The thought of dying beneath Sully’s rage chilled her, but she could not really make herself believe it was more than a fraction of a possibility. Thus it bothered her less than the question of the sort of person into which she herself was evolving.
Or was that really it? She frowned, challenging herself. She was becoming a swinger, a sexual experimenter, and this did not bother her in and of itself. On the contrary, she was surprised how easy it was for her to accept these changes in her own attitudes. As long as she and Sully were content with the pattern of life they led, nothing else really mattered much to her. She had no friends, and since she had married Sully she had never been unpleasantly conscious of the absence of friends.
She closed her eyes tightly, then opened them wide. She knew what it was.
What bothered her was the thought of other people knowing. What bothered her, what summed it all up, was that Warren Ormont had been able to approach her out of the blue with total assurance that she would be game for what he and his friend had in mind. She did not know Warren Ormont. And he did not know her. Yet he had known.
She positioned herself in front of her mirror and studied herself very carefully. She had examined herself in this fashion at other times in her life. When she got her period for the first time. When she lost her virginity. On each occasion it had seemed as though her face ought to reveal the changes in her body, and on each occasion she had sought such facial revelation in her mirror with no success. If there were changes they were all beneath the skin.
And now? Was there more tension in the corners of the eyes? Did the nostrils tend to flare? Did her mouth show a pout of petulance or lust or abandon? If so, she saw no evidence. Or was it in her walk, or her speech? If so no mirror could show it to her.
Either he had seen something or he had heard something, and in either case she was troubled. Of course the most obvious explanation lay in the fact that Bert must have noticed her weeks ago at the Carversville Inn. But she had gone there only once, and she had not thought her availability was quite that obvious. Even if he had reported that she had gone out looking for a man, why would that lead them to believe she was looking for far-out sex? Why?
It was this goddamned town, she thought suddenly. New York or Chicago or Los Angeles none of this would be a problem. There she and Sully could choose their friends and acquaintances from people like themselves. Or they could have no friends, could take their sexual pleasure with strangers and be utterly ignored by neighbors. But in a town the size of New Hope there was no such compartmentalization. Men with whom she slept would turn up at the Barge Inn for a drink, and she would run into their wives at the market or under the dryer. That added spice, but it also added an unmistakable element of danger.
Did everyone know? Was the whole town talking about her? Men did talk. You couldn’t expect them all to keep silent. Sooner or later it was inevitable that she would be talked about throughout the county. She wondered if she could handle that. She wondered if Sully could handle it. If worse came to worst, they could move, they had already discussed the possibility, but she did not want to move and neither did he.
And she certainly did not want to have to move.
She turned off the television set, went downstairs, fixed herself a cup of instant coffee. Then she made a pot of regular coffee so that it would be there for Sully when he came home. He would sit around drinking coffee and waiting for her while she played bizarre games with a couple of faggots. It seemed that making the coffee for him was the least she could do.
Faggots.
This puzzled her. She had never known a homosexual well, and she had always taken it for granted that a faggot was a faggot and that they only did it with each other. They were not supposed to be interested in women. But Warren had been unmistakably interested in her. She remembered the expression on his face when she had taken him up on his invitation to examine his erection with her foot. She had instantly kicked off her shoe and plopped her foot in his lap, and he had obviously never expected her to do so. His face, however, had shown surprisingly little of his surprise. Well, perhaps that was to be expected; he was an actor, after all.
Not even an actor could will an erection into existence. And that erection had been real enough, big and hard, warm when her toes gripped it.
She could have done him with her toes. The current that flowed between them then had been that strong. And she remembered his hand on her foot. He had stroked her foot as any lover might have done. There was nothing faggoty in the way he had handled her foot. And nothing equivocal in her response to that handling.
She pictured Warren now, the eyes glinting at her through the rimless eyeglasses, the high forehead, the sharp hawk nose. She heard his voice in memory, caught all the special inflections, the campy mannerisms. Everything about him proclaimed his homosexuality, and it was absurd to imagine herself responding to this proclamation. And yet she had responded and could not deny it. Part of the response, of course, was excitement over the underlying kinkiness of the situation. But not all of it, for a part of it was a response to his very definite masculinity.
There was so much she did not know, not merely about herself but about the way people behaved in general. So very much she did not understand.
Had Sully ever done things with another man? Earlier the thought would have been laughable, but now she was not so sure. How could anyone be sure of anything? If she had learned nothing else, she had learned that there was very little you could be sure of. She tried to imagine Sully with another man. She tried to picture him on his knees before another man, with the man’s cock in his mouth. But she could not bring the picture into focus.
Sully was completely male, utterly male. And she herself was utterly female, and yet she was dizzy at the thought of having sex with faggots and had been unable to dismiss the idea of having sexual relations with another woman. She even had the woman in mind. Every time she saw Karen Markarian on the street a delicious shiver went through her body, and the few times they had spoken she walked away with the feeling that her desires were reciprocated. She had done nothing about this. She could not think what to do about it, or how to go about doing it, but the thoughts would not go away. Had Sully ever had strange thoughts like this about another man? Had he ever done anything about them? She pictured Warren again and began to imagine him in bed. She tried to bring Bert into the picture but could not manage it. She did not know what they would to do, or how, and although she could imagine all of possibilities, none of them had reality because of her own ignorance.
Well, she would find out, and soon.
She could not remember what Bert looked like. She had seen him one time, and she remembered the evening well enough, the drive to Carversville, the solitary drinks, the exploration of possibilities. She remembered vividly the man she had ultimately picked up, remembered even more vividly the ecstasy she had shared with her husband afterward. But she could not remember Bert LeGrand. She did remember his hands, their assurance on the keys, the power of them, and mixed with that memory was the feel of Warren’s hand on her foot. Did a man like Warren touch a male foot and a female foot in the same way? Or was there a difference?