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CHAPTER ONE

The car headlights made vivid arcs of brightness on the bedroom ceiling as the Cadillac turned into the driveway. Tires crunched gravel and Johnny Simonson squirmed uneasily under the bed-covers, knowing from the way his father gunned the motor that his parents were having another of their constant quarrels. He had been asleep; he had wakened. Now he lay staring up at the ceiling, eyes wide and unseeing, blind bitterness making a metallic taste on his tongue.

His window was up a few inches since it was a mild night, not wintry cold the way January had been. His body was tense and he was surprised to find that his fists had clenched themselves as if independent of his body. He was waiting to hear their voices; like the tires on the driveway, they would give him an indication of the seriousness of the dispute.

A car door slammed. Footsteps moved across the gravel, walking swiftly and purposefully. Johnny came up on an elbow, straining to hear. Silence was a new tactic between them.

It was nothing at all or it was the worst one they'd ever had. Their voices when the front door opened and closed would tell him what he waited to hear. Johnny lay there, tall and mature for his seventeen years, going into his senior year at Mill Hollow High next fall, telling himself he ought to get back to sleep and forget what was about to happen below-stairs.

Sometimes he became physically sick when they fought. A churning nausea grew in him then, making him want to retch, to scream out that he was a part of their lives too, a unit of the family, that he had a right to their consideration and respect, not just witness privileges at one more of their endless battles.

The front door slammed. “You black-hearted Fallopian bitch!"

Johnny lay back and closed his eyes, whispering, "Jesus, it's a bad one, a real bad one."

Cool laughter tinkled.

He whispered, "Don't, Mom. You know he goes kind of crazy mad when you laugh at him like that."

Scuffling sounds rose up the stairwell of the big house. There was the sound of flesh on flesh. His father must have hit her in his insanity of rage. Johnny rolled over and pressed his face into the pillow. He wanted to cry but to cry meant being a nance and he hated the thought of that even more than he hated the thought of crying.

"Cal Andrews is ten times the man you are or ever will be," his mother was saying. "You know it, I know it. He's chairman of the board for United Steel, isn't he? There are two Mark Continentals in his garage, and a Reventlow Scarab. Do you know how much a Scarab costs? Thirty thousand dollars! You can't even afford to buy Johnny an Impala to run around in!”

"No and I never will. I never had an Impala. All I had was two good feet to go back and forth to school on. Irene, I tell you, you'll spoil that boy rotten if you don't—"

She laughed again, carefully and deliberately. "Go on, make excuses. You don't have the money to get him a car, so you harp on the horse-and-buggy days. Times have changed, I tell you. Harv Andrews drives the Scarab, Cliff Magruder a Jaguar, Phyllis Trent the Trent's Thunderbird. But your Johnny should walk, because you did.”

Johnny's thoughts were chaotic, knowing the hot fury glistening in his father's eyes and the cold, remote beauty of his mother standing with her chin high as if daring her husband to match her feminine logic.

I don't want a car, Mom. Why can't you ever understand that? I'd just as soon walk to school. I would. It's only the really rich kids like Harv and Cliff who have cars, anyhow. None of the others do, except some beat-up rattletrap they save for and buy out of Christmas money and part-time jobs. Harv Andrews' parents were divorced nine years ago. He's living with a stepmother now. The third one, I think. And Cliff—

He rolled over onto his back. Why won't they see things the way I see them? Who cares about a car of my own or whether my father is board chairman or not? Harv hasn't seen his father in a month and a half.

Maybe it was because he never saw his father that Harv Andrews was the ringleader for the faster crowd at Mill Hollow. Johnny had heard stories about Harv and Phyllis Trent and Ellen McKay and the others in their crowd. All their parents were divorced, all except Mack Preston's, that is, and his never slept together. Mack used to joke about the woman his father was keeping somewhere on East Fifty-fifth Street but Johnny knew it hurt him to say the things he did. He was only beating somebody else to the punch. Say it himself or have it said to him, it was that simple.

No, he had no wish to run with that bunch, not even in a flashy red Impala. Johnny Simonson would be very happy to walk to school if his parents would settle down and be a normal mother and father to him,

"—just a plodding worker all your life. No more, no less. Why did we ever move out here to Mill Hollow if you didn't intend to better yourself?”

