Chapter 7
Doris intended to put every problem, every worry, every suspicion out of her mind. She wouldn't think about whether or not her husband still loved her. She wouldn't wonder if he might not be making love to Leslie Stanton right now. There was no point in such speculations, she told herself, since he had had plenty of opportunities in the past and would have more in the future and she could hardly keep him in sight at every minute of the night and day.
She would simply put all that aside for this evening and have fun. Jack had been most circumspect in his behavior since that evening at the Faculty Town Club, the evening that had ended so miserably for her and Max, and she knew she could trust him to stay away from touchy subjects and to give her a good time. She excused herself from the other women, making vague references to plans for the evening, and took a taxi back to the hotel. She didn't trouble herself with the thought that the others would undoubtedly gossip about Jack's having brought her and would correctly guess that he was her plans for the evening.
Jack was already parked outside the hotel when she got there. She went up to her room alone and changed her clothes as quickly as possible. She put on a white party dress and gave thanks that she had remembered to have the fluffy skirt pressed. Someone had said something about rain being forecast, so she took out her hooded cream-colored raincoat.
The evening was quite young so they had time to drive about before dinner. They cruised the old streets she had once known so well, praised the oaks and mourned those elms which had fallen, the victims of blight. They stopped at a couple of outlying bars that had once been fashionable among the university crowd and drank toasts to the once decorated walls, now tattered or bare, and Doris was deeply pleased when one of the bartenders recognize her. "Since I've worked here, this place has been popular with the campus crowd about three times," he told her philosophically, "and around next year it's due to get popular again."
They drove country roads as the dusk fell around them. They passed old roadhouses and old parking places.
They passed one place where Jack had sometimes made love to her-and she wished that they had traveled a different road.
Finally Tack drew his car into the parking lot of Furgasons. It was an old mansion in the Georgian style, remodeled and extended, and Jack assured her that it still had a reputation for being the best restaurant in four counties.
The praise prove to be warranted. The traditional decor was comfortable and softly lighted without making it difficult to see across the table. There was no orchestra at that hour and by some miracle each table seemed to be soundproofed from the chatter and clatter of every other. When the martinis came, they were large and cold, yet hardly a drop of excess water was detectable. The steaks were rare with barely a raw spot, and the dark wine Jack ordered went with it perfectly. They ate and talked at luxurious ease, as if the night would never end and they had all the time in the world.
After dinner, Jack took her to a new roadhouse, one that had been built since Doris had left town. The eight-piece orchestra rated as superior, and they danced more numbers than they sat out.
At moments, as she glided over the dance floor in Jack's arms, she felt as if she had never been away. The four-year interlude with Max was a dream, a painful and degrading dream.
But she banished such feelings. She didn't want to think or feel or remember anything about Max at all. She wanted to relax and dance and feel that at this moment all was right with her world.
Wearied by the dancing and ready for another scene, they went to another bar, one with not too much nostalgia attached, and after a drink Doris noted that it was getting late. Soon the last round would be served.
Such being the case, Jack observed, they might as well wait for it-and Doris readily agreed. Jack's presence was warm and not much conversation was necessary.
After they got into Jack's car, Doris paid no attention to where he was driving until he pulled up in front of his apartment building. She worried: he wasn't going to spoil it, was he?
"I'd better get back to the hotel, Jack."
"A nightcap."
"I've had too much already."
"Oh, then you need coffee I Come on, lady, we're going to sober you up."
Well, she wasn't a child-she could take care of herself. She smiled and followed him.
In front of his door, he shushed her-"We've got to sneak you in past Audrey"-and she giggled. Once inside, she accepted his invitation to look around his three-room apartment while he put the coffee pot to work. She found the place to be roomy and comfortable, a big step up from the room where she used to visit him.
When he called her, she went to the kitchen, where he had two cups of coffee and a pint of Martell's ready. They settled down on opposite sides of the table. She had been prepared to ward off a pass as gently and firmly as possible, but now as they talked she began to doubt that the pass would come.
At the end of a long pause, he said, "Doris, be happy," and outside the building thunder growled, as if to dispute the admonition.
"I am happy," she told him. "This evening I'm quite happy."
"Be happy always."
"I try. Don't we all?"
He shook his head and sipped his coffee. "No. Some do not. Some prolong misery forever."
She tried to laugh. "But I'm not miserable!"
"All right, you're not miserable. I'm only saying that if you aren't perfectly happy, do something about it. Do it fast, soon, and with finality."
She fell into silence. This was one of the things she had hoped to avoid. "Let's not talk about it, Jack," she said at last.
"Then there is something wrong."
"Oh, look. There's something wrong between every man and woman. There's something wrong between any two people in the world whose lives touch for any length of time. So if there's something wrong-don't make a tragedy of it."
"If you're not happy, it's already a tragedy."
