Chapter 7
Ken Creighton quietly locked the bathroom door behind him before turning on the taps at the sink. Merely closing a door meant nothing to Judy. She felt no need for privacy, and she couldn't comprehend anyone else's need for it. Until he'd spoken to her, she'd never bothered to close the door of the bathroom when she relieved herself. Even now, she sometimes forgot.
Ken avoided looking at his reflection as he removed his bridge, rinsed it, and dusted it with white adhesive powder from a small flask in his pocket. Not until it had been fitted firmly in place did he confront his mirror image and try on a wry smile. He told himself that the crinkles at the corners of his eyes were becoming, but he remained unconvinced. He looked tired.
Judy's lack of self-consciousness had once seemed one of her most appealing traits. He remembered vividly their first afternoon in a motel, when she had shucked the clothes from her sun-browned body so quickly and efficiently. The act of disrobing and the fact of being naked held no special meaning for her. Taking off her clothes was just a necessity for making love, not a preliminary part of the lovemaking ritual.
Ken had found her attitude refreshing. What he liked to think of as her freedom from false modesty suggested that she might be free from all the other little hangups that made life so much more complicated than it had to be. She might, by her example, lead him back to innocence and honesty. Back to youth, perhaps. His smile in the mirror became slightly sardonic.
As if cued by his thoughts, the doorknob rattled.
"Just a minute," he called, trying not to sound annoyed.
She didn't answer. She probably didn't need to use the bathroom, but was just bored with being alone. She was easily bored, but he was always able to divert or entertain her. He found himself, as he so often did, contrasting her with Marcia, who never seemed to need diversion or entertainment. Marcia was always happiest when wandering inside the complexities of her own head. Being with Judy, even with a bored and impatient Judy, was preferable to being with someone who, he often suspected, would rather be alone.
Perhaps he ought to try harder to emulate Judy's style and abandon all secretiveness. She wouldn't care, most likely, whether he wore a bridge or not. Even the sight of it might not arouse her disgust. Worse, it might arouse her childlike curiosity. She would pick it up, inspect it like a new toy for a moment, then forget about it.
No, he couldn't forsake his fastidious ways, not entirely. He was too acutely aware of the fine line between eroticism and revulsion. Stroking Marcia's long, black hair with his lips was not the same thing as finding a strand of it on his toothbrush. Had his love for his wife died a natural death, or had the necessity of living with her killed it? He didn't know.
He had no reason to remain in the bathroom. Now he was indulging a whim to be alone and exclude Judy from his life while he sorted out his feelings. He would have found such an indulgence exasperating in Marcia. Had he become like her? He would have to try harder to improve himself. For Judy's sake, he added.
Resisting the inclination to wrap a motel towel around his waist, he opened the door and stepped into the bedroom. Judy stood naked at the window, staring through the Venetian blinds at the intermittent flow of traffic on the dark highway. For a moment he studied the glow of lamplight on her beige skin, banded at her buttocks and breasts by the pale ghost of her swim suit. He contemplated the smooth length of her legs, the perky uptilt of her tits, the taut tuck of her ass. Then propriety reasserted itself.
"Christ," he breathed, moving forward quickly to shut the blinds. "Anybody could see you."
She shrugged. Her breasts quivered delightfully. "There's nobody out there."
She looked up at him. Her face was smooth and ingenuous. The shortness of her curly hair and its bleached blondeness accentuated her large, dark eyes. Her mouth was wide. The thick protuberance of her lower lip almost caricatured sensuality. She wasn't especially pretty, but she looked like what she was: a damned good lay. His irritation faded. Standing close enough to feel her radiant body-warmth, he sensed a sluggish stirring in his prick that he wouldn't have believed possible. He'd screwed her twice this afternoon-this evening, as it had unexpectedly become. Judy's eyes lowered. She saw that his cock was beginning to rise.
"Tiger," she murmured, slipping easily into his arms. "Let's fuck some more, O.K.?"
"I ought to go home," he said. He knew that he wouldn't.
"You ain't leaving here with that hard-on, man. I got it up for you, and I don't want you taking it home to stick in your wife," she said.
Her words might have made him wince if she hadn't chosen that moment to reach down and tickle his prick with her fingertips. She raised its swelling head against her dark bush. She massaged it against her cunt lips, greasy with the blend of their sexual juices.
He slipped his fingers into the close-fitting cap of her yellow curls, toying with them, stroking down to her neck and her slim shoulders. He lowered his head to take one of her nipples into his mouth, licking it in slow circles until it thrust forth like the tip of a little finger. He eased her toward the disordered bed. Her fingers delicately skinned his cock as it continued to rise.
