by Ed McBain
There was a barn adjoining the camp property.
The barn boasted stacks and stacks of hay, and Cara visited that barn often during that hectic summer at Taka-Manna. The hay was softer than any feather bed, filled with a succulent aroma she could almost taste, exciting by its very nature. She was kissed for the first time in that barn, and she decided she liked being kissed. She could not remember later who first put his lips on her own. She only remembered, with a warm sort of laziness, that it had been very pleasant and unlike the later kisses she received. The first kiss had been misty with innocence, a delicately fragile thing which would have shattered under the pressure of fiery lips. She had not known how to kiss then, but she learned during that summer, and the subsequent kisses were more expert but never like that first one had been.
She learned that lips were mobile things, and she learned about the soft inner cushion of those lips, and she learned the secret of a slightly parted mouth. She learned remarkably well, and, considering the fact that her education was all at the hands of male tutors, it was something of a miracle that she did not learn more than she’d bargained for.
She left Taka-Manna amid a welter of crushed hearts. She did not go back to camp again.
The next summer, fresh out of high school, aglow with the idea of college in the fall, aglow with the idea of wanting to help her father pay her way, an idea which had been born and nurtured the summer before, she took a job as a waitress in a Borscht Belt mountain resort.
Rainbow Hill was a dump.
For Cara Knowles, it was exciting and gay. The hennaed women rocking their chairs on the pine-shaded front porch, the shouts and cries from the swimming pool, the horses trotting off into the mountains, the cool nights with crisp stars overhead, the crystal clear days, the sudden thunderstorms ripping themselves from the jagged mountain ridges, bristling with electric fury, the dancing in the casino, the hikes, the stolen kisses, the given kisses, the kisses begged for and the kisses poutingly offered, and the kisses wholeheartedly delivered, the kisses …
The touch of a hand on her full breast.
A tentative inquisitive touch, the warmth of spread fingers, the sudden anger, and then a questioning of the anger, a secret hidden questioning, unspoken, sharp and searching, why am I angry? All at once the unbidden stiffening of her nipples, as if a cold wind had passed over her breast, and then a strange awareness, and the fingers gently caressing, the pressure on her breast warm and wonderfully soothing, and then a quiet, pleased, unashamed, warm, contented, lazy withdrawal, a small feminine shaking of her dark head and a whispered “No, please don’t,” but a slight smile on her full lips, her eyes alight with a new discovery, dancing and mischievously knowing in the darkness, and the beginning of a greater awareness.
The awareness did not reach full flower that summer. Oh, there were numerous attempts to complete the education of Cara Knowles, but Cara was not ready for her degree. The attempts started with Bud, the boy who had first touched her. But when he tried to initiate her into the more complex and universally secret society of the enlightened, he was greeted with a frosty, horrified refusal. The attempts came hard and fast after that. The bus boys, the boys in the band, the kitchen help, the guests, all tried their hand, but Cara refused to become enlightened.
She was not afraid, and she did not think of herself as being particularly moral.
She simply was not ready.
She did not become ready until her junior year at the University of Wisconsin. She became ready on a starlit April night in the back seat of an automobile owned by a senior named David Brooks. She became suddenly and uncontrollably ready, and Brooks was somewhat amazed if delighted by the fiery passion of the woman who had suddenly sprung to life under his caresses.
Curiously, she was not in love with Brooks, nor was her heart broken when he was graduated that June. After that first time in his car she had remained casually aloof, treating him with cold disdain.
Cara left Wisconsin in the first semester of her senior year. She told herself she was fed up with the useless senility of a Liberal Arts education. Actually, she was bewildered by the rapidity with which she made her body available to other boys after her first sortie with Brooks. She was bewildered and dismayed, because her lovemaking was a strangely loveless thing which gave her little satisfaction. She was plagued, too, with a gnawing knowledge that time was hurriedly passing and she was no longer a starry-eyed adolescent. Other girls were already married or engaged, other girls had been in love. Seeking love desperately, not knowing why, she used her body as a divining rod, cutting each affair short in its infancy, unwilling to settle for a tiny burst of pleasure when the full glory of a real love might be lurking right around the corner.
