Community of Women (16 page)
She felt sorry for them.
She went to the window. No, she thought, I do not mind the rain. Not at all.
The sunshine makes up for it.
E
LLY
C
ARR
was the kind of woman who had trouble making decisions. Now she was still at her window, still looking at water and listening to the whoosh of montizorous raindrops against the window, still trying to decide whether to have her cake or eat it, whether to run off with Maggie or stick with Ted.
Alone, she might never have made the decision.
She had help.
She saw the panel truck pull to the curb in front of her house. She tried to read the lettering on its side, but the rain was coming down so thick and so hard that she could not make it out. She saw the man get out of the truck and begin to make the trek through the rain up her driveway to the door. He was halfway to the door before she recognized him. Then her heart skipped a beat.
It was Rudy Gerber.
Rudy Gerber. The brawny and brainless one who delivered for the dry cleaner. But he was not delivering today; his hands were empty. And he was not coming to pick up anything, since this was not the pick-up day.
She shuddered. He was coming to pick up something, all right. He was coming to pick
her
up. And if there was one thing she did not want, it was the physical embrace of Rudy Gerber.
The thought alone made her nauseous.
She wanted to run, to hide. She heard him ring the doorbell and made no move to answer it, hoping against hope that he would go away and leave her alone. But he did not go away and leave her alone. He stayed precisely where he was, on her door-step, and he went on ringing the damned bell. She thought she was going to go out of her mind.
She thought insanely that she would sit in her chair by the window forever, and that eternity would spin itself out without her answering the door and without his taking a hint and leaving. But finally she stood up on shaky legs and walked to the door. She looked through the little window into his stupid pig eyes. Her hand found the doorknob, turned it, tugged.
The door opened and he came inside.
“I thought I’d give you a break,” he said thickly. “Thought I’d take a little time off work to give you a little pleasure. You had me worried when you didn’t answer the door.”
“Not … today,” she managed.
He went on as though he hadn’t heard her. “Worried,” he said. “I thought maybe you was with somebody else. You know, screwing for some other guy.”
“I—”
“And then I figured I’d have to sit around and wait for sloppy seconds. You know, take up where the other guy left off. But today’s my lucky day, huh? You’re all alone. I guess not many guys would’ve come out in rain like this just for a piece of you. But I’m hungry, Mrs. Carr. I can use a piece of you.”
“Get out,” she said.
“Huh?”
“I want you to get out.”
“I don’t getcha …”
“That’s the whole point,” she said levelly. “You don’t get me. Not today and not ever. You get the hell out of here and you don’t come back. You leave me alone or I call the police.”
He scratched his head, genuinely puzzled. Then his pig eyes assumed a crafty expression.
“You wouldn’t call no cops,” he said. “Not you. I could tell ’em a few things about good old Mrs. Carr that would set ’em on their ears. I could tell the whole town a few things about Mrs. Carr. Nice things. Juicy things. I don’t think you’ll call no cops.”
“Look—”
“And I don’t think I’ll get outta here just like that,” he went on. “You know how that rain’s comin’ down? You know what it’s like out there? I didn’t come through that rain for the hell of it. I came because I figured on taking you to bed. And you know something?”
She stared at him.
“I still figure on taking you to bed, Mrs. Carr.”
“No—”
He did not take her to bed, if one wishes to be precise. He took her, but on the living room couch rather than on the bed. She did not cooperate. She was raped.
She fought, but a girl her size could hardly expect to put up much of a fight against a man the size of Rudy Gerber. She raked his face with her nails, drawing blood, and she aimed a knee at his groin. But when he drew back a ham-sized fist struck her savagely in the stomach, the fight went out of her at once. She sagged and fell forward, and he caught her by the shoulders and led her back to the couch.
And raped her.
It took a long time, and it hurt, and it was awful. When it was over she crawled to the upstairs bathroom and showered. Then she threw up a few times and showered again.
Men were rotten.
