STEVE WAS co-owner and producer in the television packaging firm I worked for and came to Hollywood several times a year to do shows. (He’s created three famous, long-lasting ones you’d recognize.) I produced “Tea Party,” a daytime woman’s show, and really liked my work. One afternoon he asked me for a date. We’d known each other six years by then and even that day he didn’t ask for a real date. He just said, “Maybe you’d like to go to a movie with me Sunday.” I said that sounded like fun. Why can’t girls ever say anything except something sounds like fun?
Sunday came and I not only had a scratchy throat, I had the runny nose, watery eyes . . . the ague, the grippe or some damn thing. When Steve called to ask about picking me up, I said, “I’m going to die, or maybe I already have. But I sure didn’t go to heaven. I can’t breathe or see or anything, so I guess I can’t go to the movies.”
“I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “Do you want me to bring you anything?”
“No,” I said, “IVe consumed roughly my own replacement in aspirin and I’m sure I have orange-juice blood by now.”
“Booze?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t dare,” I said. “Then I’d be a sneezing drunk”
“Well, listen,” he said, “if you start to feel better later in the day, please give me a call.”
“Okay,” I said. I wasn’t ever going to feel better.
We hung up. I thought about him tooting around Beverly Hills in his rented Thunderbird, going to church first, then delivering flowers to several Beverly Hills matrons who’d had him to dinner. That was his Sunday-morning ritual when he was on the Coast. Then I blew my nose and drank some more orange juice and wondered some more about how he’d got around to me. He was a popular man, nice-looking though not good-looking, because his skin was somewhat pock-marked and one eye was lower than the other just slightly. He must have got around to me because he’d run out of girls, I decided, although I couldn’t remember ever hearing that he was a chaser. It seemed to me I would have heard in six years. Anyway I knew he was married—with a family in West-port, Connecticut. We’d had a number of friendly chats during our years in the same firm. If a man in your company is single, of course, you find out everything you can about him if you have to hire Pinkerton. If he’s married, you don’t go quite so all out. Perhaps Steve decided to ask me out because I had made some improvements since we first met. My psychoanalysis was all finished, I dressed and looked better at thirty-six than I had in my twenties, and I had a good female body.
I didn’t call Steve back at his hotel for three hours, which was quite a long time when you consider that after the first half-hour I’d already figured this was a psychosomatic cold that I’d developed purely because I had a date with a married man and wanted a good excuse to break it. Having decided I was taking him and me and the cold far too seriously, I did call back, got him at the pool and said I was feeling better. He said great, would I like him to pick me up or maybe I’d like to come over and get some sun—perhaps it would be good for the cold. I said I’d drive over. The Bel Air Hotel was a good twenty miles from my apartment in Pasadena but I liked to drive, and perhaps I had in the back of my head that with my own car I could leave exactly when I wanted to.
When I drove into the wooded parking lot in front of the Bel Air, he was waiting for me. I was snuggled into a woolly, pale blue dress which I adored and a coat the same color, and I felt nice—whether this was a cold or a psychosomatic defense.
We went inside to the bar so I could have a hot toddy by the fireplace—and no doubt perspire and really get pneumonia if this turned out to be a bona fide cold. Anyway, we started laughing and gossiping about his shows and my show and our associates, and we didn’t stop doing that, among other things, for four long years. That’s how it began.
We went to his bungalow presently to change into swimsuits—there were four big rooms so nobody was bumping into each other—and then we went to the pool. A number of people we both knew were there and we chatted and had a lovely time. The sun was good and hot, but then the afternoon cooled down as it does in California. First thing you know I had broken out in these damned hives. I never could take aspirin. And I had a chill.
We went back to his bungalow, and while I was still in my swim-suit I drank a bathroom tumbler full of brandy to stop shaking (and itching—hives are very itchy). While I was getting the stuff down and because it was gagging me, Stephen kissed me very gently on the forehead to tell me without saying so that he knew I really did have a cold, though we were both pretending I didn’t; that he understood and that I shouldn’t be hivey or embarrassed; that we were old friends and there was nothing to be nervous about. He was nice.
