Chapter 4

Leslie felt a shiver of excitement AS she looked toward the swimming pool. It was the excitement of knowing that she might see Max Flagg at any moment. Her gaze circled the sparkling pool carefully. She didn't see Max. But there was Doris, flanked by Jack and Audrey, so Max must be around somewhere. Or perhaps that was wishful thinking.

She went to Cabana No. 21 and knocked before trying the door. It was just possible that Max might be in there this very minute. But there was no response to her knock, and she used her second key to enter.

Inside, she found, besides Doris's clothes, a pair of men's slacks and a sport shirt on a hanger. She smiled.

Max was here. He was somewhere very close to her at this very moment.

She stripped off her clothing and looked at herself in the mirror. She imagined Max's image in the mirror beside her; naked excited, intent on taking her as intent as she was on being taken. Soon, darling, soon.

Someone knocked on the door and a voice called out, "It's me sweetie. Audrey."

Leslie wished she had something on but decided that it wasn't wise to keep Audrey waiting. She opened the door and let the younger woman slip in.

"Well, look at the yummies," Audrey said, viewing Leslie's nude body.

"Hands off, baby. Mommy's going for a swim." Leslie tried to sound light-hearted and today it wasn't difficult.

"Saving yourself for Maxie?"

"Don't be silly."

"I'm not being silly-I'm no fool. But I can tell you this. I've been keeping my eyes on Max and Doris, and I can make you a guarantee. Those two are in love. I mean really in love."

Leslie was chilled. Audrey, she knew, was not always imperceptive. Was it possible that Max Flagg had been conning her? After all, there was a contract at stake, one that was probably very important to Max.

But that was silly. No matter how important the contract, the attraction between her and his man had been real. And he hadn't been faking the several rather slighting references he had made to his wife, she was positive. He had given her the contract to read a couple of days ago here at the Faculty Cabana Club, and he hadn't made a single reference to it since.

No, surely Max Flagg hadn't been conning her. He wasn't that kind of an operator.

"Certainly, they're in love," she told Audrey. "I'm glad to have my own impression verified."

Audrey laughed softly and derisively, and Leslie had a strong desire to hit her. Her abiquitous presence, her obvious willingness to make trouble, was becoming bloody damned tiresome.

Leslie took a two-piece yellow bathing suit out of the small chest of drawers she kept in the cabana. It was as close to a bikini as one dared to get at the Faculty Cabana Club, and she knew it did things for her that a bikini couldn't do for most other women.

She half expected Audrey to try to delay her putting the suit on, but all she did was grin and say, "Well, good luck, mommy. He'll never know what hit him."

Leslie ignored the remark. Audrey was only fishing for some confirmation that her suspicions might prove to be correct.

Without bothering to put on a cap, Leslie left the cabana and raced for the pool, leaving Audrey behind. As she ran, she saw Max bobbing in the water on the other side. She did a racing dive, felt the fine thrashing of bubbles around her, and knifed through the cool water in his direction. When she guessed that she was nearly to him, she surfaced, took two strokes, and said, "Hi!"

His grin was spontaneous. He was glad to see her. "Hi, beautiful. How's my favorite mermaid today?"

"Favorite?"

His shrug suggested an element of embarrassment. "My wife likes to swim, but not as much as you do."

She pushed herself down into the water, grabbed his knee and pulled him under. He kicked and struggled to get away from her, and she enjoyed the feeling of a man's muscles against her palms.

Pulling away, he twisted beneath her, and, as he returned her touch, she was flooded with warmth. She wondered if she effected him the way he effected her. Surely, she must.

They surfaced and laughed at one another, but there was a kind of strain, a special excitement, in their laughter. Yes, she did effect him.

"Max," she said after a moment, "I have a confession to make to you."

"What's that?"

"Since you gave me that copy of the contract, I've hardly glanced at it."

"No hurry."

"Isn't it important to you?"

"Extremely. It affects my entire future with my company, in all probability."

