Community of Women (10 page)

The music on the phonograph was a Mozart piano sonata, simple and clean and precise, formal and crisp and cool. Roz Barclay sat on the sofa and smoked the last cigarette in the pack. Soon, she thought, she would have to get up and get another pack: She looked at the ashtray, overflowing with cigarette butts. Then she looked at the cigarette between the index and middle finger of her right hand. She remembered that last time she had studied a cigarette, remembered the thoughts she had thought then, remembered the laughter that had killed her frustrations for the time being.

Now she smoked, and listened to the music, and waited. The music was enough to carry her off, to occupy her mind so that most of her thoughts would cease to bother her. She was waiting for Linc. He would come home soon, and then they could be together. They could not make love, because lovemaking was out until Linc’s slump ran its course. But they could be together. And simply being with the man you loved was a thousand times more satisfying than making love with a stranger.

She heard the car, ran to the window like a teenager waiting for a date. She saw the car pull into the driveway, then waited at the door for him to come back from the garage. He walked in, a strange faraway look in his eye. He kissed her and she hugged him.

“Okay?”

“Fine,” he said.

“A little drunk?”

“Not even a little,” he told her. “I had three mugs of ale downtown and walked around for a few minutes. This’ll kill you.”

“What will?”

“This,” he said. “I ran into a whore.”

“Anyone you knew?”

He laughed happily, then described the girl he had met. “A pathetic little thing,” he said. “I gave her five dollars and sent her away. She couldn’t have picked a less likely prospect.”

She laughed with him. “Can we afford the five?”

“She needs it more than we do.”

“I suppose so. Come on in. Sit with me.”

He kissed her again. “What’s playing?”

“Mozart.”

“Nice. Let’s warm the couch.”

They sat together on the couch. For a long moment an urge spread on Roz, an urge to throw herself at this man, to do her damnedest to make him want her the way she wanted him. But the urge passed. She mastered it, and they sat quietly together and listened to the music.

A weekend in Cheshire Point. Sunday came, finally, and it was a day for black coffee and aspirin, a day to stay away from the children because noise was not a good idea when your head was a few sizes too large. It was a day for husbands and wives to forgive and forget, because Friday and Saturday night had undoubtedly supplied a great many scenes which needed forgetting as quickly as possible. It was a day to draw yourself together, a day to recuperate and set your sights on the week ahead, the week of commuting and school for the kids and everything else.

A weekend in Cheshire Point. It was hectic, and while you might look forward to it on Friday afternoon you regretted its arrival by Saturday morning and hated it all across the board by Sunday. It performed one function that could be described as valuable. It set you up for the work-week.

Because, when Monday morning came around, you were glad.

14

M
ONDAY
morning came, and Maggie was glad of it.

She got up early enough to drive Dave to the station in the Volkswagen, then headed home again and stood under a cold shower until she felt sufficiently awake to eat breakfast. The weekend had been hellish, but it was over now, and today she and Elly were going into Manhattan to shop for clothes. She had not seen Elly since that Friday afternoon and she was anxious to see her, to talk to her, to be with her.

Friday itself had been more than she had expected. The bare-breasted episode was an unanticipated stroke of luck. She’d initiated it, of course, by stripping down to her bra, but when Elly had tugged her sweater over her head to reveal uncovered breasts, the ball had really gotten rolling. It wasn’t hard to understand why Ell occasionally wandered around without a bra; the little devil had the firmest pair of breasts in captivity. Maggie’s mouth had started watering at the sight of them, and concealing her interest had not been the easiest thing in the world.

But Friday afternoon had paved the way for the horrid weekend. She hadn’t seen Elly, but she’d carried around the memory of Elly’s exciting body, and as a result she’d been too keyed-up and stimulated to settle down. And so she had skipped Saturday night’s round of parties. Instead she went into New York, went down to the Village to a convenient lesbian bar, and found a convenient pick-up.

The girl she picked up was a blonde bit of fluff, a student at Brooklyn College who was not, strictly speaking, a dyed-in-the-wool lesbian. The girl, Marcia Andover by name, was bisexual. She wore her hair in a long pony tail, wore a great deal of eye makeup, talked in self-consciously hip slang, and carried a copy of a book of poems by Alan Ginsberg under one arm. She was, in short, playing with hipsterism; she wanted to sample
kicks,
wanted to take her pleasure where she found it.