Men were vile and evil; she did not want them and could not stand them. Men were like Rudy Gerber—they took you whether you wanted to be taken or not, because they were concerned with nothing other than their own self-satisfaction.
Men were no good.
Her decision had not been an easy one to make. Now it had been made for her. Now she knew with certainty that she could not go through life as Ted Carr’s wife, that she could not conceivably be married to any man. She was a lesbian, and if that made her abnormal and perverted that was just too damned bad. She knew what she was, and she knew that she could no more go on enduring sex with men that she hated than she could stomach being raped by men like Rudy Gerber.
She went to the phone.
She dialed Maggie’s number.
“Throw some clothes in a suitcase,” she told Maggie. “In a hurry. I’m going to pack in about five minutes and spend thirty seconds leaving a note for Ted. Then I’m going to hop in the Caddy and come by for you. You’d better be ready.”
“That’s short notice, Ell.”
“That’s the way it has to be, Maggie.”
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
“I’m positive.”
A pause.
Then: “I love you, Ell.”
“I love you, Maggie.”
Nan Haskell fumbled a cigarette loose from her pack and leaned forward to take a light from her husband. She was breathless now: she had been talking, virtually without interruption, for almost half an hour. Now it was Howard’s turn to say something.
She waited.
He said: “I think it’s a damned fine idea, Nan.”
“Do you mean that?”
“I’ve never meant anything more sincerely. Except when I asked you to marry me. This country life is no good for us, Nan. We’re dying out here. We should get back to the city.”
“Can we afford it?”
“We’ll save money. I’ve been … looking at apartment ads lately. We can buy one hell of a fine co-op for less than half of what we can sell this place for. And the monthly maintenance comes to less than taxes and upkeep on this architectural horror. We’ll be way ahead.”
“You’ve been looking at ads?”
He nodded. “I’ve thought about moving back for weeks now. But I was afraid you liked it here.”
“Howie, I hate it!”
“So do I. But I never knew—”
And they started laughing together. They laughed heartily and happily for the first time in far too long. They laughed hysterically, and they held each other close, and they hurried the kids off to bed.
Then they, too, went to bed.
Much later Nan lay awake, ready for sleep but too happy to close her eyes. Everything was going to be all right now, she know. Howard was her husband and she loved him and he loved her. Ted Carr was a horrible mistake who was no longer a part of her life. He had not even left a scar.
Everything was going to be all right now.
The young couple stood at the railway station in Cheshire Point. The man was about twenty-six, with short hair and gray flannel suit. The woman wore a pregnancy outfit, neat maternity clothes which covered a belly due to give forth life in approximately three and one-half months.
They had looked at a house that afternoon. They were city-dwellers and did not own a car, so they were waiting for the train to take them back to New York. The house they had looked over was a swank split-level colonial on a full acre plot of land. They both liked it.
“I think we can afford it,” the man was saying. “After all, we’ll be paying off the mortgage the same as we’re paying rent now. And at the end we’ll have something to show for it. It’s a beautiful house, isn’t it?”
“Lovely. And all that yard for the kids to play in.”
“Kids?”
“Well, kid. But kids, eventually. I love it, honey.”
The man put an arm around the girl’s shoulders. “Just think of it,” he said. “Fresh air to breathe. And we’ll be able to have a car finally. You know, I miss driving a car. It’ll be good to have one again. You can’t drive in Manhattan without losing your mind.”
“I know.”
“I’ll like it here.”
“It’s a long way for you to come for work,” the woman said. “Are you sure you won’t mind it?”
“I’ll enjoy it. Give me a chance to get my brain working in the morning and a chance to unwind at night. I won’t walk in grumbling about the hard time they gave me.”
“Are you sure you won’t mind? I mean, it’s an hour or so in the morning and the same thing at night.”
“Better than fighting the subway.”
“Oh,” she said. “I guess you’re right. Smell the air, honey! Isn’t it divine?”
They sniffed the air together and agreed that it was divine.
“Just one thing,” the man said. “You know, you’ll be all alone here with not much to do.”
