Chapter I: Part 1

JOURNEY TO
A WOMAN

An Original Gold Medal Novel by

ANN BANNON

Gold Medal Books
FAWCETT PUBLICATIONS, INC., _Greenwich, Conn._

Copyright © 1960 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.

First Printing, March 1960

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof.

All characters in this book are fictional and any resemblance to
persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Printed in the United States of America

Chapter One

She lay in the dark and cried. She lay close and warm in her husband’s arms while their breath slowed to normal and their hearts quieted together and she wept silently at his sigh of relief. She had learned to cry without making a sound. It had taken a while but she had had plenty of opportunities to learn. If he caught her crying there was always a terrible scene. He started out by questioning her love and ended by questioning his own manhood.

“Goddamn it, Beth!” he had cried to her once, when they had been married only two months, “if I’m doing it wrong, _tell_ me! How do I know what you want me to do if you don’t tell me? A woman isn’t like a man. I can’t tell if it’s any good for you or not.”

He was blaming her for his own faults of love, she thought, and, stung, she snapped back, “What am I supposed to do, give you a play-by-play analysis? Can’t you figure it out for yourself, Charlie? You did well enough before we were married.”

“So did you, before we were married,” he flung at her. He got out of bed, lighted a cigarette in the dark, and sat down on the floor. They could not afford chairs yet, and he didn’t want to share the bed with her for a few minutes. Not until the anger wore off.

“Beth, you’ve got it just backwards,” he said. “Most girls can’t enjoy it until they’re married. Their consciences hurt, or something. They’re afraid they’ll get pregnant. But not you. Not Backwards Beth. The minute we get married it’s no fun any more. Does love have to be immoral or illegal before you can enjoy it, honey?”

Insulted, she turned her back to him and pulled the covers over her disappointed body. She was afraid to think of what he had just said. It had too much the shape of truth and she had had to work very hard to forget it completely. Charlie finished his cigarette and climbed gingerly back into his place in bed, more chilled by his wife’s behavior than the night vapors.

It had been nine years since the first such quarrel. There had been others, but Beth had learned fast to hide the tears of frustration. True to her contrary nature, there were times when she loved Charlie—if love can be an on-again, off-again affair. And sometimes, when she didn’t expect it, desire sneaked up on her and made the moments in his arms unbearably lovely, the way they had been in college. But that was only sometimes, and sometimes was not enough.

On this night, like so many others, she got up after he had fallen back to sleep and went into the bathroom and washed herself. It comforted her obscurely to tidy herself up this way. And when she went back to bed, she dreamed. Beth dreamed often and vividly.

But tonight it wasn’t a dream like any other. She dreamed of Laura. Just Laura, sitting on the studio couch of the room they had shared in college, looking at Beth and smiling. Laura with her long light hair and periwinkle eyes. Laura, who didn’t know herself until Beth discovered her. Laura, who loved her and who had disappeared from her life like frost from a spring lawn, and who never came back.

That was all. Beth spoke her name, trying to make her answer and explain herself, but Laura only sat and smiled. Beth repeated the name until suddenly she wakened and pressed a hand over her mouth. Had she spoken aloud? But Charlie slumbered undisturbed and she relaxed again, leaning back on her pillow and staring at the dark ceiling.

_I haven’t even thought of her for months_, she pondered. _How strange. It’s been years since I dreamed of her. I’d half forgotten. I wonder how she is ... where she is. In Chicago with her father, I suppose. He always ruled her life like a tyrant. She wouldn’t have married, of course._

In the morning she told Charlie, “I dreamed of Laura last night.”

“Oh?” He looked up from the financial page of the paper. He spoke casually enough, although he stiffened inwardly. Charlie remembered Laura, too. A man does not easily forget a rival and for a few months, many years ago, when they were all in college, that was what Laura had been. A strange cool girl she was, with a capacity for violent love that Beth had almost accidentally roused. It had only lasted a short while—the space of a semester—and for Beth it had not seemed serious, for she was falling in love with Charlie at the time, and Charlie won her handily. That was when Laura had disappeared.

Beth and Charlie had talked it over, had even tried to help Laura. There was little about the curious affair that Charlie didn’t know; little that he couldn’t forgive. And, it should be added, little about it that he understood.

When he and Beth married he was confident that she would forget it, and to a large extent she had. At first, anyway. She liked men, she was married to one. She had children now and a stable home. Most important in Charlie’s eyes, she had _him_. And besides, she was a sensible girl. When Laura dropped out of Beth’s life physically, Charlie had faith that she would drop out emotionally as well.

Beth had rarely mentioned Laura over the years, and now, when she spoke of her dream at the breakfast table, it was the first time Charlie had even thought of Laura in over two years. So he was startled, but he didn’t want it to show.

“What was the dream?” he asked.

“Not much. Just Laura, sitting there.”

“Where?”

“That room we had on the third floor at the Alpha Beta house.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all. Polly, damn it, don’t wipe your fingers on your dress!” Her four-year-old daughter grabbed a paper napkin guiltily.

“Don’t swear at the kids, honey,” Charlie said mildly.

“Don’t scold me in front of them,” she said.

He sighed, feeling a quick hot frustration, a sensation that was much too common for comfort these days, and picked up the paper again. “What else about Laura?” he said.

