Chapter 5

The day after Betty's encounter with Bob at his new apartment Shirley moved across town to join her husband. Kent was off on another business trip the following afternoon, and Betty was left alone in the large ranch-style house. She was grateful to have the young couple off her hands and felt relieved when Kent announced that he was flying to Chicago for a market-research meeting. She needed time to think and assess the disorder of facts and feeling floating around her brain, so the emptiness of the house was a kind of late-summer balm that she welcomed wholeheartedly. She began to feel more like herself again and took up some reading she had been planning all year for a vacation during the summer. On a few afternoons she drove to the shore of Long Island Sound, discovering a secluded beach between the rows of cramped beach houses and suburban estates, and sunned herself in her new bikini. Two evenings before Kent was to return from Chicago Bob had called. She was out on the patio drying her body from a dip in the pool, and she had found it troublesome to have to run still wet to the kitchen phone.

"Hey, Honey," he had said with a disarming intimacy in his voice. "How you doing without Kent around?"

"I'm doing just fine. Is that all you want to know?" she answered irritably. "I'm soaking wet from the pool and dripping all over the kitchen floor."

"Just wanted to remind you that our little party is coming up this weekend. Don't suppose you've made a decision yet?"

Betty had sucked in a deep breath and replied: "I thought I had made my feelings clear on that. Enjoy your little party by yourselves. I'm sure Kent will be too tired to think of getting out of the house Saturday."

She had thought she heard some female laughter somewhere on the other side of the line. Bob was silent for a moment, and then: "Shirley thinks I'm going to Boston. I think you can count on Kent being here. I hate to disturb you, but he knows about the party. He's already promised Shirley he'd come." There was a pause, and he had continued: "Anyway, the apartment will be dark. He'll never see you."

Then Bob had hung up, leaving Betty in questioning silence.

The next day she had busied herself attending to neglected chores. She tried to release her mind from its compulsive concern with the phone call of the night before, but she had found it impossible. Bob had said the apartment would be dark; she had heard Shirley's sharp high-pitched voice in the background that clearly showed her that Bob's wife was in on whatever scheme that had been devised. By mid-afternoon Betty had finished most of her housework and she settled in a chaise-lounge on the patio and opened up the novel she had been reading to where she had left off the night before. She took in the words with her eyes, but they made no sense. She tried reading more slowly, but her mind kept flitting off to the phone conversation and the party Saturday night. No, she must be wrong; it was ridiculous to assume that Bob and Shirley were in on any such plan together! Hadn't she been the one to inform Bob of his wife's infidelity? Although Bob had been forward with her that afternoon, she had given in of her own free will and she had been as much to blame for what had happened. She set her novel face down on the cast iron coffee table. So much of her feelings were really tied up with her sense of guilt, and she saw the explanation for her reaction to Bob's phone call as an attempt to shift that guilt onto Bob and Shirley's shoulders. She stood up from the lawn chair and faced the thick green foliage of the backyard. Summer was coming to its lush appointed end; almost imperceptibly, the leaves seemed to have turned a deep blue-green color, and Betty had noticed a slight chill in the early morning that was eventually burnt off in the mid-day sun. Her thoughts flowed back to the party... she would wait and see, she frowned with a lack of conviction; if Kent went out Saturday night, it might be her duty to make sure that nothing more of this sort of thing happened.

Kent returned home late Friday night, drunk as usual, and had turned into bed not noticing Betty still lying awake beside him. She looked over at his heavily breathing body and the unopened suitcase standing by the door. The usual questions drifted through her mind: where had he been? Had his trip to Chicago actually lasted as long as he would explain tomorrow morning? After only a few hours sleep she awoke and went into the kitchen to make breakfast. Saturday. The breeze blowing in the half- opened kitchen window felt cool, but the sun had risen over the thick shield of pine at the top of the yard, already a brightening orange disk that threatened a hot August day.

"Some lousy convention," Kent groaned and sat down at the table a few minutes after she had begun boiling his eggs and prepared coffee.

