‘Take a hike’

“All ashore who’s going ashore!”

“Bon voyage, Sugar, Sir Harry. Say ‘bye bye’ to Mommy, Baby.”

That next morning Sarah kisses Laudette and Gloria goodbye and goes along on the playboy philosopher’s dream vacation, but for her the honeymoon is neither sweet nor dreamy. The cruise is bumpy and she spends the first nineteen days with her stomach in her hands and her head in the head, the brass-tooled commode in the Regina Mare’s stateliest accommodation. In bed she is as cold and as off-smelling as a dead fish.

Harry waits, counting on the palatial chateau he’s let with its majestic views and fresh mountain air, to calm her stomach and stimulate her appetite. Once more on high and dry land, she regains her former model dignity and appeal. On the first night Harry comes to her room with a bouquet of edelweiss and tries to warm her up by talking about the fun they had before they were married.

“Harry, I thought we married for money not for sex. Now leave me alone. Take a hike, that’s what you came here for, isn’t it?”

Ooh, nasty, Cupcake, but what a beautiful bitch you are! Harry thinks.

Her resistance is every bit as compelling as it is aggravating. Frustrated, yet athletic, Swan loves a challenge. He will stick to the old-fashioned courtly ways he thinks will win her over. Marriage has been known to do strange things to a woman’s desires. He relies on what he believes will be a winning strategy. He’s never seen it to fail with a woman: sweet talk her, give her some room, try to be considerate; let her know you care and not press her too hard, but let her see the man in you. Sooner or later. Bingo!

“Yes, Cupcake, if it’s all right with you, I’ll give my friend Basil a call. We’ll do a little rock climbing, and stay at the lodge for a few nights.”

With her husband out for the next several nights with the Duc du Fondue, Sarah counts on the time she will have, the time she needs, to reflect and pray, to be alone with the phantoms in her imagination. But she is still not alone. There are servants who come with the house and they invade her privacy. Heidi and Bridget are two maids who continually pester her. The frauleins, stiffly formal and starchy in their uniforms, are nevertheless overly eager when it comes to service. They are hardly older than she but as servants they behave as if they were to the manor downstairs born. If she does not have them fuss over her, they put on condescending airs which intimidate her. They turn up their noses as if she smells of common blood. She wants to dismiss them with the same looseness she shooed her husband away with but she finds, to her greater irritation, that she is pluckless in front of them. She does not want to let these complete strangers know that they are more experienced in the ways of aristocracy than she. Image first, her prayers have to wait while the maids drive her to put on an important face of her own as they wait on her.

The lady’s day is leisure with no respite. They serve her breakfast in bed; they help her with her correspondence, the lone letter she sends to Laudette and Gloria; then there is a morning bath where they wash her feet and dry her hands so she can page through a magazine. Then a massage by thumby Bridget. At her toilet, they help make her up as a smooth-finished porcelain lady, and dress her as if she were a toy doll. They accept a luncheon invitation on her behalf from the Duchesse du Fondue, and have the driver take her off, staring vacantly out of the back window of the car, to see the neighborhood castle and meet some peers. They see to it that she gets her beauty rest, has her afternoon tea and then in the late afternoon another beauty bath, this in Heidi’s special herbs, with champagne. Dinner and more wine are served her. Finally, after dinner they help her on with her bed clothes and put her to bed. Even then they deprive her of the comfort of crying herself to sleep by insisting she take some blue narcotic pills which go along with the wine to make her too drowsy to call the dogs.

The playboy philosophy says that gifts will butter her up. Before Harry returns he makes sure he stops in the village so he can come home loaded with presents, sweets for the sweet, Emmenthal chocolates, perfume, flowers, and lingerie, even a fur coat. “I know it’s the middle of the summer but I was thinking these high pine nights can be cool for a delicate flower like you, Cupcake.”