“Nothing else. Silly dream.”

But it haunted her. And Charlie had a feeling there was more to it than she told him. He kept his eyes on the paper another five minutes and then rose from the table. “Got to get going,” he said. He kissed his two children goodbye and then came around the table behind Beth.

“’Bye, honey,” he said into her ear, and blew into it gently.

“Have a good day,” she said absently.

He wished gloomily that she would see him to the door.

“Daddy, when you get home will you make me a kite?” Skipper said suddenly. He was five, just a year older than his sister, and he looked very much like Beth.

“Sure,” Charlie said, still looking at the short dark curls on the back of his wife’s head. He stroked her neck with his finger.

“Yay!” Skipper cried.

Beth squirmed slightly, irritated by Charlie’s wordless loneliness and a little ashamed of herself. Charlie left her finally and went toward the front door, slipping into his suit coat as he went. Beth felt his gaze on her and glanced up suddenly with a little line of annoyance between her eyes.

“Something wrong?” she said.

“No. What are you doing today?”

“I’m flying to Paris,” she said sarcastically. “What else? Want to come?”

“Sure.” He grinned and she softened a little. He was handsome, in a lopsided way, with his big grin and his fine eyes. The kids set up a clamor. “Can I come too? Can I come too, Mommy?”

And when Charlie went out the door he heard her shout at them in that voice that scared him, that voice with the edge of hysteria in it, “Oh, for God’s sake! Oh, shut up! Honest to God, you kids are driving me insane!”

And he knew she would slam something down on the table to underline her words—a jam jar or a piece of tableware, anything handy.

He drove off to work with a worried face.

Chapter Two

Beth loved her kids the way she loved Charlie: at a distance. It was a real love but it couldn’t be crowded. She had no patience with intimacy. The hardest years of her life had been when the two babies arrived within eleven months of each other. One was bad enough, but two! Both in diapers, both screaming and streaming at both ends. Both colicky, both finicky eaters.

Beth was completely unprepared, almost helpless with a screaming nervousness that put both Charlie and the kids on edge. She never quite recovered from her resentment. A few years later, when the worst was over, she began to wonder if her quick awful temper and desperation had made the children as nervous as they were. She blamed herself bitterly sometimes. But then she wondered how it could have happened any other way.

But when Polly shut herself in a closet and cried all afternoon, or Skipper threw a tantrum and swore at her in her own words, or when Charlie sulked in angry silence for days on end after a quarrel, she began to wonder again, to accuse herself, to look wildly around her for excuses, for escape.

Beth had just one friend that she saw with any regularity, and that was the wife of Charlie’s business partner. Her name was Jean Purvis, and she and Beth bowled together on a team. Beth had been searching for ways to get out of it since she had started it. Bowling bored her and so did Jean. But you couldn’t help liking the girl.

Jean Purvis was a good-hearted person, a natural blonde with a tendency to plumpness against which she pitted a wavering will power. She had two expressions: a little smile and a big smile. At first Beth envied her sunny nature, but after a while it got on her nerves.

_She must have bad days like other people_, Beth thought. _She must get mad at her husband once in a while._

But if Jean ever did it never showed and her eternal smile made Beth feel guilty. It was like an unspoken reproach of Beth’s sudden wild explosions and cloudy moods, and it made her resent Jean; it made her jealous and contemptuous all at once.

Jean Purvis and her husband Cleve were the only people that Beth and Charlie knew when they first moved to California. Cleve and Charlie were business partners now, manufacturing toys, and it had been Cleve’s drum-beating letters that encouraged Charlie to give up his law apprenticeship and move to the West Coast.

Beth reacted angrily at first. “I like the East!” she had exclaimed. “What do I know about California? Everybody in the country is headed for California. It’ll be so crowded out there pretty soon they won’t have room for the damn palm trees.”

“Cleve has a good start in business,” Charlie said.

“Charlie, what in God’s name do you know about making toys? I’d be glad if you’d make one decent slingshot for Skipper and call it quits,” she told him.

But his stubborn head was already full of ideas. “One craze, one big hit—we’d strike it rich,” he said. “One Hula Hoop, one coonskin cap, something like that.”

“You sit there like a grinning happy idiot ready to throw your whole career, your whole education, out the window, because your old fraternity buddy is making plastic popguns out in Pasadena and he says to come on out,” Beth cried, furious. “I don’t trust that Cleve Purvis anyway, from what I’ve heard about him. You always said he was a heavy drinker.”

But he had made his mind up, and with Charlie that was the same as doing a thing. He could not be moved.

* * * * *

Charlie left Beth and the two babies in Chicago with her uncle and aunt while he went out to Pasadena to join Cleve and find a place to live.

Beth loved it. Her Uncle John was fond of spoiling her. Beth was his daughter by proxy; he had no children of his own. She had been dumped in his lap, sobbing and runny nosed and skinny at eight years, when her parents were killed. Miraculously, she had learned to love him and he returned her love. With Aunt Elsa it was all a matter of keeping up good manners, and she was automatically friendly.

For four months Beth slept and ate and lazed around the house. It was delicious to be waited on, to have civilized cocktails in the afternoon, to let somebody else pick Polly up when the colic got her. To go out for whole evenings of food and glittering entertainment and know there were a dozen capable baby sitters at home. Beth refused to join her husband in California until she threw him into a rage.

