I swear by all that is holy to me, by my father’s insurance business back in Illinois. I have no intentions of any kind toward your daughter outside of friendship, although she is an attractive and well-bred young lady, as I have already said.
She is not so “young.” Look at the bathing suit she wears.
I had wondered about that …
Well. Hmm. Helga thinks that, you say, she and I …?
Exactly. That is straight from the horse’s mouth. And now, I think I’ve overstayed my welcome. I have to go and beat poor Ralph to a frazzle.
Thank — thank … you, Thebus. I’m sorry if I misjudged you. Ha ha! Don’t concern yourself an iota, John. I have nothing but the highest respect for you wanting to protect your daughter. You are a lucky lucky man. O.K., I’d better take a powder. Toodle-oo. Thanks again. Tom.
~ ~ ~
One night he dreams of Bridget. Rather, he dreams of himself and Bridget together as if he is a third person watching them. They are in the country, here in New Jersey, for that matter, in any event the softly tinted landscape is familiar. She is sitting on a split-log fence, one that no longer exists, but that he recognizes as one that used to fence off the field of timothy wherein Stellkamp now pastures his two old and blind horses. Bridget is in a new gingham dress of white with pale-yellow stripes and a stiff white collar, and is half turned toward him standing next to her, smiling down at his hands, which are clasped on her knee. Her small feet are shod in black kid boots with tiny mother-of-pearl buttons and between the top of her right boot and the white cotton petticoats thickly swirling from beneath her dress can be seen — he sees — an inch or so of dully gleaming black silk stocking. He is also smiling in a curiously secretive way, smiling, or so it seems, into himself. He appears to be tremendously pleased, natty in a light-grey tropical worsted suit, a boater with a red-and-blue-striped band, a dark-blue four-in-hand, and gleaming white French-toed shoes. Behind them the fields are luminous green. Bridget slowly reaches toward him, still smiling, and touches lightly his clasped hands, then presses upon them to increase their weight upon her knee. He watches himself turn his head toward her and then up so that he is looking into her face, and he is not at all surprised to find that he is looking into the face of Jean Whiting, Bud Halloran’s secretary of some ten years back. Jean smiles at him, her lips full, swollen, shining with lip rouge as her eyes shine with lust. She leans back on the top rail of the fence with both hands and opens her thighs and he looks to discover that she is naked from the waist down, her pink sex wet and open to him. Still smiling, he reaches for it, his fingers trembling, and as he wakes he hears her low laughter transformed to the laughter of Helen Copan on the moonlit road below, saying good night to her lifeguard.
He starts to reach under the bed in the dark for his bottle of Wilson’s but then thinks better of it and lies back, still. The dream has upset him. He considers the wife who appeared in it, her gentle smile, so perfect that he almost believes that she always smiled that way. And his own contented and secret smile? That young man, he? The elegant angle of his boater. The crispness of his summer suit. He seemed so absolutely at ease with that young and adoring wife. Why did she turn into Jean Whiting?
Tears of self-pity come to his eyes as he realizes that he was indeed that young once, that Bridget had once, many times, many times, smiled at him that way — a girlish smile of acquiescence, surrender. Her surrender might have been, what? More complete? More abandoned. But it was as it was, and sweet, nonetheless. His face burns as he strikes against a fantasy that he has not entertained for years, and it seems to him that his wheezy breathing will awaken his grandson asleep across the room. When it first came to him he cannot remember, but it had been after the death of their second daughter, in the dark center of the sexual death that their lives had entered. The baby’s death was his responsibility. Bridget’s pregnancy had been his responsibility. His dirty needs, as she had phrased it, had sent the infant to her grave. May God forgive him.
Perhaps it had been after that night on which Bridget had allowed him, after so long, his desires. There had been an outing on the Fourth of July to the Rockaways and she had drunk two highballs and then, in the evening, three or four glasses of beer. Her mouth had opened. Her lips were wet and juicy and they had sweated together in the hot dark bedroom of the rented bungalow in Sheepshead Bay. She had licked and sucked his tongue to muffle her moans. He thought that their lives were changing, but that holiday expression of love had been an aberration, and they fell back immediately into their bitter celibacy. That may have been the time that his obsessive and recurring daydream began. It was so clear in his mind that he thought that had she looked into his eyes she would have there discovered it in impeccable clarity, a very picture of his shameful thoughts.
He is sitting in the leather Morris chair reading the paper after supper. Bridget has finished the dishes, and although Skip is asleep, she has not come to join him in their customary silence before he says, as he says each night, “About time to go for a pint.” He suddenly looks up, and sees her at the door of their bedroom, smiling at him in unutterable lasciviousness. Her hair is loose, falling over her shoulders and back, her dark coppery hair, and her face is almost grotesquely bright with rouge and powder. Her lips are fuller, her mouth wider. She is wearing a white linen chemise, the low front bordered with pale-pink embroidered roses. Below this garment, she is naked, her belly slightly rounded with the weight she has put on since their marriage, her sex hidden in luxuriant hair slightly darker than the masses on her head. Her strong straight legs are set slightly apart and her white silk stockings catch the soft glow of the bedroom lamp. They are rolled to just above her knees and there caught tightly by pink satin garters. On her feet are the white patent-leather shoes bought for their dead daughter’s christening and not worn since. She walks toward him, still smiling, her hips swaying, her face flushed with lust and her eyes softly virginal. Taking the newspaper out of his hands and dropping it on the floor, she bends over him, her knees drawing modestly together, her teeth wetly brilliant, and kisses him, their mouths awkwardly open. Her breasts fall out of her chemise and she laughs, her mouth still on his, and begins to stroke his hidden sex, laughing lower, and then she says filthy, forbidden things into his mouth, filthy, incredible things, which he begs her to repeat as he caresses her heavy breasts. She frees his aching phallus from his trousers and straddles him, one hand guiding him into her, the other cupping one of her breasts and pushing its stiff nipple into his slavering mouth. As he begins to suck at her furiously, she starts to pump up and down on him, sinking deeper and deeper onto his throbbing erection.
Skip was so goddamn het up about going into Hackettstown with that excuse for a man, Dave Warren, that John knew — wasn’t she his flesh and blood? — that she was going to make a horse’s ass of herself buying something or other to show off to Thebus. It better not be anything that makes her look like a cheap piece of trash, or by God he’d really put his foot down! He put on a long, sad face as he saw Billy come out on the porch and look across at him on the church steps, and then felt ashamed of himself, Christ, mixing the boy up in it, he must be getting dizzy. But the boy pretended not to notice him and went back inside, huh, she’s got him dead set against me, the mean old grandfather, sure. When the boy is a little older he’ll look back and be able to see himself what a shabby piece of goods this Thebus is. God forbid that he even remembers him!