Thy Neighbor's Wife (2 page)

Placing his school books on the desk and taking off his coat, Harold opened the magazine to the photographs of the nude Diane Webber. He stood near the bed holding the magazine in his right hand, and, with his eyes half closed, he gently brushed his left hand across the front of his trousers, softly touching his genitals. The response was immediate. He wished that he now had the time before dinner to undress and be fulfilled, or at least to go down the hall to the bathroom for quick relief over the sink, holding her photograph up to the medicine-cabinet mirror to see a reflection of himself exposed to her nude body, pretending a presence with her in the sun and sand, directing her dark lovely lowered eyes toward his tumescent organ, and imagining that his soapy hand was part of her.

He had done this many times before, usually during the afternoons when it might have seemed surreptitious for him to close his bedroom door. But, despite the guaranteed privacy behind
the locked door of the bathroom, Harold had to admit that he was never completely comfortable there, partly because he really preferred reclining on his bed to standing, and because there was insufficient room around the sink on which to lay down the magazine if he wished to use both hands. Also, and perhaps more important, if he was not careful the magazine might be stained by drops of water bouncing up from the sink, since he kept the faucet running to alert the family to his presence in the bathroom, and also because he occasionally needed additional water for lathering when the soap went dry on his fingers. While the water-stained photographs of nude women might not offend the aesthetics of most young men, this was not the case with Harold Rubin.

And finally there was a practical consideration involved in his desire to protect his magazines from damage: Having read in newspapers this year about the more zealous antipornography drives around the nation, he could not be sure that he would always be able to buy new magazines featuring nudes, not even under the counter. Even
Sunshine & Health
, which had been in circulation for two decades and populated its pages with family pictures including grandparents and children, had been described as obscene this year at a California judiciary hearing. Art-camera magazines had also been cited as “smut” by some politicians and church groups, even though these publications had attempted to disassociate themselves from girlie magazines by including under each nude picture such instructive captions as
Taken with 2¼ × 3¼ Crown Graphic fitted with 101 mm Ektar, f:11, at 1/100 sec
. Harold had read that President Eisenhower’s Postmaster General, Arthur Summerfield, was intent on keeping sexual literature and magazines out of the mails, and a New York publisher, Samuel Roth, had just been sentenced to five years in prison and a fine of $5,000 for violating the federal mail statute. Roth had previously been convicted for disseminating copies of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, and his first arrest, in 1928, came after the police had raided his publishing company
and seized the printing plates of
Ulysses
, which had been smuggled in from Paris.

Harold had read that a Brigitte Bardot film had been interfered with in Los Angeles, and he could only assume that in a city like Chicago, a workingman’s town with a tough police force and considerable moral influence from the Catholic Church, sexual expression would be repressed even more, particularly during the administration of the new Irish-Catholic mayor, Richard J. Daley. Already Harold had noticed that the burlesque house on Wabash Avenue had been closed down, as had the one on State Street. If the trend continued, it might mean that his favorite newsstand on Cermak Road would be reduced to selling such magazines as
Good Housekeeping
and
The Saturday Evening Post
, a happenstance that he knew would provoke no protest from his parents.

In all the years that he had lived at home he had never heard his parents express a sexual thought, had never seen either of them in the nude, had never heard their bed creaking at night with love sounds. He assumed that they still did make love, but he could not be certain. While he did not know how active his grandfather was in his sixties with his mistress, his grandmother had recently confided in a typically bitter moment that they had not made love since 1936. He had been an unskilled lover anyway, his grandmother had quickly added, and as Harold had pondered the statement he wondered for the first time if his grandmother had secret lovers. He seriously doubted it, never having observed men visiting her home, or her often leaving it; but he did recall discovering to his surprise a year ago in her library a romantic sex novel. It had been covered in brown paper, and on the copyright page was the name of a French publishing house and, under it, the date, 1909. While his grandmother had been taking a nap, Harold sat on the floor reading once, then twice, the 103-page novel, enthralled by the tale and amazed by the explicit language. The story described the unhappy sex lives
of several young women in Europe and the East who, after leaving their small towns and villages in despair, wandered into Morocco and became captives of a pasha who secluded them in a seraglio. One day, when the pasha was away, one of the women noticed through the window a handsome sea captain below and, luring him upstairs, made passionate love to him, as did the others in turn, pausing between acts to reveal to the captain the sordid details of their past that had eventually led them to this place. Harold had read the book during subsequent visits so often that he could practically recite certain passages….