She realized with something like a shock that she didn’t miss Charlie’s love-making at all. She missed _Charlie_, in a sort of pleasant blurry way, and she loved to talk about him over a cold whiskey and water, laughing gently at the faults that drove her frantic when they were together. But when she heard his anger and hurt on the telephone it came to her as a surprise, as if she would never learn it once and for all, that a man’s feelings are urgent, even painful. She remembered feeling it like that once, long ago, in college. Was it Charlie, was it really Charlie that did it to her? Or was it somebody else, somebody tall and slight and blonde with soft blue eyes, who used to sit on the studio couch in their room at the sorority house and gaze at her?

Charlie was in a sweat of bad-tempered impatience when she finally, reluctantly, agreed to come out and resume their marriage.

_Marriages would all be perfect if the husband and wife could live two thousand miles apart_, she thought. _For the wife, anyway._

And Charlie missed the kids. “He misses them!” she cried aloud, sardonically. But she knew if they were far away she would miss them too. She would love them at her leisure. They would begin to seem beautiful and perfect and she would forgive them their dirty diapers and midnight squalling sessions.

It scared her sometimes to think of this streak in herself; this quirk that made her want to love at a distance. The only person she had ever loved up close, with an abandoned delight in the contact, was ... Laura. Laura Landon. A girl.

Charlie drove her home from the International Airport in Los Angeles. He was bursting with excitement, with things to say, with kisses and relief and swallowed resentments.

“How’s business?” she asked him when they were all safely in the car.

“Honey, it’s great. It’s everything I told you on the phone, only better. We did the right thing. You’ll love California. And I have a great idea, it’ll sell in the millions, it’s—oh, Beth, Jesus, you’re so beautiful I can’t stand it.” And he pulled over to the side of the road, to the noisy alarm of the car behind him, and kissed her while Skipper punched him in the stomach. He laughed and kept on kissing her and they were both suddenly filled with a hot need for each other that left them breathless. Beth felt a whole year’s worth of little defeats and frustrations fade and she wished powerfully that the children would both fall providentially asleep for five minutes. She was amazed at herself.

They got home after an hour’s driving on and off the freeways. It was a small town just east of Pasadena: Sierra Bella. It was cozy and old and very pretty, skidding down from the mountains, with props and stilts under the oldest houses.

It was quite dark when they drove into their own garage and Beth couldn’t see the house very well. But the great purple presence behind them was a mountain and it awed and pleased her. She was used to the flat plains and cornfields of the Midwest. Below them were visible the lights of the San Gabriel Valley: a whole carpet of sparklers winking through the night from San Bernardino to the shores of the Pacific.

“Like it?” Charlie said, putting an arm around her.

“It’s gorgeous. Is it this pretty in the daytime?”

“Depends on the smog.” He grinned.

Inside the house she was less impressed. It was clean. But so small, so cramped! He sensed her feelings.

“Well, it’s not like Lake Shore Drive. Uncle John could have done better, no doubt,” he said.

“It’s—lovely,” she managed, with a smile.

“It’s just till we get a little ahead, honey,” he said quickly.

Beth fed the children and put them to bed with Charlie’s help. And then he pulled her down on their own bed, without even giving her time to take her clothes off. For fifteen minutes, in their quiet room, they talked intimately and Charlie stroked her and began to kiss her, sighing with relief and pleasure.

Suddenly Skipper yelled. Bellyache. Too much excitement on the plane. Beth jumped up in a spitting anger and Charlie had to calm the little boy as best he could.

Beth was surprised at herself. She was tired and she had had an overdose of children that day. And still she responded to Charlie with a sort of wondering happiness. She didn’t want anything to intrude on it or spoil it. Maybe this was the beginning of a new understanding between them, a better life, even a really happy one.

A half hour later Skipper woke again. Scared. New room, new bed, new house. And when Beth, nervous and impatient, finally got him down again, Polly woke up.

Beth’s temper broke, hard. “Damn them!” she cried. “Oh, damn them! They’ve practically ruined my life. They’re driving me nuts, Charlie, they’ll end up killing me. The one night we get back together after all these months—” she began to cry, choking on her self-pity and outrage—“those miserable kids have to spoil it.”

“Beth,” Charlie said, grasping her shoulders. His voice was stern and calm. “Nothing can spoil it, darling. Get a grip on yourself.”

Polly’s angry little voice rose over Charlie’s and Beth screamed, “One of these days I’ll croak her! I will! I will!”

And suddenly Charlie, who adored his children, got mad himself. “Beth, can’t you go for a whole hour without losing your temper at those kids!” he demanded. “What do you expect of them? Skipper isn’t even two years old. Polly’s a babe in arms. Good God, how do you want them to act? Like a pair of old ladies? Would that make you happy?”

“Now _you’re_ angry!” she screamed.

He clasped his arms against his sides in an expression of exasperation. “You were in love with me five minutes ago,” he said.

Beth didn’t know quite what had gotten into her. She was tired, worn out from the trip and the emotions, fed up with the kids. She had wanted him, coming home in the car. Now all she wanted was a hot bath and sleep.

She walked out of the bedroom and slammed the door behind her. But Charlie swung it open at once and followed her, turning her roughly around at the door to the bathroom.

