Community of Women

by Lawrence Block

  It sounded corny, but this made it no less true. She had a glut of friends, a bevy of acquaintances, but there had been something annoyingly superficial about every relationship she had entered into since she and Ted had moved to Cheshire Point. There were friends like Nan Haskell, friends like Rita Morgan and Cynthia Grass. They were people to talk to, girls to swap recipes with and otherwise pass time. But no close friends, no bosom buddies.

  She looked at Maggie now, noticing again how attractive she was. Lustrous red hair, a full mouth, deep eyes. And a fine figure, with long shapely legs and high proud breasts. She thought again of Dave Whitcomb and wondered how come he had managed to grab off a prize like Maggie. Of course, he made a good living, and he was supposed to be a sharp guy in his field. But he didn’t have Maggie’s verve.

  “Pam should be through with school soon,” she heard herself say. “I’ll have to run over and pick her up.”

  “Can’t she walk home?”

  “It’s a little far. She’s only six.”

  Maggie nodded. “We don’t have children. Sometimes I’m glad of it and sometimes I’m sorry.”

  “You haven’t wanted them?”

  “It doesn’t really matter whether we want them or not,” Maggie said. “Dave is sterile.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I—”

  Maggie grinned softly. “Please don’t be sorry. Really, it’s nothing to be embarrassed about. One summer while he was in college he was in an auto accident, had some back trouble. They took too many x-rays, evidently. And that ended his chances of becoming a father.”

  “It’s permanent?”

  “Uh-huh. But it’s not that much of a tragedy. Oh, I suppose Dave would like to be a father, but I don’t imagine I’m much cut out for motherhood. It’s not my line.” She smiled again. “But it makes the days lonely, I’ll tell you that much.”

  “You shouldn’t let yourself be lonely. Just drop in on me. Any time at all, Maggie.”

  “You’re a doll, Ell. But I hate to make a pest of myself.”

  “Don’t be silly—I like your company.”

  “And I like you, Ell.”

  There was something strange about the phrase, something a little funny about the way Maggie’s eyes held Elly’s, something weird in the intensity of Maggie’s gaze. Then Maggie’s eyes left hers and studied Elly’s body, glancing at breasts and hips. It was almost … well, almost sensual. A man looking at a woman—

  Oh, that was ridiculous. Maggie was looking at her just the way she, in turn, had looked at Maggie. Women did that—they took note of other women’s physical attributes. It was a sort of measuring, with no sexual connotations at all.

  “I’d better run, Ell. I’ll see you soon, won’t I?”

  “Of course.”

  “Fine. Thanks for the coffee, and the sandwich. Why don’t you drop in on me soon?”

  “I will,” she promised. “Soon.”

  She walked Maggie to the door, then went back to the living room and watched the redhaired girl walk down the driveway to the red and black Buick hardtop. She was aware of the fluid grace with which Maggie Whitcomb moved, the way her lush buttocks swayed as she walked, the way her long legs were shaped.

  Well, she thought. Now I have a friend.

  She lighted a cigarette, sat down on the couch and smoked. Maybe Maggie would make a difference. Maybe if she had a friend she could stop the wild sex, the horrible promiscuity. Maybe Maggie was an answer. Maybe it was loneliness and emotional insecurity that drove her into the arms of men like Rudy Gerber, loneliness and emotional insecurity that made her fantasy about a phantom lover on a sleek black stallion.

  Because, she thought, the promiscuity had to stop. Ted was a good husband, a perfect husband. He was faithful to her—she was confident of this—and she certainly had an equal responsibility to be faithful in return. And, if she went on sleeping with any brawny moron who rang her doorbell, Ted would find out. Sooner or later he would learn, and he would be hurt and shocked, and he would leave her.

  Pood Ted. She owed him fidelity. And now, with Maggie Whitcomb as a friend, maybe she could mend her ways.

