Chapter 1
Susan needed the car that bright December morning. She rushed to get the breakfast dishes cleared and washed so that the kitchen wouldn't look like the ruins of Pompeii when she came back. Gil was singing as he ran an electric razor over his face. He sang just a little off tune, but the effect wasn't unpleasant. He knew the words to a lot of songs and Susan liked to hear his boisterous voice ringing through the house. His singing meant that, for a little while at least, he wasn't worrying about the business.
She had just finished running a damp sponge over the table in the dining area adjoining the kitchen when Gil came in. He was dressed in fresh whites. His name, Gil Emory, was sewn into the uniform over his left breast pocket.
"Charge," Gil said. "The clock is running."
He led the way out the door, cranked the noisy but efficient motor of the Volkswagen which sat in buggy, bright red grandeur in the carport. Susan came out behind him, patting at her hair. He reached across the car to open the door for her. He wasn't smiling. He was, she suspected, thinking of the payment which was due on the car.
"Charge, lover," she said. "Onward! If you're late you can't blame it on me."
I can blame anything I want to on you," he said, grinning. "I'm bigger than you."
She liked to see him smile. She was constantly trying to take his mind off the problems which seemed to press down with greater weight every day. Poor Gil, just twenty-four, an age when a man should be free to ramble, to see some of the world, to experiment and test life and whoop it up, but Gil was not free.
It wasn't Susan's fault he was tied to his business, to the city. She didn't think that the mere fact that a man was married should tie him down completely, not when he had a wife who was willing to go where he went, share whatever came his way. When, late at night or on Sunday afternoon, Gil would talk of places he would like to see, she would share his yearning for them. She could understand the faraway look in his eyes when an especially nice spring or autumn day brought the smell of the sea from the coast over a hundred miles away and reminded him of the world out there, the world far from the daily grind of operating his television repair shop in the outskirts of Orlando.
Susan could understand Gil's desire to run away from people who drove with combative intensity and walked the streets unsmilingly. She, too, got tired of seeing people who had nothing to smile about. No, it wasn't her fault. She'd go with him. The things she wanted, Gil could give her anywhere. She didn't have to have a mortgaged house in a city. She would skimp and save and go without a meal now and then, and they could bum around the world on tramp steamers or drive the bug up the Florida peninsula, west through the Gulf Coast states and then south into Mexico. She would go gladly, but there was Gil's mother. The elder Mrs. Emory was strung around Gil's young neck like the ancient mariner's albatross.
Gil's mother, like the mountain, was there. She lived two miles from Gil and Susan in a Florida-boom house, built of stucco, grotesque in its poor imitation of Latin architecture.
When it rained, the roof leaked and water discolored the ceiling of the living room. Its sole redeeming feature was the fact that mortgage insurance had paid for it in full when Gil's father died of a heart attack the year Susan and Gil were married, five years ago now.
For all its faults, old Mrs. Emory loved it. She had been offered a good price for it by a businessman who wanted to tear it down and build a modern apartment house, but she was adamant.
She could not be blasted out of it with dynamite, even though it took every extra penny Gil could make to keep it from falling apart.
So it was Mrs. Gilmore Emory, Sr., just past sixty, a pleasant enough woman if one overlooked her constant stream-of-consciousness chatter, who was the albatross about Gil's neck. Mrs. Emory received sixty-four dollars a month from the Veteran's Administration as the surviving widow of a veteran of World War One. That sixty-four dollars wasn't enough to buy her groceries, for she still cooked as if she were feeding a family. She threw more food in the garbage can, Susan thought bitterly, than Susan brought home from the store.
Gil had to make up the deficit in Mrs. Emory's bills, the taxes, which went higher each year, the insurance, and the million-and-one odds and ends of expense which infest an old house. Gil spent his treasured off-hours mowing the lawn at his mother's house, making little emergency repairs on aged plumbing, running senseless errands for his mother.
As a result, the Gil Emory home, a concrete-block development house in one of the newer subdivisions, suffered both from a lack of money and a lack of time spent on its upkeep. While Mrs. Emory's lawn flourished, close cropped and always green from the endless amounts of water she used to irrigate it in the dry spells, her son's lawn was sickly, weedy, often in need of mowing.
But she was Gil's mother and he was her only child.
That morning, traffic on the Orange Blossom Trail was at its worst. Gil drove aggressively, snaking the little Volkswagen in and out of traffic lanes, using the four-speed transmission to good advantage. The odometer of the car showed less than five thousand miles. The new car represented the one extravagance of the Gil Emorys' in the past five years.
