by Joan Ellis
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.
CHAPTER 1
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 Terr
y 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 ou
t 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?
CHAPTER 2
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.