The Last One Left

Chapter Eight

Crissy Harkinson arose a little before noon on the day after first taking the boy, Oliver Akard, into her bed. The double thicknesses of draperies kept the room in semi-darkness, the switch on the bedside phone had been turned off, and the little Cuban maid had long since been taught to work in silence until the coffee summons from the bedroom of the mistress released her from such constraint.

She remembered that her last glance at the luminous dial of the radio clock, just after the boy had slipped out onto the dark terrace and closed the sliding door, had shown that it was just four in the morning.

She trudged slowly, solidly, heavily, through the dressing room alcove and into her bath, touched the silent switch and, when the cruel lights flickered and went on, she stared mockingly and mercilessly at herself in the mirror, at the tangle of her hair, deep smudges of fatigue under her eyes, face slack under the tan, mouth pale and swollen — pulpy looking. Her body felt stretched and wearied and lamed. At thirty-six, my lady, she told herself, such a romping takes one hell of a toll, and he lives up to Kinsey’s report on that age group, and you have got your work cut out for you to hew your way quickly back down to that twenty-eight you damned well have to make him believe.

She started with an amphetamine, and then a long hot sudsy languid shower, turning to a very brisk cold shower. Then harshly astringent lotions, a soothing gentleness of cream, subtle care with the eye makeup, including the drops of magic which made them shine with the imitation of youth. The amphetamine had begun to hit, lifting her spirits, taking away the weariness which had seemed bone-deep, and after she had brushed and poked her almost-dry hair into the casual and youthful style which seemed to do the most for her this year, she selected and put on a pale, fitted, silver-blue housecoat with a fussy girlish frothiness of lace at the throat. She turned this way and that, smoothing the fabric down over her hips with the backs of her hands, moved a little closer to the mirror and gave herself what she called her Doris Day smile.

“You might just make it, kid,” she whispered.

She went to the bedroom intercom, pressed the lever and said, “Francisca?”

She heard the quick light sound of the girl’s approaching footsteps and then the merry voice of first greeting.

“I think maybe you could squeeze about three or four of those big oranges. Enough for a tall glass. And a pot of coffee.”

She went over and pulled on the drapery cords, hand over hand, opening the whole side of the bedroom to the bright day. She bent over the low broad bed and balled up the tangle of pale yellow sheets, carried them in and stuffed them into the hamper. From the linen closet she selected pale green sheets and pillow cases and tossed them onto the bed for Francisca to make it up. From the rug beside the bed she picked up the orange and white striped shift, shook it out, reflected with bitter humor she hadn’t gotten much use out of it this time, took it in and hung it up carefully.

When Francisca knocked and brought the tray in, Crissy Harkinson went to her chaise and sat and swung her legs up, and gave the maid a mechanical smile as she reached and took the tray with its short legs and set it across her thighs.

“Was come for a school theeng,” Francisca said. “Small girls on bicycle. Teekits to send off the music somewheres. One dollar from the bockus I give. Hokay?”

After a pause for comprehension, Crissy said, “That was fine, dear. Would you do the bed now, please?”

She unfolded the morning paper. Friday. The twentieth day of May. Her heart tilted for a moment, and she felt sick. It was beginning to be too long. Garry had guessed it might be two days, certainly not more than four. God, if it had gone wrong somehow, then the big chance was gone, and it was the only one you’d ever get, girl. The years are running the wrong way for you. If Garry messed it up, then you’re back to sweating out the other choices, all of them bad. There’s only one big thing left to go, and that’s this house, and when you sell it, you have three choices. Live the way you like to live on the money you get, and it will last maybe four years and then you are forty and you can decide whether it will be the sleeping pills or a cruddy little job, a cruddy little room, sore feet from standing all day behind a cruddy counter. Or invest the money and get some funny little income for life, and go see if any of the old contacts were still in the business and, out of pity or sentimentality, wanted to make room in the circuit for a one-time upper-level hooker who’d retired too many years ago, at the personal request of State Senator Ferris Fontaine. Or take the house money and make the gamble of building a front with it, maybe the tragic, youngish widow, obviously well provided for, demure as hell, visiting Hawaii or Acapulco or some damn place to try to take her mind off her grief, and then sort out the possibles and take dead aim at some old goof with a fat portfolio and stampede him into marriage, hoping his heart isn’t too damned sound. But what if the pigeon turned out to be canny enough to get her checked out first? Or what if he happened to be putting on a front with money as small as hers? Or what if he kept living another twenty-five years, so that when she finally got it — the total freedom and total security she’d wanted all her life — she’d be over sixty years old?