“What’s that little act supposed to mean?” he said.

She stared at him and the kids continued to chorus their sorrows in screechy little voices. Charlie’s big hands hurt her tender arms and his eyes and voice had gone flat.

“I won’t argue,” she said, her voice high and shaky. “I won’t argue with you. You don’t understand anything about me. You never have understood me!”

He looked into her flushed face and answered coolly, “You never have understood yourself, Beth. If you knew who you really were it wouldn’t be so hard for me to know you. Or anybody else.”

That infuriated her. She hated to be told that she didn’t know herself and it was one of the things Charlie always told her when he was mad at her. She hated it the worse because it was true.

“You lie!” she cried. “You bastard!”

Charlie pushed her back against the wall, so hard that her head snapped and hit the plaster with a stuffy thump. He kissed her. He was not very nice about it.

“If you think you’re going to make love to me, tonight, after the way you’ve just been acting—” she panted furiously at him, struggling to free herself—“if you think I’ve come two thousand miles just to let you _rape_ me—”

“You shut up,” he said harshly, and kissed her again. He nearly crushed her mouth and she would have screamed again if she had been able. When he released her she slashed at him with her nails and he pulled her by her wrists back into the bedroom.

Beth tried all the old favored tricks of crossed women. She kicked, and flailed with her dangerous nails; she tried to bite him; she whacked him with a knife-heeled pump, thrilled to see a slightly bloody scratch bloom on his shoulder.

But Charlie smothered her with his big body. He just rolled on top of her and told her, “Shut up. You’re noisier than those poor kids you complain about all the time.” The sheer weight of him overwhelmed her. Struggle was futile, arguments were useless.

While he fumbled with her underthings she said, “You’re a brute. You bring me home to this miserable little cracker-box, you drag me all the way to California for this. _This!_” She tried to gesture at the four walls, to make him feel her disdain. “At least in Chicago I’m treated like a human being.”

He kissed her angrily.

“I _am_ a human being, in case you didn’t know.”

He kissed her again, and his hands found her breasts.

“If you touch me I’ll be sick. I’ll throw up every goddamn thing I ate on that plane. Including the biscuits.”

But he touched her. He touched her all over, shivering all through his large frame and groaning. Beth began to sob with hurt and confusion and rebellion. And most dreadful of all, most humiliating, with desire. She wanted him. He was wonderful like this, the live weight of him on her yielding flesh, the thrust, the warmth, the sweat, the sweet moaning. When he took her like this, like a master claiming a right, she submitted, and she experienced relief. She did not know who she was, but for a little while he made her think she knew. He made her feel her womanhood.

And when he had forced her to surrender once, she gave in again without fighting. He kept her busy for a long time. If the kids kept up the noise their parents didn’t know it and didn’t care. Charlie wouldn’t let her out of his arms. He wanted her there where he could fill his nostrils with the scent of her, his arms with the smooth round feel of her. Four months is a damn long time for a husband in love with his wife to make love to a pillow.

It had not been quite like that between them since their college days and it was not like that again very often.

Chapter Three

They fell into the routine then which became so dull and empty to Beth over the next few years. At first she was too busy getting settled in her new home to be bored. She inspected the holly, the palms, the poppies, the bamboo that grew, rare and exotic, in her own back yard. She breathed in the mountains in back and the sparkling valley in front. But little by little she grew used to them. You can’t live with the marvelous every day and keep your marvel quotient very high.

Charlie and Cleve worked hard on the toys, and Charlie loved it. He liked keeping his own hours, being the boss, running the show. Almost imperceptibly he began to take on the lion’s share of the work and, with it, the lion’s share of the decisions. He was willing to spend nights in the office working out new plans or briefing new men. It made Beth cranky with him. And the crankier she got the more he stayed away. It was the start of a vicious circle.

“It must be my fault. I must bore you to death!” she cried.

“No, Beth, you don’t bore me,” he said, climbing into his pajamas while she watched him from her place in the bed. “You scare me a little, but you don’t bore me.”

“I _scare_ you! Ha!” She said it acidly, but only to cover her chagrin. She didn’t dare to ask exactly what he meant, and he didn’t bother to tell her. But her fits with the children, her depressions, her lack of interest in the love that should have sparked between them, had something to do with it.

Charlie reached the point where he couldn’t tell if Beth ever wanted him or not. She got him, because he didn’t have the strength or the patience to turn monk. But there was none of the old smoldering response that had used to thrill his senses and reassure him of her answering passion. She was quiet and she made the minimum gestures mechanically. As he had blurted unintentionally, it scared him. Dismayed, he had tried once or twice to talk to her about it. Not knowing how to be subtle, he simply exclaimed that something was wrong and she had damn well better tell him what it was before it got worse. But Beth had given him a smirk of half amusement and half contempt that had withered his pride and driven him to silence.

So things rolled along. The business was never quite good enough to get them a bigger house or the flashy sportscar Beth wanted. Cleve was never quite drunk enough to botch his job. Beth didn’t have enough love and Charlie didn’t have enough insight. And that was their life.

For Beth it was dismal. She yearned for a diversion, an escape hatch, _anything_. Travel, a new car, an affair even. But all she had were her boisterous children, her irate husband, and bowling twice a week with Jean Purvis. Her mood was desperate.