In fact, the presents make her feel safe and warm, glad Harry is her husband and not some lout. He holds the coat for her to try and she backs in arms first. When he fixes the collar around her shoulders, he nuzzles his nose against her neck. “You’re so soft and sweet, Cupcake! And you smell so good.” She feels the swell in his leather climbing pants.

Sarah looks inside and finds her eyes looking through Corn Dog’s face. There’s the trolly coming, about to strike her dead. “Aah! Ouch!” She moves her neck as if Harry were being too rough with her. Her husband can protect her on the surface, but he cannot make her feel secure or passionate in her core. Inside she is as cold as ice cream. “Thank you, Harry, but some other time.” She moves beyond his reach. “I’m just not in the mood tonight.”

Again, Harry is sorry to have lost the suit for her attentions. He bulges with apologies. “I only meant to say I love you, darling.”

She sees his strategy. Treated nicely, Sarah feels obliged to respond in kind. It’s easier to refuse a horny toad than a gallant prince.

Harry goes on, “Don’t you feel anything for me at all? You seemed to before we were married.”

“‘Seemed’ is not ‘is’, Harry. I don’t think you’re capable of understanding what real feelings are. Don’t box me in.”

The icy way she says this hits him like a slap on the face. But the playboy follows his guaranteed methods of seduction faithfully. He tries to reassure her. “Is it that you have doubts about my love, my Love? For me ‘seems’ and ‘is’ both are. You are the most exciting woman in the world. You’re like a flame I want to burn in. I beg you, marry me for real, not only for convenience but in the spirit of for better or worse. Share yourself with me. Start with what is on your mind, talk to me, and we will work together down to what you have below your waist.” Ever jolly, Harry winks.

But her relationship to her husband begins where her relationship to her father left off. Her fuse is short and she doesn’t hesitate to explode when she is angry. In fact she adds onto poor Harry’s bill her annoyance with herself over the intimidation she feels from the maids.

After all, she thinks, my life was richer when I worked on a pay-as-you-come basis, but just because I’ve sold out at the bulk rate that shouldn’t mean I have no place to call home.

“Goddamn it, man, what I really need is some privacy around here, some time to myself! If you’re not badgering me those damn maids are. All the while you were gone they followed me like dogs wherever I went. I want you to fire them, or at least get them out of my hair, understand? Whoever said this was easy money? Now thanks for the gifts, they’re lovely, but if you would be so kind, please go, I need time to be alone.”

No sense of humor, the sweet sourpuss pushes him out, locks the door, and gets ready to clam up in her room for the rest of their stay: no maids, no master.

The more piqued and picky she gets the more beautiful Harry finds her. Boxed in himself in a vicious cycle, loving a woman for not loving him, he is obsessed by the thought of conquest. He will win, he must win this woman’s body, even if he has to become her slave to do it. He must have her because she is impossible to have.

Yes, Harry loves his wife, but when sex-starvation sets in, in a pinch, anyone will do. He sees how the problem could contain its own solution. Perhaps the maids would find Monsieur more amenable to their services than Madame. Instead of discharging them he will approach them on a physical level. He calls and asks them if they would help him off with his hiking boots and leather pants and soap his feet. He smiles when he sees what a thorough job they do. He sends them out to the village to get some linament for his back. Being the master of the house and they his servants he feels no fault when he goes to their quarters to sniff them out first in private. Are they really as starchy as all that? He goes through their drawers to find out. Starchier!

But then, under Heidi’s stiff underwire, bra, he finds a camera, and … what!? A letter to Bridget from a private investigator, Sam Hunkel, soliciting their help, giving the details of a plan to drive Sarah mad, seduce him, and get it on film. The maids are his sister’s spies, saboteuses.

Sis means business, he thinks. I know the puritanical ethic keeps all promises and honors all commitments, but this is worse than I thought.

“Pack your bags, dear.” He wastes no time telling Sarah. “I think you’re right, this place is rather tiresome.”

He says nothing about the maids and Sarah doesn’t ask questions. Anything to get home sooner; she doesn’t mind leaving the high country behind, to get on with the next round in this newlywed game.