"C'mon baby, leave the goddamn drink. I gotta bottle in the room."
Ollie, the machinery salesman, peered impatiently at Erica Trenton in the semidarkness, across the small black table separating them.
It was early afternoon. They were in the bar of the Queensway Inn, not far from Bloomfield Hills, Erica dawdling over her second drink which she had asked for as a delaying device, even though recognizing that delay was pointless because either they were or weren't going through with what they had come here for, and if they were they might as well get on with it.
Erica touched her glass. "Let me finish this. I need it."
She thought: He wasn't a bad-looking man, in a raffish kind of way. He was trimly built and his body was obviously better than his speech and manners, probably because he worked on it - she remembered him telling her with pride that he went to a gym somewhere for regular workouts. She supposed she could do worse, though wished she had done better.
The occasion when he had told her about workouts in the gym had been at their first meeting, here in this same bar. Erica had come for a drink one afternoon, the way other lonely wives did sometimes, in the hope that something interesting might happen, and Ollie had struck up a conversation - Ollie, cynical, experienced, who knew this bar and why some women came to it. After that, their next meeting had been by arrangement, when he had taken a room in the residential section of the inn, and assumed she would go to it with him. But Erica, torn between a simple physical need and nagging conscience, had insisted on staying at the bar all afternoon, and in the end left for home, to Ollie's anger and disgust. He had written her off, it seemed, until she telephoned him several weeks ago.
Even since then, they had had to delay their arrangement because Ollie had not come back from Cleveland as expected, and instead went on to two other cities - Erica had forgotten where. But they were here now, and Ollie was becoming impatient.
He asked, "How about it, baby?"
Suddenly she remembered, with a mixture of wryness and sadness, a maxim on Adam's office wall: Do it TODAY!
"All right," Erica said. She pushed back her chair and stood up.
Walking beside Ollie, down the inn's attractive, picture-hung corridors - where many others had walked before her on the same kind of assignation - she felt her heart beat faster, and tried not to hurry.
Several hours later, thinking about it calmly, Erica decided the experience was neither as good as she had hoped for, nor as bad as she had feared. In a basic, here-and-now way, she had found sensual satisfaction; in another way, which was harder to define, she hadn't.
She was sure, though, of two things. First, such satisfaction as she had known was not lasting, as it had been in the old days when Adam was an aggressive lover and the effect of their love-making stayed with her, sometimes for days. Second, she would not repeat the experience - at least, with Ollie.
In such a mood, from the Queensway Inn in late afternoon, Erica went shopping in Birmingham. She bought a few things she needed, and some others she didn't, but most of her pleasure came from what proved to be an exciting, challenging game - removing items from stores without payment. She did so three times, with increasing confidence, acquiring an ornamental clothes hanger, a tube of shampoo, and - especial triumph! - an expensive fountain pen.
Erica's earlier experience, when she had purloined the ounce of Norell, had showed that successful shoplifting was not difficult. The requirements, she decided now, were intelligence, quickness, and cool nerve. She felt proud of herself for demonstrating that she possessed all three.