
IN THE SHADOWS
By
Joan Ellis
In The Shadows
By Joan Ellis
First published in 1962.
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ISBN: 978-1-936456-39-0
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Elaine Ransome flung one arm protectively across her face to shut out the autumn sun that had just reached her smartly-appointed bedroom. Subconsciously, she was shutting off too the memory of last night---and the ugly hung-over feeling that was beginning to penetrate into wakefulness.
"Why do I do these things?" She forced herself to prize open her eyelids, squint at the clock on the night table.
It was only eight-twenty. Magnificent thing, habit! She'd been carousing with Rick Stacy till way past four, yet habit had sprung her into routine. Elaine made a point of arriving at her office at nine-thirty, even though in her executive capacity nobody would have flickered an eyelash if she'd strolled in two hours later. Discipline, that was the ruler of her existence, she thought pridefully. She never let things get out of control. Not even Rick Stacy, last night, though for a while it'd been touch and go. She'd underestimated his capacity for liquor.
Elaine tossed back the sheet, swung her long, lean body in the expensive tailored pajamas, into a semi-vertical position. It wasn't that she liked to drink; she loathed the stuff. But get a man like Rick Stacy, who had to be catered to because he was a new vice-president in the agency with several topflight accounts under his wing, get a man like that sufficiently liquored-up and he'd give up the aspirations to rape.
"Oh, Lord!" Now Elaine remembered. Rick Stacy was snoring away out in the living room on Elaine's eight-hundred-dollar custom-ordered sofa. But hung-over as he must be considering his alcohol intake, he wouldn't be too much of a problem this morning.
She moved briskly into the bathroom, under the shower, fighting cobwebs, striving to eliminate the heaviness that enveloped her from last night. She relished the rush of the needle shower over her body. People who meant to flatter told her she had a fashion model's figure. The narrow hips, the flat belly, the faintly swelling breasts that were like a budding adolescent's. She could wear clothes though, she admitted with a sense of satisfaction. And she could afford the best. Tailored with utmost simplicity, with a single strand of cultured pearls that had become her trademark. The pearls and the high-heeled pumps masked the severity of her sleek dark coiffure, the strength of her face.
She went about the business of dressing with practiced speed, out into the tiny kitchenette to set up a percolator of coffee. Without that morning cup she wasn't truly civilized. And now she couldn't delay it any longer. A wave of repugnance shot through her as she made herself display the casual, sophisticated smile that would belong to the kind of woman Rick Stacy thought she was.
Elaine stood there by the couch, inspecting his prone body with its Best & Company shorts and under-shirt. Fifty-ish, showing the effects of hard-living and the faint paunch of the man who lives and drinks too well. How he'd slobbered over her last night, she recalled with a shiver of disgust! How she hated these stupid men! He'd got as far as taking off his shirt and trousers and passed out cold. For a moment she'd sat there in a cold sweat of panic, loathing his hands on her breasts, his greedy Scotch-smelling mouth fighting to penetrate hers. And then he'd collapsed.
"Morning, sweetie," she chirped with a brittle chuckle, proud that she displayed no signs of last night. At thirty-two she could pass for a solid six years younger, but soon she'd have to start watching herself. "Rick, love, the agency calls."
She stood there, that slightly mocking smile that belonged with the smart suit and the expensive apartment and her eighteen-thousand-a-year job as package designer for Fleet and Comstock, cast upon Rick Stacy's painfully-awakening face.
"Wow, what a head!" Rick groaned, clasping his forehead.
"I'm off to the salt mines, darling. There's coffee waiting, or shall I pour it for you now?"
"Let it sit." Rick closed his eyes. "This is a slow, arduous process. By the way, was I a bad boy last night?" A pleased grin crossed his face.
"That depends upon what you call bad," she taunted, loathing his eyes greedily undressing her now. "I thought you were quite good." He'd take that the wrong way naturally, but that was good. She wanted Rick on her side when she went to bat for the assignment on the cosmetic account he'd brought into the agency. Elaine knew by now---a man who'd thought he'd made it in bed and come off with flying colors was apt to be pliable.
"Angel, would you by any chance remember," he sighed unhappily. "Did I call home last night?"
"You did." He had a wife and two teenage sons somewhere in Connecticut---either Wilton or Westport, she couldn't recall which. "You were terribly tied up in a conference---you were staying over in town."
"Thanks." Rick closed his eyes again, and Elaine knew it was time to take off.
"See you later, Rick," she murmured with just the right note of nonchalance, belying her instinct to pick up a lamp and crash it over his head. Damn Rick, for ruining all last night's carefully-laid plans!
\*
The moment she hit the sidewalk, Elaine felt better. With her usual rapid strides she hurried into the drugstore on the corner, already reaching into her coin purse for a dime for the phone. Impatient that she'd had to delay this long, but she could hardly phone from the apartment with Rick lying right there.
"Damn!" she swore softly at the nail broken in her rush to dial.
"Hello," the sulky, sweet voice at the other end came to her after the first ring.
"Darling, I'm so sorry about last night!"
"I was just about to leave for the office---I thought you weren't even going to phone," Terry reproached softly.
"I couldn't phone from the apartment. Stacy passed out cold---I had to let him sleep on the sofa. He's still there."
"I fixed dinner for us," Terry went on wistfully. "I even bought a bottle of champagne. It was my first night in the apartment---I thought you'd be there to share with me."
"Darling, I could have killed that pig," Elaine insisted huskily. "I called you as soon as I could. You know Stacy's position at the agency---I couldn't afford to antagonize him." Besides, it was part of Elaine Ransome's perfect disguise---to let her Madison Avenue circle believe she played around a bit. With men.
"Are you hung-over?" Terry asked with that whisper of solicitude that never failed to touch Elaine. How long had it been altogether so far?
Seven weeks tomorrow. Elaine remembered like a recent husband.
"I've felt better," Elaine managed a chuckle, then eagerness to see Terry, to explain, to make amends, charged through her with sudden urgency. "Darling, call in the office and say you're sick. I'll take a cab right over."
"I'll have breakfast ready for you."
Elaine sensed the satisfaction surging through Terry now, and she was pleased with her decision. To hell with the agency---so she'd come in late for once. Nobody would ever connect her with Terry Brooks, the new girl in the steno pool. Nobody would ever guess that Elaine Ransome was a Lesbian.
\*
Sitting back in the cab, her eyes closed, Elaine remembered the first time with Terry. She'd been working till almost eleven to finish up a prospectus, and at the elevator she'd met Terry, who'd been working late with some junior executive---and was obviously furious. Something about her wistful youngness---she looked years less than her twenty-six years---had prodded Elaine into inviting her to have a late snack with her at a small French restaurant around the corner.
"On the agency," Elaine had chuckled. "Expense accounts are marvelous things."
Gradually, Terry had relaxed. She'd sat there opposite Elaine, with her wistful haunted eyes and fluffy pale gold hair, and Elaine had been entranced. Terry was burning over the junior exec's amorous efforts. He frankly couldn't understand why she wasn't panting to hop into bed with him.
Terry confessed, with pathetic eagerness, to a past marriage with a brutish hulk of man, that had ended three months later. She'd had a baby, which her mother was raising back home in Pennsylvania.
"He was impossible!" Even now Elaine could hear the echo of Terry's voice, frankly outlining the sexual habits of her over-sexed husband, completely devoid of gentleness or interest in her. "It's funny---a man and a woman do those things and it's fine to the world, but when two women want to make love, without the ugly force, it's supposed to be a crime."
Terry's eyes had met Elaine's then, holding them, letting Elaine understand. It'd been a stupefying shock, for a few moments, for Elaine to realize that someone had stared past her supposedly unpenetrable mask to the loneliness and pain that was her secret existence.
Elaine took Terry home with her that night, and for the first time in two years she'd unleashed her hunger for love. Terry had been so painfully sweet, coming to her in the darkness of Elaine's narrow bed, her hands eager, her body warm and responsive. Knowing all the secrets, all the frenzied pent-up desires, and how to nurture them, and coax, and finally to satisfy. That exquisitely-soft, yielding body, seemingly so fragile, in reality hotly passionate. Remembering, Elaine's own body trembled with renewed desire.
"Ninety cents," the cabbie shattered her introspection with good-natured admiration. Figuring her for a good tip. He was right. "Thank you!"
Elaine sprinted from the cab into the brownstone. She'd done what she'd never expected of herself. She'd rented this apartment, furnished it, and installed Terry. Only seven weeks tomorrow, and her whole life was a complete reversal. She'd have to be careful, she reminded herself with recurrent nervousness. She couldn't afford to let the truth out about herself and Terry. She wasn't some Village character who could take love right where she found it. She had an impressive career ahead---too good to take stupid chances over. That's why the periodic flights to Mexico or Jamaica, where she was just another stranger---and usually there was somebody like her, lost and lonely and searching. Rarely satisfying, it was nevertheless something. But the last trip had been two years ago---two years of living in an arid desert until Terry had found her out.
"You were so long, sweetie." Terry stood there in the door reproaching her as she bounded up the final steps of the third flight.
"We had to wait for every light across town." Elaine slipped an arm about Terry's waist, and closed the door behind them. "I could have killed that louse last night, but he's dangling the Truly Yours cosmetic account under my nose."
"I have breakfast ready," Terry turned aside with a slight petulance still lingering.
"Darling, don't be like that." Elaine reached to pull the slight figure in its dainty flowered peignoir close to her.
"Breakfast can wait a little while," Terry murmured, nuzzling her face against Elaine's shoulder. In her high heels Elaine was half a head taller.
"Let's." Desire rolled over Elaine in frantic waves.
"You're wonderful, you know," Terry murmured as Elaine walked her over to the generous-sized divan in the sleeping alcove. A divan made for love. "Nobody like you, ever."
Elaine's eyes shot to the window. The blinds were tight. Terry was like that---she hated the daylight coming in---she wanted to keep the secrecy of night as much as possible.
"Sit down, Elaine," Terry whispered eagerly, already helping her off with the perfect-tailored jacket, and then her skirt.
"You're sweet, so sweet!" Elaine couldn't wait to feel that soft, yielding body close to hers now.
"Wait," Terry ordered, in perfect command of the situation as she carefully removed Elaine's shoes and stockings, the wisp of a bra that was all she needed, the simple white panties. "I love the way you're built," Terry murmured, her slender fingers moving with deceptive strength across the slight swell of Elaine's breasts, her narrow waist, the slim hips and firm lean thighs that might have belonged to a young boy. Then Terry's mouth was tracing the course of her hands, bringing sobs of exquisite pain from Elaine as she sat there immobile, eyes closed, absorbing the glorious ecstasy of relief.
"Oh, baby, baby!" Elaine drew Terry up from her knees, to lie on the divan beside her, and she couldn't wait to thrust aside that dainty peignoir. Terry was ready for her---nothing beneath.
"Love me, darling. Love me like crazy." Terry was pleading.
And together, they forgot the ugliness of the outside world, the brutal coarseness that was man-woman love to them. Together they nuzzled their demanding bodies, writhing, legs and arms entangled, their tongues lashing together, their bodies hurtling frenziedly to wild, wonderful tortuous relief.
"Honey, how did I ever live without you?" Elaine muttered.
"You won't have to anymore," Terry murmured, and the note of triumph in her voice somehow nagged at Elaine. She'd never felt unsure of herself before. She'd have to be so careful now, her inner caution warned urgently. So utterly careful!
\*
Elaine walked out of the elevator onto the plush carpeting of Fleet and Comstock at ten of eleven. Past the admiring eyes of the receptionist, to whom a package designer like Elaine Ransome was the glamorous career girl, to be envied and emulated. Through the lane of cubbyholes belonging to lesser personnel to the rows of private offices in the rear. The office of Elaine Ransome was marked "Private". It wasn't so private now.
"Must have been quite a night," Paul Hennessy tossed off mockingly, sprawled back in Elaine's chair, his feet on the desk.
"Don't you have an office of your own?" Elaine demanded calmly. So the word was around that she'd been cavorting with Stacy. Fine.
"When are you going to stop giving me the brush off?" he complained, nonchalantly unwinding himself. "If I didn't know you better, I'd think you were queer."
"I don't have time for your brand of fun," Elaine informed him comfortably. Paul she liked---so long as his passes remained verbal. "I have a job, remember?"
"You're going to wake up at forty and find out an easel is terrible company in bed on a cold night!"
"Beat it," she laughed at him feeling more relaxed today than in many months. Terry was right there in the apartment, always within reach. No more tortured nights, furious at the hammering demands of her body. No more the sleeplessness born of unsatisfied anguish that knew no relief. None of the empty iciness of those who walk alone, living a lie, in constant dread of being found out. She could face the world with this mask of hers, when she knew there was Terry.
Elaine was running a comb through her severely simple coiffeur that managed to be smart and becoming, when her phone rang.
"Hello," she utilized the professionally charming office voice, despite her impatience to be out of the office now, to phone Terry again from the outside.
"Elaine, how are you!"
"Eric!" The familiar but not recently-heard voice of her brother shook her back into the present. "Are you in town?"
"Not yet," Eric chuckled, "but soon. Look, Sis, could you do us a tremendous favor?"
"Possibly. How's the bride?" she remembered to ask. She hadn't gone to Eric's wedding out there in Idaho but she'd sent a shockingly-expensive wedding present to make up for it. Four months by now, she took a fast guess.
"Great. Sis, I've got tremendous news---I'm being transferred to New York. The promotion's fabulous, and you know me---I've always been pining for the city life."
"When are you coming?"
"In about ten days," Eric supplied. "Our big problem is getting an apartment."
"That's a real problem in the city," Elaine hedged. Eric and his wife coming into the city. Now! Why now?
"Good old Elaine, you can solve any problem," Eric teased, and suddenly all the years rolled back---and all the old bitterness. Elaine, the stalwart reliable, her father's right arm. Eric, so frail the first years of life, the dreamer, their mother's pet. Handsome, too handsome for a man, she'd remembered her father saying too often. But Eric was married---he was straight. "Sis?" Eric's voice interrupted her backward kaleidoscope reminiscing.
"Okay, Eric," she catapulted herself back into the old image. "I'll search around for something suitable."
"In the Village," Eric chuckled again. "Kathy writes poetry, just for relaxation, but she has this wistful urge to live where Edna St. Vincent Millay once lived."
"I don't know about the exact houses, but I'll do my best. The Village isn't what it used to be you know---luxury apartment buildings going up all over."
"Make sure it has all the comforts of home, Sis. I'm a guy who likes to live well."
Elaine listened attentively while Eric briefed her on their needs, automatically made suggestions about their shipping the furniture east, outwardly the perfectly composed ever-efficient elder sister. Yet deep inside, she churned with alarm. Something undefinable troubled her, warned her against impending disaster. Of all the times to decide to move to New York, why did Eric have to pick right now? Why, why, why?
Elaine could have shot herself for phoning Eric this way and telling him that the apartment was ready for instant occupancy.
"But it'll take time for your furniture to arrive," she murmured nervously, doodling on her desk pad in exasperation. Somehow, she wanted to prolong the interval between accustoming herself to her new way of life with Terry and Eric's arrival with his wife. Eric brought back so much she'd fought to lock away in the back of her mind! At least, Eric knew nothing. Nothing he could pinpoint as fact.
"We can have the furniture picked up tomorrow. This is a small town, Sis---not like when we were living in Chicago. We can fly in Thursday, give ourselves the long weekend to get settled," he wound up with a chuckle of satisfaction.
"Okay dear," Elaine masked her annoyance. "Let me know what flight you're taking, and I'll be at the apartment to welcome you." And his bride, she thought with a rush of insecurity. Someone who'd be one in the city, who'd probably want to foist herself on Elaine. Lord, it could be wretched! Then she membered what Eric had said about the poetry-writing kick his wife was on. Nothing she loathed more than pseudo-artists and phoney intellectuals.
Elaine heard herself making the perfunctory inquires about Kathy, Eric's wife, and the proper replies to his few moments of chit-chat. With a sigh of relief, she put the phone back into place. "Hi, are you finished for the day?" Terry's small face suddenly appeared in the doorway.
"Yes!" Elaine's head shot up in surprise. They'd made such a point of barely knowing each other here in the office.
"It's all right, darling," Terry reassured her with that smile of a tiny tot eager to please. "Not a soul left on the floor except us."
"It's better not, though," Elaine reiterated casually, reaching into a drawer for her purse and gloves. Better not take any chances that might jeopardize this fearfully-wonderful relationship, her mind echoed cautiously.
"Shall we eat at home or out?" Terry perched on the desk while Elaine slid into her suit jacket.
"Out," Elaine decided, her mind racing along on the routine errands she'd have to attend to for Eric and his wife. The gas and electricity to be turned on, arrangements to alert the super about the furniture arrival, a woman to come in and clean the place. "Oh yes, I have to stop by and pick up the lease and sign some sort of affidavit they're demanding since Eric'll be moving in before he has a chance to sign it."
"You mean they're holding you responsible?" Terry demanded indignantly.
"You don't have to worry, Eric won't run out. He's the quiet, dependable type, always determined to do the right thing."
"You don't make him sound very likeable," Terry decided curiously.
"Didn't I?" Elaine stared in astonishment. "I've always adored Eric. He's six years younger than me, and I suppose he had some sort of thing about having to try to keep up with me in everything. A funny sort of competition, you know," she fumbled, not saying what she wanted to at all. "He's really a brilliant character. Only twenty-six and with a job like his!"
Terry laughed delightedly. "You're a riot as the proud sister."
"Why?"
"It's just that I can't see you with a brother," Terry admitted frankly. "I can't see you in a family circle at all."
"I didn't just grow," Elaine's eyes twinkled. "I had the routine mother and father." Her eyes lost the twinkle now. "Maybe not routine, but a father and mother."
Terry did most of the talking in the cab downtown, waiting outside while Elaine went into the real-estate office for the necessary papers about the apartment. Five minutes later she was back in the taxi, leaning forward to give the driver the address of a quiet restaurant on West Eleventh.
"Let's go somewhere different," Terry decided impulsively. "It isn't far from here."
"All right," Elaine gave in. Terry could be such a child sometimes. She was rather surprised, though, that she would know a place down in the Village. She'd only been in New York a short while.
The instant Elaine pushed open the door that lead to the basement restaurant called "Maria's", she was aware of an inner sense of wary alertness.
"It won't be too crowded this early," Terry chattered animatedly as they walked past the cashier towards the beckoning "Maria".
"That's good." Elaine's eyes were accustoming themselves to the ultimate in subdued lighting the place affected.
"Not too many sightseers, either," Terry murmured with a smile of anticipation. "You'll like it."
Elaine thought, for a brief moment, that this was just another Village eating spot, with the typical wine bottles with candles, fishnet drapes, paintings that adorned every available hanging space. Here and there she noticed couples who looked as though they were out "seeing the Village", bright-eyed girls with scornful males. Then, with stunning clarity, the whole picture changed for Elaine.
At first, she'd thought "Maria" was a woman wearing velvet pants and a satin blouse. Now, as "Maria" hovered over them, the truth was blatantly clear. "Maria" showed the first faint signs of needing a shave. The lipstick, the mascara, the exotic turban, like the shocking pink velvet pants and the orange blouse, declared the feminine instincts and desires that masked a male body.
Her body tense, shoulders hunched tightly, Elaine gripped the table with her hands, while her eyes darted about the room, confirming her suspicions. Mostly, the dining couples were paired by sex. Two girls together, two fellows. Most of the girls in slacks and shirts, or full-swinging skirts with high-necked sweaters. The fellows displaying varying degrees of daring, some of them going the whole hog, with wildly-striped slacks, mad shirts, all the make-up offered by the cosmetic manufacturers. Elaine felt physically sick. Terry had brought her to a gay hangout!
"I haven't been here more than once or twice," Terry said carefully, her eyes taking in Elaine's insecurity.
"You should have told me," Elaine said jerkily.
"The food's good." Terry's knee sought Elaine's under the table, and one hand reached to cover hers. "And we can relax," she added with a show of bravado. "You need to relax."
"I've never been in a place like this," Elaine managed quietly. "Not here in New York." She had to be honest---she'd traveled the rounds of gay bars in Acapulco and San Francisco and Miami. Never however, in a city where she might, by some horrible accident, bump into someone who might know her. There'd been one frightening near-encounter, in 'Frisco four years ago. She'd been in a bar with a girl who'd picked her up in another bar, and suddenly in the next booth she'd seen Len Woodson. Len Woodson. Len was an account executive in a competitive agency, with a wife and kids in a mid-Manhattan duplex. Only here he was with a fairy pal who couldn't keep his hands off Len. She'd excused herself incoherently and dashed off. Never in a million years would she have guessed Len wasn't straight! It taught her a lesson---if you're going to be smart, be smart all the way.
"You won't find anybody here from Fleet and Comstock," Terry intruded softly, and for the first time, Elaine realized with a start, Terry seemed sure of herself. More the wise frankly-initiated habituée of a place like "Maria's" than the wide-eyed half-child she'd always appeared to Elaine.
"Terry, I've tried to explain the importance of being discreet," Elaine started off, self-conscious in the presence of Terry's frankness.
"Darling Terry, where have you been?"
Elaine glanced up with a start as the handsome dark-haired chap in Madison Avenue tweeds descended upon them, reaching for Terry and kissing her noisily.
"Stephie, how wonderful," Terry beamed. "Elaine, this is Stephen Carr, one of the first people I met in New York. This is Elaine," she adroitly avoided last name identification.
"Hello, dear." Stephie was candidly scrutinizing her now. "Isn't this one a doll?"
"You're so conservative today," Terry giggled. "Business?"
"Yes," Stephie sighed. "Fred likes me to make a pretense of working for a living, you know. I'm doing a series of photographs for some cold-nosed New England pal of his tonight. Can you imagine if I showed up in drag?"
Elaine listened apprehensively to the high-pitched small talk that occupied the other two for the next few minutes. If it weren't for the touch of eyebrow pencil, the slightest blend of lipstick, Stephen Carr could have passed as a normal Madison Avenue junior executive, on his way up.
"Oh, I took Fritzi a present today," Stephie remembered exuberantly. "Fritzi's the bartender in a gay bar up in the Forties," he explained for Elaine's benefit, while she writhed with the agony of his presence. "I stole this new hat Fred's sister bought for herself over in Bendel's---the maddest thing you ever saw. Of course, it looks much better on Fritzi than on the old girl!"
Elaine struggled through the dinner, painfully conscious of her surroundings. How she detested these noisy, ostentatious queers! Why must they advertise to the world? Where were the sensitive introspective, fearful ones like herself? People who knew and understood and didn't condemn.
"I'm sorry I brought you here," Terry said finally. "It was a mistake, wasn't it?"
"We'll forget about it." Elaine allowed one hand to caress the slender leg that reached out towards hers.
"Let's go home," Terry coaxed urgently, her eyes bright with anticipation now. "Let's go home and I'll make you forget all about this!"
\*
Elaine roamed through the apartment she'd rented for Eric and his wife, encased now in nervousness at meeting them. She glanced at her watch. Their plane was due to have arrived over an hour ago. They should be here any minute. It was more than three years since she'd seen Eric---during those agonizing days at the hospital while their father lay dying.
Her father, who'd so desperately wanted her to be a boy. He was well in his forties when she'd been born, and their mother not far behind. He was so afraid there'd be only Elaine. No son for him. Almost from the very beginning he'd treated her like a son, she thought, churning with the old frustration. When Eric was born, six years later, it made little difference. He'd been so delicate until he'd hit his teens. It was Elaine who played tennis and golf with the old man, Elaine who went on fishing trips with him, shared his confidence. Elaine, who should have been a boy!
Eric knew nothing, she'd kept telling herself for years, yet somehow his keen knowing way of looking at her could make her squirm with discomfort. Could he have seen through her disguise, as Terry had? No, this was ridiculous, she wouldn't cherish such idiotic ideas! She reached for a cigarette, lit it, picked up the bottle of champagne she'd bought as a token of welcome for Eric and Kathy. To keep busy, not to think, that was the urgent matter at hand. Then the doorbell rang, sharp and decisive. They were here.
"Hi ya, Sis!" Eric grabbed her warmly, kissed her, then held her at arm's length for inspection. "You look terrific," he commented approvingly. "What do you think, Kathy?"
"I think she's lovely." Kathy smiled with a simple honest warmth that won Elaine instantly.
"Well, come on and see your apartment," Elaine drew her sister-in-law into the living room with pleased surprise. Eric had done well for himself, she guessed instinctively. He needed someone like this---unaffected, warm, with her feet on the ground.
"I don't know about you two," Eric announced, "but I'm starving."
"Why don't we eat right here?" Kathy decided, her eyes darting to Elaine for support. "We can run down and pick up cold cuts at the delicatessen. We have champagne!" she waved to the bottle.
"You stay here and get acquainted with Elaine," Eric ordered, taking his tall, slim body to the door with rapid strides reminiscent of his sister's.
"Don't get lost," Elaine warned. "We want to eat tonight." With a start she remembered her original plan to have a drink with the incoming couple, a short conversation of welcome, and then up the West Side to the brownstone where Terry was waiting. She'd have to figure out a way to phone Terry if this threatened to become a long evening.
"Eric's talked so much about you." Kathy sat on one end of the sofa, tucking her slender legs beneath her.
"Has he?" Somehow, Elaine was surprised. "I hope it wasn't all bad." Such banal conversation, but it gave her a chance to inspect her brother's wife. A slender, dark-haired girl, built somehow like Terry yet with a striking difference. Kathy had wide intense eyes that seemed to question with bright interest, a full sensitive mouth, the classic oval face. Yet it wasn't this that gave her an indefinable air of beauty---it was something inside. Here was a girl who'd understand many things, Elaine thought turbulently, then grasped hold of herself. She must give herself away to no one. No one at all!
"Eric says you have a marvelous job," Kathy went on avidly. "It sounds absolutely fascinating."
"Not really." For the first time in years she was giving voice to the secret doubts that had gnawed at her at recurrent intervals. "Commercial junk, that for some insane reason pays off well. After a while, you forget anything else."
"You mean there's nothing creative about designing a package for a new lipstick or a bra or girdle?" Kathy smiled whimsically.
"Oh, it's creative, in one respect," Elaine allowed herself a brittle laugh. "It creates the means for my very charming apartment, clothes I couldn't otherwise afford, vacations."
"But it isn't enough, is it?" From Kathy it didn't sound phoney or pseudo-intellectual.