"Jesus Christ, Irene! What've you got for a heart, an IBM computer? All you can see is money—"

"Excuses! The mouthings of a failure!"

"I make over fifteen thousand a year and—”

The cool laughter grew shrill. "Do you call that money? Do you? I'll tell you what money is. It's a hundred thousand a year and more. Two hundred, three hundred thousand. Income from stocks, from—”

Johnny rolled out of bed and stumbled toward his door. He slammed it hard. Maybe that would give them the hint. Tears were in his eyes so that he could hardly see his bed as he fell into it and jerked the covers up over him.

Goddamn it! Oh, Goddamn it all to hell!

Mark Simonson glanced at the stairwell. He was a tall man, lean in the hips and with wide shoulders, the brush of gray at his temples adding maturity to the black crew cut above his tanned face. Anger was a red flush in his cheeks and in the brightness of his eyes. He had paused in his constant stalking of the living room carpet to look at the stairs; now he resumed that pacing with hatred in his heart for the woman who stood beside the walnut cellarette.

"Everybody can't be a titan of industry, Irene. The sooner you make up your mind to that fact, the happier we'll all be, including Johnny."

"Oh, leave Johnny out of it. Don't fall back on him to excuse your failings. Be a man. Stand on your own feet, the feet you walked to school on."

She swung and faced him and even in his rage, Mark knew admiration for the blond loveliness of this woman, his wife. An Edith Head original, an evening gown of pale silk, was taut at her slim waist, falling in folds of pleated beige to her slippered feet. Full breasts crowded the draped bodice and smooth white shoulders made a perfect frame for the diamond pendant which graced her throat.

Irene Simonson wore her pale yellow hair in a bouffant cut, fluffed out above the temples in soft, wide waves. Her red mouth was full and gently curved; a mouth made for kisses, not for the verbal vitriol that poured onto his head so often these days.

Mark made a little gesture with his hands. "Let's not quarrel any more, Irene. It's gotten to be a habit with us."

"Will you agree to the dinner party, then?”

"No, I won't. I won't kiss old man Wheatley's ass that way, not for any amount of money."

"It isn't kissing his ass. It's a social gathering at the country club I have in mind."

"Sure, with Abner Wheatley and his wife, Luther Penny and his wife, Everett Collins and his wife. The three top men in Wheatley and Penny. And me, the hireling."

"How else can you expect to get ahead in the world, unless you put yourself before these people's eyes? Wheatley and Penny are one of the world's biggest advertising companies. They make millions. I'd like some of that money to rub off on you."

“So you can get Johnny a red Impala."

"That's one thing I'd like to buy, yes."

There was a deadliness in the way she was regarding him, with her head tilted slightly and her eyes narrowed. Coldness clamped around his heart.

"Well, go on," he urged. "If I won't listen—what?"

Irene shook her head. "You'll listen. You aren't a fool, no matter what else you are. You'll go along with me in this."

"Not this Saturday or next. I have my camping trips all planned."

"It must be this Saturday or next. The club's booked solid into the spring, right through July and August. By then it might be too late."

"Look, Irene. What do you expect to accomplish with this dinner party?"

"I want you to be firm secretary. Henry Blanton died two weeks ago. His position's vacant. Wheatley and Penny will be picking a new secretary. You can be the one they choose. I knew Nancy Wheatley. We went to school together. I've spoken to her on the phone—”

"I say no and the hell with it.”

Anger made her lips thin and the toeless evening slipper began to tap ominously. Dissatisfaction was an acid in Irene Simonson, always nibbling at her nerves. From a moneyed family herself—her father had been head of a big publishing firm, while her mother was heiress to an interstate baking concern—she saw with eyes used only to the best. She had come down a step when she married Mark Simonson, but she had married for love, and there was good stuff in Mark. Nineteen years of married life, however, had taught her he was lacking in that relentless drive which every money—man must have.

She wondered idly if he could be made to change his mind. She was still a young woman, not quite forty and sexually attractive. Mark was only a few months past his own fortieth birthday, still healthy, still vigorous. Irene scorned women who used their bodies to achieve their wants; it smacked of harlotry.

However...

