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The wind caught the cover of a book on the passenger seat and flipped it open. She slapped it shut and turned it around on the seat with its spine to the wind. Modern Literary Criticism. The classroom would calm her down. It was a calm place, isolated, locked away from the rest of the world—a place where P.R. meant not public relations but Partisan Review. A room full of pot-smoking short-haired girls and long-haired boys with shaggy moustaches. It was a world that would never be hers, any more than her father’s would be; she despised his world of wealth and business but she would never fit into a literary ivory tower. By the cruel trick of birth she had been forced into a circumstance where the simple desire to be a woman—unsophisticated, without intellectual or financial pretense, just a woman to make a home and have babies—was denied her.
Seething, her mind on fire, not knowing what she wanted or how she felt, she drove at four thirty past a dusty side road that led to some forgotten destination across the hills; a dusty car was parked along the shoulder with two or three vague shapes inside but she didn’t notice it when she went by at sixty miles an hour. Four hours from now she would return by this route and pass the same side road.
Dressed casually for di
Shaking the little man’s hand was like gripping a fresh-caught trout. Making conversation, Oakley said, “That’s a pretty wild shirt.”
“Yeah. It got arrested twice.” Frankie Adams gri
Oakley said desultorily, “You and Louise knew each other in New York.”
“Worked some of the same teevee shows,” Adams said, and struck an Ed Sullivan pose. “And on our shew t’night, lez an’ ge
Adams bowed to the audience and coughed behind his wrist.
Co
Co
Adams was halfway through the speech before any of them caught on to the fact that he was doing Co
“I don’t find that amusing,” Co
Adams’ face fell; Louise said, “Really, darling”—calling her husband “darling” with steely emphasis.
Co
Trying to cut the tension, Adams said weakly, “Let’s have no loose remarks about my nose.” He tried to smile. With a nervous gesture toward his feet he said, “I sure admire your house, Earle. Never saw a carpet like this—you need snowshoes to travel it. Oh hell, never mind me, I thought it was fu
Oakley watched the jewel-hard shine of Louise’s glance against Co
“Sure—sure,” Adams said, and stood silent, having run out of things to say.
“Really!” Louise breathed, and strode toward the kitchen, walking with a magnificent jounce and heave of young buttocks which seemed to writhe with a life of their own. Oakley caught the way Adams stared at her, unblinking. He distinctly heard Adams whisper, “Yes sirree Bob,” although it was plain Co
She must hate Earle terribly to do it right here in his own house under his nose. Watching Co
A few hours later the phone rang.
C H A P T E R Six
Mitch Baird squatted brooding on his haunches. Below him he could see the road winding north through the hills. The heat, rising from the earth in the dusk, sucked sweat from his pores. Out across the flayed surrealist landscape dust-devils fu