"It has to be," Elaine said calmly. "I'm not good enough for anything else."
"I thought you'd be the one who'd defy commercialism, who'd throw conventions to the winds." Kathy perked her head to one side, inspecting Elaine.
"What on earth gave you that idea?" Elaine felt herself caught up in alarm.
"Eric, the way he talked. Eric's sweet and wonderful, and I love him madly, but he needs success, financial reward. He has to know he's making good or it drives him to distraction."
"And I'm different?" she countered, her mind chasing back. Eric, with his maddening sense of competition with her. Competition for their father's love, for worldly approval. Why did he have to drive himself that way?
"You're strong," Kathy guessed intuitively. "I knew it even before I met you, from Eric. You have the strength to fight for what you want. Even if you never made it, you'd have the victory of having done it your way."
"You're a strange gal," Elaine teased, yet she knew Kathy accepted this as approval. "Wonder if Eric knows how lucky he is?"
They switched to casual talk then---about the city, the apartment building, the neighborhood---each satisfied in having made a friend in the other. It was a comfortable feeling, Elaine thought---she could relax with Kathy. So few people gave her that sense of not having to keep the barriers tightly locked.
Then Eric was in the apartment again, and they made a gay party-like thing of preparing the spread he'd brought up.
"Old Elaine didn't fail us, did she?" He pulled Kathy close to him now. "An apartment right in the Village, the way you wanted."
"I told you," Elaine laughed, "the Village is changing since the old days. The luxury apartments, like this one, are moving in all over---the actors and artists and writers are being shoved off into cold-water flats on the East Side."
"There'll be enough left, though," Kathy insisted determinedly. "So much I want to see."
"Maybe you can persuade Elaine to leave off that career pursuing and show you around," Eric shot a mocking smile at his sister, and again she felt that penetrating insight that seemed to know more than it revealed.
"Oh, Eric, Elaine's squandered enough of her time on us. Finding this apartment, arranging everything!" Kathy glanced fondly from her husband to her sister-in-law.
"The trouble with Elaine," Eric was opening the champagne now, "she's so all-fired concerned about that career, she forgets about having fun. You ought to get married, Sis," he poured the champagne with a flourish. "Nothing like it!"
"Now, Eric," Elaine tightened inside. This was an almost-forgotten obsession of Eric's---to get her married off. "He's been going on like that for years."
"I hate to see you going to waste!" He shook his head in good-natured disapproval. "An attractive babe like you---you could have been married a hundred times if you didn't play so hard to get."
"Eric, shut up!" Elaine said it with a smile, but the peremptoriness underneath caught Kathy's attention.
"Eric, stop riding her," she protested gently, sipping at her own champagne with cautious watchfulness. Elaine knew Kathy sensed the unspoken peculiar antagonism between herself and Eric.
Eric was going fullspeed now---Elaine knew when he was bursting with high spirits like this nothing could stop him. She clutched her champagne glass, wanting to throw it in his face, yet understanding he did this only because he was driven. He couldn't accept the fact that he was as good as his sister in their father's eyes, even though the old man had been dead three years. He took this means of lashing back at her, gaining some release for himself.
"For a time I thought there was hope for old Elaine," Eric chuckled mockingly, but his eyes rested on his sister with honest affection. "Remember that crazy year when you tore off to Paris? I'd just started high school."
"I remember," Elaine said briefly. But she didn't want to remember! She hadn't let herself dwell on that for years.
"Elaine's sold out to old devil Success now," a trace of envy sneaked into his voice, "but she had the makings of a first-rate painter. Dad nearly burst with pride when she won some prize over there in Paris. Then suddenly, she gave it up and came back home. Never could understand it, Sis." His face probed keenly again, the mockery gone. "I figured, though, it must have had something to do with one of those crazy Left Bank love affairs. Mother went over to visit her, and lo and behold, they returned to Chicago together. Mother was bursting with the conviction she'd persuaded Elaine to be practical, to give up this starving artist bit, the art for art's sake deal. I never bought that, though."
"It was simple." Elaine compelled herself to meet Eric's eyes, though somehow she couldn't face Kathy's. "I realized I wasn't good enough to be great. In-betweens didn't interest me."
"You owed yourself the chance," Kathy insisted intensely.
"Now we've done enough talking about me," Elaine inspected Kathy with determined curiosity. "Let me hear all about Kathy now."
But while Kathy talked, lightly, brimming over with the joy of her marriage, Elaine's mind shot back. Thirteen years ago it was. She'd gone to Paris completely enraptured with Tomorrow, sure of herself, what she'd do with her life. The bare necessities of life would be enough, so long as she could work. Then she'd met Alex and the world had seemed too perfect. Alex---short for Alexandra---was an art student too, and the two of them moved into an attic studio together, sharing everything. They couldn't afford models, so they posed for each other. It'd been so easy, almost without realizing each new step, to fall into that relationship that people back home, in their circle, talked about only in whispers. Alex was warm, lovable, intelligent, and she adored Elaine.
How different life might be today if her mother hadn't popped to Paris for a surprise visit, and walked unannounced into that attic studio. Elaine's teeth clenched, pain shooting through her, reliving that awful moment. Alex had been posing for her in the nude, and the portrait was going so well. It was a hot day---they'd stopped for a glass of wine. They'd lain across the couch together, and then Alex had crept into her arms and began her gentle lovemaking, until neither of them remembered to be gentle. Caught up in the fury of passion, neither heard the door open. Then her mother's voice lashing at them, cold with outrage.
"You fiends! You rotten, degenerate fiends!".
Elaine fought to blank out her mind, not to remember the terrible scene. Her mother's threats to expose her to her father and Eric unless she returned to Chicago with her immediately. Elaine couldn't have borne exposure---she went back with her mother.
"Hey, Elaine, stop daydreaming," Eric's voice brought her back to reality. "Is this what champagne does to you these days? I still say, you ought to get married---that'd fix you up."
"I have to leave." Elaine arose abruptly. "I forgot completely about an appointment this evening."
"Eric, you're driving her away," Kathy rebuked him with a hopeless smile. "It's supposed to be the bride who's always trying to marry off the eligible gals among her acquaintance."
"I'm sorry," Elaine gathered her things together, knowing her sense of urgency was carrying across to the other two, but she couldn't help it. "I really do have to leave now."
She walked out of the apartment as though it were suddenly a gas chamber smothering out her life. Why couldn't you keep things locked away in those secret vaults in the back of your mind? Why did somebody have to come along to fling the doors open again?
Elaine walked, not knowing where, not knowing how long, until a corner clock struck reality into her. It was almost midnight and she hadn't phoned Terry! She hastened inside the nearest drugstore, dropping the coin into the change holder of the phone with nervous fingers. She'd promised to call early.
The phone rang, continually, with no answer. Perhaps she'd dialed incorrectly. Where was Terry? All at once it was urgent to know that this much, at least, remained unchanged, accessible to her. Elaine dialed again, her breath hurried and anxious. Again, the regular monotonous buzzing of an unanswered phone.
"Damn," she swore softly as her change purse skidded to the floor of the narrow phone booth.
Out on the sidewalk, she hailed a cab, impatient to reassure herself again with Terry. Out of the cab, up the stairs of the brownstone, ringing the bell with clamorous urgency. The windows were dark, she'd noticed from the street, but if Terry were asleep, she'd hear---she was such a light sleeper. Taking out her key, Elaine unlocked the door and walked inside. The bed was empty. The apartment was empty. Terry was nowhere around...
\*
Elaine stood there in the middle of the empty apartment, as though her world had suddenly dissolved into a shambles. At least, she could run to Terry, she'd thought. Terry who understood and sympathized and loved with such tenderness. She must have dressed in a rush, Elaine decided with the first faint stirrings of suspicion. For whom? Her make-up lay scattered about the mirrored dressing table with the reckless abandon of a temperamental Broadway star almost late for an entrance.
Elaine reached out to touch the spilled dusting powder, closed the bottle of perfume Terry had overlooked, as though somehow this would bring her close. She glanced at her watch again. What was so urgent that Terry would dress to the teeth and run out this way? Elaine had said she'd call! But she hadn't, Elaine reminded herself, determined to be fair. Terry, volatile and emotional, must have been furious with her.
Elaine lowered herself into a chair, reached for a cigarette and lit it. Maybe she'd stay here a while, wait to see if Terry would show up.
"Damn!" She leapt to her feet in a fit of impatience, after only a minute of repose. How could she sit, with this insistent doubt eating away at her? Why had Terry dashed out like that? Couldn't she wait even a while? That was one of the small things in Terry that plagued at her---that faint streak of vindictiveness that showed itself at the slightest provocation. Terry was angry because Elaine hadn't called, Elaine improvised, so she'd cooked up this stunt to get even with her. She'd probably gone tearing off to Maria's, Elaine told herself---because she knew Elaine loathed the place.
Or had she gone to some man? Some hidden corner of the days before they'd met, like the life that included Maria's and that posturing character Stephie, had returned to lay claim to Terry, Elaine thought, perspiring with alarm. She needed one certain thing in her life, one thing with roots, to know. That was supposed to be Terry, who'd come into her world and changed it to glorious hues. Where was she---and with whom?
No sense in staying here, torturing herself, conjuring up nasty mental pictures. Elaine reached for her purse, tossed her jacket over her arm and hurried out of the oddly-haunted apartment into the quiet midnight of the west seventies. She reached the sidewalk with a sigh of relief, then uncertainty caught hold of her again. The prospect of returning to her own apartment was suddenly repugnant. Tonight's encounter with Eric had punctured sealed-off memories that threatened to destroy utterly the peace of mind she'd labored so long, so hard, to attain for herself. A peace of mind that was admittedly a fragile tenuous thing, but it had been something. On top of that, Terry's desertion.
Of course she was being melodramatic, Elaine taunted herself. What was the matter with her, that she could become such an emotional mess because Terry hadn't been there when she expected her to be? Kathy was different, an insidious voice whispered. Eric's wife would never be vindictive, shallow. There was a fine, wonderful quality in that girl Eric had found for himself. She almost envied him, Elaine admitted. But enough of such dangerous mental meanderings, she tried to take herself in hand. She was Elaine Ransome, successful, highly-respected in her field, with an exciting career to pursue. Think about that Truly Yours account, for instance, she commanded herself sternly. What a feather in her cap to land it! And if she were smart, she would.
Elaine hesitated as she turned onto Broadway, still loath to go back to her own place. The bar at the corner appeared quiet and relaxing. So she wasn't the type to wander into a bar alone! This wasn't the routine night in her existence. She'd go in, sit quietly alone over one drink, take hold of herself again---and then a cool cab ride across Central Park to her apartment. When she got there, she'd phone Terry---and Terry'd be home, she promised herself with soaring optimism. And Terry would have a marvelously simple excuse.
"Yes ma'am?" The bartender strolled over leisurely inspecting Elaine and obviously coming up with a complimentary appraisal.
"Gin and tonic," Elaine ordered with an impersonal smile, to let him know she was friendly but not there for a pick-up.
She glanced about at her surroundings. It was a small place, intimate and cozy, not over-populated at the moment. She could feel herself beginning to relax. This was good---being among people without being with them. It took the edge off the horrible loneliness that sometimes threatened to smother her.
The bartender brought her drink, offered a moment's small talk, and discreetly took himself off. Elaine almost wished he'd remained. That way her mind couldn't probe its uneasy secretive caverns.
With a start she realized the man at the extreme end of the bar was casually making his way over to her. She stiffened coldly as he straddled the seat next to hers.
"I could ask for a light," he said in low, interested tones, "but that's such a trite approach, don't you think?"
"It fits a trite situation." She returned his inspection with disdainful iciness. "I suggest you extend your search to a more fruitful area."
"It's a shame," he murmured regretfully. "We could make it a fascinating evening, with some cooperation on your part."
Elaine forced herself to regard him calmly. He was quite attractive, actually---the average woman would have considered him a real catch. But then, she wasn't the average woman. She was only half-woman---only this outer deceiving shell. In a way, it was a compliment to her efforts at camouflage that so many men found her attractive physically. They didn't know!
"You'll have to find yourself another playmate," she brushed him off, outwardly casually, hiding the insistent urge to bash in that handsome male face of his. Was Terry off with somebody like that? A cold, sick chill encased her as she envisioned Terry in the arms of some hulk of a man set on satisfying himself with that soft pliant body that had stretched beside hers.
Elaine concentrated on finishing her drink, allowing him time to retreat gracefully, then she paid the tab and hurried out of the bar as though her life depended upon breathing fresh air again. She walked to the subway, poised uncertainly at the head of the stairs, then swerved and walked swiftly in the opposite direction. An all-night coffee shop, bright and cheerful, captured her attention, and she walked inside. She took a small booth near the front, where she could watch the door as though expecting someone, in case anybody got ideas about joining her.
She was working on her second cup of coffee when something about the tensely erect shoulders of the man coming through the revolving door drew her glance. At the same instant he spied her. Paul Hennessy.
"Hi!" He wandered over, frankly delighted. "What are you doing on this un-smart side of town?"
"My brother and his wife just moved into town. They're staying at a hotel in this section until their apartment is ready for them," Elaine lied skillfully. "And don't be a snob about your neighborhood."
"I can't picture you in anything but Sutton Place or East End Avenue," he kidded, enjoying this unexpected encounter. He waved to a waitress and gestured his wants. Plainly Paul was a regular here.
"You don't really know me at all," she said intensely, then gasped in dismay at her inadvertent admission.
"I've tried to remedy that situation, regularly." His eyes held hers, and something there must have warned him to veer away from the romantic track. "How many people actually do know one another? We work together, spend hours each day practically side by side, but who has time in our crazy world to bother with learning the real things?"
"They know you here, don't they?" Elaine noticed the warm curiosity of their waitress, the counterman, watching their table.
"Practically my second home." Paul smiled whimsically, "I belong to the night people---I can't fall asleep before three or four in the morning. I get sick of TV and reading after a while. I come here."
"There's a whole world of drugstore and cafeteria people," Elaine said softly. "I remember when I first came to New York to live. I knew practically no one, except the familiar faces I saw every day in the cafeteria where I had breakfast and a late snack before bed time. Somehow, I felt as though I wasn't entirely alone."
"Been a long time since you thought about those cafeteria days," Paul challenged.
"That's right," Elaine conceded. The horrible, frightening aloneness she'd suffered through before Terry hadn't been assuaged by such innocuous diversion. But then people like Elaine Ransome didn't sit around in such places. She studied Paul's face with fresh respect. "Why does someone like you prowl around through the night? You with your feminine fan club!" It was true enough; women in droves plagued Paul with phone calls at the office. She'd heard the awed comments of the receptionists and switchboard operators.
"What about you?" he countered. "What ghosts are you chasing?"
Elaine caught her breath sharply. She was almost giving herself away! "I don't make a practice of this," she reminded. "I was visiting my brother and his wife, then suddenly got this urge for a bite to eat. So, here I am." She spread her hands eloquently, a thoroughly un-Elaine gesture.
"What brought your brother to New York?" He was watching her quizzically. "Trying to emulate his sister's success?"
"Eric's brilliant," she said calmly. "His firm made him a fabulous offer to come to New York, so he grabbed at it."
"Like his job?"
"I think so." The question caught her unawares. "As much as most people do."
"What about you?" Paul probed. "Where you always bent on designing lipstick containers and deodorant packages?"
"I had the usual adolescent ideas," Elaine conceded, frowning. Why must everything tonight drag out the Paris year?
"Too bad we can't hang on to the adolescent ideas ---we'd be a damn lot happier, most of us." Paul stared at his cigarette. "I was nuts to study seriously in Paris or Rome. The old evil, money, got in my way. Now I do fool things, like buying weird paintings by artists I think are going to be great fifty years from now. I've been collecting this one French guy. Not expensive, to a man who can afford to collect, but on my salary it's kind of nuts. Anyhow, I went chasing over to the gallery tonight to plunk down another hundred on a painting they're holding for me. I got there too late---the gallery had closed already." He peered moodily into space.
"They'll be open tomorrow." Elaine watched him now, her interest caught by this unexpected side of Paul Hennessy. At the office it was always the gay, flippant side she encountered.
"There was this couple standing before the window. Inspecting my painting---the one the old boy was holding for me. Know what they said? This guy is good, yes---my painter, I mean. But they claim he has his top students execute paintings in his style, he signs them, and then they split the loot."
"Sounds pretty rotten."
"That's the way I figured it. But I started to think. There's an awful lot of his work around town right now. How do I know I'm getting the McCoy? It's been so long since I've been around anything that wasn't phoney!" He jabbed his cigarette butt in the ashtray.
"You'd know," Elaine consoled, then curiosity compelled her to question him. "The fellow really is that good?"
"I told you!" Excitement kindled in Paul's eyes, creating a feeling of kinship in Elaine. "I'd swear he'll be considered one of the great ones." He toyed with the idea for a moment, while Elaine watched him. "Say, my place is just five minutes from here. Why don't you run up with me and give me your opinion? I'd feel lots better."
"If I agree," she kidded, but it was a good-natured, almost intimate kind of thing. The sort of intimacy shared by two people, regardless of sex, because of a closeness in the things nearest to their hearts.
"I'll chance it. Come on." His eyes held hers, urging her to agree.
"All right." Her acquiescence was compulsory. She was fidgeting to see these paintings that had aroused such unbridled enthusiasm in Paul Hennessy. Perhaps, she told herself wryly, it was no more than envy.
They walked across to Riverside Drive, enjoying the quiet crispness of the autumn night, and Elaine thought it might be good to have this man for a friend. Such friendships did grow and become cherished segments of one's life. Perhaps Paul Hennessy could be a real friend, the land she'd never honestly known, because she was so starkly afraid of getting close to people. Paul Hennessy, friend---not lover.
Paul stopped in front of a narrow greystone along the Drive, led her up the sedately carpeted stairs to the third floor. When he unlocked the door and switched on the lights, Elaine caught her breath in amazement. She'd expected a typical bachelor efficiency apartment. Paul Hennessy occupied a high-ceilinged duplex.
"It's absolutely lovely, Paul." Her eyes swept the large, comfortably-furnished living room with its wood-burning fireplace and the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Hudson, the winding stairway that led to the second floor. "I never expected something like this."
"You figured I'd live in one of those starkly-modern atrocities with the kind of furnishings you'd read about in Esquire or Playboy," Paul interpreted. "When I leave the office, I leave Madison Avenue behind me."
"People with something like this don't know how lucky they are," Elaine told him warmly. "You're living here---not existing in a luxury vacuum."
"Don't get wild ideas," Paul teased lazily, lighting a cigarette and giving one to her. "I inherited this place from a college buddy. The rent's frozen. Probably only peanuts more than you pay for your place. And it's my one extravagance. After all, I don't have to buy my wardrobe at Bendel's or Bergdorf Goodman's."
Something about the way Paul looked at her now was disturbing. His eyes were destroying that wonderful friendship idea she'd been nurturing.
"What about those paintings?" she prodded, a growing self-consciousness taking over. Had this been a stupidly impulsive move on her part? Paul kidded regularly in the office, but basically she'd taken it for the routine phoney verbal lovemaking that was part of their daily chatter.
"Upstairs." He pointed "In the bedroom." His eyes trailed the length of her, passion showing itself in the vein pounding away in his forehead, in the quickened breathing.
"Odd place for paintings," she said levelly.
"I'm an odd character." He stood still, like a panther watching for the propitious moment to spring.
"Are there pictures, Paul?" Her voice was laced with iciness now. Damn him for leading her on this way. "Or is this the slightly dressed-up etching routine?"
"Sweetie, are you calling me a liar?" he chided lightly, but there was nothing light about the way his eyes lingered on the boyish slenderness of her lean, firmly-built body, down to the adolescent-slim legs. Paul Hennessy obviously wanted no part of the voluptuous Hollywood type beauties.
"Are there pictures?" she repeated calmly, without moving, fighting to conceal the tornado of anger whirling within her.
"Eight of them," he assured her, and suddenly it was as though the flame had been mysteriously extinguished. "My dowry, you might call it. I'm always one step ahead of my paycheck, but they're worth it. Want to see?"
"Of course." Elaine felt oddly guilty. Had she been ridiculously mistaken about Paul? Could she be so edgy as to have imagined that man-on-the-make look in him?
"Then let's go!" He gestured mockingly towards the stairs and she walked towards them with her swift eager strides, wishing she didn't feel so terribly aware of Paul's body uncomfortably close to hers. Next time she wouldn't let herself in for something like this. This crazy feeling of suffocation that being alone with a man always thrust upon her. Because there wasn't a man living whom she sincerely trusted. Every rotten one of them with the single-track mind!
"You're a strange babe," Paul's voice was a husky whisper, and then his arm was about her waist as they started up the stairs.
"Oh, for God's sake!" Elaine said harshly. "Is that all you ever have on your mind?"
"Know something better?" he challenged, locking his hands behind her, his face close to hers, his male body sickening her with its insistence.
"I was right. This is strictly the corny old etching routine!" she lashed out scathingly. "I gave you credit for more intelligence!"
"Now really, Elaine," he shook his head mockingly, "isn't it rather late for you to be playing the wide-eyed virgin bit?"
"That's not what we have under discussion." Fury rocked her, yet she was determined to be in command of the situation.
"Let's have a little less discussion and more action," he turned on the amorous, little-boy brand of charm.
"I came up here to see some paintings. I honestly thought you were serious." She managed to put distance between them now---only a few inches, but she could breathe again.
"Then it's the way I thought---the way people talk about. You only play when it does some good for that almighty career of yours. Rick Stacy, for instance?"
"Why don't you leave me alone, Paul?" Her eyes met his with cold antagonism. "I thought I'd made it clear enough that I'm not interested!"
"One of these days you're going to make a slip, duchess, and when you do it's going to be a colossal blunder!" He moved aside to let her pass.
"Don't worry. I won't ask you to pick up the pieces!"
Without a backward glance Elaine strode across the living room and to the door, impatient to be out in the clean night air again. What a horrible, nightmarish evening this had been! What would tomorrow be like, her tortured brain demanded? Right now she was at the point where every small obstacle to peace of mind assumed gigantic proportions. She tried to rationalize to herself, but it was useless. Eric back in her life again, unlocking all those secret doors---Terry bringing out traits within her that made her cringe with shame---an idiot like Paul Hennessy making that stupid play. They all seemed, at first glance, to be isolated occurrences, yet in her present state Elaine could only believe that some relentless pattern was forming to choke off her tenuous hold on life, to make tomorrow completely, impossibly unlivable...
Elaine was faintly conscious of a dull ache in the back of her head as she rode up in the elevator. She'd have to take something to make her sleep, she decided tiredly---something to knock her out so as not to think for a good eight hours. "Elaine?"
Elaine swerved sharply at the sound of the familiar voice. "Terry, what are you doing here?" She gazed in astonishment at Terry's small figure leaning against the door that led to the stairs.
"You didn't phone or call or anything," she complained. "I got worried."
"Honey, I'm sorry." Remorse surged through Elaine, as she extended a hand to the other girl. "It was so hectic, meeting Eric and his wife---you know."
"You might have called me, Elaine," Terry said sweetly, but annoyance shone through her eyes. "I couldn't imagine what happened."
"Come on in," Elaine said with false gaiety. "I'll tell you all about it while we have a snack."
"Nobody saw me waiting out there," Terry murmured, her eyes watching Elaine. "I didn't want you to be embarrassed if some of the neighbors got the picture."
"It's none of their business," Elaine replied with more sharpness than she intended. Terry's putting their relationship that way somehow made everything slightly gutterish, like the crude, bold pairs you encountered here and there in the Village. The real butch girls who shouted their Lesbianism to the world. Half of them, she thought contemptuously, were doing nothing more than kicking up their heels, thumbing their noses at anybody who bothered to look, searching for new censored thrills. It was cheap, rotten, degenerate, when it was like that. Not what she and Alex had shared in Paris---nor what she'd found at last with Terry. Yet somehow, something about Terry disturbed her. Her frankness, that was it, Elaine tried to convince herself---Elaine had lived so tightly locked within herself she expected to spend the rest of her life in whispers. But the other night, that Stephie, and tonight, Terry crouching in the hallway like that.
"It felt funny, being locked out of your apartment." Terry moved over to rest her head on Elaine's shoulder. "Kind of lost."
"I'll have a key made up for you tomorrow," Elaine promised, while something inside grew alarmed at the idea of losing this last vestige of a separate life.
"It was silly of me to worry about you, wasn't it?" Terry's voice was huskily sweet. "I mean, I knew you had this date with your brother and his wife. But I started to imagining the craziest things, like car smash-ups or some freak accident like that man who was killed when an air-conditioner tumbled out of a window and fell on him."
"You shouldn't have worried, dear." All her insane suspicions had been groundless, Elaine acknowledged with stabs of guilt. Terry had been home waiting, and then she'd come running over here. All the time Elaine wandered about alone, went through that wrestling act with Paul, Terry had been here!
"You must have been having a marvelous time," Terry smiled wistfully, falling back onto Elaine's smart sofa that seemed an oddly wrong background for Terry's fragile, candy-box prettiness. "It's way past two now."
"I hadn't seen Eric for such a long time," Elaine hedged.
"Is his wife nice?" Terry snuggled up as Elaine sat down on the sofa beside her.
"Seems to be." Unaccountably, Elaine couldn't force herself to meet Terry's eyes. "Eric and she are apparently very much in love."
"You won't be running off to see them all the time, will you, angel?" Terry pouted with kitten-like grace.
"I doubt that." Some inner compulsion forced the truth from her now. "I wasn't at Eric's all this time."
"Oh?" Terry straightened cautiously, waiting for the full confession.
"I left Eric's and went straight to you at the apartment. I didn't think of calling first." She smiled whimsically.
"Oh, Elaine!" Terry stiffened in anguish. "And I was on my way over here! Darling, did you think awful things about me?"
"I was---upset. Seeing Eric again brought back memories I'd thought were dead. I was all tied up in knots inside when I left. I ran straight to you."
"And I let you down. Sweetie, never again, I promise. I'll wait forever if you say you'll call!"
"It was just one of those stupid mix-ups. Nobody's to blame."
"You thought I'd gone off with a man," Terry guessed shrewdly, "and you were hurt."
"I suppose I did imagine all sorts of nonsense," Elaine conceded self-consciously. "I should have known better."
"Elaine, have you ever been with a man?" Terry asked matter-of-factly, startling her.