The love thing had already started by then, I guess. We didn’t go to bed that night or the next or the next, but the build-up was fantastically exciting. I used to sit with my stop-watch trying to time ‘Tea Party,” and my mind would be so many millions of miles away they couldn’t possibly have had television sets wherever I’d got to. When we met in the evening, we’d go to some lovely place for dinner on the Strip or off the Strip, and we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. I remember sitting in the parking lot at Romanoff’s one night and necking . . . rubbing noses, kissing, hands on each other’s faces, fingertips in each other’s mouths. It was breathless and magic, but we had so much time and no one was rushing. We’d waited six years already.
We couldn’t see each other for three nights. He was taping shows and I had no business being there, and I had recording sessions clear across town anyway. Then, Saturday morning, I brought enough clothes to his hotel in my car to outfit a girl for Bermuda, because I wanted to be gorgeously dressed for whatever we planned to do that weekend. As it happened I could have gotten by with a muumuu or nothing at all. We hardly got out of bed.
It was a found weekend. I was thirty-six, Steve was forty-seven, and it had never happened to either of us before like this. Well maybe it had happened to him (how do you ever really know?), but he seemed too proud of himself and too overjoyed for me not to think this love-making was something special. I know he was deeply moved.
Sometimes when he was completely exhausted I would seduce him again, and it wasn’t difficult. Or I would be sleeping lighdy beside him, and he would reach over and gather me in his arms and just hold me quietly for a long time. There was the lovely, languorous getting to know each other and each other’s bodies, and the more we had of each other the needier we seemed to be. We had so much to give, and there was no embarrassment.
Sunday morning late we finally let the maid in to make up the room, but of course it didn’t do any good. We were back in it the minute she left. Eight times, if you want a box score for the weekend, and I think we could have made it nine—but I had to be at an agent’s office early Monday morning to interview actresses.
I believe in some people’s minds there is still the thought that you must have either a wild, sexy, abandoned relationship or a traditional love affair—not both. Well, we had both. It doesn’t happen often. Perhaps this was a loaded situation to begin with, more romantic than life really is. Steve was a “stranger” in hot and sunny Southern California—practically the sultry tropics for a man who works in New York—far from home where his real cares were. He had an almost unlimited expense account, so there was no end to glamorous dinners, Bel Air Hotel bungalow living to the hilt and champagne breakfasts. As for me, I was an angel from the moon all that time—cool, sexy, beautiful (as much as money and care could buy), kind, funny ... I don’t think he ever saw me at my worst. We went to marvelous parties because he knew lots of people who liked him and accepted me. I even gave a party or two myself. We went to church sometimes.
One morning when he finished his show we borrowed a beach house—a really palatial affair in Malibu that belonged to one of his movie-star friends—and swam nude all day, baked in the sun and made love. And always there was the gossip about the office and network executives and tales of our own two lives, which we went into in depth, and discussions about de-colonialization and the world market, or as much as I could discuss anyway. After lunch he gave me a rubdown with the Ballantine’s Scotch from his flask, and then I smelled all boozy and we had to go swimming again. We were in love as much as two people can be, for a while, I’m sure.
The relationship lasted, incredibly—more or less like this—for four long years. It couldn’t have continued so long except that he lived three thousand miles away from me, and we only saw each other four or five times a year. Also, I wasn’t badgering him to get a divorce and marry me. It wouldn’t have been right. He was married to a nice woman who loved him, though she may not have been very good in bed. He couldn’t justify a divorce, and they had three children.
As for me, I was pretty hooked—but I was also a big girl, and I knew this sort of thing didn’t always lead to marriage.
One afternoon we were lying in bed at the hotel when his phone rang—as it did eighty or ninety times a day—but I heard him tell the operator he’d take the call on the extension in the living room. He did, and when he came back to bed I said, “Will you light me a cigarette?”
“You don’t smoke,” he said.
“But I want a cigarette now,” I said.
He lit one for me, and when it was going nicely I crushed it out against his knee.
“I don’t like your being married,” I said. “And I don’t like your taking calls from Connecticut on my time.”