Maggie didn’t like hit-and-run sex. But, at the moment, she had no choice; the afternoon with Elly had her ready to start climbing the walls, and a girl like Marcia could take a little of the tension out of her system. Marcia was ideal for her purposes. Marcia was attractive enough to be worth the trouble to get her into a bed, human enough to spend an evening with, and essentially dull enough so that Maggie would not miss her.

Maggie bought her drinks, talked to her about existentialist poetry, and went home with her to a third-floor walk-up on Barrow Street, a small single room in an old brownstone. There Marcia played progressive jazz records on a too loud hi-fidelity phonograph, danced around nude for awhile, and finally joined Maggie on top of the small bed.

They rubbed their breasts and bellies together, stroked each other, kissed and fondled each other. They were in bed together all night long, waking periodically to have sex, then drifting into a lazy sort of sleep only to awaken again and seek the delights of each other’s bodies. It was a satisfying, fulfilling sort of evening, and when Maggie caught a northbound train in the morning, the tremendous wave of desire which Elly had caused had been temporarily slaked.

Still, as she finished her breakfast coffee this Monday morning, Maggie could not be too pleased with the way she had spent Saturday night. Marcia had been a substitute, and a mediocre one at best. Her breasts had been sweet to kiss, but they were not nearly so appealing as Elly’s. Her body had been good to hold, but not nearly so good as Elly Carr’s would be. Her moans and groans were exciting, certainly, but Maggie would be ten times as excited when it was Elly who was doing the moaning.

And now it was time to see Elly.

She called her first, on the phone. “It’s Mag,” she said. “Ready to go to the big town?”

“Very ready.”

“I’ll pick you up in ten minutes. Or is that too soon?”

“Better make it fifteen.”

“Fine,” Maggie said. “I’ll drive the Volks and leave it at the station. See you in fifteen minutes, honey.”

She put the receiver back on the hook. Then, whistling happily, she began to get dressed. She put on perfume. Just a little, just a dab behind each ear and at the tip of each breast. She did not want to overdo things, but she wanted to be as desirable as she possibly could.

Today would probably not be the day, but you could never tell. It might take quite awhile before she could even bring herself to toss a genuine pass at Elly. Then again, they might wind up in the rack within a day or two. There was no way to tell yet.

She smiled and hurried to the Volkswagen.

Something had happened over the weekend. Roz Barclay was not sure just what it was, or just how it had happened, but she could not deny that, whatever in hell it was, it had in fact occurred.

The weekend was a strangely quiet one for Roz and Linc Barclay. They did not go out to parties; when Linc was in a slump he was distinctly asocial, so they spent the weekend at home. Linc did not even drink. He sat around brooding, alternately reading any of a number of books, staring blankly at the screen of the television set, or lost in some private thoughts all his own.

Then Monday morning came. Linc was awake at nine—early for him. He headed for the bathroom, showered, shaved. He came out, dressed, in a tremendous hurry.

“Bring a thermos of coffee to the study when you get a chance,” he said. “I’ll be in there.”

“You’ll have breakfast first, honey. It won’t take—”

“No, Roz. Not now. I think I’m going to be able to write. I don’t want to pass up a chance. Just bring coffee.”

She had known better than to argue with him. She went to the kitchen to make coffee while he went through the yard to the cottage he used for a study. She filled a thermos with the hot black liquid and took it to him, pausing at the door to listen to the hectic clatter of typewriter keys. It was a welcome sound, a sound she had gone too long without hearing. She listened for a moment, gauging the speed at which he was writing. He was going fast. That was a good sign, a sign that the slump was very probably over. He didn’t have to grope for words. The sentences were flowing freely and easily, flowing from mind to paper with the typewriter an intermediary. She smiled to herself, a happy and grateful smile. Then, knowing better than to interrupt him by knocking, she pushed the door open.

