Community of Women

4

It was night in Cheshire Point.

It was a relatively dark night, as a matter of complete fact. The moon was a thin crescent hardly there at all. A cloud cover had blown in from the east and the stars were few and far between. This, however, is relatively immaterial. The Carrs and the Haskells, busy playing bridge at the Haskell colonial-split, were in the basement recreation room, seated around a card table. It hardly mattered whether the moon was full or not, whether the sky was bright or dark.

What mattered, Nan Haskell thought, was that Ted Carr was making passes at her.

To give Ted full credit, they were remarkably subtle passes. When you are sitting at a bridge table with your own wife, and with another man and his wife, you have to go some in order to make passes at the other man’s wife without anyone else realizing the fact. But Nan knew damned well that Ted Carr was a past master at the art of the subtle forward pass. It was, she thought, one hell of a shame that a decent, straight-and-narrow girl like Elly should be married to a philanderer like Ted Carr.

While Elly sat quietly in the background, very neat and very chic and very bright, her husband was busy laying his way through the available female population of Cheshire Point. Elly evidently did not realize this. Nan did. She was not entirely sure just what girls had succumbed to his manly charms, but it was pretty obvious that — one — he was cheating on Elly every chance he got, and — two — he got more than a few chances.

Nan had a good memory. She remembered a little scene at a party at Hal and Bev Cooper’s, at which time she had had the dubious privilege of watching Ted Carr lead Rita Morgan into an unoccupied bedroom, with one hand on Rita’s sashaying rump and the other plunged into her neckline. She remembered the autumn dance at the Cheshire Point Country Club, when Ted and some girl up for the weekend from New York had wandered onto the golf course looking for the nineteenth hole.

Other times, too. Ted was sexy — there was no getting around that; the man positively oozed beddability. And Ted was persistent. He didn’t let a girl wonder what he was after.

Right now he was making it obvious.

But only to her. They sat playing bridge, the Haskells against the Carrs, and the game proceeded at its usual pace. Every so often Nan would look up to find Ted Carr’s eyes boring very intently into her own. He would smile, slowly, and would go on looking at her until, embarrassed without quite knowing why, she averted her gaze.

Then, when her eyes darted back at him, he would be looking at her again. And that same slow smile would spread on his face.

The smile was not exactly obscene. It came close, however. It said, in a nutshell, I’m Interested In Taking You To Bed And Sooner Or Later I’ll Do Just That. And there was something about Ted Carr that didn’t let you doubt the idea. If he looked at a woman long enough, and carefully enough, she would melt. She would permit him to seduce her because she accepted her seduction as inevitable.

Then he started with the foot.

Now, playing footsies is corny. It is corny and square and very definitely Out. If a man starts playing footsies with somebody else’s wife, she generally laughs at him.

This was different.

Because Ted somehow managed to do two things. He made the action a burlesque, so that it was funny instead of being corny. And at the same time he let you know that the burlesque itself was just a mask, that he really deep down inside and underneath and from the heart meant every last nudge of it, that he was playing footsies, in short, without being corny about it.

“Two spades,” Elly Carr said.

Nan tore her attention back to her cards. She didn’t remember the hand, or the bidding, but she had a lousy hand and there was no problem. She passed. Ted raised to four spades, the table passed around, and it was her turn, incredibly, to find an opening lead. She tossed out a singleton diamond and tried to get interested in the play of the hand.

This did not materialize. Ted’s foot kept reminding her that he had more on his mind than bridge, and she kept losing track of things, and Elly made the contract with an overtrick, bringing in game and rubber.

It was ridiculous, she thought. She should simply laugh the whole thing off. Exurban males made automatic passes at exurban females; it was part of the game, and the passes were rarely very serious. In Italy men pinch women on busses, not for the sexual thrill and not in an attempt to get the females into bed, but simply as an acknowledgment of their physical attractiveness. In Spain and Latin America, males say complimentary things to passing females. And, in exurbia, men makes passes at other men’s wives.

A custom, a form of compliment, symptomatic perhaps of the rather schizoid nature of exurbanite society. Nothing more, certainly.

Oh, yeah?

This, she told herself firmly, was hardly the case. Ted Carr was not a perfunctory pass-tosser. He meant it all. He wanted to take her to bed, and thus he was obviously out of his mind.

How could she possibly be interested? Oh, there had been men before Howard — that was no secret. But there had been no men since Howard and there were not going to be. She was a married woman with children, a happily married woman. She had no intention of tossing a hot little extramarital affair just to relieve the boredom of—

Boredom.