She got up from the table and went into the living room. She didn't want to be with him if he was going to talk like this. But he followed her.
"Doris, I'm not going to ask you to leave him for me. It would be the height of arrogance to assume that you could still love me after all this time. Even if I do love you. But if he doesn't love you, do leave him. Find someone else, someone you can find happiness and fulfillment and a good life with-"
"Jack, it wouldn't do any good!" The words broke from her like an involuntary sob.
"Of course, it would-"
"No-because my trouble-Is still-I" The one thing she wouldn't have dreamed of admitting, and she had said that aloud to him.
Jack slumped into a chair.
"Makes a big difference, doesn't that?" she said with an unhappy laugh. "Our Doris doesn't seem like such a prize any longer, does she? And our Maxie doesn't seem like quite such a rat if he occasionally casts an eye over the landscape for what's available."
The story had been told and Jack wasn't talking and it was time to head for the door.
Her hand was on the knob when he spoke. "I still say, leave him. Come back to me. We'll get you the medical help you need. If it takes another four years or five or ten or however many, we'll fight it out together. And I promise you that from the first time-the next first time-you let me make love to you, I'll never look at another woman. Stay with me tonight, if you will, and I'll be yours forever."
At that moment, Doris Flagg loved Jack Home. It was only for a moment and she had no physical desire for him and she wasn't in the slightest vulnerable to his desires. But at that moment she loved him.
And, loving him, she told him the truth.
"No, Jack. I've been through the therapy bit, and that won't work either. During the second year of my marriage, my analyst came to know me only a little less than God does. And for a while analysis actually seemed to be helping me. But it fell through. The problem got worse again, worse than ever, and I can't say it's getting any better-"
She expected Jack to wilt further but he didn't. He stood up, looking at her with new interest.
"And in your psychiatrist's opinion you should have been cured?"
"He thought I was-or that I was well on the way toward it. He said it was time I was on my own-"
"And yet you couldn't with Jack."
Her voice wavered. "Oh, we will-we'll find the answer yet-I love him, Jack-"
"But you just said you were even worse after therapy and that you can't say you're getting any better!"
"Please don't throw my own words back at me "
His voice was harsh. "Doris, stop kidding yourself-"
"All right, I'm a lost cause!"
"You're nothing of the sort. You simply married the wrong man. You left me for him out of desperation and you called it love. Once you were cured, you still couldn't make the grade with him because something in you didn't want to-"
"That's not true!" Panic brought her voice up a level.
"And you know perfectly well in your heart that if you haven't been able to achieve success with Max by now. you never will. Never, Doris!"
"Will you please leave me alone-"
"Never. You are making a lost cause of your life, throwing it away, because you haven't got a chance in the world with Max. Hell, don't take my word for it-I'm not a psychiatrist. Ask your own. Do you think he won't back up what I say?"
She didn't want to believe what Jack said, but she didn't have an answer. When he spoke again, the urgency had gone out of his voice.
"I don't know. Maybe the real reason you couldn't was that you'd developed a permanent habit of failure. Maybe you felt guilt and resentment because you had married him. It's hard to say. Leave me out of it, when I want you so badly, but I'll say it. Leave me out of the picture. But leave him out of it, too. I remember how you used to kill yourself trying to. Just find someone else."
She went back to the kitchen, poured more brandy into her coffee, and drank it down. "I think I'd better go now."
As he drove her back to the hotel, the sound of the first rain and the warmth of the coffee and brandy brought back her earlier feelings of ease. She regretted that Jack had spoken as he had, but perhaps, considering his feelings, she had gotten off lightly.
"You don't hate me for speaking as I did?" he asked after he had pulled the car up to the curb.
"No, Tack. I've always had a special and very nice place in my heart for you. Now, more than ever."
He kissed her cheek.
She darted through the rain into the hotel lobby.
She realized for the first time as she entered her room that she half-expected Max not to be there, but his voice came to her through the dark: "Doris?"
"Yes."
She turned on the bedside lamp. Max was in bed, without pajamas as usual, the sheet pulled up to his waist.
"Have a good time?" he asked. "Lovely. Did you?"
"Been in this damned hotel room since late afternoon, wishing you were here. Didn't even feel like taking in a movie. Glad you had a good time, though."
It had never occurred to her that he might spend the evening alone, and somehow she was startled. "I sort of thought you'd be with Les Stanton."
"Oh, that...." He took a cigarette from the bedside table and lit it. "I wasn't going to mention it tonight, honey, but I'm afraid there won't be any contract."
"Darling, I'm so sorry!" He shrugged. "We'll live."
Yes, they'd live. She supposed that he was telling her that not only was the contract off but also anything else that had been going on between him and Leslie Stanton.
Or maybe there never had been anything.