Things took an odd turn finally, one night when Jean and Cleve invited Beth and Charlie to a birthday party. It was for Cleve’s sister, Vega Purvis. Beth remembered Vega very well. She had met her shortly after she arrived in California, and though she had never gotten to know Vega well, she was interested in her.

Vega was a model. She was a very tall girl, at least as tall as Beth herself, and excruciatingly thin. Throughout her twenties she had worked at modeling in Chicago and then suddenly came down deathly sick with tuberculosis, ulcers, and Beth had never known what else. Everything. It had meant the temporary finish to her working days and a long trip to the West Coast, where she went directly to the City of Hope for help. She was there for over two years.

Vega had sacrificed a lung to her tuberculosis, a part of her stomach to her ulcer, and perhaps more of herself to other plagues. And still she was stunningly beautiful. Still she smoked two or three packs of cigarettes a day—something that struck Beth as insane but rather wonderful, as if Vega had taken a bead on Death and spat in his eye. Nobody else would have gotten away with it. Vega brushed it off, laughing. “The first thing I asked for when I came out of the anesthetic,” she said, “was a cigarette. The doctor gave me one of his. Tasted marvelous.”

Vega had deep-set eyes, almost black, and fine handsome features, and she was witty and interesting. She was running her own model agency now on Pasadena’s fashionable South Lake Street—mostly teen-age girls, with one or two older women who took the course for “self-improvement.” Or, perhaps, self-admiration.

Beth recalled the night she had first met Vega. They waited for her, Cleve and Jean and Beth and Charlie, in a small restaurant near her studio. Vega came late. It was necessary to her sense of well-being that she arrive late wherever she went. So Charlie and Beth and the Purvises waited for her in a small booth in the Everglades, where everything was chic and expensive.

Vega swept in at last, forty minutes late, wrapped in a red velvet cloak, and she was so striking that Beth had stared a little at her. She sat down and ordered a Martini—double, dry, twist of lemon—before she greeted anybody.

She had a lovely face but it was, like the rest of her, painfully thin, with the fine bones sharply outlined. It soon became apparent why she didn’t put on weight. Vega rarely ate anything. She drank her dinner, though they had ordered her a steak. She seemed to depend on booze for most of her calories. Cleve persuaded her to take one bite, which she did, promising to finish the rest later—but of course she never did. Charlie and Cleve finally split the meat and ate it, but the rest was wasted.

Charlie was interested in her too. Beautiful women interest almost any man without making much of an effort.

“What do you do here, Vega?” he asked her. “Cleve said something about modeling.”

“I _teach_ modeling,” she said, accepting a fourth drink daintily from the waiter. “Women are my business. Men are my pleasure,” she added, smiling languidly.

Charlie smiled back, unaware of the silly look on his face. Beth saw it, but it didn’t alarm her. It struck her funny, and before she had time to think about it, she was laughing at him. And suddenly the fun and flavor went out of the game for him, and he turned his attention to his meal. Beth saw his embarrassment and rebuked herself.

_I should have been quiet, damn it_, she thought. _I should have let him have his fling. Such an innocent little fling. What’s wrong with me?_ But it was too late. Charlie was carefully casual with Vega the rest of the evening. It didn’t console him much, when he got home that night, to check his muscles in front of the mirror or stretch to his full six feet two. He was baffled and shamed by his wife, who laughed at even his normal masculine reactions. He was almost defeated by his inability to make Beth’s life mean something.

On Vega’s birthday night they waited, as before, at the Everglades for her entrance, drinking whiskey and waters, and talking. Beth felt warm and relaxed after the first two drinks and she squeezed Charlie’s arm. It caused him some concern, instead of reassuring him, because it was unexpected.

“Good whiskey?” he asked, nodding at her glass. That must be the source of her pleasant mood.

“The best,” she said and smiled. “Why aren’t you nice like this all the time?” she teased clumsily.

“I’m only nice when you’re a little tight,” he said. “The rest of the time I’m a damn bore.”

It was so short and sad and true that it almost knocked the breath out of her. She looked at her lap, despising herself for the moment, feeling the tears collect in the front of her eyes. When she had to reach for a piece of tissue to stem the flood he murmured, “I’m sorry. God, don’t do that in here.” He had a masculine horror of scenes, especially in front of Cleve and Jean. Jean had noticed the little exchange between them and her smile—her permanent smile—wavered, but Cleve was talking to her and didn’t see.

“Come on, honey, this is a birthday party,” Charlie whispered urgently in Beth’s ear, exasperated and helpless like all men before a woman’s public tears.

Beth pulled herself together. She would save her bad feeling for later. Now she wanted to enjoy herself, to let the liquor take over, and the muted lights and the piped music. She wanted to forget her kids, forget she was married. Charlie lighted a cigarette for her.

“Peace pipe,” he said. And when he snapped out the match he saw Vega coming and added, relieved, “Here comes the guest of honor.” He got up as she approached the table and took her coat for her.

“Thank you, Charlie Ayers,” Vega said with a smile. She had a habit of calling a man by his whole name, as if it made him completely special, unique, valuable—and perhaps a little bit labeled. But the men loved it. It sounded foolish when you tried to explain it to somebody else, because it was impossible to imitate Vega’s intonation, her peculiar lilting voice in its contralto register; but when she said your name, your whole name soft and low and very distinct, the whole company reacted. You were looked at, and the beautiful woman who had spoken to you was looked at, and it was a wonderful, slightly silly, but charming, ceremony.