"Then I'd think you'd want matters settled right away so that you can relax and enjoy your vacation-"

"Look." His voice suddenly took on a special tension. "The sooner you sign that contract, the sooner I lack an excuse for seeing you."

They stared at one another.

Max tried to bring lightness back into his voice. "I have no right to say that, but it's true. I get a big kick out of being with you, Les. Let's just say that I enjoy the privilege of using your membership in the club here."

"Yes. Let's just say it's that." For now, she added silently.

They played in the water a few minutes more, and Leslie swam away from Max. She had seen so much of him in the last few days that she knew it must look suspicious, especially considering the fact that this community often saw illicit meanings where the facts were completely innocent.

Both to allay suspicion and under the theory that it was a good policy to know the "enemy," Leslie had made a practice of spending time with Doris as well as with Max. She knew this was un-likely to fool anyone but she could at least refer to it as a point in her favor should Audrey or someone else raise the voice of gossip too loudly. Now she made a note to herself not to let Doris get away without spending some time with her.

But first she must see Jack Home.

She climbed out of the pool, only half-conscious of the eyes that were turned toward her sleek, wet body, and went in search of Jack. She found him in the club bar-and-grill enjoying a Tom Collins.

"How's it going with Doris?" she asked in a low voice as she slid onto a bar stool beside Jack.

"Oh, she's fine," he said casually. "Same sweet girl and all that yok."

Leslie ordered a gin buck. "Attractive as ever?"

"She is attractive, isn't she?"

"You know what I mean."

"Deed I do." He said it as if he did not.

She ignored his affectation of disinterest.

"Then you won't mind taking her to the party at the Faculty Town Club tomorrow night."

For the first time Jack's ears seemed to prick up. "I had assumed that she'd be going with her husband if with anyone."

"I mentioned the party to Max. I suggested that we might all go together. If you're free."

"I see no objection to that."

"A foursome. You and me, Max and Doris."

Jack smiled. "Or however you want to cut it."

"Still go for her, don't you, Jack?"

He shrugged and looked away. "It's been a long time. About four years."

"How time flies!"

They completed their arrangements. Leslie finished her drink and went back to the pool. Doris was still sitting in the same canvas chair in which Leslie had seen her earlier. She was quite a picture, Leslie noted, in her one-piece aqua suit.

Leslie sat down beside her, saying, "Hi, there."

"Oh-hi." Doris turned a smile toward her. It was a warm sun-lazed smile, sincere, whatever Doris's suspicions about her husband might be.

Did she have any idea of the growth of special feeling between Leslie and Max? If she did, she might well be suppressing it. Or perhaps Jack Home was proving to be an adequate distraction.

"I hope your husband thought to tell you," Leslie said. "Yesterday I suggested that both of you come to the Faculty Town Club party tomorrow night."

"He did say something about it."

"Good. Jack Home will be going with us, too. The four of us should have a lot of fun."

"Yes. Jack's a nice fellow."

Leslie relaxed beside Doris, trying to "read" her, trying to get the feel of her mood. She was fairly sure there was big trouble between Max and his wife: she could feel something between them that was wrong aM wrong, but she couldn't be absolutely certain what it was. Doris was Jack's lost love. Did that cast any light on the matter?

She remembered that Jack had said or hinted that Doris had some problem in frigidity. If that were the case, the problem might very well have carried over into, and poisoned, the marriage.

Which was all to Leslie's advantage.

She was working slowly. Ordinarily, if she and some male had found that they attracted one another to an exceptional degree, she would have seen to it that they went to bed at the first available opportunity. Love generally worked out best that way. They would have kept on loving until one or the other was bored, parted friends, and that would have been that.

But matters were different with Max. He was married and despite an marital troubles, he might well be deeply attached to Doris. He might succumb to a weekend orgy, get the trouble out of his system and be done with Leslie.

And, more and more, she was intent on not being done with.

More and more, she wanted never to say, "It's been fun-farewell!" to Max Flagg.