"Terry, you know how I feel," Elaine stammered uncertainly.
"But didn't you try it, ever?" Terry persisted.
"Not---all the way." Elaine's face was flooded with color, even at merely talking about herself in the normal woman role.
"Tell me," Terry commanded, her eyes bright.
"Once in high school, and again in college I tried to pretend I was like the other girls in my classes. I went out with the same boy several times in a row. I---let him kiss me. The kid who was a high school junior and the one in my last year at college."
"That's all? Just kisses?" Terry inspected avidly. "Soul kisses?"
"That's right. And the usual hand routine," Elaine compelled herself to be honest because she knew this was important to Terry. "It made me feel sick inside." She shivered disgustedly, not wanting to remember. "I'd known all along it'd be that way but I had to convince myself. After that---incident in college, I knew the truth and made up my mind I'd have to live with it."
"You ought to go the full road with a man, darling," Terry whispered intensely. "Then you'd really know how much better it is our way."
"I couldn't!" Elaine's eyes flew wide in astonishment.
"Just once, Elaine---because after that you can thumb your nose at every man in the world. The whole rotten selfish lot of them!" Watching her, Elaine remembered the stories Terry had told her about her brutish husband. Poor sweet kid, she'd had a rough deal.
"After I left your place, I had a run-in with Paul Hennessy," Elaine began slowly.
"Does he live in our neighborhood?" Elaine noted Terry's insistence on calling the apartment "theirs".
"Apparently." Some inner protective instinct warned her not to confide the whole incident. "He invited me up to see his paintings." They both chuckled for a moment. "Darling, why don't we go to the theatre and somewhere special for dinner Saturday night? We owe ourselves a treat. Like that?"
Terry glowed with pleasure now. "You're sweet, Elaine. I'd die without you."
"Let's eat instead," Elaine managed a smile. "Hungry?"
"I'm always hungry," Terry giggled. "Soon I'll have to start watching my figure."
"You're perfect," Elaine insisted, sitting into a chair at the small dinette table. "Exquisite of face and form, as the poets would say."
"You know what I'd like?" Terry brushed her lips against Elaine's cheek, her mouth close to her ear as she spoke. "I'd like to have some photographs of us."
"That's easy to arrange," Elaine laughed. "Now what about those sandwiches?"
"I don't mean straight photographs, silly." Terry's sulky little giggle was warmly teasing. "I mean us, together, like later, on the bed. I'd like to have them to look at the nights you're not over at the apartment."
"That's impossible!" Elaine protested, slightly shocked. "I mean, what if somebody saw them? And who'd take them?"
"Nobody'd see them, ever," Terry promised, her hands circling Elaine now, pressing her full young breasts against Elaine. "And Stephie would take them for us. He's really a terrific photographer."
"But we couldn't let him!" Elaine's eyes dilated in horror.
"Darling, it wouldn't mean a thing to him." Terry's eyes were serenely candid. "You know he's queer. And he's done that sort of thing before, lots of times. It'd be like having another girl shooting the pictures."
"No!" Elaine was thoroughly shaken up at the suggestion.
"Silly, why not?" Terry teased. "I'd adore to have them---it'd be like pictures of our honeymoon. And with you running off to your brother's house now that he's right here in town, and to meetings---I'll be alone so much."
"I won't be running off to Eric's," Elaine told her with more sharpness than she'd intended. "His being in town won't have anything to do with us." She wouldn't let it, she told herself defiantly. Their lives were totally separate---she was divorced from family life. Eric's presence could do nothing to cut in on this new existence she'd arranged for herself.
"Then why won't you let Stephie take some pictures of us?" Her voice was a low wistful whisper. "Like that, making love. Please."
"Honey, I just couldn't," Elaine protested desperately. The idea was startlingly repugnant to her. Where did Terry dig up these weird notions? "To let others see us that way?"
"Only Stephie," Terry persisted. "And you don't have to mind him. He understands."
"Darling, I promise you'll see me just as much as before." Elaine smiled determinedly. "Last night was one of those tilings that won't happen again ever."
Terry's eyes glittered brightly. A danger signal Elaine recognized. All hurt feelings charging to the fore now.
"You think I'm disgusting because I want you to pose with me like that! You think it's degrading!"
"I didn't say that!" She knew Terry would turn melodramatic, now when she was so completely exhausted. "You make up these things in your mind, sweetie."
"If you didn't think so, you wouldn't fight me the way you're doing." Tears welled up in the wistful eyes now, and Elaine churned with guilt. But to have evidence like nude pictures lying around! It was too dangerous, too personally repugnant. And to know that Stephie could hold this over them whenever he liked!
Terry's eyes fastened on Elaine's, and subconsciously Elaine was aware of the subtle change as the other girl sensed the insecurity charging through her.
"Oh, Elaine, you're an old prude," she purred. "Now what could possibly be wrong about letting Stephie do one roll of plain colored film? For me, darling?" She nestled close to Elaine now, using that persuasive yielding body to break down the increasingly-shaky resistance she could feel in her awkward tenseness.
"Darling, you know I'd like to do anything to make you happy," Elaine protested, torn both ways. Yet everything within her rebelled at this latest whim.
"Then let Stephie take the pictures. You won't be sorry." Terry's hands crept about her, while she planted soft moist kisses about her throat, at the slender opening of her blouse. One leg lay across Elaine's taut body, making poignant promises.
"We'll talk about it later," Elaine murmured huskily, her quickened breathing striking triumph in Terry. Right now she was conscious only of the insistent demands of her body, screaming for relief. "Let's go into the bedroom now." Her arms tightened convulsively about Terry's slight form.
"All right, sweetie." Terry half-closed her eyes, brimming over with satisfaction now. "I want you so bad!"
\*
Elaine woke with a start, the crazy kaleidoscopic events of the night before hitting her with stunning force. She'd promised herself, first of all, to keep her life with Terry away from this apartment. Now her eyes dwelt on the warm impression of Terry's body on the sheet. She could hear her singing away inside the bathroom. Terry chafed over the dual apartment set-up, Elaine realized. She was young, impulsive, Elaine forgave her determinedly. It was up to her to be prudent for both of them.
She tossed the sheet away from her slender, lithe body, inspecting it with troubled wariness. Had she given herself away last night with Paul? It was hysterically funny, she chuckled with inward bitterness, how Paul could think he wanted this man-woman body of hers.
"Elaine?" Terry's pert face poked itself out from the bathroom door.
"I'm awake." Elaine forced a smile.
"I'll fix breakfast for us," Terry decided happily. "We have time, darling."
"You'll be late," Elaine said ineffectually.
"Twenty minutes or so," Terry shrugged this aside casually. "But you'll be on time. If I'm late once, they can't complain."
Terry trooped off to the kitchen, while Elaine hurried into shower and dress, her mind grappling with the problem of Paul Hennessy. Last night she'd forgotten about the prospect of running into him constantly at the office. After that encounter, seeing Paul could be awkward. She compelled herself to regard the matter from the practical viewpoint now. Only one way to cope with it. She walked over to the telephone, reached for the directory. She hoped he had a fisted phone number.
"Darling, would you like waffles?" Terry interrupted, obviously enjoying this spurt of domesticity.
"If you feel like making them." Elaine smiled gently. Terry was sweet, so good to her. She must remember how much this girl meant to her---how she made fife bearable when Elaine had reached the point where it didn't seem worth the effort to exist. Nevertheless, she waited until Terry was completely absorbed in breakfast preparations before she returned to the phone project. She'd been only partially truthful with Terry last night, the girl didn't know Elaine had gone to his apartment with him.
With a sigh of relief, Elaine pinned down Paul's phone number. She dialed, surging with self-consciousness, yet knowing this had to be done. Their being in competition for the Truly Yours account was only part of it. She couldn't work in the office if there were constant nastiness every time Paul and she met, which could be a dozen times a day. She couldn't live under that kind of tension.
"Hello," Paul's voice came to her, shaking her back into reality.
"Hi," Elaine said with remarkable coolness, considering the pounding within. "I figured if you were still asleep, it was time somebody woke you up."
"I was awake, Elaine." She could feel the wary curiosity chasing through him.
"Dear, about last night---let's bury the hatchet, shall we?"
"Sure," he said, after a moment's silence. Weighing the situation, realizing this was the "civilized" approach for the two of them, she thought grimly. "But I really have those paintings," he came back with a chuckle.
"Some night when I'm feeling amorous, maybe I'll ask you to show them to me," she laughed lightly.
"Don't take too long," he kidded. "I'm a popular guy. You may have a long waiting list ahead."
"I'll keep that in mind. See you at the office." She was pleased at the casual note, yet the old apprehension nagged at her that Paul might be suspicious. Which was ridiculous. She tried to laugh this off--- Paul thought she was an opportunist where sex was concerned, a nymphomaniac who confined her activities to men who could be useful career-wise. Which meant he could be potentially dangerous since he resented her using sex as a weapon with Rick Stacy, in the battle for Truly Yours. To date though, she commanded herself to be fair, he'd never shown any genuinely predatory emotions over the fight for the account. They joked, made dramatic threats, all in the typical advertising jargon that meant absolutely nothing. It was Elaine who constantly let her nerves throw her into unreasoning fits of alarm. She'd have to stop this! Live for each day as it came along. That was fight enough for someone like her.
\*
Elaine deliberately lingered before a shop window, to insure Terry ample time to arrive at the office well ahead of her. The big thing in her mind right now was the reminder that Rick had said he wanted to get together with her sometime today, to discuss her ideas for the Truly Yours magazine campaign. She must keep a clear head for this---it was too important a step upward in her career to allow herself to muff it. And she'd put in a lot of groundwork. The prospect of landing the account was a challenge she'd almost enjoyed. The whole agency churned with curiosity about who'd land it, Paul or herself. Nobody had to tell her how desperately Paul wanted it, despite his banter. The decision would be Rick's.
Elaine checked the clock on the corner. Terry must be upstairs and at her desk now. Safe to go up. Nobody so far connected her with Terry. She meant to keep it that way. With the faintly tense fixed smile that was part of her office face, Elaine entered the building, strode to the elevator, managing the routine morning chit-chat with the elevator starter and with the cheerful flip youngster who operated the express elevator to Fleet and Comstock's floor. A nice kid, she'd reflected often, until he'd started a running verbal flirtation with Terry. It was idiotic for her to feel antagonism towards every man who was interested in Terry, Elaine argued with herself religiously---but the prickle of jealousy was hard to root out. Because she felt so desperately insecure, she'd tried to rationalize. But to rationalize in the face of strong emotions could be a sadly losing battle.
She hurried out of the elevator, past the pretty, friendly young receptionist, back into the long avenues of cubicles.
"Good-morning, Miss Ransome." Terry grinned impishly as Elaine walked past her in the corridor, en route to her own office in the rear.
"Good-morning." Elaine shot her the friendly impersonal office smile, her eyes sharing Terry's amusement.
As she stood with her hand on the knob to her own office, Paul poked his head out the door of his and waved good-naturedly. Thank heaven, no awkwardness there, Elaine sighed with satisfaction. She'd done right in making that phone call this morning.
The rest of the morning shot by with incredible speed. She had lunch on a tray in her office. This was a dodge she was resorting to with increasing frequency. It avoided Terry's reproachful glances at her not sharing the lunch hour. That uncomfortable exasperation caught up with her again. Why couldn't Terry accept the need for utmost discretion?
"Hi, Gorgeous Career Girl," Rick Stacy's slightly condescending baritone brought her up sharply.
"Hello, Rick." Elaine managed the faint smile, laden with promise, that was part of the routine with Rick. "You were going to go over some points about Truly Yours with me today, if I remember correctly."
"That's right." He came inside and closed the door softly behind him. "But not here---I can't concentrate in the office."
"Cocktails this afternoon?" Elaine suggested rapidly.
"None of that, angel," he grinned. "I want to know what I'm talking about." He squinted thoughtfully. "Say, I have the keys to a friend's place a few blocks from here. We can work there. He's at business, his wife's in Florida. Quiet, comfortable, private. What do you say?"
"You're the boss!" Elaine shot him the tauntingly seductive look that had been fooling males for years.
"Let's go right now," Rick decided, his face impassive.
What did he have in mind, Elaine wondered nervously? Business, or business and pleasure? Rick Stacy sober was a commodity she might not be able to handle.
"I have a conference here at four, so we won't have too long," he said. "Do you mind?"
"Whatever you say." Elaine was reaching for the jacket to one of her impeccable suits.
\*
Rick's friend's apartment was a lavish layout on Park. He sank onto one of the sumptuous sofas, dumped out the contents of his expensive custom-made briefcase.
"Take a look at these," he ordered, handing her a batch of sketches. "What do you think?"
So he meant to work, Elaine thought, relieved, taking the sketches in her hand, forcing herself to concentrate.
"I don't like them," she said bluntly, knowing they were Paul's. His style was unmistakable. "Not that they aren't lovely and lush and everything that Truly Yours wants to emphasize," she conceded astutely. "They're great, for last year's campaign."
"What did you have in mind?"
Rick leaned back, watching her closely, his eyes mixing pleasure in with business as they dwelt on her long slender legs in the inevitable high-heeled pumps.
"I'd like to see a complete departure," Elaine launched forth confidently. "Instead of this air-brush business, the Beautiful Lady theme, go in for smartness, sharp line drawings that'll stand out from every other package on the cosmetic counters. Like this." In seconds she'd whipped out crayons from her purse, was sketching in the ideas she'd labored over for weeks now, in preparation for this conference.
"Interesting," Rick commented finally, refusing to commit himself. But he was thoroughly impressed, Elaine knew. What was the hitch now?"
"It'll sell Truly Yours," Elaine said casually, as though the deal meant nothing to her.
"I'll give it serious thought, angel," he promised, rising leisurely to his feet, taking a brief glance at his watch. "Like to see the rest of the apartment? It was done by some French decorator they flew over especially for the job."
"I'd love to." Elaine felt those little warning signals now, but she couldn't antagonize Rick.
"They must have spent a fortune on it," he took her hand and walked her down the length of the living room, off into the foyer that led to the bedrooms. "Of course, money means nothing to people like these. Here, take a look at the master bedroom."
Rick swung the door open and Elaine walked inside.
"It's fabulous," she gasped. "Like something designed for Madam Pompadour!"
The floor was covered with rich dead-white carpeting, the window wall discreetly concealed behind white velvet drapes. The other three walls were completely mirrored. The bed a king-size masterpiece in white and gold, to match the assorted chests and tables. Far too lush and ornate for Elaine's taste, but impressively expensive.
"They even have music here." Rick went over to fumble with the hi-fi set built into a chest suitable for the bedroom. "Dance?"
"Why not?" She looked down at that thick carpeting and kicked off her pumps. Rick had that four o'clock appointment, she reminded herself nervously. He couldn't be overly rambunctious.
"Mirrors fascinate me." Rick was tossing off his own shoes, then his jacket, before he reached his arms out for her.
"A Narcissus complex?" she mocked.
"Nothing like that," he chuckled, his face close to hers now. "I have no illusions about myself. I have no movie star build, my youth has long since gone, but I know how to enjoy life." His arms drew her closer now. "I'm determined not to miss a trick. Before I die, I want to taste every bottle on the shelf."
"For instance?" Elaine pretended not to understand.
"Sex," he said calmly, stopping now, while the music kept on its sultry background accompaniment. "I don't want to miss a trick."
"Why tell me?" she asked sharply, wondering about Rick now.
"Because you're a woman of strength. You've got the adventurous soul, too. There's deep, exploring passion in you I'll bet no other man's ever fully guessed," he shot out unexpectedly.
"My, you've been reading erotic literature," she tried to laugh him out of this. "Marquis de Sade?"
"Let's have ourselves a little fun. Two thoroughly uninhibited mature people, reaching on the shelf for new bottles. Maybe you've tried most of them," he conceded, "but let's try them together."
"Darling, in broad daylight?" Suddenly the room was suffocating because already Rick Stacy was methodically stripping, inspecting his nakedness in every mirror.
"Come off this stupid virgin kick," he said with the first flicker of impatience. "I know some people show more respectability under the blankets than I might in a business conference, but you're not that type, Elaine. You see, I know you."
"Know what?" Her throat tightened defensively.
"That you're a passionate, hot bitch who could make any man forget everything." He was reaching to take off her jacket now. "Even his normal business sense."
So that was it, she thought, sickened. If she wanted the Truly Yours account, it could be acquired right here, in front of these mirrors. She stood rigidly at attention while Rick Stacy, a faint smile of anticipation about his mouth, calmly removed every garment that separated him from her. She couldn't bear to see him in the mirror this way---it was too much, she thought violently.
"Hey, open your eyes," he prodded, pulling her hard, lean back against him. "That's half the fun!"
Then he was on the floor, pulling her down with him, his hands and his mouth greedy with excitement, impatient to try everything. To see everything. She clenched her teeth to stop from screaming at him, battling not to grind her feet into that slobbering, perspiring face of his. Oh God, let it be over, she prayed. If he didn't stop soon she'd throw up right on his beautiful white carpeting.
"Come on," he coaxed huskily, "Relax. Let me show you!"
She kept telling herself about the Truly Yours account, how desperately she needed that. The prestige involved, what it would do for her career-wise, but this sickening nausea kept tearing at her until she knew she'd have to tell him to stop.
"Okay, baby," suddenly he was through. "We can't spend all day like this. I have that conference at four."
While he calmly dressed there in the bedroom, Elaine fled with her things into the bathroom, and was miserably, thoroughly sick.
Elaine sauntered into the offices of Fleet and Comstock at Rick Stacy's side, thoroughly aware of the curious glances cast in their direction. Naturally, the whole agency was aware of Stacy's cosmetic account---it was the largest single billing they had. They were all making side bets about Elaine's snagging the assignment. She saw Paul Hennessy inspecting her from the doorway of his office as she casually took leave of Rick and went into her own office.
"Well?" Paul appeared a moment after Elaine had collapsed into the chair behind her desk.
"Well what?" She gave him the bantering smile that was part of their normal exchange. If Paul ever wanted to cut her throat, he never gave an inkling of it. But this time she caught the undercurrent of his unrest.
"You make it with Rick Stacy?" His eyes flickered knowingly.
"If you're talking about the Truly Yours account, we discussed it." She scrutinized Paul carefully now. For the first time she sensed antagonism. Paul wanted that account as desperately as she.
"And?" he prodded, slouching into a chair and crossing his feet on one edge of her desk.
"He'll make up his mind over the weekend." But Rick's hand about her breasts as they walked out of his friend's apartment had told her the answer---the account was as good as hers.
"I figured you'd come out ahead," he conceded, drumming with one hand on the arm of his chair. "After all, how can I compete with your equipment?" This time his smile made no effort to hide his envy.
"Get your mind out of the gutter, Paul," she said coldly.
"What's the use, when Rick's is in the bed?" He rose, bowed arrogantly and turned to go. "Happy landing, career girl."
The sickening wrestling match with Rick, the encounter with Paul, fomented restlessness in her. From this point on she'd have to watch herself with Paul---he'd do anything to cut her throat now. With a sigh of impatience she reached for her purse, heading for the washroom. She didn't want to look at her office, the office that probably every little receptionist and steno in the place envied. Sometimes she wondered if the price wasn't too expensive.
Elaine was making a pretense of combing her hair, after her usual polite exchange with the two girls who'd been in the washroom when she came in. Now she was alone. For a few seconds. The door opened noisily and Terry raced inside, her face bright with inquiry.
"How'd you make out?" Terry made a swift survey that told her they were alone.
"What do you mean?" Elaine was startled---did Terry guess about the thing with Rick?
"With Stacy," Terry frowned impatiently. "The whole place is rocking. They know you went out with him for cocktails or something." Then the wistful blue eyes acquired a gleam of doubt. "Or was it cocktails?"
"Cocktails," Elaine confirmed, smiling with forced confidence. "I think I'm getting the account. He's going to make up his mind over the weekend."
"Darling, that's marvelous!" Terry flung her arms about her excitedly. "You'll get a tremendous bonus or promotion or something, won't you?"
"Probably," Elaine glanced nervously towards the door as Terry planted soft wet kisses along her throat.
"We'll have to celebrate tonight. Oh, I almost forgot," Terry said with such casualness Elaine suspected it was planned, "Stephie phoned me late last night. His friend Fred is in town and throwing a party tonight. We're invited."
Elaine frowned. "Terry, you know how I feel about gay parties."
"Oh, it won't be anything like that. Fred's a solid businessman type---you'd never guess, unless you knew him awfully well. He has this terrific juvenile furniture firm with a plant in Westchester. Stephie says their advertising billing runs over a million a year. He'd like to make Fred throw it into your lap."
"With Stephie around, how does this Fred expect to keep them a secret?" Elaine asked frankly. "Why, he's as obvious as---"
"Only when he's had a few drinks," Terry interrupted. "Around Fred, unless it's when they're alone, Stephie is strictly on the wagon. He tells people he's allergic to liquor." Terry giggled. "That's a fascinating way of putting it, isn't it?"
"I don't really feel in a party mood," Elaine hedged.
"We don't have to go until late. Fred's parties never get rolling before eleven or later. He's mad about people in theatre and television. Says it relaxes him to be around creative people after he's spent eight or nine hours checking plant production and sales and all that jazz."
"Sweetie, I just can't think straight," Elaine said finally, too tired to battle this out now. "Well talk about it later."
"I'll be at the soda fountain as usual," Terry murmured, a glow of triumph on her face. "I'm so proud of you, Elaine---winning that Stacy character's account."
She wouldn't be proud if she knew about the rumpus on that white carpet before the mirrors, Elaine admitted inwardly. Terry harbored a deep capacity for jealousy that was beginning to show through that wide-eyed, wistful exterior. A disturbing trait to someone like Elaine, who guarded her secrecy with such desperation. She walked into her office just as the phone began to buzz.
"Yes?"
"Still sore at me?" It was Eric, turning on the infectious charm.
"Eric, I haven't been sore," Elaine protested with a little laugh. How like him to be on the defensive!
"Nice of you to say so, anyhow," Eric chuckled. "You should have heard Kathy laying down the law to me about riding you. She made me out a real villain."
"It wasn't that bad." It touched her that Kathy had been so concerned. She hadn't been wrong about Eric's wife. She was something special.
"Looks like my wife's pretty fond of the sister-in-law," he said with frank good-humor. "I told her you weren't somebody she could merely like. With Elaine, you either hate her guts or you're her friend for life!"
"I'm glad I made the grade with Kathy. She's absolutely the best." Elaine meant it. Subconsciously, she was amazed at Eric's evaluation of her---she hadn't realized he ever thought of her beyond the usual sister-brother feelings. And it was true. People did either like her without reservation or they actively loathed her.
"She's very anxious to be friends with you," he went on thoroughly pleased.
"I'm looking forward to that," Elaine assured him with a rush of sincerity. Remembering Kathy's clean, cut honesty, her warmth, Elaine's face softened. It was good to be with someone like that.
"Oh, golly, I'm almost forgetting my mission. I have strict orders to persuade you to come over to the apartment for dinner tonight. Come on over and bail me out of the doghouse, Elaine. I promise to be absolutely the perfect host---not one word of nagging."
"I'd love to come," Elaine accepted impulsively. And then she remembered Terry. "Oh, Eric, I'm sorry ---I can't," she added swiftly.
"Why not? Don't tell me you're keeping your nose to the grindstone that much."
"I completely forgot I have a dinner date for this evening. I made it weeks ago," she fabricated, "so I can't possibly back down at the last minute like this."
"Bring him along," he ordered blithely. "You'll save the guy's money for him tonight. Eat and be entertained by the Eric Ransomes."
"It isn't a 'him'," Elaine said reluctantly. "I'm having dinner with a girl."
"Waste of time," Elaine could visualize his grin. "But come to dinner anyway---bring her along. Kathy never fails to prepare enough for six, anyhow. I think she's got some weird idea I'm undernourished from my days as a bachelor."
"Sure Kathy won't mind?" she hedged.
"Kathy loves people. And I love beautiful women. I won't mind being surrounded by three of you at dinner."
"If you're sure it's okay." Elaine was still hesitant.
Somehow, something jarred her about the prospect of taking Terry to Eric's apartment for dinner. Yet she sensed that Kathy might be hurt if she didn't accept. And she was anxious to see her brother's wife again. To reassure herself that last night hadn't been a mirage.
"I'm positive," Eric said emphatically.
"She's a gal here in the office. She's alone in the city---came here from New England a few months ago, I believe. I make a habit of meeting her for dinner now and then." Why was she making these stupid excuses, Elaine reprimanded herself. Eric hadn't asked who the girl was!
"I don't care if she comes from Pocatello or Timbuctoo," Eric joshed good-humoredly. "If she's a friend of yours, we'll take her without references."
"She's a little on the shy side," Elaine lied, suddenly hit by panic. Instinct told her this was a blunder, to take Terry into Eric's home. "She might not be in the mood for strangers."
Was Eric developing suspicions now, Elaine demanded of herself, the stupid clumsy way she was handling this? Or was it only her own nervousness that read doubt in the faint silence at the other end of the wire before he resumed his prodding?
"No need to be shy with characters like us," he insisted. "We'll count on you two for dinner. Come over straight from the office. We can have a cocktail before dinner. The festive city touch," he chuckled again.
"All right, Eric." Elaine gave up fighting. She'd stuck her neck out; it was too late to pull back now "See you tonight," he chirped blithely, and hung up. Elaine sat at her desk, immobile, staring into space without seeing. What on earth had got into her to suggest bringing Terry along? Yet she couldn't have broken tonight's date. Terry would never have forgiven her.
Elaine closed up shop for the day promptly at five, hurried out to the washroom with the subconscious thought that she might catch Terry before she went on down to the drugstore around the corner where they'd planned to meet. She wanted to be done with the job of explaining about going to Eric's tonight. Instinctively, she felt Terry might not mind. It would be rather pleasing to her to meet Elaine's family, Elaine guessed. Yet with Terry one never knew what childlike turn her mind might take. It'd be awkward to have a battle with her now. She felt nervous at the prospect of showing up alone. She wanted the protection of Terry's presence, she realized with astonishment. Why? Why couldn't she relax with Eric and Kathy? What was this monumental thing building up in her about being alone with her own brother and his wife?
The instant she walked into the drugstore, she spied Terry at the small rear booth they'd labeled as "theirs".