The next time he was on the Coast, I made it a point to be in Chicago. Six months after that I met the man I married. I’ve never lighted another cigarette. Sometimes I wonder if my husband ever takes a call on the other extension in a hotel room for a reason I just might understand. I don’t think so. I really keep him pretty busy.
I was twenty-three years old when Andrew A. Corwin, president and owner of Andrew A. Corwin, Ltd., investments—offices in New York, San Francisco, London, Rome, Paris, Madrid, Lisbon and Istanbul—interviewed me for a secretarial job. It was just ten days before my twenty-fourth birthday.
When he came in, I was already seated in his office, having gone through about twenty-nine screenings with thirty-eight people to get to him. The office was paneled in wood and was just plain rich . . . not ostentatious, but rich. The wood was real, the leather was real, the paintings were real. There was a Renoir hanging behind the desk.
I guess Mr. Corwin had just come in off the street. He still had his hat and muffler and overcoat on. He left the hat on after we began to talk, which I thought was odd, but later, when he took it off, I realized he was getting bald and was probably self-conscious about it. I remember thinking, how ridiculous . . . what difference would it make if you were bald and had all that money? Actually he was only forty-three, but that’s like ninety if you’re only twenty-three yourself.
He got me to doing most of the talking, which I only realized years later was rather unusual for anybody that important. He was interested in my family back in Nebraska. He asked about the jobs I’d had before and whether I enjoyed working. Then he asked whether I was engaged. I said no, and he didn’t say anything stupid like “I should have thought a lovely girl like you would have been snapped up by now.” He just said he had one or two more people to see and that someone would let me know about the job in a few days.
I wasn’t surprised when the employment agency called me and said I had the job. I was young, but I was a good secretary—shorthand one hundred and thirty words a minute, typing speed eighty. The last people I’d worked for had wanted me to stay, but I just had to make more money. Even though this was an investment firm, apparently I didn’t have to know about finance.
On my twenty-fourth birthday, three days after I started working there, I said something about being almost a quarter of a century old that day. I’ve always been too talkative about birthdays. I think other people ought to share them. Mr. Corwin said, “Congratulations.” Then he said, “Sit down, Paula, I want to talk to you.”
He said, “I’d like to buy you a present for your birthday—maybe a wristwatch, or perhaps you’d like to order a Galanos dress.” Then, before I had a chance to say anything, he went on, “I know, Paula, this is something you would not ordinarily accept, and I won’t be dishonest with you. I would like you to be my girl. I hired you because I hoped you would be. I suppose I could have my choice of . . . secretaries. This job pays well (I’ll say it did), and some people who know that I’m personally wealthy might take the job for other reasons. I don’t tell you these things to brag. I’m just trying to be honest.”
I sat very still and didn’t say a word for a moment, but it wasn’t because I was shocked. I knew somehow this was how it was going to be. It’s even possible I told him about my birthday in order to give him an opening. (You never can be quite sure why you do these things.)
He went on. “Being my girl wouldn’t be as sordid as you might think. As a matter of fact, I believe you would have a very good life. I don’t promise you to get a divorce. In fact, the chances are very unlikely. I like Mrs. Corwin. She’s a fine woman. She has never liked the . . . physical aspect of marriage. We’ve both tried and that’s that. I won’t sell too hard, but again I will tell you that I can more or less have my choice of girls. When someone is wealthy, these are . . . well . . . just the facts of life. Perversely, perhaps, I don’t want those girls. I want you. I will see that by the time you leave you have a considerable amount of money. My last secretary, who just left to get married, had over five hundred shares of A.T.& T. in her own name. (I didn’t realize what that amounted to at the time.) Of course, I’ll give you the things you should have. We’ll start with an apartment. Don’t tell me now, Paula, but think about it.”
I can’t remember what I said, but I didn’t say no. I’m afraid I wasn’t insulted. I just opened my shorthand book and we went on with the dictation.
A week later we went to bed—in a hotel suite—and I began being kept. I wasn’t out and out kept. I worked hard at the office and made a good salary, but you don’t have an expensive apartment and charge five hundred dollars worth of dresses at a whack on a secretary’s pay.
After I got the apartment we usually went there. It was a beautiful place, with a crystal chandelier and thick pale blue carpets and a very lavish fountain in the foyer. Once or twice we made love in Andrew’s office—on the floor or on one of those creamy leather couches—and once in the board room with the doors locked and the lights on.
