This was one of the most disgusting and yet memorable episodes of my naughty, naughty life. I only remember Andy by name, but if I ever see one of the others again, I shall have no trouble recognizing him.
When I attempted to tell Bob the next evening at the airport how I had managed to get the money together, he merely snapped, “I don't want to hear it!” I presume that he had an idea of what I might have been through and he did not want to admit to himself that it was he who had been responsible for it.
We were both dead tired that night, so I was not too unhappy that he seemed in no mood to make love to me. Psychologically, it would have given me a lift, but I did not need sex. Instead, we spent most of the time talking about how we would work our little plot on Charley.
The next day was Saturday, and when Charley came to see me at two in the afternoon, we were ready. I played the role of the confused woman to the hilt, while Bob acted the part of the slightly peeved ex-husband. Poor Charley. He actually broke down and cried. There was no problem with him, really. He bowed out gracefully and muttered something about hoping his wife would take him back.
The confrontation with Kathy was fairly smooth too. She apologized to Bob for the lie she had told me, but what really hurt was the look in her eyes that she directed to me. We talked about it the next day when Bob was out on one of his mysterious “business” trips.
“I'm afraid of him, mother,” she insisted with dramatic seriousness. “He just gives me the creeps, and after all you told me he had taken you for… why did you let him come back?”
“Please believe that I had a very good reason, dear,” I asked her, noticing with pride how more beautiful and lovely she looked than last year even. “I don't think there's anything for you to worry about, dear. You admitted yourself that he never really did anything to you.”
“Oh, yeah… but you could tell he would have liked to,” Kathy said with a feigned shudder. “I know that look in a man's eyes when he wants to have sex with me. Like… I was riding the subway last December when we were in New York. This funny looking little man with real squinty eyes kept pushing against me until I could feel his thing get hard, Mother. I looked around and his eyes glowed with rape just like Bob's do sometimes when I'm in baby-dolls or shorts.”
“What happened after that… on the subway?”
“Eee-yuk!” she spat distastefully. “The creep licked his lips and pushed up closer to me in the crowd and then zip! He ducked out the door just as the subway was ready to pull out of the station.”
“Bob would never do anything like that,” I told her, and I believed it.
“No… not exactly,” she agreed, but added, “He does other things though, like in the bathroom. He left the door open when he was shaving and I was sitting on the stairway talking to Mary yesterday. I could look right in and see him. That was gross, Mother. Honestly. He was shaving so calmly, using both hands… and this thing came out of his shorts just like a snake, I swear. It flopped out and then it started growing and lifting up… zoo-oom! Oh, I thought it was a riot…”
“When was that? Yesterday morning?” I demanded, suddenly outraged. “Was he looking at you? Tell me?”
“Well… no. He wasn't exactly looking at me,” Kathy admitted, more in a laughing mood about than anything else. “But he knew I was there. He could hear every word I was saying to Mary. I had even said 'Hi' to him when I sat down to phone…”
I felt worse than some cheap whore. Bob had been making love to my daughter by proxy. This time, I knew it. There was no doubt in my mind. I remembered only too well that I had been making up the bed in our room when Bob finished shaving the day before, and he came in with an erection and took me by surprise, telling me that he was suddenly inspired to make love. It had been a wonderful session… until I found out the reason why.
“You still have this fixated idea, don't you?” was his reaction when I confronted him with it that night when Kathy had gone out, “You still have this incurable inferiority complex, this idea that you are incapable of arousing me while your daughter is.”
“Don't… don't try to fool me anymore, Bob,” I protested, shaking my head as I sat on the side of the bed and watched him casually begin to undress. “You let Kathy sit there and watch you get a hard on! You were excited BECAUSE she was watching you! Maybe what she was saying on the phone to Mary excited you I too! Bob, you…”
“Shut up and listen to me!” he almost lost control of his temper, grabbing me by the shoulders. “When I walked out of this bedroom to go in there and shave, I carried with me the vivid memory of your naked body in bed next to mine. Two minutes before, you had taken my penis in your hand, kissed it, and looked at me with that lustful expression of yours and said, 'Mm-mmm, I like him. Don't keep him away from me too long,' isn't that correct?”
“Yes,” I had to admit.
“And before that… when we first woke up, Denise, you had taken my hand and placed it between your thighs to show me how wet you were! Right?”
“Yes, of course, but…”
“I'm a man. And like all men, I have a hard on when I get up, but I need to go urinate, right?”
“Yes.”
“So I went to the bathroom and did just that… WITH THE DOOR CLOSED!” he emphasized, releasing his grip on my shoulders and walking over to the dresser. “After that, if I may acquaint you with a few biological facts of the male, I was not erect, because I had to de-tu-mesce in order to urinate. Now… I put my organ back into my shorts and I opened the door while I was shaving. It has been common practice for me to do this, right?”
“Yes… we've become like a family… Kathy sees you in your shorts…”
“Kathy spoke to me as she walked by or something,” Bob went on, lighting a cigarette. “It was early morning. I was hardly even aware of her. My mind was much more taken with what I had just left in the bed-you! You do recall that you have expressed a desire that I shave prior to intercourse?”
“Yes…”
“That was the reason I chose to shave, my dear,” he brought his point dramatically home, “My entire mental concentration was on you. I was thinking of coming back into the bedroom here and making love with you… that, my dear Denise, is why my penis erected while I was shaving! Why… why do you punish yourself like this? Why? Denise, you are a very sexy woman!”
“Will you… forgive me, Bob?”
How can I describe the rest of the summer except to say that it was a series of similar incidents? In looking back, it appears that these things came in regular cycles. Bob would make love to me on night or one day until I was literally exhausted. His staying powers were almost superhuman, it seemed. This would be followed by a period of deprivation, and I would think that he was never going to make love to me again. There would be the flirtations with Kathy too, and I realized more and more how two-sided they were. One night, I walked in on them unexpectedly while they were watching T-V in the den. They were sitting on opposite ends of the sofa, but Kathy had one of her breasts out the front of her baby dolls and it looked as if she was rubbing the nipple. I know Bob was watching, although he denied it. I felt his erection as soon as I sat down.
Before I knew it though, summer was over and Kathy was gone. I felt more confused than ever. It was almost as if the continual crises presented by the Bob-Kathy problem had been a way of life, a kind of replacement for the hectic swinging and part-time prostituting that kept me going before.
But Bob managed to introduce other intrigues. He would be gone for days or weeks at a time, then suddenly reappear in the middle of the night from out of nowhere. He took my car on most of these trips and ruined it in a wreck in Georgia that March. I saw the accident report listing a 29-year-old woman and a 14-year-old girl as occupants of the car. “The family of one of our men killed by the Commies,” he explained. And at the time, he made me believe it. When I was away for the state teacher's convention in April, I thought it would be Tuesday before I returned. We adjourned a day early, and I found a woman's suitcase and clothing in our bedroom when I arrived at the house. I didn't know what to do. I was actually afraid to stay there and face it when they both came back. Instead, I stayed overnight in a motel.