Susan watched Gil's face as he drove. She saw the grim lines around his eyes, the hard set of his mouth. She hated to see him that way. She hated the duty which tied Gil to his mother and bled away the extra money which could have bought him a new pair of shoes, a sports-car instead of the practical VW, a new suit. Money which could be used to buy nice things for their own house, to save for the future, to pay for a baby.
Wanting a baby was the nearest Susan came to thinking of herself. There were many things she would have liked to have, dresses, coats, shoes, but she was content. She was happy in her marriage, except when she worried about Gil.
Of course, the solution was simple. Mrs. Emory had only to sell her house. She would have enough money to rent an apartment and live comfortably, enough money to last her the rest of her life, and some to spare. Or, Mrs. Emory could move in with Gil and Susan. There was about as much chance of that happening as there was of having a full blown hurricane coming up the Orange Blossom Trail before noon.
"Please don't forget to send out for lunch," Susan said to her husband. "Do you hear me?"
Gil braked to a stop in front of his repair shop. The shop was in a good location. Business was good. It was more man one man could handle without working outlandish hours. There was a large, modern shopping center just down the road and the spreading housing developments radiated outward for miles around.
"Sure thing," Gil said, bending to kiss Susan on the cheek.
"That's a kiss?"
He smacked her quickly on the lips and got out of the car. Someone was parked beside the shop, a customer waiting for Gil to open. Gil's day would begin with a rush and continue to be hectic as customers demanded one-day service on hopelessly battered TV sets.
Susan watched sadly as Gil hurried across the walk, dug his keys out of his pocket and unlocked the door while greeting the waiting customer cheerily. Susan slid into the driver's seat and eased the car into the stream of traffic.
It was grocery day. She also had to match buttons and thread to a sample of cloth she carried in her purse. She was almost finished making a new dress and was eager to apply the finishing touches, to see how it was going to look.
She drove carefully to the shopping center, found a parking place not too far from the supermarket and opened the door of the car. As she slid her legs out, her tight skirt rode high to show an attractive length of thigh.
A nice looking man in a white sport shirt let his eyes enjoy the display before she jerked her skirt down. The man looked at her and smiled. She knew the look well. She got her share of stares from men, a few whistles, too.
A whistle, Susan thought, could be taken as a compliment. Open looks of invitation, such as she got from the man in the white shirt, were not exactly complimentary. It was as if all men thought all women were promiscuous bitches who had only to be asked.
She held her head high as she walked coldly past the man. He stopped what he was doing, putting parcels into the trunk of a big, new car, and watched her as she stilted on high heels over the smooth asphalt of the parking lot toward the variety store. She could almost feel his eyes on her as her buttocks rippled under her skirt in a provocative way over which she had no control.
In a city where beautiful woman are in abundance, Susan Emory could hold her own in any gathering. She was five feet four inches tall. Her stilted heels added height and length to her perfect legs. She weighed 120 pounds and the right proportions of that weight were in bust and hips. Since she made her own clothes, she knew her measurements well-34-24-35. She thought herself a bit too hippy, a bit thick in the waist. She would have liked to knock off an inch in each dimension, except the bust. Gil liked her breasts. But she couldn't lose weight, because she was compacted into her tight-skinned frame without an ounce of excess.
She could not resist a glance at her image as she walked past a plate-glass window. She was wearing a neat gray skirt and matching blouse. Her chestnut hair was straight, hanging close to her face, flaring attractively at her shoulders. Her blue-green eyes were large with a tiny suggestion of tilt at the outer corners which she accentuated with make-up. Her mouth was full, kissable, expressive, a lush-lined mouth which drew male attention immediately.
She was satisfied with her face and her breasts and her lips because Gil liked them.
In the variety store, she spent a pleasant half hour matching buttons and thread to her material sample. Satisfied at last, she paid the cashier and walked down the mall to the supermarket. She took her time shopping for food, making the trek down each aisle, spending long minutes in front of the exotic food counter thinking how pleasant it would be to be able to afford to try some of the wild, foreign dishes in her cookbook. However, the ingredients were too expensive.
She settled for such small luxuries as two small tins of smoked oysters to be eaten with little crackers and cheese while they watched television. Otherwise she filled her basket with staples, good, solid, economical food. She bought a healthy amount of good meats, not the most expensive cuts. Things like chicken, on which there was a good special, pork chops, which were going up, hamburger for meat loaf.