"Hi." Terry shot her that sweet secretive smile that said "I love you madly but those stupid fools around here don't know!"
"Did you order anything yet?" Elaine's face softened.
"Coffee for the two of us." Terry glanced up. "Here it comes."
"Hi, you two gorgeous gals," the high-spirited soda jerk who doubled as waiter before the dinner-time rush gurgled good-naturedly, yet again Elaine's sensitive mind thought she detected a note of curiosity in him. Damn it, why did she keep up this insane routine of thinking everybody they encountered knew about Terry and her? It wasn't true! She knew that.
She waited until the boy was gone before launching into the story about their dinner engagement.
"Eric phoned a few minutes before I left," she introduced lightly.
"Oh?" Terry's face lit up inquisitively. "What's on his mind?"
"He wanted to ask me over to dinner tonight."
"Again?" Terry's eyebrows shot upward. "Isn't he getting over-brotherly?"
"I was rather surprised," Elaine tried to sound believable. "Anyhow, I told him I had a dinner engagement." She paused briefly, reading satisfaction in Terry. Terry was pleased that he'd been put off---but she'd have to tell her the truth. "He absolutely insisted on my bringing you along. Do you mind going over there, honey?"
"I'll love it," Terry said instantly, her face glowing with pleasure, and Elaine felt tension oozing away from her body. "He doesn't know about us, does he?"
"Of course not!" Elaine was shocked at the question Terry put so matter-of-factly.
"I figured. I just wanted to be sure, so I wouldn't disgrace you." Terry smiled with wide-eyed innocence. "I've been dying to see their apartment. It must be something gorgeous."
"It's quite lavish," Elaine conceded, aware of the surging curiosity in Terry now. She hadn't realized Terry's strong interest in her family until this moment. It fairly gushed forth in torrents from her now.
"Eric must have a fabulous job to pay that kind of rent," Terry pursued avidly. "Or does his wife work, too?"
"No, Kathy doesn't work," Elaine told her.
"You like her, don't you?" Terry flung at her with deceptive sweetness.
"Kathy? Yes, she's a fine person. Eric did very well for himself." She wanted suddenly to steer the conversation away from Kathy. "Eric's delighted with his new job," she improvised, though they hadn't actually discussed it that fully.
"Enormous salary?" Terry's eyes were wide with admiration.
"For his age, yes," Elaine conceded.
"It must be marvelous to have all the money you want, and to be able to five in a smart building like theirs." Envy sneaked into her voice. "I can't wait to see their apartment. I've never been in anything like that. Except yours, of course," she corrected swiftly.
"If you were so anxious to see it, honey, you could have gone up with me before," Elaine said, surprised. "All those times I had to dash up to make sure about furniture and the cleaning."
"Well see it tonight," Terry smiled with satisfaction. Then she turned questioningly to Elaine. "Darling, did you remember what you said? About the key to your place?"
"I'll take care of it over the weekend." She'd forgotten about her promise to Terry. Probably because she recoiled from the idea of giving Terry the key. It was like relinquishing part of her cherished freedom.
"Elaine, maybe we ought to stop by and let me change into another dress," Terry suggested brightly. "This old thing I wear to the office is awful."
"Honey, it looks lovely with you in it," Elaine insisted diplomatically. She didn't want to show up at Eric's two hours later. When Terry decided to dress up, it became a major project. "Besides, Eric knows we're coming directly from the office.
"I probably won't think of a thing to say to them," Terry jabbered excitedly. "I mean, somebody like Eric who's so smart and all. It's different with you." that secretive adoring look that pierced wells of tenderness in Elaine, came full strength across the small drugstore table to her.
"Eric is easy to know," Elaine told her gently. "And his wife is sweet and unassuming. You'll like them both."
"What does he do? His job, I mean?" Terry was thoroughly excited over the night's adventure. Like small child going to her first party, Elaine decided with a rush of affection. Right now she was glad she'd blundered into the arrangement for dinner.
"Eric is an engineer---he's managing his firm's New York office. They're quite important in their field," she said with frank admiration for Eric's abilities. "Of course, he's already talking about a bigger job. He's terribly ambitious."
"So are you," Terry reminded, wisdom replacing wistfulness.
"I suppose I am."
Somehow, the comparison with Eric startled Elaine. She'd never considered this fevered career race of hers in the category of ambition, but of course that's what it was. Misplaced ambition, because her aim in life had been so shockingly different before that horror-ridden return from Paris. Why had Eric dragged that back to her with such glaring painful clarity? And Kathy. Sweet, fine Kathy, she thought with a surge of gratitude. Because she was Eric's sister, Kathy was blithely positive Elaine was endowed with all sorts of wonderful qualities, certain she was born to be a great artist.
"I wish I had some special talent," Terry confided. "Instead of just being 'nothing' me."
"Being you is a talent, sweetie." Elaine reached out to cover Terry's small hand with her own. "You're somebody special."
"I'd like to be able to take on some fabulous job." Terry's eyes glowed with excitement. "Have people look at me and say, there goes Terry Brooks! The Terry Brooks. I'd be famous and rich and deliriously happy. I'd go out and buy myself a fabulous wardrobe in all the best stores!"
"I didn't know you felt underprivileged." Elaine's voice assumed an air of banter, but she was taken aback. How little she actually knew Terry, she thought with amazement. All she knew with complete knowledge was what they were to each other in the darkness of the night---that, and the little inconsequential things like what Terry wanted for breakfast and how she liked her showers. How little she knew about what went on deep in the recesses of Terry's mind, behind that wistful, gamin face!
"Do you think it's terrible of me to want things?" Terry pursued softly, her eyes clinging to Elaine's.
Elaine managed a wisp of a smile, telling herself this was merely Terry offering a confidence. "I'm quite certain you have much company." She squinted thoughtfully into space. "We'll have to take you on a wild shopping spree one of these days soon." She tried again, with reluctant success, to convince herself this wasn't a deliberately planned play on Terry's part.
"Darling, you mean that?" Terry glowed. "You aren't just teasing me?"
"We'll go shopping," Elaine promised. "Soon."
"Where you buy your clothes?" Under the table Terry's knee pushed close to Elaine's.
"If I land the Truly Yours account," Elaine smiled at her little-girl jubilance. "We can afford it then."
"Oh, Elaine, the account is practically yours," Terry purred delightedly. "You know Rick Stacy's going to hand it over to you!"
"When everything's official, we can be sure." Elaine made a point of never jumping the gun. It was too easy to make yourself a prey for disappointments that way.
"Darling, I'm so excited!" Terry squeezed her hand. "You're the sweetest. I adore you!"
\*
Elaine rang the doorbell to Eric's apartment with a rush of self-consciousness. After his kidding the other night, to show up with Terry. Would Kathy add up the facts and come up with the truth, she wondered, perspiring with anxiety? She'd always been so proud, so secure in the belief that her deception was impregnable. Until this affair with Terry. Too many small, supposedly inconsequential slip-ups.
"Hi!" Eric swung open the door and drew them inside. "Kathy," he yelled over one shoulder, "they're here!"
"Are we too early?" Elaine asked nervously.
"Certainly not." His eyes lingered on Terry with friendly curiosity.
"Terry, this is my brother Eric," Elaine struggled for the casual touch. "Terry's with my office," she said, making it sound more important, knowing Terry'd be pleased.
"Like advertising?" Eric closed the door and piloted the two of them towards the living room. "It can be interesting sometimes." Terry was turning on the kittenish charm, and then her eyes narrowed as Kathy hurried eagerly into the living room to greet them.
"I'm so glad you could come." Kathy extended a hand to Elaine, then turned her attention to Terry. "Both of you."
Elaine made the perfunctory introductions, while her insides churned with unrest at the change in Terry. One swift appraisal of Kathy, and Terry's back was up like a nasty-tempered Siamese. Elaine shot a swift glance at Kathy, to see if she were aware of the instant antagonism. The unjustified antagonism, Elaine told herself angrily. Why was Terry like that?
Eric marshalled Terry and Elaine to the sofa, retreated to the bar for his cocktail preparations. Terry punctured the brief silence, with a voice that was maliciously patronizing.
"Think you're going to like living in New York, Kathy?" She made it sound a doubtful situation.
"I'm sure of it," Kathy bubbled with enthusiasm. "After spending all my life in a small town, it seems so wonderfully exciting."
"Have you been married long?" Terry pursued, a tight little smile replacing the normally provocative one.
"Four months." Kathy's eyes rested affectionately on Eric as he poured cocktails for them, then dwelt admiringly on her sister-in-law.
"Don't forget your promise, Sis," Eric exhorted, passing around the cocktails. "Kathy's looking forward to it."
"What was that?" Elaine was startled, then annoyed at the sharp suspicious glance Terry shot at her.
"To show her around New York. She's mad to see the Village."
"Eric, for heaven sake," Kathy chided laughingly. "Elaine has more to do than run a tourist service."
"Elaine knows the Village like nobody in New York," Terry murmured, almost too sweetly. "All the special places."
"You're living right in the Village," Elaine smiled at Kathy. "The more fashionable part perhaps, but nevertheless, it's the Village."
"She's been finding out all about the poetry reading in the expresso shops, the off-beat art galleries and the playhouses. Sometimes, I'm sure Kathy married me because she knew the firm was considering me for the New York branch." Eric dropped onto the arm of the sofa, to slide an arm about his wife.
"You know each other long before you were married?" Now Terry was deliberately turning on the "wistful waif routine, all for Eric's benefit.
"Five weeks." Kathy laughed self-consciously. "I couldn't believe it was all actually happening."
"How exciting!" Terry's eyes rested adoringly on Eric, and Elaine resisted an urge to kick her in the shins. "That means you're just beginning to learn all about each other. So many unexplored sides!"
"I find it very exciting." Kathy's eyes met Terry's with candid recognition of the other's antagonism. Then she rose with a tiny smile of something close to apology, that something like this should mar their evening. "I'll see about getting dinner on the table, if you'll excuse me."
Terry was flirting outrageously with Eric, who apparently considered her in the light of a precocious, attractive little kitten. Suddenly, Elaine wanted to slap her furiously. How did she dare behave like that, deliberately baiting Eric, to try to cause friction in this new marriage! It wasn't Elaine she was trying to make jealous, Elaine reasoned as calmly as she could manage. But why this need to strike out at Kathy?
When Eric put on the hi-fi and he and Terry began to dance, Elaine moved out to the kitchen.
"Need some help?" she asked, thinking how earnest Kathy looked at that moment, industriously filling the four dinner plates, obviously anxious that this dinner should turn out well.
"I'm just about set," Kathy smiled back, and then her face turned serious. "Elaine, why does Terry dislike me?"
"She doesn't, Kathy," Elaine protested, the telltale color in her cheeks giving lie to the words.
"I'm only asking because I hoped it was something I could straighten out." Kathy searched Elaine's face for a clue. "I hoped I could be friends with Terry, since she's your friend,"
"Terry works in the same agency," Elaine fenced evasively. "She's a rather strange girl sometimes---don't be upset."
Kathy's face lit up spontaneously. "I'm glad Eric has you."
"He has a wife now," Elaine reminded gently, sensing the tension in Kathy.
"But he needs family behind him, too. You know him so much better than I." Elaine had an uneasy suspicion Kathy was trying to tell her something.
"Kathy, is something wrong?"
"No, not wrong." Kathy busied herself at the stove again. "Only, sometimes I feel there's so much inside Eric I don't understand. Crazy conflicts that drive him. Maybe one of these days we can sit down and talk about him. I want to be a good wife, Elaine."
"I'm sure of it." Elaine reached impulsively to draw the girl near her.
"Think we're going to be eating soon?" Terry's sulkily sweet voice intruded mockingly. "Eric and I are just hungry enough to start taking bites out of each other!"
The glance she bestowed on Kathy was laden with hatred. She'd have to get her out of here fast, Elaine thought, laced with panic. In this kind of mood Terry might say anything! The truth was glaringly plain to Elaine now. Terry was consumed with jealously over Kathy! She'd sensed instantly the strong current of liking that had sprung up between Elaine and Kathy and she was determined to root it out. Seeing them together like this had triggered her into what devilish plan, Elaine wondered apprehensively.
"Yes, do let's have dinner," Elaine pretended casual gaiety. "I'm close to starvation myself."
Struggling to mask her inner conflict, Elaine deliberately slipped one arm through Eric's and the other through Terry's. "We'll let the hostess do all the work tonight."
But she couldn't forget that look of hatred that shone forth from Terry. Let Kathy, in all her innocence, be protected. Let her not understand!
Dinner went off fairly smoothly, mainly because Eric was happily unaware of the cross-currents of fomenting unpleasantness under cover, and because Elaine was determined nothing should mar the surface gaiety.
"It's been a wonderful evening," Elaine smiled casually, a few moments before eleven, "but I'm a working gal. Early conference tomorrow morning." She resolutely refused to meet Terry's astonished glare.
"On a Saturday?" Eric lifted one eyebrow questioningly.
"Special conference," Elaine lied. "We're angling for a new account---this is the big push." It sounded effective, anyhow.
They broke up the evening with a rush of light conversation, and Elaine breathed a sigh of relief as Terry and she walked into the elevator and headed for the street.
"I don't see why we had to leave so early," Terry complained, watching Elaine with stormy eyes.
"You hardly seemed to be having a good time," Elaine reminded, not looking at her.
"I was having a marvelous time," Terry lashed back. "Eric's sweet, even if his wife is just a little too much."
Elaine hailed a cab and then climbed in silently. Elaine gave the driver Terry's address.
"What a dull way to spend a Friday night." Terry reached into her purse for a cigarette, and automatically Elaine reached to light it for her.
"Still interested in going to that party of Stephie's?" she asked Terry on impulse. Something tugged at her to turn Terry's thinking away from Kathy.
"You bet." Terry lifted her face eagerly to Elaine's with the familiarly coaxing smile. "Can we?"
"If you're sure," Elaine delayed instinctively.
"Everything'll be fine, you'll see." Terry glowed with anticipation as she leaned forward to give the driver the change of address. "Stephie and Fred always throw the most wonderful parties I"
When they entered the apartment, in a town house somewhere off Fifth, Elaine realized Terry hadn't been wrong in her advance information on Fred. He was undoubtedly wealthy, blessed with good taste, and the convivial crowd beginning to assemble hardly seemed what would be expected at a gay party. Off in one corner, making a play for a statuesque redhead, was a television director Elaine had met some weeks back. A Name. Elaine wondered how many parties like this Terry had attended. Of course, she'd long since realized Terry wasn't the wistful naive waif she simulated so successfully. There was a native shrewdness that popped out at unexpected, oddly uncomfortable moments.
"There's Stephie," Terry gurgled, and hurried forward to greet him. "Angel, how are you?" Elaine caught the exchange of triumphant glances between them. They must have been betting on Terry's power to bring her here, she guessed intuitively.
"I'm so pleased you could make it," Stephie murmured softly, his eyes searching about. "Oh, there's Fred---wait here."
Stephie trundled off to collect Fred, giving Elaine time to inspect him. Terry was right---Fred was apparently the well-groomed, thoroughly masculine business executive. He even inspected his feminine guests with connoisseur-like tours. No, nobody would guess the relationship between Fred and Stephie, Elaine acknowledged, with a truant trace of concern about herself and Terry.
"Hello dear," Fred smiled briefly at Terry, then gave his full attention to Elaine. "Stephie's been raving about Terry's brilliant friend. You're an artist, isn't that it?"
"In a bastard fashion," Elaine smiled faintly. "Package designer, wedded to commercialism."
"So long as you're successful at it." His eyes trailed to Terry knowingly, then he lowered his voice. "Stephie simply adores Terry, you know. He says she feels just like a sister to him. You should hear them carrying on about clothes and such things." In a split second Fred had swerved from the sophisticated businessman to the amorous lover of Stephie. A second later that naked exchange between the two half-men was gone, and Fred was again the controlled business executive throwing a party.
Someone called Fred away then, and the other three wandered over to the bar, Elaine's eyes roaming interestedly now, ordering herself to forget everything else and enjoy this party. It was safe here. She was beginning to recognize faces here and there, from casual meetings, from having seen some of them perform in night clubs and the theatre. With a start of amazement she noticed Leila Armstrong, the tough, hard-hitting stage director who'd been at the helm of hits for a dozen years, emerging from a room somewhere to the rear, one arm about an exquisite ingenue who was giving Leila her absorbed attention. Now she remembered the story about Leila and her penchant for attractive ingenues. But nobody looked down on Leila Armstrong, Elaine reminded herself with a surge of satisfaction. She was highly respected, handled with deference. Leila Armstrong's private life was her own. Except, of course, for the dark, undercover whispers....
"Why don't we go out on the terrace?" Stephie suggested. "Fred had it built especially for me." He furtively managed a pleased giggle. "I have this mad thing about getting sun every day you know."
Stephie escorted the other two out onto the terrace, then let out a startled "whoops!" and swerved them back inside. Elaine had caught a glimpse of the statuesque blonde with the television director. Evidently, they'd walked in on a private audition. A very private audition. The blonde's smart black chiffon cocktail dress had been pushed high above her thighs as she leaned back against the terrace railing, while the television director industriously labored to make contact.
As they moved back inside the lavish living room, Elaine heard the half-lit giggle of the blonde. Evidently, the intrusion had amused her. Actually, Elaine summed it up, this wasn't too different from many parties she'd attended---though this was her first in the company of Terry. She had always before made a point of showing up with a man.
By two Elaine was frankly yawning. Her head ached slightly from the pent-up tension of the earlier part of the evening. The whole rotten day depressed her, she thought with a rush of revulsion, suddenly anxious to be out of here.
"Terry, it's late," she began tentatively.
"Darling, the weekend's just beginning," Stephie reproached, then signaled to Fred to join them. "Sweetie, Elaine's so tired. Why don't the four of us go for a drive out in the fresh air somewhere?"
Fred slipped an arm about Elaine's waist, and Elaine knew exactly what he was doing. She could hear the thoughts of the uninitiated of the guests--- "a handsome couple, don't you think?" Fred took malicious pleasure in deluding them, she guessed instinctively.
"This party'll go on all weekend," he admitted candidly. "But they don't need me. The refrigerator's loaded, so's the bar. My man knows what to do. Now, why don't the four of us drive up to the house? It's only a mile above Larchmont---we could be there in less than an hour."
"Elaine, let's," Terry coaxed persuasively. "I've never been up to the house."
"Come on," Stephie backed her up. "We can find things for you to sleep in, if you're worried about such items," he suppressed another giggle. "It's wonderful up there. Over three acres, not a neighbor in sight. Just us and the quiet country air. Free as birds!" His eyes were laden with meaning.
"All right," Elaine capitulated with unexpected suddenness. Maybe this was exactly what she needed---to get away from the city, from familiar places and faces. To forget about everything except being.
"That's my good girl," Terry purred, her mouth curved into a pleased smile that promised Elaine lavish reward.
"Then come along," Fred prodded cordially. "Why waste more time with these slobs?"
Fred waited at the curb with Elaine and Terry while Stephie chased around the corner to the garage where Fred kept his car. Then they piled into the smart, expensive Citroen and headed for the parkway, Fred driving, Stephie installed beside him, Elaine and Terry in the rear. Terry reached for Elaine's hand, squeezed it tightly, then pulled it close to her. The back seat was beautifully dark as the car charged through the dark city streets. Elaine closed her eyes, willing herself to blank out everything in her mind except right now.
\*
As they drove up the long circular driveway to the front of the house, Elaine sighed with pleasure. It was good to get away from the city. Fred's large rambling colonial was set smack in the center of his acreage, with century-old trees blotting out the outside world. Tomorrow morning would be lovely, she thought gratefully. Walking under those trees with their first autumn tints, the falling leaves crunching under their feet. Peace. Wonderful, exquisite peace.
"You're going to like it here," Terry whispered, her head nestled against Elaine's shoulder. "It'll be the nicest weekend ever."
Stephie made a gay production of showing them through the house, even though it was close to four already, and finally led them to their room.
"No sense in putting you separately," he said blandly. "That reminds me of the story of some foreign king who visited the White House and was caught by a guard chasing through the corridors late in the night." Stephie chuckled satanically. "Poor old king was searching for his queen."
"Stop jabbering like a fishwife," Fred ordered calmly. "I'm tired, and I'm sure everybody else is."
"Oh dear," Stephie sighed elaborately. "And here I was looking forward to a mad night of it."
"See you in the morning," Fred smiled at the two girls, then joshingly pushed Stephie in the direction of their own room, at the opposite end of the corridor.
Elaine had expected to toss and turn till daylight, the way she usually did when she was overtired and tense as she was now. Terry had abandoned conversation, puttering about with soft giggles in one of the pajama tops Stephie had supplied for them. By the time Terry climbed into bed, Elaine was already fast asleep.
It wasn't a pleasant sleep though, Elaine thought tiredly, waking up to the sounds of morning in the country. She frowned, trying to clear her head, to push off the sense of doom that weighed her down. It was that rotten dream, she realized slowly. Lord, what a crazy chaotic nightmare! The pieces were fitting together now in her wide-awake memory. Terry and Kathy, fighting furiously, ripping at each other, scratching, kicking, biting---and there was this high fence that kept her from getting through to stop them! And Kathy, sweet little Kathy getting the worst of it! Then Eric running to catch up with her, accusing her of planning it this way! She shuddered, hating the sharply-cut memory of the nightmare.
She slid quietly out of bed, to walk over to the window and glance out at the early autumn scene. Down below their bedroom, chrysanthemums bloomed in profusion, even now, and the trees were just touched with the warm glow of yellows and reds. It was good to be here, she thought again, feeling at that moment strangely safe and immune to danger. So thoroughly confident her secret was safe.
After a cigarette, Elaine returned to bed, drifting off this time into a sleep that was so deep as to seem almost drugged.
"You going to waste the whole weekend sleeping?" Terry's voice broke into her consciousness.
"What time is it?" Elaine opened her eyes slowly.
"Past two. Stephie's getting breakfast ready." Terry was climbing into slacks and a sweater. "Nice of Fred's sister to leave her clothes out here. A little big but I can manage." She touched the fine soft wool of the slacks with satisfaction. "Expensive, I'll bet."
"What did Stephie rustle up for me?" Elaine chuckled, reaching across for a cigarette.
"These," Terry collapsed on the end of the bed, clutching winter-white slacks and a matching sweater. "They ought to fit you perfectly, you're built so lean and narrow." One hand reached over to fondle Elaine's hips.
"Hey, you two," Stephie bellowed at the door, "Breakfast is on the terrace. Hurry up!"
They were racing down the stairs in less than five minutes, Elaine having satisfied herself with a hasty splashing of water on her face and a hurried comb drawn through her easy-to-manage dark hair. Up here, Terry, too, abandoned the elaborately attractive make-up she wore unfailingly in town.
"Sleep well?" Fred inquired politely.
"Wonderfully," Elaine smiled, enjoying the smell of fresh coffee and bacon mingling with the crisp autumn air.
"How do you like my present?" Stephie extended is hand proudly, indicating a stunning platinum and diamond wedding band of elaborate width. "It's our third anniversary. Freddie gives me a new ring each year."
"It's beautiful," Terry gushed, her eyes turning to Elaine for confirmation.
"Very lovely," Elaine echoed, yet feeling uncomfortable inside. Did Stephie have to carry on this way?
Elaine devoted herself to breakfast, which was astonishingly good, letting the other three carry the ball of conversation. Her mind kept darting traitorously back to the city, to Eric and Kathy. Eric hadn't got the full impact of the antagonism bristling from Terry, had he? Not likely, she thought cynically, the way he'd lapped up her stupid flirting with him. But he couldn't root out a feeling of concern for Kathy. She was so tenderly vulnerable, Elaine admitted with mounting apprehension, so determined her marriage would be a perfect shining thing in their lives.
"Why so solemn?" Terry murmured mockingly. "Worrying about brother dear back in the city?"
Elaine felt ice race through her veins. Terry wasn't thinking of Eric at all. The truth lay bare in her brooding glance on Elaine. Terry, in her uncanny fashion, had pierced through to Elaine's naked thoughts.
"I was thinking about Truly Yours," Elaine lied, compelling herself to meet those probing eyes. "I'd like to know the account was definitely sewed up."
"Paul Hennessy has no chance against you, darling," Terry said silkily, yet Elaine knew she hadn't thoroughly accepted the lie.
The rest of the afternoon disappeared in a haze of lounging in the sun on the terrace, with the hi-fi lulling them into relaxation. Elaine allowed herself to think of nothing now, just to he there and lap up the autumn-tinged sun. The other three had already started drinking while Elaine still nursed her second cup of coffee.
Around five-thirty Fred announced he had to drive across-county on a business appointment.
"I'll be back by eight or a little after," he exchanged a loaded smile with Stephie. "If you get too hungry, eat without me."
When they heard the car crunching over the blue-stone of the driveway, Stephie broke into a wide smile.
"Well, there goes my future security, dears," he gloated. "Fred's meeting his lawyer, to have a new will drawn up. I'm to share with his sister. Wouldn't she be livid, if she knew?"
"Half of everything?" Terry's eyes popped with awe.
"Why not?" Stephie's eyebrows shot upwards. "I'm giving Fred the best years of my life, aren't I? I told him, if I was his legal wife I'd be protected."
"Is that kind of a will legal?" Terry pursued avidly.
"Of course. Fred's paying the lawyer a fortune to make sure nobody can ever break it. They're signing tonight." He leapt to his feet like a young faun. "That calls for a celebration, doesn't it?"
"Absolutely," Terry concurred, turning to Elaine for confirmation, an oddly appraising look in her own eyes.
"Congratulations," Elaine managed faintly.
"It's getting cool out here, anyhow. We'll go inside and have a drink by the fire. Fred has logs all set for us."
The three of them sauntered inside, Terry and Elaine falling into the low wide couch before the floor-to-ceiling fireplace. Stephie busied himself efficiently with starting the fire, then moved to the bar for drinks for them. It was pleasantly warm and restful, Elaine thought drowsily, clutching her drink, gazing into the fireplace. It really wasn't cold enough to be necessary, but Elaine enjoyed it. She'd forgotten the wonderful scent of birch logs burning in the country.
"I did a new batch of photographs last week," Stephie remembered. "I can show you these because they're a European couple who've gone back to Paris. I'm always most discreet, you know." His eyes glowed speculatively as they rested on Elaine.
