Ride a Cockhorse (4 page)

Terry said nothing to that. He sat fixated. She guessed he was quite scared. The profile of her breasts in the mirror was magnificent.

“I hate the men I work with. Fat, middle-aged bankers who talk from morning to night about football.”

“What bank is that?”

“The Parish Bank. I'm a loan officer.”

“I didn't know that.”

“Is it too tight?” she asked. “In the thighs?”

“I don't think so, Frankie.”

Pivoting, she looked over her shoulder at the mirror. “Also, they're all midgets. Even the chairman is a midget. I hate midgets. All men are crazy,” she said, “but when a midget picks up the scent, a woman needs a revolver just to go to the bathroom.”

The Sugrue boy gave a quick shout of laughter. Mrs. Fitzgibbons strode past him into the kitchen and returned with a bottle of Canada Dry ginger ale and two glasses. She was talking as she came and went. “I sometimes worry about my own son-in-law. When Barbara isn't around, he looks at me funny.”

“Funny?” Terry was prepared to be shocked.

“You know, like he's expressing a secret language to me.” She waved indeterminately.

“That's disgusting.”

“It is disgusting, but it's true. My own son-in-law. He wants me. You're the only person I've ever told.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons poured Terry some soda, then got herself some vodka from a bottle on the liquor cabinet. “You don't want vodka, do you, sweetheart?”

“A small amount would be nice.” He reached up his glass, and Mrs. Fitzgibbons poured in a dash.

“Get us some ice cubes, and I'll tell you what happened with him. His name is Eddie. I'll tell you what aroused my suspicions.” While Terry was in the kitchen, Mrs. Fitzgibbons poured him additional vodka. “You'll be the judge.”

When he returned with the ice, Mrs. Fitzgibbons touched his glass with hers. “To golf,” she said.

“Are we really going to play? Because I'd like to.”

She flourished her glass. “To next Sunday morning, on the first tee, at ten o'clock. You'll wear your white ducks, and I'll give you Larry's clubs.”

Terry couldn't get past her to return to the sofa. Instead, he leaned against the doorpost. Mrs. Fitzgibbons was getting more excited by the minute but was endeavoring to conceal it. She was controlling herself. Her thoughts were lucid.

“The last time Eddie was here,” she began, “Barbara went outdoors to water the last of the marigolds, and while she was gone, Eddie asked me if I'd like to go on winter vacation this year.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons grimaced perplexedly. “I said no, that picketing a nuclear power plant in the wilds of New Hampshire is not my idea of a vacation. Eddie said, ‘But we'd go anywhere that you want. You decide. I,' he said in a secret sort of voice, ‘will talk Barbara into it.' And he was looking at me very, very funny.”

The youth was fascinated by Mrs. Fitzgibbons's bizarre recital. “That's very strange,” he said.

“You agree with me, then?”

“Yes, I do.”

“There's more.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons paused to drink and waited till Terry had also drunk. “I shouldn't be telling anyone, but what the hell do I care? I didn't make the world,” she said, “I just live here.”

“What else did he say?”

“That was in early September, just before Barbara went to Boston to attend some pro-choice women's rally for abortion. After she was gone, Eddie called me on the phone. He said the pollen count was at a record, and could he sleep overnight on the sofa, because I have an air conditioner. He wanted to sleep in my house.”

“Wow,” said Terry.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons would have finished the fictitious story but had put her left hand on Terry's waist and had forgotten momentarily what she was saying. The thought of lying beneath the drum major's hard body disrupted her thoughts. She was just talking now, with no thought content.

“He's a bug,” she said.

“He sounds it.”

When Terry reacted to Mrs. Fitzgibbons's kiss by going pale and not moving a muscle, she shuddered perceptibly. Without hesitating, lest he find a reason to withdraw, she reached down and fondled him. She was whispering in a hoarse voice. “I'm not even going to that party tomorrow night. I hate men like that.”

Terry managed to make a reply. “I'm glad,” he said. He stood frozen against the doorjamb. She was clutching him through his trousers and had set the tips of her breasts against his chest. He was staring at her.

“Men like that are pigs,” she said.

In short order, Mrs. Fitzgibbons had maneuvered him onto the sofa, her arms coiled about him, and was licking his ear. “I can tell you're experienced,” she said.