The word stopped her cold. She was bored, she’d been bored all day, she was so damned bored she was ready to go out of her mind. But Christ above, she wasn’t bored enough to be a damned fool, wasn’t sufficiently staggered by stagnancy to have a highland fling with Ted Carr. Nothing could interest her less. Nothing. Why, she loved Howard, she worshipped him, he was everything she wanted in a husband—

Methinks, a voice said, the lady doth protest too much.

She was troubled. She went on being troubled when Ted went on with his pass-tossing. He made it a little more physical while she was getting a tray ready with coffee and sandwiches after the bridge game was done for the evening. Ted managed to pass through the kitchen on the way to the john, and he managed to be so crude that it was frightening. He came up behind her almost before she knew he was there, slipped an arm around, her, grabbed hold of a breast—

She whirled around.

And he was smiling. “No sense being silly about this,” he said, calmly and levelly. “I’m going to get in your pants. I want you and you want it as much as I do.”

“I do not!”

“You will.”

She felt her temper coming to a boil. “You bastard,” she snapped. “I’m in love with Howard!”

“What’s love got to do with it?”

She simply stared at him.

“I’m going to lay you,” he went on. “And you’re going to love it. I’m going to take you on a neat little ride to the moon, Nan-O. And love hasn’t got a goddamn thing to do with it. I don’t want to love you, Nan-O. I just want to lay you.”

And then, infuriatingly, he had touched her breast again. She pushed his hand away and his other hand moved to stroke her below, insinuatingly. The hand was gone in an instant. And Ted Carr was leaving the kitchen, light laughter on his lips.

They drank their coffee, ate their sandwiches. The Carrs left. Nan thought once again that Elly was incredibly unfortunate to be married to such a Grade-A son of a bitch as Ted Carr. And then she banished Ted Carr from her mind for the night.

Not entirely, however.

She and Howard made love that night. They undressed, and washed up, and brushed their teeth. Nan pulled out the alarm button on the electric clock while Howard got his attaché case in order for the morning’s trip to the office. Then, the chores out of the way, they slipped under the covers into each other’s arms.

Their lovemaking was slow, gentle, tender. It was the coming-together of two very familiar bodies, two bodies which had grown quite used to one another. It was tender, and it was sweet, and it was very meaningful. They moved together, slowly, questingly, and they reached fulfillment together, and they lay close together for several minutes before Howard rolled over to fall asleep.

There was only one thing wrong. It was something that may have been present before in their lovemaking; if so, Nan had never been aware of it in the past. Tonight, though, she was aware of it. The awareness was not at all pleasant, not remotely pleasant. It was, as a matter of fact, thoroughly unpleasant.

Their lovemaking was monotonous.

Not without sparkle, not without drive, not without zest, not without satisfaction.

But without surprise. Totally without surprise.

She knew everything Howard was going to do before he did it. She could lie back and anticipate every caress, every kiss, every stroke and pat and pinch. She could, also, anticipate her own reaction to each caress, her own corresponding and answering caress. The whole affair, from beginning to end, was eminently predictable. It followed the pattern that had already been established in the course of years of marriage.

Thus it was monotonous.

She would not have noticed this if it had not been for Ted Carr. His overtures, majestically subtle at the bridge table and incredibly brazen in the kitchen, had made her acutely aware of sex and its various ramifications. And now, after all that, she and Howard had had sex. And it had been, well, boring.

So now, unwillingly, she thought again of Ted Carr. It would not be love with Ted, as it always was with Howard. It would not be warm. It would not be so thoroughly fulfilling.

But neither would it be so annoyingly predictable!

That was the whole thing. She tried to imagine what it would be like — kissing Ted and being kissed by him, touching him and being touched by him, making love to him. It was ridiculous, she would never do it, nothing could be farther from her mind.

And yet—

And yet she was thinking about it, was wondering. And, to be as painfully truthful as possible, was interested.

Damn!

She could not sleep. She had just had sex, and sex almost always brought sex. But now the very fulfillment of union with Howard left her mysteriously unfulfilled and sleep was not possible. She tossed on her pillows, listening to Howard’s measured breathing, remembering again the boring events of the day from the first ringing of the alarm clock through the loneliness up to Howard’s return.

Now, suppose she were going to have an affair with Ted. How would they work it? Where would they meet, for the love of God? And what would it be like — what on earth would it be like?

Ridiculous, absolutely absurd, simply ridiculous. She wasn’t going to have an affair with Ted. She wasn’t going to have an affair with anybody. She was in love with Howard—

Love hasn’t got a goddamned thing to do with it. I don’t want to love you, Nan-O. I just want to lay you.

Damn!

She took a sleeping pill. After a while, it worked.