She arrived home for the Thanksgiving holidays and casually announced she was not returning to school, much to her parents’ bewildered dismay. She moped around the house until January, doing a lot of reading. She read books about women mostly, Gone with the Wind and Forever Amber and Saratoga Trunk and Rebecca and Wuthering Heights. She was a rapid reader, but the books did not tell her what she wanted to know, and in truth she really didn’t know what she wanted to know. In January, she enrolled at a secretarial school. Cara was a smart girl and the rigors of the stenographic course were duck soup to her. When she completed the course, the school placed her with an architectural firm.
She met a young architect named Fred Ransom there. For a while, she thought she was in love with Ransom. He was a big man with fiery red hair and sparkling blue eyes, an impudent smile on his mouth. He owned a tastefully furnished apartment in Tudor City, and she spent a weekend with him in that air-conditioned fortress, telling her parents she was spending the time with an old college chum in Pennsylvania. She discovered she was not in love with the young architect. She grew bored with his red hair and blue eyes, annoyed by his impudent smile and callow face, and then frantic to the point of tears by his curiously detached way of toying with her breasts.
She left him on Sunday afternoon. There was a deep sadness within her, and when she went home she took a cleansing hot shower, the water scalding and purifying. She tried to read a little then, wondering what was becoming of her, wondering what was happening to her, answering stupid questions from her mother about whether or not her girl friend had been happy to see her, and whether or not she had met any nice boys on the trip.
She was well aware of her parents’ anxieties concerning her state of spinsterhood. Sometimes, in her impotent fury, she wanted to unleash the whole sequence of her amours on her unsuspecting mother, but she knew the knowledge would kill her, and she still held a somewhat grudging respect for the symbol of purity her mother represented.
She quit the architectural firm the next week.
She took a job at Macy’s as secretary to the stationery buyer. The stationery buyer was a married man, but he intrigued her until the revulsion of what she was doing struck her. She pulled out of the romance and out of Macy’s, taking a job with a law outfit, and then a job with an importer-exporter, the pattern always repeating itself, pattern upon pattern, as endless as her search. And always the patiently entreating eyes of her mother, wondering if her daughter would die a dried-up virgin. The notion would have been amusing, were it not for the harsh kernel of truth beneath it. The will-o’-the wisp Cara chased was not even a real thing in her own mind. She had no preconceived notion of what her man would look like. And in her desperate search for him, she remained a mental virgin, outraged by the liberties her body took. She sometimes stared at herself in the full-length mirror of her closet door, stared at her naked body, the globes of her breasts, the flatness of her abdomen. Even naked, she looked virginal, darkly secretive, wide-eyed in innocence. The contradiction of her physical appearance was sadly amusing. She knew that everyone on the Grand Concourse considered her a “good girl,” but she wondered how long it would take for her cloak of respectability to wear shabby and thin. The idea frightened her a little.
When she took the job
with Julien Kahn, Inc., she took it with a new, steadfast determination. There would be no affair this time. This time, this time …
Her brief excursion with Raymond Griffin was something of an experiment with her. The other men she had known, though widely divergent in physical characteristics, had all possessed an almost animalistic power which glowed like a consuming fire in their eyes.
Griff was not like that at all. There was a quietness about him, an almost shy nature. He was a good-looking man in a quiet way, with a nice smile and a vacillatingly serious and jovial personality. He had not, upon first sight, stirred anything but curiosity in her well-curved bosom. But he had appealed to her. She was devout in her determination to throw off the pattern, and Griff had presented himself to her, and he had taken a place alongside her mother as another symbol of purity. And besides, his proposal had really been quite the cutest she’d ever received. She’d gone out with him.
