“I’d love to. But I’m afraid not, Mr. Thorpe.”
“I don’t appeal?”
“Of course you appeal. But you’re one of those overworked executives. I wouldn’t dare have a mad passionate affair with you.”
“Why on earth not?”
“Because you might have a coronary attack and die in my arms.”
“In your legs, you mean.”
“Whatever. And we’d be the talk of Cheshire Point. Imagine what the minister would say!”
“You’re absolutely right,” he said, patting her thigh gently, almost paternally. “Besides, my insurance isn’t paid up.”
“Then we can’t, Mr. Thorpe.”
“Quite right, Mrs. Haskell. See me again, please do.”
She moved off, picked up somebody’s half-filled drink and finished it. There was a world of difference, she thought, between the sort of proposition Penn Thorpe had just handed her and the kind she’d gotten from Ted Carr. Ted was serious. Penn Thorpe, on the other hand, was making cocktail party passes, the perfunctory sort that flew through the air along with the gin fumes. They never stopped. They were the banter of Cheshire Point on weekends, the constant words that were always bandied about and never taken seriously. If she had accepted Perm’s pass, he would have had a coronary, probably brought on by shock.
But Ted was different. He meant it.
Maybe I should get drunk, she thought. Maybe I could get stinking drunk, screaming drunk, barking drunk, and then I would go puke and Howard would take me home and that would solve everything.
She got stinking drunk.
She drank everything in sight, and she wound up throwing up over the rug, and Howard wound up taking her home. But even with her head spinning in circles, even with her stomach turning itself inside out, she knew full well that everything would not be solved, not at all.
The music on the phonograph was a Mozart piano sonata, simple and clean and precise, formal and crisp and cool. Roz Barclay sat on the sofa and smoked the last cigarette in the pack. Soon, she thought, she would have to get up and get another pack: She looked at the ashtray, overflowing with cigarette butts. Then she looked at the cigarette between the index and middle finger of her right hand. She remembered that last time she had studied a cigarette, remembered the thoughts she had thought then, remembered the laughter that had killed her frustrations for the time being.
Now she smoked, and listened to the music, and waited. The music was enough to carry her off, to occupy her mind so that most of her thoughts would cease to bother her. She was waiting for Linc. He would come home soon, and then they could be together. They could not make love, because lovemaking was out until Linc’s slump ran its course. But they could be together. And simply being with the man you loved was a thousand times more satisfying than making love with a stranger.
She heard the car, ran to the window like a teenager waiting for a date. She saw the car pull into the driveway, then waited at the door for him to come back from the garage. He walked in, a strange faraway look in his eye. He kissed her and she hugged him.
“Okay?”
“Fine,” he said.
“A little drunk?”
“Not even a little,” he told her. “I had three mugs of ale downtown and walked around for a few minutes. This’ll kill you.”
“What will?”
“This,” he said. “I ran into a whore.”
“Anyone you knew?”
He laughed happily, then described the girl he had met. “A pathetic little thing,” he said. “I gave her five dollars and sent her away. She couldn’t have picked a less likely prospect.”
She laughed with him. “Can we afford the five?”
“She needs it more than we do.”
“I suppose so. Come on in. Sit with me.”
He kissed her again. “What’s playing?”
“Mozart.”
“Nice. Let’s warm the couch.”
They sat together on the couch. For a long moment an urge spread on Roz, an urge to throw herself at this man, to do her damnedest to make him want her the way she wanted him. But the urge passed. She mastered it, and they sat quietly together and listened to the music.
A weekend in Cheshire Point. Sunday came, finally, and it was a day for black coffee and aspirin, a day to stay away from the children because noise was not a good idea when your head was a few sizes too large. It was a day for husbands and wives to forgive and forget, because Friday and Saturday night had undoubtedly supplied a great many scenes which needed forgetting as quickly as possible. It was a day to draw yourself together, a day to recuperate and set your sights on the week ahead, the week of commuting and school for the kids and everything else.
A weekend in Cheshire Point. It was hectic, and while you might look forward to it on Friday afternoon you regretted its arrival by Saturday morning and hated it all across the board by Sunday. It performed one function that could be described as valuable. It set you up for the work-week.
Because, when Monday morning came around, you were glad.
14
Monday morning came, and Maggie was glad of it.
She got up early enough to drive Dave to the station in the Volkswagen, then headed home again and stood under a cold shower until she felt sufficiently awake to eat breakfast. The weekend had been hellish, but it was over now, and today she and Elly were going into Manhattan to shop for clothes. She had not seen Elly since that Friday afternoon and she was anxious to see her, to talk to her, to be with her.
Friday itself had been more than she had expected. The bare-breasted episode was an unanticipated stroke of luck. She’d initiated it, of course, by stripping down to her bra, but when Elly had tugged her sweater over her head to reveal uncovered breasts, the ball had really gotten rolling. It wasn’t hard to understand why Ell occasionally wandered around without a bra; the little devil had the firmest pair of breasts in captivity. Maggie’s mouth had started watering at the sight of them, and concealing her interest had not been the easiest thing in the world.
But Friday afternoon had paved the way for the horrid weekend. She hadn’t seen Elly, but she’d carried around the memory of Elly’s exciting body, and as a result she’d been too keyed-up and stimulated to settle down. And so she had skipped Saturday night’s round of parties. Instead she went into New York, went down to the Village to a convenient lesbian bar, and found a convenient pick-up.
The girl she picked up was a blonde bit of fluff, a student at Brooklyn College who was not, strictly speaking, a dyed-in-the-wool lesbian. The girl, Marcia Andover by name, was bisexual. She wore her hair in a long pony tail, wore a great deal of eye makeup, talked in self-consciously hip slang, and carried a copy of a book of poems by Alan Ginsberg under one arm. She was, in short, playing with hipsterism; she wanted to sample kicks, wanted to take her pleasure where she found it.
Maggie didn’t like hit-and-run sex. But, at the moment, she had no choice; the afternoon with Elly had her ready to start climbing the walls, and a girl like Marcia could take a little of the tension out of her system. Marcia was ideal for her purposes. Marcia was attractive enough to be worth the trouble to get her into a bed, human enough to spend an evening with, and essentially dull enough so that Maggie would not miss her.
Maggie bought her drinks, talked to her about existentialist poetry, and went home with her to a third-floor walk-up on Barrow Street, a small single room in an old brownstone. There Marcia played progressive jazz records on a too loud hi-fidelity phonograph, danced around nude for awhile, and finally joined Maggie on top of the small bed.
They rubbed their breasts and bellies together, stroked each other, kissed and fondled each other. They were in bed together all night long, waking periodically to have sex, then drifting into a lazy sort of sleep only to awaken again and seek the delights of each other’s bodies. It was a satisfying, fulfilling sort of evening, and when Maggie caught a northbound train in the morning, the tremendous wave of desire which Elly had caused had been temporarily slaked.