"They won’t be home until tomorrow sometime."
"Mine are in bed," she said. "And so’s Joey."
Joey, Steve now recalled, was her little boy.
There was a long, awkward pause.
"You want to come up?" he heard himself asking.
Oh, my God, what did I say?
"To tell you the God’s honest truth, Steve, I’d love to," Dianne said. "But what if anybody found out?"
"Who would find out?"
"I wouldn’t want Beraice to find out, for example. Not to mention my parents."
"She wouldn’t get it from me," Steve said, firmly. "Nobody would."
"But, Jesus, if we got caught!" Dianne said, and then the phone clicked and went dead.
He felt his heart jump.
She wouldn’t come up. She’s had a couple of drinks, a couple of drinks too many, and it’s a crazy idea. Once she actually went so far as calling up, she realized that, and hung up. She absolutely would not come up.
The doorbell rang.
He ran and opened it, and she pushed past him, closing the door behind her and leaning on it. She was wearing a chenille bathrobe and slippers that looked like rabbits. She had a bottle of Scotch in her hand.
"I saw that you liked this," she said, holding it up.
"Yeah," he said. "I’m glad you came."
"Can I trust you? If one word of this got out, oh, Jesus!"
"Sure," Steve said.
She leaned forward quickly and kissed him on the mouth.
"Leonard is a good man," she said.
"Huh?"
"Leonard is a good man. I mean that. He’s really a good man, and he wants to marry me, and I probably will. But . . . can I tell you this?"
"Sure."
"He thinks you should wait until you’re married," she said. "I mean, maybe that’s all right if you’re a virgin. But I was married, you know what I mean?"
"Sure."
"If I hadn’t come up here, were you going to do it to yourself?"
"What?"
"You know what I mean," she said.
"Yeah, probably," he said. He had never confessed something like that to anyone before, not even to one of the guys.
"You didn’t, did you?" she asked, and then decided to seek, with her fingers, the answer to her own question.
"I think I would have killed you if you had," she said a moment later, pleased with the firm proof she had found that he had not, at least recently, committed the sin of casting his seed upon the ground. "After I took a chance like this."
"You want to come in my room?"
"There, and in the living room, and in every other place we can think of." She pulled his head down to hers and kissed him again, and this time her tongue sought his.
It took him a moment to take her meaning. It excited him. He wondered if she would be able to tell, her having been married and all, that he was a virgin.
Jesus, I’m really going to get laid.
(Four)
121 Park Avenue
East Orange, New Jersey
0830 Hours 2 January 1942
Dianne Marshall Norman woke up sick with the memory of what had happened between her and the kid upstairs. She knew why she had done it, but that didn’t excuse it, or make it right. She had done it because she was drunk. And she knew why she had gotten drunk; but that didn’t excuse it, or make getting drunk right, either.
Maybe she really was a slut, she thought, lying there in her bed with her eyes closed, hung over. A whore. That’s what Joe had called her when he’d caught her with Roddie Norman in the house at the shore. She’d been drunk then, too, and that had been the beginning of the end for her and Joe. He had moved out of their apartment two weeks later and gone to a lawyer about a divorce. And been a real sonofabitch about it, too.
His lawyer had told her father’s lawyer that Joe would pay child support, but that was it. He would keep the car and all the furniture and everything else, and he wouldn’t give her a dime. He would pay for her to go to Nevada for six weeks to get a divorce. If she didn’t agree to that, he would take her to Essex County Court in Newark and charge her with adultery with Roddie Norman, and it would be all over the papers.
Dianne didn’t think doing it with just one man (two, actually, but Joe didn’t know about Ed Bitter) really made her a whore or a slut. And there was no question in her mind that Joe had been fooling around himself. She’d even caught him at the Christmas office party feeling up the peroxide blonde, Angie Pal-meri, who worked in the office of his father’s liquor store. And there had been a lot of times when he’d had to "work late" at the store and couldn’t come home, and she had driven by and he hadn’t been there.
What had happened with Roddie Norman wouldn’t have happened if everybody hadn’t been sitting around drinking Orange Blossoms all afternoon; it had been raining and they couldn’t go to the beach. And the real truth of the matter, not that anybody cared, was that she had been mad with Joe because he had been making eyes at Esther Norman all day and looking down her dress.
And then, because Roddie was taking a nap on the couch and Joey was asleep, Joe and Esther had gone to get Chinese takeout at the Peking Palace in Belmar. God only knew what those two had been up to when they were gone, but that’s when it had happened. Roddie had awakened and the phonograph had been playing and they’d started to dance, and the first thing she knew they had both been on the couch and he had her shorts off, and Joe had walked in.
Dianne sometimes thought that if Joe had been able to beat Roddie up, it wouldn’t have gone so far as the divorce. What actually happened was that Roddie knocked Joe on his backside with a punch that bloodied Joe’s nose. Getting beaten up by Roddie was the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak.
So she’d gone to the Lazy Q Dude Ranch, twenty miles outside of Reno, Nevada, for the six weeks it took to establish legal residence. Then she’d gotten the divorce and moved back home, where her parents treated her as though she had an "A" for "Adultery" painted on her forehead.
And then her father brought Leonard Walters home. Leonard sold dry cleaner’s supplies, everything from wire hangers and mothproof bags to the chemicals they used in the dry-cleaning process itself. She had seen him around, seen him looking at her, and knew that he was interested. That was really one way to get her life fixed up, she thought. But Leonard was the single most boring male human being Dianne had ever met.
Dianne’s father brought him home to a potluck supper. That was so much bull you-know-what. They just happened to have a pot roast for supper, and Bernice just happened not to be there, and they ate at the dining room table off the good china and a tablecloth, all usually reserved for Sunday dinner, if then.
It had been carefully planned, including a little dialogue between her mother and her father to explain Dianne’s situation. The story they fed Leonard used the phrase "Dianne’s mistake" a lot. But "Dianne’s mistake," the way they told it, was not getting caught letting Roddie Norman in her pants, but in "foolishly running off to get married."
In her parents’ version, Joe Norman had stolen her out of her cradle. And then, once he got her to elope with him-in the process throwing away her plans for college and a career-he started to abuse her and drink and run around with a wild crowd who drank and gambled and did other things that could not be discussed around a family dining table.