She stripped to her underwear and went into the bathroom to wash off her make up. There she also finished undressing and put on a pair of fresh white pajamas. When she returned to the bedroom, Max had finished his cigarette. She kissed him good night, turned off the bedside lamp, and went around the foot of the bed to climb into the other side.
She yawned in the darkness and thought, God, what a crazy way to end the evening: talking about her frigidity with her ex-lover! Oh, well, it had been a delightful evening anyway. She wasn't going to let anything spoil it.
She felt Max moving toward her. and his arm came over her waist. Maybe he wanted a last kiss in bed. She turned her face toward him.
The shadow of his head moved toward her and their lips met. He kissed her several times, tenderly and tentatively. She whispered. "Good night, darling," and he kissed her again, harder.
His head rested between her breasts, and she patted it and combed his hair with her fingers. He stroked her for a moment, stopped as he brought his lips to hers once again, and moved his hand under her pajamas to her breast.
Suddenly she was extremely tired. She felt this way sometimes: the day took so much out of her that she simply could not go through the struggling attempt to make love, and her back started aching and weariness made her almost ill.
She didn't want to go through this tonight. Why spoil a beautiful evening by ending up the way she had the last time she had loved Max? Or the time before. Or before. Or....
Max's kiss played at her lips and his fingers tugged at her nipple arousing her in spite of herself. She had to stop him fast.
She pushed him away. "No, Max...."
He persisted.
"Max, not tonight, please."
"You'll be all right."
She remembered what Jack had said. You haven't got a chance in the world with Max. Maybe it was true.
She hadn't the slightest reason in the world to believe otherwise. In any case, she didn't want to rise to the challenge tonight.
"No-I'm too tired. Max, I just don't want to!"
He drew away from her and she felt him looking at her in the dark. Then he rolled over to his own side of the bed.
She felt guilty. "Tomorrow, darling." She reached for his hand, found it, and held it. Neither of them moved and she couldn't hear him breathing.
His hand pulled away from her and he sat up in the dark. He left the bed, went into the bathroom, and turned on the light. After a moment, she heard a strange hoarse sound from the bathroom, a sound that oddly terrorized her: she could have sworn that Max was crying.
When he returned, she couldn't tell if he had been or not. Hastily, he began pulling on slacks and a sport shirt, socks and shoes.
"What's the matter? Where are you going?"
"Take a walk."
"But it's storming out!"
As if to emphasize her point, lightning cracked, thunder rolled, and the sound of dashing rain came harder and faster.
"Doesn't matter," Max mumbled. "Little walk, maybe a drive...."
"Max, come back to bed. We'll hold one another and listen to the rain."
Without pause, he continued dressing. He never faced her, he never looked at her. He went to the bathroom to turn out the light. A flash of lightning revealed him going to the corridor door.
"Don't go out, Max, please don't!"
"You get some rest, honey. Don't worry about me."
And then he was gone.
The night had turned chilly, and Doris pulled a blanket as well as the sheet up under her chin. It was an hour before she slept.
Leslie slept lightly. She curled up in the great, low Japanese bed, bundling herself up in a white sheet and a light comforter of pink nylon. When lightning pierced needles through the curtained doors to the veranda and thunder growled, she stirred a little and burrowed deeper under the covers, barely aware of the storm.
How many times the doorbell had rung before she heard it, she didn't know. When she was fully awake, it rang twice more. She hurriedly tossed the sheet and comforter from her naked body and turned on a light. The bell rang once as she hurried toward her closet, and she knew intuitively that it was ringing for the last time. She pulled on a white silk robe and knotted the cord about her waist as she went through the house toward the front door. One light was burning in the Living room: perhaps that was why she had a caller.
She opened the front door and looked out through the screen. No one was on the veranda but there was a dark shadow on the lawn.
"You, there," she called. "Who are you? What do you want?" Her heart was beating like a drum, and she couldn't have said it was because she knew the answer to both questions or because she didn't.
The dark shadow came back toward the door. "Saw your light," it said. "Thought maybe you were awake."
It was Max and he was soaking wet.
"Come in here! What are you trying to do, catch pneumonia? Come in-take off your shoes!"
Max did as he was told. At the moment, he looked like a rain-bedraggled dog. Leslie shut and locked the door. She took Max's shoes and socks and led him to the bathrom. She told him to take off all of his clothes and to hand them to her through the door. "You'll find clean towels in there," she said. "Get yourself thoroughly dry."
When he had handed her the rest of his clothing, she went to the basement and put everything but his belt, shoes, and the scant contents of his pockets, into the clothes dryer. Then she returned to her bedroom closet and selected another white silk robe-a man's robe. 'What to drink? Oh, yes the Courvoisier. Taking up where they left off. She got the brandy and two small snifters and put them on the low bedside table beside the lamp.
She took the robe, went to the bathroom, and tapped on the door.
"I have something for you to wear, Max. Are you ready for it?"
The door opened a crack and she handed him the robe. After a moment, he came out.