She had been honestly dismayed by the crowded dance floor that night. Up to now, her body had been her sounding board, but in the new scheme of things, she tried to divorce herself from her body completely, and the crowded dance floor was a slap in the face to her plans. She had pulled away from him hastily, embarrassed by her mixed emotions, more embarrassed when she’d seen his embarrassment. Nor was the evening what she had expected. She was trying to fall in love, really in love, and she was discovering how difficult it was to fabricate emotion. They began drinking, and as she drank she became increasingly aware of the futility of the evening, of the futility of her determination, of the futility of her whole life. And as the alcohol spread to her blood, she suddenly wanted Griff to desire her as other men had desired her, knowing her body was winning out over her mind, but not caring very much any more, hating her body, and hating herself. They danced again, and she could tell he wanted her, and she was pleased with his response until the revulsion came over her again, revulsion at his embarrassment and at her own weakness. She had pulled away from him guiltily, again wondering where it would all end for Cara Knowles, puzzled by the dark road she traveled.
The night had been a dismal failure.
When he left her, she could not sleep. She told herself she had not given him an honest chance, and she decided to try again with him, if only he would ask her out again. So she’d been pleased when he turned up at the Guild Week party, even though he’d seemed very interested in the blonde on McQuade’s arm. When Griff took the blonde home, Cara had been strangely hurt, hurt perhaps for the first time in her life. She began drinking. It was easy to drink at the Guild Week party. There was a man there, and she drifted toward him and was not surprised when he took her home that night.
Jefferson McQuade was bigger but no more frighteningly animalistic than other men she had known. The only frightening thing about McQuade was the inner knowledge of what would eventually happen with him, and the knowledge of what would follow that. She had found a strange contentment in the rut of Julien Kahn, Inc. She did not know if she wanted to leave that rut. But she knew what would happen with McQuade, she was very familiar with the pattern of her life, too familiar with it.
She sat by the window of her bedroom that evening in a half slip and brassiere, reluctant to get into her dress. The heat mushroomed against her window like the recussion blast of an atomic bomb. She breathed with her mouth open, trying to suck in a semblance of air from the hot breath that fumed back at her.
It was no use. Heat and Cara Knowles would never be on more than nodding terms.
She rose abruptly and went into the bathroom. She washed her face and patted it dry, and then she touched a dab of cologne to her elbows and the backs of her ear lobes, and the hollow of her throat where the beauty spot crouched minutely.
From the bathroom, she called, “Time, anyone?”
“Seven forty-five,” her father answered.
“Thank you,” she chimed.
She left the bathroom, went back into her bedroom, and took a white cotton frock from its hanger. She didn’t know what McQuade had in mind for that evening, but she would definitely turn thumbs down on dancing. She carried the frock back to the bathroom, running into Dr. Knowles in the hallway.
“Oops!” the doctor said, turning, and she hastily held up the frock to cover the jutting cones of her brassiere, smiling at his embarrassment, immensely pleased. He was such a little boy, her father.
She put the dress on, and then smoothed it over her hips, wondering if she should wear a belt with it. The small patent leather, perhaps. No, the hell with it. She took the bobbies from her hair and then brushed it out, noticing the effect of its blue-black coloration against the whiteness of the dress. The dress had a yoke neck, and the brown beauty spot showed in the hollow of her throat. Beneath that, her breasts rose, straining against the high uplift of her brassiere, firm white mounds crowding the thin shadowed line between them.
She took her lipstick tube from her purse and then touched her brush to the crimson tip, moving the brush to her lips, carrying it a little beyond the edges of her lip line to increase the size of her mouth. She put the lipstick away and touched her lashes with mascara lightly. She took a last appraising look in the mirror and then went back into the bedroom, barefoot. From her top dresser drawer, she took a pair of nylon peds, slipping into them quickly. She found the Julien Kahn white linen pumps in her shoe bag, put them on, took another look at herself in the full-length mirror behind her closet door, sucked in her breath, and then went to sit by the window, waiting for McQuade.
