Chapter 2

Beside her elbow on the vanity table were the plastic case for her false eyelashes and a bowl of soggy breakfast cereal. She had been dieting again, and she felt a little crazy with hunger as she looked at her face in the mirror.

Whenever she looked at the make-up advice in Glamor magazine, as she had done that morning, it irritated her to be reminded that her face was "triangular". Girls with triangular faces, she thought, usually looked like weasels or saints, and she hoped she wasn't just rationalizing when she decided that neither description applied to her. She simply looked like a twenty- three-year-old woman who had, whether it showed in her face or not, recently separated from her equally young husband.

Valerie Davis was not beautiful, but men seldom realized this when caught by her charms, as Mike Duckworth was. Her milky-blue eyes were wide-set and clear below her full but well-tweezed smoke-brown brows. And it was probably her broad, high cheekbones that saved her triangular face from giving her the look of Saint Bernadette or a crafty mink. Her complexion, more so when she was not worried or dieting, was extremely fair, with just a hint of pink showing through the velvety skin of her cheekbones. But it was a flawed face, too. She took pains to cover up the defects, but in reality these were part of what made her so attractive to men. As a child she had worried that her nose was not pretty; she had wanted a button nose, like the kind her Irish father so admired. So she had developed a continual habit of pushing the end of her nose up with her finger; it had not given her a button nose, but now the tip of her nose had a slightly upturned effect to it, and there was a faint crease on the tip of it which she now took pains to disguise with powder. Her chin bore the slight trace of a cleft, but beyond that she also had a small scar Mom where she had, as a child, fallen from her first bicycle. This, too, she usually kept camouflaged with powder. Her hair, combed straight and slightly curled under at the ends, framed her face with a smoky brown.

Jim had always teased her about her favorite brand of cosmetics. "White Shoulders," he would say. "That fits you."

Valerie opened the round box of powder and looked down at her nearly naked body. She pursed her lips a little and blew at a piece of cigarette ash that had drifted into the hollow between her shoulder and collarbone. With mild disgust she snubbed out the filter-tipped Salem that lay smoldering in the ashtray on the vanity. Then, with the fluffy white puff, she began to smooth the velvety talc over her neck and collarbone, dipping down low enough to graze the upper curves of her heavy breasts. When she had been in high school, she had been a little ashamed of the huge, jouncing mounds. Now--and she smiled to herself at the realization--she was more than a little silly in the pride she took in them, the more so since her roommate, though her breasts were firmer, was still wearing falsies to make it look as if she were older than fourteen. And it was not particularly strange for Valerie to take such pride in her most obvious point of attraction. It was for this reason that she frequently dieted on the Spartan ration of one bowl of Grape Nuts per day and numerous cups of black coffee. In this way, she maintained her one- hundred-thirty-five-pound figure as an attractive showcase for her pleasantly large breasts.

She gently rubbed the talc over their curves, feeling slightly perverted as the tickle of the powder puff caused her hen's-egg-brown nipples to erect. The grapefruit-sized mounds were resilient beneath her fingertips as she slyly squeezed them, testing for any sign of fat. She was well satisfied that she was not really gaining weight; but to make doubly sure, she tossed the powder puff into its cardboard box and forced herself to take another spoonful of the cold, mushy breakfast food.

When she had swallowed, she curled her upper lip and stuck her tongue out at her image in the mirror.

"Yuck!" she cried to the reflection. Then she put the spoon down in the bowl and stood up.

As she turned away from the mirror, the pert hillocks of her blue-nylon-covered buttocks reflected in the glass. She looked back over her shoulder and rubbed softly at her thighs, where a slight red mark had been made by the edge of the vanity stool. The flesh of her big breasts quivered as she walked across the bedroom carpet to her closet. When she opened the closet door, once again she was greeted by a full-length-mirror image of herself. She glanced at it thoughtfully, posing a little as she had seen Jeanne, her roommate, do in fashion shows.

I could be a model if I wanted to, she thought. And anyway, Jeanne isn't exactly a model, she added. She only does that when she can get away from the bar-girl bit. Then, feeling guilty for having been envious of her girl friend, she tucked a few stray pubic hairs into the legband of her blue panties and reached for her housecoat.