She snubbed out her cigarette in the bronze ashtray and reached behind her for the gown snaps. "I'm too tired to fight you, Mark," she murmured. "Just give the party some thought. I'll have to know by tomorrow night, though. The invitations must go out."

The snaps were proving elusive. She turned her back and murmured, "Mind giving me a hand?"

He came across the carpeting, the anger still visible as a red flush on his cheeks, moving in automatic obedience to her wishes as he'd done so often in the past. Only when the snaps were undone and the dress had opened to reveal her white back, bare down to the ridge of her black girdle, did he begin to understand.

“I thought you were above that," he told her maliciously. She glanced over a nude shoulder. "Above what?"

“Using your body to win an argument."

She walked ahead of him, not answering, her evening gown fully parted in the back, holding up the skirt with one hand, the bodice with the other. "The stays were too tight," she murmured. "Any harm in being comfortable?"

He went after her, switching off the lights, watching her slim ankles in the blue nylons moving up the stair treads. It had been some time since they'd treated one another as lovers; not since Atlantic City, come to think of it, when Irene, pleased at having gotten her own way, had made herself irresistible in a transparent nightgown.

When he went into the master bedroom and closed the door, she was stepping out of the pale beige gown, a slim white nude in black girdle and blue stockings. Mark always enjoyed watching Irene take off her clothes.

She had retained her figure. Her hips had widened slightly but the waist was as slim, a fact she disputed with him, quoting figures like a ticker-tape. Twenty-two inches when they had married, twenty-seven now. Yet she looked ripely voluptuous, which he supposed was what influenced his judgment.

Tiredness was a pulse-beat at the base of his neck but he could not deny the enjoyment he got from seeing Irene go through her paces. She stood hip-shot before the vanity mirror, fingers fluffing her blond hair, humming softly as if he were a hundred miles away.

She turned and glanced at him as if sensing the direction of his thoughts.

"Hmmmm? Have you decided?"

This was the moment, the pivotal point of their marriage. Mark was aware of that suddenly, with an intuitive wisdom. Give in to her, go to her country club party this coming Saturday, make his pitch to be secretary of Wheatley and Penny, get her soft white body in his arms to amuse himself within whatever way he wanted.

Or stand on his own two feet and be a man. And get an empty bed to sleep in.

His hands yanked his shirt-tails free. "I don't know. I'm weighing values. Do I become your slave or do I remain a free human being?”

"Oh, my God," she said, turning back to the mirror.

“Whether you see it that way or not, that's the choice you give me. I never have measured up to what you think a husband should be, Irene. Not from the beginning, not since I wouldn't go into Rappaport Books with your father."

"If you had, you'd be a millionaire today.”

"Is that good? Is that the best in life, to be a man with a million dollars?"

"Money buys whatever you want."

"Not for me it doesn't. I like to get out in the woods with a camera and snap wildlife. I couldn't do that if I were a millionaire. I'd be too busy making money and then more money, all the time worrying if I could keep what I had. All life is a compromise or a barter. We all decide what we want out of living, just how much we're willing to give up to get it, then go ahead. The lucky ones don't have to sacrifice too much. Some of us never get what we want."

"The bedroom philosopher," she murmured, bending to undo a garter clasp, well aware that his eyes were fastened on the round white breasts she displayed between her arms. Barter, he had said. She would gladly trade him a little fun with her bosom in exchange for his promise to attend her dinner party at the country club next Saturday. Irene fought down a flush and moved to the bed, knowing her stocking were sliding down her legs, that her garters were bouncing on her thighs, that she was just as wantonly enticing as any foreign film star and proud of it.

She sat down and began to unroll the stockings very carefully, taking her time. She said casually, "Do you know how much Henry Blanton was making when he died?"

"The job pays fifty thousand."

"He was making ninety-three thousand. As an executive he also got a percentage of the accounts he handled."

Anger made him whirl on Irene where she stood naked by the edge of the bed unfastening the girdle zipper. "Is that what my freedom costs? Is that its price? A hundred grand a year? Don't you care anything about me, whether I'm happy or miserable? Can you honest to Christ be that selfish?”

"I care," she told him and rolled onto the bed.

"Yes, you care. You care because you think that what makes you happy must also make me happy. You just can't understand anyone not falling madly in love with a million dollars.