Hence, their relationship must go deeper than merely going to bed. It must become the harmony of the whole being, the attraction of the soul as well as of the body.

Although she tried to avoid referring to the concept, tried almost superstitiously to avoid it, Leslie knew, quite well what she was looking for.

A true marriage. A husband.

And that meant working to preclude completely and desperate element in her relationship with Max. It meant sinking her hooks into him far more deeply than Doris ever had, so deeply that Doris could never get him back.

And why not? she rationalized, why not when it might be as well for Doris as for Max and herself? If this were a marriage gone sour, Doris would be far happier with someone other than Max, wouldn't she? Jack Home, for example, was still interested in her; she might have made her worst mistake in tossing over Jack for Max.

Leslie became aware that perhaps dishonesty had entered her speculations, and she had a moment of self-hatred as a result.

If you're trying to steal her man she thought, you're trying to steal her man! After thirty-four years of playing it fairly decent and straight, you've gone mean-witch and you're trying to steal another woman's prize to keep yourself happy, so have the grace at least not to be a hypocrite about it!

Leslie was an attractive woman in a rather full-blown way, Doris reflected, and she was a pleasant person to be with. It was quite understandable that Max should like her and spend time with her, even ignoring the business aspect of the situation.

And it was quite natural that she, Doris, should be jealous. But she had to remain aware that it was only jealousy, only in her own mind, only a part of the sickness in her own soul.

But, on the other hand, perhaps her jealousy had some grounds-thanks to the way she herself treated Max. After what happened a few nights ago, for instance, was it surprising that Max hardly looked at her? Would it be so surprising if he went to another woman to salve his ego?

She winced as she remembered how she had turned on him because of her own frustration. But she had been trying so hard, so desperately hard, and then he had gone right ahead, thoughtlessly, taking his own pleasure-!

There she went again. Blaming poor Max. When she knew perfectly well, much as she hated to admit it, that more than once she had virtually destroyed him with the razor edge of her vicious tongue.

Oh, to hell with it. Why think of such things?

And yet the image of Max and Leslie persisted in springing to her mind, sickening her.

She shook her head as if to clear it and looked around the pool. Where was Jack?

And why should she look for him?

Funny. She had been afraid to see him again. The idea of her and Max and the man who had at one time taken her to bed, all being in the same room, trading small talk, was extremely distasteful. It didn't help in the slightest that Max didn't know Jack had been her lover. If anything that might make things worse, because Jack could ignore the fact that Max had cut him out and could take the smug male, "I was there first" attitude, as if she and Max both were merely discards. She had seen men behave that way before.

But things hadn't worked out that way at all. There was no slightest hint of condescension on Jack's part, no trace of male one-upmanship toward either Max or her. The result was that Doris now felt guilty for underrating the degree of Jack's sophistication.

And she felt disarmed when he made clear that he was still attracted to her. He had lost her long ago and had never gotten over that loss. He knew of the inability she had once had and might have still, but it made no difference to him.

He wanted her.

He hadn't said that in so many words. He had hardly hinted. But neither had he hidden the fact behind any kind of mask. And his presence helped her to reaffirm her womanhood and desirability when her failure with Max had torn her confidence apart.

She had never made complete love with a man until she met Jack. Oh, there had been a certain amount of light petting, of course, but even in that respect she had never gone as far as most of the girls she knew in her dorm here at school. After she had graduated, her behavior had remained the same for a long time, on the undergraduate level, as she now thought.

She took a secretarial job with the university. She dated and had fun and was a "good girL"

But what was a good girl? She noted that most of the girls she had started school with were married. The "heavy petters" were married. Those whom she suspected or knew to have slept with boys were married. Some married the boys they had played pre-marital games with. Some married others. On the whole, they all seemed happy regardless of past history. The only exceptions of which she was positive, in fact, were a couple of girls who had been as cautious in their pre-marital years as she was being.

