Chapter 8

Clara had been in the library for twenty minutes and had not yet found a single book with a scorpion bookplate like the one she had shown Garnett. She was crouching in front of a low shelf, and, as she rose, her shoulder struck a small table on which a huge porcelain flower vase had been standing. The vase fell to the floor, splattering its contents over the hem and lower skirt of the dress of a woman who had been unobtrusively reading in an armchair near the table.

"I'm so terribly sorry," Clara fluttered. "I didn't know I was so close to your chair."

The woman smiled. "Don't worry about it, my dear," she said as Clara kept repeating her apologies. "It makes a woman twice as interesting if she changes her dress in the middle of the evening. But," she added, "if it will soothe your conscience any, you may come along and keep me company while I change."

"Oh, yes," said Clara, "that would make me feel better. I'd be glad to come." She followed the older woman out of the library.

Clara's new companion was one of those not-young, not-old women whom one so often finds at smart country houses. She was probably close to forty, but she could have passed for thirty with ease. She had gray eyes and a nose that tilted slightly at the end. Her step was that of a girl of twenty and her eyes were as bright and lively as those of a baby. But, over all these varied youthfulnesses, there was a rich cloak of maturity and poise.

"I haven't seen you here before," she said.

"This is the first time I've been here," Clara replied. "I've just met Mrs. Mason."

"Blanca is wonderful, isn't she? And it's an exhilarating place, too, don't you think?"

"I'm not used to it yet, and some of the people frighten me a little."

The woman laughed-a tinkle of tiny silver bells. "The people frighten you only because you see them acting perfectly naturally, and you're used to people who act perfectly unnaturally-that is to say, people who are always keeping up pretenses. At your age, you don't realize what a wonderful place this really is. This is the way the world ought to be, but isn't. A perfect anarchy. When you catch on to what it really means you'll appreciate it more and more."

"But it seems as if everyone wants to make love to me," Clara sighed. "And they just grab."

"Of course," the woman laughed. "Doesn't it make you feel good to have men really come out and try to grab you for a change, instead of hinting around the edges for hours and trying to liquor you up and put their hands all over you on the sly? I much prefer the out-and-out grabbers myself."

"I should think it would infuriate your husband to have his wife grabbed at," said Clara.

"Why should it? There's always someone else's wife for him to grab at. Only a lazy man can complain about such a system. If it hurts a man's vanity to know his wife is bored with his sex technique, well, he can posh up his vanity by working on some other wife who's bored with her husband. A lazy man wants to keep his own wife to himself even after being bored with her brand of loving for years simply because it's too much effort-physical or mental-to get somebody else's wife."

"But what about jealousy?" Clara asked.

"What about it? I suppose it exists. And, when it does, it's good for people. Gives their adrenalin glands a workout. At least they feel some sort of emotion for a change. Too little real emotion and too much fake emotion is what's wrong with the outside world. Self-hypnosis or hysteria or plain fraud masquerading as emotion. Most of it is just sentimentality, anyhow. You see me. My husband is here somewhere. He's with a woman. I don't know who. I hope she's pretty and I hope she's giving him a good time-but not a better time than I can give him when we get home. See? When we go traveling, we pick up a young couple if we can, and trade partners. I Like a young man to compliment me and sleep with me, and my husband-likes to have a pretty young girl fuss over him and make love to him. It makes him feel important. But we love each other, and we always come back to each other."

"It sounds too simple," Clara said. "There must be something wrong with it."

"You aren't very experienced, are you? Please don't be offended. I don't mean to be condescending. But an experienced woman either knows better than you seem to, or she's made a mess of her life. At least that's the way I see it. You see, I'm not trying to hold a husband. I don't need a meal ticket. I can earn my own living. I love my husband, but my big project in life is not to try to hang on to him. What I'm really trying to do is get on with the business of living a life as successfully and as happily as I can. Insofar as I succeed or fail, I keep or lose my husband, too-or at least his love, because he's no dummy. He wouldn't be able to love me if he couldn't respect me as a human being."

Clara appeared impressed, but she asked: "Do you believe that all the people here think like that? The people I saw making naked love on the lawn?"

"I don't know what they think. These parties are a kind of emotional explosion. You can see violent things around here if you want to: things that would bring a police raid if they got out. No one is forced to stay and watch, though, and no one is forced into participating. I stay because I like to be thrilled, and some of the things that happen here thrill me. It isn't always the things that I think are nice that thrill me. Sometimes it's things that I realize are pretty beastly and vicious. But you can't pick the things that are going to thrill you, and it isn't very sensible to fight against being thrilled. You just get neurotic that way, and you don't have any fun. I'll watch or do anything that makes my heart beat with excitement, as long as I don't ruin my health or go to jail for it. That's part of my way of getting everything I can out of life."