  7

  TELEVISION is many things to many people. To the great unwashed masses, it is a prime medium of entertainment, a big box which is turned on whenever there is anyone at home to watch it. To a top Hollywood director, it was a boon, in that there was finally an entertainment medium which was markedly inferior to motion pictures.

  To Dave Whitcomb, television was a way to earn a living. To many Cheshire Point children, television was simply a substitute parent, ready and willing to spend time with them while their biological parents were drinking, dining or fornicating.

  To Nan Haskell, television was a bore.

  Nan hadn’t even wanted to get a set in the first place. She hardly ever watched it, and in Manhattan she and Howard had gotten along perfectly well without a set in the apartment. Now, in Cheshire Point, with two small sons in the house, the television was a permanent fixture. It stood on a teevee table in the family room in the basement of their split-level colonial. And now, for the first time in weeks, she was watching it.

  Well, not exactly. She had the set turned on, and she was seated in front of it, and her eyes were pointed more or less in the direction of the flickering images on the 24-inch screen. But in another equally valid sense she was not watching television at all.

  She did not hear what the fuzzyheaded announcer was saying, and she did not see what was going on upon the screen. She did not know what program she was watching, what channel she was tuned to, or what the hell she was doing in front of the television set, as far as that went. She was killing time, and the television set was on, and that was about all there was to it.

  She focused her eyes upon the screen now. The announcer was selling soap, some brand-new washday product which would care for her washing machine and lighten her workday chore load. That, at least, was what the slick announcer was trying to palm off on her. She got to her feet, walked to the set, and flicked a knob that darkened the picture tube and halted the sound.

  Then, remembering a picture starring David Niven, she drew back her foot to kick in the picture tube. She stopped just in time, turned on her heel and left the family room.

  Everything was such a damned bore. Time was passing her by, time was all over the place and yet she was wasting all the time there was, letting the days sail by without doing anything, without accomplishing anything, without getting any place or doing anything at all.

  Bored.

  Bored.

  Bored—

  Read a book, she thought. Read a book, go to a movie, make a dress, hoe the garden, cut the lawn—but she did not want to do these things, had no desire to do these things.

  Then what did she want?

  She knew the answer to that question as well as she knew her own name, as well as she knew that she was bored. What she wanted was a change, a break in the established routine. The introduction of a new element into her life, the element of excitement.

  Life had once been exciting. Once she had lived in such a manner that each day was a new adventure, an experiment in dynamic living. But now that period of her life seemed to have come to a sort of end, and that was unfortunate in the extreme. Now she was a wife and mother settled down in a split-level colonial in luxurious exurban Cheshire Point.

  And bored to tears.

  So, for the tenth or twentieth time that day, she thought of Ted Carr.

  She did not think of him in terms of face and body, as a woman might think of a man with whom she was hazily considering the possibility of an extramarital affair. She did not think of him in specifically sexual terms, to be sure, but as a possible means of alleviating all that boredom, of changing all that dreadful monotony.

  Great God in heaven, she thought. Now there was a fresh approach—going to bed with somebody else’s husband not because you were hot to trot but because you were bored stiff. Getting boffed not for the sheer joy of the boffing
but because it might be a change. God!

  Well, she thought, just for the sake of argument, what would it be like?

  In the first place, it would be hidden. It would be something to be carried on in secret, something done on the sly. How? At her home, during the day when Howard and the kids were gone? That would be tough, since Ted had to be in town just as Howard did. In motels? That would be something pretty outré, signing in under an alias in a sleazy motel and stealing a few minutes’ worth of lust in a smelly bed. Or maybe, by God, they could do it in the back seat of a car. That would take her back to the days of her youth, all right.

  But Ted had a sports car, and it would be difficult. Bucket seats were fine for riding, but—

  Well, they could take the Caddy. Plenty of room in the Caddy. Even more room in the station wagon; just toss a mattress on the floor in back and you’re ready for action. Then—

  Oh, it was ridiculous. The whole thing was insane and she had to forget about it. Had to forget all about it. Had to think about other things like when to pick up Skip and Danny, and what to wear to the PTA meeting, and what to have for dinner, and, well—

  Boring.

