Chapter 8: Married

Eric Stewart figured out that he’d put himself in a trap. Before he’d married Candy, she had gone to the State’s Attorney’s office to meet Miss Murphy. Everyone in the office she had asked where to find Miss Murphy would know that she was a rape victim; that was the only sort of case Murphy handled. He had thought that not inviting anybody to see his wedding would avoid their making that connection.

Now, though, he was married and nobody at the office -- except the guy in the personnel office, whom he didn’t know socially and almost certainly forgot as soon as he filed the papers -- knew that he was married. When they found out, it would raise more questions, and he didn’t want questions.

At church, though, everybody knew he was a married man. They saw him with his pretty, young wife, and he thought that put his prestige higher than it had ever been before. Instead of being that dry stick, he was the dry stick married to that beauty. And Candy, who had worried that she would be too afraid of him to have marital relations, wasn’t modest about his seeing her beauty. The first Sunday in March, she came to him and stripped. He was conscious of her lovely breasts, of the patch of brown hair shielding her center -- the center that had received him just the night before. Candy, however, didn’t seem conscious of any of this. She was concerned with the shape of her stomach.

“Do you think I’m showing?”

“Maybe, just barely.” Her belly was lovely, too, but it was still slender.

“Someday soon,” she said, “it will be obvious even when I’m dressed. I don’t know how long I can hide it.”

“Well, you’re a married woman. Do you really need to hide it?”

“I can tell the world I’m pregnant. I just can’t tell them how long I’ve been pregnant. Unfortunately, you can’t persuade anybody that you’re showing in your second month.” She thought that a pregnancy that began before the wedding was a great scandal. In the 20th century? Caroline had been known to tell mixed company that the only reason she’d married Bill was that he was good in bed.

“Really, the people you should tell are Carolyn’s circle. After all, they can give you advice. Really, there are only so many places in the church where gossip happens.” He wished that he could say that nobody in the church would gossip. That wasn’t true, though, and he didn’t want to lie to her. “You have the choir covered. You have the college students covered, although I don’t know if they gossip about people outside their little group. If you have that circle covered, you only have to worry about the other circles.”

“You think I should?” she asked.

“Worry? No. Talk to the circle? I really think you should. You said you wanted a support group. That’s a specially-designed support group. Now come here.” She did, and he kissed the tiny bulge in her stomach, the bulge that was her reason to marry him, the bulge, or rather the baby somewhere under it, which he had promised to treat lovingly because he loved Candy.

When Candy told him that there was another circle now, he could have kicked himself. He’d heard at one point but had forgotten. On the way home from church the next Sunday, she gave him the address and he drove past the apartment house. Candy knew Evanston now, but not as well as he did. The circle met on Tuesday, which meant that he and Candy missed their movie date that night, but this was more important. She came back happy about the group. This pleased him immensely.

He didn’t delude himself that she had married him because she was deeply in love with him. She had married him because the alternative was worse, becoming an unwed mother. Right now, she needed him. Candy wasn’t some mercenary; she hadn’t married him with the expectation of divorcing him as soon as her son had a name. She had said, “As long as we both shall live.”

On the other hand, she had no reason to stick with him for years of unhappiness. So anything which made her happy was in favor of his keeping her. And anything about the church that made her happy was an even better omen for their marriage. He was her attachment to the church. That was what worried him about her picture of everybody gossiping that the baby would come too soon. It wasn’t everybody in the world, it was the people of the church who worried her. She pictured them as all talking behind her back.

As a matter of fact, damn few of them cared. If you put out a questionnaire: “Premarital intercourse should be permitted. favor? oppose?” probably two out of three would check “oppose.” Maybe nine out of ten if they had to sign it. On the other hand, fewer than a dozen people, most of them women and most of them past 65, disapproved strongly enough to make judgments about people. He’d be surprised if Claire wasn’t sleeping with Kurt. And if Kurt had an affair with another coed, Joan would think him horrible, not because he had sex without marriage, but because he had betrayed Claire.

On the other hand, plenty of the congregation would gossip. The choir, if he weren’t there, would have a field day with stories of somebody having sex on the sly. They wouldn’t be shocked, but they would be titillated.

“Would you mind if I went back to brown hair?” Candy asked out of the blue once when they were driving back from church. That would be all right.

“No. That would be fine. Are you thinking of that?” Why did he say ‘fine’? That would be wonderful! Nobody in the office who had seen her would recognize her in brown hair. It wasn’t as though they had actually met her and been introduced to her that day. Murphy and her tame cop had, but their mouths were sealed, and they didn’t socialize with the traffic group much anyway.

“Yeah. A bottle-blonde co-ed is one thing. A bottle-blonde mother is something else.”

“Well, when you do, I want a picture of you.” He could put a picture of his wife -- his beautiful wife, though a tiny photo might not do her justice -- on his desk. Then people would get to know that he was married. They might be a little surprised, but they wouldn’t be for long. By the time that they saw her, nobody would be reminded of the blonde that they’d seen briefly months before.

One Friday, he came home to a brunette. When she changed the color, she had changed her hair style a little, too. That was all for the best. She was still as pretty, but she looked a little different. Then, too, the hair style would dominate her face more in a picture than it would in life.

“Did you get that photo?” he asked.

“No.”

“When you do, let me have a couple of small prints.” He wanted one for his wallet, too. He thought of asking her whether she had enough money for the photography studio. He didn’t have any spare cash then, though, and he had no good way to get it to her before Monday night. Also, she had both checks and credit cards by this time. She could get cash almost as easily as he could.

“I love the way you look,” he said when she came to bed that Saturday night. They were both naked, and he mostly meant her body, but he meant her new hair style, too. He had once told her that he would go without sex if she was too afraid of men. She’d said that she wasn’t too afraid, but he remembered that promise and tried to restrain himself.

She had asked him to excite her each time, and he started to excite her now. Of course, kissing her breast and delving into the secrets between her thighs with his hand, excited him, too. He managed to control himself until she was obviously aroused -- her body tensed; she breathed shallowly; her moisture flowed. Then he moved to kneel between her legs.