That didn't prove any praticular pattern of behavior to be right or wrong or best or worst. But it did tend to suggest that the pattern Doris had been following wasn't an absolute requisite for marital happiness in the years ahead.

Doris began to re-evaluate the pattern of her life. Then she met Jack.

Perhaps it had been an infatuation. Perhaps she had simply wanted to get married and had left behind by her girl friends, many of whom had children by that time. Or perhaps she had been truly in love with Jack.

In any case, she let him take liberties she had never allowed before. Little by little, the bars went down. She let him touch her bosom. She let him unfasten her brassiere. The suspicion that he would lose respect for her and that he would come to want her for only one thing was still with her, and, to her surprise, the more she let him touch her the more he seemed to care for her.

He told her he loved her.

He told her that when he received his next raise they'd be married. He asked her, almost implored her, to marry him. And she consented.

They floated in the warmth of their mutual love and desire, and the bars went down further yet. With increasing frequency, she visited the room he called his home. There her young bosom was entirely bared for him. There, for the first time, she rid herself of her panties for a man. There, for the first time, she saw a passionate man naked.

And, inevitably, in a moment of pain, they were both sacrificed.

Exquisitely, even with the pain, and she had never loved Jack more than when he reached his final ecstasy and thundered a dozen times or more.

But that was incomplete. The next time would be even better.

But that wasn't.

Nor was the time after that.

But she learned from the books she acquired from the library that these things frequently took practice for a woman.

She practiced.

She stayed all night with Jack more often and coaxed him several times each night, and each time she worked to reach a conclusion.

Unsuccessfully.

And then one day Max appeared in her office. She might have seen him once or twice before, but if so she hadn't noticed him. But from the moment she did notice him, he was never out of her mind.

He took her out that night. He was near her every waking hour of that weekend.

Jack was ignored, forgotten. Max came back each evening, even when it entailed driving a hundred miles or more. Jack was nothing, Max was everything. Surely she had been fooling herself about Jack. Or how could she feel this way about Max?

She saw Jack, broke off their affair as gently as she could under the circumstances, and continued to live with Max only on her mind.

After a few weeks, he proposed marriage and she accepted. A date was set.

But how could she wait until the ceremony? By now she was used to having a man, even if she had never been satisfied, and the only man she wanted was Max. She yearned for him.

On the next Friday evening, she went to his hotel, knowing that he usually checked in before calling her. She met him out front and, after he had visited the desk, she went with him to his room, quite shamelessly ignoring the presence of following eyes and the bellhop who carried Max's bags.

When the bell hop was gone and Max had washed up, she threw herself at the arms of her man.

"I love you, Max. Tell me you love me."

"I love you more than life."

After a moment, she dared. "Darling, would you think me quite shameless if...."

"Tomorrow I had planned to move to a motel..

"You mean, you were going to...."

"If you'd let me. I don't want to wait, Doris. I can't wait. This is driving me crazy, holding you, touching you, but never really loving you."

"I want you to, Max. You're my man. I want my man."

They kissed and she wanted him so badly at that moment that she wished he wouldn't bother to take off all their clothes, just take her as quickly as possible. But he insisted on stripping her naked and taking off all his clothing, and she was glad. Her emotions hit a higher pitch than they ever had before, long before he took her, and she knew that when he did take her, everything would be all right.

He took her.

He loved her leisurely and cried out in the agony of his peak.

But she was left unsatisfied.

Well, she told herself, it was their first time together, so the results should have been expected.

But the results didn't change the next time or the next. By the time they were married, she was quite worried, but she kept telling herself that everything would work out all right.

It didn't.

The next year was a journey into hell. Every month their situation was worse. She constantly expected an improvement that never came. Their life together ceased to be one of love and became a series of desperate, strenuous, soul-consuming wrestling matches, each one culminating in a bitterness that was close to hate.

Max prevailed upon her to seek psychiatric aid, and she finally acceded to his wishes, though it took all the nerve she had to go to her first session. It took just as much nerve to revive her hidden memories, to retain and describe in detail her worst dreams, to be completely truthful in telling of her relations with Max and Jack.

