Scruples (30 page)

She spent long hours thinking about the problem of achieving some sort of normal sex life. She tried, as always, to think with Aunt Cornelia’s head but abandoned the attempt as quickly as if she had unwittingly picked up a piece of shit on the street. Aunt Cornelia would have repressed such thoughts if they had, indeed, ever dared to creep into her mind. She tried to think with Jessica’s head. Jessie, she knew, would not have wasted time with such consideration—she would have gone out and gotten herself fucked, good and proper, months ago. But she wasn’t Jessie. She was still married to a man she deeply loved, even if now he was less than half alive, and she couldn’t, she wouldn’t belie that love with a meaningless affair with one of the pros at the club or one of her friends’ husbands.

As far as she could tell, there were no other possibilities. Billy accepted only a few of the invitations that came to her, going only to the homes of women who were not, she felt, using her as an attraction, almost as a sideshow, to satisfy the curiosity of the other guests. Even then, when she was introduced to strangers, she found them treating her as if she were a new widow to whom condolences, embarrassingly, could not be offered. They—indeed, all the world—had seen newspaper photographs of Billy walking next to Ellis in his wheelchair, crossing the landing strip to the jet as they left New York for California, and it seemed to her that everyone who heard her name immediately thought of that dying man in the fortress as they shook hands. At those stupendously wealthy Beverly Hills-Bel Air-Holmby Hills dinners to which Billy was invited as an “extra woman,” the “extra man” invited to sit next to her at dinner was either a homosexual or a professional leech who dined out every night by mere virtue of being unmarried and mildly presentable. The rare, newly divorced man always brought his own dinner partner, usually a woman twenty years his junior. And, in any case, she realized, she had become too famous a face, too much an object of gossip, to carry on an anonymous affair even if a man had been available.

More important to Billy than all these deterrents was the absolute need she felt to defend herself from the speculation that would follow any relationship she might have with a man. She was Mrs. Ellis Ikehorn and that fact alone made her invulnerable, no matter how bereft she understood herself to be. Should she become simply Billy Ikehorn, sleeping with this one or that one, all her security, her proud place in the world, the regal girl-queen role she had played so eagerly during her marriage, would disintegrate in a flood of sneering, knowing, leering malice. She could actually
feel
the gossips lurking out there—waiting for her to do the wrong thing.

Billy’s only regular masculine company were the three men, all registered nurses, who tended Ellis. Often she would invite the two of them who were not on duty to eat dinner with her, and she enjoyed their gentle, amusing company. All three were homosexuals, who often cruised the gay bars of Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley.

Once they had realized how much Billy needed their companionship, they lost their reserve with her and made her laugh, dubbing the guest wing “Boys Town,” telling stories of their adventures, always, however, leaving a wide margin of discretion. The fifteen hundred dollars a month and keep, plus use of a car, which they each earned for their work, was good money indeed, and they did nothing to jeopardize it by overfamiliarity.

Billy didn’t realize just how dependent she had become on the trio until two of them announced that they had to leave, Jim, who was from Miami, had to return home for family reasons. Harry, a wisecracking westerner, had become his lover during the last months and freely admitted to Billy that he had become too involved with Jim to let him go alone.

“We’re both real sorry, Mrs. Ikehorn,” he said reassuringly, “but there’s an excellent nurses’ registry in L.A. You won’t have any trouble replacing us—the woods are full of ex-medics from Vietnam who finished their nursing training after they got back. See, most of them were drafted out of high school and now it’s good living for them. No sweat.”

“Oh, Harry, that’s not the point—you’ve been with us right from the beginning. Mr. Ikehorn will miss you too.”

“Ma’am, it would have happened sooner or later anyway—we sort of drift from job to job—you tend to go stale after awhile. No offense meant—it’s the best job I’ve ever had.”

Billy understood Harry perfectly. If she could have drifted on, who knows? But the bogus castle was her prison, and she was stuck fast in it for an unlimited period of time. She was determined to be very certain that the two new nurses she hired were pleasant people, since they would become such a large part of her world.