The television set she had switched on during his absence was a peripheral nuisance, but he didn't want to break their contact long enough to squelch it. He was made dimly aware, as he stroked the youthful tautness of her skin, that politicians were denouncing corruption, that activists were protesting inaction, that a hermit had been devoured by his faithful dogs. He slipped his finger into the slithery depths of her cunt and rotated it slowly.
"Would you suck me off?" Without waiting for her answer, he pushed her head down his belly.
"You got to promise not to come in my mouth." The moist warmth of her breath was an excruciating tickle on the tight skin of his fully swollen prick.
"Sure, sure, of course."
Marcia would never suck his cock. She never suggested refinements, she resisted experiments. She seemed merely to tolerate sex. Did she pretend, on those occasions when she permitted him to fuck her, that he was someone else, someone she would have greatly preferred-Melody's lather, for instance? He had never believed her crazy story that she'd forgotten who he had been. How could a woman forget a thing like that? He had been some scruffy, indolent hippie whose only ambition had been to lie around all day and fuck. He had no doubt given her everything she'd wanted-except a name for her child, a fine house, the money she needed to indulge her eccentricities. When she had felt the need for those things, she had taken her bastard child back into the real world and deliberately sought a man who could provide them: himself.
Judy knelt on the bed beside his supine body. She lowered her face and slipped the moist red ring of her lips over the swollen head of his cock. He gasped with pleasure as he felt her quick little tongue flickering around his cockhead. She slipped downward, taking more and more of his quivering flesh inside her mouth. Her wet tongue was in constant motion.
Her eyes met his for a moment. He saw a flicker of amusement touch her busy lips. She enjoyed doing this. With touching and uncharacteristic shyness, she had actually asked his permission to blow him, the first time, as if asking for a special treat. He shifted his hips, pushing his cock deeper into the firm compression of her pouting lips. Her tongue swirled and slithered.
Marcia had probably denied nobody what he wanted at that swinish commune. All those hippie orgies, cramming a lifetime of degeneracy into a few months, had made her weary of sex by the time she'd met him. Maybe he disgusted her, as a square. She had made a few snotty comments about the compromises he had to make to earn a living, comments he could still recall word for word.
Goddamnit, why did he have to think of her at a time like this!? She was like a chilling ghost in the bed with them. He slid his hand down the taut curve of Judy's rump and slid two fingers into the slippery softness of her cunt, spreading them as he pumped them slowly in and out. She squirmed with pleasure when he slid a third finger down to massage the rubbery little nubbin of her clitoris.
Judy sucked his prick steadily deeper, until her rather long nose was touching the curls of his pubic hair. Her dainty fingertips jerked steadily at that part of the root she couldn't fit inside her mouth, setting up a syncopated rhythm with the pumping of her lips and the steady washing of her rolling tongue.
Just when it seemed that the simmering load of sperm that was boiling up in his balls was about to burst free and flood her mouth, she made him gasp again by pulling her lips away.
"Please-suck it some more," he groaned. "I love it when you do that. You're terrific.''
"You were going to come in my mouth, you dirty old man," she said, pouting lasciviously. "And you promised."
Her eyes were slightly glazed, her cheeks were flushed. He continued to work expertly with his hand, rhythmically rubbing her bone-hard clitoris while her pussy leaked its sticky juices over his hand and wrist.
"What do you care?" he asked. "You like to eat it. You told me it was good for your complexion. Come on."
"Bastard," she whispered, but she began to work on him with her tongue again. She licked her way all around the bulging knob at the end of his cock, lapping off the sticky ooze that was already seeping out in eager anticipation. He was just barely able to stand this teasing-he wouldn't have been able to stand another instant of her talented cocksucking.
She moved down, her hot breath caressing his prick as she traced every blue vein in the hard, white shaft with the tip of her tongue. He nudged his cock against her soft cheek, trying to force her to take it between her sweet lips, but she evaded his efforts. She seemed intent on teasing him to the absolute limits of his endurance.
She moved ever lower. She pushed his thighs apart to admit her head. Her tongue slipped through his hair to lick his balls. The skin contracted under her touch. She seemed determined to cover every inch of them with her tongue. He reached down with his free hand to cup the silky weight of one of her tits. Gently, he tried to guide her back up to suck him off at last.
Giggling at the torture she knew she was inflicting, she relented. She slipped her lips once more over the head of his throbbing cock and sucked it deep into her mouth. She was a wet vortex of sexual delight. She sucked hard, hollowing her cheeks and completely immersing his prick with the feel of her soft, moist flesh. Her lips, pushed out to enclose as much of his tingling meat as they could, kept up a steady, pumping suction. Her tongue slipped and slid around the head in a dizzying swirl.
