Chapter 1
She lay sunning herself, stretched luxuriously on the chaise lounge and dreaming, mixing the sound of the gulls overhead with her dream. The dull aluminum frame of her chaise, the summer-burned grass, the parched and peeling plants, all contrasted sharply with her lustrous long black hair and her richly bronzed flesh. She looked very much alive; she had indeed always met life head on - just as directly as she now met the sun with her exposed, relaxed face. Her eyes were closed, not squinting, and without sunglasses; her face looked young - as twenty-five should - and possessed a magnetism to which the people she'd met over those twenty-five years had invariably responded. The bronze color of her face, her arms and shoulders and legs, was interrupted by the black lower half of her bathing suit - and by whiter, softer shades where the upper half should have been. Her exceptionally full breasts pointed free and upward toward the sun; they had such tiny, pink-tan buds at the end that they looked like over-ripe fruits trying to burst. When people compared Rosemary to Sophia Loren it was not only for her long black hair.
A dense ring of bushes and trees surrounded the yard, guaranteeing Rosemary the privacy needed to for once let some sunshine fall on her naked young breasts. The yard was well-populated by flowers - it retained the look of prosperity which had been planted into it. The grass, however, was browner than it should have been for this part of California in early summer. The grass had been Kevin's job. The same combination of solidness and neglect might be seen in the house itself. Large, new and sturdy, the house gleamed its cream-color in the sun; yet a closer gaze revealed some things which needed doing - a loose screen-door hinge, large blisters of paint hanging from the window frames, a busted water-hose connection. These things Kevin would also have fixed, had he been here. And all of these matters were only trivialities compared to the real lack Rosemary felt - the lack of emotional and bodily satisfaction Kevin would have provided her.
Would have, if he were there!
He was in Vietnam. They had lived together quite happily until he got drafted and left her, of necessity, to her own devices. He'd had a good job, as a junior executive in an engineering firm, and they'd been able to afford this house and large spread of land in prestigious, rural Redwood City, and the rest of the material life-standards that went with it. Rosemary did still manage to keep things financially together: Kevin sent her his army pay and she now worked part-time as a receptionist to supplement it. Money was not the root of her problems. The root was Kevin's absence, his absence which now spanned nearly two years . . .
The doorbell rang. Rosemary, startled from her dreamy half-sleep, reached on the grass beside her for her bathing-suit top, which she then hastily kneaded her full sensuous breasts into. As she clamped it shut behind her back, she was already running into the house tugging at the bottom of her suit to make sure it, too, was in place.
A Western Union boy stood holding a crisp yellow envelope for her.
"You Mrs. Rosemary White?" he asked.
"Yes, yes," she said, "give me the telegram!" She yanked it from his hands and closed the door, the duty of tipping him never occurring to her; she ran into the living room where she sat in a chair and tried to calm herself, still holding the unopened telegram. It could mean one of two things: either Kevin was dead, or he was coming home. She stuck a fingernail under the flap and with her trembling finger raked the top of the envelope open; she nearly destroyed the little paper inside pulling it out.
Kevin was coming home!
In three months!
She sank into the chair. She could feel her heart pounding at every point where her body touched the chair. She'd thought. .. she'd thought.. . But no! He was coming home, and so soon! God almighty was that good news, the one piece of news which she needed more than anything. She sure wanted that, all right. Kevin home!
She began to relax, her heart very gradually slowing, and already visions of a bright new future with Kevin filled her head. She slowly pulled herself up, walked to the liquor sideboard, and poured a small, weak gin and tonic, which she carried into the backyard. Standing over the chaise, she reached behind her and undid the top of her bathing suit: she tore it off and exuberantly gave it a strong fling across the yard. She felt very free, refreshed, and healthy now that Kevin was coming home. "Let the boobs out," she thought. Kevin sometimes used words like that, and when he used them she didn't mind. Kevin had a plucky character, in fact, that was one of the things which had drawn her to him; he used common words and also his own invented words to speak of her body, her voluptuously ripened body which he loved. How he loved it! The wedding night she had practically been eaten alive, and all of their married months following the wedding night - and there were not many before he got drafted - his attention and devotion to her had never flagged. She had lived encased and protected in a sort of web of devotion - physical, emotional, spiritual.