Billy had a month before Jim and Harry left in which to interview applicants for the jobs. She saw fifteen men before she found two who were suitable by virtue of both the excellence of their training and the ease of their personalities. The first of them, John Francis Cassidy, known as Jake, had a droll and artful street-urchin look to him and typically Black Irish coloring with thick, white skin and unabashed blue eyes. The second nurse, Ashby Smith, was Georgia born and bred. He wore his red-brown hair rather long, and in his soft voice there was a feeling of fastidiousness mixed with pride, which went agreeably with his slender height and graceful, long hands. They had both been medics in the war, and Billy had the suspicion, if not the certainty, that neither of them was homosexual.

Months passed, an unusually hot spring settled over southern California, and Billy found herself sinking deeper into depression. Every day she had to force herself to get dressed and drive to her tennis lesson or to her exercise class because if she stayed home she found it impossible to sleep at night. When it became too hot to run around chasing tennis balls in the sun, she took to swimming laps in the big pool, trying to exhaust her body, but even when she swam so much that her muscles quivered with the strain, she almost always had to take a sleeping pill, often two of them, before she managed to sleep. She found that liquor helped the process, although she knew it was dangerous. She never permitted herself more than a small wineglass of warm vodka. The lack of ice made it taste like medicine, and she tossed it off in one gulp, the unpleasantness of the taste taking away the tinge of impermissible pleasure that followed.

Billy found herself spending more and more time in the pool house. There, the decorator Lindy had chosen had exercised all the abandon he had not been permitted to put into the big house. It was a large pavilion with a big central room, intended for entertaining, with two wings of dressing rooms and showers for men and women. Looking around at the lavish, voluptuously appointed pavilion, Billy wondered dispiritedly if the decorator had assumed that she would be having many pool parties. There were three puffy divans, ten feet square, covered in thick, red terry cloth and the floor was tiled in a Moroccan design of various shades of purple, pink, and white. Big, soft terry cushions in many shades of purple were piled everywhere. The domed ceiling had been painted in stylized arabesques, and beaded curtains made a slippery whispering sound when anyone passed through them. In one corner there was a bar, which had gradually become covered with the books Billy always carried with her. The pool house had become her favorite place to read because it was so removed, so private and secluded; there, for hours at a time, she could forget the house on the hill and all its occupants. No one, not even the gardeners, was allowed to work near the pool house after midmorning.

One evening of that sultry spring Billy found herself having dinner alone with Jake Cassidy. Morris, the one male nurse left over from the old days, was on duty, and Ash had taken himself off in his car. Billy had no appetite, but she forced herself to take tiny bites of her avocado and crab-meat salad. Every time she put her fork to her plate she caught sight of the black hairs on the white skin below Jake’s cuff. She was almost hypnotized by the movement of his strong wrists. She felt a hungry heaviness, a grindingly good ache, begin between her legs. She let her lids fall over her dark eyes so that he couldn’t see them, couldn’t guess that she was imagining the thickness, the wiriness of his pubic hair, wondering how far up his belly it reached.

“Jake,” Billy said casually, “why is it that you never use the pool?”

“Don’t want to disturb your privacy, Mrs. Ikehorn.”

“That’s thoughtful of you, but it’s a shame to let it go to waste. Come on down tomorrow afternoon and have a swim—it won’t bother me.”

“Hey, thanks! I’ll take you up on that if it’s my afternoon off duty.”

Billy smiled. It would most certainly be his afternoon off. She’d make sure of that right after dinner.

Billy lay full length on one of the red divans, covered only by a large turkish towel, a big soft pillow under her head. The pool house was dim; only an orange glow from the sun outside penetrated, with occasional flicks of light reflected from the surface of the pool. Her eyes were almost closed in the soft light and she sighed deeply in almost unendurable impatience. Finally she heard the whisper of the beaded curtains as Jake Cassidy entered, wearing only a pair of thin, nylon racing trunks. He stopped dead when he saw her, stretched out there, her long, black hair loose and wild in a way he’d never seen it before, her long, tan legs spread carelessly on the red terry cloth.

“It’s almost too hot to swim, isn’t it?” Billy murmured.

“Well—I’ll just have a quick dip—”

“No. No you won’t. Not yet. Come over here, Jake.”

He moved hesitantly toward her and stood close to the divan.

“Sit down, Jake. Right here—there’s plenty of room.” The young man perched gingerly on the edge she had indicated. Billy readied out, took his hand, and drew it toward her.

“Just move a little toward me, Jake, you’re not close enough.”

This time he obeyed quickly, with the final dawning of understanding. Billy took his large hand and guided it under the towel that covered her. He held his breath as he felt her pressing it down her body until it reached her cunt. Her clitoris, already engorged, pouted out from her pubic hair. She took his middle finger and placed it on the hot, wet flesh and slowly slid it back and forth over the precise spot from which her burning body radiated. He immediately took up the rhythm as she pulled off the towel and let him see her, magnificent in her nakedness. Jake bent to suck fiercely on her dark nipples. Billy’s whole body arched upward in longing as she responded to that authoritative finger, that hard man’s hand, that hot man’s mouth. Oh, the difference when it was the flesh of another that touched her. After a minute she looked down the length of his body as he still savaged her breasts. Pushing out, above the drawstring that held his trunks low on his hips was the distended tip of his imprisoned cock. She pulled the drawstring open, on an indrawn breath, and looked, dry mouthed, at his large penis, rock hard and rosy against the whiteness of his belly and the dark thicket of his hair.

“Put it in me,” Billy commanded.

“Wait—I want to—”

“Now!”

Jake straddled her and kneeled on the divan. She took his thrusting stiff prick in her hands and eased it, inch by inch, prolonging the delight until he growled in frustration. Finally, when he filled her entirely, Billy could feel him about to plunge wildly inside her.

“Hold it, Jake,” she whispered into his lips, “got something good to teach you—you’ll like it—” She put her hands on his hips and pushed him backward until his cock was almost entirely withdrawn from her, then she slowly released her forearms so that he reentered her vagina. She could hear his teeth grinding with barely restrained lust, but she paid no attention. Several more times she repeated the maneuver, and the last time she pushed him so far that his cock came out of her entirely. She took it in her hands and leisurely drew the whole length of the underside of his prick across her clitoris and up toward her navel, then drew it back just to the entrance of her cunt. He caught on quickly and rubbed it up and down, again, and again, over her belly, never losing contact with her tumescent clitoris, which Billy now visualized as a dark red, ripe fruit.

“Look at it, look at it,” he muttered. Billy couldn’t take her eyes off the glistening, superb penis on which the veins stood out in bold relief. The head of the cock had grown twice as big while he was inside her, and now she moaned with an excruciating need to have him back inside.

“No, you don’t,” he whispered. “Not so fast—you wanted it like this—you’re going to get it all right, get it good and hard—you’ll get all of it—don’t worry—look at it—look—that’s what you’re going to get—as much as you can take—now!” And he drew back and rammed his prick all the way up, brutally, wonderfully, just as she came in violent, mindless, racking shudders.

They lay on the divan for long minutes, speechlessly waiting for his cock, which was still half hard inside of her, to subside. Billy felt the warm trickle of sperm between her legs and couldn’t imagine how she had gone so long without it, without the quivering, sticky, sweaty reality.

That night Billy dined in her sitting room, telling the butler just to put everything on the coffee table.

“Just leave it, John, I’ll help myself,” she said. “I’m a little tired. Please see that I’m not disturbed.”

She didn’t touch her food. She was in the grip of a snarl of conflicting emotions: deep worry and a return of tearing lust. While part of her mind was concentrated on the memory of the afternoon, even while her cunt twitched involuntarily with the thought of it, even as she lightly, unconsciousy fingered her tangle of pubic hair under her light robe, she mulled anxiously over the repercussions of the incident. Would he tell the others? Boast of it? Would he try to blackmail her? What if this ever became public knowledge? What did he think of her? Not, she reflected, shaking her elegant head for a second at her vestigial puritanism, that it mattered. But what did she know about Jake? How far could she trust him? Billy had the answers to none of these questions and there was no one she could ask. The only thing she was sure of was that she had to have Jake Cassidy again. In her. Deep inside. Soon. Her fists clenched. She licked her lips and paced back and forth. She wanted him
now
. Her sexual appetites, starved for more than a year and a half, gripped her more violently than they ever had before in her life, even during the times in New York, even during any of the days of her marriage.