Chapter 2
Nan had been very much Ed Mikell's woman for the sixteen years they were married. She'd come to him-well, not quite a virgin, perhaps, but not quite experienced either. She'd been raised small-town Catholic, poor and strait-laced, and only her bright and agile mind and the striking beauty that accompanied it had shown any sign of raising her out of the Polish, steel-town ghetto in which she'd been born.
That same beauty, however, had been a two-edged sword. It won her attention-and then her mind had won her the scholarship to Bryn Mawr that had made her bid farewell to Pigiron City. But it had also severely restricted her sexual education. Her brothers, tough street-fighters, quick to protect her good name, had at the same time protected her from anyone who might have wished to further her education in this line. One boy did-Johnny Bobrowicz; she'd never forget him-and her brother Stash had broken his arm for him, to the tune of an obscene Polish tirade that could be heard all the way to the end of the street She hadn't had the nerve to go back to school for two days after that And after that her dates ended promptly at ten o'clock.
She'd thought things would change, away at school. She'd even changed her name, a little anyhow, thinking that what plain Anna Karpowa wouldn't do, Nan might. (She hadn't had the nerve to do anything about that plonky Polack last name; her family'd never speak to her again.) But keeping up with her grades had come much harder back East, in the Quaker country. There were always so many distractions. And it had taken all her nerve and Polish stubbornness to get her all the way through to her degree-and then Ed had come into her life.
She'd never expected to marry millions. She'd raised her hopes, perhaps, to the point where she'd meet a man with a bright future, and she'd help him along, and they'd be in six figures, perhaps, at the end of his career. And that in itself was an audacious dream for a steel-town girl to have. She'd have settled for much less.
But she never had a chance. Ed had met her on her first job, a fresh-out-of-school summertime thing she'd taken at a suburban Philadelphia TV station. She'd been at work writing the evening news report-it consisted of retyping and cueing a series of clips from the UPI wire-when Ed had blundered in looking for Mr. Hovis, manager of the station. He hadn't found him, Ed always said later. But he'd found something much more to his liking.
It'd been a whirlwind courtship, and their honeymoon had taken them to places she'd dreamed of, but had never imagined herself visiting: Monte Carlo, Ibiza, Mallorca. And in each of these places Ed had friends, and old girl friends, and social and business contacts waiting for him. She'd always felt as if she were going along as part of the furniture. This world was Ed's: the world of the house in Norristown and the house in Bal Harbour and the house in Palma and the house in...well, simply everywhere. There'd been a place open for him on the Main Line, but Philadelphia bored him. He'd bounced back and forth between divorced parents all during his childhood; he was a cosmopolite at twelve, he'd told her, with so many stickers on his luggage that the leather could only be seen at the handles.
But it was all Ed's. As she was Ed's. Her life was arranged by Ed's schedule, and that had much to do with the schedule of the Eastern Petroleum Company's conglomerate interests. You went to such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time because so-and-so would be there, and getting a chance to talk to so-and-so in a social, just-friends context was worth a single firm's annual payroll. And if you were Ed Mikell, you took your wife with you.
Thus she'd lived all those years on the road. And it had been a natural thing, in the kind of circles that Ed traveled in, to put your only daughter, when she came, under the care of a nanny from the first, and then send her off to boarding school as soon as it was decently possible. Nan had had Mickey, and had loved her from the first. But Ed's schedule had taken her away from the child almost immediately. Now they hardly knew each other.
And when Ed had died...Nan had quietly come apart. And then she'd just as quietly, with all her stolid Polish stubbornness to draw on, put herself back together again, called the bankers in, reorganized the business, and taken over as much of Ed's complex schedule of activities as she could handle. He'd been chairman of this, honorary vice-president of that Very well, she took over these functions as a dead politician's wife might while the limelight lasted. Weekly they brought her checks to sign; daily her private secretary went over her schedule with her and told her about this flower show, that museum dedication, the varied activities she was expected to grace with her presence.
And it was all still Ed's. Nothing was hers.
Not even fifteen-year-old Mickey was hers. The two met several times a year at school vacations; they had little to say to each other. Mickey clearly thought Nan was some sort of wind-up Barbie doll her father had bought Nan secretly thought Mickey a terrible little prig, and wondered if she weren't hanging around with the wrong crowd of people off there at school, or away on those summer-camp excursions.
This had gone on for something like two years now, since Ed's sudden death. She'd attend religiously to the functions people expected her to attend to, and then retire to whichever house the schedule required her to occupy during that season: to read, to exercise (for some reason, the upkeep on Her still beautiful body was important to her), to watch television, to...solitary pursuits.
It hadn't always been this way. She'd tried to accept some of the masculine sympathy she'd been offered in the months that had followed Ed's passing. But the choices a woman had at the top weren't much better than the ones she had at the bottom. The men were rich drunks, sexually inadequate even for a normal woman, much less for a woman whose responses (Ed had said, ever so gently, one time) were slower than most. Or they were climbers, cozying up to her with little thought in mind but her money. She'd had a handful of experiences with either kind, and quietly wished she were either back in Pigiron City, where the wives cried out in abandon, deep into the night, as their lusty husbands, poor but virile, plowed them to sleep, or out in that hazy, middle land she'd never known-and where, she quietly suspected, the action really was.