  Boring.

  Boring!

  She was just about to go to the station wagon and drive down to school to pick up the boys when the phone rang. She hesitated a moment, then went to the phone and lifted the receiver to her ear.

  “Hello?”

  Silence greeted her. She said hello again, then listened to gentle laughter come over the line.

  “Hello yourself,” Ted Carr said. “How’ve you been feeling, Nan-O?”

  “What do you want?”

  “You.”

  Just the single word, the second-person-singular pronoun. Just that. It made her gasp.

  “You’ve got your nerve,” she said finally. “You’ve really got a hell of a lot of nerve, calling me like this.”

  “Busy, Nan-O?”

  “Damn it—”

  “I just thought you might have been doing a little thinking, Nan-O. About our discussion last night.”

  “Ted—”

  “Because I still think we might have a ball,” he went on. “You’ve got beautiful breasts, Nan-O. I’d like to touch them. Kiss them, play with them. I want to get in your pants, Nan-O.”

  She hated him. And yet his words were reaching her, getting to her. She squirmed uncomfortably, passion beginning to mount up unwillingly in her system.

  “Hot, Nan-O. All hot and ready to go?”

  “Ted—”

  “Let me draw you a picture,” he went on. “You’ll be lying on a bed. You’ll have your skirt way up over your waist and your panties down around your knees. And I’ll be working you up, getting you so hot you can’t stand it. You’ll beg for it, Nan-O. You’ll crawl to me on your dimpled knees. And then—”

  “Stop it!”

  A wicked laugh. “I’ll ring off now, Nan-O. But think it over. I’ll call again soon.”

  He hung up before she could answer him. Think about it?

  She shuddered.

  She could think of nothing else.

  8

  DAVE WHITCOMB took Maggie out to dinner that night.

  This was not unexpected. It was a Wednesday night, and Dave always took Maggie out to dinner on Wednesday, before heading over to the weekly poker game at Len Barnes’ house. They went, as always, to The Gables, an old Cheshire Point mansion which had been converted into an Early American style restaurant. They had a pair of extra-dry martinis to start, a pair of shrimp cocktails, a pair of chef’s salads with roquefort. Maggie ordered the roast beef while Dave had a blood-rare strip sirloin. Dave talked about how the shows had gone that morning, and Maggie mentioned her visit to Elly Carr.

  The dinner was not exciting. Dave and Maggie did not have an especially exciting marriage, yet it was for each the most desirable solution to their own personal problems. The Whitcombs, man and wife, were united far less by love than by an affectionate tolerance. Each was a support for the other, a help for the other.

  Maggie had lied to Elly Carr. Dave Whitcomb was not sterile. He and Maggie had never had any children not because Dave had spent too much time in front of an x-ray machine but because he and Maggie had never made love. They were in their seventh year of marriage, were very happy together, and could not conceivably regard divorce as even a remote possibility. Yet they slept in separate beds, and stayed in their respective beds, and never exchanged more than a public kiss.

  There was a reason for this.

  Dave was a homosexual, and Maggie was a lesbian.

  To look at them, of course, you could never have guessed this cheerful little fact. Dave could hardly have looked less like the popularized concept of the homosexual. He wore his hair in a mud-brown crew-cut, didn’t swish when he walked, and wore standard latter-day Ivy League clothing, maybe a shade quieter than most of his Cheshire Point friends. He never minced, never lisped, and seemed on the surface to be one-hundred per cent heterosexual.

  Like the majority of American homosexuals, Dave worked very hard to keep his sex life and his business and social life as far separated as possible. His poker friends were heterosexual, his business acquaintances were also heterosexuals; as a matter of full fact, he was a homosexual with absolutely no homosexual friends. Once or twice a week, when he wanted to meet a lover, he would go to any of several homosexual bars in New York, either in Greenwich Village or around the intersection of 72nd Street and Broadway. There he would meet someone, proceed to the other man’s apartment or to a hotel room, and have sexual relations. He was always careful never to permit his lover to learn his real name or address. He was an up-and-coming man in the television industry, a rising star in the production end; public knowledge of his sexual tastes could not possibly do him any good.

