Chapter 8
Mitzi no longer could remember exactly what she had done last night after leaving the private club. She had never felt so alone and wounded before in her life. The young wife remembered having jumped into her car and driven blindly on the freeway going from one end of Los Angeles to the other, stopping occasionally at roadside bars for another conscience-killing drink. She knew she could not expect comfort of any kind from her husband, particularly after seeing him with another woman, and yet she felt she had to talk to someone, to explain how she had come to be acting the part of a three-dollar whore. But whom?
Mixed up with her feelings of self-disgust, the young redhead had to admit that she had somehow been more sexually satisfied by this degrading evening than she had ever been with her husband. This only added to her confusion, however, nearly driving her mad with shame and remorse at what she done.
Finally, waking up Sunday morning about dawn in the parking lot of a shopping center where she must have pulled in the night before, Mitzi decided there was only one thing to do.
She would have to leave.
It was impossible to think of staying with her husband Oscar, now, or of having to work every day for God knew how long with Dan Roper, not to mention Ted Mason or Pat Reynolds. Actually, she did not feel the same strength of repulsion toward the younger Ted, although at the moment she couldn't admit it, even to herself.
By the time Mitzi had driven home and started packing the clothes she would need-her husband hadn't even bothered to come home the night before-the distraught young redhead had reconciled herself to going to another city and trying to begin a new life.
It was when Mitzi was choosing which purses from her wardrobe to take with her that she realized with a shock that she had no money. She was paid only once every two weeks, and all that she had brought home a week ago had already been spent paying off the bills. There was a whole week, five more working days, before she could conceivably afford to take off on her own.
Nevertheless, she decided to put her suitcases in the trunk of her car, and tomorrow morning when she got to work she would ask a girl she knew if she could move in for the week. The redhead would have to put up with one more night with her husband, Oscar, but no more than that. There was not even the slightest impulse to tell him in advance that she was leaving. Let him find out when she didn't come home on Monday night.
Oscar finally returned shortly after twelve noon, looking tired, and obviously suffering from a bad hangover. Mitzi said nothing to him when he dragged in the front door, merely casting one glance filled with accusation in his direction. Her husband slept most of the afternoon, getting up a few times to take aspirin and drink tomato juice.
By night, he was in good enough condition to shower and shave, and then he went straight to the liquor cabinet in the living room and mixed himself a double Scotch. Mitzi had never known him to drink so much. Obviously he, too, was feeling the tension that had gradually built up between them over the past few months. They avoided getting into conversation over dinner, tacitly agreeing that they would only end up in an argument no matter what they started talking about.
That night, without any discussion at all, Oscar carried a pillow and blanket into the living room and slept on the couch. Mitzi lay alone on their wide double bed, suffering a few regrets that their one-year-long marriage had so suddenly deteriorated and was now ending up on the rocks. She had never thought that it would turn out like this for her and Oscar, but it had happened now and nothing they could do would ever change things. That much she knew instinctively. Once two people had hurt each other time and time again, the innumerable tiny wounds never really healed. The relationship would never be the same even if they were to kiss and make up.
Feeling a little sorry for herself, having no place to go and no one to go with her, Mitzi gently cried herself to sleep, her pretty young face turned dejectedly down into the damp pillow.
The next morning Mitzi and Oscar as usual prepared themselves for work and went their separate ways. With a slight twinge of regret, and an inexplicable feeling of pity for her unaware husband, the red-haired wife locked the door behind her for the last time, placing the keys in the mailbox and a short note asking Oscar not to bother trying to find out where she was staying. She didn't really believe he would take the trouble, but just in case, and out of an impulse to hurt him a little, she felt she had to leave some brief sign of farewell.
The day at work was one just like all other Monday mornings, except that Mitzi and Ted could not look at each other, treating each other like perfect strangers even after Dan Roper left them alone to install bathroom fixtures in a new apartment. Mitzi thought that Roper made a suggestive little smirk as he left, and the other members of the plumbing crew seemed to be studying her with a prurient curiosity. Roper was the kind of person who would like nothing better than to tell everyone he knew about his Saturday night conquest, and the young redhead cringed inwardly to think that by now her fellow workers had probably heard the whole story.