And in the end, she'd sent all her suitors packing. She wanted no part of them. She wanted...well, what did she want?
"What do I want?" she said one morning. And, sitting up in bed with her breakfast, she suddenly pushed the tray away. She started to ring the bell for Beatrice to come and take it away, but something made her stop. And, hugging her knees under the light sheet, she let her mind run.
A day or so before she'd had that embarrassing-and profoundly shocking-experience with the young cataloguer from the library. She hadn't forgotten it. She had been deeply disturbed by the clear implications of it. She was getting...well, sex-starved. And that wasn't so bad in itself. That was curable. But....
But she'd clearly felt herself attracted to the girl. To a girl! And she'd openly flaunted her nakedness at the young woman-gloried in it Was something wrong with her? Was she going off the deep end? Turning...lesbian?
But no; that was impossible. She was as normal as blueberry pie. She probably needed a man. She needed, well, perhaps a change of scenery. Or a change of friends. Or....
Friends? She hadn't any friends. What she had, after all these years, was Ed's friends. There wasn't a soul left in the world that she could talk to. Except....
But of course!
Wouldn't it be nice to see some of the girls from school again? Mary Alice Carpenter, for example? Her old roommate and confidante?
Nan scampered out of bed, wearing only her shortie nightgown, and went to the bureau for notepaper. She'd write Mary Alice today, right away. Her address would be in the Class Reunion brochure that came last month. And she'd figure out a way for the two of them to get together to talk over old times, old boyfriends, Hoop Day at Bryn Mawr, all the old jokes. They'd have a fine time. And maybe Mary Alice (who had always seemed so sexually secure, so sure of herself) could put her back on the right track. And so thinking, she plopped her bare fanny down on the cold leather seat and began writing.
But it wasn't so good that night. And the self-doubts, the fears, all of it came roaring back. And Nan Mikell went to the bar four times, mixing herself a more deadly double Martini each time, until her head reeled from the sudden ingestion of that much alcohol. It was a hot night, and that didn't help much either. She put the last drink down, kicked her shoes off, and sauntered across the room. At the glass doors she stopped, switched on the underwater lights of the pool, and considered. A cold dip would clear her head. And she reached for her zipper.
Then she stopped again.
She knew what she would do.
And she pulled die side zipper of her dress down, all right, and stepped naked out of it And, still nude, one hand lightly running down her bare body, she went to the bedroom wardrobe for robe and sandals. Stepping into the light robe, slipping the thongs of her beach shoes between her toes, she thought angrily of the loneliness of the past year. And she shook out the dark mass of her auburn hair, letting it spill in abandon down her back as she strode purposefully to the deck, heading for the concrete stairs that led to the tunnel beneath the road to the beach.
The tunnel was dark, but there was an almost-full moon out that night and, once inside it, she could see ahead of her the light glimmering on the water-a full moon, or nearly so; no cover of darkness. Yet...the four doubles were working on her brain, making her giddy, reckless. What if? What if she? Well, why not?
And, stopping near the opening on the house side, with the whole length of the tunnel to cross and the whole width of the beach to traverse, she stepped out of her sandals, slowly undid the robe, and laid it carefully over the hand rail. And she walked, nude-the cool beach air coming in from offshore, to caress her sensitive skin-the length of the dark tunnel
As she walked, feeling the breeze, feeling the rough kiss of the beach grit under Her soles, a reckless and sensual scenario of lust was running swiftly through her mind, fed by the too-sudden spree of drinking, fed by the sultry night and the cool kiss of the breeze on her body, fed, most of all, by the mad dreams that had been keeping her in an almost constant state of arousal for weeks now. She was thinking: I'm naked, and unprotected, and vulnerable. There will be moonlight on my body on the beach. Anyone who wanders by can see all I've got. I will hide nothing. I will go to the water and swim. And I will not cover myself with my hands, or shrink away, if I am approached. And I will give myself, fully and completely, to the first person I meet on the beach, tonight, in the moonlight
The thought was daring; more so than any she'd ever allowed herself. And yet it was something she so desperately wanted to do that nothing in the world could have kept her from it. Abandon! Let yourself go! All the way! No inhibitions!
And then, inexorably, the thought crept in: To anyone? To the first person she met on the beach? Male...or female?
And the defiant demon inside of her said, Yes! Yes!
Crossing the deserted beach, so bare, so open to chance, was a strange experience. After all, her-robe-her entire covering, any protection she might have-all these were far behind her now. There was no one to whom she could call for help should she require it Yet...there was a strange feeling of power coursing through her limbs now, as she walked-she forced herself not to run, forced herself to a leisurely pace, to draw it all out-slowly across the sand. It was an oddly new feeling, and she wasn't sure what she thought of it all. And only when the cold surf sloshed excitingly around her ankles did she allow herself to look around.