  Sometimes, when he had little time to fence around or when his usual haunts failed to turn up a prospect, he would go to a male prostitute. He would meet any of a number of overgrown effeminate juvenile delinquents at a cafeteria on the north side of 42nd Street at Times Square, and for anywhere from five to thirty dollars he would enjoy the young man’s favors. He didn’t like to do this. It was sordid, for one thing; for another, he risked a beating or a robbery. But there were times when he had no choice.

  On the surface, Dave Whitcomb’s life was eminently normal, eminently respectable. A happily married man with a beautiful wife and a good position in a dynamic industry.

  If Dave did not fit the public image of the homosexual, Maggie in turn could not have less resembled the stereotyped lesbian. Her hair was long, not butch-cut. Her dress was feminine and in perfect taste. She used quite a bit of make-up. She looked, as one male country club member had remarked to another in a wistful voice, as though she might be a joyful nymphomaniac. Every pore of Maggie seemed to ooze sex. The sex, however, was directed solely at other women.

  The Whitcombs finished dinner. Dave paid the check, left a large tip, and led the way to the Buick, which was parked in The Gables’ parking lot. He put a quarter into the attendant’s hand, opened the door for Maggie, closed it, walked around the car, opened his door, got behind the wheel, fitted the key into ignition, turned key, stepped on the gas pedal, and drove off.

  “Well,” he said finally. “So you’re putting on the make for little Elly Carr.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You don’t have to,” he said. “Not in so many words. Be careful as hell, Mag.”

  “I’m a careful person.”

  “I’m not kidding,” he went on. “All you have to do is tip your hand before she’s ready to play ball and we’ve had it. The odds are about eighty-three to one that she’ll tell all the world just how gay you are. You know what that would mean?”

  “Leaving Cheshire Point, I suppose.”

  “Leaving the country,” he said, “would be more like it. We’d be in a pretty little spot. I frankly wish you’d stick to New York lesbians instead of trying to make converts. There’s a m
axim—Don’t crap where you eat.”

  “You don’t have to worry.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “No,” Maggie said. “I can be very subtle, David.”

  “You’ll have to be.”

  “Very subtle. Elly will be the one who thinks she’s dragging me to bed, not the other way around. You want to know something? I think she’s one of those gals who’s gay without knowing it. I was cruising her gently today, giving her big eyes without being obvious about it. She didn’t figure out what I was doing, but I think I was reaching her. It shouldn’t be hard to let her wind up in bed with me.”

  “Just be very careful, Mag.”

  She told him again not to worry, that she would be tremendously careful. Then they were at their home, a streamlined ranch decorated in perfect modern taste by a homosexual interior decorator who managed to spend two weeks with Mag and Dave without guessing that they were gay. She stepped out of the car, stood for a moment on the sidewalk while the big Buick hardtop pulled away from the curb, then turned and headed up the walk to the front door.

  The night was cool, clear. The air had a crisp edge to it and she waited for a few seconds, her key in the lock, filling her lungs with fresh air and letting herself unwind. Then she turned the key, pushed open the door and went inside.

  She made herself a drink, putting one large ice cube in a highball glass and covering it with a lot of Scotch and a splash of soda. She sat down with her drink on the long low couch and thought about Elly Carr.

  Elly, she thought, was not going to be anywhere near as easy as she had made her sound to Dave. You had to make sex a simple matter for David, because his own attitude toward sexual activity was, in essence, a simple one. Love never entered into his concept of the overall scheme of things, and a permanent or semi-permanent relationship with a homosexual partner was something he could not possibly desire. He was fully satisfied with hit-and-run sex, in which his partner did not know his name and the two of them were together only long enough to arrive at their desperate little orgasms.