He arrived at eight on the button. Mrs. Knowles came back to tell Cara her friend had come and Cara, fully dressed and waiting for five minutes, said, “Tell him I’ll be ready in a few minutes.”
Her mother, used to Cara, said nothing, but she secretly, told herself that such tactics were the best insurance you could buy against marriage, and then went to tell McQuade to make himself comfortable.
Morosely, Cara sat by the window, wishing wistfully, and a little sadly, that her escort for tonight were Griff rather than McQuade. Griff was a good guy.
The good guys and the, bad guys. The clichéd television concept caused her to smile. The meek shall inherit … what?
What had Griff inherited? He was a good guy, a nice guy. He’d taken her out, and he’d been embarrassed when she’d pressed her body against his, embarrassed even though he’d flared into excitement for a moment. He was a good guy, and he’d got nothing.
David Brooks, the first. He was really David Brooks III, but in her mind he would always be the first, and with wry amusement she realized she could no longer even remember his face, and the realization was painful. Had Brooks been a good guy? She dimly remembered him bragging about the sweet young freshman co-eds who had dropped their lacy lingerie and their honor at the sight of his virile form. Not a good guy, not a good guy at all, David. Why had she chosen him for the first? Does anyone ever choose anything, really? Things have a way of happening. Things happen when you’re ready for them.
And all the rest? Good guys? None like Griff, and the knowledge was at once exasperating and terribly saddening. She cared not a whit for Griff, really, but there was something somehow unjust about the fact that she had given him nothing, and the others she’d cared even less about got everything. If he had been in the room with her that moment, she would have recklessly seduced him, thrown all of her womanly wiles at him, done for him what she had never done, really given herself, sweetly, warmly, and only because he was good and down deep she knew she herself was rotten.
Not really rotten, Cara, she told herself. But a little moldy in spots.
Reluctantly she went out to greet McQuade.
From the instant she saw his eyes, she knew it would happen that night. The eyes she saw were the eyes of an old friend. She had learned those eyes well. They filled her neither with excitement nor dread. The eyes of an old friend never do.
“You look lovely,” he said, his voice more Southern than usual.
“Thank you,” she said lightly.
He was a big man, McQuade, dressed now in a blue tropical suit, the solidity of the color making him appear larger. His blond hair was efficiently, economically combed. There was a smile on his face, and above the smile the gray eyes were ignited with the smoldering inner fire she knew so well.
“Are we ready?” he asked editorially.
“We are,” she said.
“Dancing?”
“Heavens, no. We’d melt.”
“Theater?”
“If you like.”
“Not really. I thought …” He smiled in embarrassment and then shrugged boyishly, contradicting the glow in his eyes. “Well, it’s a silly idea.”
His trick did not fool her. “What?” she asked.
“A drive to Jones Beach,” he said in a rush. “It’s such a hot night, Cara, but wonderful really, more stars than I’ve ever seen in my life. I thought … do you like the beach?”
For a moment, she wanted to shout No, not the beach. Dancing or the theater, someplace crowded, someplace where there are people, people. The rebellion died.
“It sounds good,” she said dully.
“Fine. Then let’s go.”
They said good night to her parents. Dr. Knowles shook hands with McQuade, his liking for the fellow all over his round dentist’s face.
They make a handsome couple together, he was thinking, a mighty handsome couple.
14
They drove out over the Whitestone Bridge. McQuade kept the top of his convertible down, and she could see the stars expanding overhead, a great litter of sparkling gems on black velvet. She rode with her head back on the leather seat, the wind blowing her hair free. She could see the other cars whisking past, cars full of Saturday-night daters, young girls, happy girls and girls like … like herself.
But none so discreet, Cara. You are so discreet.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“Oh, nothing,” she said.
Nothing. The sum total of my life. Nothing.