That evening, after Roper had first picked her and Ted up, then stopped for a second plumbing crew in another apartment nearby, Roper suddenly turned and called into the back of the panel truck where Mitzi was sitting with the others.
"Hey Mitzi," the coarse foreman called out her name. "I think this belongs to you."
The blood drained from Mitzi's face when she saw dangling from his extended forefinger her tattered white bikini panties that he had ripped from her on Saturday night. Mitzi gasped out loud and froze to her seat. The all-man work crew began chuckling then, waiting to see how she would react.
At that moment Ted happened to glance in the rearview mirror and saw what Roper held in his hand. He slammed on the brakes and pulled the panel truck off to the side of the asphalt canyon road, immediately turning off the engine. The strong young plumber grasped his boss' shirt by the collar in his left hand and with one forceful blow rammed his right fist into the startled foreman's face. Roper blinked his eyes in disbelief as if he couldn't understand. And then he felt the second blow hit his chin. The older man crumpled down into the seat, unconscious and limp.
In a flash Ted Mason was out of the front seat, and opening the back door of the truck and lifting Mitzi out onto the ground. The other plumbers sat there thunderstruck, their eyes filled with disbelief that the young man had punched the foreman in the nose and knocked him out.
"Come on, Mitzi," he growled angrily. "Let's leave these creeps before some of their bad smell rubs off on us," he told her, staring challengingly into the back of the truck.
When the two young plumbers had walked about a mile up the road, the plumbing truck passed them, going at a fast clip back toward town. Ted could see that Roper was conscious now, hunched up in the front seat holding a handkerchief to his nose.
"Well, that's that," he mused out loud.
"N-Now what will you do?" Mitzi asked in a voice still edged with embarrassment and tears. There was no doubt in her mind that Roper would fire Ted and perhaps herself, in addition to which he could conceivably have Ted arrested.
"I'm tired of this place anyway," Ted told her without looking in her direction. "I've been thinking of heading east to look for work, maybe Atlanta."
Mitzi's imagination flew into action. Why couldn't they go somewhere together? At least until they both found something to do, and a place to live.
"I-I packed my bags last night. They're in the trunk of my car. I-I've decided to leave my husband and go to another city myself," she offered, watching his reaction out of the corner of her eye. Especially after the way he had joined in with Roper in humiliating her, she had no reason to think that Ted would want her along. But he had stood up for her personal respect in the plumbing truck.
Ted did not reply for a long time, lost in his own thoughts.
"We could leave together," he finally suggested. He had thought things over after leaving the club Saturday night, and decided-hoped-that Mitzi had somehow been an innocent victim of Roper's deal with Pat.
"I-I'd like that," Mitzi told him, still not looking into his eyes.
Suddenly Ted stopped walking and turned to her.
"Listen, Mitzi," he said earnestly. "You probably don't have any more money than I do. How about one of us selling a car to give us something to go on? Chances are we won't see the money the company still owes us, at least not for a while. What do you say? His face was excited now, and he held her by the upper arms with both hands.
"That's a great idea, Ted," she replied finally, looking into his gentle brown eyes for the first time that day. They continued staring into each other's gaze for a long moment, and then they broke into a smile, pressing their bodies together tightly in a warm embrace.
"I'll bet old Roper didn't know what a big favor he was doing for us," he laughed. Then he turned Mitzi's face up to his and planted a moist, open-mouthed kiss on her lips. Their tongues lashed and probed together until they were both breathing heavily, giving them a brief preview of the pleasures they had in store together. Finally Ted reluctantly pulled his throbbing loins away from hers.
"Come on, Mitzi, let's hit the road," he cried out happily, and the two of them set out walking at a brisk pace up the road, occasionally laughing together as they remembered they were at the beginning of a totally new adventure.