Community of Women

21

Nan Haskell was taking a bath. There was enough water outside for her to bathe in the yard, but she hadn’t gone quite that far yet. Ted was breaking down her reserve, pushing her inhibitions a little farther each time, but she had not yet reached the point where she would go out and bathe in the rain.

She rarely took tub baths. She usually preferred showers — they were faster and simpler, and you didn’t wind up lolling in a tub of dirty water that way. But this morning she was taking a bath. She was not interested in getting clean, since she had already had her morning shower. She was sitting in a tub of hot water because she ached.

Ached.

Her muscles were sore, and her flesh was sore, and her stomach was weak from throwing up. The little fun-and-games episode at the Star Bright Motel had left her broken and vomiting. It had been one for the books, all things considered.

She never would have believed herself capable of such perverted behavior, never could have imagined herself submitting to such bestiality and, what was more, getting an insane sort of kick out of it. And yet she had submitted, and had gotten those insane kicks, and now her whole body ached.

Ached from the spanking, and from being kicked. And from throwing up, sick with herself, humiliated and ashamed. She had done things no woman should do, had done them with a man who was evil and twisted and vile. And now she lay in the tub, soaking herself in steaming water, trying to bring herself back to life again.

Maybe she should kill herself.

It was a tempting thought. All you did was take your life and put an end to it, and then all the little worries, along with yourself, simply cased to be. God, what was the best way to kill yourself? A doctor had assured her once at a party that the simplest and most pleasant suicide method called for a lethal intravenal injection of morphine. This had impressed her at the time, but less than a year later that same doctor had placed the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth, triggered the gun with his toe, and blown his brains all over Westchester County, thus killing himself off in as painful and unappetizing a manner as possible.

The poem was one of Dorothy Parker’s, and it summed things up precisely enough. She put her head in one hand, thinking now what a cockeyed course events had taken. She’d started out bored, and had entered into an affair with Ted to escape somehow from boredom. And now she was thinking of suicide, which was nothing but the ultimate boredom of death.

It was the town, she thought. Cheshire Point. When all was said and done, the town of Cheshire Point was nothing but a grass-covered tree-shaded trap. You wound up with all the inconveniences of country life and all the pressures of city life, the unpleasantness of either way of life all rolled into one unpalatable pill. You watched your husband go off to the city each morning, and you waited in occupied monotony for him to return, while other women waited in the same manner in all of the other houses in town.

You waited, and you went crazy. You lived in a fundamentally artificial manner, living in the town but not really a part of it, with your social world composed solely of people in your own special notch, other expatriate New Yorkers with the same problems and the same frustrations.

She rubbed her aching shoulders, massaged her sore breasts. Sitting in the tub wasn’t really doing a hell of a lot of good, but there didn’t seem to be anything else to do. And, if nothing else, the tub was a pleasant place for the analysis of the myriad ills besetting the unidyllic community of Cheshire Point.

But what was she going to do? God, she’d looked for an escape from boredom and had wound up holding a man-eating tiger by the tail. She wasn’t bored now, certainly. Monotony would have been a relief.

She had to end the thing with Ted. An illicit love affair would have been bad enough, but, as Ted Carr had told her himself, in this instance love had nothing to do with it. This was sex; worse, it was unnatural, a master-slave relationship that could have hardly been less healthy.

It was making a nervous wreck out of her. The episode at the motel had been pure horror, and if she was any great shakes as a prophet, things could only get progressively worse. Ted would seek to make her more wretched, would strive to find new and improved ways to humiliate and torment her. A bright future, she told herself firmly, it was not.

But then what? Breaking up with Ted would not be easy — he had an emotional hold over her, and she was perceptive enough to realize how strong it was. Still, she could make the break if she put her mind to it. And where would that leave her?

Up the old creek, natch. The boredom would come back, and she’d try to find some other way to escape, and if the other way were not Ted Carr it would probably be no less harmful to her well-being in the long run. Or, if she managed by hook or crook to avoid such a means of escape, she would only succeed in winding up back where she had started, all bottled up in an empty and insufferable world.

Maybe they could move back to New York. They could sell the house, then buy into a decent co-op apartment building on the East Side. That wasn’t the worst place in the world to bring up children. There was that one public school, Number Six, which was as good as most private schools. And, if they weren’t in that particular district, tuition for the kids at a decent private school would cost less than the taxes they paid on their split-level trap in Westchester. The boys wouldn’t have all that fresh air, but Central Park was nearby. And there were more cultural advantages for the kids — museums and lectures and kiddie concerts and special plays.

There were advantages for the children, in a sense. Kids who grew up in Manhattan were sharper than their country cousins, more sophisticated, more keenly polished. They understood more things and tended to develop into more interesting people. Maybe Cheshire Point was a trap for kids, too. Maybe Danny and Skip were being molded into television-watching morons, breathing fresh air but never developing as they might.

Maybe—

Would Howard move back? She realized suddenly that she actually had no idea how he felt about Cheshire Point. And that made her aware of just how little they communicated. He might like the house and he might hate it; she had no way of knowing which was the case, just as he was no doubt unaware of how she felt. They’d grown apart, living in Cheshire Point. In New York they had been very close, but the gracious-living rat-race had separated them, impeding communications and keeping them apart.

Maybe Howard wanted to return to the city himself. Maybe he hated the Point just as she did and would welcome a chance to return to Manhattan. That would solve everything. Oh, there would still be problems — that much was impossible to avoid. But the problems would work themselves out in Manhattan. If you took a pair of people and put them where they really belonged, they had a chance to be happy. If you stuck them in the wrong environment, the chance was smaller.