No. Garry Staniker had worked it. It was the only way things would come out fair. The Senator had not really meant to cheat her. She knew she was probably the only toy the old boy had ever bought himself in his whole chinchy, skinflint life, the only time he had ever spent real money with any kind of pleasure at all. Over seven years of a good honest return on the investment too. You spend money on what’s important, and she remembered how strange it had seemed to her, when they had met, that an old guy with so much power and influence in the state would be so uneasy and ashamed and apologetic.

It had been one of those long weekend arrangements, six of the kids supplied on request and flown down to Key West where some kind of contractor had a big house with a wall around it and was putting on a special house party with the idea of softening up some politicians who were in a position to do him some good. It came to three hundred each after the usual cut was taken off the top, and that was better than good during the slow season, and there was some iced champagne on the company plane that ferried them down, so all the kids were in a mood to have fun.

When they were sorted out, she turned out to be Fontaine’s, and she remembered how, to the twenty-seven year old woman she was then, he seemed older than God, though later she found out he was sixty-one then. But as she got to know him, he seemed funny and sweet and nice. He was very courtly and old-timey. When they were alone was when he got all shy and strange and funny. She finally understood from what he was saying that it would not make any difference in the money arrangements, and he would just as soon have his friends believe that she was earning the money as expected, but it just wasn’t possible, and that was that, and he did not care to talk about it any further.

There was just the one double bed in the room they’d been given, a bed with a huge carved Spanish headboard. After the light was out she got him talking again and got him around to talking about the problem, which he seemed to find easier to do in the dark. He said, no, he hadn’t been sick. He had just gradually become — incapable a couple of years ago, and he did not care to go through the dreary experience of proving it again. He told her about his life. He had married young. There hadn’t been the time or the money for play. He said there had been some episodes, as he called them, during his middle years when he had become successful as a rancher. His home base he said was at one of his ranches, a long way east of Arcadia. Twenty-six thousand acres. Brahma and Black Angus.

She made her cautious beginning by explaining to him that she could get to sleep much easier if she was close to someone, and after certain reluctance he held her with his arm around her, and her head on his shoulder. She kept thinking of twenty-six thousand acres, and imitated deep sleep, a purring snore, but a restless sleep in which she shifted, burrowed against him, put her round arm carelessly across him, a great fan of her soft hair — much longer then — across his throat. She wondered at the increased knocking of his heart, but was not sure there could be any ultimate victory until, at last, she felt him with infinite stealth move his hand, bit by bit, until he could touch the strong round breast of the girl he thought asleep.

Ten days later at his telephoned request, she took a commercial flight to Miami where he had registered them both on the same floor of one of the big beach hotels. She sidestepped his attempts to talk of future arrangements until she had managed to prove to his satisfaction and hers that what had been thought impossible was becoming easier at each opportunity. The next day he sent her, alone, to look at the apartment he could arrange if it suited her.

Over dinner in his one-bedroom suite that evening they struck their bargains. She could count upon his visiting her for a couple of days on the average of once each month. It might be oftener at times or less frequent, but it would probably average out that way. He wanted total discretion on her part. He said he felt he did not have the right to demand physical faithfulness of her. He would leave that up to her, stipulating only that she was not to have anyone visit her at the apartment, nor was she in any direct or indirect way to sell herself. The apartment lease and the utilities would be taken care of. He would give her money to open a checking account, and she would give him the name of the bank and the account number, and a deposit would be made, untraceable, to her account each month. What did she think it should be?

“Fifteen hundred dollars a month,” she said.

“You trying to gouge me, girl?” he asked, scowling.

“Senator, I don’t think it’s nice to argue about money. I told you what I need. I don’t have to argue about money. I can remember from high school, from economics class, a monopoly can set its own rates because there’s noplace else to buy what it’s selling. I’m going to gouge you pretty good, but I’m going to give you fair value. If you don’t want it that way, let’s call the whole thing off right now.”