Kent liked to be eased out of a hangover he always said, rather than jolted into the weekend with slabs of french toast and maple syrup. She set his soft-boiled egg onto a dish before him.

"Makham split the Conrad account. We didn't do so badly," he cleared his throat, peering into his coffee as though trying to catch his own grim morning-after reflection. "But I get so frigging tired of his Executive Accountant's face kissing up to everybody like a puppy dog."

"Is that all you have to say about ten days in Chicago?" she smiled across the table at him.

"Betty, if you don't mind," he said in a voice that seemed too tired to offer anything more than a small reproach. "Let's drop the subject. Hope you had a nice time, all quiet around here, I guess?"

She nodded limply. The rest of breakfast was eaten in silence. A half-hour later he was out the door, a golf bag slung over his shoulder. "Be back by four or five o'clock," he said, giving her a quick peck on the cheek. "If anything comes up, I'll call you."

At five-thirty he did call, saying he'd be out until late that evening as he had run into some clients from New York who wanted to talk over investment shares in the company. All of this seemed plausible, probable in fact... but Betty Howard was slowly being moved to the point where she could no longer take any chances. Too much was at stake to let her marriage dissipate when she had been forewarned of impending trouble. She resolved to go to the party if only to see for herself whether Kent had made an appearance. She became tense as the night approached and she drank two very dry martinis after her solitary dinner to soothe her nerves a bit. It did seem odd, she remarked to herself as she dressed, that she was so excited about going to Shirley and Bob's only for a quick anonymous appearance. She hoped that the lighting was dim enough that her presence wouldn't be too obvious. She pulled on the white sleeveless form-fitting sheath that she had picked up at Mrs. Fergusson's a few weeks past and quickly surveyed herself in the bedroom mirror; as Kent, in an earlier time might have remarked, she had never looked more beautiful. Her trim smoothly tapering legs flowed down from lushly curving hips and her firm uplifting breasts stood out just perfectly beneath the tightly pressing material. God! What was the matter with her!! Her mind raced. She went into the kitchen and made another martini. It was her third and she felt more relaxed after finishing half of it, yet as she walked out to the station wagon she sensed a warm tingling of expectancy in herself that made her somewhat uncomfortable.

From the second floor landing Betty could hear loud music and laughter coming from the hallway and she was met at the top of the stairs by a burly man in costume garb who handed her a mask. Behind him she could see that the entire corridor had been made into a dance floor: brightly lit Chinese lanterns hung from strings draped in colored crepe paper, and the doors of the two apartments occupying the building's third level were flung open disclosing the obscured forms of figures dressed in costume like the man in front of her.

"Put on the mask," the man said, making a gesture for her to pass by him. "No one needs to know who you are."

"I didn't know this was a masquerade," Betty smiled nervously and pulled the white cameo-like mask over her face.

"Yeah," the man laughed hoarsely. "That's why I'm standing at the top of the stairs."

She walked down the hallway, pushing through elaborately costumed dancers, and headed toward Bob's apartment. A tug on her arm pulled her backward and she turned toward a man dressed in a skeleton-suit and mask who quickly handed her a drink.

"This will help for awhile," Bob's voice came out muffled. "You know that mask you're wearing has a place for breathing and a place for drinking."

"Is he here?" Betty came directly to the point. "I just want to see if he had the nerve."

Bob gestured her off the dance floor to a makeshift bar where couples were lined up waiting for the masked barman to supply them with refreshments. "Look, do you want to simply see that he's here, or do you want to find out what he's going to be doing and who he'll be doing it with?"

Betty didn't answer.

"We can't just go ogling at people. I just got here myself," he exclaimed, raising up his hands in frustration. "If you want to do it right, let's just take our time and act like part of the crowd. We don't want to give ourselves away."

"Alright," she acquiesced. "But only to see what I came for and nothing else."

