Chapter 4
It was almost eight when Wanda woke in the morning. Despite the fact that it was late by her standards, she still felt tired. Remembering how often she had wakened during the night, she wasn't surprised.
In the kitchen, she saw the lesbians across the alley were at it again but it wasn't difficult to turn away from the window and make the coffee. Watching them the first time had been an experience, but Wanda had no intention of making it a career, though. Judging by what she had seen of them, it seemed that it was their full time occupation.
Plugging in the perc, she walked out of the kitchen and went to the bathroom. By the time she returned, the coffee was ready. Through the window, she saw that one of the women was lying naked on the bed. There was no sign of the other one. Wanda wondered whether the rules of the game they played called for coffee breaks or something between rounds.
As she poured a cup of coffee, Wanda couldn't help feeling just a trace of bitterness. Her own life lately had been practically barren of sexual acitivity while the two in the apartment seemed to wallow in a surfeit of it.
Just when she could have started feeling sorry for herself, Wanda stemmed the door on the temptation. Long ago, she had decided it was the essence of stupidity for a woman to just marry any man who was available simply because he offered regular sexual fulfillment.
Having made that choice, she accepted the price involved. The price that a normally sexed, single woman was called on to pay. There could be affairs from time to time, but there would be long hungry periods between unless she chose to be promiscuous. That particular alternative wasn't included in her plans.
It was probably that line of thinking, she realized, that brought a new thought into her mind. Hurrying over to the couch where she had dropped her purse last night, she dug out her working diary and opened it.
It confirmed her thought that Art Bowman was due in the city later today. Art was a friend she had known since she left college. Divorced now, she had known him during the unhappy days when his marriage was coming apart at the seams.
They had made love fairly often, but they didn't love each other. Their relationship was one of friendship and mutual respect. Any time Art came to town, he would call her. If she was free, they would find time to get together for a few drinks, a lot of talking, and, unless something prevented it, some good healthy lovemaking.
Their relationship in the bedroom was just as nicely matched as in conversation, politics or philosophy. The only thing that prevented their marrying, was the absence of actual love.
Art had come around to insisting that he loved her and wanted to marry her, but Wanda kept turning him down.
"Art, dear," she would answer each proposal, "you have to know I like you more than just about any man I've ever known. I respect you without reservation and I also think you're great in bed, but I just don't love you and I'm damned if I'll destroy both your life and mine by marrying. You're too important to me."
From that point, they would get into a philosophical argument about love and marriage and all the related aspects.
It was never the sort of argument that anyone wins or loses, just a sort of mental exercise in which two razor sharp minds jabbed and sparred through a proscribed choreography. The only ground rule was that no one must get hurt.
If wrestling could ever be translated into something intellectual, Wanda often thought, then their arguments about marriage could be compared to that alleged sport. Both made great, impressive motions of demolishing the other, but there was no danger in the world of either actually getting hurt.
Putting the diary back into her purse, Wanda felt decidedly better as she poured her second cup of coffee. Through the window, she saw the wild ones, as she had come to call them, getting dressed.
There was no doubting that they were a pair of real beauties. What a shame, she thought, that they've committed themselves so completely to their one-way street of lesbian love. There was so much more for them if only they would dare leave their forbidden security and go out in search of it.
Through the light shade which made only an empty pretense of hiding them, she saw the lush young bodies clad in bras and panties. They were, she told herself, younger and more beautiful than she. Wanda wondered how many normal, healthy men there were in the world who would be delighted to offer normal, healthy heterosexual love to either and instead of condemning them, she could feel only pity.
In her studies of psychiatry and psychology, she had learned much about the motivation behind homosexuality, but it was so difficult to translate learned texts into human problems. It was a problem she frequently faced in her work but, as usual, it hurt her to realize that not all the books in the world could contain all the answers to any given problem involving the complicated and individualistic human mind.
By nine-thirty, Wanda was dressed and ready to leave. Only one thing was missing. She didn't have the faintest idea where she was going to go or what she would do when she got there.
In desperation, she went to the door and brought in the morning paper. The story of her decision to run for council was on page one and she knew that Mike had exerted a lot of influence to bring that off in view of all the page-one things that were happening in the city and the world generally.
It was really the want ads she wanted to read, but Wanda couldn't resist pouring yet another cup of coffee and reading her story. Mike had stayed strictly within the bounds of their agreement, she saw without surprise.
She also realized how fast he must have written the story to get it ready before deadline. That didn't surprise her either. Mike was the kind of man who could be expected to do that sort of thing without any fanfare. It was just the way he worked.
Even before she turned to the ads, Wanda knew it was a waste of time. There were only a few possible openings and she knew what they would have to be. She also knew that with people like Bryce Jenkins, Chief Markey and Mayor Paulson opposing her, she didn't have a hope in hell of landing one.
When she finished the paper, Wanda realized that there had been three or four phone calls that she had left for the answering service to pick up. Since she had nothing else to do, she decided to check them out.
The first one was a dud, but the second and third messages the operator gave her told Wanda that the day wasn't going to be a total loss after all.
Both Sam Gold and Art Bowman had called and left numbers for her to call back. She decided to do it in that order.
