Ira Levin: The Stepford Wives

That quieted things down. They drove back through Stepford Center-slowly, because Pete said that he might throw up too. Walter pointed out the white frame library, and the Historical Society's two-hundred-year-old white frame cottage.

Kim, looking upward through her window, lifted a sucked-thin Life Saver from her tongue and said, "What's that big one?"

"That's the Men's Association house," Walter said.

Pete leaned to his seatbelt's limit and ducked and looked. "Is that where you're going tonight?" he asked.

"That's right," Walter said.

"How do you get to it?"

"There's a driveway farther up the hill."

They had come up behind a truck with a man in khakis standing in its open back, his arms stretched to its sides. He had brown hair and a long lean face and wore eyeglasses. "That's Gary Claybrook, isn't it?" Joanna said.

Walter pressed a fleeting horn-beep and waved his arm out the window. Their across-the-street neighbor bent to look at them, then smiled and waved and caught hold of the truck. Joanna smiled and waved. Kim yelled, "Hello, Mr. Claybrook!" and Pete yelled, "Where's Jeremy?"

"He can't hear you," Joanna said.

"I wish I could ride a truck that way!" Pete said, and Kim said, "Me too!"

The truck was creeping and grinding, fighting against the steep left-curving upgrade. Gary Claybrook smiled selfconsciously at them. The truck was half filled with small cartons.

"What's he doing, moonlighting?" Joanna asked.

"Not if he makes as much as Ted says he does," Walter said.

"What's moonlighting?" Pete asked.

The truck's brake lights flashed; it stopped, its left-turn signal winking.

Joanna explained what moonlighting was.

A car shot down the hill, and the truck began moving across the left lane.

"Is that the driveway?" Pete asked, and Walter nodded and said, "Yep, that's it." Kim switched her window farther down, shouting, "Hello, Mr.

Claybrook!" He waved as they drove past him.

Pete sprung his seatbelt buckle and jumped around onto his knees. "Can I go there sometime?" he asked, looking out the back.

"Mm-mmn, sorry," Walter said. "No kids allowed."

"Boy, they've got a great big fence!" Pete said. "Like in Hogan's Heroes!"

"To keep women out," Joanna said, looking ahead, a hand to the rim of her sunglasses.

Walter smiled.

"Really?" Pete asked. "Is that what it's for?"

"Pete took his belt off," Kim said.

"Pete-" Joanna said.

They drove up Norwood Road, then west on Winter Hill Drive.

AS A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE she wasn't going to do any housework. Not that there wasn't plenty to do, God knows, and some that she actually wantee to do, like getting the living-room bookshelves squared away-but not tonight, no sir. It could darn well wait. She wasn't Carol Van Sant and she wasn't Mary Ann Stavros-pushing a vacuum cleaner past a downstairs window when she went to lower Pete's shade.

No sir. Walter was at the Men's Association, fine; he had to go there to join, and he'd have to go there once or twice a week to get it changed.

But she wasn't going to do housework while he was there (at least not this first time) any more than he was going to do it when she was out somewhere-which she was going to be on the next clear moonlit night: down in the Center getting some time exposures of those Colonial shopfronts.

(The hardware store's irregular panes would wobble the moon's reflection, maybe interestingly.)

So once Pete and Kim were sound asleep she went down to the cellar and did some measuring and planning in the storage room that was going to be her darkroom, and then she went back up, checked Pete and Kim, and made herself a vodka and tonic and took it into the den. She put the radio on to some schmaltzy but nice Richard-Rodgersy stuff, moved Walter's contracts and things carefully from the center of the desk, and got out her magnifier and red pencil and the contact sheets of her quick-before-l-leavethe-city pictures. Most of them were a waste of film, as she'd suspected when taking them-she was never any good when she was rushing-but she found one that really excited her, a shot of a well-dressed young black man with an attache case, glaring venomously at an empty cab that had just passed him. If his expression enlarged well, and if she darkened the background to bring up the blurred cab, it could be an arresting picture-one she was sure the agency would be willing to handle. There were plenty of markets for pictures dramatizing racial tensions.

She red-penciled an asterisk beside the print and went on looking for others that were good or at least part good but croppable. She remembered her vodka and tonic and sipped it.

At a quarter past eleven she was tired, so she put her things away in her side of the desk, put Walter's things back where they had been, turned the radio off, and brought her glass into the kitchen and rinsed it. She checked the doors, turned the lights off-except the one in the entrance hall-and went upstairs.

Kim's elephant was on the floor. She picked it up and tucked it under the blanket beside the pillow; then pulled the blanket up onto Kim's shoulders and fondled her ringlets very lightly.

Pete was on his back with his mouth open, exactly as he had been when she had checked before. She waited until she saw his chest move, then opened his door wider, switched the hall light off, and went into her and Walter's room.

She undressed, braided her hair, showered, rubbed in face cream, brushed her teeth, and got into bed.

Twenty of twelve. She turned the lamp off.

Lying on her back, she swung out her right leg and arm. She missed Walter beside her, but the expanse of coolsheet smoothness was pleasant. How many times had she gone to bed alone since they were married? Not many: the nights he'd been out of town on Marburg-Donlevy business; the times she'd been in the hospital with Pete and Kim; the night of the power failure; when she'd gone home for Uncle Bert's funeral-maybe twenty or twenty-five times in all, in the ten years and a little more. It wasn't a bad feeling.

By God, it made her feel like Joanna Ingalls again. Remember her?

She wondered if Walter was getting bombed. That was liquor on that truck that Gary Claybrook had been riding in (or had the cartons been too small for liquor?). But Walter had gone in Vic Stavros's car, so let him get bombed. Not that he really was likely to; he hardly ever did. What if Vic Stavros got bombed? The sharp curves on Norwood Road- Oh nuts. Why worry?

THE BED WAS SHAKING. SHE lay in the dark seeing the darker dark of the open bathroom door, and the glint of the dresser's handles, and the bed kept shaking her in a slow steady rhythm, each shake accompanied by a faint spring-squeak, again and again and again. It was Walter who was shaking! He had a fever! Or the d.t.'s? She spun around and leaned to him on one arm, staring, reaching to find his brow. His eye-whites looked at her and turned instantly away; all of him turned from her, and the tenting of the blanket at his groin was gone as she saw it, replaced by the shape of his hip. The bed became still.

He had been-masturbating?

She didn't know what to say.

She sat up.

"I thought you had the d.t.'s," she said. "Or a fever."

He lay still. "I didn't want to wake you," he said. 'It's, after two. "

She sat there and caught her breath.

He stayed on his side, not saying anything.

She looked at the room, its windows and furniture dim in the glow from the night light in Pete and Kim's bathroom. She fixed her braid down straight and rubbed her hand on her midriff.

"You could have," she said. "Woke me. I wouldn't have minded."

He didn't say anything.

"Gee whiz, you don't have to do that," she said.

"I just didn't want to wake you," he said. "You were sound asleep."