It was Saturday morning, and she felt wonderful at not having to go to work at her job as a secretary for a plumbing company. Later that afternoon she had a date with Mike Duckworth, the music teacher who had been her boss when she and Jim were both teachers' aides a year before. In the meantime, she planned to enjoy the first morning of her weekend. First, she would make herself another cup of coffee and settle down with Glamour to discover what they had decided she was doing wrong with her make-up for this month. Later on, when she became disgusted with the magazine, she might get around to doing the few dishes in the kitchen; or, better yet, she would tackle the thick John O'Hara novel she had been reading for two weeks now.

That's what I'll do, she thought. I'll take a bath and read John O'Hara. She had long ago developed the habit of reading while she took her bath. Sometimes, when the book was good as she found this one-she forgot about the bath and stayed in the water until it was quite cool. Then she would have to refill the tub to get her bathing over. Half the books she owned were blurred from the water of the bathtub, and their covers were corrugated like tin from the effect of the steam on their covers.

She slipped her arms into the quilted satin fabric of the knee-length pink housecoat, shivering a bit, her big breasts bouncing, at the first coldness of the material against her skin. Then she padded back across the room to the vanity table. She ignored the soggy bowl of breakfast food, but snatched the magazine from the powder-glazed glass top, making a face at her image in the mirror as though her reflection had caught her preparing to read a sexy book. Then, barefoot and adjusting the neckline of her housecoat over her bare breasts, she swished out of the bedroom with its unmade bed and into the morning light streaming through the big living room windows.

Her creamy breasts floated like life preservers on the surface of the tepid bath water. She turned a page with her wet fingers, then started, for she realized that for some moments she had been listening to the ringing of the doorbell without realizing it.

"Oh, shit!" she cried, standing up in the tub, the water streaming down through her matted pubic hair. She grabbed a towel and made three hasty swipes at her dripping body, then hopped out of the tub.

Quickly throwing on the pink housecoat, she ran through the bedroom and into the living room. Her feet left wet tracks on the stairs down to the front door. Through the frosted glass of the door, she could see the outline of a man.

If that's Mike this early, she thought, I'll kill him

But when she threw open the door, she saw that it wasn't Mike.

"Mr. Davis!" she gasped.

"Hi, Val," Richard said, swallowing hard. "I bet you're surprised to see me."

Valerie pulled her wet hair away from her face. "Surprised isn't the word," she said. She wondered what he was doing there.

He was dressed in his work uniform--dark-blue trousers stained with oil, and a blue denim workshirt. But he was also wearing a service station black bow tie, which she hadn't remembered him ever wearing before. And in his hands he gripped the neck of a bottle wrapped in a brown paper sack. She stared at him for several seconds, wondering why he had come. She didn't want to be rude to him--he was her father-in-law, and she was fond of him even if she had separated from his son--but she wished he had picked a better time to visit her.

"I was taking a bath," she said.

"So I see," he said, grinning, and nodding at the cleavage showing where she gripped the housecoat shut.

Valerie adjusted her grip on the collar of the robe. "Well," she said, "I guess you'd better come in. I'll put something on." She stood aside to let him pass her on the stairs, then took a quick glance outside to see if anyone had been watching. As she closed the door she said, trying to be casual, "I thought you worked on Saturdays."

Richard looked down at her from the top of the stairs. "Only half a day most of the time. If there's a lot of work, I stay. But there wasn't anything today, so I got the hell out of there. Thought I'd drop in and see you," he said. He held up the bottle and the brown paper bag. "Maybe have a little drink together. You know I haven't seen you for quite a while. Not since you and- --"

"I'll just put on some--"

"No, no," he insisted. "I can only stay a few minutes anyway. Besides, I've seen you in your bathrobe before."

Valerie couldn't help grinning at him. In many ways she pitied him, because his wife kept such a tight rein on his drinking habits.

"Okay," she said. "The glasses are over there on the shelf by the window. You get to work, and I'll be back in just a minute. I've got to dry off or I'll freeze to death!"

She watched him as he went to fetch the glasses, thinking how awkward and out of place he looked in a modernly furnished apartment. He didn't particularly like Mrs. Davis' early American furniture, but she was used to seeing him sitting in the big overstuffed chairs, so he looked strange among her brightly colored, low-rise furniture. Then she hurried into the bathroom again to dry herself.