In spite of the light-headed sensation the martinis had left her with, she could feel a small knot of fear growing in her stomach. There was no way of knowing whether this was a trick on the part of Bob just to get her over here. Still, the evidence from her earlier experiences seeing Kent and Shirley in the backyard wrapped nakedly around each other, and Kent's ten days at the convention was just a bit too much against him and if he were here it would take all the willpower she had not to turn loose on him and begin berating him right in front of the other guests. At any rate, she thought as she walked down the corridor with Bob Howard, it's too late now.

They turned in the door to the apartment adjoining Bob's and moved to a small love-seat in the corner of the room. "Friend of mine, Jake Roberts, went in on the housewarming. This is his place," Bob remarked, settling down beside Betty on the couch.

Betty looked around the crowded room for a sign of her husband, but most of the costumes were so elaborate that it would be impossible to find him in the dim lighting unless he were pointed out. From observing the trim physiques of the men and the daring outfits the women were wearing, she decided that most of them were from around the community of Bellows: young executive types with a few airline stewardesses and college students thrown in. She watched Bob raise the glass to his lips and take a deep swallow and she did the same, glad to have something in her hand to stop her from shaking. She was surprised at first by the cool licorice taste bubbling down her throat. She had expected something much stronger to be served at a party like this. She tipped the glass again, her throat parched from nervousness and the several martinis she had drunk at home by herself while preparing for the party.

"Go slow on that stuff," Bob said, chuckling boyishly. "It packs a pretty good punch after a couple."

"What is it? It tastes good, like a liqueur," she mumbled with a full mouth.

"Pernod. Absinthe. Real exotic after dinner drink imported from Spain. Van Gogh drank it and it made him go crazy," he quipped and finished off his glass.

"If that's the case," Betty said. "You can just drink mine for me."

"Now, baby," Bob said and laughed reassuringly. "Taste that stuff. Do you think you'll flip after one evening on Pernod. Goddamn it, I was only kidding."

She leaned back and rested against Bob's arm, feeling more relaxed and slightly lightheaded. The drink certainly did taste different, but it wasn't really strong flavored and it didn't dull her head as the martinis had earlier. The glow was there but it seemed to bring her senses more alive rather than to dull them. A strange new giddiness seemed to pervade her whole body and she sipped heavily again as she felt Bob's arm wrap gently around her shoulder. She pushed it off with a gentle movement of her hand. "Bob, I don't see any reason to get too cozy," she scolded, good- naturedly sensing that strange giddiness she had felt moments before.

"I don't want to look conspicuous," he explained. "If we sit here like two gawkers somebody might suspect something."

Betty strained again to see if she could find her husband in any of the groups of three or four people talking on the open space of floor in front of them. In the corner where they were sitting it would be almost impossible for them to meet up with Kent and that was good, but she began to feel a little uncomfortable with her brother-in-law pressing insistently close to her as he was.

"I don't think we're going to have much luck in this corner," she said after a bit through the blur of cigarette smoke.

Suddenly Bob stood up. "You just stay right here," he said briskly. "I think I have an idea."

Before Betty could utter a protest about being left alone, he had disappeared out of the room. The groups of people standing masked in front of her were breaking off into couples now and some of them went into the interior of the apartment while others began dancing closely to the slow insistent beat of soft guitar music coming from the stereo set in the hallway. There was something openly provocative about how the dancers thrust their bodies up against one another in a kind of grinding movement that matched the sensuous rhythm of the electrified music; it was as though their masks had given them new identities and they were free to do as they pleased in their anonymity. Through the hallucinatory flicker of a "strobe light" that had been set up at the far side of the room, she made out the embracing forms of one couple who appeared exceptionally engrossed with each other. The man ran his hands over the woman's full sensuous breasts and the woman wrapped her hands around the man's buttocks, pulling his groin to hers as though they were in a standing copulation position. God, the two of them were actually "dry humping" as some of the more audacious girls in college had called it, right out in the open where everyone could see! But she doubted whether the others paid the least attention: they were too much a part of the pulse of the music to be aware of anything but the rhythm of their own bodies...

"Interesting, isn't it?" Bob spoke with a kind of animal purr in his voice when he sat down beside her.

"I I didn't even see you come back into the room," she managed and took her refilled drink from his hand.

