or anything that would make her live a gay life instead of the one she lived now, complete with its veneer of heterosexuality. More than one affair had ended because her partner had demanded more than Maggie had been willing to give.
She sighed. She sipped her drink, which was a little stronger than she liked it. She lighted a cigarette, smoked, put the cigarette out. She finished her drink, set the empty glass upon an end table, and stretched out on her back upon the couch. For a few minutes her eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling. Then they were closed.
She thought, again, about Elly Carr.
Elly was very lovely. That was the first thing — Elly was beautiful, and Maggie couldn’t help thinking of her in sexual terms, imagining herself cupping Elly’s girlish breasts in her own trembling hands, imagining Elly’s mouth kissing her and Elly’s hands stroking her body in return. In her mind she could taste Elly’s mouth, could sense the thrilling contact of Elly’s bare flesh against her own. Elly’s legs all tangled up with her own legs, Elly’s body pressed tight against her own, Elly, Elly Elly Elly—
She had never before attempted to seduce a woman in Cheshire Point. The arguments Dave had advanced were not ones which had not already occurred to her a thousand times, arguments which flooded into her mind every time she felt herself attracted to a woman in the exurbanite community. But this time she was not going to repress her desires. They were too strong. A lover in Greenwich Village could not dissipate her insatiable ache to get Elly on a bed.
And it was not as though she would be breaking up an ideal marriage. She was hardly the home wrecker type, and she had no intention of taking Elly away from her husband. Elly would go on being married to Ted Carr, and Maggie would seduce her and they would have their fling, and in time Elly would be back in Ted’s arms and none the worse for wear.
And Ted Carr had no right to expect fidelity from his wife. That was another point, and a pretty damned valid one. Ted Carr would and did go for anything in a skirt. He had tried, more than once, to go for Maggie. Not knowing that she was a lesbian, and firmly convinced that he was Christ’s gift to American womanhood, and strongly attracted by her breasts and hips and all-around sexuality, he had made his passes. It had been, if nothing else, a little awkward.
She had solved it neatly. She had told him, gently but firmly, that if he bothered her again with his sexual suggestions she would cut off his manhood.
This worked. He had turned a rather attractive shade of green and had stalked off, never to offer his fair white body to her again. An emasculated Ted Carr would be like an unarmed gunman or a defrocked priest, and the thought alone was enough to put him off permanently.
Ted Carr, though, was a louse.
That was the whole point. He was a louse, and he was cheating right and left on Elly, and what was sauce for the gander was undeniably sauce for the goose as well. Which was why the thought of introducing Elly Carr to the highways and byways of female homosexuality did not exactly strike Maggie as patently immoral.
Her eyes were still closed. She was thinking back now, thinking all the way back to the first time. It had been years ago, many years ago. It had happened at her high school, a fancy girls’ boarding school in New England where only girls from the better families were accepted.
And, she thought, where more subjects were offered than were listed in the school catalogue.
Her first two years had been virtually sexless. The very few dates with boys had done nothing to her virginal status. She was sixteen, in her junior year, before sex reared its lovely head in the majestic person of a girl named Lily Raines.