I told only one other person what I was doing, my girl friend. “I don’t see why I can’t take a year of my life and give it to someone who needs me and who will make me financially secure in return,” I told Diana. Surprisingly enough, she agreed with me. I still went to parties when kids that I knew gave them, but of course I never took a date. Finally I stopped seeing very many people at all. It was just too complicated.
I’d like to say the arrangement with Andrew was gruesome. Actually, for quite a while, it was fun. Of all the fringe benefits, I think I liked shopping the best. Perhaps one afternoon a week I would leave the office at three—we were always busy—with Andrew’s car and driver and go uptown to shop. I’d always struggled for hours before deciding whether I could or could not afford a six-ninety-five sweater, and usually I found I could not. But on these shopping sprees I could buy absolutely anything and everything I wanted, from fur-lined raincoats to Swedish crystal.
People to whom this sort of thing never happens are usually horrified by the idea. It just isn’t that horrible if you like the man. It’s sexy to try on lingerie knowing that someone you like very much is going to see you in it. Maybe it’s even a little sexier knowing that somebody is going to pay for the lingerie. I remember one afternoon meeting Andrew at the door of my apartment in a black short chemise—all black lace and pure silk—and I wore high-heeled black satin mules. I’d just come home from a shopping spree. I’m sure he liked the fact that I was his quiet, sweet, efficient, demure little secretary at work and the rest of the time an adored and expensive courtesan.
He enjoyed making love to me but . . . well ... I just didn’t enjoy making love to him! I guess he was what you’d call “clinical.” Just think of a passionate, uncomplicated Italian waterfront worker and then think of the exact opposite—that would be Andrew. He didn’t know, of course. I’m sure he thought he was marvelous. Still, even though he was twenty years my senior, I used to enjoy giving him pleasure as though he were my child. At the height of love-making—you know, the climax—it was almost as though I were an observer. I was glad that he found me so pleasurable, and not getting swept up in it myself didn’t worry me.
There wasn’t a chance of marriage, of course, and I found myself getting more and more annoyed—petulant even—when Andrew and his wife swept off to the opera or charity balls or openings of art galleries. Finally I decided I had to do something to hurt him for being married, irrational as it was. I began to go out with other men from the office. That was the beginning of the end for me, and two of the men were let go. Andrew gave me six months’ severance pay. He was very businesslike when we parted—obviously I wasn’t the first girl in his life—and he saw to it that I got a job in another brokerage firm. I sometimes wonder what my husband would think if he knew how I paid for the psychoanalysis which made it possible for me really to fall in love with someone nice and marry him.
What does an efficiency expert do? I still don’t know, really. Anyway, whatever he does, he was one. He’d been “making things more efficient” at Wirtz and Feuthwanger, the shoe manufacturer I work for, for about a month—coming in every morning at nine-thirty with his brief case. Everybody treated him with some respect, although he looked hardly any older than I. Every day he’d ask to see certain papers or certain people, and finally he got around to me. We had a chat about whether I liked my job, if I thought I was overworked, if I had enough help during rush periods and so on. I wasn’t going to tell him a blessed thing, but pretty soon I found myself yapping away about Muriel’s being late four mornings out of five and my calculator being at least a hundred and fourteen years old and hard to work with, especially during inventory.
After that chat, when he came by my desk every day he’d say, “Good morning, Miss Lanebroom.” “Lanebrawn,” I would answer. I knew perfecdy well he knew my name. One day he brought me a rose. His mother grew them, he said. It was a Helen Traubel. Fine.
Well, I never did like blond men, and though I was as eager as the next girl to meet somebody really good and get married (twenty-seven isn’t getting any younger, and my current romance was a mess), he just never entered my head as a possibility. Not ever. He was very blond—pale eyebrows, pale hair, pale skin—and a little pudgy, and he wore turquoise socks which I found absolutely revolting.
I’ve decided since that a girl doesn’t know what she likes, because after I got involved with him I started liking some pretty spooky things (which I’ll tell you about), the least surprising of which was probably blond eyebrows.
