She finished the cigarette and the coffee. She, of course, had things to do — a house to clean, shopping to shop for, people to call and odds and ends to take care of. Never a dull moment in Cheshire Point. Wait a minute, she thought. Correct that. Plenty of dull moments, but never an occupied one. Loads of monotony, oodles of banality, an impressive quantity of boredom.
And here we are, Nan thought. Thirty-two years old, pretty, married, two kids, and an expensive and ugly heavily-mortgaged house on a full-acre plot in lovely Cheshire Point. And a day full of monotony with the boys in school and Howard on Madison Avenue.
Was this what she had wanted? Was this the dream stuff in Clifton College, where she had majored in English and covered reams of unlined yellow paper with sophomoric poetry? Was this the dream at Greybarr, where she waded through the slush pile, pinning Thanks But No Thanks notes on manuscripts from frustrated Iowa housewives? Was this the be-all and end-all, the obvious role for an intelligent woman in the twentieth century?
Cheshire Point. Close enough to New York so the men could get to work, far enough away so the air was clean and the grounds were spacious and the schools were good. Country advantages and city convenience — that was the sales pitch, and it was true enough, fundamentally.
She ground out a cigarette, stood up, stretched. There was nothing wrong with Cheshire Point, she told herself. It was better than a Manhattan apartment, better than a sandbox house in Queens, better than the real country. It was the best they could possibly afford, and she was perfectly satisfied with it.
Wasn’t she?
She thought again of all the other women in all the other houses in Cheshire Point. Women alone, she thought romantically. Women alone, with the menfolk away. Might make a thoughtful article for a woman’s mag, maybe the one with the togetherness pitch. Or, with a little sex tossed in, a hot item for the exposé type books. Sin In The Suburbs. Or Excitement In The Exurbs. Or—
Things to do, shopping and cleaning and straightening up. Was the evening free? No, she thought sadly, it wasn’t. The Carrs, Ted and Elly, were due to arrive for an evening of family bridge. Not that she didn’t like the Carrs, but it would be heaven to spend an evening alone with Howie for a change instead of sharing his company with the rest of the world.
At eleven-thirty, after a trip to the Grand Union and after a load of wash had gone first into washing machine and then into dryer, she thought again about Sin In The Suburbs and Excitement In The Exurbs. No, she thought; no article there. What kind of sin could happen in Cheshire Point?
Hardly a nest of sinful folk. Take Elly Carr, for example. Now who in the name of God Almighty could imagine Elly, for example, cheating on her husband?
2
It was twelve-thirty in the afternoon, and Elly Carr was about to cheat on her husband.
She had done this before. She was a very attractive woman, two years younger than Nan Haskell and several inches shorter. Her hair was black, and she wore it in an Italian-style haircut which made her look perhaps three years younger than she was. Her build was boyish, while distinctly feminine; men who lusted for Audrey Hepburn were frequently entranced by Elly Carr. Her breasts were small but firm and well-shaped, her waist very slender, her hips barely evident.
She had one child, a dark-haired pug-nosed girl named Pamela. Pam was at school now, not due to return until three-thirty. She had a husband named Ted, a sandy-haired public relations executive. Ted was in an air-conditioned office on Forty-eighth Street off Madison, not due to return until six-fifteen. She had, then, a minimum of three hours to cheat on her husband.
It rarely took that long.
Her partner now was a man named Rudy Gerber. He was the deliveryman for the dry cleaner, a husky fellow about twenty-five years old with an athletic build and a handsome if ruggedly stupid face. He had made love to her a week before. Now he was about to make love to her again.
Elly didn’t love Rudy Gerber. She didn’t even especially like Rudy Gerber, as far as that went. But that had nothing to do with it. Rudy Gerber was quite excellent in bed, and Elly was randy as a brood mare in the springtime, and the bed was ready, and what the hell. God was in his heaven, all was about as right with the world as it ever was, and she was going to get loved.
So what the hell.
“I been looking forward to this,” Rudy Gerber said. “Last week — I mean, something like this don’t happen all the time. A broad like you—”
He let the sentence trail off. It was a habit of his, as though his mind couldn’t hold too much and it was enough of an effort to begin a sentence, much less complete it. She wished he would talk less. He talked so stupidly that the words only tended to spoil things.
But she said: “You must meet lots of lonely women.”
“Well,” he said. He scratched his head and leered, trying to look like a man of the world and not quite succeeding.
“This way, Rudy.”
She led him up a long flight of stairs. The house, unlike the Haskell home, was an older structure, one of the original homes in the town of Cheshire Point. It was an authentic center hall colonial, complete with hand-hewn exposed beams and loads of rustic charm. That had been the salesman’s strongest selling point, and Ted had gone for it hook, line and thirty-year mortgage. He liked to fancy himself a Colonial type, or Edwardian at the very least. A colonial house fit into his sublime image of himself, along with the tweed jackets and the pipe and the foreign car.
They went into the bedroom. Rudy Gerber grinned. “Some broad you are,” he said. “Some hell of a broad.”
“You Tarzan,” she said.
He stared at her.
“You Tarzan,” she repeated. “Me Jane. That bed. Let’s get with it, sweetheart.”
They got with it. He reached for her, lunging a little like Tarzan and a little like an anthropoid ape, and she let his big ape-arms close around her slender body and draw her close. She smelled the strong man-smell of him, the fresh sweat and the dirty clothes that could have used his employer’s attention. And that did it. The sarcasm and the cynicism left her. She was a woman in heat now, a woman who needed a man.
She reached upward, throwing her arms around his neck and hugging him. Her mouth ground against his mouth and her tongue snaked into his mouth. She felt the immediate urgency of his response, felt him quicken with desire and go rigid with need for her, and her body grew warmer with knowledge of her sure appeal.
They were on the bed then, suddenly, and his hand was on her breast. She felt his fingers fondling her, felt dizzying sensations racing through her system. She was a woman now, a woman, a woman with a man. Everything else disappeared.
He took off her blouse. His hands found her breasts again, played with them. She shivered with tremendous delight, the excitement moving within her body like a living entity. His hands went around her, impatient now, struggling with the bra. He broke the clasp and wrenched the bra off, exposing her breasts.
Their love play was deliberate and intense. He handled and kissed her breasts and she began to pant volcanically, Vesuvius in the throes of an eruption. Her eyes were closed and her hips were already churning in the mystic motions of love. She was on fire.
He stroked her and kissed her. She lay with her eyes closed, imagining not Rudy Gerber but a phantom lover, a man on a sleek black stallion, a man dressed in black with eyes like pools of black fire. A man who would whisper poetry to her, a man who would kiss her when she was good and whip her when she was bad. A man who would always be master and for whom she would be forever a willing slave.
A phantom lover.