Harold heard his mother calling him from the kitchen. It was time for dinner. He put the magazine with its photographs of Diane Webber under his pillow. He replied to his mother, waiting momentarily as his erection subsided. Then he opened his door and walked casually toward the kitchen.

His father was already seated at the table with a bowl of soup in front of him, reading the paper, while his mother stood at the stove talking airily, unaware of the minimal attention she was receiving. She was saying that while shopping in town today she had met one of her old friends from the Cook County tax assessor’s office, which is where she had once worked, operating a Comptometer. Harold, who knew that she had left that job shortly before his birth seventeen years ago, never to work again outside the house, commented to his mother on the fine aroma of
the cooking, and his father looked up from his paper and nodded without a smile.

As Harold sat down and began sipping the soup, his mother continued to talk, while slicing beef on a sideboard before bringing it to the table. She wore a housedress, little makeup, and smoked a filter-tipped cigarette. Both of Harold’s parents were heavy smokers, smoking being their only pleasure insofar as he knew. Neither of them was fond of drinking whiskey, beer, or wine, and dinner was served with cream soda or root beer, purchased weekly by the case.

After his mother had seated herself, the telephone rang. His father, who always kept the phone within reach at the dinner table, frowned as he grabbed it. Someone was calling from the garage. It happened almost every night during dinner, and from his father’s expression it might be assumed that he was receiving unwelcome news—perhaps a truck had broken down before making its delivery or the Teamsters’ union was going on strike; but Harold knew from living in the house that the grim, tight-lipped look of his father did not necessarily reflect what was being said on the telephone. It was an inextricable part of his father’s nature to look sullenly upon the world, and Harold knew that even if this phone call had come from a television game show announcing that his father had just won a prize, his father would react with a frown.

Still, despite whatever genuine aggravation was inherent in managing the Rubin trucking business, his father got up diligently at five-thirty each morning to be the first on the job, and he spent his days dealing with problems ranging from the maintenance of 142 trucks to the occasional pilferage of cargo, and he had to deal as well with the irascible old man, John Rubin, who personally wanted to control everything, even though the operation was now too big for him to do so.

Harold had recently heard that several of Rubin’s drivers had been stopped by the police for driving without license plates, which had infuriated the old man, who ignored the fact that his stinginess had caused this: Trying to save money, he had pur
chased only 32 sets of license plates for his 142 trucks, requiring that the men in the garage keep switching the plates from vehicle to vehicle or risk making deliveries without plates. Harold knew that sooner or later this scheme would result in a court case, and then his grandfather would try to bribe his way out of it, and, even if he was lucky enough to do so, it would probably cost him more than if he had paid for the proper number of plates in the beginning.

Harold vowed that he would never work full-time in the garage. He had tried working there during the summer but had soon quit because he could not tolerate the verbal abuse from his grandfather, who had often called him a “little bum,” and also that of his father, who had remarked sourly one day, “You’ll never amount to anything.” This prediction had not bothered Harold because he knew that the price of appeasing these men was total subjugation, and he was determined that he would not repeat the mistake of his father in becoming subservient to an old man who had sired a son he had not wanted with a woman he had not loved.

