“Now do you love me?”
Yes, yes, yes.
“What’d you do all day?” he asked, holding her close, beginning to relax, succumbing to the warmth of her.
Teddy opened her hands like a book.
“Read?” Carella watched while she nodded. “What’d you read?”
Teddy scrambled off his lap and then clutched her middle, indicating that she had read something that was very funny. She walked across the room, and he watched her when she stooped alongside the magazine rack.
“If you’re not careful,” he said, “I’m going to undo that damn safety pin.”
She put the magazines on the floor, stood up, and undid the safety pin. The skirt hung loose, one flap over the other. When she stooped to pick up the magazine again, it opened in a wide slit from her knee to almost her waist. Wiggling like the burlesque queen Carella had described, she walked back to him and dumped the magazines in his lap.
“Pen pal magazines?” Carella asked, astonished.
Teddy hunched up her shoulders, grinned, and then covered her mouth with one hand.
“My God!” he said. “Why?”
With her hands on her hips, Teddy kicked at the ceiling with one foot, the skirt opening over the clean line of her leg.
“For kicks?” Carella asked, shrugging. “What kind of stuff is in here? ‘Dear Pen Paclass="underline" I am a cocker spaniel who always wanted to be in the movies...’”
Teddy grinned and opened one of the magazines for him. Carella thumbed through it. She sat on the arm of his chair, and the skirt opened again. He looked at the magazine, and then he looked at his woman, and then he said, “The hell with this noise,” and he threw the magazine to the floor and pulled Teddy onto his lap.
The magazine fell open to the personals column.
It lay on the floor while Steve Carella kissed his wife. It lay on the floor when he picked her up and carried her into the next room.
There was a small ad in the personals column.
It read:
Widower. Mature. Attractive. 35 years
old. Seeks alliance with understanding
woman of good background. Write
P.O. Box 137.
Six
The girl had read the advertisement six times, and she was now on her fifth revision of the letter she was writing in answer to it.
She was not a stupid girl, nor did she particularly believe anything romantic or exciting would happen after she mailed her letter. She was, after all, thirty-seven years old, and she had come to believe — once she’d turned thirty-five — that romance and excitement would never be a part of her life.
There was, in the girl’s mind, a certain cynicism. There were some who would call her cynicism a simple case of sour grapes, but she honestly believed it was a good deal more than that. She had been weaned on the Big Romance legend, had had it bleated at her in radio serials, flashed before her eyes at the local movie house, seen it and heard it since she was old enough to understand the English language. She had been more susceptible to the legend because she was a girl — and a rather imaginative girl, at that. For her, the knight in shining armor did exist, and she would wait until he came along.
When you’re not so pretty, the waiting can take a long time.
“Marty” is a nice-enough fiction, but the girls outnumber the men in this world of ours, and not many people care whether or not you can do differential calculus so long as you’ve got a beautiful phizz. Besides, she couldn’t do differential calculus. Nor had she ever considered herself a particularly intelligent girl. She had gone to business school and scraped through, and she was a fair enough secretary at a small hardware concern, and she was convinced at the age of thirty-seven that the Big Romance legend that had been foisted upon her by the fiction con men was just a great big crock.
She didn’t mind it being a great big crock.
She told herself she didn’t mind.
She had said good-bye to her virginity when she turned twenty-nine. She had been disappointed. No trumpets blasting, no banners unfurling, no clamorous medley of gonging bells. Just pain. Since that time, she had dabbled. She considered sex the periodic gratification of a purely natural urge. She approached sex with the paradoxical relentlessness of an uncaged jungle beast and the precise aloofness of a Quaker bride. Sex was like sleep. You needed both, but you didn’t spend your life in bed.
And now, at thirty-seven, long since her parents had given up all hope for her, long since she herself had abandoned the Big Romance, the Wedding in June, the Honeymoon at Lovely Lake Lewis legend, she felt lonely.
She kept her own apartment, primarily because her jousting with sex would never have been understood by her parents, partly because she wanted complete independence — and alone in the apartment, she could hear the creaking of the floor boards and the unrelenting drip of the water tap, and she knew complete aloneness.
It is a big world.
From somewhere out in that big world, a mature attractive man of thirty-five sought an alliance with an understanding woman of good background.
Cut and dried, cold and impersonal, stripped of all the fictional hoop-dee-dah. The man could have been advertising for a Pontiac convertible or a slightly used power mower. She supposed it was this directness of approach that appealed to her. Understanding. Could she understand his appeal? Could she understand his loneliness, the single cipher in a teeming world of matched and mismatched couples? She thought she could. She thought she could detect honesty in his simple appeal.
And because she detected honesty there, her own dishonesty left her feeling somewhat guilty. This was the fifth draft of her letter, and her age had changed with each draft. In the first letter, she’d claimed to be thirty. The second letter advanced her age by two years. The third letter went back to thirty again. Number four admitted to thirty-one. She had done a bit of soul-searching before starting on the fifth rewrite.
He was, when you considered it, thirty-five. But he’d said he was mature. A mature man of thirty-five isn’t a college kid with a briar pipe. A mature man of thirty-five wanted and needed a woman of understanding. Could this not mean a woman who was slightly older than he, a woman who could... mother him? Sort of? Besides, wasn’t complete honesty essential at this stage of the game? Especially with this man whose plea was devoid of all frills and fripperies?
But thirty-seven sounded so close to forty.
Who wants a forty-year-old spinster? (Should she mention that she was wise in the ways of the world?)
Thirty-three, on the other hand, sounded too suburban housewife — skirt and blouse and nylons and loafers, going to meet the 6:10. Was that what he wanted? A scatterbrained little blonde who hopped into the station wagon in compliance with the Commuter Romance legend — the automaton who set the roast according to her husband’s train schedule? The robot who had the shaker full of martinis waiting for dear, tired, old hubby: Hard day at the mine today, sweetheart?
Or was he looking for the sleeker model? The silver-toned beauty in the red Thunderbird rushing over country lanes. Gray flannel pedal-pushers, white blouse, bright-red scarf at the throat, push-button control, push-pull-click-click: Dahling, we’re terribly late for the Samalsons. Do tie your tie.
He wanted honesty.
I am thirty-six years old, she wrote.
Well, almost honesty.
She crossed out the words. This man deserved complete honesty. She tore up the fifth letter, picked up the pen, and in a neat, precise hand — except for the t’s, which were crossed with somewhat animalistic ferocity — she began writing her letter again: