Peyton Place (60 page)

“I've never been naked in front of anyone before,” she said, against his shoulder.

“Don't use that word ‘naked,’” he said. “There is a world of difference in referring to yourself as nude. Nude is a word as smooth as your hips,” he said, caressing her, “but naked has the sound of a rock being turned over to expose maggots. Now, what is it about being nude that embarrasses you?”

She hesitated.… “I'm afraid that you'll find me ugly,” she said at last.

“I am not going to say anything, because no matter what reassurances I made in this moment, every one would sound false to you. Besides, that is not what you are afraid of, you know.”

“What is it then?”

“You are afraid that I will think badly of you for allowing me to have you. It is a perfectly normal feminine fear. If I gave you a reason that was convincing enough for why you are doing as you are, this fear would leave you. It is an odd thing, but most women need excuses of one kind or another. It is much easier for men.”

“How?” she had smiled at his descriptions of women.

“A man says, ‘Ah, here is a gorgeous creature whom I should love to take to bed.’ Then he begins to work toward his goal. If he achieves it, he jumps into the nearest bed with her and fornicates for all he is worth, before she can change her mind and demand that he present her with a good reason for what she is doing.”

She turned on to her back and put her arms over her head. “Then you think that sex between unmarried persons is excusable.”

“I've never thought of it as being either excusable or inexcusable. It is just there, and it can be good if people just won't mess it up with reasons and apologies. Have you understood one word I've said?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“May I look at you, then?”

She had clenched her fists, but she did not close her eyes or turn away from him. “Yes,” she said.

He did it slowly, following with his eyes the path created by his hands as they traveled over her.

“You are truly beautiful,” he said. “You have the long, aristocratic legs and the exquisite breasts of a statue.”

She let out her long-held breath with a sigh that made her quiver, and her heart beat hard under her breasts. He placed his lips against the pulsating spot, while he pressed gently at her abdomen with his hand. He continued to kiss her and stroke her until her whole body trembled under his lips and hands. When he kissed the softness of her inner thighs, she began to make moaning, animal sounds, and even then he continued his sensual touching and stroking and waited until she began the undulating movements of intercourse with her hips. She was lying with her arms bent and raised over her head, and he held her pinned to the bed with his hands on her wrists.

“Don't,” he commanded, when she tried to twist away from him at the first thrust of pain. “Help me,” he said. “Don't pull away.”

“I can't,” she cried. “I can't.”

“Yes, you can. Press your heels against the mattress and raise your hips. Help me. Quickly!”

In the last moment a bright drop of blood appeared on her mouth, where she had bitten into her lip, and then she had cried out the odd, mingled cry of pain and pleasure.

Later, after they had smoked and talked, he turned to her again.

“It is never as good as it should be for a woman, the first time,” he said. “This one will be for you.”

He began to woo her again, with words, and kisses, and touches, and this time she had felt the full, soaring joy of pleasure without pain.

“I thought I was dying,” she said to him, afterward. “And it was the loveliest feeling in the world.”

By Sunday morning, she had been able to walk nude in front of Brad, and feel his eyes probing her, without feeling either shame or fear. She had arched her back, and lifted her heavy hair off her neck, and pressed her breasts against his face, and gloried in his swift reaction to her.

This is what it is like, she had thought exultantly, to be in love with a man with everything that is within oneself.

Too soon, it was Sunday night, and they made their way back to New York over the Merritt Parkway. Brad held her fingers in his and she giggled.

“It would be terrible if I got pregnant,” she had said, thinking that it would not be terrible at all, “because then we'd have to get married and I'd never get any work done. We'd be spending all out time in bed.”

Brad withdrew his hand from hers at once.

“But my dear child,” he said, “I was extremely conscientious about taking precautions against anything as disastrous as pregnancy. I am already married. I thought you knew.”

She had felt nothing but a numbness which seemed to insulate her body with ice.

“No,” she said, in a conversational tone, “I didn't know. Do you and your wife have children?”

“Two,” said Brad.

She should have felt something, but the nothingness inside her would not dislodge itself.

“I see,” she said.

“I'm surprised that you didn't know. Everyone does. David Noyes knows it. He met my wife in the office one day, as a matter of fact.”

“He never mentioned it to me,” she said as if she were talking about someone who had met a vague acquaintance and had attached no importance to it.

“Well,” said Brad, with a little laugh, “Bernice is not the type who impresses a stranger on a first meeting.” He pulled up expertly in front of her door. “I'll read the novel tomorrow. Let's hope that it's as good as you make it sound.”

“Yes.” She got out of the car. “No, don't bother to come up, Brad. I can find my way. Good night. Good night,” she had repeated, “and thank you for a lovely time.”

Steve Wallace had been entertaining a friend in the apartment when Allison came through the door.

“Beat it,” Steve said to her friend, and as soon as the door had closed behind him she turned to Allison. “What?” she demanded. “What is it? What happened?”

Allison put her suitcase down on the floor. “Brad's married,” she said, in the same tone she would have used had she told a stranger that Brad had black hair.

Steve went over to the coffee table, took two cigarettes from a box, lit them both and passed one to her. “Well, it's not a tragedy, is it? I mean, it's not as though you were in love with him or anything. Allison?”

“Yes?”

“I said, it's not as though you were in love with him or anything. Is it?”

“I never heard anyone talking about his wife,” she said in a puzzled tone. “Isn't that odd? I didn't even know Brad was married until he told me on the way home.”

“Allison! Answer me! I said, it's not as though you were in love with him or anything. Is it?”

“I've spent the whole week end in bed with him. I don't believe that a woman could know Brad and not think herself in love with him, or that she could sleep with him and not know that she loved him.”

“Oh, my Lord!” said Steve and sat down on the edge of a chair and burst into tears. “Oh, Allison,” she wept. “What can you do?”

“Do? Why, I'm going to bed.”

When Steve looked into the bedroom to see if Allison was awake the next morning, she found her lying on her back, staring dry eyed at the ceiling.

“Are you all right?” Steve asked anxiously. “I have an appointment at nine, but I'll call up and cancel it if you aren't all right.”

“I'm perfectly fine,” she had said, feeling as if she were encased in ice.

“Oh, Allison. What are you going to do?”

“Do?” she had asked, in exactly the same tone as the night before. “Why, I think I'll go for a walk. It looks like a lovely warm day.”

She swung her legs over the edge of her bed and stood up. “You'd better run if you have a nine o'clock.”

“Oh,” said Steve, “I forgot to tell you. Your mother called you on Saturday. I told her that you were spending the week end in Brooklyn, with a girl friend. She said it was nothing serious, that she just had a piece of local news that she thought would interest you. I told her that I'd have you call when you got back.”

“I'll do that. Thank you.”

She had drunk three cups of coffee and smoked four cigarettes, but she did not eat, and she did not call Constance. She left the apartment and began to walk, and she walked all morning. Around noontime, she found herself on Broadway, near Times Square. She was almost fifty feet away from the newsstand before what she had seen there registered on her tired brain. She had seen a folded newspaper, and the bold letters of the headline had nudged something in her. “Peyton Place,” were the letters she had seen. She fought her way against the crowd and back to the stand.

“That paper there,” she said, pointing.

“Ten cents,” the man said.

It was a four-day-old copy of the
Concord Monitor.

“PATRICIDE IN PEYTON PLACE,” she had read. Then she hailed a cab and told the driver to hurry her to her address, that she was ill and had to get home.

When she had reached the apartment Steve had told her that Brad had called three times.

She had walked past Steve and into the bedroom. She took her suitcase from the closet where Steve had put it the night before.

“I'm going home,” she had said to Steve.

Allison sat still and listened to the quiet which was part of Peyton Place at night. She had not got away from New York before Brad called, she remembered.

“I've read the book,” he had said, as if nothing had happened between them over the week end. “Can you come down to the office?”

“No, I can't, Brad,” she had replied, trying to match her tone to his. “I'm going home.”

There was a long pause. “Listen, Allison. Don't be silly, please. Come down to the office and we'll talk.”

“What did you think of the book, Brad?”

Again there was a pause. “It lacks something,” he said at last. ‘It doesn't seem alive or quite real.”

“Is it impossible to fix?” she had demanded.

“I didn't say that, Allison. I simply think that you should put it away for a while. You are young. There is no hurry. Write me a few more stories for the magazines, and perhaps you can try on the novel again next year.”

“You mean the book is no good, don't you?”

“I didn't say that.”

“Can you sell it?”

Brad had allowed another silence to spread from his telephone to hers. “No,” he had said finally. “I don't think that I can sell it.”

Allison stood up and went to the fire. She poked the dying log apart so that the fire would go out more quickly, then she turned and went upstairs to her room. She was thinking of what David Noyes had said about
Samuel's Castle.
“If you goof–” he had said. Well, she had goofed and the book was no good. She went to the small desk in her bedroom and took out the letters she had been receiving from David all summer. She smiled as she reread them, for each was a miracle of tact and cheerfulness. He must certainly have heard about her novel from Steve Wallace, yet he did not mention it in his letters. He wrote of his daily activities, the work he was doing on his new book, the places he went, the people he met. And in every letter he asked her to hurry back to New York.

“I miss you,” he wrote. “Your sharp tongue, or should I say the lack thereof, has left a big hole in my daily existence. No one has called me a ‘boy genius’ since you left and my ego suffers.”

He wrote: “Today I am puking with disgust over the words of various popular songs. ‘Take me. Leave me,’ say these sickening things. ‘Knock me down and kick me in the teeth. Grind your lovely heel into the bridge of my nose. It matters not. I'll understand.’ Can you imagine a guy that stupid? I can.”

Oh, David, thought Allison wretchedly. I am going to hurt you, but I cannot help myself.

She sat down at her desk and wrote a letter to David. She wrote to him as if she were writing a story, and she described her Connecticut week end in the most minute detail. But it was not until she put down the last sentences that she began to feel comforted.

“The measure of my shame, David, is that I did not love him,” she wrote. “This is the worst part of it now. I should have liked to think of myself always as the type of woman who needs sex only to express love of the highest kind. But this was not so with Brad. I used to think that the business of confusing love with sex was childish and stupid, but now I know why so many women do this. It is because it is too painful afterward, if one can remember nothing of love.”

She did not hear from David again, nor did she write him again. But his silence created a feeling of apprehension in her and she was almost sorry that she had written to him as she had.

But she could not imagine being careful of what she said in front of David. She decided to return to New York at the end of October and she wrote short notes to Steve Wallace and to Bradley Holmes to tell them. She was able to write Brad's name on the envelope without a trace of feeling, with her hands steady and her heart not pounding.

It is done, she thought, and yet she felt none of the calm satisfaction which she had generally associated with the tying up of loose ends.

One afternoon, late in September, Allison and Tom walked up the hill to Samuel Peyton's castle.

“I've never been there,” she said. “Perhaps that's why I couldn't write about it successfully. A long time ago I realized that it was a waste of time to try to write about something one does not know about.”

“Are you going to give it another try?” asked Tom. “The novel, I mean.”

“Not for a while,” said Allison. “I think I'll go back to the short stories for another year or so. Tom–” She paused and bent to pick up a stick which she poked into the ground as she walked. “Tom, I'd like to make peace with my mother.”

Tom bent in his turn and picked up a stick. “That sounds like a good idea,” he said calmly. “But don't do it on the spur of the moment. Don't do it if you don't mean it because that would only hurt her more, and I would not stand for that.”

“I mean it,” said Allison. “I understand how it could happen. Mother was just unluckier than most, that's all.”

Tom laughed. “I wouldn't say that,” he said. “She got you, didn't she? Maybe she was luckier than most.”

“I wonder what Peyton Place would say about us if they knew,” murmured Allison.