Andrew Shaw - Sin Hellcat

And there were we, anyway, Helen and I, in our house. Linda Holmes was a thing of the past, aborted and forgotten, and I was living the commuter’s life. I put in my two hours daily on the 8:12 to New York and the 5:15 to Boondocks Station, and I mowed my crabgrass and wrote my ad copy and functioned, all things considered, as a model citizen of twentieth-century America. Suburban model, that is.

Until I discovered the next door neighbors.

Now there’s something about Suburbia. In Manhattan I had had at least six hundred next-door neighbors, and the only one I ever knew was an old wino named McHenry who wandered into my apartment one night to borrow a cup of grog. But in Reckless Rockland you were supposed to love thy neighbors as thyself and simply because they had bought the house next door to you. They could be horse thieves, they could be dullards, they could be syphilitics — this did not matter. You knew them, dammit. You had to.

The Sheggittses lived next door to us. Harry Sheggitts was an engineer with a crew and a slide rule tie-clasp (does that not sum him up?) and Bonnie Sheggitts was a lithe and limber copperhead. That is, she had copper-colored hair. She wasn’t a snake, exactly.

We played bridge with the Sheggittses, and if anyone knows a better way to destroy an evening, I’ll have to hear about it sometime. We played ping pong with the Sheggittses, and there’s a better way than bridge, now that I think upon it. The high points came when Bonnie lurched across the table after a hard rebound, giving me a good look at her own high points. But a glance of breast-flesh covered with cotton is not enough to carry an insupportable evening.

We bowled with the Sheggittses, and we picnicked with the Sheggittses, and we drank with the Sheggittses, and if there was one thing I didn’t want to see after a bitchy day at MGSR&S, it was Harry Sheggitts’s pink face shining at me over his slide rule tie-clasp. I was so sick of the nuances of neighborliness that I almost missed out on my share in the Great American Dream, suburban division.

Then this Friday came around. It was one of those long lazy days in early autumn, and when I awoke with somebody else’s head on my shoulders I knew at once that the bully boys at the ad farm would not see me that day. I buried face in pillow and listened to bombs going off in my head, dozing like a tired Londoner during the Blitz until nineish, whereupon I called my office and told them I had a small case of impetigo complicated by tertiary syphilis and that they wouldn’t see me until Monday.

“I feel hellish,” I told Helen. “I think I’ll stick close to home today.”

“They won’t deduct from your pay, will they?”

The kind and considerate helpmate with her heart in the right place. “No,” I said. “They don’t exactly pay me by the hour anymore. You can relax now.”

I had a slow leisurely breakfast, complicated by my inability to taste anything. I sat in the backyard and let the morning go to hell, and in mid-afternoon I was still in the backyard and Helen was out buying things. It was her favorite sport, running far ahead of guess-what, and she was good at it.

And there, Dear Reader, was Bonnie Sheggitts.

There doesn’t quite narrow it down, does it? There, across the fence in her own backyard, was the copper-haired Bonnie. She was alone, stretched prone upon a terry cloth-covered chaise, wearing tight shorts and no bra. Her arms almost but not quite obscured her breasts. Her body’d been gloriously tanned — funny how you fail to notice such things while playing ping pong or bridge — and her hair was magnificent against the tanned skin, and I stood up and walked to the fence separating their yard from ours. I did this for a very simple reason. I wanted a better look at her.

And, slowly, her head turned. Her eyes opened, and looked at me, and her red mouth smiled. “Well, hello,” she said.

“Hello.”

“Helen home?”

“No.”

“But you are, huh?”

“Didn’t go to the office today.” Inspired conversation, no. But we and Harry and Bonnie had somehow striven to avoid inspired conversation. Helen talked about shopping, and Harry mouthed platitude to the eternal glory of (1) the engineering profession (2) the Republican Party and (3) God. “Stayed home,” I went on, brilliantly.

“Oh,” she said. “Come on over here, Harvey, and talk to me.”

I thought of climbing the fence. If I had, it would have buckled or I would have torn my slacks, or something. So I walked down our driveway and across in front of their colonial ranch — a specimen quite as absurd as our colonial split — and up their driveway, and there she was, by God, on the chaise.

“Harvey,” she said, “rub my back, huh?”

The Great American Dream, suburban div. Love thy neighbor as thyself, and love thy neighbor’s wife even more, and rub her back and kiss her in the kitchen and, when the opportunity arises, take her to bed. I rubbed Bonnie’s back, and I felt how warmly smooth her skin was. And, like a kitten, she purred.

“I’m not a tramp,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Of course, Bonnie.”

“But you can’t imagine what it’s like. Being married to Harry, I mean. It’s not heaven.”

“I can imagine.”

“Harry the engineer. I thought it would be better than typing letters and taking dictation for the rest of my life, and I guess I was wrong. He’s so dull, and in bed — you can’t imagine.”

My hands moved, gently, to her shoulders. They massaged, and she raised herself slightly on her elbows, and my hands moved to the tops of her breasts.

“Sex is a problem in logistics to him,” she said. “Or something like that. Harry has a slide rule at his legs, Harvey.”

Now there was an image with possibilities. But, muse upon it all you will, Bonnie offered too many possibilities of her own for me to think such a much of Harry. My hands had located those mammaries by now, and I held firm flesh in both hands, and nipples went stiff against my palms.

“Helen doesn’t understand me,” I said.

“I never thought she did.”

“She doesn’t. Not at all.”

Now lest you think I was boyishly banal with that line, I must explain something. Remember when you laid little girls in the schoolyard, and they asked you if you loved them? You didn’t, of course, but you said you did. They didn’t believe it, of course, but it made things easier. Before you lay an unmarried girl, you tell her that you love her. It’s a lie. She knows it’s a lie. You tell her anyway because it’s what she wants to hear.

My wife doesn’t understand me is the I love you of adultery, the sine qua non of seducing your neighbor’s wife. It may be true — it certainly was, in my precious case, for what it’s worth — but true or false it must be whispered intensely before you pin the horns on the man next door. So we went through that sequence, and then Bouncy Bonnie rolled onto her back and I covered her breasts with my chest and kissed her for all I was worth.

“I need you,” I said.

“I know. And I need you.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

“Too open. Too many people could drift around. Not here, Bonnie.”

“Where?”

“Inside,” I said. “Your house.”

“Can’t. The maid’s cleaning the place.”

So Harry Sheggitts had a maid for his wife. If the game were being played properly, the maid was young and willing and Harry was laying her from time to time. Another wrinkle in the Great American Dream.

“Your house, Harvey?”

“Sure. Fine. Helen’s out, she’s buying a store or two, we have plenty of time.”

“Oh, good. Oh, let’s hurry.” This because my hands were busy, and her pulse was racing, and she was ready. And so was I.