“Oh, of course, I know this picture,” Lynda said.
Lew was fifty-five in that fall of 1953, when Jamie joined the agency. By December of that year, he’d earned for Jamie five times as much as he’d realized in the ten months preceding the appearance of the Bowery essay in Life. Six days before Lissie’s second birthday, the Crofts moved to a new apartment on Eighty-ninth and Central Park West. Seven rooms! A darkroom the size of their previous bedroom on Seventy-eighth! A master bedroom overlooking the park, and a room of her own for Lissie, with pale pink wallpaper covered with blooming bluebells, and a new crib with a mobile hanging over it — Donald Duck and his three nephews, Dewey, Dopey, and Doc, or whatever they were called. Seven rooms! A brand new Omega enlarger, with which he blew up all the best shots he’d taken of Lissie in her second year. The huge living room, with its southern exposure, was still largely unfurnished a week before Christmas; they’d moved into it the sofa, floor lamp and single easy chair from the Seventy-eighth Street dump, and the pieces floated there on the new blue broadloom like rafts adrift on a vast uncharted sea.
“And so you have lived happily ever after,” Lynda said, and reached behind her to tie the bra straps, rising as she did. Again, he saw the full breasts, naked for an instant before the riotous Pucci fabric covered them.
“Yes,” he said.
She was smiling thinly. “And do you still love your wife very much?” she asked, and tossed her long red hair, and looked away from him, toward the pool where Ernesto and Connie were swimming back toward the diving board.
“Yes,” Jamie said. “I love her very much.”
“How lucky for you,” Lynda said, and smiled again. Idly, almost remorsefully, she said, “I’ve never been made love to in English. I’ve known only European men.”
He said nothing.
Her eyes met his.
She studied him solemnly for a moment, and then said, “I think I’ll take a swim. Would you like to swim with me?”
He hesitated. “Connie mentioned something about a nap,” he said.
“Ah, yes, then, you must take your nap with Connie,” Lynda said, and rose from the lounge and ran to the edge of the pool. He watched as she dove cleanly into the water.
She had been in the bathroom for a very long time.
He lay on the bed in the shuttered room, the voices of waiters calling to each other in Italian below, and far out on the lagoon the sound of a speedboat. He lay with his hands behind his head, waiting for his wife to come to him. The erection tenting the sheet that covered him was a joint enterprise, sponsored by the hot sun (which always made him horny), the promise inherent in Connie’s whispered lunchtime suggestion that “a nap later” might be a good idea, and the coconut-scented proximity of a gray-eyed woman who, he admitted, had done much to inspire unbridled passion. Hands behind his head, he lay staring up at the ceiling. Connie had been wearing only her bikini panties and her high-heeled sandals when she’d gone into the bathroom. The bra top to the red bikini lay on the dresser top, where she’d thrown it beside the calendar she normally carried in her cosmetics case. He envisioned taking off the bikini panties and fucking her with just the high-heeled sandals on. He envisioned fucking her tirelessly, all afternoon long. He imagined taking pictures of her with his cock in her mouth, a drop of semen glistening on her lower lip.
He could remember once — this was when they were first married, before she’d got pregnant — when he’d shot four rolls of color film with the camera relentlessly focused on Connie’s pert, snub-nosed breasts. Touch them, honey, make the nipples pop, Connie turning this way and that, cupping her breasts, stroking the rubescent nipples till they were hard and pouting, basking in the admiration of the camera eye. He had developed an erection of heroic proportions and had finally all but raped her where she lay spread for him on the white shag rug, her hands still clutching her breasts, the nipples bursting through her spread fingers. When he told her later he wanted to try selling the portfolio somewhere, she said, “No way. To you it’s a portfolio, to me it’s dirty pictures.”
When finally she came out of the bathroom, he took one look at her face and knew the afternoon was shot. He didn’t even have to ask her. He knew exactly what had happened. The calendar should have been his clue. She must have taken a look at the calendar before going into the bathroom to examine herself.
“What is it?” he asked.
“What do you think it is?” she said.
She was naked. She had taken off the bikini panties and the high-heeled sandals, and now she went angrily to the dresser and picked up a hairbrush and began brushing her hair.
“I thought we were going to take a nap,” he said.
“That’s just what we’re going to do,” she said.
He longed to touch her. He longed for her to steal a sidelong glance at the erection still threatening the white sheet. He longed for her to come to the bed, and pull back the sheet. She kept brushing her hair.
“Why don’t you come over here?” he said.
“No.”
“I thought we were...”
“Shut up,” she said, “I’m counting.”
“I don’t hear you counting.”
“In my head.”
“Well, stop counting and come over here.”
“It’s been thirty-two days,” she said. “The calendar’s right.”
“What?”
“I got my period thirty-two days ago.”
“Is that what you were counting?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you were counting your goddamn brush strokes.”
“No, I was counting the days. I should have got it four days ago. The calendar’s right.”
“You’ve been late before,” he said.
“Never four days late. Except when...”
“You’ve been four days late. You’ve been five days late, in fact. In fact, you’ve been a week late, in fact.”
“Four days is very late,” she said.
“In that case, let’s take advantage of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you’re pregnant, let’s fuck our brains out,” he said, and threw back the sheet.
“Terrific,” she said. “Go stick it up your ass.”
“How about your ass?” he said.
“Don’t be disgusting.”
“Or your mouth. Is your mouth four days late, too?”
“I don’t feel like sex right now,” she said.
“At lunch, you sounded as if you felt like sex.”
“At lunch, I did feel like sex. I don’t feel like it now.”
“Connie... it’s only four fucking days,” he said.
“Yes, but we did it at a bad time last month.”
“You were wearing your diaphragm,” he said.
“Yes, but you came inside me before I went to put it on.”
“I did not come inside you, damn it! You got up almost the minute we...”
“I meant you put it in me.”
“So what? If I didn’t come...”
“Men dribble.”
“Oh, Jesus,” he said.
“They do.”
“Okay. Okay, fine.”
“It takes only one sperm to...”
“Forget it.”
“It does. And four days is very late.”
“Okay. I said okay, so okay, the hell with it.”
“It’s not you who’d have to march around with a big fucking belly for nine months.”