He stared at her, and he chuckled for a long time, shook his head, chuckled some more, and from then on did not deny her what she asked. By the time she picked out the land and the house was completed, he had regained a virility which, he claimed, seemed like unto what he could dimly remember of himself as a bridegroom. With the house went a stolid square humorless but efficient Swedish woman. Ferris Fontaine had hired her, and when Crissy made mild objection to her, she gathered that Fontaine had once done her delinquent son a favor of such magnitude the woman’s personal loyalty to the Senator was beyond measure. Crissy gradually became aware that Fontaine had been testing her discretion and her judgment in small ways for some time. When he had satisfied himself about her, the Biscayne Bay house, because it had been located and designed for total privacy, became a place where he held secret meetings of men with whom he was involved in various intricate business affairs. Crissy acted as hostess, knowing when to absent herself to let them talk, learning from the Senator which drinks she should make a little heavier than usual. Though the relationship between Fontaine and Crissy could not help but be obvious to all who were invited there, the Senator never permitted other girls in the house.

Three years ago, perhaps as a reward for how well she had handled things when he used the house for meetings, and perhaps out of the money which had been the result of such meetings, he had bought her the pleasure cruiser, the handsome Odalisque, and had hired Garry Staniker to captain it and maintain it.

“Use it all you want and any way you want, honey. It’s registered to you, but I’ll be using it now and then. Some of the cagiest ones will loosen up a little when you get ’em off on the water.”

By then the Senator was sixty-seven. Though he seemed far more vigorous and vital than when she had first met him, she knew it was time to take the final step, and one evening when they were there alone, she brought it up with more of an air of casual confidence than she felt.

“It’s been six years, darling,” she said.

He sipped his ale, belched comfortably and said, “Six very wonderful years, little girl.”

“Thirty-three makes a pretty old little girl, Fer.”

“By God, you sure don’t show it a bit.”

“Thanks heaps, but the fact remains. Also the fact remains that I think about it. And I think about you being sixty-seven.”

“Mmmm. Let’s say I show it, but I don’t feel it.”

She went to him, sat crosslegged on the floor close to his chair, took his hand in both of hers and looked earnestly up at him. “Fer, I’m not going to bring out any violins and give you any crap about the best years of my life.”

“But?”

“I think the word is settlement. Some kind of a settlement. You are a tough old monkey and I think you are going to live forever, but I think you would feel better if you knew that if something did happen, you wouldn’t leave me behind cussing you up down and sideways for not setting up some kind of an arrangement to keep your little girl off the streets when the money runs out. Fair is fair.”

She waited in the silence while he thought it through. “Fair is fair, sure enough. It isn’t the easiest thing in the world to set up, Crissy. By God it isn’t. I can’t just go sticking you in my will. The wife and the kids and all the grand kids would rise right up and bust hell out of any codicil like that, especially if it was as big as what you’d need.”

“What do I need, Fer?”

“Pretty good piece.” He went inside to her desk and worked it out on scratch paper. He called her and she went and stood beside him, her hand resting on his shoulder. “Little girl, if you was to live exactly as good as now, with the upkeep to pay on everything and what you have to spend, and if it was set up so you’d live off investment income, it would take four hundred and fifty thousand dollars put away into a good balanced program.”

“Good Christ!”

“But that would mean you’d eventual leave behind a pretty fair estate, going to somebody I don’t owe spit. So it’s got to be worked out on a lifetime basis, so you live fat and die broke. Okay?”

“Sure, Fer.”

“Lump sum life annuity, I guess. And some way to transfer this house out of your name but giving you the right to live here as long as you live. That would pay some of the bite on the annuity. The thing to do is get ol’ Walker Waggoner scratching around seeing what he can come up with. Then the smart thing would be to get you started on it and me pay the gift tax or whatever, then there’d be no fuss from anybody after I’m gone. When I know what it will come to, then I can figure out the best way to scramble it together. Fair is fair, little girl. You said it true.”

Some months later she had to take a complete physical and sign insurance application papers. More months passed and when nothing happened she queried Ferris Fontaine.

It had irritated him. “Little girl, I am doing the damned well best I can, and it is going to get done when a lot of things that affect it one way and another get sorted out.”