"You feel there must be something abnormal about anybody like that. Not love money, not do anything for money? Why, that's like being a traitor in wartime, a girl molester or a rapist. Isn't it, Irene?"

"All this because I'm asking you to give up a camping trip and stay home to improve your lot in life?”

"Oh, hell! If it were just this time I'd say yes and be glad you took an interest in me. But ever since we got back from our honeymoon I've had to forgo everything I used to enjoy—the boat trips in the Mudfly, the camp-outs, and Aqua Lung swims, the long tramps in the woods, the photography contests—just because you decided those things wouldn't get me ahead fast enough."

"Well, they won't!" she screamed, sitting upright.

She was no longer Irene Maxwell Simonson but a grasping, greedy bitch hungry for the goodies in life and not content to wait for them.

He fought to be calm. He wanted to reason with her, he honestly did, though he was in no mood for logic. He sat on the edge of the bed, gingerly, as if she might push him off. "Irene, listen. A man works hard all week long. When the weekend comes he's entitled to ”

Her fist beat on the bed-clothing. "I don't mind your having fun and games. I don't, I don't. Can't you understand that? Just have fun the way I want you to. You can get your relaxation talking to Ab Wheatley on the country club patio."

"Irene, every one of us is an individual. What's your meat can be my poison. When will you ever realize that?"

"Maybe never," she muttered sullenly. "You don't want to realize it.”

"Well, maybe I don't. Maybe I'm seeing us for the first time, the way we really are. You don't give a damn about money, the things money can buy."

"You're a greedy bitch."

"Am I? Well, I want the nice things of life and if that's being a greedy bitch, then that's what I am. I'm not getting any younger. I want to wear nice clothes while I still have the body to show them off."

Her hands went under the heavy breasts, lifting them. "These won't stay firm for many more years. They'll get flabby. And my hips will spread. I'll be like Clara Preston, fat and fifty, with as much sex appeal as a squashed tomato.”

"A lot of good your sex appeal does me," he said bitterly.

She stared at him. "Oho! So that's the way the wind is blowing, is it? Mama hasn't been putting out as often as you'd like. No, and Mama won't put out until you come to your senses and make your bid to go places in Wheatley and Penny."

The bed moved as he rose to his feet. His face was hard, implacable. "You're no better than a whore, Irene. A legal whore. A wife's supposed to love her husband not for what she can get out of him, but because he is her husband."

"Oh. darling. You're quoting horse-and-buggy maxims.

Let's bring the show up to date, shall we? Everybody knows a wife uses sex as a kind of whip. Even Peg Andrews uses it with Cal, to get him to take time off for a theater date or a dinner at the club."

"Might be cheaper for Cal to make time with the office help," he said lightly.

"Oh, he does that too," she told him. "I think every man as successful as Cal Andrews ought to be allowed certain privileges."

"Jesus," said Mark. "You really believe that, don't you?”

He wanted to laugh, to let the tension slip from him with sophisticated mirth, to say "The hell with it!” and get down on the bed and wallow in the blond nudity of his wife until dawn. Except that you could never really wallow with Irene. No matter how suggestive her patter might be, her performance was always taut and restrained as if she were ashamed all the time of what was happening.

"You know," he said slowly, "sometimes I think you'd be happier without me."

"Mmmmm! I've had a few thoughts like that myself.”

Something in her voice, a hidden hunger creeping into view along her tongue tip, caught his ear and held him with the fascination of the snake for the cock. He paused with one leg in and one leg out of his pajamas, looking at her.

"Do you want a divorce?"

The word hung in the air between them like a magical enchantment, suspending time, halting all the natural functions, the breathing and the heartbeat, the laughter and the tears. Irene lay on the bedclothes, staring straight up at the ceiling.

"Is that it? Is that why we've been fighting so much these past two, three years? Have you made up your mind and now you're only trying to find an excuse?

"I never realized. I honest to Christ never realized. Jesus, how stupid can a man be? Sure. All along you've wanted to break us up. So you could zero in on some guy who has what it takes in your eyes."

