Conceit? No, not really — at least she didn’t think so. She had an ability, she felt, to assess herself in a detached, realistic manner. She saw her body, for example, as a tool, even a weapon. Nice tits, nice ass, but like all tools (weapons), meaningless without the brains to put them to use.
Take her high school years, for instance. She’d blossomed rather late, well into her teens, and consequently had that muted contempt for her admirers that all former wallflowers feel. She used her good looks to be popular, to date the cutest guys from the wealthiest families, to be a cheerleader and homecoming queen candidate and generally overcome a somewhat poverty-stricken background. (Her father had worked for the railroad and earned a decent wage, but not decent enough to properly feed, house and clothe six kids, a wife, and mother-in-law. As the oldest, Julie had all but raised her two sisters and three brothers, as her mother had had enough to do just to cook, keep house, and look after her own ailing mother.) The highlight of her climb out of the lower middle class muck came shortly after graduation, when she won the home-town beauty pageant that could have led to Atlantic City and beyond, if it hadn’t come out about her and the one judge.
They let her keep her scholarship money (held in trust for use in educational pursuits only), and she eventually used it, to go to beauty school, but first she got knocked up by one of the few nonwealthy guys she’d ever gone out with, a sandy-haired football hero who she figured would probably go on to make a fortune playing pro ball someday. She began to think she’d figured wrong when he flunked out of school the first year, trying to study, play football, hold a job, and be a husband/father simultaneously. He got drafted. Sent to Vietnam.
She divorced him while he was still overseas. It was a gamble, because he still might come back and be a pro ball player and get rich, but then again he might also get his leg blown off over there, so she’d dumped him, left her kid (a girl) with her mother, who had the time to look after a kid now that most of her own were grown and gone and with Grandma dead and gone, and enrolled in beauty school.
That was where she had latched onto Claire. Claire was a rich man’s daughter and hadn’t been smart enough to make it in a real college or university and had ended up at the beauty school in Iowa City. Nobody at the school liked Claire because she was stupid and spoiled and a closet lez. But Julie liked Claire. Or anyway Julie liked Claire’s money, and soon they were roommates; she even gave Claire a free feel now and then. And when they got their diplomas and passed their state boards (the fix had to be in for Claire to pass, the stupid bitch) Claire’s rich old man had given her the beauty shop in West Liberty (which was a small town midway between Iowa City and Port City) as a graduation present And Claire had invited Julie along.
And Julie had gone, figuring it would do till something better came her way.
Like a George Rigley.
She’d known it would only be a matter of time before a George Rigley entered her life. A wealthy, my-wife-doesn’t-understand-me type who wanted some nice, young, sympathetic snatch. And she was eager to fill that role... until the time came when she could take over the wife’s role, and step into the plush, easy life hard cash could bring.
But it had taken her longer than she’d thought: her small-town location limited her prospects, and the two men who preceded Rigley as her benefactors (an attorney from Iowa City and a doctor in West Liberty) had not proven the long-term meal ticket she’d hoped.
Then, finally, three years ago last summer, she met him. She’d been on the prowl, sitting at the bar in that new place in Iowa City, the Pier, wearing as little as possible — baby-blue flimsy halter and short shorts. George Rigley, sitting a stool or two away, asked her if he could buy her a drink; she’d said he could, and it went on from there. He was at first as smooth and superficial as he no doubt was when he was sitting behind his desk at his bank. But later, after they’d taken a table off in a properly dark and secluded corner, he’d blurted out, “Listen, I’m nervous as hell. I mean, I’m new at this, and you’ll have to forgive me if it shows.”
She’d given him a coy smile and said, “New at what? Forgive you if what shows?”
“What I’m saying is it’s been a long time since I’ve tried to make conversation with a pretty girl.”
“Don’t you mean it’s been a long time since you tried to make a pretty girl, period?”
And he’d grinned. An honest and shy sort of grin that had been her first peek behind his executive mask. Her first peek at the insecure child lurking behind his plastic, practiced pose. And a child needs a mother. And a mother can manipulate a child into doing most anything, if a mother is ballsy enough...
So she had listened patiently to the story of Rigley and his wife, and of his recently dissolved affair with a friend’s wife (though she guessed there’d been several of those over the years) and of the unhappiness he was experiencing as he sank deeper into middle age, most of it because of a marriage that had been a good one once but now was stagnant, without even the usual children to hold it together. It wasn’t a new story, or even a very interesting one, but she wasn’t looking for a new and interesting story — just one with money in it.
And money had come her way during her three years plus as George’s secret little girl friend. He provided the cottage (which was, of course, more a house than cottage), and though on paper she paid him rent it was more the other way around. She continued to work with Claire at the beauty shop in nearby West Liberty but only to keep appearances up, only until she could step completely into the wife’s role and trade in the cottage, nice as it was, for a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar home the likes of the one the present Mrs. Rigley was using to do her drinking in.
Julie would have it all, if George held up through the strain of the days ahead.
Well, she thought, rinsing her hair tinder the cold rush of water from the tub’s faucet, I’ll just have to see to it he does.
Because she was not about to spend her life a damn kitchen slave like her mother, or as a lousy shitty working girl slaving her ass off over fat old ladies and their thin gray hair, no goddamn way in hell. She’d have a life worth the living or not at all. A life with money in it. A life that would be one long, luxurious bath.
She stepped out of the tub, then stroked her body dry with a crushed-cotton towel and wrapped another towel, turbanlike, around her damp hair.
The bedroom was dark.
She slipped under the sheets.
She touched the side of his face and said, “Do it to me, honey.”
And let him.
And afterward she cradled him in her arms, patted him, soothed him. He was trembling. The sex hadn’t taken care of his trembling.
“It’ll be over soon, honey,” she said. “We’ll be together and there’ll be no sneaking around and no worries. Just you and me and all that money.”
“Is that... that all I am to you? Money?”
There was no bitterness in his voice; more like fear.
“How can you even think that?”
“Would you... nothing.”
“Would I what?”
“Would you want me, even if I didn’t have the money?”
“You don’t have the money, George.”
“I’m going to. We’re going to. But would you? Love me? Without money?”
Would you love me without my tits, you silly ass?
“Of course I would,” she said.
10
George Rigley’s home was two miles outside the city limits, on a bluff overlooking the winding blacktop road that a mile later connected with the highway to Iowa City. Rigley’s was one of a handful of homes on the three-mile stretch of blacktop, which was a thickly wooded, exclusive area whose beauty was matched only by its real estate value. A gravel drive ascended the bluff to the sprawling wood and brick ranch-style home, with its private tennis court, swimming pool, and separate garage the size of an average house.