Fifteen months ago he had come to stay with her on the middle days of a windy week in January. He complained of indigestion. She heard him get up in the middle of the night, and she could not tell how much later it was when she woke again, reached and found him still gone, and no body heat remaining in his side of the bed. She found the bathroom lights shining down upon him on the floor near the toilet, in the pale blue pyjamas she had once bought him. He had reached up and had unrolled an entire role of flowered toilet tissue, pulling it down upon him so that she had to brush it to the side to see his face and know that it was a dead face. He had told her once what she would have to do if he ever should become very sick at that house, or die. She did not think she could manage it. Then she remembered the loyalty of Bertha, the Swede. Bertha understood at once. The two women dressed the body, Bertha with silent tears running down her square pale face. Crissy packed his suitcase. They put the body in the front seat of the navy blue Continental, and the suitcase in the trunk.

Bertha got behind the wheel and Crissy followed at a cautious distance in her white sports car. They left the Lincoln on a dark street in downtown Miami. When no cars were coming, they tugged the body over behind the wheel. The motor was running, the windows down, the headlights on. Bertha tipped the Senator forward and as the horn began to blow, she trotted heavily to the sports car and climbed hastily in beside Crissy.

They did not speak all the way back. When they got out of the car Crissy said, “Thank you — for helping.”

Bertha said, “I’m giving you my notice now, M’am. I’ll stay thirty days if you haven’t found anybody by then, but then I’ll have to leave.”

“Suit yourself.”

“I came with him because he asked me to, only.”

“Don’t bother to explain.”

“But I am a decent woman.”

“Congratulations,” Crissy said and went into her house. She stripped the bed, remade it fresh, showered, made a stiff drink and went to bed and waited for tears. There weren’t any. She had liked him well enough. He had paid well for what he wanted from her. But the old floof had let her down where it counted most, maybe.

After the Senator had been buried by his family, with suitable fanfare and an attendance so large that it was rumored that half of them came not to mourn but to assure themselves he was dead, Crissy drove all over the state seeing in privacy those men who had been members of the inner clique, trying to use the leverage of her special knowledge to pry loose some promise of support.

But they seemed more amused than distressed, and she gave up quickly after one of them, eyes gentle as flint, alternately squeezing and stroking her shoulder, said that they sure didn’t want to upset anyone Fer had been fond of, but they’d have to rig up something to give her a nice long stay up to Chattahoochee to ponder it all out some. You had it right nice for a nice long time, considering...

So she had hurried back to the house, aware of having been a fool, of having attempted a dangerous game. She had to learn wariness all over again, after these past lush years. She knew it wouldn’t be difficult. The practice had started early, maybe way, way back when they took you from the grammaw-house to the Home, and you knew it was a terrible mistake and you were too little to explain it to them, but you knew somebody would remember you and fix the mistake. Then you gradually realized it wasn’t a mistake, and it wouldn’t be fixed.

You learned wariness when you were a child bride and the New Orleans cop bounced a slug off the pavement into the back of Johnny Harkinson’s curly head as he was racing off with a snatched purse. Wariness during the thousand nights Phil Kerna owned you, and you were his luck, sitting back out of the cone of light, watching the poker sessions. Owned you and then loaned you, when the markers came due. Wariness in New York, sharing the apartment with Midgie and Spook, the three of you modeling Frankal’s cheap wholesale imitations of high-fashion items, and hustling the buyers but giving them a fair and full return because Frankal didn’t want any repeat business ruined. New lessons in wariness when you pulled stakes and went down to Savannah with Midgie and used her contacts to get lined up with that Friendship Club, a telephone operation, hundred-a-week dues. Once they couldn’t come up with it and spent ninety days working in the prison laundry, ruining their hands and teaming up to fight off the old bull dykes. From then on you make certain you always have your dues.

Drifted to Atlanta, where it was closer control, a straight percentage action. Wariness in the slow realization that it had stopped being something you were doing for just a little while for kicks. You were a seasoned hooker, and you’d turned twenty-seven, and because your score on repeats was falling off because of competition from the kid stuff just breaking in, you had no more choice left on who, and damn little choice left on what. So, in your wariness, you knew that a really big score was the only way out. So when you got picked for the Key West duty, one of the six packages picked up by the company airplane, one of the steadier types, and the chance with the Senator opened up, you begged and bargained your way loose, using tears and money saved up.