Elaine knew if she hadn't been so comfortably relaxed with the Scotch inside her she'd have caught on instantly. As it was, it was a distinct shock to open the scrapbook Stephie nestled across her knees for Terry and her to inspect. The photographs were excellent, the color breathtaking---and the two French girls thoroughly nude. The photographs had been snapped outside, with the lush greenness of the grass and richly abundant gardens for background.
"Aren't they sensational?" Terry slipped an arm about Elaine's waist while Stephie refilled their glasses.
"They're quite---stunning," Elaine sought for a suitable word, her mind foggily anticipating Terry's next move.
"Why couldn't we have Stephie do a set of us?" Terry was murmuring, her fingers caressing Elaine's waist. "There's nobody here but us---it's the perfect time."
"I couldn't!" Elaine rose abruptly to her feet, the whisky glass precariously tilted.
"Darling, that's no way to treat Freddie's best Scotch," Stephie protested, then smiled as Elaine swigged it down in two choking gasps.
"Elaine, let's make Stephie do our pictures right now," Terry coaxed again, her head on Elaine's shoulder. "Please."
"But it's ridiculous," Elaine protested, not moving. The liquor cloaking her in a feeling of unreality, the pressure of Terry's body against hers generating a sense of urgency within her.
"All we have to do is undress and pose here on the sofa. Stephie can get all the shots he wants in ten minutes."
"I don't think it's a good idea, Terry," Elaine heard her voice as from a distance, knowing her will to refuse was ebbing away. Knowing Terry knew this.
"Darling, you'll love them, wait and see." Terry was pulling the sweater over her head, slipping out of the slacks.
"It's absurd, really." It was though she weren't here, Elaine thought with panic, as Terry gently tugged at the white sweater, then reached for the zipper of the slacks.
Then Stephie was back, setting up his equipment, his face glowing with zeal. Stephie got a peculiar kind of thrill out of taking these pictures, Elaine thought subconsciously while she allowed Terry to pose her against the sofa. Then Terry's own nudeness stretched beside hers, and the only sound in the room was the popping in the fireplace and the sound of the camera clicking.
It was insane, it was stupid, but she had no will to resist. As though from a distance, Elaine was aware of what was going on. The provocative positions Stephie was demanding, the catapulting desire that was taking possession of her as Terry and she posed for these shots of love.
"They're going to be perfect," Stephie was panting with satisfaction. "Wait till you see them!"
"Are you finished?" Terry asked, stretching on the rug before the fire with the sinuous grace of a panther.
"All wrapped up," Stephie announced.
"Then beat it," Terry ordered frankly. "Right now you're one too many."
"I can take a hint.\* Stephie loaded up his equipment, gathered everything together, and sauntered off singing. "I have a passionate date with a wood-chuck down the drive. Come and get me when you're in the mood."
"Wouldn't it be wonderful if we had a place like this of our own?" Terry lay back against the rug, arms high above her head, thoroughly conscious of the provocative picture she made.
"I could hardly afford anything like this," Elaine reminded her frankly.
"It wouldn't have to be this big," Terry whispered, her eyes fastened on Elaine. "Just a little hideaway for the two of us that nobody else in the world knew about."
"Perhaps we could rent a little house somewhere, for weekends." Elaine was starkly conscious of everything Terry's eyes were saying to her now. All the tumultuous exciting promises. Actually, she conceded mentally, she could afford to find something like that. She'd even toyed with the idea of a place for herself last year, when she'd been so desperately on edge. A place to paint---the truant thought dashed in her mind, then was resolutely chased out. What was the matter with her, dreaming like a wide-eyed adolescent again I
"Darling, what are you thinking about?" Terry held up her arms invitingly, and Elaine moved urgently onto the rug beside her.
"About us," she said, because that's what Terry wanted to hear. Because sometimes the mind and the body operate on such widely divergent levels.
"What were you thinking about us?" Terry pursued, her breath in labored gasps now. "Tell me! No," she corrected herself, entwining her arms about Elaine, "Show me!"
"I was thinking about all the crazy things you make me do." Her hands captured Terry's small face and brought it close to hers. "I forget when I'm with you.
"Love me, Elaine," Terry implored with sudden urgency, pressing her nakedness into Elaine's, her hands tugging violently at the other girl's dark cap of hair above her. "Love me!" Then she was pinching, biting, demanding, half out of her mind with a devouring passion.
"Darling, yes!" Elaine promised hoarsely, the same fire consuming her.
"Elaine, you have to love me," Terry whimpered. "I'll kill you if you don't!"
"Be quiet," Elaine ordered between clenched teeth. "Don't talk, please don't talk!"
Elaine's mouth found hers, and their tongues clashed. They wrestled frenziedly on the rug before the fireplace, with a passion that tore at them, shoving the rest of the world into oblivion. All that mattered was now. Now, now, now!
Driving back into the city early on Monday morning, Elaine took refuge in simulated drowsiness, tormented by the memory of that session before Stephie's camera. What a careless, stupid thing for her to do! All these years, so careful---and suddenly she was losing control. Not that she feared either Stephie or Terry would try to use the photographs, she tried to convince herself---but it was degrading to lower herself to that level.
Elaine stole a pensive look at Terry, slouched back against the seat, a smile of satisfaction about her sulky mouth, the wistful eyes closed against the early morning sunlight. There was something of the young savage deep inside Terry, Elaine acknowledged. She'd fight for what she wanted, no holds barred. And for all that wide-eyed sweetness, shrewdness lurked close to the surface---Terry could be coldly calculating when it suited her purpose; no point in denying that. Elaine wished with a soaring urgency that she could somehow manage to destroy those negatives.
"I suppose you'll each want to go home to change?" Stephie was asking as he swung the car off the parkway into the upper Manhattan city streets.
"It'd be a public announcement if we went to work with the same clothes," Terry giggled. "Leave me off first, then Elaine. She's the lady executive---she can afford to be late."
Again, Elaine caught the note of resentment that they didn't share Elaine's apartment. She remembered, with a sense of guilt, that she still hadn't had that extra key made for Terry.
"Thanks for everything," Elaine said casually, struggling to mask her unease. "Your place up there is perfect, Fred."
"Come up again, soon," he invited. "Maybe next time you might want to bring your paints and things and do some work."
"I haven't worked on anything but package designs for years," Elaine said harshly, and not entirely truthfully. In the quiet cavern of her bedroom, she'd worked sporadically on several projects, each of which was eventually abandoned.
"Then do it for a lark," Fred urged. "Good for the psyche, if you can believe the experts."
"Maybe Elaine'll paint my portrait," Terry laughed, pleased with the idea. "Will you, Elaine?"
"Maybe," Elaine hedged, suddenly knowing whom she'd like to paint. Her brother's wife. Kathy. If ever she got down to serious painting again, it would be for Kathy.
They left Terry off at the door of the brownstone, then shot across town to Elaine's small smart building. Somehow, it was a relief to be back within her own place, with its aura of utter privacy. She showered again, as though to wash away the weekend, then hurried into one of the smartly expensive suits that was practically a uniform with her. Coming back to the office later than usual on Monday morning was suitable to her status, she thought with a wry smile.
It was well past ten when Elaine strode through the corridors of Fleet and Comstock to her office. She moved purposefully towards her door, tossed it open, and halted coldly.
"Are you moving in here permanently?" she demanded, facing Paul Hennessy with candid annoyance.
"An apple for the teacher." He pointed to the big red apple resting on her desk.
"Meaning?" She crossed over to the cabinet where she kept her purse and gloves.
"Congratulations are in order," he announced leisurely, his eyes fastened on her.
"For what?" She swung around to face him, startled.
"I spent at least twenty minutes listening to Rick Stacey rave about your plans for Truly Yours."
"You mean it's set?" she demanded involuntarily.
"All wrapped up in neat satin ribbons," Paul smiled ruefully. "Have to admit it, beautiful---you really delivered the goods. The set-up's great."
"Thanks," she managed a slight smile, while her insides churned with pleasure. The whole campaign had paid off! She was handling Truly Yours! She knew about the hefty bonus that would go with this.
"I still insist," Paul sauntered to his feet and walked to her, "that's sad consolation on a cold night."
"Let me worry about that." Her eyes met his coldly.
"I must be out of my mind, but you do screwball things to me, career girl." With unexpected swiftness he slipped his arms about her waist, pulling her close.
"Screwball is right!" Her face colored angrily. "Go play in somebody else's backyard, Junior."
"What's this peeve you've got against me?" He refused to release her. "The bank account too small? The status too low? I'll bet you weren't this coy with Rick Stacy." His hands moved upward, touching her breasts.
"Take your filthy hands off me," she spat at him furiously. "And don't come back in here again!"
His face tightened as his hands slowly released her. "I don't dig you, career girl."
"Because I don't happen to go for your brand of charm?" she demanded haughtily. "Is that so remarkable?"
"I can't figure you out, and usually I'm right about women." He moved to the door now, inspecting her as he walked.
"Chalk me up as a mistake," she tossed at him, then flung herself into the chair behind her desk, determined to ignore him. She sighed with relief when she heard the door slam behind him.
She was deeply involved in the morning's mail when the phone rang. It was Rick Stacey. He wanted to see her right away, in his office. This was it, she realized, putting the phone down and reaching for the small mirror she kept in her desk drawer. The official assignment for Truly Yours. Well, she'd earned it, she told herself with a surge of distaste, remembering that private conference Friday afternoon. She earned everything the hard way.
It was nearly lunch time when she emerged from the conference with Rick Stacey and Mel Comstock. As she walked out of the room with the two men, she was acutely conscious of the hum of avid curiosity rumbling through the offices and cubicles. Everybody had been watching to see the race between Paul and her. But she'd won it fairly, she reminded herself. Despite the personal persuasions. If she hadn't come up with a superior campaign, Rick Stacey wouldn't have picked her. Or would he? But even Paul admitted her ideas were good, she reminded herself sturdily, so why torment herself with vagrant ideas?
On impulse, she hurried out to the washroom on the chance of encountering Terry. She needed to share this conquest with someone. They'd break her die-hard rule and have lunch together, somewhere special. She glanced about the washroom, already crowded with secretaries and typists going out on their lunch hour. Terry wasn't there. She'd probably gone straight to lunch, Elaine decided, and headed for the elevators, to go down to the drugstore to search for her.
Terry wasn't in the drugstore, Elaine discovered, somewhat taken aback. Terry made a point of eating here, on the chance that Elaine could casually wander in and eat with her, as though by accident. Oddly uncertain, Elaine seated herself at a rear booth and ordered her own lunch, eating with absent-minded disinterest, trying to relax with endless cigarettes and coffee refills.
She walked slowly back to the office, aware of the undercurrent of unrest charging through her. What was the matter with her, anyhow? She had the Truly Yours account signed and delivered. This was the big thing right now! Yet once again, that familiar sense of dissatisfaction, unfulfillment.
Elaine walked into the building just as Paul Hennessy and Terry walked into the elevator. Instinctively, she knew they'd been out to lunch together. Why Terry, she demanded suspiciously. Why had Paul asked Terry out, when they barely knew each other? Was she living in a stupidly blind dream world, thinking nobody knew about Terry and her? Was Paul pumping Terry for information about them, the suspicion shot clamorously through her.
In a vise of insecurity Elaine waited for the next "up" elevator, tapped impatiently with one foot until it shot up to her floor and she could hurry back to the washroom where she was sure she'd find Terry.
"Hello," Terry greeted her in surprise.
"I saw you downstairs, with Paul," Elaine said with calculated calmness, glad that they were alone in the washroom at least for a few moments. "I tried to catch up with you but I had to wait for change when I paid my check."
"Wasn't it sweet of Paul to take me to lunch at the Lobster Pond?" Terry crowed triumphantly. "You should have seen the check, with the drinks he insisted on having!"
"I didn't know you two were such friends," Elaine said, ostensibly repairing her lipstick. So she'd been right! Paul had taken her to lunch.
"Elaine, you don't mind, do you?" Terry turned reproachful eyes on her. "Actually, I never said more than hello' to him before. We met in the elevator and he suggested lunch. I was bored so I figured, why not?" A tiny smile played about the sulky mouth. "Sweetie, you aren't jealous?"
"Certainly not." Elaine strove to keep the impatience out of her voice. "Just a bit curious about his sudden interest."
"He's on the rebound," Terry confided. "It's really hilarious! He's got a mad thing for you. Kept slipping your name into the conversation."
"Be careful with him, will you? He can be dangerous." Elaine was reluctant to confide her own suspicions about Paul, yet she had to put Terry on her guard. "Don't forget, he was desperate to nail Truly Yours."
"Even more desperate to nail you," Terry giggled. "Isn't that riot? Oh, honey, you won't mind, will you? He asked me out this evening---he has tickets for a hit musical. I figured it'd be okay. Monday nights you're almost always tied up here at the office until late, anyhow."
It wasn't strictly true that she worked every Monday evening, but Elaine was willing to by-pass that.
"I'd rather you didn't make a regular thing of Paul," she frowned uneasily.
"Elaine, you know better!" Terry pouted. "I just thought---free tickets to a hit show. I'll get rid of him easily enough afterwards." She let one hand rest on Elaine's arm. "Why don't you meet me at the apartment later? Paul won't be coming up. You know me better than that." Again, that secretive smile that shared derision with Elaine. A tremendous joke, their being interested in any man.
\*
It was mid-afternoon when Kathy phoned up. "How are you, dear?" Elaine asked with instant cordiality.
"Fine," Kathy's voice came to her, warm and bubbling. "Have you got a minute to talk or are you up to your ears in work?"
"I have time," Elaine reassured her.
"Eric's working late tonight, and I thought maybe you'd like to come over and have dinner with me. If you don't have another date," she hastened to add with a tiny laugh of apology. "I know it's awfully late to be asking you."
"I haven't a thing to do," Elaine said. "I'd love to come." Funny, how fate worked things out! Terry was going out with Paul suddenly, and she was free to go to Kathy's. "What time?"
"As early as you can make it." Kathy's light laugh drifted musically over the phone. "I'm absolutely dying of lonesomeness."
"I have some work to finish up that may take me a while," Elaine's eyes chased about her desk, "but I should be there no later than seven."
"Wonderful, I'll be waiting," Kathy said, pleased.
"See you then."
Elaine returned to the sketches on her desk that needed to be checked, struggling to keep her mind on the work at hand. But her mind kept charging ahead to the evening with Kathy. There was something so refreshing, so exquisitely clean about Kathy, that made it good to be with her. It was stupid of Eric to leave her alone this way, when they'd been in the city less than a week. Of course the poor kid was lonely.
Elaine dug into work, not even conscious of the cessation of activity outside. After five, except for private offices like hers, the agency was ghost-like in its quietness. She didn't even hear the door to her office open. Only, when it was slammed shut with an undisguised noisiness did she glance up, startled.
"What are you doing here now?" Her eyes inspected Paul suspiciously, as he leaned there against the door, his face darkly impassive, an odd smile laying about his mouth. "I have some time to kill. Have a date at eight." He lounged toward the chair beside her desk now, and Elaine caught the faint unsteadiness of his gait. He'd been guzzling cocktails pretty steadily all afternoon, Elaine knew instantly.
"Why tell me about your private life?" she countered.
"Because I want you for my private life!"
He reached out a hand to grasp her by the wrist, awing her roughly against him, his belt buckle digging into her flesh from the impact.
"Let me go! You're drunk!" she flared out furiously, trying impotently to release herself.
"Ever know, beautiful, how many truths come out in drink?" he chuckled, and again that sharp charge of alarm shot through her. "I know what's wrong with you and me now."
"You do?" Her eyes shot to the door, wondering who was outside that she might call to for help. Or was it better to brazen this out between them? What did Paul know?
"Sure I know what's wrong. You're one of those very-strong broads who needs a sadistic guy to beat the hell out of her. Then she'll come crawling on all fours, begging for it. We get so wrapped up in our polite exteriors we forget these things."
"Paul, you're drunk---you're not responsible. Let me go now and we'll forget about this." Her voice was ostensibly cool and controlled, belying an inner turmoil.
"Not yet, doll," he drawled. "This is our big moment. Not a soul in the place tonight, until the cleaning crew comes in!"
"Paul, let me go!" Her voice soared precariously now as he pinned her back against the desk and ripped away the delicate softness of her blouse, tearing roughly at her bra straps to reach her breasts. "Paul, stop it!"
"Go on, yell, if you like it," he encouraged, pulling off her jacket, what remained of her blouse. Then his hands were at the zipper of her skirt, shoving it down about her hips, her thighs, her legs, until it lay in a huddle on the floor about her feet, and he lifted her out.
"I could kill you!" she raged, clawing at his face.
"You'd enjoy that, wouldn't you?" he grinned with satisfaction, then with no warning sent his hand across her cheek in a stinging slap that hurled her to the floor. His belt was in his hand now, and her eyes dilated in fear as she saw it descending towards her body.
"Stop it!" she screamed now, not caring who heard. "Stop it!"
"God, you're beautiful," he muttered, falling to his knees beside her now. "Not like these over-ripe sluts with their bulging bustlines. Like Diana the huntress." His voice sunk to a husky whisper as he reached for the faintly swelling adolescent's breasts, as his hands caressed her buttocks with deceptive gentleness.
"Let me go!" she tried again, senselessly, as his hands dug into the tender flesh, and she sunk her teeth into his shoulder.
"You like that!" he gloated triumphantly, after the first bellow of pain.
"I hate it! I hate you!" She was half-sobbing now in her helpless rage. "You're an insane fiend!"
"You'll be begging me for it," he told her hotly. "Wait and see! Even if I have to beat you into a coma!"
For a moment Paul relaxed his grasp and Elaine rolled over and struggled to her feet. As he staggered waveringly to his feet, she put all her strength into one frantic shove. He landed on the floor, striking his head against the desk.
"Paul!" Horrified, she rushed beside him, checking the injury to his head, his pulse. "Just stunned," she muttered to the empty room. "That's all, I'm sure." The liquor and the blow had stunned him, nothing more---at least, she was able to reassure herself to that extent.
Elaine staggered weakly to her feet, feeling bruised and shaken. What would she do now? Best thing, leave Paul here to pull himself back to consciousness. The cleaning women would find him here if he merely fell into a drunken stupor and slept it off. Let him brazen out his presence in her office, she decided shrewdly. As far as everybody knew, she'd left at five with the others. The whole agency, except for her, had probably known he was thoroughly lit.
Her blouse and petticoat were torn beyond redemption. She hastily gathered them into a heap, shoved the remains into a manila envelope. She could deposit that in a street corner waste basket, she decided. Her jacket could be worn buttoned up the front, without a blouse. Her hands trembling, she struggled to repair the damage to her make-up, grateful that the welts from Paul's belt were where they couldn't be seen. There was a bruise across her cheek, but that she could manage to laugh off. Or better still, she remembered those sticks of make-up to cover such unsightliness. She'd stop in a drugstore on the way over to Kathy's, she decided.
She'd go to Kathy's, she reassured herself with a rush of relief. She could relax there, put this stinking mess out of her mind! Suddenly, she was charging with impatience to be out of this place, to look at Kathy and feel cleansed. It was almost seven. If she hurried, she could make it on time...
Elaine leaned back in the cab, her eyes closed, fighting to regain an outer calm. She knew it'd be hours before she'd stop trembling inside. She couldn't erase the memory of Paul Hennessy lying there on the floor, completely out. He wasn't badly hurt, she kept insisting mentally. An anguished sigh escaped her as the cabbie pulled into another lane to allow an ambulance to pass---its siren screaming emergency. She wouldn't think about Paul now---she couldn't. Whatever would be with him, she'd face up to it tomorrow. Not now, with her nerves a shambles, her body aching.
Then the taxi was stopping and Elaine automatically reached into her purse, stealing one last apprehensive glance at herself in the driver's rear view mirror as she did so. She looked a trifle pale, that's all, she caught her breath in relief. Nobody'd guess about that struggle back in her office.
Kathy opened the door almost the instant she rang.
"Hi." Kathy smiled brilliantly. "I'm so glad you could come---I was ready to talk to the furniture."
"I'm glad you invited me," Elaine smiled back, already relaxing a bit.
"Would you like a cocktail? I'm not very good at it," Kathy was wistfully apologetic.
"I'm not particularly fond of them," Elaine was candid. "I usually drink because people expect it of me."
"You mean for business," Kathy elaborated. "You're too strong a person to care very much about what people think."
Elaine laughed, settling herself onto the sofa. "You have some strange ideas about me."
"Eric's talked so much about you." Kathy tucked herself into a corner of the sofa, her eyes brightly inquisitive. "He wouldn't admit it of course, but you're sort of up on a pedestal for him."
"That's not really the problem." Elaine was serious now, guessing that underneath the light chatter Kathy was honestly concerned about her husband.
"Is it a problem?" A hint of alarm edged Kathy's voice.
"I hope not, Kathy." Elaine rose, walked over to the window for a moment, searching for words to convey her meaning. "You see, though neither of us has ever admitted it, there's always been this thing between Eric and me. I'm six years older---Dad made me his companion rather than Eric. Eric was constantly battling to work to keep up with me, whether it was school grades or an ability to play tennis or get a job. He was always out to prove to Dad he could do anything I could."
"That wasn't fair," Kathy said steadily.
"No, but those things happen." Elaine came back to the sofa. "That's why I thought it was good for Eric when he went off on jobs that separated him from the family. He wasn't always in there battling."
"But he is." Desperation crept into Kathy's voice. "He tries to appear cool and easy-going on the surface, but underneath he's all tied up in knots. It's worse since we've been here in New York."
"You'll work it out with him, Kathy." A hand reached impulsively to touch her shoulder in sympathy, but instantly Elaine withdrew it.
"I'm going to try." Kathy made a determined effort to throw off her somberness. "But this is a fine way to greet you, crying on your shoulder!"
"Eric and I are the only two left in the family---I guess we should worry about each other." Elaine reached for a cigarette now. "Tell me about you, Kathy. You know Eric---he can be so vague sometimes. All he really told me was that you were absolutely wonderful and you write poetry."
"I dabble," Kathy said candidly, "but I enjoy it. Back home before I married Eric I worked in an engineering office. Terribly dull, until Eric joined the staff. I lived at home with my mother and three brothers. Quiet little life in a quiet little town. Eric teases me sometimes---he says I married him just to get away from there." Now Kathy's eyes turned seriously upon Elaine. "But from what Eric tells me, you should be doing some tremendous things with your painting. He told me about that exhibit of yours in Paris---how your instructors prophesized such a wonderful future for you---"
"Everybody makes mistakes," her voice was tinged with bitterness. Must everybody throw Paris in her face right now? "Even the best instructors."
"Why don't you give yourself a chance, Elaine?" Her earnestness was unmistakable. "I know I have such a tiny little talent, but you've proved yourself to a point."
"I've thought of it now and then." Encased in horror Elaine heard herself talking, as though from a distance. She'd told this to no one up until now. No one! "I even started to rent myself a studio down in the south of the Village, where I could hide myself away and work. When it came to signing the lease, I reneged."
"Take a chance now," Kathy moved forward urgently. "Rent yourself a studio, gamble on yourself."
"I might," Elaine said unsteadily, "on one condition."
"What's that?"
"If you promise to pose for me." Suddenly, she wanted insistently to paint Kathy. That honesty, the inner beauty---if she could capture that on canvas!
"You mean that?" Kathy stared in astonishment. "You'd really want me to pose for you?"
"Only condition." Elaine waited quietly, her eyes fastened on Kathy, refusing to listen to that exhorting voice within her that told her this was sheer madness.
"I'd love it," Kathy agreed instantly, then her face puckered with concentration.
"What's the matter?" Alarm shot through Elaine.
"Could we keep it a secret from Eric, for a while?"
"Of course," Elaine agreed, a momentary premonition of trouble invading her. But this was what she wanted herself, wasn't it? Their secret, hers and Kathy's.
"Then we can surprise him later." Kathy's face lit up now like a delighted child's.
"Right." Elaine leaned back against the sofa, wondering into what strange paths fate was leading them.
"You must be starving." Kathy jumped resolutely to her feet. "I'll have dinner on the table in three seconds."
"I'll give you five," Elaine teased. "After that, the gallows."
Elaine was amazed at the ease with which the hours slid past. It was almost eleven when Eric's key sounded in the door and her eyes moved to her watch to check the time.
"Darling." Kathy rushed impulsively to greet him.
"Hi, sweetie," he kissed her, at the same time casting an oddly speculative glance in his sister's direction---or so she interpreted it.
"Wasn't Elaine an angel? I was popping with loneliness, and I asked her to come over and talk me out of it, and she did." Kathy bubbled vivaciously, enjoying the presence of the two of them.
"Good old Elaine," there was an undertone of mockery, "you can always depend upon her." He came over and dropped an arm about her shoulder, and Elaine caught the scent of Scotch on his breath.
"I gather you're keeping your nose to the grindstone," Elaine mentioned casually.
For a moment the nonchalant mask slipped from Eric's face, to reveal tension. "It's tough, coming into a new town, taking over a new branch like this. Most of the men are older than me---there's a certain resentment."
"You know your job. That'll earn you respect," Elaine reminded quietly. "They wouldn't have sent you here if they hadn't appreciated your capabilities."
"Nothing like a doting wife and sister." Eric's eyes were veiled again, as he bowed with dramatic gallantry. "Say, has Kathy been keeping you on the wagon?" he accused, heading for the liquor cabinet.
"I didn't want a drink---she offered," Elaine interposed swiftly.
"Nobody minds if I have one?" He was already pouring.
"Eric, are you hungry?" Kathy jumped eagerly to her feet.
"Now there's a constructive idea." He came over to his wife now, pulling her close, and Elaine caught the apprehensive suspicion that captured Kathy. Kathy was just now becoming aware that Eric was one step removed from being tight. Elaine stifled an impulse to laugh derisively. What was there about the atmosphere tonight that brought on the need to get loaded? First Paul, now Eric.
"I'll fix a tray of sandwiches, and some coffee." Kathy lost that look of open-faced ingenuousness now. She was bright enough not to let on to Eric that she knew, though the quick glance in Elaine's direction carried a note of apology. "Sit down and talk to Elaine," she coaxed.'
"Hey, you giving the old man the brush-off?" His mouth touched the base of her throat, his hands close about her waist. Instinctively, Elaine knew this show was for her. What's he trying to prove, she thought angrily.
"Honey," Kathy tried to laugh it off. "I'll bet you had a miserable dinner."