Vega sat down between Cleve and Beth, and the waiter, who was an old buddy of hers, came up, as soon as she had adjusted herself, with her usual order: a Martini, double, dry, with a twist of lemon. The waiter went up to the bar as soon as she had thanked him for it and began mixing the next. She always took the first three or four on the run. It amazed Beth to watch her. Oddly, Vega never seemed drunk.

Vega was all in black with a single small diamond clip at her throat and diamond earrings. On her they looked real, whether they were or not. Vega looked very very expensive, though she was quick to tell you the price of anything she was wearing. Her clothes were usually bargains picked up at sales in the better shops. Some of the shops gave her discounts, in return for which she told people she bought her clothes exclusively from them. She had this arrangement with at least five shops, all of them unaware of the others, and she lied to them all with charm and grace.

Beth watched her with an interest that intensified as the total of highballs went up. There were two gifts in the center of the table, one from the Ayerses and one from the Purvises. Vega ignored them.

“I’ve been teaching my girls how to walk,” she told them. “To rock and roll records. Are you familiar with Elvis Presley?”

“Polly’s got a crush on him,” Beth said. “I think he’s godawful myself.”

“You’re wrong,” Vega said. “He’s very useful. Especially with a gang of teen-age girls. You put one of his records on and suddenly you’ve got—cooperation.” She emphasized the word and smiled. “They walk around the studio like so many duchesses—just what I want. I used to play Bing Crosby for them but all it got me was a slouch and a lot of behind-the-hands giggling. Now I play crap and suddenly they’re ladies.” She turned to Cleve. “Explain that to me, brother,” she said. “You know all about ladies.”

Cleve ran a finger over his moustache in the wrong direction. “Simple,” he said. “You have one rule: treat a bitch like a duchess and a duchess like a bitch. Never fails.”

“What has that got to do with Elvis Presley?”

“You didn’t _ask_ me about Elvis Presley.”

“Cleve, are you drunk?” Vega said. “It’s against the family rules. You can’t be. We never get drunk,” she explained to Beth and Charlie. “Limber, but never drunk.”

“You’re right.” Cleve ordered another round and when the drinks came he stood up and Beth saw that he really was pretty high. “A toast,” he remarked, “to my charming sister, who is thirty-nine years old today. For the fifth time.” He glanced down at her and Vega smiled seraphically at the ceiling. “Her company is charming,” Cleve went on, while heads turned to grin at him from across the room, “her face is beautiful, her manners are perfect. Thank God I don’t have to live with her. Vega, darling, stand up and take a bow.”

Vega stood up with a lovely smile and told him tenderly, “Go to hell.” They both sat down and drank to that while Jean laughed anxiously.

“They’re always like that,” Jean said. “It strikes me so funny.”

Beth wanted to put a gag on her. Jean only wanted to make it seem friendly, teasing. Everybody in the Everglades had heard her husband and his sister. She wanted them all to know it wasn’t serious.

But Beth liked to think they really hated each other, for some weird romantic reason. It gave an edge to the scene that excited her.

They ordered their meal and Vega, as always, ordered with them. Beth wondered why she bothered. Maybe it was just to give the men an extra helping. Maybe it was to ease her conscience about her drinking. At least if she had a plate of food in front of her she could always eat; she had a _choice_. If she didn’t order anything her only choice would be to drink, and the people with her would take it for granted she was a lush. That would never do, even when she was with her own friends, her own family, who knew the truth anyway. It just didn’t go well with her elegant exterior, her control.

So she ordered food, and ate one bite. It was a sort of ritual that comforted her and shut up the worriers in the party who tried to force French fries or buttered squash down her. When they had all finished she could divide her meal among the men unobtrusively.

Beth yearned to ask Vega how old she really was, but she didn’t dare. She wondered at her own curiosity. Everything about Vega seemed valuable and interesting that evening. The glamorous clothes, the strange feud with Cleve, the dramatic entrance, the illnesses, the modeling.

_I wonder how she’d like being a suburban housewife_, she mused, and almost laughed aloud. Vega, with kids. Vega, doing dishes. Vega, with—God forbid—a husband! On some women all the feminine ornaments and virtues only look out of place. Those women seem complete in themselves, and so it was with Vega. Beth couldn’t imagine her, sleek and tall and with a hint of ferocity beneath her civilized veneer, being domesticated by any man. There was something icily virginal beneath her sophistication that made Beth doubt whether Vega had ever given herself to a man.

Vega opened Beth’s birthday gift to her while the rest of them ate. “How did you know?” she said, so quietly that Beth almost missed it.

“It’s only a book,” Beth murmured.

“You picked it out yourself. I’ve been wanting to read it, too.”

It was such a personal exchange, almost intimate, that Beth was taken aback. Vega treated the book like a private present from Beth—as if Charlie, who after all paid for it and wrote his name on the card with his wife’s, had nothing whatever to do with it.