Sam was delighted at her decision to join the reform team. He also wanted to talk to her about the matter of earning a living and Wanda was pleased to go along with that. She agreed to meet him at ten-thirty and spend the rest of the morning with him.
Art was waiting in his hotel room for her call and his voice was just as warm and refreshing as she had known it would be. He had a lot of things to do, but he insisted on lunch and the evening with her. She wasn't even temped to try the womanly role of playing hard to get as a ploy to keep the man panting.
What had started out as a lost day suddenly became terribly active so that Wanda knew she was going to have to really scurry to get everything done. Driving to the School of Social Work, she drove a consistent ten to twelve miles above the limit.
She knew Sam Gold had been watching for her when she saw him walk out to meet her in the parking lot. It had been quite a while since she had seen him, but his easy manner made it seem like only yesterday that they had discussed the many problems common to their field of interest.
Sam guided her to the cafeteria where they picked up coffee and found a table in a quiet part of the room.
He was obviously delighted with the way she had handled Bryce Jenkins and horrified at the treatment she had received from him and the Police Chief as she told him all that had happened.
"And what are you thinking of doing now, Wanda?" he asked with obvious sincerity. "I mean in addition to winning a seat on City Council."
"Assuming you're right about winning the election, Sam, I haven't even the faintest idea what I'm going to do about a job. I'm not desperate, mind you, I know I can find something I like, it's just a matter of what and where it's going to be."
"Where?" Sam looked concerned. "You're not thinking of leaving the city, are you?"
"Lord no," Wanda answered with emphasis. "That would smack of running off with my tail between my legs and I'm not about to give Jenkins and Markey that kind of satisfaction."
"That's a relief. You had me scared for a minute. As far as a job is concerned though, I know where there's one that's just perfect for you. If you want it, it's yours."
"Out with it, Sam," she smiled. "You have the same kind of look Mike Hanson wore when he tossed the City Council at me as something I just had to do."
"Wanda," he shook his head, "you have such a suspicious nature. I just can't understand it."
"That's not all, Mister Gold. I've also been known to throw a cup of coffee when my patience has been pushed too far."
"Come now, Miss Tupper. That would never do for a lecturer at the august School of Social Work."
"Sam," Wanda gasped, "you have to be kidding. I'm a social worker and a good one, but I'm no teacher."
"They're the same thing, Wanda. Sure we use books to teach our students, but we need more than that. We need people like you who have proved themselves in the field. There's no substitute for that. I'm not offering you a job out of charity or pity or anything like that. We need you here, Wanda, as a teacher."
"But even if I agreed," she protested, "it just couldn't be. Can you see how our beloved mayor would react to that?"
"No dice, Wanda. This isn't a city institution. We happen to be state supported. We just happen to be located in this city, it has no say at all over what we do."
"All right, but he still has influence on the state level. So has Chief Markey and so has Bryce. They just wouldn't stand still for it."
"Speaking of influence, my dear," he shrugged off her objection, "I have some of that myself. So has our dean. The job is yours as of right now, Wanda. All you have to do is accept it."
"What makes you so sure the dean will go along with it? He'll get a pretty rough report on me, you know."
"He's already gone along with it," the man smiled confidently. "You don't think this is something I just happened to think of, do you? We made a rather large hole in a bottle of brandy last night talking about why you should join the staff."
"Tell me, Sam," she looked at him with just a hint of a smile, "did you ever get the impression that all sorts of people are buzzing in the wings hatching plans for your life?"
"Nooo," Sam looked pensive, "can't say I have. Have you ever had that feeling?"
"I've got it right now, you big wonderful phony. First, you and Mike conspire to rope me into politics, now this job. Can't a woman have any privacy? I mean, if I'm out of a job, surely it's my democratic right to go hungry in privacy."
"So who's worried about your rights?" he held up his hands in the manner of a comedian telling a Jewish dialect joke. "We need a good teacher, Rights, schmites. You maybe got something against social work?"
"No, you big fraud, only against Ph.D.'s with phony east side Jewish accents. The first thing I'm going to do when I come to work here is send you for speech therapy."
"Then you will take the job?" he leaned across the table.
"Of course I will," she laughed. "I've always said you teachers have an easy life, now I intend to enjoy it myself. Besides, you need someone here who can speak English."
"Let me see now," he looked up as if deep in thought, "the penalty for insubordination is, uh, I'll have to check that. As I recall, it's something terribly interesting."
"You're still a fraud, but let's talk about the job anyway. I'm rather busy today, but I can start first thing in the morning. By the way, is there a salary involved in this job? We didn't mention that, you know."
"What a salesman I turn out to be. Oy vey!" Sam hit his forehead with the heel of his right hand. "The salary is supposed to be the big attraction and I forget to tell you about it."
They went on to discuss money then and Wanda soon discovered that instead of being unemployed, she had just come into an increase in salary of about two thousand a year.
"You absolutley can't start tomorrow, though," he explained with a serious frown. "There must be all sorts of things you have to do to make the adjustment from one job to another and we'll need time to work out new schedules and that sort of thing. How does Monday morning strike you?"
It seemed like a million years away, but Wanda agreed she would report for work then.
All of a sudden, Wanda congratulated herself as she eased her car out of the parking lot, life is looking very, very good. She had to drive just a bit over the limit to be on time for her lunch date with Art, but that matched her mood of excitement.