The third week he was there he said, “Miss Lanebroom, would you like to have dinner with me tonight?” “Lanebrawn,” I said. “I really can’t because I have a French class tonight.” (All good single girls go to night school to get cultured as well as to meet men, as I’m sure you know.)
“Tell you what, Miss Lanebroom—Lanebrawn—if you’ll miss your French class this evening, I’ll tell you a mnemonics system that will help you remember your vocabulary four times as easily all the rest of the semester. Is it a deal?”
“I suppose so,” I said. A date is a date, and in spite of the turquoise socks I thought we might go someplace nice for dinner. (He did tell me the system, but I never had a chance to try it because I gave up the French shortly after that.)
That night I not only missed French class, I didn’t get any dinner either, although I don’t think he really planned it that way. He brought a fifth of gin, a bottle of vermouth and onions along with him, which was sensible if you wanted anything to drink around my apartment because I didn’t have anything in stock except that fifth of Crème de Cacao Mr. Carruthers gave me for Christmas last year. What a present.
I can’t make a really good martini—not enough practice, I guess, and I don’t care really—but if I’m not mistaken, his martinis were practically undrinkable. They were terrible. I don’t know how you could go that far wrong with perfectly good Gordon’s gin and Noilly Prat vermouth. It must have been my ice, which sometimes has a cantaloupe taste. Anyway, we drank the martinis, terrible as they were, and I realized again what a good listener he was. All he said was, “How’s your co-worker,” and again I was telling him that Muriel had gone to lunch twice last week and never come back at all. He seemed to think everything I said was funny, though I’m hardly a raconteur.
After the third martini I was still doing most of the talking and hadn’t even complained about not eating, which isn’t like me. I usually insist on eating. I was feeling rather nice somehow . . . like a great All-American girl charmer and—I don’t know—maybe just a touch superior to this boy. (We compared birthdays, and he was only six months older than I.) Tonight it wasn’t turquoise socks. They were black and red plaid, speckled with blue dots. Honestly! He was a big square, too. He helped out in the rose garden at home—not that there’s anything wrong with that—and he never skiied or went to parties or anything. I’d traveled a great deal more than he, and . . . well ... he didn’t know how to mix a martini. I doubt if he’d ever mixed one before. Let’s say I was feeling a bit like the sophisticated lady entertaining a very impressed country bumpkin in her apartment ... I was coming on like Gloria Vanderbilt, I thought.
Hah! I was somewhere in the middle of a sentence about the ski lift at Breckenridge when he kissed me. It wasn’t a jerky kiss, or grabby or anything ... it was almost as though he were shutting me up. But it was a good kiss, an expert kiss. That he knew how to do.
Then he began talking to me very quietly, and I’ll never forget any of that conversation. He looked at me with those wild blue eyes and never let them leave my face.
“Miss Lanebrawn,” he said, “I’ve made a bargain with your company. In return for my doing this very comprehensive survey and analysis for them, I am to have you as payment. They know you are very valuable, but they also know that what I’m doing for them may save them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Your company is in a little trouble right now, as you may know.” (I knew.)
Despite the company trouble, I could just see my bosses, Mr. Wirtz and Mr. Feuthwanger, turning any female employee over to a management firm as payment for a survey! Mr. Wirtz had been trying to get the Playboy Club run out of Chicago ever since it opened, and Mr. Feuthwanger fired on the spot any employee caught dating another employee. I’d have considered leaving the company for that reason alone if I hadn’t been so tied up with someone on the outside. (I’ll tell you in a minute.) Yet it was fascinating listening to this guy weave this crazy story.
“I’ve been under a kind of spell since the first morning we talked,” he said. “I knew you wouldn’t be easy to own, but then I came up with this plan. Wirtz and Feuthwanger were dead set against it at first, but they realized their company was actually at stake and they couldn’t very well refuse. We’ve agreed on it,” he said.
“Don’t I have anything to say about somebody getting me as payment?” I asked. “After all, it’s me you’re bargaining over.”
“I’m afraid not,” he said. “Your company’s whole future may be resting on what I come up with in my work. Naturally I couldn’t possibly accept any other payment now that I’ve met you.”