“I’ll have the baby—”
“Besides that, I mean. What’ll you do for friends?”
“I’ll have loads of friends,” she said. “Women like myself, with husbands who go to New York to work. And they’ll be decent, interesting people. Not like that madhouse of a city where you can live next to a person for fifteen years without saying more than hello and goodbye.”
“Sure,” he agreed. “We’ll make real friends here.”
“It’ll be great.”
“Wonderful.”
They fell silent, thinking just how wonderful it would be.
“Oh,” he said suddenly. “Oh, it’s nothing.”
“What?”
“Just a thought,” he said. “I won’t mind it at all.”
“Mind what?”
“Well,” he said, “it’ll probably be pretty … quiet here, almost a little dull. I guess not much happens in a little town like Cheshire Point.”
“Will you miss the excitement?”
“Not me,” he insisted. “How about you?”
She shook her head firmly. “It will be a pleasure,” she said. “Just peace and quiet. Because what could ever happen in Cheshire Point?”
THE END
Ah yes,
Community of Women
.
Both the title and the book’s premise originated with someone at Beacon Books. I don’t know his name, but I would give odds he was a fellow who put on a jacket and tie every morning and drove to the train station. And as his commuter train pulled away from the platform, bound for Grand Central, he found himself looking out the window and thinking about all the woman who were left behind while their husbands went off to earn a living in the concrete canyons of Manhattan.
All those women
, he thought.
Women in the bloom of youth, women beginning to ripen into their full sexual maturity. Women, all of them, with no men around, and here I am stuck on his fucking train …
How often did he have this thought?
Five days a week, you figure? And how many weeks before he picked up the phone and called a literary agent with whom he’d done some business. “I’ve got an idea for a book,” he said. “Oh, I dunno. It just sort of came to me. Maybe that new guy could do it. What’s his name, Sheldon Lord? Maybe he could do it.”
Indeed.
I was away from my desk when my agent, Henry Morrison, relayed the call from the horny commuter at Beacon. My desk was in my apartment in Manhattan, and my wife and daughter and I were in Buffalo, New York, visiting family. We were staying in the house I grew up in, on Starin Avenue, and I know that because I remember writing
Community of Women
on the card table in the sun room, which was what we called the front parlor.
“They have this idea for a book,” Henry told me, and recounted the title and premise. “But here’s the thing, they need it Right Away.”
Now this was not the first time I’d been told that somebody needed something Right Away. And here’s the weird thing—I always believed it, and I always acted accordingly. This may stem from my training, during the not-quite-a-year I spent as an editor at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. Every once in a while some magazine editor would call up, having suddenly discovered that he had a hole in an issue that was about to go to press. Someone who’d promised to deliver something had failed, or somebody pulled an ad, or—well, it didn’t matter. Some editorial content was required, and did Scott have a writer handy who could deliver the thing soon? Say yesterday, for instance?
It was those of us in the office—editors by day, writers by night—to whom these prizes would be offered. One learned the only proper answer to the question, “can you do this?” was, “yes, of course.”
Could you write a medical confession story? A male adventure article? Yes, of course you could. And could you bring it in tomorrow morning? You bet.
Because, if it was that urgent, it was also a sure sale. You still made sure you turned in something professional and as good as you could make it in the time available, because you wanted them to turn to you again. But it was more important that it be done than it be done superbly, and that was clear to all concerned.
But there was a difference between a magazine editor with a hole in his issue and a book editor with a hole in his head, and I never learned to make the distinction. Beacon couldn’t possibly need
Community of Women
right away. But that’s what I was told, and I acted accordingly.
I think the first time this had happened was in the summer of 1960. I had been married in March and was living at 110 West 69th Street. A mystery writer named William Ard had died at the age of 37, leaving a young widow and an incomplete manuscript. While I couldn’t be expected to do anything about the former, I’d been chosen to finish the book, which was under contract to Monarch Books.
And they needed it Right Away!