Community of Women

3

Late afternoon in Cheshire Point. A hot day, with the sun high in the sky to the west and only a few stray cirrus clouds breaking the expanse of blue. Nan Haskell had finished what housework had to be done. There was a roast in the oven; the rest of the meal could wait. Skip and Danny had both gravitated to other backyards to play with other children. Nan sat at her desk, going over some of the household bookkeeping which had become her responsibility since they had moved to Cheshire Point. That had been Howard’s job in Manhattan, but with him spending eight hours a day on the job and three hours more commuting, it had gravitated to her shoulders.

Late afternoon in Cheshire Point. Somewhere someone was burning leaves and the rich smoke hung in the fresh country air. Elly Carr stretched out on a chaise on the lawn in back of her home and smelled the smoke. Pam was upstairs, playing with her dolls or something of the sort. Elly had picked her up after school, but somehow she couldn’t manage to spend any time with her daughter on those days when she had had a lover. Shower or not, she still felt fundamentally unclean. Pam, with her glossy dark hair and her pug nose, was the perfect symbol of innocence. Elly felt almost as though her own presence would contaminate the girl. It was on days like this one that she most wanted to be with Pamela, and it was paradoxically on these days that she had to remain most within herself. She stretched out on the chaise and thought about bridge with the Haskells, which she dreaded tonight, and dinner, which she did not want to prepare. Well, she could always chuck a few teevee dinners in the oven—

Late afternoon in Cheshire Point. A breeze was blowing up from the southeast, coming up off Long Island and the Atlantic. Trees swayed in the breeze, and loose autumn leaves were wafted by it. Roz Barclay sat in her garden in a wicker chair and thought about money.

Money.

In every exurb there are three classes of persons. First there are the natives, those souls whose families lived in the town from the beginning, and who now make their livelihood from the recent immigrants. These persons, like Rudy Gerber, for example, run the stores that the immigrants patronize and perform various services for the new arrivals. They tend to consider New Yorkers a breed apart, even though those New Yorkers may have resided in the exurb for ten or fifteen years.

Then there are the commuters, families like the Haskells and the Carrs. For the most part, they earn their livings in that complex of advertising and publishing and public relations and television which falls under the general heading of communications. They belong to the exurb and to New York, living in one place and working in the other.

And, finally, there are the geniuses.

Linc Barclay was a genius. A genius, in exurban terminology, is New York living in the exurb who does not have to commute. A genius may be a commercial artist or a composer or a dramatist. He may, like Lincoln Barclay, be a writer. He lives in Cheshire Point, works at home, and goes to New York at odd intervals because New York is, ultimately, the source of his income, the market for his wares. Shows are produced there, books and magazines are published there — so he lives close to the city, but does not commute. He is thus a breed apart from the nine-to-five crowd.

Lincoln Barclay was a commercial writer. He sold stories to slick magazines, for which he was paid anywhere from one to three thousand dollars, and he wrote novels for a variety of paperback publishers, for which he was paid in the neighborhood of twenty-five hundred dollars plus royalties.

And his wife, a pretty girl with dark brown hair and a willowy figure, sat in a wicker chair and thought about money.

Roz drew on her cigarette. Genius or not, Linc was in New York today. He’d gone into town to see his agent in a desperate attempt to cadge still another advance against future sales. There had already been a great number of advances against future sales. And, because it had been a matter of months since there had been anything of note accomplished on the IBM electric typewriter in the clapboard guest house Linc used for a study, those nebulous future sales seemed very nebulous, and very much in the future.

Linc was in a slump. It was a bad slump, the worst so far in a life composed of hot periods and slumps alternating precariously. The typewriter was silent, Linc was moody, and the cycle was vicious. He had been halfway through a paperback novel when the slump hit and the contract had called for delivery of the book weeks ago. The publisher was impatient, the agent was impatient, and now, with income at a standstill and bills piling up, the creditors were becoming impatient.

Roz sighed. She yawned unhappily, her large breasts drawn into sharp relief against her red jersey shirt. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It was hell being a writer, she thought. It was even hell being married to a writer. Oh, it was fine when the good times came — she thought of that time when Warner Brothers bought Naked By Moonlight out of the blue and dropped thirty-five thousand dollars into Linc’s lap. And then the trip to Europe, and the new car, and—

Those were the good times. And not having to commute, not playing a role in the Ulcer Gulch rat-race, that was good. Being your own boss, working your own hours, planning your own life — those were good things. But the ad men and the PR boys didn’t have to worry about slumps. They could get laid off, they could get dumped with little ceremony, and their jobs were by no means secure. But they never had the awful feeling of a writer in a slump, the feeling of a man trying to draw water from a dry well. The horrible feeling when there were no words to type on sheets of paper, no words at all.