Well he just went on and on, looking at me very steadily and talking away. It sounded nice. I liked it.
“When does the thing go into effect?” I asked.
“It’s in effect now,” he said. Then he laughed and broke the spell and went back to the kitchen to get another of those poisonous martinis. Ye gods! He may not ever have made any before, and I’m not even sure he had ever drunk any before but he was holding his liquor better than I was. He never did anything the least out of fine the rest of the evening. He was quite full of respect and admiration, and to tell you the truth, I began to think perhaps I was some rare jewel without price ... or at least that I was an Eastern princess who’d bewitched a visiting prince. (If it weren’t for those socks!)
We went to lunch twice that week—once to a lovely garden restaurant and another time to the Cape Cod Room—and I still felt faintly superior because he wasn’t at ease in those restaurants. Still, Wirtz and Feuthwanger really were treating him like the company savior, and all the time he was still spinning out this tale over lunch about my being his possession and that no one had ever consummated such a brilliant deal. He did it all with such charm, looking straight at me with those cuckoo blue eyes, and I had to keep saying to myself, “My God, Wirtz and Feuthwanger couldn’t really have given me to this madman, could they?”
The following weekend I had a date with Roy, whom I haven’t told you about. He’s with the C.P.A. firm that audits our books and he’d been the love of my life—for the past two years anyway. That’s how long we’d been having an affair. I suppose we’d broken off ninety-two times already, because he just didn’t want to get married, but Sunday was the ninety-third . . . and this one took. I was sort of tired of the whole thing by then I guess, and besides, I was now a princess that some cuckoo nut had decided to forfeit his entire management consultant fees for!
The cuckoo nut—Lyle was his name, incidentally—and I began to see each other in earnest then. For all I know, he’d sensed there was somebody I really belonged to before, just as he sensed now there wasn’t.
I worked hard at work. I thought I’d better, Mr. Feuthwanger’s policy about dating being what it was. In two weeks I went to bed with Lyle for the first time, but instead of it being he who went right off his rocker with the princess, it was I who flipped . . . practically for the first time in my life.
With Roy I had spent the whole time trying to knock him out in bed. Really, I worked like a rat. He was so attractive to other women I thought I had to prove myself. He liked that. Well, nothing usually happened to me. With Lyle, who presumably cared much more for me than I did for him, I just sort of lay there and let things happen. I relaxed and let somebody love me for a change. I was knocked absolutely silly. He was so big and full of desire and so skilled (I don’t know where he learned) and so full of wild and heavenly things to say.
I still hated the socks. His suits were too padded. He wasn’t at ease socially. I couldn’t take him places (or thought I couldn’t), but who wanted to go anywhere? Then he began to lead me down a shivery path I’ve never yet got back from.
One evening in my apartment, when I was wearing green silk Capri pants and mules, with nothing on top, he said, “My Polaroid’s down in the car. Why don’t you run down to get it and I’ll take some pictures of you?”
“Me run get it?” I said. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I think you should go get it,” he said. “Go on. Only take you a minute.”
We were looking at each other very hard. I knew he didn’t mean for me to put a blouse on, and I said, “All right. But what if someone is on the street?”
“It’s late,” he said. “There won’t be anyone there. Here. Here are the keys.”
He walked to the window while I flew out of the apartment as though I were possessed, raced to his car, unlocked it, got the camera out and was back in sixty seconds. I don’t think anyone saw me.
“Good girl,” he said. He didn’t bother with the pictures. He just looked at me and started taking off the few clothes I was wearing. We made love.
A few days later we were riding in his convertible with the top down. His work was finished with Wirtz and Feuthwanger, and he was now at another company. The fantasy about my having been traded to him was finished too. It had had a good run, and we didn’t try to revive it in conversation.
As he drove, he reached over and began unbuttoning the silk shirt I was wearing. He had long since persuaded me never to wear a bra. He got past the fourth button and then pushed the blouse gently away from my breasts on either side so they were quite exposed to all the electric lights and cars and everything.
“Beautiful,” he said. “Absolutely beautiful.”