They had reached the woman's room, which was in an annex to the main house, and Clara entered after her. The woman took off her damp dress and put it away. She stood before the mirror and both women gazed at the reflection of the older woman's body. Her soft breasts did not thrust out like a young girl's, but they had a full heavy sensuousness that was very attractive. The woman put a dab of lipstick on her mouth and two more dabs on each of her full, dark-brown nipples. "Kiss proof," she said. "It doesn't stain the dress, and the men like the look-and the taste-of it." She put perfume behind each ear and at the base of her throat, and touched it to her nipples, too. She cast a sidewise glance at Clara before sliding the dropper of the perfume bottle down under the band of her panties into her navel and across her Mount of Venus.

"If you want to help me," the woman said, "you can End a black dress in the closet. It's the one with the fringe at the neck." She took off her gray slippers and put them in the closet. Clara searched for the black gown in a second closet.

"Shoes, too," the woman called. Clara laid the dress out on the bed and put the black shoes with the high-tying straps on the floor near the bed. "And with a black dress I'll have to wear black step-ins. I hate to disappoint the men," the woman went on. "Or anyone," she added with a tinkling laugh. "The step-ins will be somewhere in that lower drawer."

Clara fumbled through the drawer. 'Tell me," the woman continued, "what did you expect when you came out here? Not people playing bridge and listening to the radio and talking about their jobs and businesses back in town?"

"I didn't think it would be like that," Clara replied, "but I don't know what I did think it would be like. I don't think I expected to find Chinese girls, and men with turbans and beards, and poets who want to run barefoot through my hair."

The woman laughed again. "I think I know what you were looking for. A grown-up college crowd. Telling dirty jokes and kidding around and doing a lot of drinking and nothing much else. Well, we've got some of the old boys from Princeton, too. There are all lands here. ... These stockings aren't the right shade. See if there's a darker pair, will you please? More purplish and less gray."

"I haven't met Mrs. Mason's husband yet," Clara said, continuing to rummage through the drawer. "What's he like?"

"Him? Marvelous. Beautiful when he's naked. Slender hips and balls like church bells. He has the same effect on women that a bull has-they gasp when they see him. I know I did the first time I went to bed with him. I was still gasping the next morning, too, but for quite another reason entirely. We're quite good friends."

As the woman spoke, she began rolling on the stockings that Clara had given her. She stood on one firm leg, pointed the other like a dancer and pulled the sheer silk along the lovely limb as though she were in love with its perfection. Her buttocks were high, with no hint of a sag, and they were just full enough to bulge slightly. In back, just above her buttocks, were two delightful dimples.

"How many men have made love to you?" the woman asked casually. There was a long silence, and then Clara said: "Two."

The woman did not question her. She remained silent for a minute. "I was trying to remember how long ago it was that I had only been had by two men," she said at last. "I don't believe I had much fun with them at the time. I didn't know a thing about having fun in bed-or under a bush for that matter. I was just plain uninformed when it came to sex. Today, one of these first two lovers sends me flowers and the other has a wife and a shoe business in Seattle. Don't you think it's depressing to have one's first lover grow into a wife and a shoe business in Seattle?"

"I never think about things like that," said Clara. "But tell me-would you let these same men make love to you today?"

"The one who sends me flowers, yes. I'll go to bed with almost any man who sends me flowers. I'm a sucker for flowers. Especially camellias. I love them. But not the shoe business, and a fat wife with woman's troubles. No, that dope will have to sleep with his own wife. That's what he got her for in the first place.

Damn him, even if he sent me flowers I wouldn't go to bed with him again."

As she spoke, the woman turned around, and Clara could see her whole nakedness for the first time. She caught her breath and gripped the arms of her chair with all her strength.

The woman just stood there, chattering away and fixing her stockings, not noticing the horror-stricken expression on the young girl's face. She stood with her legs planted firmly apart while she half turned her head toward the mirror and readjusted a lock of hair that had escaped from her carefully curled coiffure. The lines of her body rose in sleek slopes from her full thighs to her shoulders. Her breasts, the nipples turned slightly away from each other and still glistening with the perfume and lipstick on them, gave her shoulders an added solidity, balancing the gorgeous roundness of her hips. Very low on her belly, several inches below her navel and just above the curling mass of public hair-was a crimson mark the size of a half dollar-a mark which looked as though it had been burned into her flesh. It was a deliberate, man-made thing, obviously not a birthmark or a scar. It was shaped like a scorpion.