He wished he could summon the self-control needed to hold still and relish this dazzling display of her talent, but it was impossible to hold still. The urge to shove his cock deeper into her lips and fuck her in the mouth was overpowering. He did it slowly, though, as slowly as he could possibly bear to do it, and he restrained himself from thrusting it deeper than she wanted to take it. He continued to work on her gash with his fingers, even though he suspected that he'd already made her come.
She sucked harder, sensing that the cock thrust deep in her mouth was about to explode. She slid her hands beneath him and dug her clawed fingers into his ass, restraining him from shoving his prick deeper into her mouth.
He wanted it to go on forever, but the hot surges cresting upward from his balls could no longer be contained. He groaned and shuddered as his cock gave a hard, hammering pulse and then another, spurting jets of come into her delicious mouth. The sinuous muscles of her throat moved as she swallowed it, gobbling the hot load down and sucking for more.
He sank down on the bed, breathing hard, while Judy continued to suck until the hot spurts had faded to tiny dribbles. She pulled at his softening, excruciatingly sensitive prick until she was thoroughly satisfied that she had sucked out every last drop of semen. Then she sat back, licking a trickle of the excess from her lower lip before she smiled down at him.
"You broke your promise, you prick," she said.
"You liked it," he stated, sitting up slowly and gazing into her dark eyes. She wanted him. She needed him. He loved her for that.
That damned dog began barking its head off the moment Ken's headlights touched the house; Lucifer wasn't being protective or threatening: he was just scared out of his wits by potential danger. Ken wouldn't have believed it possible for a Doberman pinscher to be a sissy, but Lucifer was, and Ken felt for him the same disgust he felt for homosexuals. He sometimes wondered if some castrating quality of Marcia's love were not responsible for this, and what that portended for Roger-or for himself, if he stayed with her for many more years.
He tried to suppress his hatred for the dog and blot its infernal yelping out of his ears in order to enjoy the sight of his house: his house, the only one he'd ever built that was truly his. He hadn't watched the clock when he'd been planning it, he hadn't counted the cost of materials when he'd built it-as he'd had to do with every other project that had come his way. He had seen it as a true creation, a new statement that the world had never heard before.
And that brat, that little bastard, had nearly screwed it up. Breaking dishes. Moving furniture around. Convincing her own crazy mother, who was off on a cloud most of the time and couldn't tell reality from fantasy, that there was actually a ghost in the place.
Some of the things hadn't been explained, of course, not even by the screwball "scientists" who'd turned the place upside down for a week. Ken knew the explanation, but he hadn't volunteered it. Quite simply, he'd failed. He'd miscalculated some of the stresses, putting such tension on one of the walls that it had sprung out when subjected to the right combination of temperature and humidity and had catapulted a desk across a room. The "footsteps" they'd heard could be similarly explained. After the house had pulled a few tricks like that, Melody had tried a few of her own, with the malicious intent of showing him up as a failure.
Nevertheless, the house had calmed down, and he foresaw no recurrence of such embarrassing incidents. Now he could afford to feel almost mellow about that episode. It was as if his creation were indeed a living thing, a high-strung and spirited creature that had to be tamed for the mundane uses of life. He felt less forgiving about Melody's part in the affair.
She hadn't learned her lesson, either. She was always thinking up new ways to throw him off balance. Whenever he called home, her latest trick was to answer the phone by saying "Hello, Ken," before he could identify himself, before he even spoke. He refused to let her know that this flustered him as much as it did.
"Daddy! Daddy's home!" Karen shrieked, colliding with him at a dead run, laughing wildly when he swung her up into the air and settled her astride his neck.
"Watch your head," he cautioned as he went carefully through the entrance, up the stairway guarded by a bust of Leonardo. "What did you do today?"
"Lucy came home," she reported excitedly.
"So I see," he said, as the Doberman gave one last bark-unquestionably directed at him personally this time and pussyfooted away across the brick floor of the atrium.
"And Mama got thrown in jail by the police, so Mrs. Curtis-"
"Hey, hold on a minute. What-?"
He was interrupted by the entrance of Nora Curtis. She never just came into a room; she always made an entrance, and she exploited the theatrical potential of the Creighton house to the fullest whenever she was here. As usual, she was gotten up like the Queen of the Gypsies, in a floor-sweeping dress of black and red and yellow, sandals, and a lot of junk jewelry.