I started to button my blouse up again but he stopped me. “Don’t,” he said, “we’re going too fast for anyone to see you.” So I didn’t. And he reached over and caressed me every so often and cars did go by all that time.
I began to worry a little about myself. Men are supposed to be the only ones who sit around and fantasize all the time, but I was getting to be a worse employee than Muriel. At least she was there when she was there. I had already lost eight pounds, never seemed to be hungry, and when I met Lyle for dinner sometimes we got around to eating and sometimes we didn’t. He usually picked out what I wore. One night he made a blouse for me entirely out of a large white chiffon scarf.
“I can’t wear this” I said, though I secretly liked the way I looked in it. You could see my breasts through it, but not very clearly.
“Of course you can,” he said. “Wear your jacket on top of it.” I did, but during dinner I had to take the jacket off because we started playing “Chicken and Hawk.” Whoever is “it” gets to tell the other person something to do, something silly. It can be anything. If the other person does it, he becomes “it” and gets to tell the first person what to do. You keep going until somebody refuses to do something, then that person becomes the chicken and the other person the hawk. The chicken then really has to do what the hawk says—though not right at the minute—and it’s usually something big and often dangerous. Because those are the rules of the game, you mustn’t start playing unless you agree to abide by them.
Of course I could have refused to play “Chicken and Hawk,” but I figured I had as good a chance of coming out hawk as Lyle did. The first thing I was told to do in the restaurant when he was “it” was to take my jacket off briefly. A waiter saw me, and so did some people coming in. Then I was “it,” and I told Lyle to go out to the parking lot and pretend to “steal” a car. He said he couldn’t leave me, and that automatically made him the chicken and me the hawk. I let him off the hook, though, and never made him do the big dangerous thing. I later found out that if he had got to be hawk, he was going to take me to a friend’s night club in Memphis and have them put me in the strip-tease show.
A few days later we all got two hours off to vote, and I saved my two hours for late in the afternoon with Lyle. When he arrived, he had his brief case with him as usual. I told him about not voting and how guilty I felt. “Yes, you’ve been a very naughty girl,” he said, “and we’re probably going to punish you.”
“What did you have in mind?” I said, and I could feel the excitement start in my stomach or pelvis or wherever it starts when you get crazy.
“I’m going to have to beat you,” he said. “Just a kind of symbolic beating, so you don’t forget to vote next time. I won’t hurt you.”
Nothing he said anymore ever surprised me. I’d even stopped being surprised at not being surprised. He then opened his brief case and produced this handsome, small riding crop. I was horrified at the sight of it. And fascinated. And horrified. And fascinated.
Then he began to undress me. We went to my bedroom—he was still dressed—and I lay down on my bed and buried my head in the pillow. He struck me—not too hard, but it hurt. He started to strike me again, and I reached for his wrist. He was very quiet and very calm.
“It’s too soon for you to know whether you like it or not,” he said. “Let me bind your wrists and ankles so you can find out for sure. Get me something to use.” So I got up and rummaged about in the dresser and found two silk scarves. He tied one around my ankles and the other around my wrists, and I lay on my face again and stuffed part of the pillow in my mouth so I wouldn’t scream too loudly. He beat me—only across the buttocks—with perhaps ten more strokes, not terribly hard. It wasn’t wildly painful, but it did hurt. Then he stopped and made love to me, and that was great.
The welts on my backside healed—after turning blue-black, then purple, then green, then yellow-chartreuse. I used to look at them fascinated. They were pretty exotic. Women like bruises, I think, maybe even non-cuckoo women. I’ve known two girls who came to the office with black eyes (I don’t know what from), and I always got the feeling they were a little proud. Maybe bruises make a woman feel feminine and helpless.
We never did the beating thing again. I don’t think Lyle enjoyed it particularly. I still sometimes take my blouse off when we’re at a drive-in movie. And when we go to Las Vegas I wear terribly low-cut dresses at the dice tables, and Lyle pretends not to know me but watches other people looking at me.
We’re going to be married this spring. He’s all for it, though I get the feeling his mother isn’t. Well, we won’t go into that subject. I’ve only met her twice. I don’t know what kind of marriage it’s going to be, but I know I couldn’t possibly live without him . . . efficiency, socks and all.