After his father had hung up the telephone, he resumed eating, revealing nothing of what had been said. A cup of coffee was placed in front of him, heavy with cream as he liked it, and he lit up an Old Gold. Harold’s mother mentioned not having seen their neighbors from across the street in several days, and Harold suggested that they might be away on vacation. She stood to clear the table, then went to check the fever of her younger son, who was still sleeping. Harold’s father went into the living room, turned on the television set. Harold later joined him, sitting on the other side of the room. Harold could hear his mother doing the dishes in the kitchen and his father yawning as he listlessly watched television and completed the crossword puzzle in the newspaper. He then stood, yawned again, and said he was going to bed. It was shortly after nine o’clock. Within a half hour, Harold’s mother had come into the living room to say good night, and soon Harold turned off the television and the house was
soundless and still. He walked to his bedroom and closed the door, feeling a quiet exuberance and relief. He was finally alone.

He removed his clothes, hung them in the closet. He reached for the small bottle of hand lotion, Italian Balm, that he kept on the upper shelf of his closet, and he placed it on the bedside table next to a box of Kleenex. He turned on the bedside lamp of low wattage, turned off the overhead light, and the room was bathed in a soft glow.

He could hear the wind whipping against the storm windows on this freezing Chicago night, and he shivered as he slipped between the cool sheets and pulled the blankets over him. He lay back for a few moments, getting warm, and then he reached for the magazine under his pillow and began to flip through it in a cursory way—he did not want to focus yet on the object of his obsession, Diane Webber, who awaited him on the sand dune, but preferred instead to make an initial pass through the entire fifty-two-page issue, which contained thirty-nine nude pictures of eleven different women, a visual aphrodisiac of blondes and brunets, preliminary stimulants before the main event.

A lean, dark-eyed woman attracted Harold, but the photographer had posed her awkwardly on the gnarled branch of a tree, and he felt her discomfort. The nude, sitting cross-legged on a studio floor next to an easel, had fine breasts but a bland expression on her face. Harold, still on his back with his knees slightly raised under the blankets, continued to turn the pages past various legs and breasts, hips and buttocks and hair, female fingers and arms reaching out, eyes looking away from him, eyes looking
at
him as he occasionally paused to lightly stroke his genitals with his left hand, tilting the magazine in his right hand to eliminate the slight glare on the glossy pages.

Proceeding through the magazine page after page, he came to the exquisite pictures of Diane Webber, but he quickly skipped over them, not wanting to tempt himself now. He moved on to the Mexican girl who sat demurely with a fisherman’s
net spread across her thighs; and then to the heavy-breasted blonde reclining on the floor next to a small marble statue of “Venus di Milo” and on to a lithe, lovely blonde standing in the shadows
1/25 sec. at f:22
of what appeared to be an empty stage of a theater, her arms crossed under her chin and above her upturned breasts, which were gracefully revealed, and, in the very subtle stage lighting, Harold was quite certain that he could see her pubic hair, and he felt himself for the first time becoming aroused.

If he were not so enamored of Diane Webber, he knew he could be satisfied by this willowy young blonde, satisfied perhaps more than once, which to him was the true test of an erotic picture. In the stacks of magazines in his closet were dozens of nudes who had aroused him in the past to solitary peaks, some having done so three or four times; and some were capable of doing it again in the future as long as they remained unseen for a while, thereby regaining their sense of mystery.

And then there were those extremely rare pictures, those of Diane Webber, that could fulfill him constantly. He estimated that his collection contained fifty photographs of her, and within a moment he could locate every one of them in the two hundred magazines that he kept. He would merely have to glance at the cover and would know exactly where she was within, how she was standing, what was in the background, what her attitude seemed to be during that special split second when the camera had clicked. He could remember, too, first seeing these pictures, could reconstruct where and when he had bought them; he could practically mark a moment in his life from each of her poses, each being so real that he believed he knew her personally, she was part of him, and through her he had become more in touch with himself in several ways, not merely through acts which Victorian moralists had defined as self-abuse, but rather through self-acceptance, his understanding the naturalness of his desires, and of asserting his right to an idealized woman.