Beth found herself oddly drawn to this lovely, rather secretive woman; to the warmth of her voice and the way she spoke. Vega articulated carefully, conserving the small quota of air in her one remaining lung. And yet her voice carried. She had turned the handicap into an asset, learning to develop and project her voice with the skill of a musician. It was pleasant to hear her talk, and she arranged her breathing so artfully that one was never aware that it was a chore, or that her very life’s breath came to her in half doses.

At the end of the evening the three women went to the powder room together. Beth found herself impatient with Jean, wanting her out of the way.

_What for?_ she thought, amused at herself. And still her impatience persisted. She stood next to Vega at the mirror while Jean leaned against the wall and waited for them to finish with their makeup. Beth wanted to say something, something memorable and witty and complimentary to Vega, but her mind was too busy admiring the woman. She only stared at Vega’s large brown eyes and parted lips and puzzled over her.

“You know,” said Vega, startling her, “you should model. You have a good figure for it.”

Beth was nonplussed. When could Vega have studied her figure? But Vega was adept at observing people without seeming to. She had seen the restlessness in Beth, just as she had seen the ardent mouth and purple eyes and short brown curls, without apparently even looking at her. Now she turned to appraise her.

“I speak purely as a professional,” she said, her mouth showing a humorous twist at the corners. She gazed frankly at Beth now, up and down, stem to stern. “Turn around,” she said.

Beth said, “Vega, I could never model. I’m too old.”

“Nobody’s too old. Except my mother, and she was born fifty years B.C. You have nice hips, Beth.”

The remark, so casual, sent an unwelcome tremor through Beth, who tried to shrug it off. “I’m thirty,” she said. “Who wants to show their clothes on a thirty-year-old when they could show them on a teen-ager?”

“You’d be surprised,” Vega said. “Me, for one.” Beth stared at her. “Oh, not my own clothes. Only a scarecrow like me can squeak into those. I mean I like the way a woman your age wears her clothes, and so do the men who hire them. They have something no teen-ager has.”

“A woman my age?” Beth repeated dolefully.

Vega laughed. “You still look like a college girl, Beth. You aren’t, of course, let’s face it. But you look it.”

Beth gave her a wry grin. “I don’t know the first thing about modeling, Vega,” she said.

“I’ll teach you.”

Beth was secretly pleased, very pleased. But she wasn’t thinking of the makeup tricks, or the poise she might acquire. She was thinking, in spite of herself, of the pleasure of spending some time in Vega’s company. She had never been able to bring herself to form a lot of friendships with women. It was not possible for her to be friendly with them, curiously enough, just as it is rarely possible for a man to be friendly with women. Beth had known Jean Purvis for years now and knew her well, but they were still only acquaintances, not friends. And Jean, though she regretted it, understood this, and had given up long ago trying to pull Beth closer to her.

“I don’t know if I could afford it—” Beth began, but Vega interrupted her.

“It’s free, darling,” she said, with an injured air, and Beth, transfixed, felt the “darling” echo through her head with a dangerous delight. She hardly heard Vega add, “Charlie won’t mind. You have a housewife pallor, anyway. You need to get out. Come on down next week and we’ll make you over. Not that you need much remodeling.” Vega glanced again at Beth’s trim torso and smiled. Beth smiled back and there was a single brief electric pause before Vega said quickly, “Everyone all set? Let’s go.” And turned to leave.

The three of them filed out, Beth so close behind Vega that she stumbled against her once.

Chapter Four

Beth, riding next to Charlie on the way up to Sierra Bella, put her head back and pondered Vega’s offer with a smile.

“What’s up, honey?” Charlie said, seeing her expression in the red glow of a stoplight.

“Nothing.”

_She wouldn’t tell me to save her own skin_, he thought resentfully, and a wave of hatred for her secretiveness, her airs, came over him. He tried to swallow it down. He didn’t want to ruin another evening, and this one held promises. Just a few, but still, a few. She had been receptive, pleasant with him, at the Everglades.

“Have fun?” he said, starting the car up again as the light changed.

“Um-hm.” _How can I tell him so he won’t say no?_ she wondered. For she felt instinctively that he would object to her desire. It seemed to Beth that all the things she truly wanted to do, he didn’t want her to do. Travel—“You can’t leave me!” Work—“Your place is at home with the kids.” Hire a nurse—“_You’re_ their mother!” Get a little tight—“Beth, you’re turning into a damn souse.”

She thought he was staid, stuffy; he thought she was wild, or would be if he didn’t keep a tight rein on her.

They undressed quietly by the light of one dresser lamp, and Charlie, watching the clothes slip off her scented flesh, revealing the fluent curves of her back and breasts, felt his body flush all over. He was overcome with tenderness, with a desire for wordless communication.

_Just be gentle with me, yield to me this one night_, he thought, trying to press the idea into her head with the sheer force of wishing. He would never have spoken such a wish; it would have aroused her contempt, or worse, her amusement.

Beth pulled open the wardrobe door, reaching around the corner for her nightie. But he pulled her arm away. “You don’t need it,” he said. “Not tonight.”

She let herself be held, submitting quietly to his kisses. When he seemed all warm and loving and tractable she whispered, “Charlie, I’m going to study modeling with Vega. Starting next week.”

He only half heard. “Let’s not talk. Let’s not spoil it,” he said.

But she felt that if he didn’t acquiesce now, in the mood he was in, he never would. “If you don’t say yes I’m going to do it anyway,” she whispered into his ear.