But in the end it was only a partial score, girl, because you turned soft and sweet and trusting. And that was the final lesson. The long years shot and no time to work on any score that would take more years. No time for mercy, girl, and who showed you any? The thing about this score, it had developed out of the Senator thing. You could say it was even a part of it — a chance to more than make up for not having really put the pressure on that old goat sooner and harder. Should have put security on a pay-as-you-go basis right from scratch, when finding out I could turn him back into a man was such a miracle to him, I could have made him crawl on broken glass all the way from his twenty-six thousand acres to where he had me stashed. Every year, old man, you lay fifty thousand on good, fat, blue chips in little girl’s name, or the fun stops.

Spilled milk. Oh God, Garry, if you messed up my second chance at the jackpot...

She heard the latch of the sliding glass door and turned her head and saw the boy, Oliver, peering in at her and sliding the door open as she had told him to do.

As he came in, closed the door, turned to her, she held both her hands out, her smile brilliant, and whispered, “Darling, darling, darling. Come here, dear. Sit right here where I can look at you.”

The shyness of translating last night’s intimacy to broad daylight made him approach her with a most curious gait, partially a humble shamble, partially a self-conscious strut.

She took his hands, turned her face upwards, eyes half closed, soft mouth demanding the kiss. He bent hastily and clumsily, got his nose in the way, managed to kiss the corner of her mouth and, in sitting back on the chaise lost his balance, squashed his weight down onto her knees, shifted off them, apologized hoarsely, sat there blushing sweatily and intensely. She noted the way he was dressed, and guessed it had been the result of anguished decisions. He wore sand-colored skinny stretch jeans, and a dark blue sports shirt with the sharp creases of brand-newness still in it, buttoned down the front with small brass buttons. He seemed able to look everywhere except at her.

“Olly, my darling, I have been sitting here waiting for you and trying to believe that what happened really happened. It all seems so fantastic and incredible. It was so — completely unplanned. When you woke up did it seem as unreal to you?”

“Yes. I guess it seemed that way to me too.”

“What is happening to us?”

“It — sort of just happened.”

She gave a sharp tug at his hands. “What’s the matter? Can’t you look at me? Can’t you say my name? Can’t you tell me how you feel?”

She saw him force himself to look into her eyes. His deep tan was suffused with the pink tinge of his blush. With his somewhat indistinct chin, and with those eyes set a little too closely, he looked at her fixedly with an expression of such wondrously enthralled goofiness, she came dangerously close to laughter. His adam’s apple slid up and down his throat as he swallowed. In a huskied and very uncertain voice he said, “I... love you, Crissy. I love you.”

It was what she wanted to hear him say, and it had come sooner than she had expected.

She leaned, lifted his right hand to her lips, kissed the heavy knuckles one by one, feeling him tremble. “I don’t know whether I love you, Olly. Love is a very precious thing. It is a lot more rare than people think. But when you find it, and it’s for real, it is worth the most terrible sacrifices. I don’t know if — if we’re strong enough.”

“Strong enough?” he asked, puzzled.

“If you think I’m going to keep us some kind of a state secret, dear, if I decide I do truly love you, then you are making a mistake about me. I am going to be proud of us. People are going to know about us. And they are going to say very cruel things. Are you strong enough for that? And for the pressure your family will put on you? We have to be so terribly sure, Oliver. After all, I’m twenty-eight years old, and I’ve been married. And widowed.”

“I’ll be twenty in July.”

“The world will say wicked things about us. And a lot of people will even laugh at us. That’s why we have to be so sure.”

She could sense that it alarmed him. Poor bunny. So many things to alarm him and fascinate him all of a sudden. In empathy her memory went all the way back to Phil Kerna, and the strangely dazed, swooning, hypnotic feeling she’d had after that first time with him, when after that night and day and following night in the Reno motel he had left her there alone and gone back to the poker table. Having been married to Johnny for a year had left her as innocent as a child in comparison with what Phil had been able to make her experience. Now it would be just the same with Olly Akard, who had come to her with only the experience of a couple of years of furtive intimacy with his little steady girl, Betty, had come to her with that curious conviction of the male of limited experience that his role was that of sole aggressor, full of determined anxiety to perform properly just as it was written in the books, and with the pitiful belief that the one small pleasure he had always achieved was all his body was capable of.

