She was on the bed, squirming. She was on the bed, wearing black toreador pants that were tight on her slim hips, and Rudy was taking them off. He had trouble with the zipper, mastered it, and then had trouble with the pants themselves. Finally they were off, and then the wispy panties were also off, and he was catching his breath at the sight of her milk-white naked body. His large hands raced over her bare flesh, setting her tingling, making her skin burn with liquid heat.
He threw himself down on her, kissed her. His tongue was the aggressor now, stabbing jokingly into her mouth. He squeezed a breast in one hand and a thigh in the other and her brain burned with feverish heat.
Phantom lover.
He let go of her to fumble with his own clothing. His big hands tore his tee-shirt over his head, unbelted his dungarees, pulled them down. He was heavy, with a beer-belly developing, with flab on his upper arms. But she did not notice all those things because her eyes were closed. She was not seeing Rudy Gerber now. She was seeing the phantom lover. He had dismounted from his black stallion. He was coming toward her—
Rudy took her. He took her as a stallion takes a randy brood mare in the springtime, fell upon her and possessed her, using her body with an almost vicious passion.
And now, in her mind, she was with that phantom lover. Rudy’s panting was the music of the hills and the groans of the bedsprings were wind in tall grasses. She was with her phantom lover, riding close behind him on the black stallion, riding far from the rest of the world.
Faster.
Faster—
Rudy, panting like a truckhorse. The odor of sweat, the odor of lust being consummated, the odor of sex in a Cheshire Point master bedroom. The odor of noonday lust.
Faster....
And then the culmination. The orgasm, the peak of pleasure, with a thunderous crash that jolted her and left her limp. The End, Finis, #, —30—, that’s all, folks.
He got up slowly, his eyes hollow, his breathing coming in gasps. He got up and looked at her, and she opened her eyes to see the vulgar animal stare focusing on her bare body. Instinctively she drew a sheet over herself, up to her neck, as if to prevent him from looking at what he had so recently possessed.
“Go,” she said. Just that.
“Next week?”
She looked at him, looked away. “Just go,” she said.
She stayed in bed until she heard the door close downstairs. She stayed in bed until she heard the panel truck pull away from the curb, carrying within it a load of clothing to be dry-cleaned and a man who had just made love to her. Then she hurried from the bed to the shower, washing the memory of Rudy Gerber from her skin. She spent twenty minutes under the shower. When she stepped from the tub she felt almost clean again.
She changed the bed linen.
By one-thirty she was in the kitchen, drinking coffee and smoking a filter-tipped cigarette. She had done it again, had had another meaningless affair with another meaningless man. She had sinned; she should wear a red A upon her left breast so all the world would know her as the adulteress she was.
Suddenly she laughed. A scarlet letter — maybe that would fit Ted’s magnificent image! After all, they weren’t that far from New England. And that was Nathaniel Hawthorne country. Why, she could be sort of a latter-day Hester Prynne, a twentieth-century adulteress who went for every male within laying distance.
Why?
Dammit, why?
It had always been this way. Elly Carr was a New York girl, in contrast to the typical exurban wife who began life as a midwestern product, went from college to Manhattan, and wound up in a house in Westchester or Rock-land or Fairfield or Bucks. Elly had been born on West 73rd Street near Broadway, had gone to New York schools and Hunter College. She had lost her virginity in her sophomore year at Evander Childs High to a now-forgotten member of the football team, had sacrificed that tiny membrane on her living room couch while her parents lay sleeping in the bedroom.
And she had been an easy make ever since. All you had to do was be husky and masculine and stupid and willing and good ole Elly Barshter would be flat on her back with her knees in the air. The football team had enjoyed her, and the swimming squad had enjoyed her, and the track team, and the baseball team—
College had not changed her, but it had edged her with subtlety. In high school, everybody knew she was an easy make. In college, the only ones who knew this were the ones who had been to bed with her. After college, when she was pounding the typewriter at Berman and Bates, she never slept with any of the men who worked in the office. She laughed with them, and she joked with them, and she went to shows and concerts with them. But she slept with raw-boned dockworkers that she picked up in sleazy bars.
She hadn’t slept with Ted, not until he married her and whisked her away to New Hampshire on a honeymoon. Then she came into his arms, as virginal as possible, and if he knew there had been men before him he never told her. And she was going to be true to him — she swore to it herself a thousand times, told herself again and again that he was the only man for her, that she had helled around enough and that it was now time to settle down and be a good wife to a good husband.
It wasn’t that hard in New York. They had an apartment on a quiet street in one of the better sections of Greenwich Village, and she kept her job at Berman and Bates, and things were fine. She was with Ted every minute possible, and he was an ardent lover and she needed him desperately. There were no other men then. There was no time for other men, and no need for other men, and she was true to Ted.
Then all at once she was pregnant. The pregnancy was accidental, but this fact made her no less pregnant. And New York was no place to raise kids, and Ted was making good money, and his dream included an old house in the wilds of Westchester, and after a long search they found the right place with the right sort of grounds and the right layout.
And they moved to Cheshire Point.
She had the baby. Pam took a great deal of time at first, and again she was true to Ted, faithful to Ted, a good wife. Because there was no time for infidelity. She dreamed the same dreams of a phantom lover but nothing came of them.
Time changed that. Time sent Pam to school. Time gave her hours by herself, hours alone in the house, with deliverymen calling and salesmen calling and finally, finally—
It happened. And once it happened — with a nameless faceless man she had long since forgotten — it was easy enough for the pattern to repeat itself, to establish itself, to become part of her life. She was once again the easy lay, the easy make, the gal who dreamed of a phantom lover on a black stallion and gave herself to every brawny clod who knocked on the door.
Ted did not know. No one knew, no one but the countless men who had made a Hester Prynne of her. And Ted would not know, not if she could possibly avoid it. Because she loved Ted.
Yet she went on cheating on him.
She left the kitchen, walked through the house. She looked at the living room fireplace, looked at the exposed hand-hewn beams.
Why?
Dammit, why?
3
Late afternoon in Cheshire Point. A hot day, with the sun high in the sky to the west and only a few stray cirrus clouds breaking the expanse of blue. Nan Haskell had finished what housework had to be done. There was a roast in the oven; the rest of the meal could wait. Skip and Danny had both gravitated to other backyards to play with other children. Nan sat at her desk, going over some of the household bookkeeping which had become her responsibility since they had moved to Cheshire Point. That had been Howard’s job in Manhattan, but with him spending eight hours a day on the job and three hours more commuting, it had gravitated to her shoulders.