“I'm not, very,” he confessed.

“You're sensitive and intelligent,” she remarked. “You don't try to rape a woman. You're one in a thousand. I could eat you alive.”

The sight of Mrs. Fitzgibbons's creamy thighs above the line of her stockings, as she hiked up her dress, must have magnetized the boy's senses, for he gave out an amorous moan.

“You're finished with Maureen,” she said. “Maureen belongs to the past.”

“I think you're right,” he said.

“You're going to be an adult now. Maureen is a child.”

“She is, Frankie.” Terry's voice quavered.

As easily as that, Mrs. Fitzgibbons had hold of Terry's penis in her fist and was squeezing and rubbing him with her fingertips. He was beyond turning back. She could say anything now.

“Next to you, she's an idiot,” she said.

“I don't know.” Terry was stressed.

“She comes from a family of idiots. All the Blodgetts are idiots.” With her fingertips, Mrs. Fitzgibbons parted her panties, and rubbed and caressed him against herself. “Our Lady of the Angels! She won't even finish college.”

“You may be right.”

“She'll never finish!” she cried.

“I don't think so, either.”

“She's a dead end, sweetheart.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons was heating up tremendously. His head was beautiful; her left hand was behind his neck. “She belongs to the past.”

“You're right about that, Frankie!” For the first time, Terence Sugrue's voice broke. He closed his eyes and grimaced acutely. He moaned again.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons denigrated the Blodgett girl. “She can't have you!”

“Oh, Frankie!”

“Tell me about her.”

“
She's an idiot!
” he cried.

“Tell me again.”

“Maureen's an idiot.”

“I like hearing you say that. And do you know why? Because it's true, peppermint. That's why. Where does a lamebrain like that get off? She doesn't even know how to dress.”

“She dresses like a bum, Frankie.”

“She can't have a man like you.”

“She really does.”

With a deft maneuver of her hips, Mrs. Fitzgibbons introduced him inside herself. Terry's eyes widened incredibly. She wrapped her arms round him. “She'll find somebody else.”

“She'll have to, Frankie.”

“Somebody of her own stripe,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons. “She can't have you anymore. It wouldn't be fair to the others. It really wouldn't.”

“You're wonderful, Frankie.” Terry was breathing exaggeratedly; his eyes were wide as saucers.

“We're going to do this all night,” she said. “We're going to do it ten times. We're going to do it and do it, till we can't even walk. How does it feel?”

“It's unbelievable,” he cried.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons scissored her legs together underneath him and squeezed her thighs. “How about that?”

“Oh, God!”

“This is sex,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons. “This is the way it's supposed to be. This is how it feels to be with a woman.”

“I love you, Frankie!”

“You're an adult, Terry. This is why people grow up. This is why I'm here. This is what I'm for. Can you feel my breasts?”

“Frankie ...!”

“Can you feel my breasts, I said?”

“They're beautiful.”

“They're for you now. They're yours, darling. Nobody else can touch them. Later, I'm going to put your penis between them. Would you like that?”

“Oh, yes!” His face was brimming with anguish. He was clutching Mrs. Fitzgibbons for dear life.

“They're going to be expressly for you. You'll give them hot, sticky kisses. You'll go crazy over them. You'll know I'm saving them for you.”

“I love you, Frankie!”

“Tell me about Maureen.”

“I hate her. I'll never see her again.... I'll say anything you want.”

“Say something horrid.”

“She stutters! She can't even talk right,” he moaned. “She has no breasts at all. She goes to an idiot college. Her family are idiots!”

“Could she ever be a majorette in the band?”

“Never!”

Still fully clothed, Terence was moving rhythmically atop her; he was breathing hard in Mrs. Fitzgibbons's face.

“Is she as good as you are, darling?”

“No, she's not.” Terry's head was up; he was staring into space in ecstasy.

“Say something worse.” “I will! I will!”

“Then do it,” she commanded.

Terry's face was pained and sweated. “I'd like to throw her in front of a car!” he shouted.