"Drank most of it," Eric conceded with a touch of defiance. "But I came home to the child-bride, didn't I?"
"Darling, I'm twenty-two years old," Kathy protested, miserably embarrassed by Eric's amorous roamings in front of Elaine. "Now be a good boy and relax while I go fix something for us to eat."
"What do you think of her?" Eric grinned, releasing Kathy.
"I think you did all right," Elaine repeated her evaluation of an earlier occasion. "In fact, you couldn't have chosen better." For a moment their looks clashed in strange defiance, then it was over.
"I won't be long." Kathy was already headed for the kitchen.
Eric played with his liquor glass for a moment, then discarded it. "Think I did right in coming to New York?"
"Why not?" Elaine countered.
"I don't know---it's a tough town."
"No more so than Chicago. You did all right there, until you went further west."
"I was young and eager then," he smiled tiredly. "I talk my way into spots, and then I die inside over whether I'll make it."
"But you do," Elaine insisted. "And now you have Kathy to back you up."
"Yep, the happy couple," he tossed off gaily. "I'll bet people pass us in the street and pop with envy."
"Eric, be happy," Elaine said urgently. "You have every right to be."
"Are you?" he turned on her with such unexpectedness that Elaine gasped.
"Fairly so," she lied. "More than most people."
"Nothing's ever been right for you since you came back from Paris," he said, with an astuteness that stunned her.
"You're having hallucinations," she tried to laugh it off, but the attempt was a shambles. "I'm doing marvelously. As a matter of fact, I just sewed up a tremendous deal this afternoon. Big sister's doing fine," she tried for flippancy.
"Maybe." His eyes dwelt on her, full of unspoken questions that sent chills through Elaine. What was he thinking? How much did he suspect? That was the horrible, the most frightening thing of all---to wonder if you lived in a dream world of secrecy when all the world, in reality, jeered mockingly at your shoddy pretenses. Then Eric was on his feet again, charged with restlessness. "Think I'll run in for a fast shower. You don't mind, do you?"
"Go right ahead."
"Won't be more than a couple of minutes."
Eric took off in the direction of the bedroom, and she sat there, oddly at loose ends with herself. For a while this evening she'd forgot herself---about that stupid session with Stephie's camera, about the revolting battle with Paul earlier this evening. Now everything came rushing back in kaleidoscopic frenzy.
"Kathy?" Eric yelled from the bathroom minutes later, over the sound of the shower.
"Yes?"
"Come scrub my back," he ordered gaily.
"Be right there." Kathy appeared for a brief instant in the doorway to the living room. "Eric gets the wackiest ideas sometimes. I'll make him hurry up.
Kathy disappeared into the bedroom, and then Elaine heard her giggling in the bathroom with Eric. Suddenly Eric was bursting with exuberance, apparently. Elaine rose nervously, hating the thin walls of new apartments. Even luxury buildings like this. She felt like an intruder, listening to the sounds of Eric's playfulness across the rooms.
"Eric, you're getting me all wet," Kathy was protesting laughingly.
"Then take off your clothes," he ordered, apparently considering this a tremendous joke.
"Eric, honestly," Kathy was protesting. "Elaine'll think we're crazy!" And Elaine caught the sense of anxiety in her voice, that she might hear the horseplay in the bathroom. Kathy was embarrassed, for both of them.
"Come on, get in with me," he was urging, his voice carrying with a clearness that pierced Elaine with the sharpness of a carving knife.
Was he out of his mind, Elaine wondered, panic overtaking her. Did he dare start up in there, with his sister right in the other room? Suddenly the room was oppressively hot. She moved to the window, opened it, willing herself not to hear even while her ears strained for every endearing phrase Eric was muttering in there.
"Now, isn't the water great?" Eric was saying accusingly. "Was I wrong?"
"Oh, Eric." Kathy sighed in defeat, and there was silence more torturous to Elaine than the sounds.
"Come on," he was teasing now, and Elaine realized he'd shoved open the bathroom door, and it was almost as though she were standing inches away. "Prove to me that wide-eyed innocence doesn't mean a thing. Come on, Kathy, show me you love me."
"Eric, please." Her desperate whisper was barely discernible, but with her need to hear Elaine's ears caught the plea. "You know Elaine's out there."
"So what?" his voice was husky now. "Do her good to hear some honest passion. Besides, I'll be quiet. I promise, baby."
Elaine broke into a cold sweat, her heart pounding, her mind visualizing. What was the matter with Eric? Had he gone completely berserk? She stood there, immobile, her ears straining to hear the incoherent sounds inside. The faint unmistakable sound of their bodies falling across the bed, the incautious whispers, the mounting frenzy that made them less oblivious of their surroundings, that they were not alone.
Agony clutching at her, Elaine hurried into the kitchen, not wanting to hear, not wanting to admit the aching desire that captured her now. She wanted to run right out of that apartment, out into the street, but that would be admitting she knew. She kept herself busy with sandwich-making, taking the percolator off the stove, finally nervously pouring, hoping the dark, secretive sounds in the other room would cease to torture her.
With a sigh of relief she heard the other two emerging. Eric whistling with an undertone of triumph.
"I probably made enough for an army," Elaine said with a show of gaiety, "but I figured you wouldn't mind. Eric was never happy unless the table was loaded." Elaine made an effort to smile in Kathy's direction now.
"I'm starving," he laughed high-spiritedly, and still Elaine caught that odd sense of victory shining from him. What was he trying to prove? That this time he had something she could never attain?
"That shower!" Kathy made a valiant attempt at levity, though her discomfort touched Elaine painfully. "Eric splashed so much I had to change into a robe."
At that moment Elaine almost hated her brother, she admitted inwardly. But she loved her brother's wife...
Opening the door to her own apartment, Elaine was flooded with relief that she could abandon the pretense of nonchalance. Her face flamed, remembering Eric and Kathy in the bedroom, with only the door and paper-thin walls separating her from that frank lovemaking. It was no use denying the truth any longer. She loved Kathy as she'd loved no one ever before. And there was no one more remotely removed from her. She sighed, sinking into a chair, visualizing Kathy's lovely face, the elfin body that every fiber of her being ached to hold. And she had to pretend! To pretend to offer friendship when her heart spilled over with love, her body trembled to possess.
The phone pierced the quiet with an ugly discordance. Still sitting there in the semi-darkness, Elaine reached for it.
"Hello."
"I thought you might be here when I got in," Terry's voice came sulkily over the wire. "You said you might," she reminded.
"I was terribly tired," Elaine began, and then the disturbing memory of Paul returned with jarring shock. Terry was supposed to be meeting him at eight. "How was your evening?" She didn't know why she asked that.
"Boring," Terry lied. "I came home early---I've been here almost an hour. I phoned and phoned, but you didn't answer." Obviously, she was waiting for some explanation.
"I went over to Eric's," Elaine told her, wondering subconsciously where Terry had spent the evening. At Maria's again, with Stephie and his friends? It struck her with an astonished sharpness that she didn't honestly care. The thing with Terry was at an end, for Elaine. Kathy had reduced it to ashes.
"Have fun?" The question was light, yet the undertone unmistakably malicious. This crazy streak in Terry, Elaine reminded herself with nagging alarm. Somebody at the office had been complaining about Terry being insolent, she recalled overhearing somewhere in the corridors. She'd meant to warn Terry, only it'd slipped her mind somehow. "You hit it off so well with your sister-in-law," Terry murmured with phoney admiration.
"Eric and Kathy are very much in love," Elaine said with all the calmness she could manage. "I'm awfully happy for them."
"Elaine," Terry's voice was huskily appealing now, "you aren't angry about my going out with Paul Hennessy, are you?"
"Of course not." Irritation crept into her voice, without her meaning to permit that. Why must Terry keep up this childish pretense that she was out with Paul?
Paul was all right, she told herself desperately, visualizing him sprawled across the floor as she'd left him. But Elaine knew she'd spend a sleepless night, worrying about him. Taunting herself, too, over the precarious situation with Kathy. While Terry rattled on, Elaine's mind pondered over what to do about her feelings for her sister-in-law. Should she stop seeing Eric and Kathy altogether, make up excuses each time they asked her over? Or should she put herself through exquisite torture, seeing Kathy, wanting her, and pretending to be merely the affectionate sister-in-law? How long could she keep up such a pretense? Suddenly, she was aware that Terry was saying something about coming over to the apartment. "Sweetie, I'm absolutely exhausted," she said with credible sincerity. "I'll see you at the office tomorrow."
"Suppose we could go to a foreign film after dinner?" Terry was reluctant to let go. "There's a terrific one you haven't seen." Terry knew Elaine's enjoyment in foreign movies, so she'd hopped on this bandwagon as proof of how much they meant to each other, another tie. "Please," she coaxed.
"All right," Elaine agreed wearily, willing to promise anything now to escape that other presence. "We'll talk about it at dinner."
\*
Going up in the elevator to Fleet and Comstock, Elaine fought an overpowering attack of jitters. How did she know Paul wasn't injured by that blow on the head? He'd struck the desk so sharply! She'd been upset and frightened and so she'd run. Perhaps she should have phoned for an ambulance. Perhaps it wasn't a drunken stupor, but a coma!
Walking from the elevator, through the reception room into the floor of cubicles, Elaine was punctured with self-consciousness. So sure that everyone was looking at her oddly, talking behind her back in whispers. Had Paul been found in her office this morning? Had he recovered consciousness and talked? What happened here, her mind demanded bitterly? What was she walking into now?
She opened the door to her own office, and leaned against it with a sigh of relief. Her eyes moved involuntarily to the spot where Paul's body had sprawled. There was no sign in the office now of last night's struggle. She sought a glance in the make-up mirror she kept in her desk drawer. The nasty bruises were thoroughly masked---nobody could see. Her clothes concealed the other bruises. She sat down at the desk, determined to behave as though this were merely any other morning.
"Yes?" she said calmly at the light knock on her door about five minutes later.
"Hi," Mr. Comstock's attractive young secretary poised in the door with a smile. "Mr. Comstock would like to see you as soon as you're free."
"Be right there," Elaine smiled back, fighting panic. Something had happened here! She could read it in the discreet curiosity Comstock's smartly-groomed secretary was taking such pains to conceal.
Elaine gave the girl a two minutes' head start, utilizing the time to compose herself. Then, a fixed smile on her face, she moved from behind her desk, out the door, and down the short corridor to Comstock's office, ostensibly the poised young career woman she'd always been.
"Hello, my dear," Comstock glanced up with that professionally charming smile he always wore.
"Good-morning, Cliff," Elaine said leisurely, going to the chair beside his desk with the polite smile of inquiry that betrayed nothing. "Something new on Truly Yours?" She hoped that none of her anxiety showed through, that the faint, nervous twitching below her eye would go unnoticed.
"Elaine, I don't want you to be needlessly upset," Comstock shuffled the papers on his desk. "We had some unpleasantness here this morning. Quite early."
"Oh?" Then Paul had been nasty!
"We all know how keen the competition was for the Truly Yours assignment. I mean between you and Paul." He hesitated briefly, then plunged ahead. "A cleaning woman found him out cold in your office. Now don't be disturbed, my dear," he said hastily as her eyes widened in fear, "He'd been drinking, probably invaded your office on the chance of destroying whatever work you'd set up on the account. He fell and knocked his head on a corner of the desk. The cleaning woman was alarmed and called for the night elevator operator."
"Was he badly hurt?" The words came out in a harsh whisper.
"Just paralyzed drunk." Cliff Comstock's face tightened. "I always figured him for being emotionally unstable. Seeing you land the assignment sent him off half-cocked. Naturally, the night operator reported the incident. When I questioned him, he was surly and insulting. I fired him on the spot."
"I'm sorry it turned out this way," Elaine stammered. "I know Paul's terribly ambitious---"
"Good riddance," he interrupted brusquely. "I called you in to tell you so that you'd have the full picture. I'd like you to check through your files to make sure nothing's been disturbed. I don't want Hennessy chasing off to another agency with a similar campaign."
"I'm sure there's nothing disturbed," Elaine reassured him. All her sketches and notes on Truly Yours were in her apartment. At the beginning of a new campaign she liked to work out the roughspots in privacy. "But I gather Rick Stacy gave Paul a fairly clear idea of our approach."
"Paul was bluffing," he said comfortably, "Probably hoping to start you talking. I checked with Rick."
"Fine," Elaine smiled faintly, knowing this little conference was at an end. But what about Paul? Was he writing "finis" to their little episode?
Elaine and Terry followed their familiar afternoon routine. Terry left the office, went into the drugstore for coffee, waiting for Elaine to join her. Then, together, they took a cab to Terry's apartment.
"You're not very talkative," Terry ventured cautiously, as she opened the door and moved inside-"Worried about Paul Hennessy ruining your plans for Truly Yours?"
"Is it all over the agency?" Elaine asked, her eyes dark with pain.
"All kinds of rumors," Terry admitted, "all ending up with Paul being kicked out on his rear end for getting loaded and messing up your office." Terry tossed off her jacket, headed for the kitchenette to start dinner. "Did he chase you around the desk first?"
"Yes," Elaine conceded wearily, too tired to lie about it. And what was the use?
"He stood me up last night. You knew that, didn't you?" Terry swerved about to face her, the sulky eyes accusing. "But you let me go on talking last night anyhow".
"I was tired, Terry," she said patiently.
"You didn't care that I was stood up!" Anger hardened the sweetly silky voice now. "You didn't care because you had a chance to go over to your precious brother's and sit there and fawn over his darling wife!"
"Terry, shut up!"
"I won't! Nothing's been the same since they came into town!" Terry's voice rose hysterically. "You took one look at that phoney little slut and that was it!"
"Terry, stop that!" Elaine ordered, fury seizing hold of her now.
"Why?" Terry thrust her small face beneath Elaine's tauntingly. "You can't stand anybody saying anything against your little darling? What does your brother think about it? That's what I'd like to know."
"You don't know what you're talking about." Elaine walked away to the window, fighting for control.
"I know you're crazy about that girl!" Terry stormed. "You're trying to get rid of me, for her. You think I'll just let you walk out on me---but I won't." Defiance shone from her. "You try to leave me, Elaine, I'll fix it so everybody knows why. Those pictures Stephie took of us---how would you like to have them passed around the agency? How would you like Eric to see them, and that darling wife of his?"
"You wouldn't dare!" Elaine froze.
"Oh, wouldn't I? Try me! Just try me!"
"It wouldn't look so good for you, either," Elaine struggled to be rational. "You can't hurt me without hurting yourself."
"I don't care about me!" Suddenly, the fury broke and tears rolled unchecked down her cheeks, with dirty smudges of mascara marring the perfect make-up. "But I won't have her taking you away from me. I won't let her."
"Terry, please," Elaine began, a shamed compassion taking hold of her now.
"Don't touch me," Terry complained petulantly, and one hand rose to strike Elaine across the face.
"Stop that!" Elaine ordered, grappling for Terry's hands that were raining blows in her direction.
"I won't," Terry screamed, and her nails left a bloody scratch down Elaine's forearm.
The two girls tangled frenziedly, falling back against the divan, the room noisy with their labored breathing. And then, it was over. Terry was clinging to Elaine, sobbing out her apology, begging to be forgiven.
"It's all right, honey, it's all right," Elaine reiterated, her mind in upheaval, her body taut with the shock of Terry's attack.
"You hate me." Terry sat up on the divan, leaning on one hand. "You don't like it when people act like this. You like everything quiet and respectable."
"I don't hate you," Elaine said with a manufactured smile. "Why do you dream up such things?"
"You don't love me." Terry touched her softly on one thigh. "You're just trying to figure out a way to get rid of me without making a scene."
"That's absurd," Elaine protested, every nerve in her body screaming for release. She closed her eyes, trying to shut out the clean memory of Kathy. Wanting Kathy. Knowing she couldn't have her.
"Prove it," Terry insisted huskily, sliding one leg towards hers. "Darling, show me you're not angry with me." Her arms crept about Elaine now, and she pressed her supple young body close to hers, daring her to refuse.
Kathy was inaccessible, an inner voice taunted Elaine maliciously. Kathy would turn sick if she knew how Elaine longed for her, how Elaine wanted to possess that elfin body of hers! But she had to have something, someone. "Sweet little Terry," she murmured softly, shutting the other girl out of her mind, praying to forget with Terry. "Darling, I love you!"
Terry came to her with tiny moans of satisfaction, her hands and her legs and her mouth working with expert determination to build Elaine to a fever pitch, to a surging clamorous climax that enveloped them as one, making everything else another world, this the real one.
"Don't ever leave me," Terry muttered, sinking her small teeth into Elaine's shoulder with satisfaction. "Don't ever leave me!"
Elaine had optimistically expected the gossip over Paul Hennessy to dwindle into past history in a day or two. It didn't. She was increasingly disturbed by the buzzing that echoed through the agency, the favorite story evidently being that Rick Stacy and Paul had had a knock-out brawl over her, with Paul being thrown out on his ear. She kept telling herself it didn't matter, why should she care what people said? She was grateful, at least, that Rick was so deeply involved with one of his accounts that he never managed more than a brief, secretive murmur about their spending an evening together.
She'd put off calling Kathy, as she'd promised to, about their having lunch together. Rush of business would serve as an excuse, she thought guiltily, if Kathy should make an overture herself. She couldn't bring herself to face Kathy again just yet. Though even now, sitting at her desk determined to follow through on the roughs she'd promised Rick for this afternoon, Kathy's face kept merging with the sketches spread on the desk before her.
"Damn!" Rising to her feet with a sigh of futility, she reached for her purse and headed for the washroom.
Some sixth sense warned her to enter quietly, and then the voices of the two girls around the bend came to her with shocking clarity.
"Don't believe that stuff about Rick Stacy fighting it out with Paul," the voice of the receptionist scoffed arrogantly. "The great Stacy wouldn't soil his hands over any gal, so long as there was one more alive on earth."
"What's the scoop?" the other, a girl in the steno pool, prodded avidly.
"The way I got it---and it came from somebody who seemed awfully sure---Paul was burnt to a cinder over her landing Truly Yours. He got loaded, accused her of beating him out via the familiar bed routine. Then he knocked the hell out of her."
Thoroughly shaken up, Elaine moved with slow, halting steps out of that haunted washroom into the corridor, turning off into a tiny alcove to try to regain her equilibrium. Her eyes stared into space as she tried to assimilate what she'd heard. Had Terry been talking? How else could a nightmarish rumor like this be in circulation? Terry with a few cocktails in her was unpredictable, and she gloated over feeling important. Spreading around an "inside story" like tins would make her feel definitely important.
Elaine lifted her head in a stern attempt at poise and walked swiftly back into the sanctuary of her own office.
Terry was fast developing into a frightening menace to her peace of mind. No matter how she tried to brush away the memory, she couldn't forget Terry's threats the other night about the photographs Stephie had taken of them. She'd always been so careful, how had she slipped up then? Why did there always have to be one misstep to throw a whole lifetime out of focus, she thought wearily. Somehow, she had to get those negatives, to eliminate this hold Terry would dangle over her head for an eternity.
Elaine dallied briefly with the idea of asking Terry for them, then discarded it. This would be walking right into a trap. Talking to Stephie would be stupid---he'd run, popping with excitement to Terry, find out if they were splitting up. Only one solution she concluded---if somehow, she could talk to Fred. He'd understand her position, the real and shattering threat those negatives were to her very existence. If somehow she could persuade Fred to get them for her! On impulse she walked outside to the stack of phone directories, a hazy idea in her mind of Fred's firm name. With a sigh of relief, she recognized the name and the community Stephie mentioned. She dialed, asked for Fred, and was told he was in conference. At least, she knew what she must do now. She'd keep calling Fred Reynolds until she reached him.
Fred was still in conference when she tried to reach him again right after lunch, but he was due back shortly. She'd call again in five minutes, she told herself urgently, not caring that his secretary was distinctly annoyed at the frequency of her calls. But before she could get on to him, Kathy phoned.
"I hope you aren't angry at Eric for being a little potted the other night," Kathy murmured in sweet apology, after they'd exchanged the routine small talk.
"Of course not," Elaine hastened to reassure her, while her breath quickened with the excitement of talking with Kathy again. "As a matter of fact, I was going to call you today---you must be psychic."
"You were?" Pleasure bubbled over in Kathy. "Have you been doing anything about looking for a studio?"
"I figured I might take time off this afternoon, just an hour or two, to run down to an agency. It's not too far from you, if you'd like to meet me." She hadn't meant to say that at all, Elaine realized in dismay. What was the matter with her?
"I'd love it," Kathy agreed promptly. "I adore people, but I'm always so slow in making friends. I haven't actually talked to a soul for days, except for Eric and the doorman and people in the supermarket."
"I'll pick you up in a cab at your place about two-thirty," Elaine decided with a surge of good humor. "I'll give you a buzz before I leave so you can be waiting downstairs. I do have to put in an appearance at the agency afterwards, you know."
"I won't keep you waiting," Kathy promised eagerly. "I'll be standing by for your call."
When Elaine hung up, she was beset with a cataclysmic torrent of misgivings. She'd made one frightening misstep already---now she was charging ahead into even more dangerous waters. Where would she finally stop?
Before she could forge her thoughts into some concrete action, Comstock called her in for conference. By the time the conference was over, she knew she'd have to find some way of channeling her personal problems into after-office hours---she'd barely stumbled through the meeting with coherence. Comstock probably felt she was still off the beam from the mess with Paul Hennessy, she assumed gratefully---he'd been bristling with sympathy. But that would suffice for a day or two longer, at most. Now it was a question of her job!
It was too late to try Fred Reynolds again, she decided; she'd just have time to phone Kathy and hurry downstairs for a cab to the Village. She'd have to be back in the office in an hour and a half at the most. But the question of those negatives---and Terry's obviously growing instability---plagued at her even during the drive to Kathy's apartment.
Kathy was full of exuberance over the project of locating a studio for Elaine.
"Now hold it, baby," Elaine chuckled. "It isn't so easy to find space today. Haven't you heard of the shortage?"
"I have a hunch," Kathy sparkled. "You're going to find a studio this same afternoon---and you're going to start painting again. My family used to laugh at me, but my hunches usually work out. Wait and see," she smiled mysteriously.
Elaine was sharply aware of Kathy sitting there in the cozy intimacy of the cab, enjoying her presence even while admitting this was meager solace. She ached to take Kathy by the hand and run with her into another existence, where love like hers wouldn't be looked down upon as something sick and unclean. But Kathy would never understand, she reminded herself ruthlessly. Kathy would only be disgusted.
To Elaine's amazement, the real-estate broker promptly referred them to a vacant studio a few blocks south. Climbing the four flights to the skylight studio, Elaine felt as though time was rolling back and she was in Paris again. It was a suffocating, frightening memory because Alex had been her first, her one big love---and here she was with Kathy, whom she longed to possess with more intensity than anyone ever, even Alex.
"It's wonderful!" Kathy whirled about enthusiastically. "Elaine, are you taking it?"
"Yes." She was powerless to say no, because she knew she had to paint again, to have something to hang on to that was real in her world of subterfuge.
It was almost like before, she told herself with unbridled exuberance! A place to work, someone to love! Though the love was one-sided, and must be secret and denied. At least, she'd see Kathy, be with her, touch her, oh so innocently. That would have to be enough.
"I'm so glad." Kathy threw her arms about Elaine with her young delight, and pain charged through Elaine that Kathy couldn't ever know.
"We'd better go now," she said abruptly, and gathered her things together. "We can stop off at the agency and I'll arrange for the lease."
Coming out of the building and hailing a cab again, Elaine had an odd feeling that somebody was watching them. A figure popping back into the shadows. Then she brushed this aside with a stab of impatience. She was seeing ghosts already. Who would be trailing them? Terry was at the office--- who else would care?
\*
Elaine sat at her desk, hunched in thought. She was no doubt all wrong about their being followed this afternoon, but the suspicion only heightened her need to recover those negatives, destroy them before they could destroy her. She dialed again, asked for Fred Reynolds.
"How are you, my dear?" This was his polite business voice talking to her, the one that wouldn't even know Stephie existed.
"Fred, I'm afraid I have a problem," she started off hesitantly, wondering how she could put it on the phone so he could understand the urgency.
"Wait a moment," he said, and she held on till he returned. "It's okay---we can talk now."
"Freely?" She had to be absolutely sure, not only for herself but Fred.
"Nobody'll cut in on this line. What's bothering you, Elaine? Something about Terry?"
"Yes." Then she remembered she was calling from the agency. "I'm calling from the office," she put him on guard, "But you remember my cousin Terry out on the West Coast?"
"Yes, of course," he caught on promptly. "Is she planning on coming into town---or isn't she here?" he corrected, leading the way for Elaine.
"She's here," Elaine accepted gratefully, "but I'm a bit concerned about her. You know how impulsive she is. She may be better off back there."
"Could be messy," Fred warned, and alarm caught at Elaine, lest he say more.
"What I really called about," she fenced, in case the switchboard operator was listening in, "she thinks she left her camera at your place, with a roll of film. Is there---is there any way I could get it?"
There was moment's silence at the other end, and Elaine's throat tightened with concern.
"Tell you what," Fred decided, "I have to be in the city this evening. Suppose I meet you for a drink about five-thirty? We can talk about it then."
"Wonderful," she babbled in relief, and then listened while he set a meeting place. It meant nothing, actually, but she felt infinitely better. If anybody could get those negatives for her, Fred could. If he wanted to...
Elaine paced her office, wondering how to alibi her absence this evening. Should she lie and say she lie and say she had to meet Rick for a cocktail? Or better to say Eric wanted to see her for a few moments to discuss something---she could always dream up something on that score later. She hated to think of the repercussions if Fred did come through and get the negatives for her---and Stephie had to tell Terry. She closed her eyes in pain, dreading the ugly scene sure to follow. If only they could work it out so Stephie would tell her the negatives were spoiled, anything to forestall nastiness. But Stephie would adore passing on that kind of information, she guessed instinctively---it'd appeal utterly to his sense of the dramatic. Unless, of course, Fred made him see the impracticality of it. Stephie, for all his kittenish ways, was basically thoroughly practical---he'd want to protect his own interests.