“Do what?” he murmured, pulling her closer.

“And we’ll have one hell of a fight over it.”

“We’re not going to fight, darling,” he told her with the confidence of his passion. “Never again. We’re just going to make love twenty-four hours a day.”

“Where? The toy factory? That’s where you spend most of your time.” Her sarcasm cut through his euphoria and the words registered harshly in his ears. He shut his eyes tight, shifting his weight a little. “Not tonight, Beth,” he begged her. “Please, not tonight.”

The pleading in his voice irritated her. If she had been another kind of woman she might have responded with a wealth of sweet reassurance; she might have been _able_ to respond that way. But instead she felt disdain for him, the sort of scorn most women reserve for a man who shows himself a weakling. Charlie was not a weakling and Beth knew it. And yet it seemed that over the years, as the ominous cracks developed in their marriage, he had made most of the concessions to keep them together, and that too aroused her scorn. It was true that she would have suffered fits of guilt and loneliness if he hadn’t, and she was grateful to him for his “tact.” But the very role she forced him to play and thanked him for in her secret conscience, lessened him in her eyes.

Dimly, Charlie realized this too. But he was caught in the squirrel cage and there was no way out.

Carefully Beth said, “I just want you to say it’s okay.”

With a weary sigh he loosened his embrace in order to look at her. “Say what’s okay?”

“If I model with Vega a couple of days a week.”

His eyes widened then as he heard and understood, and he turned away from her, picking up his pajamas and carrying them in front of him. His unwanted love was too obvious and it embarrassed him. “Vega Purvis is a Class-A bitch,” he said.

Beth’s cheeks went hot with indignation. She whipped her nightie out of the closet and slipped it over her simmering head. If she threw her anger in his face now he would never agree to it. But to call Vega a bitch, when he hardly even knew her!

“I think she’s delightful,” she said haughtily, when the covering of the nightie gave her some pretense to dignity.

“Sure. Delightful. What in hell do you want to learn _modeling_ for? From that winesop?” He climbed under the covers and lighted a cigarette, and there was a flood of misery in him at the sight of her drawn up stiff and chilly in her resentment.

“You say modeling like you meant whoring!” she flashed.

“Well, what _does_ it mean?” he asked with elaborate courtesy. “You tell me.”

“I’d probably go down there once or twice a week,” she said, suddenly softening in an effort to bring him around. “It would be just for fun, not for money. I’d never model professionally. But it would be something to get me out of the house, something really interesting for a change. Not that goddamn interminable _bowling_ Jean dotes on.”

“I can’t see that walking around with a book on your head is so damn much more interesting than shoving a ball down an alley.”

Her fleeting softness vanished. “I _knew_ you’d be this way!” she cried. “Just because _I_ want something, you _don’t_ want it! When in doubt, say no. That’s your motto.” She continued to berate him for a moment until it became clear that he wasn’t listening. He was staring past her, beyond her, at nothing, thinking. And his eyes were dark and heavy. He held his cigarette in one hand, so close to his chest that she had a momentary fear the hair would catch fire and scorch him.

“Charlie?” she said, after a moment’s silence.

“Beth, tell me something,” he said seriously, and his eyes, still aimed at her, focused on her once again. “I want you to explain to me what is the matter with our marriage.”

For a long minute neither of them spoke. And then Beth sat down on the bed, at his feet, biting her lower lip. “You explain it to _me_,” she said.

“I’ll gladly tell you all I know,” he said. “I know we have two lovely children. I know we have a pleasant house to live in, even if it is small. I know _I_ love _you_.” There was a significant pause, in which she should have said, _Of course I love you too_. But she didn’t. He sighed. “I know we _should_ be happy. There isn’t anything specific you can put your finger on that’s out-and-out wrong with us. So why do we argue all the time? Why, when we’re still together, we still have each other, and things are going along the right way—_why_ aren’t we happy, Beth? Because we’re not. We sure as hell are not.”

Beth couldn’t look at him, at his frowning face. “If you’d pick up after yourself once in a while,” she said. “If you’d agree, just once, to let me do something I really want to do.” The spite in her voice piqued him.

“Oh! Now I understand. This would be a gloriously happy household if it weren’t for me, is that it? If the husband and father would just get the hell out, the family would be perfect. Right?”

“Cut the sarcasm, Charlie,” she said. She tried to sound firm but her chin trembled.

“I get it from you, dear. It’s catching,” he said. “Besides, I’m not convinced that you’ll swoon happily in my arms if I pick up my socks in the morning.”

She made a helpless gesture with her hands. “All right, Charlie, I’m at fault too. Is that what you want me to say? I fly off the handle, I’m cross with the kids. I—I—”

“You kick me out of bed three or four times a week.”

She turned a blazing face to him. “Charlie, goddamn it, I’m your wife. But that doesn’t mean that any time you feel like having me, I feel like being _had_. Three or four times a week is _too much_!”

“It didn’t use to be,” he said, his voice as soft as hers was loud. “What happened?”

Tears started to her eyes for the second time that evening and she turned away. “Nothing,” she exclaimed.

“Something must have happened, Beth. You just don’t want it any more. Ever. You give in now and then to shut me up—not because you really want me.”

She covered her face with both hands and wept quickly with fear and confusion. “I don’t _know_ what happened,” she admitted finally.