She set the thermos of coffee upon the desk, unscrewed the top, used the top as a cup and filled it with coffee. He had not stopped typing. He came to the edge of a page, looked up only long enough to nod at her, then separated the sheet of carbon paper from the sheets he had just finished. He slapped the carbon paper between a fresh first and second sheet, rolled the paper sandwich into his typewriter, glanced for an instant at the last few words on the recently completed page, and started in again, picking up in the middle of the sentence and rattling away.

She watched him for several seconds. A cigarette was burning in the porcelain ashtray. Another cigarette was jammed in the corner of his mouth. He had not lighted this one yet, but he would get around to it sooner or later.

She left the cottage, walked back to the house. He was over it now, over the slump, through with sitting and moping and drinking too much. Now he would work at breakneck speed, finishing
Murder By Moonlight
easily within the week, working night and day, plunging into a fresh book or story as soon as the current one was finished. She didn’t expect to see much of him for the next few days. He would be too busy catching up with himself, too busy pouring out all the words and phrases and sentences and paragraphs that had been bottled up for months, too busy grinding out all the pages he had not been able to write before.

But she did not mind. He was a writer and she was a writer’s wife, and the clickety-clack of the IBM electric typewriter was the sweetest music she had ever heard.

15

T
HAT
morning, as she kissed Howard good-bye at the station, Nan Haskell watched Elly Carr kiss Ted goodbye and send him off to the wars of Madison Avenue. Then, driving home in the Chevvie station wagon, she thought how thoroughly inconceivable it all was. Ted was Elly’s husband and Howard was her husband, and it was absolutely out of the question that she would consider giving herself to Ted Carr.

It was all a dream, she decided. All a dream, or all a fantasy, or something of the sort. He had said—Friday, on the telephone—that he would see her Monday or Tuesday. But he had gone off on the 8:03 to New York and he would not be back until dinner time. He was not going to see her at all, was not going to make love to her, was not going to alter the overpowering boredom which was her life.

Maybe he just liked to talk. Maybe he got his kicks saying dirty words to women, grabbing hold of them and propositioning them. Maybe the years on Madison Avenue had made him far more concerned with advertising and promotion than with reality, far more with selling a girl on the idea of sex than with sex itself.

She was surprised, at twelve-thirty in the afternoon, to answer the door and find him on the steps.

“Hello, Nan-O.”

“What are you—”

But he was pushing past her, stepping into the hallway, pulling the door closed behind him. She looked up, bewildered, and his smile leered back at her.

“You took the train—”

He reached out a hand and chucked her under the chin. “The trains,” he said, “run both ways. Trains go to New York, and trains return from New York. Science is wonderful, Nan-O.”

“But—”

“I took a train to New York. I took another train back from New York. Get your clothes off, dear heart. I want to go to bed with you.”

“But—”

“Now.”

It would not have happened like this with Howard. They would have embraced and she would have washed her face and brushed her teeth, and then he would have done the same. And she would have looked in on the children, making sure they were sleeping soundly, while he checked his attaché case to make sure all his paperwork was ready for the next morning. Then, clock set and lights out, they would go to bed.

But this was different. Fast directions, blind impulses. Nan was not excited now, not sexually aroused in the least, and yet she knew she had not the remotest chance of refusing to do whatever Ted Carr asked her to do. The boredom was over. Perhaps boredom was preferable to what was going to come next, perhaps monotony was a better alternative than misery. It made little difference. He would command and she would follow orders, and, to mix a metaphor hopelessly, the chips could fall as they might. Or may. Or something like that—

“Take off your clothes,” he said.

“Not here, Ted. Somebody might see. We could go to the bedroom. We could—”

“No one can see in, Nan-O. Get nude, and fast.”

She knew better than to argue. She stood there, feeling half like a fool and half like a goddess of love. She was wearing an ugly housedress that had a row of silly buttons from the neckline to the hem. There must have been two dozen of the buttons, and she opened them one at a time, her fingers quick but deliberate. She stepped out of the dress, finally, smiling a smile of self-satisfaction, standing before him in bra and panties and house slippers. Her eyes were shining. She tossed her shoulders back, thrusting her big breasts at him, and suddenly, all at once, the passion began to reach her, to flood her system.