"She isn't in jail, Ken. But she discovered a body, and apparently there's all sorts of red tape connected with that sort of thing. And she has to stay with the story, she said-"
"Where, for God's sake?"
"Out in the woods somewhere, I don't know exactly."
He began to breathe more easily. He had instantly assumed that Marcia had found the body somewhere on their property, that his house was due for some more unpleasant publicity.
"That damned newspaper."
He wanted to add that it was no sort of job for a woman, at least not for a decent one, with its seedy characters and its ungodly hours, but he didn't know how Nora would take such an observation. He didn't want to become entangled in a fruitless and exasperating argument about women's liberation. Nevertheless, he thought he detected sympathy in her green eyes.
Nora Curtis was a trim little woman in her late twenties. The way she wore her thick, tawny hair suggested a miniature lion, and her perfect posture called attention to her exquisitely molded little breasts. Ken had entertained more than one sexual fantasy about her, but prudence had deterred him from trying to live them out with such a close neighbor, a friend of Marcia's. She was a widow. She had been married for less than a year when her husband-an energetic and apparently healthy man, younger than Ken was now-had gotten up from watching a ball game on TV to fix himself a sandwich and had dropped dead on the way to the refrigerator. The doctors had called it a cerebral hemorrhage.
"I just popped in to see Marcia, and I found a couple of starving kiddies, so I threw something together and fed them. I keep telling her not to leave an Aquarian in charge of anything, but she just won't listen to me."
"A what?"
"An Aquarian. Melody. Absent-minded professors. She's the perfect type, except for her stand-offishness. But what can you expect, with a moon in Scorpio?"
Ken smiled pleasantly, as if agreeing with her, while he lowered Karen from his shoulders; but Nora's astrological patter never failed to irk him. It was impossible to hold a reasonable discussion with someone who believed your words and actions were actually motivated by a system of superstitious absurdities. Perhaps her husband had died of apoplexy having been told that he was complaining about the coffee only because Saturn was in his Fifth House.
"But Melody has a really crazy chart, with all her strong planets in Gemini, her rising sign-but you must be hungry, too, aren't you?"
"No, don't trouble yourself, I-"
"It's no trouble at all. Really. I threw together a casserole from some leftovers and things I found in the cupboard. All I have to do is dish it out."
"Roger said it was disgusting because it had mushrooms in it, but I liked it," Karen said.
"Yes, I am hungry, thanks. I'll go and wash up."
"And I'll mix you a martini, which you look like you're dying for. Rinse the ice with vermouth, then throw it out, right?"
"Right," he said, laughing.
She swept out of the room, jewelry clunking, with Karen tagging along.
No question about it, she was a damned attractive woman. He wondered idly why she had waited so long to marry, why she had never remarried.
He was in a good mood. Marcia's unexpected absence relieved him of the need to make some lame excuse for his lateness. He had been making too many such excuses lately. Marcia wasn't stupid. She would become suspicious. And he didn't want her to suspect him until he had sorted out his feelings, until he had decided what he really wanted to do. He didn't want to have a decision forced on him in the course of a stormy, emotional scene.
But he was in too good a mood to think of such things now. Maybe Nora had put him in this mood. It was pleasant to come home and find things in some semblance of order, to find someone besides Karen who was glad to see him. Even Nora's empty-headed chatter about astrology was a relief from Marcia's abstracted silences.
He hesitated at the door of his study. He didn't use it very often, and never for the work he was paid to do. That work had become mechanical drudgery. Here he sometimes went-less often than he used to-to fiddle with the plans of buildings he would never be asked to design. On his work board now was his half-finished rendering of an Olympic stadium.
He entered and switched on the light. "Jesus Christ," he breathed, as his initial shock gave way almost immediately to rage.
The room had been ransacked. Pictures had been smashed, the drapes torn down. Someone had destroyed his rendering by writing across it, leaning so heavily on the pencil that it had torn through the thick paper and left it hanging in shreds.
He stepped closer. The formation of the letters and their spacing were wildly erratic. Sometimes the writer had failed to space the letters at all, piling one on top of the other to produce a spidery blotch. Toward the end of the message, if that's what it was intended to be, the pencil had broken. Ken believed he might have produced writing like this if he'd first gotten so drunk he couldn't see, then gripped the pencil like a dagger in his left fist.
He studied it carefully. Only a few words and syllables could be deciphered: "my sist," "let in," "dog no god," and "Maeve."
He didn't recognize the handwriting, but no one's handwriting would have been recognizable if the pencil had been held as he'd imagined it had, if the writer had been impelled by insane rage.
He had no doubt at all that Melody was up to her old tricks.