She'd never expected to marry millions. She'd raised her hopes, perhaps, to the point where she'd meet a man with a bright future, and she'd help him along, and they'd be in six figures, perhaps, at the end of his career. And that in itself was an audacious dream for a steel-town girl to have. She'd have settled for much less.
But she never had a chance. Ed had met her on her first job, a fresh-out-of-school summertime thing she'd taken at a suburban Philadelphia TV station. She'd been at work writing the evening news report-it consisted of retyping and cueing a series of clips from the UPI wire-when Ed had blundered in looking for Mr. Hovis, manager of the station. He hadn't found him, Ed always said later. But he'd found something much more to his liking.
It'd been a whirlwind courtship, and their honeymoon had taken them to places she'd dreamed of, but had never imagined herself visiting: Monte Carlo, Ibiza, Mallorca. And in each of these places Ed had friends, and old girl friends, and social and business contacts waiting for him. She'd always felt as if she were going along as part of the furniture. This world was Ed's: the world of the house in Norristown and the house in Bal Harbour and the house in Palma and the house in…well, simply everywhere. There'd been a place open for him on the Main Line, but Philadelphia bored him. He'd bounced back and forth between divorced parents all during his childhood; he was a cosmopolite at twelve, he'd told her, with so many stickers on his luggage that the leather could only be seen at the handles.
But it was all Ed's. As she was Ed's. Her life was arranged by Ed's schedule, and that had much to do with the schedule of the Eastern Petroleum Company's conglomerate interests. You went to such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time because so-and-so would be there, and getting a chance to talk to so-and-so in a social, just-friends context was worth a single firm's annual payroll. And if you were Ed Mikell, you took your wife with you.
Thus she'd lived all those years on the road. And it had been a natural thing, in the kind of circles that Ed traveled in, to put your only daughter, when she came, under the care of a nanny from the first, and then send her off to boarding school as soon as it was decently possible. Nan had had Mickey, and had loved her from the first. But Ed's schedule had taken her away from the child almost immediately. Now they hardly knew each other.
And when Ed had died…Nan had quietly come apart. And then she'd just as quietly, with all her stolid Polish stubbornness to draw on, put herself back together again, called the bankers in, reorganized the business, and taken over as much of Ed's complex schedule of activities as she could handle. He'd been chairman of this, honorary vice-president of that Very well, she took over these functions as a dead politician's wife might while the limelight lasted. Weekly they brought her checks to sign; daily her private secretary went over her schedule with her and told her about this flower show, that museum dedication, the varied activities she was expected to grace with her presence.
And it was all still Ed's. Nothing was hers.
Not even fifteen-year-old Mickey was hers. The two met several times a year at school vacations; they had little to say to each other. Mickey clearly thought Nan was some sort of wind-up Barbie doll her father had bought Nan secretly thought Mickey a terrible little prig, and wondered if she weren't hanging around with the wrong crowd of people off there at school, or away on those summer-camp excursions.
This had gone on for something like two years now, since Ed's sudden death. She'd attend religiously to the functions people expected her to attend to, and then retire to whichever house the schedule required her to occupy during that season: to read, to exercise (for some reason, the upkeep on Her still beautiful body was important to her), to watch television, to…solitary pursuits.
It hadn't always been this way. She'd tried to accept some of the masculine sympathy she'd been offered in the months that had followed Ed's passing. But the choices a woman had at the top weren't much better than the ones she had at the bottom. The men were rich drunks, sexually inadequate even for a normal woman, much less for a woman whose responses (Ed had said, ever so gently, one time) were slower than most. Or they were climbers, cozying up to her with little thought in mind but her money. She'd had a handful of experiences with either kind, and quietly wished she were either back in Pigiron City, where the wives cried out in abandon, deep into the night, as their lusty husbands, poor but virile, plowed them to sleep, or out in that hazy, middle land she'd never known-and where, she quietly suspected, the action really was.
And in the end, she'd sent all her suitors packing. She wanted no part of them. She wanted…well, what did she want?
"What do I want?" she said one morning. And, sitting up in bed with her breakfast, she suddenly pushed the tray away. She started to ring the bell for Beatrice to come and take it away, but something made her stop. And, hugging her knees under the light sheet, she let her mind run.
A day or so before she'd had that embarrassing-and profoundly shocking-experience with the young cataloguer from the library. She hadn't forgotten it. She had been deeply disturbed by the clear implications of it. She was getting…well, sex-starved. And that wasn't so bad in itself. That was curable. But…
But she'd clearly felt herself attracted to the girl. To a girl! And she'd openly flaunted her nakedness at the young woman-gloried in it Was something wrong with her? Was she going off the deep end? Turning…lesbian?
But no; that was impossible. She was as normal as blueberry pie. She probably needed a man. She needed, well, perhaps a change of scenery. Or a change of friends. Or…
Friends? She hadn't any friends. What she had, after all these years, was Ed's friends. There wasn't a soul left in the world that she could talk to. Except…
But of course!
Wouldn't it be nice to see some of the girls from school again? Mary Alice Carpenter, for example? Her old roommate and confidante?
Nan scampered out of bed, wearing only her shortie nightgown, and went to the bureau for notepaper. She'd write Mary Alice today, right away. Her address would be in the Class Reunion brochure that came last month. And she'd figure out a way for the two of them to get together to talk over old times, old boyfriends, Hoop Day at Bryn Mawr, all the old jokes. They'd have a fine time. And maybe Mary Alice (who had always seemed so sexually secure, so sure of herself) could put her back on the right track. And so thinking, she plopped her bare fanny down on the cold leather seat and began writing.
But it wasn't so good that night. And the self-doubts, the fears, all of it came roaring back. And Nan Mikell went to the bar four times, mixing herself a more deadly double Martini each time, until her head reeled from the sudden ingestion of that much alcohol. It was a hot night, and that didn't help much either. She put the last drink down, kicked her shoes off, and sauntered across the room. At the glass doors she stopped, switched on the underwater lights of the pool, and considered. A cold dip would clear her head. And she reached for her zipper.
Then she stopped again.
She knew what she would do.
And she pulled die side zipper of her dress down, all right, and stepped naked out of it And, still nude, one hand lightly running down her bare body, she went to the bedroom wardrobe for robe and sandals. Stepping into the light robe, slipping the thongs of her beach shoes between her toes, she thought angrily of the loneliness of the past year. And she shook out the dark mass of her auburn hair, letting it spill in abandon down her back as she strode purposefully to the deck, heading for the concrete stairs that led to the tunnel beneath the road to the beach.