She got up from the tub, stepped out of it, wrapped herself up in a towel. She massaged her skin with the towel until it glowed, healthy and pink and alive again. She drained the water from the tub, scrubbed the ring away and rinsed the tub out. Then she went to her bedroom and dressed. She got into a simple skirt and sweater and left her feet bare.

She went downstairs, poured a cup of coffee, took it into the living room, sat down with it. She was just beginning to understand exactly how much she loved Howard, how much her husband meant to her. She had pretty much fallen out of love with Howard lately, not because of anything he had done but because they had not been able to sustain in Cheshire Point the sort of relationship they had built up in New York. Love did not grow by itself. It had to be fed and nourished. When you only saw your husband at breakfast and after dinner, when he left the house at dawn and returned at dusk, love was hard to keep going. When you spent your free time partying with people you didn’t really like and attending meetings of the Parent-Teacher Association, love could disappear in a sea of trivia and banality.

But the love was real. Howard was her husband and she loved him, loved him more now that a disgusting affair with a disgusting man had showed her just how badly their marital relationship was atrophying.

She wriggled her bare toes, took another sip of hot coffee. New York was a big town; you didn’t have to spend time with people whom you didn’t happen to like. You could live next door to another couple for twenty years and never say more than hello and nice day to them. You picked your own friends, and you spent your time whatever way you damn pleased, and that was an infinitely saner way of life than exurbia afforded.

She didn’t want to kid herself. Manhattan was as much of a rat race as Cheshire Point, perhaps more of one. But it was their kind of rat race, and that made all the difference.

The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that Howard would go for the idea. He was no happier in the country than she was, and they both belonged back in New York. She would discuss it with him that night; they could do that instead of wasting time at some drunken brawl.

And as far as Ted Carr went, she was not going to waste her time worrying about him. She did not need him any more. He had never been a problem, but was only the symptom of a fundamental ill. When the main problem was solved, Ted would not matter at all.

She walked to the window, looked out. It was still raining.

Roz Barclay went down to the basement to put a load of wash in the washing machine. She put in the recommended low-suds detergent, added bleach, and got things off to a good start. Then she climbed the cellar stairs and found a chair in the living room to sit in.

It was still pouring. There was no justice, she decided. The wonderful thing about being a writer was that you could work at home. You didn’t have to rush into the city, and when the weather was rotten you stayed snug as a bug under your own little roof.

So what had happened? Well, it rained. And Linc, who had just finished both Murder By Moonlight and a slick story called One Cup Of Sorrow, had been stuck with that most miserable day for a run in to New York to deliver both scripts to his agent. It could have been worse, of course. Linc was in considerably higher spirits taking scripts to his agent than cadging advances.

She smiled. The rain was unimportant — Linc wouldn’t melt. What was important, and very important, was that he was writing, that the typewriter did what he wanted it to do. She was married, she told herself, to a very special sort of man. He was only half-alive when he was not writing. It was as though that IBM electric in the study were an extension of himself, a natural outgrowth of his hands and arms. Away from it he was not his full self. His moods were intense and unhappy, and he spent his days alternately blaming himself and blaming the world.

But when things went right, then not even rain could spoil the perfection of the day. Then the world was Linc’s oyster and she was his pearl, and God was in his heaven and everything was just fine.

So she did not mind the rain.

Linc would be home soon. She checked her watch, counting minutes, waiting for him. He was going to take the rest of the day off — God knew he deserved some time off after the way he’d plowed through the book and the short story. They were going to have dinner out, maybe at The Gables or some similar restaurant, and then they’d come home for a few drinks and a little of the old togetherness routine.

And he was interested in things now. He’d been talking at breakfast about spending the winter in Mexico, insisting that it wouldn’t be too much more expensive than staying in the States, that they could combine business with pleasure, taking an apartment in Mexico City or a shack in a small fishing village. Linc would write, as usual, and they would have a ball. Besides, travel was tax-deductible for a writer. All he had to do was set a novel in Mexico and they could write off the trip.

That was Linc, she thought. They were broke, advanced to the hilt, and he was planning a trip and justifying it as tax-deductible. She wondered whether or not they would go and hoped that they would. Somehow they would get the money, and somehow they would manage to afford it, and it would be nice. Neither of them had ever been to Mexico. It would be a nice change.

She didn’t mind the rain at all.

She thought back to the slump now, remembering how bad it had been, remembering things which might better have been forgotten. She pictured herself sitting alone in the bathroom playing auto-erotic games like a sex-crazed teenager, but the image did not cause her to blush or to feel ashamed. She smiled to herself.

Slumps were hard times, hard for her and harder still for Linc. But you had to take the bad with the good, the wheat with the chaff, or something like that. It was like the weather — some days you were going to have rain and you had to accept it. The good times made up for the bad times with plenty of room left over.

Some women, she knew, had it easier. Some men — most men, for that matter — were a good deal easier to live with than Linc was. These were the steady men, the plodding men, the men who made no music and dreamed no dreams. They worked steadily and made love on schedule, and their wives lived an easy life.

That was fine for some women. Roz would have died of boredom.

Because those women did not know what they were missing. They couldn’t know the joy that came when your husband cracked through a barrier, when he did something really well and overflowed with satisfaction. They couldn’t look back on times like that surprise movie sale, when the two of them danced around like lunatics, staying up all night drinking to Hollywood and money and the times they were going to have together. They couldn’t imagine what real happiness was.

She felt sorry for them.

She went to the window. No, she thought, I do not mind the rain. Not at all.

The sunshine makes up for it.