Now he could understand some of her actions, like the night at the Beauforts' party with her evening gown up to her hips doing the cancan wearing a girdle but no panties, or at the country club the week before Christmas, driving off for two hours with Thurman Purvis and God alone knows what they did or where. He never said very much about that because as soon as Thurm and Irene disappeared, Thurm's wife Elsie and he had themselves a sweet little session in the back seat of the Cadillac.

Now he thought back, there were other times when Irene had thrown her conduct up to him almost defiantly, as if challenging him to do whatever he wanted about it. The night she and Fred Marlow had been caught by the Prestons in the cloakroom of the club, for instance; nobody would tell him what they had been doing and he'd laughed it off, pretending Irene and Fred had had too much to drink. Or the time Irene and he had gotten drunk and in her maudlin state she had compared him with Cal Andrews, Perc Drayton and Wally Evarts in a highly intimate way.

"A divorce," he said numbly. "You've wanted it all along and I was too goddamn dumb to realize it."

As if of its own volition her hand went to the bed-covers and drew them up over her body, right to her throat. A flush lay along her cheeks.

"Yes, Mark," she said gently. "I think I would like a divorce. While I'm still attractive enough to get another husband."

His fingers busied themselves retying the drawstrings of his pajama trousers. He slid arms into the jacket. "I wouldn't fight it, you understand. I'd be agreeable to whatever arrangements you made.”

She nodded, lower lip caught in her teeth. "I don't want a lot of alimony, Mark. I have some money of my own and Mother's always said that if I needed it, I could borrow on the estate I'll inherit when she dies. All I'll ask is enough to take care of Johnny."

He sat down on the vanity bench and stared at her. This did not seem quite real to him. He always imagined couples agreeing on divorce amid tears and accusations of infidelity. There ought to be blows struck and screams from Irene curses from himself. Instead, they were rather affable and friendly about it, as if talking over a party.

He shook his head. "There ought to be more to it."

Irene giggled and since she rarely giggled, Mark looked at her sharply. She looked hoydenish with her blond hair rumpled and her white arms and shoulders suggesting the shapely body hidden beneath the covers. Almost like a different woman, he thought in amazement. As if the mere idea of divorce were doing something to her, changing her from the cool, calculating woman he had always known her to be.

"Mark, you're too bourgeois. You think middle-class. Sanctity of the marriage vows, no divorce no matter what happens. Chicken for Sunday dinner and mortgage payments every month. Maybe that's your whole trouble. Judged by middle-class standards you're a walloping big success in life.

"By my standards, you're a failure. Maybe that's what galls me most, being married to a man I feel has let me down. I know I'd be happier not being married to you, and I'm honest enough to admit you'll probably be happier without me, too. It'll be like breaking a habit. Tough at first. Then after a while it'll get so you'll have to try and remember what it was like, being married to me."

"You seem to know a lot about it.”

"I've talked to Peg Andrews, to Madge Trent, to Nancy Wheatley. All of them were divorced and have remarried.”

There was a silence between them. She murmured thoughtfully, "I'll go see a lawyer first thing Monday morning. The question is, what lawyer??

"Ab Wheatley gives his business to Marshal Donovan," he said lightly.

"Donovan? Of course. That's who Peg Andrews went to! Now I remember. He's somewhere on Fifth Avenue."

"Convenient to Grand Central," he commented wryly.

"Oh, Mark, don't be stuffy. Deep down you're as glad to be rid of me as I am of you. Now when Sue Magruder lets you look down her dress you won't have to worry whether I'm anywhere around."

"Sue is—"

"I know, I know. Just a tease. Never wears brassieres but if you put a finger on her she runs to friend husband."

He looked down at Irene burrowing deeper under the covers. She murmured sleepily, "Turn off the lights on your way out, lover.”

He closed the door behind him. Maybe Irene was right. Maybe they were stifling one another. Free of him, Irene could look around for the type of man she'd hoped to find in him. And he? Why, now he could take his cameras and go camping to his heart's content without feeling he was cheating her of his time and companionship.

In the guest room he sat on the edge of the bed and stared through the window, looking out over Longmeadow Road. Monday morning his wife would ride the Central into New York. She would visit a lawyer in order to cut him out of her life. And he felt good about it.

We ought to have done it years ago, before the bitterness piled up between us, he thought.

He crawled under the covers and lay staring upward, wondering what life would be like without Irene always at his elbow.