They could go dry, or stale, and the money still came in every week. They knew just how much was coming in, could budget expenses and plan ahead and know where the money was coming from. They might overspend themselves, but at least they had the chance to plan.

Not so with Linc. Not so, because he never knew what month would be a good month financially and what month would be a catastrophe. Even without a slump, they could find themselves in a cash bind, with a host of sales in the Soon-To-Be-Paid file and no dough in the checking account. And when a long slump hit—

There were no children. That kept a certain ceiling on expenditures. But there were the mortgage payments on the house, the monthly payments on the car, the insurance payments, the gas bill, the electric bill, the taxes, the phone bill, a whole bevy of fixed costs before they even got around to putting food on the table. And you couldn’t cut your personal expenses too far. You had to keep up a front for the neighbors, had to make a certain pretense of economic security. You had to entertain now and then, had to find money somewhere to buy expensive liquor for other people to drink. Whether you could afford it or not.

No money coming in, and money always going out. Linc was advanced to the hilt. He owed his agent three thousand dollars, and was now doing his damnedest to wangle another thousand. That meant four thousand dollars’ worth of work before he would see more money. Two books, say.

And the slump was still going strong.

She ground out her cigarette in the grass, sucking in a mouthful of air and struggling to keep the tears back. God, how she loved Linc! She never regretted marrying him, not even in the bad times, especially not in the bad times. These were the times when he needed her, when she had to reassure him that the slump would end, that every cloud had that silly silver lining, that he would write his way out of debt and out of whatever weird and unknowable personal hell was causing the slump in the first place. He needed her, needed the love and consolation she could give him.

And she needed him.

Emotionally, because helping her man and sticking by her man were things which made Roz aware of her own essential femininity. And physically as well, because she was a passionate woman, a woman who surrendered her whole being to the sexual embrace of the man she loved. She had been a virgin until Linc made a woman of her in a sagging bed at a rundown motel across the Putnam County line, and since that night no other man had ever held her in his arms. She needed Linc, needed him most of all during the bad times when the slump was at its worst and the typewriter was silent and the bank balance dwindled away.

Which was markedly unfortunate.

Because when Lincoln Barclay had a slump, he had a slump. And such a slump was more than a professional matter. It was a sexual matter as well. Something other than his production of prose drooped.

A woman less fundamentally monogamous might have taken a lover. A woman less sensual might have suffered in silence. Roz Barclay found another outlet, a reversion to the habits of adolescence, a temporary measure that relieved the need for sex better than nothing at all.

And now was time for it. Now, with Linc in New York for the next hour or two, with the house to herself, with no pressing obligation but the relief of her own sexual needs.

She got up from the wicker chair and walked slowly toward the back door of the house. She was trembling, less in delighted anticipation than from the anxieties that always were the muted accompaniment of self-satisfaction. Guilt was an inevitable by-product. She knew, intellectually if not emotionally, that there was no reason to feel guilty, that what she was about to do was neither immoral nor harmful, that it was neither an act of infidelity nor a pernicious habit. Yet the guilt remained; society had its own ideas, and her heart accepted what her mind could manage to reject.

She went to the bathroom on the second floor. This, too, was habit, an obvious carry-over from teen-age years when the bathroom had been the place for every secret vice from cigarette smoking to what she was going to do now. The bedroom might have been more comfortable, but the bathroom was the inevitable place, seated upon the toilet with the door securely locked.

She sat down, closed the door, turned the lock. She shut her eyes, and in the ensuing darkness her own hands roamed her body. Her own guilty hands stroked her full breasts, reached beneath the bra to cup firm flesh and fondle the nipples that were already stiffening with lust. She unhooked the bra, releasing her breasts, and she prodded their softness while her brain began to whirl with the fantasies of sex, with memories of nights in Linc’s arms, with sexual dreams and sexual themes.

No!

She couldn’t. It was wrong, it was impossible and she couldn’t.

No!

Slowly, dizzily, she rearranged her clothing and got to her feet. Her fingers found the lock, turned it. She left the bathroom and went downstairs once again.

The frustration was alive now. It was a living breathing pulsating force within her and she fought it with every bit of strength in her body. She breathed in gasps, struggling to pull herself together. Other women would find a way out. Other women would play around. But she had to be true, true to Linc and true to herself.

Even if it killed her. Even if it had her climbing the damned walls, for God’s sake—

It was late afternoon in Cheshire Point.