Yes, let the breasts out; let them out into the jiggling, erratic freedom they now enjoyed as she again settled into the chaise, gin tonic in her hand; let them get a little brown for Kevin would like that. It was all for Kevin now, everything, each single breath she took, each gull that passed shrieking overhead, each ray of sunlight which imperceptibly darkened her body. It was for Kevin, all of it, for their new life together, for their happiness, for something different from the hell she was in now . . .
My god! she thought, the bright, confident vision of her future rising in a single bubble which then burst in the sun, the fragments evaporating. Tears formed in her eyes.
Christ! If only it wasn't true, if only she had actually gotten out; Lord knew she had wanted to for several months, but that ruthless Vance . .. No, she stopped herself, she had never yet actually tried to get out; and perhaps if she did try Vance might in fact let her out - let her out without blackmailing her later. The whole business was just such a nightmare: the whole business with the group, the group she was in!
Months ago she had promised herself she would get out of the circle before Kevin came home; and, once she'd made that promise, she'd slipped into the sort of mental half-lethargy, half-hell which had been her life for so long now, thanks to the circle. Worst of all, had she even - if she were honest with herself - enjoyed some of the group's activities?
She sank deeper into the chaise, her face covered with tears. She knew the answer to that question. God help her, she had! She had enjoyed some of those parties, all right. She looked down at her body - at her ample hips, long sculpture-perfect bronzed legs, white mounded breasts with the tiny tips on the ends. She began to sob out loud. She was a whore! A common whore! she thought, for how many others had gazed over that body she now looked at, that body she would like to think was just for Kevin. For Kevin - hah! If he knew how many others had not just looked at that body but possessed it, over the last months, why - why there would be no more of the two of them. That was for sure. She could not even pass the thought of all the things she had done through her own mind without a shiver of disgust. Sure she'd been drunk, sure she'd been desperate - but the depths she had sunk to, the incredible depravity of the acts she herself had committed in Vance's circle! Why did it have to be so? Why did Kevin have to go away in the first place leaving her accessible to traps like the one she had fallen into? Why could she not now, right this minute, be free of the circle, free to enjoy the future with Kevin she so desperately wanted and needed?
Whatever could she do? she sobbed to herself in total desperation.
The months of depraved, wanton activities fused into a whirling delirious nightmare of horror as she lay crying with her eyes shut, the sun which beat down on her closed eyelids providing a red background for the images which danced before her. Images in which she appeared, sometimes in the very middle, the central figure, others working her curvaceous form over like a delicacy to be sampled or a piece of meat to be consumed whole. In some scenes she hung off to the side, a minor player in some hellish vision of obscenity, an insect gnawing on some pathetically small bit of carrion. Sometimes too she played the part of the sex-hungry antagonist, the one circling over the frightened central figure, swooping with a buzzard's watchful patience induced by a complete certainty about what would follow, time being the only uncertainty. Then she pounced and the vision became a tangled cacophony of nakedly intertwined arms and legs, heaving breasts and gyrating curly-haired loins and milk-white trembling buttocks, in a union sealed by frustration, by drugs, and by the liquor which washed over the entire orgiastic scene like a brown rain. The visions swirled ever more rapidly before Rosemary's eyes, until they were all her - her in her weakness which had become obscenity, the delirious red-blurred scenes surely a direct glimpse into hell itself.
She opened her eyes, still sobbing.
"My god! My god!" she said to herself, her desperation total, the vision she now saw of the future completely black. So alone as Rosemary was, her moods were volatile, in these few minutes she had gone from the shock of the telegram to the joy of an unblemished future with Kevin, only to remember her hellish present which kept that desired future from her. And her dejection was the more extreme, because of the extreme joy it had destroyed.
Yet already she felt a change. She had sunk to such an absolute bottom of depression that her raw thoughts made contact with the flint-hard core of strength in her being; the strength which - if it sometimes helped her get into trouble - was also capable of getting her out. She stopped sobbing and stared blankly before her in intense concentration.
She knew what she would do, all right. And she would do it today.