When she blushed again, he chuckled. “Take your time,” he said. “I’ll wait here until they’re gone, then go in and start the drinks. What do you drink?”
“A salty dog will be fine,” she said. “You’ll find everything you need at the bar, including a bartender’s guide on the backbar, in case you don’t know the recipe of a salty dog.”
Inside, Mrs. Felton told her that her husband had phoned from the country club only a few minutes before, and wanted her to call him back at the bar. When she contacted him, he asked if she had any particular social plans for the evening.
“I hadn’t planned on going out unless you want to,” she said. “I had in mind having dinner at home, then writing some letters.”
“Well, some of the boys are getting up a poker game and they want to start early. If you don’t mind, to save time I’ll have dinner here.”
“Oh, sure, go ahead, dear,” she said. “You’ll probably be quite late, then?”
“Probably,” he conceded. “I’ll try not to wake you.”
When she hung up, she told Mrs. Felton that Mr. Carr would not be home for dinner, and she felt like nothing more than a cold snack. “I can make it myself,” she said. “If you’ve finished your other work, you may leave any time you want to.”
“Well, I guess I’ll go now, then,” the housekeeper said. “Everything is done.”
Irma changed into her suit in her bedroom. She first put on a bikini, but when she looked at her image in her full-length mirror she was appalled to see how she was beginning to bulge in a couple of spots where bulges were not attractive. She quickly changed into a one-piece black suit that tended to minimize the bulges.
Examining her reflection again, she decided she was still in pretty good shape for thirty-five. Her natural blonde hair as yet showed no sign of gray, her complexion was still smooth, and her figure was still generally good. She probably could stand to lose about ten pounds, but that wasn’t much of a problem. She could accomplish that in two weeks on a crash diet.
From her bedroom window she watched the bus back out of the driveway, and a few minutes later saw Mrs. Felton’s car drive away. Only then did she go downstairs.
Gary Sommers was at the bar, pouring the contents of a cocktail shaker into two stemmed glasses with salted edges. He finished pouring and set the shaker down before he turned to examine her. He looked her over slowly from head to foot. The frank admiration in his eyes, mixed with something more intimate than mere aesthetic appreciation, made her blush for a third time, which in turn made him smile.
Handing her one of the drinks, he raised the other and said, “To love.”
She hiked her eyebrows, then shrugged. “To love,” she repeated.
They drank, set their glasses down and looked at each other. The quizzical, estimating expression in his eyes started her heart beating violently. His face was so expressive that again she knew exactly what he was thinking. He was simply considering how long he ought to wait before making an overt move.
Apparently her expression was readable too, because he decided no wait was necessary. Almost casually he drew her into his arms, but there was nothing casual about his first kiss. It was so savage and demanding that it instantly set her on fire.
They never did get back to the swimming pool.
In the beginning it was simply a physical affair insofar as Irma was concerned. They spent most of their time during their clandestine meetings making love in motel rooms.
It wasn’t hard for Irma to arrange to be with Gary. Her husband was so involved in community projects that he spent a good many evenings away from home, and he made no effort to check on his wife’s activities. Irma could generally get away for at least a couple of hours several nights a week. Also, Stanton got in the habit of playing poker at the country club every Saturday night, and she could safely stay out quite late then.
After a rapturous period of compulsive lovemaking, Irma and Gary finally got around to talking to each other.
Their early dialogue involved little but trading personal information. Irma told him how she had grown up in foster homes, had attended business school, then had worked for years at a variety of stenographic and secretarial jobs until she had finally landed the position as Stanton Carr’s private secretary, which led to their marriage two years later.
Gary told Irma of his boyhood on an Oregon farm under the despotic rule of a martinet father, how he had run away to join the Army at sixteen, and how he had acquired a high school diploma by taking Army extension courses. Briefly he mentioned some “minor” trouble that had ended his Army career six years later. He didn’t describe the trouble, but he assured Irma he had an honorable discharge — the reason recorded as “for the good of the service.” He had been reduced from staff sergeant to private, he admitted, but it was still a “white” discharge.
Gary’s Army service had been in ordnance, and in addition to acquiring a high school diploma he had learned to become a machine-shop worker. Since his discharge eight years ago, he had held a number of jobs up and down the coast in different manufacturing plants. His jobs had been so numerous because he would quit when summer arrived in order to work in some resort, usually as a lifeguard.
Despite this seemingly aimless background, he expressed to Irma a driving ambition to own his own machine shop eventually. He’d had enough experience with every type of power tool to run such a shop, he said, and his various jobs had given him friendly contacts in several plants that had government cost-plus contracts and farmed out a good part of their machine-shop work. He was sure he could get all the subcontracts he could handle. All he needed was a sufficient stake to go into business for himself, he told Irma, and within five years he could be a millionaire.
As she got to know him better, Irma found that she liked Gary Sommers more and more. Toward the end of June she suddenly realized she was hopelessly in love with him; not just physically in love, but in love the way a woman is when she starts dreaming of changing her status from lover to wife.
When Gary told her he loved her too, all the luxury she enjoyed as Mrs. Stanton Carr became meaningless. Gary was the Prince Charming she had once given up ever meeting, and now that he had finally come along, she was instantly ready to move from the palatial Carr mansion into whatever type of residence a drill-press operator could afford.
Gary wasn’t quite as ready, though. While he had every desire to marry her eventually, he assured her, they had to be practical. Moving out on Carr and in with Gary while the divorce was pending would be a bad tactical error.
“Our starting to live together openly would accomplish two things, darling,” he said patiently. “First, it would get me fired. Then it would get you a divorce without alimony. So what would we live on?”
After thinking this over, Irma said contritely, “I really hadn’t thought about anything but being with you all the time. What do you want me to do?”
“Keep our relationship entirely secret until your divorce is in the bag and you have your settlement. If the court found out you planned to remarry as soon as your decree was final, you wouldn’t have a chance of getting any money out of Carr. But if you’re just a poor abused wife who can’t put up with your mistreatment any longer, you can nail him good. I did some checking, and his first wife took him for nearly a million.”
Irma was silent.
“Incidentally, it’s not a divorce anymore in California. Now they call it a ‘dissolution of marriage,’ and the only ground is ‘irreconcilable differences.’ Which means you don’t have to prove your husband beat you or seduced your housekeeper or anything like that. You just have to tell the court you can no longer get along. You don’t have to prove anything, because the law no longer requires one party to be at fault and the other to be innocent of fault. You ought to be able to have the marriage dissolved within a month if you see a lawyer right now.”