The moonlight was a delicious color. The beach was bathed in an odd blue light that carried far down the sand; she could see people splashing in the surf far down the strand-just outlines, dark against the reflection of the moon on the sand. A thrill of some new and delightful kind went through her as she realized that they had only to come closer to catch her in the altogether, to.... But then an even odder sensation blotted this out
Someone was out there, watching her. Nearby. Someone standing in the shadow of the seawall.
She couldn't make out the figure. All she could see for sure was the light of a glowing cigarette-tip, there in the pitch-black shadows. But even if the cigarette hadn't been there, she fancied she could have told whether someone was there or not. There was an aura of...presence there.
Someone was staring at her. Slowly, insultingly, unhurriedly.
At the thought a sudden chill ran through her.
And a strange thing happened. Perhaps it was the giddiness that the drinks had brought on; she wasn't accustomed to that much alcohol in that short a time. Perhaps it was the odd mood of carefree recklessness, the eerie atmosphere of dream-like reverie, that had overtaken her when she first made up her mind to go naked to the beach. But it seemed, now, that the sounds of the crashing surf died, and the distant yells of the night bathers, far down the beach, went away, and there was no one there, in this strange moment of suspended time, but the two of them alone: she, naked and defenseless in the bright light of the waxing moon; the stranger, anonymous, clothed in darkness, watching her, smoking lazily in the deep shadow.
And the voice said: "You're beautiful."
It was a husky voice, halfway between a man's and a woman's: a deep, throaty, alto sort of voice.
It paused; she saw the unseen watcher take another puff on the glowing cigarette.
"Who's there?" Nan Mikell said, crossing her arms over her little breasts.
"Don't rush things," said the voice. "I want to look at you. You're quite lovely, you know. Don't cover your breasts. I want to see them. I want to look you over, slowly and carefully, before I make love to you."
"Make...love?" Nan said, shivering. "You! Don't come any closer." She drew back; one hand went to her crotch in the classic pose of Venus surprised.
"Lovely breasts," said the voice. "Lovely soft belly. Lovely soft hair on your lovely cunt Won't it be nice when I have my hand where your hand is?"
"Go away," Nan said, stepping back again. Her ankles were in the water now. "Go away. This beach is private."
"I'll bet you're excited, aren't you?" the voice said in that lazy drawl. "I'll bet you're terribly excited, under that feeling of fear you think you're supposed to have." And it was true: Nan had to tell herself that it was true. But the feeling she had on the surface was one much closer to panic and terror. She wanted to scream, to run...yet she stood still, silent all her resolves canceling each other out
"I'll bet your cunt is wet and juicy with excitement now, isn't it?" said the voice. It paused; the unseen speaker took another drag on the red cigarette. Then she saw the red ember describe a crazy arc to the sand and disappear. The speaker was truly invisible now. "Yes," the voice went on. "Feel it with your hand. That's where my hand will be in a moment That's where my lips will be. My tongue."
"Oh, my God," Nan said in a choked voice.
She was sure she knew to whom the voice belonged. The young beach boy, hardly out of his teens, whom she'd seen in the surf near her the other day. He'd been hard-muscled, bronzed, smooth-skinned-and breathtakingly beautiful, with his hard thighs scissoring in and out below the skimpy bathing suit he wore, with his hard buttocks pounding as he ran into the surf. He'd turned to her, just once, and smiled, showing strong young teeth, gleaming white. He hadn't spoken.
But this would be the voice he'd have: deep, but not yet a man's; throaty; pulsing with an innocent lechery that would belie the deliriously dirty words he'd say to her. This would be the way he'd talk: insinuating, commanding.
Something inside Nan Mikell snapped. And all the fear she felt flashed, just once, through her-and was gone. This was what she'd come here for, after all. This was the experience she'd dreamed of: the dark, quiet lover, coming to her alone and in near silence, ready to do her bidding. No, more: ready to do all the things she had never had the courage to ask a man to do. All the things she needed so desperately.
Her hand flashed again to her crotch, felt inside, touched her button, dabbed deliriously in the wet God, she was hot!
"Come," she said in a voice so husky she could hardly recognize it. "Come out in the light where I can see you. You can do anything you want. But come to me...naked...like I am." She was breathing hard as she said this; her hand went furiously back and forth in the auburn bush. Little chills of intense sexual anticipation went through her, near the pain threshold. She closed her eyes and opened them again.
A flash of moonlight lit a hand, emerging from the shadows, holding a large piece of cloth-a towel: no, a robe. The hand dropped the cloth on the sand. The figure stepped out on the beach before her, its every detail framed in the ghostly moonlight
The figure was smooth-skinned, lithe, beautiful. Its arms and legs were perfectly formed, strong, graceful. Its hair was dark and cut short Its hands reached out for her.
It had large, beautifully formed breasts. In the patch of hair below the flat belly there was no penis, no testicles. Her lover was a woman.
Breaking into uncontrollable screaming, Nan Mikell ran, wildly, aimlessly, into the dark tunnel, as fast as her legs, knotted with fear, could take her.