Elaine collapsed into her chair, worn out by mental controversy. She hated ugliness! It made her physically sick to drag out their relationship the way Terry relished doing. It'd been so different at first:---or so it had seemed to Elaine. Terry had not been obvious then, flaunting herself, telegraphing to the world! "See, I'm a dyke!" she seemed to screech aloud when she'd had a drink or two, or when she was angry with Elaine. She'd been so sweet, so appealing, those first few weeks. Elaine faced reality; the affair with Terry had to end, not only because everything she cherished was in jeopardy but because Terry meant nothing to her anymore, except cheap, fleeting physical relief when her body's demands became overwhelming. The price Terry demanded was too high.
"Elaine!" The door to the office was flung open and slammed shut, and Terry stood there, two violent patches of red staining her cheeks.
"What's the matter?" Elaine shot to her feet, rushed to make sure the door was closed. Terry knew better than to come bursting in here this way!
"That creep Kennedy, the narrow-minded old bitch! She just fired me!"
"What for?" Automatically, Elaine led her to a chair and sat her down.
"She's got some screwy idea I'm arrogant. That's the word she used. Arrogant! You tell her off, honey." Suddenly, Terry was wistfully tearful. "Who does she think she is, anyhow, to go around firing girls because they don't look like sour-pussed old maids?"
"Terry, I have nothing to do with the steno pool," she reminded her worriedly. Actually, she should have expected something like this---Terry had been courting it for weeks.
"You can talk to Rick Stacy. He'll change her mind for her awful fast."
"Terry, how can I?" Elaine shook her head tiredly. "To everybody here I barely know you."
"You're smart, Elaine, you can figure out a way," she wheedled. "I'm not terribly good as a steno, you know. It won't be easy for me to get another job without a reference from the agency."
Terry was lazy, that was the basic problem, Elaine thought subconsciously. She'd wanted to be fired, to have an excuse to lounge around the apartment all day. Probably, in her mind, Elaine could easily afford to support her.
"Sweetie, have you tried to talk to her? I mean, perhaps apologize..." Elaine trailed off, reading fury in Terry's eyes as they met hers.
"Elaine, I've done nothing wrong!" Terry rose from the chair to fling herself against the other woman. "She's a nasty-minded old bitch, that's all. She wants me out of here. Darling, you go to Rick Stacy. Make her eat crow!" Malicious determination shone starkly for an instant, to be replaced by wistful pleading. "Oh, darling, you won't let me down, will you?"
"Terry, I don't know." Elaine put her arms about Terry's small body, foisted against her own. "I'm completely at a loss."
"You'll think of something," Terry smiled with sultry sweetness. I know you will." She reached up and pulled Elaine's face to hers, her mouth finding Elaine's and kissing her with stormy passion.
"Excuse me!"
In trance-like horror Elaine stared back at Eddie, the smirking office-boy who hadn't bothered to knock. That was a nasty habit of his that others had complained about.
"Get out!" Elaine spat at him. "Get out!"
"That was a stupid stunt for you to pull!" Elaine lashed out with acid fury. "Now what?"
"I didn't think anybody'd just walk into your office without knocking." It was the first time Elaine had ever seen Terry really frightened. "He won't say anything---he'd be afraid to."
"That big-mouth?" Elaine snorted, pacing frenziedly. "I knew something like this was going to happen. I knew it!"
"It's his word against ours," Terry tried to brazen it out, but her eyes were scared. Not for what the others might say but because of the cold anger enveloping Elaine.
"Stay here," Elaine commanded, an idea catching hold in her mind.
"What are you going to do?"
"Fix Eddie's wagon," Elaine said venomously. "Ill be right back."
Elaine strode quickly through the corridors to the desk of Miss Kennedy, who supervised the steno pool. Deliberately raising her voice so that anyone within twenty feet could hear her, Elaine launched into lightly annoyed conversation.
"Miss Kennedy, I hope you don't mind my using you this way, but I simply have to do something to get that girl off my neck." She sighed with simulated boredom.
"What girl?" Miss Kennedy was almost obsequious in her eagerness to be helpful.
"I believe her name's Terry something or other--- you fired her a little while ago. She had some farfetched idea that I might go to bat to have her reinstated. Isn't that absurd?"
"I'm sorry she's bothered you like this." Miss Kennedy rose nervously to her feet, her mouth a tight little frown.
"Oh, please don't bother yourself further," Elaine gave her a conspiratorial smile. "I just wanted to be able to tell her I'd spoken to you and it was useless. She was nearly hysterical. Threw her arms about me and bawled." Elaine shivered with delicate distaste. "I do hate these emotional girls, don't you?"
"I never did like that one. If you'd like me to talk to her," Miss Kennedy pursued.
"Thanks, I'll be able to get rid of her now. I'm sure she watched to see if I came to talk with you." Elaine managed a rather impersonal smile of gratitude, and retraced her steps, acutely aware of Eddie's open-mouthed astonishment as he stood at the mail table watching her. Let him try to spread stories around now, she thought with grim satisfaction.
She went back into her office, closed the door, and drew a deep breath of relief. Thank heaven, that was over.
"What happened?" Terry's eyes clung to hers. "It's fixed," Elaine said shortly. "You'd better get out now."
"Meet you downstairs as usual." It was half-statement, half-question.
"Oh, I forgot." Elaine frowned. "I'm supposed to meet Eric for a cup of coffee when I leave. He has some problem on his mind."
"You going there for dinner?" Terry's face dropped sulkily.
"No, I told you---I'm simply meeting Eric for twenty minutes or so." She fought to conceal her irritation.
"It's been such a rotten day, let's go somewhere we can relax," Terry wheedled, her eyes watching Elaine sharply.
"Where?" Elaine asked unthinkingly.
"Maria's. I could meet you there. Oh, darling, please," Terry coaxed. "You'll never meet anybody there you know---unless they're on the same side of the fence. Nobody else goes to Maria's, except an occasional tourist. Come on, Elaine, let's have some fun for a change."
"Okay," Elaine agreed, at this point ready to agree to anything that'd smooth the current situation into something to be endured. At least this way she could meet Fred, secure in the knowledge that Terry was waiting for her at Maria's. She remembered the spot with a wave of repugnance. The boy-girls and girl-boys who had to scream out their secrets to the world! Everything she loathed, and yet actually wasn't she the same as they were? At least, they were honest---they didn't hide behind phoney fronts, What was the right way, after all?
"See you there," Terry purred with satisfaction, blowing a kiss at her. "Don't be too long."
"I won't," Elaine promised automatically, her mind racing ahead now to the meeting with Fred, More than ever now, she had to enlist Fred's help,
\*
Fred Reynolds smiled with sympathetic understanding as Elaine frankly broke down her problem, her fears of what Terry might do.
"It's rough, Elaine, for those like you and me to keep up the clean, straight front. With Stephie I'm lucky. He's smart, knows he's set up for life with me so long as he plays my game. Oh, he gets out of line now and then, goes down to the Village and raises all hell. But he knows when and where."
"Terry was a mistake," Elaine said, her eyes on her cocktail glass. "I was worn out, tired, I wasn't thinking straight. It wasn't meant to be a long-time arrangement."
"Careful how you break it up," Fred warned gently. "I've seen girls like Terry---they can make an awful mess for everybody concerned."
"That's what scares me," Elaine sighed. "I don't know how I'm going to manage it, but I must. The most important thing is to be in the clear with those photographs." She flushed painfully, knowing Fred was aware of their nature, probably had seen them by now. "I don't think he's sent them to Terry yet---she would have shown them to me."
"I'll get them for you," Fred promised firmly. "I'll deliver the negatives right into your hands, so you can burn them personally. No doubts in your mind about it ever."
"Fred, can you?" Her eyes sought his for reassurance.
He smiled faintly. "I told you---Stephie's a smart one. I'll explain that Terry's irresponsible---she could use the photographs to trigger a scandal. He could be dragged in as a witness---so could I. Stephie knows I wouldn't tolerate a thing like that."
"How'll he explain it to Terry?" she probed.
"Simple. Defective film. He'll be terribly enthusiastic about another chance to do a re-take. Naturally, you'll make sure that never happens."
"You don't know how much this means to me," she stammered gratefully.
"I think I do." His eyes were full of understanding. "Next time, Elaine, be careful whom you choose."
"I doubt if there'll be a next time," she said violently.
"There will be," he said, with a sad confidence.
"There has to be for those like you and me. At least, be cautious."
\*
Elaine opened the door to Maria's, wrapped in self-consciousness. When she'd come here before, she'd walked in unknowingly. Tonight was different. She knew what she'd find inside. The same high-pitched chatter over at the bar, the whispered incoherent murmurs at the rows of tables. The musical comedy clothes the she-boys affected, the stern masculinity of the butch set. Then she spied Terry, waiting at a rear booth, sulkily impatient. Terry in old faded slacks she never remembered seeing and a tired tailored blouse, with her face devoid of make-up, the fluffy pale gold hair brushed severely about her face. Tonight Elaine felt strangely like an outsider, even to Terry. But then, which of them was really masquerading, she taunted herself harshly? She was the one who offered the world the false front!
"I thought you'd never get here." Terry shuffled about in her seat like a querulous child.
"Eric wanted me to help him choose a gift for his wife," she lied calmly.
"I'll bet you adored that." Defiance shone back at Elaine from her.
"Terry, stop that." Her fragile hold on patience threatened to elude her.
Terry sighed elaborately. "I suppose I'll have to get up tomorrow and start chasing around to employment agencies. Unless you know somebody who'll give me a job."
"We'll talk about it later," Elaine murmured quietly. Maria was bearing down on their table with a gushy smile.
\*
Elaine told herself she should have expected something like this. Days went by with no sign of Terry's going back to work. She made a great pretense of telling Elaine about the places she went and vague promises made, yet Elaine guessed instinctively that she spent most of the day lounging around the apartment. When she complained about being broke, Elaine supplied her with money. This could go on forever, Elaine realized, squirming in the trap. If Stephie and she had discussed the episode of the photographs, Terry kept it to herself. True to his word, Fred sent the negatives to her at the office by messenger. Five minutes later they were tiny bits of nothing at the bottom of her wastebasket. Yet still Elaine felt the vise tightening about her throat.
She was making a habit now of running up to the studio for an hour or so every afternoon, feeling the tensions slipping away as she roamed the semi-barren rooms, fiddled with the painting supplies she'd surreptitiously bought and carried there---pushing time till she could decently remind Kathy of her promise to pose for her. Kathy had been willing, heaven only knew---but Elaine wanted to feel more sure of herself before reminding her. More able to cope with the crazy, tearing emotions that wracked her body every time she thought of Kathy. Then Kathy herself called, to invite her up to dinner---and softly inquired about Elaine's efforts at getting back to work.
"You look a little ragged about the edges," Eric remarked, inspecting her closely as the two of them nursed cocktails and Kathy puttered about the kitchen preparing to serve dinner.
"Working hard," Elaine said evasively.
"Better knock off for a while and relax," he said with brotherly bluntness. "On you it doesn't look good."
"Dinner'll be ready in five minutes," Kathy came into the room with her quick eager little steps. "I want to be sure the roast is just right."
"Perfect little wife," Eric said with a trace of mockery, pulling her down beside him, and for a horrible instant Elaine dreaded a recurrence of that other evening. Then this was replaced by something wholly different---an awareness that all was not thoroughly right in their household.
"I've been trying to convince Eric he shouldn't drive himself so," Kathy said with an attempt at lightness, yet her eyes were darkly somber.
"He's been giving me something of the same deal," Elaine retaliated, wondering where this marriage had gone wrong. "You ought to practice what you preach, Eric."
Eric bowed elaborately. "You are so right, dear sister. You're always right. That's always what Dad used to say. Elaine is one hell of a guy."
Don't call her a guy," Kathy protested, and Elaine's eyes shot sharply in her direction. "It sounds so---harsh."
"Elaine's strong, got backbone, nerve---not like me. She should have been the son in our family."
"Now stop that nonsense," Elaine tried to laugh it off. Then she decided, once and for all they must bring this out into the open. "Eric's always seemed to nurture some weird idea that I was Dad's favorite, that somehow he was disappointed in him."
"Weren't you?" Eric's words were coldly incisive. "And wasn't he disappointed in me? He demonstrated that often enough. We're a screwed up family, Kathy. On the surface we look quiet and staid and reliable, but we're all messed up inside."
"You've kept things bottled up too long. Why can't we talk them out?" Kathy pleaded desperately. "Eric, what's gone wrong?"
"Nothing that wasn't always wrong!" He rose to his feet, walked away with his back to them. "You, with your wide-eyed illusions about your ambitious, capable husband! Know why they sent me out here on this job? I wasn't the first choice, I was third! Lamberson was slated for it first, then his wife persuaded him to move out to the West Coast---better chances for the future. Then they offered it to Colby, and he was frankly scared---preferred staying in his cushiony little berth out there. I was third choice!"
"Eric, if they didn't think you could handle the job, they wouldn't have offered it to you." Kathy's face was darkly anxious. "You were third choice because of your age. Lamberson and Colby are fifteen years older than you!"
He swung around defiantly. "I was third choice---and I don't know if I'll even make it."
"Come on, Eric," Elaine was deliberately brusque. "Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Of course you'll make it."
"Eric, if only you'd stop keeping everything inside. Let me be a wife to you, someone who can help. I know we got married after only a few weeks---we barely knew each other, actually---but I felt it was enough. So did you. Then."
"I still do." He moved forward. Like a scared child, Elaine thought, agonized.
"I think Eric and I are suffering from the same malady," Elaine forced herself to be matter-of-fact. "We get so tense and involved in our jobs and our ambitions we forget how to relax and live with ourselves."
"I want to share his problems," Kathy said simply. "If he'll only let me. That's part of being married."
"We never told you about Mother and Dad, did we?" His eyes moved somberly from Kathy to Elaine, and for a painful moment she wondered what ghost he was dragging out now. "Ten days after they were married, Dad took off---for Paris, the Left Bank, the art colony. He was going to dedicate himself to his art. Mother went chasing right after him, pulled him out of that garret he was living in with that crackpot writer and brought him home." He turned to Elaine for confirmation. "You know that story, Elaine---Dad told it to us half a dozen times, when he had a load on." Elaine nodded, not wanting to speak, remembering her mother's second trip to Paris, to rescue her daughter---at least, that was the light in which she saw it. "Mother made a man out of him. Made him a husband."
"I didn't know." Kathy squinted in contemplation, going over in her mind the things Eric had told her.
"Are you properly shocked?" he taunted. "Are you afraid, like father like son?"
"Eric, if you wanted to go to Paris and paint, I'd go with you. Whatever you felt was right for you would be right with me."
"Dad was just wild in those days---he wasn't queer."
"Don't use that word!" Elaine lashed out sharply.
"Why not?" An odd defiance radiated from him.
"I hate it!" Then she reined herself in tightly. "You're talking about your father, Eric."
"So I'm a rotten son." Suddenly, Eric was determined to dismiss the whole discussion. "Let's forget about us and our psychotic grievances. Kathy, I'm starving---get that roast on the table or I'll fall flat on my face."
\*
Elaine sat in the studio, starkly conscious of each passing minute, waiting to hear Kathy's light steps coming up the four flights to the studio. They'd made their secret little plan when Eric had insisted on going off to the kitchen to do the dishes himself. It'd been an act of apology for his outburst earlier in the evening, they'd both recognized. Yet even now Elaine couldn't toss out of her mind the deep suspicion that Eric was concerned about himself even as he intuitively guessed about her. If only somehow, she could make him understand that her own deviation from the normal had nothing to do with him! But she couldn't do that without admitting what she was---and somehow that seemed a loathsome, impossible step.
"Elaine?" Kathy's melodic voice called breathlessly.
"Right here." She swung about with a smile of welcome. "I was afraid you'd give up somewhere about the third flight."
"Takes more than stairs to defeat me," Kathy laughed.
"Like some coffee?" Elaine waved to the percolator off in a corner on the two-burner gas range.
"No thanks." Kathy's eyes glowed intensely. "Since we don't have too much time, I thought maybe you'd want to get right down to work."
"Are you going to be a slave driver?" Elaine teased, but the warm affection in her voice belied the words.
"I didn't know if I should bring something special to wear, or what." Plainly, to Kathy, this was a tremendous adventure.
"I'm not sure myself just what I want to do." Elaine faltered, because suddenly an image passed through her mind. She knew exactly how she wanted to paint Kathy.
"You caught hold of an idea then, didn't you?" Kathy guessed intuitively.
"Sort of," she hedged, her breath quickening, her body tense. How could she ask that of Kathy? She'd never agree. And if she did, how could Elaine bear seeing her like that, all of her screaming to hold that exquisite, elusive elf that was Kathy?
"Tell me," Kathy coaxed, avidly curious, yet with none of the cloying, sulky sweetness of Terry. Something so fine, so clean about this girl, Elaine thought painfully, wanting her, fighting the need to pull her close, fondle her, show her this other love.
"I'd like to paint you in the nude," she compelled herself to say calmly. "A wood nymph caught unawares."
"I couldn't." Kathy's eyes widened in shock.
"I wouldn't show it, Kathy," Elaine heard herself pleading. "It'd be something to get me started again! An incentive, because I know that would be good!"
"I'd feel---funny," Kathy faltered. "I mean---I hadn't thought you meant that sort of thing."
"I didn't at first," Elaine admitted, hearing herself talking with an odd harshness, a compulsive determination. "Kathy, we wouldn't even have to let Eric see it! I'll do another portrait, after that, for him."
Kathy's eyes searched Elaine's, as though seeking for an answer, but not really finding it. "If it's so terribly important to you, Elaine, yes."
Gratitude shinning forth from her, obliterating the need for words, Elaine swiftly pulled out a sketch pad, all the tools she'd need for the rough sketches her fingers ached to do now. Because sketching Kathy would be the closest thing to loving her. She kept herself busy, her eyes everywhere but on Kathy---except for thirsty involuntary glances.
Kathy's face wore a half-smile of eagerness, telegraphing her honest desire to help Elaine find herself again, yet the slightly frightened wistfulness of her eyes betrayed her uncertainty. With slow, methodical movements Kathy was removing her clothes, everything that separated her from Elaine---soberly folding each bit of apparel and laying it on the chair nearby. Until she stood there, wistfully appealing in her nudity---and Elaine bit her lip, fighting for control.
"You're lovely," Elaine whispered huskily. "More lovely than I even suspected."
"What do you want me to do?" Kathy faltered self-consciously. "Sit on the bench here---or what?" Her eyes fluttered in a downward glance that shot torrents of desire tearing through Elaine. But she had to remember this was Kathy, Elaine ordered herself in anguish. Her sister-in-law!
"Let's try something like this," Elaine said unsteadily, moving to Kathy and settling her into position on the bench, her hands ice-cold on Kathy's warmly fragrant shoulders. "All right?"
"Whatever you want, Elaine," Kathy smiled back, trying not to feel the oddness of this occasion.
Charming words!" A male voice cut with knife-sharpness into the quietness of the studio. Eric, at the door, his face white and set.
"Eric!" Kathy froze in astonishment.
"You're not fussy, are you?" he mocked. "Elaine or me---after all, it's still in the family."
"Eric, what filth is your mind cooking up?" Elaine demanded hoarsely, feeling herself entrapped in a net of unreality.
"All my life I've been trying to tell myself I was crazy---to think something like this about my own sister! A rotten Lesbian, who chases after my own wife!"
"Eric, shut up," Kathy's voice was a painful whisper.
"You were so sweet, so honest, so innocent," he mocked with terrible bitterness. "My Lily Maid of Astelot!"
"You don't know what you're talking about," Elaine started off, striving for one crumb of reality in this unreal nightmare.
"I'm not blind," he interrupted with brutal determination. "I can see! A minute later and you'd have been rolling on the floor together."
"Eric, shut up!" Kathy stood there, trembling, white, her eyes dark coals of anguish. "You don't know what you're saying."
"Go ahead, stay with your ardent Lesbian. Laugh together over the big joke you nearly pulled off! I have more respect for the tramps in the whorehouses than I have for my wife!"
And in horrible silence the two of them hovered there, listening to the disappearing footsteps down the long flights of stairs, until Elaine reached down to pick up the note Eric had dropped in the doorway:
If you want to know whom your wife really love go to this address.
The note was printed with rough block letters to conceal the identity of the sender, but she might just as well have signed it, Elaine thought bitterly. Terry! She should have seen this coming from the very beginning.
"Kathy, I don't know what to say," Elaine finally broke the deadly quietness.
"He must be sick," Kathy whispered, ashamed for her husband. "To talk like that."
"Someone deliberately tried to make trouble," Elaine extended the note, wondering how much she must tell Kathy, how to tell her.
"What kind of a marriage do we have that he believes the first stranger that comes along? He bursts in here, and believes what he wants to believe!" Anger rose to challenge Kathy's grief. "What can Eric know of love?"
"Kathy---" Elaine searched desperately for words, finding none.
"It's been like this all along," Kathy forced herself to admit. "Eric's kept a wall between us from the very beginning. He'd never let me get really close to him."
"Because of me." Elaine walked across the room, unable to face her. "Because he suspected the truth, and was afraid. Not just for me but how this thing might be part of him, too. Eric's never been sure he was fully a man."
"But that's absurd," Kathy protested, and in the silence that followed Elaine felt her recognition of the truth about Eric. The wall that intruded in their marriage.
"There's nothing wrong with Eric---it's me!" Elaine flung out, hating herself. "Ever since I can remember, there was this thing. I remember the first time it came out into the open, the ugly truth, that I could only love women. There was a girl counsellor when I was away at camp---she was older than me, and so wise! Everybody thought it was a teenage crush, but I knew even then. I went to college, and there was a girl there. But it wasn't real with her the way it is with me---she was able to break away. She got married right after graduation, has a family now. If we meet on the street, she walks by pretending she doesn't recognize me."
"Elaine, I didn't know," Kathy fought to keep the shock out of her voice.
"Does it make you sick?" Elaine demanded harshly. "Can you bear to look at me now?"
"No, I'm not sick," Kathy said steadily, "except about Eric."
"Kathy, let me make it up to you!" It was as though a complete stranger had taken control of her body, Elaine thought frantically, hearing herself yet unable to stop. "We'll go away together somewhere, and you'll forget all this nastiness. I'll show you soft, real love that makes life beautiful and worth living."
"Elaine, no!" Horror shone from Kathy.
With shattering suddenness Elaine realized what she was doing. "Kathy, I'm sorry," her voice was a whisper of shame.
"It's all right, Elaine---we've both had a horrible experience---you didn't think."
"I didn't want you to hate me."
"I don't," Kathy insisted, regaining her composure as she saw Elaine's eluding her. "I'm not condemning you, Elaine. I want to help. As Eric should! He's your brother."
"Nobody can help me," Elaine said heavily. "Except myself. I have to learn to live with myself, first of all."
"Then do that, fully," Kathy moved towards her earnestly. "You're an artist---this career of yours means nothing, does it? Be real, all the way. Live the way you have to live---and be true to your ability. You know you're an artist---that should make up for so many things."
"I haven't the honesty to live my way," Elaine said bitterly. "I have to run around corners and hide! I can't face the loathing I see in eyes around me."
"Not everybody feels that way."
"Most," Elaine closed her eyes for an instant. "To almost everyone in the so-called normal world those like me are sick, depraved animals to be shunned and laughed at!"
"No!" Kathy insisted, her face taut with sympathy
"The least I can do is straighten out this thing with Eric and you. We'll go back to your apartment I'll make him listen to me, understand. I won't lie any more about myself---maybe in that way I can set him free. The whole family isn't messed up, as he's so utterly afraid. It's only me!"
They went back to the apartment together, because Elaine would have it no other way. They sat in the desolate quietness, like two at a wake. Then Elaine began to talk, until it seemed she'd talked for years---because here was someone who'd listen without condemning, who might not understand because how could any human not cursed with this inward conflict ever completely know what it was like to follow these strange, shadowy paths? And still Eric didn't arrive.
"Maybe he isn't coming back at all," Kathy forced herself to give voice to the torrent of fear that kept soaring within her, higher and higher until she was ready to choke with it.
"He'll be back," Elaine insisted because she didn't dare believe otherwise. Because if he didn't, she knew what she'd have to do. She'd kill Terry!
"And if he does come back, so what?" Kathy tossed off defiantly. "Why should I even want him?"
"Because you love him. Because he loves you. You can't give up something that's precious to both of you so easily."
"I'm not right for Eric. He needs somebody he can lean on---somebody to push him ahead the way he wants to go."
"You're exactly what Eric needs," Elaine said with conviction. "That's his trouble---always pushing, in the wrong directions." She didn't say---"exactly what I need"---but the thought tore at her. The nearest thing had been Alex in Paris---and she'd let her mother drag her away from that.
"I ought to get out of here. Pack up and just go." Panic seized Kathy with sudden urgency.
"You can't," Elaine ordered sharply.
"That's the right way, Elaine. Clean and finished. Eric won't want to see me when he walks in here!"
The two girls froze, hearing the key in the lock, and then Eric stood there, his face running through a frantic transition of emotions. Shock, anger, bitterness that Elaine guessed even before it showed itself.
"Well, what a welcome home I'm getting," he chuckled harshly, glancing from one to the other. "Home comes the hero, straight from the bars."
"Eric, I want to talk to you," Elaine said quietly, her eyes holding his. He'd been drinking heavily---but not so much that he was incoherent.
"Yes, that's a great idea," he agreed with a tortured mockery. "Let's talk!"
Then, with cold deliberation, he swung about and locked the living room door with his key. He caught the glance of consternation that shot from Kathy to Elaine, and this seemed to amuse him enormously.
"Now may we talk?" Elaine asked grimly.
"In a while." He sauntered across the room, his tongue between his lips, thinking out his course of action, plainly announcing he was master here. "We have plenty of time---a whole lifetime ahead of us."
"I'll make some coffee," Kathy offered hopefully.
"I'm not that drunk!" It was a sharp reprimand.
"I didn't mean that---" Kathy flushed.
"First of all," a smile played about his mouth now, "I want to talk to my wife. Or should I say---'our wife'?"
"That's enough of that," Elaine said with a calmness she didn't feel. "We've got a lot of air to clear up, and let's start off by throwing out stupid suspicions."
"We'll talk to you later. Right now," he moved to Kathy, grasping her by the wrist, "I want to talk to Kathy."
"All right, Eric." Kathy's eyes were dark with uncertainty, yet the pain mirrored in his told her the depth of his hurt.
"Inside," he gestured elaborately to the bedroom, and she walked silently inside.
Elaine moved to the sofa, insecure, upset. What was Eric up to in this alarming mood of his? What did he expect Kathy to tell him?
