She was a good wife, and might have been a good mother, but she was not a good mistress. Her attachments were strong, but they were almost passionless. She did not, therefore, value highly what she could not feel. And she was too realistic to pretend to any enormous loss or betrayal when what she did not want was expended elsewhere on another.
What she did value highly was her position, with all it involved of pride and immunity to public shame. And what she would never accept without reprisal, if it came to that, was any threat to it through reckless aberrations.
Having reached without much stress the same decision she had reached before, she closed her eyes and went to sleep. She slept lightly and quietly until she was awakened later by the sound of Brad moving around in his own room beyond the intervening bath. She lay a while awake, listening, and then she got up and pulled a brush a few times through her hair and went into the bathroom and knocked on Braid’s door. In response to his invitation, she opened the door and walked into his room.
He was, as she had expected, putting a few things into an overnight bag. Crossing to his bed, she sat down on the edge and folded her hands between her knees.
“Hello, Maddy,” he said. “You were asleep when I came in, so I didn’t bother you.”
“That was considerate of you,” she said, “but I’m sorry I wasn’t awake. Are you going somewhere?”
“Yes. As usual. It’s Friday, you know.”
“So it is. I’d forgotten for the moment. Do you really think it’s necessary to spend every Friday night in Kansas City?”
“I suppose not, but it’s convenient. Haven’t we discussed this before?”
“Several times, I believe.”
“Well, the conditions are no different. It makes it much easier to reach the studio on time in the morning.”
“I can see that. Perhaps I should go with you for company.”
“I wouldn’t hear of it. You’d be bored to death in the hotel room. Besides I wouldn’t be able to take you out. I always review my lecture for an hour or so and go immediately to bed. You wouldn’t believe how demanding that damn half hour on television can be.”
“Is it actually such a trial? I’ve always had the feeling that you rather look forward to Friday evenings.”
“Nothing of the sort. I’ll be immensely relieved when the course is over. Believe me, they’ll have to look for someone else to conduct the next one.”
“Will you stay at home for dinner?”
“Yes, if it’s early.”
“We can eat at six-thirty, if you like.”
“That will be fine.”
“All right. I’ll dress and go down and give the instructions.”
She went back into her own room, but she did not immediately dress and go downstairs. Instead, she began automatically to brush her hair again, and she thought, while brushing, that Brad was a most accomplished liar. Oddly enough, she was not shocked or shamed by this, for her father had also been an accomplished liar when occasion demanded it, and she herself could lie readily enough when it suited her. Neither her training nor her nature had been calculated to make her excessively sensitive to moral or ethical niceties.
The only daughter of an only son, the granddaughter of a wheat farmer whose land had later produced oil, she had come in due time into a comfortable fortune which she had handled competently and preserved intact. Her mind was strong but not subtle. It saw a problem whole and approached it directly with no self-deception or devious nonsense.
This was precisely the way she had first seen Brad and still saw him, and precisely the way she had approached him and now held him. No nonsense then or now.
She had first decided that she was in love with him, or at least wanted him, and then she had tried to decide deliberately upon the surest method of acquiring him. Characteristically, the method was direct. In essence, almost crude.
He would not have considered her judgment of him flattering in all respects, if he had ever known exactly what it was. Fortunately, he never knew. To her it was merely a realistic appraisal that she would have applied, in a more or less the same way, to a piece of property. Indeed, in her mind, that was pretty much what Brad amounted to. A piece of property with certain inalienable human rights.
He was handsome, which she liked. He was brilliant, which she admired. He was single, which was necessary. He was palpably vain, which would make him vulnerable. He was driven by ambition, if not cupidity, which would make him susceptible to material seductions. He was available and worth owning, and she wanted to own him.
She met him in the fall of his first year on the Peermont faculty. She had been a graduate student then, not because she had any desire or need for an advanced degree, but simply because there was nothing at the time that she preferred to do. She was getting pretty bored with her superficial studies, though, and she had nearly decided to drop classes and go home to stay when the Thanksgiving holiday came round.
It was then, three days before the holiday was to begin, that she met Brad at an afternoon party, a deadly dull affair of tea and chamber music, and it was a fact, which she recognized later with some astonishment, that she began almost at once to feel possessive about him, and to consider the best means of giving her feeling, after a while, a legal status.
She was wearing black that day, and she always looked her best in black. The dress was, moreover, a slim sheath that presented her fine figure as boldly as seemed appropriate to tea and chamber music. She was, in short, pleasantly conscious of looking more attractive than she ordinarily looked, and she had the additional pleasure of understanding that her place beside him on a small uncomfortable love-seat was as much his contrivance as hers.
Since she was a genuine realist with a hard head, she accepted without bitterness the possibility that he may have been partly motivated by the oil in her background and the knowledge that her father was a person to be reckoned with on the Peermont campus.
After suffering through part of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, a lovely string quartet that she did not have the ear to appreciate, she looked sidewise from under lashes at Brad’s face, deducing instantly from its stiff expression of artificial attention that she had already discovered one thing — a bad ear — that they had in common. On impulse, she leaned toward him so that her shoulder brushed his and her breath stirred on his cheek.
“I’m looking for a man to take me out of this,” she whispered.
His face swung round, flashing a smile in brackets of dimples, and she had a notion suddenly that he was going to kiss her, which was a ridiculous notion in such a place among such people, but which left her, nevertheless, with a sense of disappointment when he didn’t.
He did, however, reach over and lay his hand on hers, which was lying in her lap, and she felt for just a second or two the tips of his fingers brush lightly the inside of her thigh.
“You’ve found him,” he whispered back. “Just follow me.”
They were at the rear of the group, luckily, quite near a doorway into a hall, and they were able to slip away almost unnoticed.
Outside the house, they breathed deeply and laughed with a kind of childish exultation, as if they had shared and survived a somewhat shady adventure.
“I’m sorry if you wanted to stay for the music,” she said.
“I didn’t. I much preferred leaving with you.”
“To tell the truth, music bores me. On top of tea, I find it intolerable.”
“I share your intolerance, and I feel indebted to you for luring me away,” he assured her, his eyes furtively appraising her figure.