Sheldon Lord - Community of Women

Which was markedly unfortunate.

Because when Lincoln Barclay had a slump, he had a slump. And such a slump was more than a professional matter. It was a sexual matter as well. Something other than his production of prose drooped.

A woman less fundamentally monogamous might have taken a lover. A woman less sensual might have suffered in silence. Roz Barclay found another outlet, a reversion to the habits of adolescence, a temporary measure that relieved the need for sex better than nothing at all.

And now was time for it. Now, with Linc in New York for the next hour or two, with the house to herself, with no pressing obligation but the relief of her own sexual needs.

She got up from the wicker chair and walked slowly toward the back door of the house. She was trembling, less in delighted anticipation than from the anxieties that always were the muted accompaniment of self-satisfaction. Guilt was an inevitable by-product. She knew, intellectually if not emotionally, that there was no reason to feel guilty, that what she was about to do was neither immoral nor harmful, that it was neither an act of infidelity nor a pernicious habit. Yet the guilt remained; society had its own ideas, and her heart accepted what her mind could manage to reject.

She went to the bathroom on the second floor. This, too, was habit, an obvious carry-over from teen-age years when the bathroom had been the place for every secret vice from cigarette smoking to what she was going to do now. The bedroom might have been more comfortable, but the bathroom was the inevitable place, seated upon the toilet with the door securely locked.

She sat down, closed the door, turned the lock. She shut her eyes, and in the ensuing darkness her own hands roamed her body. Her own guilty hands stroked her full breasts, reached beneath the bra to cup firm flesh and fondle the nipples that were already stiffening with lust. She unhooked the bra, releasing her breasts, and she prodded their softness while her brain began to whirl with the fantasies of sex, with memories of nights in Linc’s arms, with sexual dreams and sexual themes.

No!

She couldn’t. It was wrong, it was impossible and she couldn’t.

No!

Slowly, dizzily, she rearranged her clothing and got to her feet. Her fingers found the lock, turned it. She left the bathroom and went downstairs once again.

The frustration was alive now. It was a living breathing pulsating force within her and she fought it with every bit of strength in her body. She breathed in gasps, struggling to pull herself together. Other women would find a way out. Other women would play around. But she had to be true, true to Linc and true to herself.

Even if it killed her. Even if it had her climbing the damned walls, for God’s sake—

It was late afternoon in Cheshire Point.

It was night in Cheshire Point.

It was a relatively dark night, as a matter of complete fact. The moon was a thin crescent hardly there at all. A cloud cover had blown in from the east and the stars were few and far between. This, however, is relatively immaterial. The Carrs and the Haskells, busy playing bridge at the Haskell colonial-split, were in the basement recreation room, seated around a card table. It hardly mattered whether the moon was full or not, whether the sky was bright or dark.

What mattered, Nan Haskell thought, was that Ted Carr was making passes at her.

To give Ted full credit, they were remarkably subtle passes. When you are sitting at a bridge table with your own wife, and with another man and his wife, you have to go some in order to make passes at the other man’s wife without anyone else realizing the fact. But Nan knew damned well that Ted Carr was a past master at the art of the subtle forward pass. It was, she thought, one hell of a shame that a decent, straight-and-narrow girl like Elly should be married to a philanderer like Ted Carr.

While Elly sat quietly in the background, very neat and very chic and very bright, her husband was busy laying his way through the available female population of Cheshire Point. Elly evidently did not realize this. Nan did. She was not entirely sure just what girls had succumbed to his manly charms, but it was pretty obvious that — one — he was cheating on Elly every chance he got, and — two — he got more than a few chances.

Nan had a good memory. She remembered a little scene at a party at Hal and Bev Cooper’s, at which time she had had the dubious privilege of watching Ted Carr lead Rita Morgan into an unoccupied bedroom, with one hand on Rita’s sashaying rump and the other plunged into her neckline. She remembered the autumn dance at the Cheshire Point Country Club, when Ted and some girl up for the weekend from New York had wandered onto the golf course looking for the nineteenth hole.

Other times, too. Ted was sexy — there was no getting around that; the man positively oozed beddability. And Ted was persistent. He didn’t let a girl wonder what he was after.

Right now he was making it obvious.

But only to her. They sat playing bridge, the Haskells against the Carrs, and the game proceeded at its usual pace. Every so often Nan would look up to find Ted Carr’s eyes boring very intently into her own. He would smile, slowly, and would go on looking at her until, embarrassed without quite knowing why, she averted her gaze.

Then, when her eyes darted back at him, he would be looking at her again. And that same slow smile would spread on his face.

The smile was not exactly obscene. It came close, however. It said, in a nutshell, I’m Interested In Taking You To Bed And Sooner Or Later I’ll Do Just That. And there was something about Ted Carr that didn’t let you doubt the idea. If he looked at a woman long enough, and carefully enough, she would melt. She would permit him to seduce her because she accepted her seduction as inevitable.

Then he started with the foot.

Now, playing footsies is corny. It is corny and square and very definitely Out. If a man starts playing footsies with somebody else’s wife, she generally laughs at him.

This was different.

Because Ted somehow managed to do two things. He made the action a burlesque, so that it was funny instead of being corny. And at the same time he let you know that the burlesque itself was just a mask, that he really deep down inside and underneath and from the heart meant every last nudge of it, that he was playing footsies, in short, without being corny about it.

“Two spades,” Elly Carr said.

Nan tore her attention back to her cards. She didn’t remember the hand, or the bidding, but she had a lousy hand and there was no problem. She passed. Ted raised to four spades, the table passed around, and it was her turn, incredibly, to find an opening lead. She tossed out a singleton diamond and tried to get interested in the play of the hand.

This did not materialize. Ted’s foot kept reminding her that he had more on his mind than bridge, and she kept losing track of things, and Elly made the contract with an overtrick, bringing in game and rubber.

It was ridiculous, she thought. She should simply laugh the whole thing off. Exurban males made automatic passes at exurban females; it was part of the game, and the passes were rarely very serious. In Italy men pinch women on busses, not for the sexual thrill and not in an attempt to get the females into bed, but simply as an acknowledgment of their physical attractiveness. In Spain and Latin America, males say complimentary things to passing females. And, in exurbia, men makes passes at other men’s wives.

A custom, a form of compliment, symptomatic perhaps of the rather schizoid nature of exurbanite society. Nothing more, certainly.

Oh, yeah?

This, she told herself firmly, was hardly the case. Ted Carr was not a perfunctory pass-tosser. He meant it all. He wanted to take her to bed, and thus he was obviously out of his mind.