"Baby, you're not afraid of me, are you?" Eric's voice came clearly from the bedroom, making no effort at concealment.
"No, Eric," Kathy spoke softly, yet again those blatantly thin walls, Elaine thought despairingly.
"Love me?"
"You know I do!" Honesty rang through her voice.
"Take off your clothes!" he ordered harshly.
"Eric---"
"What's the matter? You took them off for my sister," he reminded with a deadly quietness.
"Eric, you said we were going to talk," Kathy tried again, and Elaine's nails dug painfully into her palms, knowing there was no escape for her here. Eric, damn him, had locked that door!
"We are---my way! The trouble with me, I've always treated you as though you were a delicate bit of china. All right, now you'll see what it's like to be loved by a man. A whole man!"
"Eric, I love you..." It was hardly more than a whisper.
"You'll do more than that before I finish. You'll want me! Not that hulk of degeneracy outside, but me!"
"Don't talk about Elaine that way," she pleaded.
"What else, when she made a play for my own wife." Elaine heard the tearing of material, and she shut her eyes to blot out the mental vision of Eric stripping Kathy the way he would some hot-blooded, wised-up slut.
"Eric, you're so wrong!"
"You've never felt my hands on you like this, have you?" he demanded. "It was always easy, careful Eric, trying not to frighten you."
"You never frightened me. For heaven sake, I'm your wife!"
"You were a wide-eyed school-girl, a married virgin! Did you call what we shared passion?"
"Eric, please, don't talk so loud," her voice was husky with shame.
"All right, we'll stop talking, baby!" His breath was labored now, and in the somber silence of the night Elaine could imagine what she couldn't hear. Eric's hands caressing that soft young body, and her faint cry of pain as his teeth sank into her breast. "Afraid now?" he taunted.
"No, Eric, no!"
Elaine swung a fist into the sofa pillow, her body tense with poignant desire, a pulse beating frantically within her, demanding. Demanding what Eric was taking for himself. God, why did it have to be this way? Why?
"All right, tell me you love me now!" Eric demanded hoarsely. "Say it, Kathy! I dare you!"
"Darling, yes!"
"Say it," he ordered.
"Eric, I love you! Eric, I want you!" It was a tortured passionate admission, and the desire that welled in Kathy in the bedroom was a red-hot poker branding Elaine, alone on the sofa.
"Okay, Kathy, prove it! Prove it to me. Right now!"
The incoherent moans of towering passion, their triumphant half-sobs of satisfaction ripped into Elaine, punishing her as nothing else on earth could ever do.
With astonishing suddenness the door to the bedroom swung open, and Eric stood there, stripped to his shorts, his face contorted with mockery. Elaine saw Kathy, momentarily stunned, reaching now for a robe to conceal her nakedness.
"Yes, Eric?" She stood her ground, acknowledging nothing.
"I showed my wife what real love means. Think you can better that?"
"There was nothing like that between Kathy and me, ever." Her eyes held his, unflinching. She didn't deny what her heart and her body admitted---but what she spoke was absolute truth---she had to convey that to Eric.
"Then here's your chance." His eyes swung from one to the other, loaded with unspoken challenges. "Show her, Elaine! Show her which one of us is the best!"
"Eric, there's no need to talk like that," Kathy forced herself to speak, tying the robe tightly about her body, as though to take refuge there.
"Let's have a contest," Eric decided, his eyes flashing ominously. "Why so modest?"
"I won't listen to this!" Desperation shone from Kathy now, as she stood there, trembling, unable to meet Elaine's glance of apology.
"Why so squeamish? You weren't squeamish with me. Shall I tell Elaine about it?"
"Eric, you're insane!" Elaine lashed out. "We've had enough already. Are you out of your mind?"
"I'm being generous, sister dear. I say, let's share and share alike. Why don't the three of us have a ball? We have all the ingredients right here. Connubial passion, homosexuality, incest. Have you ever had a man, Elaine? Or has it always been women?"
"Eric, shut up!" Kathy's voice rose to a scream of hysteria. "I won't listen! I won't listen!" She ran from the room, sobs wracking her, slamming the bedroom door with the sharpness of bullets.
"Eric, how could you?" Elaine stared at him in disbelief. "How could you be so utterly and completely stupid?"
"For the first time in my fife I had something wonderful, that belonged to me. My wife! And you couldn't stand even that. You had to take her, too."
"Eric, Kathy came to the studio to pose for me. It was simple as that. She was trying to make me face myself, do the kind of work that makes life bearable for me. Even I have to have something, Eric!"
"That note," he said harshly, but for the first time Elaine grasped the faint wavering of his suspicions.
"A girl who was jealous. Yes," Elaine nodded slowly. "The kind of a girl you think. I suppose you'd say I've been keeping her."
"Terry? The one you brought here?" His voice was incredulous.
"Terry. She hated Kathy from the first moment she saw her---because she knew how I felt. I'm not lying, Eric. I love Kathy, the way you think. But that's as far as it's ever gone. Far as it'll ever go."
Eric's eyes fastened themselves on hers, as though to force out the truth. They stood there in a cold, overbearing silence, that was suddenly split by a faint scream of pain across the rooms, and the moans that followed jolted them into action.
"Kathy!" Eric raced, deadly white into the bedroom, across the room to the door that led into the bathroom.
"Oh, no! No!" Elaine swayed in the doorway as Eric knelt beside his wife, while the blood gushed from her wrist, and the razor blade lay silently in witness on the floor beside her. "Oh, Eric, no!"
"I'll call an ambulance!" Eric started indecisively, horror gripping him.
"Give me that towel, quick!" Elaine was thrust into action, knowing Kathy's life was spurting away there.
"Can you stop it?" The words were wrung from him.
"I think so! But we need medical help, fast." She reached frenziedly for Eric's hand. "Here, hold this tight, and press here on the brachial artery---that should cut down on the flow of blood." Thank heaven, she'd studied first aid, she thought with a sob of relief.
'We have to get a doctor," Eric reminded quietly, as though the strength for speech had deserted him. Let me try someone I now, before we put a call in for an ambulance. You know what it'd do to Kathy, to be dragged into Bellevue Psycho."
"I hadn't thought of that." Shock seized hold of him.
"Hold tightly," Elaine warned, rising from her knees and making a dash for the telephone. If only Dr. Levy were there! He was the one doctor she'd ever known to whom she could talk. He'd listened, providing her with gentle words and bromides to give her much-needed sleep when the going had got so rough a few times. Dear heaven, let him be there, she prayed, dialing.
"Dr. Levy's residence," a pleasant feminine voice came over the phone, and Elaine sighed with relief.
"Mrs. Levy, this is Elaine Ransome. We have a serious emergency at my brother's apartment!"
She waited, breathless, while Mrs. Levy got the doctor to the phone, then in quick simple terms she told him what had happened.
"I'll be there in five minutes," he calculated swiftly.
"Sure you have the bleeding under control."
"Yes," she said apprehensively, and listened to his further instructions.
"Is he coming?" Eric sought instant reassurance as he heard the phone click back into place.
"Right away," Elaine walked back to him. "Don't move her, he said. Stay just the way you are."
"Is he far from here?"
"Fortunately only a dozen blocks or so." Elaine lowered herself to the edge of the tub, the horror of these last minutes draining her strength away.
"You okay?" Eric demanded, watching her anxiously.
"Fine." A crazy thing to say, but he understood.
"If---if anything happens to Kathy, I'm to blame," he muttered.
"No, it's on my head. I shouldn't have asked her to pose for me like that. I shouldn't have let myself think the things that went through my head."
"I really made a mess this time," he sighed. "Will I ever be able to straighten it out?"
"Don't think about that now." All the insane, stupid things they were saying, she thought rebelliously.
"Isn't there anything we can do?" Eric watched the small, bloodless face of his wife, as Elaine watched it.
"Only what you're doing now. Dr. Levy'll be here any minute."
\*
Elaine paced the living room, one side to the other, back and forth, for what she was sure were miles. Only soft murmurs in the other room where Dr. Levy worked over Kathy and Eric held his breath in fear.
"Well?" Elaine froze as the door opened and Eric walked out.
"We won't know anything for an hour or so," he said tiredly, falling into a chair. "He sent me out here to wait."
"Does he think she should go to a hospital?" Elaine demanded frantically. "What about blood transfusions?"
"Everything possible to do has been done," Eric repeated tonelessly. "That's what Dr. Levy told me. We can only wait now."
Elaine couldn't bear sitting there across from Eric now, feeling herself to blame, torn apart inside with anguish.
"I'll be back soon, Eric," she reached for her coat and purse.
"Where are you going?" His head shot up in surprise.
"An errand," she said tersely, all at once knowing what she had to do. "I'll be back in less than an hour."
Elaine hurried out into the corridor, into the elevator, impatient to be in a cab that would take her across town to Terry's. She had to talk to that little fiend, let her know what she might have done! Let her know it was all over between the two of them. Suddenly, it was desperately important.
The lights were out in Terry's apartment, Elaine noted grimly as she hurried from the taxi to the stoop of the brownstone. How did she dare sleep when Kathy's life might be ebbing away? She raced up the stairs, stumbling in her anxiety to get there, reaching into her purse for the key, fumbling with the lock for an instant because her fingers were so unsteady. Then the door was open, and she reached for the light switch.
The two on the bed blinked as the overhead lights hit their eyes. The windows were tightly closed, so they needed no blankets. Not that they would have anyway, Elaine thought mirthlessly, as overheated as they were now. Terry and some strange girl. This was the kind for whom the word butch invented, Elaine thought, sickened. She'd never seen a girl so thoroughly masculine. The severest of male haircuts, a flat lean male body that was glistening with perspiration from the efforts of their lovemaking.
"Who's that?" Terry's friend demanded nastily.
"Elaine," Terry explained sullenly. "You got some nerve coming in at this hour."
"I thought I was paying the rent here," Elaine reminded, then was instantly ashamed of herself even mentioning it.
"So what?" Terry said insolently. "You got yourself that studio, didn't you, so you could romp that screwball sister-in-law of yours. Why should I be different?"
"You followed me," Elaine murmured quietly. "You trailed me, thinking all the wrong things."
"I know you, Elaine. I knew what you wanted with Kathy. How was she? Better than me?" She flexed her body provocatively, as though daring Elaine to deny her vulnerability.
"Kathy isn't like you," Elaine spat out bitterly, "She happens to be in love with her husband."
"You mean, she isn't like us," Terry corrected venomously.
"You want me to throw this creep out?" The other girl rose from the bed menacingly, as though thoroughly enjoy a fist fight.
"Don't bother," Terry purred silkily, stroking her bare buttocks. "Tell you what, sweetie, slip into some clothes and go buy us a few beers. I'll be waiting when you come back. Alone."
Terry and Elaine stayed in stony silence while the butch hastily pulled on slacks and a shirt, reached for a beat-up leather jacket.
"You don't have to worry, doll, I'll be fine," Terry reassured her newest acquisition as she hesitated at the door. "Buy a few cans of beers and come back."
Elaine waited until the door was shut and the heavy steps told her they wouldn't be disturbed for a few minutes.
"How dare you send that note to my brother!"
"Why shouldn't I?" Terry tossed her head back defiantly. "You were crossing me up, trying to figure out a way to get rid of me. For her!" Suddenly Terry was on her feet, clawing at Elaine, trying to tear her clothes. "Nobody does that to me, you lousy bitch! Nobody!"
"Stop that!" Elaine swore under her breath, shoving Terry violently away from her, not caring that she landed on the floor with an ugly thud.
"I hate you!" Terry screamed. "I'll louse you up at the agency so you'll never dare show your face in that place again! I can do it, too," she warned triumphantly.
"I don't care what you do," Elaine assured her with brutal frankness. "Go back to your new girl, live any way you want. I'm giving you this, for services rendered." She reached into her purse and began to write out a check.
"The perfect gentleman?" Terry mocked. "I've got enough on you to keep those checks coming regularly. Wait'll Stephie comes across with those photographs."
"There won't be any," Elaine told her. "He's stalling you."
"I don't believe you!" But Elaine saw alarm shoot through that once so-desirable body. "Stephie just hasn't had time."
"There won't be any photographs, or any more checks." Elaine's voice was coldly confident. "Here you are, paid in full!"
Elaine handed over the check, watching cautiously for any further outbursts.
"Sure you can afford it? Five hundred bucks." Terry shrieked derisively.
"I'll pay three months rent on the apartment. By that time you should be thoroughly set up again." Elaine put her checkbook back into her purse "And don't ever show your face before me again. If we meet anywhere, it'll be two strangers!"
"Get out!" Terry yelled in sudden fury. "Get of here before I kill you!"
As Elaine closed the door she heard the crash of the lamp and the sobs of rage that tore through Terry. That was that. The end of a most bitter affair.
\*
Elaine knocked gently on the door, not wanting to ring the bell lest she disturb Kathy. Eric came slowly to open it for her, then returned silently to his chair.
"Anything new?" she asked anxiously.
"Not yet. He just sits in there by the bed, watching." Eric rose to his feet again. "I feel so damn useless, sitting here like this, doing nothing!"
"I'll stay here till I know she's---out of danger," Elaine forced herself to take the optimistic road. "Then I'll go."
"Why should you go?" Eric turned his agonized face to her. "You saved her life, if---" his voice broke. "If she makes it. Dr. Levy said so."
"She won't want to see me," Elaine tried to be calm. "Not after everything that's happened here tonight."
"Will she want to see me?" Eric countered. "God, the things I said!"
"She loves you."
"How much can love take?" he demanded. "I don't know what happened to me. Everything inside my head seemed to break loose suddenly."
"You can talk to Kathy. She'll listen."
"Maybe," Eric reminded ominously. "If she's in condition to listen to anyone."
"Would you like a drink, Eric?" Sympathy for her brother surged to the surface now. She knew what agony encased him.
"Haven't I had too many already?" he asked wryly. "No, I'll wait it out, sober." He paced again, for a few moments, then returned to stand beside Elaine's chair. "I haven't been much of a brother, either, have I?"
"I've always understood," she smiled faintly. "You weren't to blame." Who was, actually?
"When Mother came back from Paris with you, she told me she'd pulled you out of some terrible scrape. She'd never tell me what it was."
"It might have been better if she had."
"I don't know. I don't know anything anymore. Except Kathy's lying in here, possibly dying!"
"Eric, don't even think it!"
"I have to. I have to start living with things now. I've been running all my life." Then his eyes sought hers. "Elaine, what about you?"
"I'm not sure," she began slowly, and then both Eric and she fastened their attention on the bedroom door as it slowly opened.
Dr. Levy walked, quietly, his face telling them nothing.
"Dr. Levy---" Eric took a step towards him.
"She's going to be all right," he said gently. "It was mighty close, but she made it." He reached into his pocket for a prescription pad. "Have this filled and follow these instructions. I'll be back some time tomorrow morning."
"Dr. Levy, you're sure it's okay for you to leave her?" Eric insisted.
"Absolutely," he smiled in sympathy. "Now before you go looking for a drugstore to fill this, go into the bedroom and see your wife. She's been asking for you. Don't let her talk too much, though," he warned.
"I don't know how to thank you, Dr. Levy." Elaine gave him a hand in gratitude.
"I'm glad everything's working out all right," he smiled, yet Elaine felt the odd questioning in his eyes. "These accidents can be nasty."
"Bless you, Dr. Levy." It would go down on the books as an accident, she thought with relief. No unpleasantness for Kathy to face. Thank heaven for that.
Elaine waited until Dr. Levy was out in the corridor and in the elevator before she began to gather her things together. Then she hesitated. If there was a prescription to be filled, someone would have to stay with Kathy. She'd go, let Eric stay here. It gave her a sense of a reprieve, to have these extra few minutes here, to rejoice in Kathy's safety. Inside, the voices were muted, the faintest whispers. She hoped Eric would say the right things.
"I'll run down for the prescription," she offered hesitantly, somehow not able to meet his eyes right now.
"I'll go," he insisted. "Kathy wants to see you."
"Eric, is everything all right between you two?" She had to know this.
"It will be. Kathy knows I want to make up for every rotten thing I said and did." He reached to touch her shoulder reassuringly. "Go on inside and stay with her."
"I have to tell you the truth," Elaine said honestly. "I love Kathy, the same way you love her. I wish there were some way I could change things."
"You didn't have to tell me that," he remonstrated.
"No lies between us, Eric," she insisted steadily.
"You have to know, just as you have to know it'll never go beyond that."
"I trust my wife," Eric said quietly. "And I trust my sister."
"Thanks, Eric."
Eric held the door to the bedroom open, and she walked inside the room, where the bedside lamp tossed delicate shadows across the small white face resting against the pillow.
"I gave you a rough time," Kathy whispered.
"We were frantic," Elaine was honest, "but the blame lay with Eric and me."
"I don't know why I did a thing like that. Never in my life did I ever think I would!" The dark eyes were wistful with apology.
"Don't think about it now," Elaine coaxed urgently. "There's so much that's good waiting ahead."
"It's funny---I thought Eric and you were the disturbed ones, but I was just as badly messed up inside. I guess nobody's ever completely normal, except in normal circumstances. I'll bet if you pull back the covers from people, you find all sorts of nightmares you'd never suspect."
"I'm sure of that, Kathy."
"What about you, Elaine?"
"What do you mean?" The question threw her off-guard.
"Are you going to be all right now?"
"That depends upon what you call 'all right'," Elaine acknowledged candidly.
"Everybody must have one big thing in their lives. If it isn't someone to love, it has to be some thing. You have your work."
"Yes, I will have that," Elaine managed, thinking how little those outside could know.
"You're going back to painting?" A glow of satisfaction shone forth from Kathy.
"Nobody'll stop me," Elaine assured her. "I'm quitting my job immediately. I have money enough put away to live on for almost a year, if I'm careful. Maybe in that time I'll find myself." She'd known when she gave Terry the check that she'd never go back to the agency again---it'd be unbearable.
"I know you will," Kathy murmured softly, and then Elaine realized she was going off to sleep.
So sweet, so vulnerable. Admit it, Elaine commanded---so utterly desirable. Yes, she'd go back to painting, and away from familiar places and familiar faces. Back to Paris for a while. Back into the secretive shadows, searching for others like herself. Not like Terry, no! But perhaps, somewhere, some time, another Alex to make the dark murky shadows less a desolate lonely world. Nobody could understand except those who inhabited this outcast isle of ill-regarded love.
She walked into the living room, to the window, to stare out into the night. She'd work, as Kathy said, and hope to find a way of life that was honest and endurable. She couldn't play the old masquerade anymore. Somewhere, out in the night, were others like herself---those who walked alone...
~
AFTERWORD
A new revolution was underway at the start of the 1940s in America---a paperback revolution that would change the way publishers would produce and distribute books and how people would purchase and read them.
In 1939 a new publishing company---Pocket Books---stormed onto the scene with the publication of its first paperbound book. These books were cheaply produced and, with a price of twenty-five cents on their light cardboard covers, affordable for the average American.
Prior to the introduction of the mass-market paperback, as it would come to be known, the literary landscape in America was quite different than what it is today. Reading was primarily a leisure-time pursuit of the wealthy and educated. Hardcover books were expensive and hard to find, so purchasing books was a luxury only the rich living in major metropolitan areas could afford. There simply weren't many bookstores across the country, and only gift shops and stationary stores carried a few popular novels at a time.
The Pocket Books were priced to sell, however, and sell is what they did... in numbers never before seen. Availability also had a great effect on sales, in large part due to a bold and innovative distribution model that made Pocket Books available in drugstores, newsstands, bus and train stations, and cigar shops. The American public could not get enough of them, and before long the publishing industry began to take notice of Pocket Book's astonishing success.
Traditional publishers, salivating at the opportunity to cash in on the phenomenal success of the new paperback revolution, soon launched their own paperback ventures. Pocket Books was joined by Avon in 1941, Popular Library in 1942, and Dell in 1943. The popular genres reflected the tastes of Americans during World War II---mysteries, thrillers, and "hardboiled detective" stories were all the rage.
Like many of the early paperback publishers, Dell relied on previously published material for its early books, releasing "complete and unabridged" reprints under different titles by established authors. Within a couple of years it was focused exclusively on mysteries, identifiable by the Dell logo on the cover---a small keyhole with an eye looking through it. Many of the Dell mysteries also featured a colored map on the back cover representing the various locations pertaining to the story's crime. These "mapback" editions became extremely popular and by 1945, Dell was publishing four new books a month.
The new paperback industry was faced with some difficult challenges during World War II. In particular, the War Board's Paper Limitation order placed serious restrictions and rations on the use of paper. Publishers began to worry whether they would have enough paper to satisfy both the civilian and military appetite for paperbacks. Manpower shortages and transportation difficulties were also proving to be difficult challenges. In response, some publishers---Pocket Books, for instance---reduced their publication schedules and reset their books in smaller type thereby reducing the number of pages per book. Others simply rejected longer books in favor of shorter ones.
In the end, World War II proved to be a boon to the emerging paperback industry. During the war, a landmark agreement was reached with the government in which paperbound books would be produced at a very low price for distribution to service men and women overseas. These books---Armed Services Editions, as they were called---were often passed from one soldier or sailor to another, being read and re-read over and over again until they literally fell apart. Their stories of home helped ease the soldier's loneliness and homesickness, and they could be easily carried in uniform pockets and read anywhere---in fox holes, barracks, transport planes, etc. Of course, once the war was over millions of veterans returned home with an insatiable appetite for reading. They were hooked, and their passion for reading these books helped launch a period of unprecedented growth in the paperback industry.
The reading tastes of these veterans were directly reflected in the popularity of certain genres at the turn of the decade. In the mid-to late 1940s, mysteries, romance, thrillers, and hardboiled detective stories seemed to sell better. In the early 1950s new genres---science fiction, westerns, gay and lesbian, juvenile delinquent and "sleaze", for instance---gained in popularity as readers were presented with stories never before seen in print. Publishers also came to realize that sex would sell books... lots of books. In a competitive frenzy for readers, they ditched their conservative and straightforward cover images for alluring covers that frequently featured a sexy woman in some form of undress, along with a suggestive tag line that promised stories of sex and violence within the covers. Before long, books with sensational covers had completely taken over the paperback racks and cash registers. To this day, the cover art of these vintage paperback books are just as sought after as the books themselves were sixty years ago.
Science fiction titles reflected the uncertain times during which they were written. The Cold War was just beginning, the threat of nuclear annihilation was on everyone's mind, governments in Eastern Europe were falling to Communists, and Senator Joseph McCarthy was looking for "un-American activities" everywhere in the United States. Many science fiction stories in the early days of the paperback revolution were little more than soap operas or westerns set in space---good guys taking on bad guys while rescuing damsels in distress---that were short stories taken from the pulp magazines. In 1952, however, Ballantine Books changed all that by becoming the first paperback publisher to release novel-length science fiction stories that were sophisticated, intelligent and thematically serious. In 1953, Ballantine Book No. 41 was released---Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451---and the paperback's science fiction genre launched like a rocket heading to Venus.
The popularity of this new genre wasn't lost on new paperback publisher, Ace Books, which became known primarily for its publication of sci-fi titles. Not content with publishing one science fiction novel at a time, Ace came up with an interesting gimmick---the double novel. Priced at thirty-five cents, the "Ace Double" featured two paperback novels bound back-to-back with the back cover appearing upside-down in the racks. The stories contained within these "double" paperbacks were novellas or long short stories, rather than novels, but the reading public didn't care---they loved getting two books for the price of one! The format also worked to the advantage of Ace Books, as they were able to combine the work of an unknown (and, therefore, less expensive) writer with that of a prominent and popular author. As a result, the careers of more than a few aspiring science fiction writers were launched via the innovative "Ace Double."
Science fiction would not be the only genre with titles flying off the shelves in the early 1950s, however. And, it is unlikely that even Gold Medal Books knew, in 1950, just how successful its first lesbian-themed paperback original novel---Women's Barracks---would be. Written by Tereska Torres, and based on her experiences in London with the French Resistance movement during World War II, the book was not intended to launch an entire lesbian genre---it was a story about women during wartime, some of whom happened to be romantically involved with other women. The story simply resonated with men and women alike---both straight and gay---and by the end of 1950 had sold more than a million copies for Gold Medal.
Women's Barracks also caught the attention of the government, unfortunately, and was singled out by the Gathings Committee as an example of how the paperback industry was subverting the morals of America. The threat of fines and incarceration made the paperback industry skittish about publishing anything that could be considered "indecent" and before long, a sort of self-censorship was in full swing. Many stories featuring characters that lived their lives outside the rules of the prevailing morality of the times soon became dark and punishing, as there could be no happy endings for those who defied convention. Still, the lesbian titles were enormously popular and soon paperback publishers---beginning with Gold Medal---realized sales would skyrocket if they moved from reprints to "paperback originals."
This move toward of the publication of original fiction by paperback companies created an immediate and strong demand for writers and provided unprecedented opportunities for women writers in particular. While it is true that some of the lesbian titles during the 1950s were written by men using female pseudonyms, a good number were written by women, many of whom were lesbians themselves. And although they were still required to write within the prescribed moral guidelines set by their editors, quite a few were able to portray the lesbian lives of their characters with a significant degree of honesty and compassion.
For lesbians across the country, especially those living isolated lives in small towns, these books provided a sense of community they never knew existed... a connection to women who experienced the same longings, feelings and fears as they did---the powerful knowledge that they were not alone. With the birth of the lesbian-themed pulp novel, women who loved women could finally see themselves---their experiences and their lives---represented within the pages of a book. They finally had a literature they could call their own.
We are excited to make these wonderful paperback stories... these pulp novels, as they have come to be known, available in ebook format to new generations of readers. We present them in their original form, with very little modification, so as to preserve the tone and atmosphere of the time period. In fact, much of the language---the slang, the colloquialisms, the lingo, even the spellings of some words---appear as they were written fifty or sixty years ago. We hope you will enjoy this nostalgic look back at a period in American history when dames were dangerous, tough-guys were deadly and dolls were downright delicious.
---Kathryn James, Editor
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For more classic pulp ebooks, visit us online at www.vintage-pulp-ebooks.com!
Love the book cover? Get fabulous gift products featuring pulp cover art at our online store, Vintage Pulp Cover Art (http://www.cafepress.com/pulpcoverart) -- mugs, refrigerator magnets, t-shirts, notecards and more!
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