His smile was bleak. "You must want to kill me for breaking in on you like this."
"Never." She tried to bring warmth to his smile with her own. "How do you like your robe?"
"Nice. A man's robe...." He stopped, embarrassed by the indiscreet phrase.
"For my lovers." She made it a joke.
"Been many of them?"
"Not so many. And none I truly loved."
He didn't resist as she led him toward the bedroom. He was almost too docile, too tractable, like a creature with no manhood left.
She sat him down on the edge of the bed and poured two brandies. "Drink this. Better make the first one fast."
They drank in silence and she poured another round.
"And now, Max, do you want to tell me?"
It was a while coming. "I guess I'm licked. Whipped. I've tried with Doris, Doris has tried, but that's no good and that'll never be any good."
He sobbed and turned away from her. The limp bend of his back, the way his head hung, sickened Leslie. She had wanted him to be a man but he was more of a shell or a simulacrum. Not a man, she thought, but a whipped animal.
"Are you going to get out?" she asked. "Or are you going back to let her kill you?"
He shook his head. "I don't know."
She moved closer to him, put her arms around him, and they leaned together, huddling like children. "I think I know what's wrong, darling."
"I don't want to talk about it." ; "Of course not. But you're going to be all right.
You're going to stop thinking about how things have been for you. Because from now on things are going to be different." She put one hand under the top of his robe and scratched his chest. "Do you know why I let you come in here tonight, darling?"
"You should have shot at me-"
"No. Because I love you."
"I'm not sure there's much of me left worth loving."
Her nails made lazy circles on his chest. "You're wrong. You're still a man, and I'll prove it to you. Kiss me, Max."
They kissed, and the kisses were long and loving and gentle. They kissed and drank brandy and kissed some more. They listened to the storm, and she nibbled at his throat and his tongue touched her ear.
"Warm and dry now?" she whispered. "The chill all gone out of you?"
"All gone."'
"And I'm warm too. You and I, we're warm together.
His hand at last found her breast, and in time she bared it so that he could kiss the nipple. "You're beautiful, Les."
Her breath caught at the pressures he was giving her, the movement of her breast at his hand. "You haven't seen everything, darling, but you may, if you wish to...."
Then there was new urgency in his love-play, but he stayed above her waist. She reached toward his robe and found him, passionate and wanting. He choked on his own startled breath, and he pushed her caressing hand away. His hand went to her and his lips returned to her breast. As she trembled at his ministrations, she pulled her belt loose and shoved her robe away After all the days and nights of longing she was finally completely revealed to him: shimmering breasts and rolling hips with their strips of tan a little lighter than the rest of her body. She was ready and waiting.
"You are beautiful!" he said. "All of you-so beautiful, so desirable!"
She untied the cord at his waist and pulled his robe open and she felt faint at the sight of his wiry-muscled torso, the hair thick on his chest, his passion. Her teeth and lips found his chest, his waist, his legs and went back to his mouth.
"I love you. Max," she said, "I love you and I want you to love me " But she didn't use the euphemism when she told him what she wanted: she used the honest word and she repeated it when she said, "Love me, Max, please Please love me now."
For an instant, she felt him shriveling in her arms.
"I may not be so good, Les-the way I am now I may be too fast."
She laughed. "I don't care, darling. Fast, slow-do whatever you want to do. Do anything you please! But please. please love me, darling!"
He pushed her back to the bed. He cast his own robe aside and he lay down beside her. exploring her eager body for a moment more while she almost sang the words: "Oh. love me. Save me with all your love and let me love you. Let's love and love the whole night through."
And then he was looking at her. No man had ever appeared to her more beautiful, more desireable. more completely virile and passionate. As trite as the concept was, it occurred to her that he looked like some ancient god about to love a mortal woman.
As he approached, she tried to help him. When he took her, it was as if he were striking her with a magic wand, and her cry was like that of a banshee.
And then she had him!
She had him at last, and she would never let him go. He would leave her for a time, as a man must, but from now on she would always get him back, she would always have him again.
He was no whipped dog, no simulacrum, now. As she met his demanding lust, she remembered her dreams be like this, and then the dream vanished in favor of the reality: the flickering fires of her body and the dance of her steaming breasts. Never before had she loved and been loved like this.
That was, as he had said, fast, and she didn't care because she was with him. As she recognized the meaning of his animal cry, she let herself go to the throes of the final wild moment.
Max screamed.
His eyes rolled up, his teeth were bared, and he moved like the rapid fire of a double-action revolver, murderously, time after time. And each time, her own final moment thundered harder, and she screamed with him.
Then he was becoming gentle again and she let her fingers relax on his back.
They worked slowly, his head sank to her chest, and he began to sigh.
But this wasn't all over, she knew: she had him now. now she had him and he had her, and they would never let one another go.
She had won.