But, oddly enough, the world didn't fall apart with each revelation. Neither what she told nor what she learned destroyed her, though she more than half expected it to.

Bit by bit, it all come to light: the fears and fantasies of the past that poisoned her present. The unallayed Freudian complexes were brought to light and made laughable; the childhood warnings against self-abuse and he danger of madness entailed, with all the concurrent guilt she had stored up, were rendered harmless. Doris began to know the truth about herself and about the world around her. The world brightened.

Gradually her relations with Max improved in every respect. Although total success in bed didn't come, they were closer, and Doris occasionally found a touch of something beyond anything she had ever experienced before.

After a year of therapy, she was certain that she was on the verge of success, and the sessions were brought to a close.

It was true that a few months later something was still missing. But she thought, if only she tried a little harder. Oh, she had been trying hard, but she must try harder yet.

She tried. And the harder she tried, the worse matters became. Rapidly she and Max descended right back to the hell from which they had so arduously climbed.

The bed became an instrument of torture. At times she became completely cold, Max completely impotent.

Still she struggled. Nothing.

Nothing but failure, nerves that clammered like a thousand telephones, loathing for Max and herself that sickened her.

Yet she tried because she loved him and because she needed his love and to be loved.

She knew that he was trying, too, of course. Even after she was reasonably certain that he had turned away from her and toward Claire Johnson. She visited his office one afternoon to find the information that the Johnsons had separated.

She hated Max for that and yet she couldn't blame him. Max had to save himself. What an irony if she got what love from Max she did through the grace of Claire Johnson. What a bitter draught to drink, that Doris had to lose her husband to another woman in order to have any expression of his physical love at all!

When, after four years of marriage, a long vacation presented itself, Doris looked on it as a great opportunity. They would be away from New York; Max would be away from Claire. There would be few or no distractions. They would make it a second honeymoon, far better than the first one and, at long last, they would achieve total marriage.

She prepared for the trip carefully; both her wardrobe and her state of mind.

Dreams, illusions were quickly bled away in the wound of recurrent failure.

She was as patient and unblaming with Max as he was with her, at the start of the trip. She had by now come to the point of exciting herself artificially in the hope it would carry her across the finish line. She covertly eyed handsome filling station attendants, truck drivers and teen-aged boys. She indulged in fantasies which she hoped would help to bring her to completion in some motel room that night. She dressed seductively at bedtime.

She failed.

She was failing still.

But she had to keep on trying. No matter how much she cursed Max, no matter how much she hurt him and he her, she loved him and she had to make their love complete.

Or maybe she was fooling herself.

She sometimes wondered. Had she turned to Max because of her frustration with Jack Home? Would things have turned out differently if she had remained with Jack?

She was a good girl, this Doris, Leslie thought. A good girl and a sad girl. It was impossible to escape the impression.

My God, she should be trying to help the poor kid if the problem was what she thought, not trying to take her husband away from her.

But Leslie couldn't afford to think in those terms. Better to remember that the all had a bit of life left to live, barring bad luck, and if Doris's Life had gone badly with Max, maybe it would go better with another man.

More hypocrisy?

Jack appeared from behind them and said hello. Doris looked up and smiled at him.

Good. Hurray for our team. Take her, Jack. Take the blonde witch to bed with you. Give her the whole world and take her out of little Leslie's hair.

"Me for the water," Leslie said. She arose, took a long step to the edge of the pool, and dived, cutting the water like a blade.

She surfaced, swam a few strokes, and looked over her shoulder. Jack was settling into the chair she had recently occupied and Doris, still smiling, was turning toward him.

Audrey was hovering nearby. May she drop dead a thousand times consecutively and simultaneously.

Leslie felt mean, vicious. It was one way to keep to her intention.

She looked around for the man she intended to seduce for a lifetime and she saw him; Max Flagg.