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  “Go,” she said. Just that.

  “Next week?”

  She looked at him, looked away. “Just go,” she said.

  She stayed in bed until she heard the door close downstairs. She stayed in bed until she heard the panel truck pull away from the curb, carrying within it a load of clothing to be dry-cleaned and a man who had just made love to her. Then she hurried from the bed to the shower, washing the memory of Rudy Gerber from her skin. She spent twenty minutes under the shower. When she stepped from the tub she felt almost clean again.

  She changed the bed linen.

  By one-thirty she was in the kitchen, drinking coffee and smoking a filter-tipped cigarette. She had done it again, had had another meaningless affair with another meaningless man. She had sinned; she should wear a red A upon her left breast so all the world would know her as the adulteress she was.

  Suddenly she laughed. A scarlet letter—maybe that would fit Ted’s magnificent image! After all, they weren’t that far from New England. And that was Nathaniel Hawthorne country. Why, she could be sort of a latter-day Hester Prynne, a twentieth-century adulteress who went for every male within laying distance.

  Why?

  Dammit, why?

  It had always been this way. Elly Carr was a New York girl, in contrast to the typical exurban wife who began life as a midwestern product, went from college to Manhattan, and wound up in a house in Westchester or Rock-land or Fairfield or Bucks. Elly had been born on West 73rd Street near Broadway, had gone to New York schools and Hunter College. She had lost her virginity in her sophomore year at Evander Childs High to a now-forgotten member of the football team, had sacrificed that tiny membrane on her living room couch while her parents lay sleeping in the bedroom.

  And she had been an easy make ever since. All you had to do was be husky and masculine and stupid and willing and good ole Elly Barshter would be flat on her back with her knees in the air. The football team had enjoyed her, and the swimming squad had enjoyed her, and the track team, and the baseball team—

  College had not changed her, but it had edged her with subtlety. In high school, everybody knew she was an easy make. In college, the only ones who knew this were the ones who had been to bed with her. After college, when she was pounding the typewriter at Berman and Bates, she never slept with any of the men who worked in the office. She laughed with them, and she joked with them, and she went to shows and concerts with them. But she slept with raw-boned dockworkers that she picked up in sleazy bars.

  She hadn’t slept with Ted, not until he married her and whisked her away to New Hampshire on a honeymoon. Then she came into his arms, as virginal as possible, and if he knew there had been men before him he never told her. And she was going to be true to him—she swore to it herself a thousand times, told herself again and again that he was the only man for her, that she had helled around enough and that it was now time to settle down and be a good wife to a good husband.

  It wasn’t that hard in New York. They had an apartment on a quiet street in one of the better sections of Greenwich Village, and she kept her job at Berman and Bates, and things were fine. She was with Ted every minute possible, and he was an ardent lover and she needed him desperately. There were no other men then. There was no time for other men, and no need for other men, and she was true to Ted.

  Then all at once she was pregnant. The pregnancy was accidental, but this fact made her no less pregnant. And New York was no place to raise kids, and Ted was making good money, and his dream included an old house in the wilds of Westchester, and after a long search they found the right place with the right sort of grounds and the right layout.

  And they moved to Cheshire Point.

  She had the baby. Pam took a great deal of time at first, and again she was true to Ted, faithful to Ted, a good wife. Because there was no time for infidelity. She dreamed the same dreams of a phantom lover but nothing came of them.

  Time changed that. Time sent Pam to school. Time gave her hours by herself, hours alone in the house, with deliverymen calling and salesmen calling and finally, finally—

  It happened. And once it happened—with a nameless faceless man she had long since forgotten—it was easy enough for the pattern to repeat itself, to establish itself, to become part of her life. She was once again the easy lay, the easy make, the gal who dreamed of a phantom lover on a black stallion and gave herself to every brawny clod who knocked on the door.

  Ted did not know. No one knew, no one but the countless men who had made a Hester Prynne of her. And Ted would not know, not if she could possibly avoid it. Because she loved Ted.

  Yet she went on cheating on him.

  She left the kitchen, walked through the house. She looked at the living room fireplace, looked at the exposed hand-hewn beams.

  Why?

  Dammit, why?

  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.

  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 aro
und 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.