For about a month, Mrs. Fitzgibbons's self-confidence had been surging, to a point where nothing of a reasonable nature seemed impossible to attain. Why should it? She looked about herself with new eyes, at the people she worked with at the bank—the ill-dressed secretaries and tellers; the stolid middle-aged loan officers toiling at their desks; even Mr. Leonard Frye, her boss, a pleasant, plodding, phlegmatic individual who never raised his voice in anger or excitement, who neither hectored nor encouraged his staff—and she marveled over her own long record of genial indifference to the way of things. During her fourteen years at the Parish Bank, which was located in the “revitalized” downtown open-air mall, Mrs. Fitzgibbons had floated along on the sluggish current of a workaday life, as a leaf being borne to the sea. Even Larry's death back in '84 had produced no remarkable effect upon her. It changed nothing in the real sense. Leonard Frye had kindly insisted, following her husband's funeral, that she stay home for a week; but in no time, upon returning, she lapsed once more into the same tiresome routine—doing her paperwork, smiling at customers, examining properties, seeking Leonard Frye's approval on mortgages.

In retrospect, what was real and ordinary took on, in Mrs. Fitzgibbons's agitated spirit, the aspect of a nightmare. It might all have been a frightening, portent-laden dream, of sitting at a shiny little desk inside a great marble-columned room, indeed a magnificent, high-vaulted emporium, with its venerable dimensions, its twinkling dome, the long row of golden grilles of the tellers' windows—an almost celestial hall!—surrounded by a collection of witless, pasty-faced people, all of whom, like herself, were involved in nothing more meaningful than growing one day older every day.

The very first occasion on which Mrs. Fitzgibbons had found her tongue, as it were, and spoken out in anything like an egregious way, had occurred three weeks ago, on a Monday afternoon, while talking to a woman on the phone about the delinquency in her mortgage payments. It was not Mrs. Fitzgibbons's job to dun customers for promptness in payment, but the woman in question had asked Julie Marcotte, the telephone operator, to connect her to Mrs. Fitzgibbons, who had arranged her mortgage in the first place, and whom she evidently trusted and liked.

“If you're looking for a sympathetic ear,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons had disabused the woman at once, “you're barking up the wrong tree.”

Remarkable as it might seem, with that one line, Mrs. Fitzgibbons put behind her years of futile, soft-soaping diplomacy. She was sitting at her desk in the home loan department, with Connie McElligot bent over the desk in front of her, and Felix Hohenberger at the desk behind. As Mrs. Fitzgibbons gave the woman a piece of her mind, she swiveled sidelong in her chair and looked up importantly at the pale, splintered sunlight trembling in the pretty windows of the ceiling dome thirty-five feet above herself. She was frowning with her lips set in an unhappy expression as the woman on the line sought to explain in detail the reasons underlying her tardiness of payment. Mrs. Fitzgibbons remembered the couple. The woman was a garrulous talker who was constantly producing documents from her handbag, as though trying to demonstrate her pedigree; her husband, a plumber or electrician, was content to sit back and let his wife carry the ball.

There was little doubt that Mrs. Fitzgibbons's agitated spirit had been coming to a boil anyhow, but it was facilitated by the soft, liquid, flattering tones of the woman working her on the telephone. The woman was appealing to Mrs. Fitzgibbons's vanity and good nature.

Suddenly, Mrs. Fitzgibbons interrupted the woman, speaking up in a voice that carried. If anyone was unsure whether Mrs. Fitzgibbons was speaking to a customer of the bank, she left no doubt on that score.

“I don't care,” she started scolding boldly, “whether you're three months late with your payment, or thirty-three!” She looked around as she spoke at the startled faces of her fellow officers and the timid customers sitting here and there on solitary chairs. Everyone was looking at her now.

“I thought you would understand,” the woman on the phone was replying in a chastened, quailing voice.

“Oh, I do!” Mrs. Fitzgibbons came right back in a rising, ironical voice. “I understand only too well. Whom do you think you're dealing with? Your local grocer? We're your bank!” She pivoted importantly to her left, then back again, in her swivel chair. She struck an arrogant listening air. She flicked an invisible fleck of lint from her knee.

Everyone in the vicinity had fallen silent. They listened with pained, embarrassed expressions. Ignoring all, Mrs. Fitzgibbons picked up a memo from her desk and gave an impression of perusing idly the words thereon, while the woman spoke. She turned slowly this way and that in her chair. She was the focus of attention in the home loan department. “No,” she said, suddenly, in a stern voice, “that's
not
good enough. I've been very patient with the two of you. I've given you every break in the book.”