"Oh, you were too wrapped up with that little scene," he laughed. "But look closely. Those costumes hide more than you think they do."

The dimness of the room and the constant flicker of the strobe light made it almost impossible to discern more than the obscure outlines of two bodies thrusting back and forth against one another in time to the music, but eventually, as though she were putting together a puzzle, she focused with some clarity on the man's body. He was dressed in a Robin Hood outfit and a black eye mask slanted across his otherwise exposed face. Yes, there was no doubt about it. It was Kent's body, and Kent's mouth pressing against the woman's lips. After three years of marriage she would recognize him under any circumstances. Bob sensed her sudden tensing and slipped his arm across her waist as she sat up and leaned forward on the couch. She made no move to resist. The shock of suddenly recognizing her husband, Kent's, form made her totally incapable of resistance. She felt the softness of her breasts crushed tightly against Bob's chest and then she pulled back.

"You were right," she said, her voice trembling. "I I wouldn't have believed it... but... I was stupid to have held out hope like that... one infidelity doesn't necessarily cancel out another."

She sat for a moment in stunned silence as Kent and the other woman continued dancing to a low primitively sensual voice on the stereo. The arms of the couple were hooked around one another's backs, their groins locked in an obscene gyrating embrace. Wild thoughts of suddenly denouncing Kent in front of everyone raced through her mind, but she knew that in the midst of this group where adultery was apparently the rule such a disturbance would be very much out of place. More than her own need not to make a spectacle of herself, she felt a desire to find out what he would do next. It was quite obvious that the short girl he was dancing with was Shirley; her large full upswinging breasts barely reaching to the base of his chest and the long swathe of blue- black hair pulled back across her toga-like costume betrayed her quite openly.

"That's my wife, alright," Bob sighed, as though reading her thoughts. "The rule was that no one would know what costume anyone else was wearing. But, Goddamn it, they're really loving it up."

Betty had been so involved in watching Kent and Shirley that she hadn't noticed another couple to the right of them who had been putting on a similar performance. She felt Bob's arm nudge her softly in the side. "Looks like the exhibitionists are taking over," he said sarcastically.

Betty sipped from her Pernod and peered through the darkness at the figures of a man and woman arched in a bending embrace to the side of a long low couch. The woman was running her hands rapidly up and down the man's groin; she had pulled the front of the peasant's dress she was wearing to her waist and he squirmed his fingers into her widespread and openly exposed loins. Suddenly the man reached toward the girl's frilly blouse and pulled it open. The young woman wasn't wearing a bra and her naked breasts popped out, quivering slightly, and the room seemed silent. A new record began playing on the stereo; it sounded somewhat eastern and exotic to Betty and its rhythms matched the lewd uninhibited movements of the lovers who had slipped to the couch.

"This is the second stage of the party," Bob said almost inaudibly. "The next plateau is when everybody starts sneaking off to bedrooms."

Betty nodded, her eyes glued to the incredible performance going on in front of her. She could see the details of the two bodies that were now half-naked with disturbing clarity. The girl was lying spread-eagled in the center of the large couch, her head rolling back and forth on a cushion, her face contorted with ecstasy. The man pulled his pants partially down his thighs and kneeled between her naked widespread legs, running his lips up and down her body. He sucked her heaving breasts into softly quivering hardness and then traced a path down to the flat plane of her spasmodically jerking stomach and inner thighs. The girl writhed beneath his steadily flicking caresses like a woman possessed. Her hands tangled in his hair, pulling his lips to the lightly trembling flesh of her belly.

Bob lit a cigarette and handed it to Betty. In a mechanical response, she raised it to her lips and continued watching the couple's strange performance that had mesmerized her into a mute acceptance of whatever might happen next. No, she hadn't wanted to come here, and it was against her best inclinations to stay any longer, but she was compelled to keep an eye on Kent, whatever the consequences. She dragged again on the cigarette Bob had given her. It had an odd sweet taste and it burned her throat, but its pungent odor almost soothed her, adding to the general light- headed feeling that she had gotten from the Pernod.