She prided herself on her ability to choose good meat. She spent ten minutes deciding which two pieces of sirloin tip to buy for their weekly blowout. That was one thing she was not going to give up, the pleasant Friday night dinner when they splurged on good steak and had a bottle of decent wine. Mrs. Emory could go to blazes before she'd give up her Friday nights.
She dropped that line of thinking guiltily. She didn't actually begrudge what Gil did for his mother. She hoped that, when and if she had a son, he would love her as much as Gil loved his mother.
There was a line at the checkout counter. It would be a few minutes before her turn. Her glance fell on a rack of magazines and books. She studied the titles idly.
"Would you mind holding my place in line for me?" she asked the young mother behind her. "I want to get something to read."
The woman nodded with a frayed smile. Susan walked to the book rack and, keeping one eye on the progress of the line at the checkout counter, began to scan the books. She decided against the one which had caught her eye. She turned her attention to the magazines and examined a line of men's books with pretty girls on the covers. One teaser caught her eye:
WHY MEN SWAP WIVES
The Inside Story of Today's Free-Loving Marrieds.
She removed the magazine from the rack, opened it, found the article and read the first couple of paragraphs. It was like many she had read along similar lines, a rehash of the Kinsey report, not really saying anything, merely arousing curiosity through its title. She put the magazine back on the rack and checked the progress of the line. There were still several baskets ahead of hers.
The bottom shelf of the newsstand was given over to a tabloid type of newspaper with lurid, attention-getting headlines. A dozen different papers black-lettered sex and perversion, ax murders and sadism. One headline stood out:
DEN MOTHER TO A PACK OF CUB SCOUTS-BUT WHAT SHE DID WAS HARDLY MOTHERLY!
She laughed inwardly. It was impossible! She squatted down, smoothing her skirt under her buttocks. The story was funnier than the headline. Did anyone in his right mind expect people to believe that a 30-year-old woman would play house with a whole gaggle of dirty little boys? She'd have to tell Gil about it. It was like something out of a risque joke. Why just tell Gil about it? It would be more fun to show him. He'd get a charge out of it.
When it was finally her turn at the cash register, she tried to hide the paper under other things, but the checker spread the sheet out in full view of everyone. Susan felt a blush creep up her throat. She was relieved when the paper went into a bag with groceries. She certainly didn't want people thinking that she was accustomed to reading things like that.
After she had supervised the boy in placing the groceries in the back seat of the car, it was still early. She locked the car and walked slowly past the store windows, examining the merchandise in the smart shops. She liked to study current fashions. It gave her ideas for her own dressmaking.
It was one of those beautiful days which make the Chamber of Commerce in any Florida city smile. It was more like May than December. In the center of the mall, a fountain poured forth clear, sparkling water in vigorous streams. At night, the jets of water were lit by colored lights. It was very pretty.
Susan paused in front of a little dress shop and looked wistfully at an evening skirt on display. The price tag, she knew, would be far beyond her means. Even if she had the money for an evening skirt, she had no place to wear it. She and Gil didn't attend any formal affairs. But the clean, simple lines of the garment appealed to her.
It might be fun to make one and use it for a lounging outfit in the evening. Very posh, Mrs. Emory, very elegant. She knew she looked her best in simple things which clung to her full, good body lines. She imagined herself in the skirt with a prim, jeweled shell atop its black simplicity, whirling gracefully around a dance floor surrounded by attractive, interesting people.
She let her daydream run to its conclusion, to a loving embrace on a dark balcony, a sweet kiss and a man-a man named Gil, of course-whispering in her ear. She smiled at herself when her imagination went beyond the kiss, when the mental images flowed into the erotic.
Good God! She was getting downright horny. Have to haul Gil off to bed tonight.
She turned away from the evening skirt and examined the other outfits on display in the window. There were some very nice ones, all hopelessly expensive. She was glad she could sew. She could make dresses which looked as good for a fraction of the price.
She studied her reflection in the window and was pleased to think that she looked quite all right, thank you, in a two-ninety-eight blouse and a home made skirt. She was turning away when the door opened and an attractive woman smiled at her.
"Well, hi!" the woman said. "Aren't you even going to come in and say hello?"
The face was familiar. "Oh, no," Susan began. "I'm just-"
"You don't remember me," the woman said. "I'm Lucia Moreland. We met at a party at Jerry Jones' house."