She knew how deeply he had been confused and frightened, first by her, and finally by the unexpected and wild and savage intensity of his own guided response. Curious guilts and shynesses made him feel very awkward to be with her in daylight, knowing she too remembered all the tumbled deliriums and grotesqueries of the unending night.

Though she knew she had brought him far enough for there to be little danger of his being frightened away now, she laughed softly and fondly, hitched herself closer to him, put one hand on his powerful shoulder, laid her right hand against his cheek and with her thumb stroked the furry sheen of his eyebrow.

“But no need to look so scared already, dear little bunny rabbit boy,” she said. “I won’t want to parade you on display until I am absolutely certain. And meanwhile we will be dreadful sneaky sneaks. Like the page sneaking into the quarters of the sexy old queen. My little maid is discreet. And this home of mine was designed to frustrate nosey people.”

He said with overly casual and clumsy curiosity, “I... I suppose that’s the way the Senator wanted it.”

She looked at him in blank astonishment. “I beg your pardon?”

“I mean — well, I guess he wouldn’t want people to know he was...”

She narrowed her eyes and firmed her lips. Then she got up quickly and strode away, whirled and pointed a finger at him. “See? See what they do? So that’s what they made of it, eh? My God! Really! And you had to find out if those dirty little fibs were true, didn’t you?” She moved closer. “I built this house to suit me! I built it with money from my husband’s estate. Ferris Fontaine was an old and dear friend. When he asked if he could use my home for little political meetings now and then, I was glad to say yes. I was honored! That’s the reward for friendship. My God, it’s really pathetic! What foul little minds people must have to really believe I was dear Fer’s mistress. A man so old! How could you believe it, Olly?”

“I didn’t,” he said earnestly. “Not really. Before I ever even met you, I didn’t believe it.”

She sat by him, smiled, patted his knee. “Thank you, dear. Let’s change the subject. It makes me angry. Are your people curious about why you got home so terribly late?”

“I coasted the last half block and into the driveway with the lights and motor off.”

“That was very clever, dear.”

“Nobody said anything about it today.”

After a silence she leaned her forehead against his shoulder and said in a small voice, “Do you know what you do when something keeps on seeming so unreal? You find out just as soon as you can if it was really real.”

She walked her fingers up his broad hard chest and, starting at the throat, undid the first three brass buttons.

“Right n-now?” he asked hoarsely.

She straightened and looked at him. He had gone pale enough to make his tan look odd. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

“My darling, we’ll try to get along without any rules at all, but there should be one rule. Whenever we want each other as desperately as we do right now, we’ll never let anything stand in the way. Be a dear and go pull those draperies. The cords are over at the right.”

She turned her head and looked at the clock radio near the bed and saw that it was three thirty in the afternoon. She rolled her head back on the pillow and saw that the boy would soon be fast asleep. She bit her lip and debated changing the schedule she had planned for him. He was adapting more swiftly than she had estimated.

Funny, she thought, how often Phil Kerna kept coming back into her mind. All tenderness and cajolerie and sweet words until he had slipped the collar around your neck so deftly you hardly noticed it. Then he could risk the flat hateful stare, give the harsh commands, knowing a humble obedience was your only choice.

“Oliver!”

“Uh?” he said, and opened his eyes, focused on the face so close to his.

She hitched herself up, resting her weight on her elbows so she could look down into his eyes in the half light of the draperied bedroom. She studied him with a flat, bright, questing stare, unsmiling, until he asked her if something was wrong.

“I was wondering about something, Oliver.”

“Wondering what?”

“Perhaps I was wondering if you think this is some sort of a game. A little diversion.”

His eyes widened. “Honest, Crissy, I...”

“You must understand that I am a very intense person, darling. As soon as I’m certain that you mean as much to me as — I think you mean right now, there aren’t going to be any half measures for me. For me it is going to be a hundred and ten percent. Or nothing at all.”

“But...”

“Let me tell you the whole thing, dear. I told you we would be dreadful sneaks until I am sure. And that gives you an opportunity to have your cake and eat it too, you know. I was wondering if that is the kind of man you are.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Have you forgotten the long talk we had in the middle of the night? I guess you could call it the confession hour. As I understand it, if you weren’t lying, I’m the second woman in your life, and Betty was the first. Did I say ‘was’? Excuse me. We’re keeping us a secret from the world, for a little while. And from Betty. That gives you quite an interesting life, doesn’t it? Two women saying yes to you. Does it give you a sense of power, Oliver?”

“Crissy, believe me, that wasn’t anything like...”

“Correct me if I read you wrong, dear. You said that you and your dear little Betty have been going steady for three years, and two years ago you — ah — slipped. Wasn’t that the word you used? And you vowed, both of you, it would never happen again, but it did. And you finally, after you’d slipped enough times, decided that as you were to be married eventually anyway, you might as well enjoy each other.”

“But it isn’t...”

“Perhaps I’m jealous, darling. Do you mind terribly? When you aren’t here with me, there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t be lifting her little skirts. She’s probably very attractive. And quite a lot younger than I am.”

“It was just kid stuff. I know that now, Crissy. It didn’t mean anything.”

“And you’ll never touch her again?”

“Never. Honest. I swear I won’t.”

“Thank you, dear. But I do think you should put temptation out of your path.”

“What do you mean?”

“Break it up, dear. End it. I don’t care how you manage it, but I think it should be all over within — three days. If you are going to get a hundred and ten percent of me, I demand a hundred and ten percent of you. I don’t share, dear. I don’t believe in sharing. You might be tempted to — find out if she is just the way you remember.”

“That’s — awful fast. What will I say to her?”

“My God, haven’t you two ever quarreled at all? Don’t you know by now what she gets mad at? Get into a brawl with her and walk out. Or just tell her very coldly you’ve out-grown her. There must be dozens of ways.”

“It’s going to hit her pretty hard.”

She thought, picked her words carefully. “I love your gentleness, and your kindness. But I want my man to be strong. If I can’t ask you to do such a small thing as that, how do you think it makes me feel? Secure? Loved? Perhaps — you’re not really ready for the big leagues, dear, where the grown-ups are. Maybe you’d be better off with your little Betty person after all.”

“No! Listen. I’ll do it. I just said it’s going to be hard on her. She thinks we’re — you know. All set. There — there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you.”

She lowered herself, dug her face into his throat, sighed comfortably and said, “We have to be strong, dear. Both of us. Strong and selfish. We have to remember that there isn’t anybody or anything else in the world that means a damn, not really. We’re all that counts. You and I. Oliver and Cristen. Hold me, darling.”

Soon, in an automatic and almost absent-minded way she began the little trickeries of arousing him, thinking as she did so that he would get rid of Betty just as he had promised. It was the first small test of how strong his infatuation was becoming. It was astonishing how compulsive the flesh could become when it was their first affair with a mature woman, rich, ripe and skilled, and so startlingly without shame or reserve, so unexpectedly frank in the giving and taking of pleasure, so impatient when her cues were misunderstood or overlooked. Then, as their clumsiness and timidity diminished, they were made ever more blind by sensation until, finally, it was such a necessary thing for them to keep experiencing, they would sacrifice everything else in the world to sustain it, and, finally, would reach that stage wherein all of life outside the bedroom walls was a vagueness, a dream-walking hallucination, a place of those shifting shadows which had once been real people, real objects, real goals and ambitions.

The practices demanded only a portion of her attention, and her thoughts ranged far as she pleasured the boy. There was one daydream that was becoming more real to her each time she experienced it. It happened a long time from now. It happened after everything had gone just as she had planned it, and after she was safe, and far away. There would be the years of heats and wanting, and at long last that too would be all burned away, and peace would come to her.

It will be a faraway place, she thought, a house above a lagoon, and I shall be old. I shall be wise. I will have young servants, brown and beautiful and smiling people who love me. There will be legends about me, none of them true. When the fires are burned out, then what is left will be goodness and kindness, and I will be able to forgive them all...

The boy slid into the heaviness of spent sleep, and she got up and freshened herself, went back and set her alarm for six thirty and was soon napping comfortably beside him.