and again she didn’t know how to handle him. His hand touched her
breasts and it was no neat medical gesture. Sunny brushed it quickly
away.
“Hey,” she said. “None of that. I told you, I love the guy.”
“Okay, you love him,” Settick said, turning away from her with a sigh.
“These things happen. Wives do love their husbands, although to hear
some of my patients talk you’d never believe it. You know something,
Sunny? You’re all backwards. You not only love your husband, you
actually want more children. Do you know how many women come in here day
after day telling me what slobs they’re stuck with and how many
screaming brats they’ve got at home? They hate being mothers, they hate
being wives. God, it’s enough to keep a man single for the rest of his
life.”
She smiled at him. “They’d probably all stay right where they are if you
gave them a choice.”
He shook his head with a laugh. “What makes you such an optimist?” he
said.
“I have to be. It’s all I’ve got.” For a moment she was afraid she would
lose control and cry in front of him. But she found a measure of dignity
by staring carefully at the large stethoscope through which mothers were
allowed to listen to their growing baby’s heartbeats. She had heard her
baby’s heart not ten minutes ago. It sounded like the rapid tapping of a
metronome in the next room, and it moved her unspeakably.
“I wish you’d tell me what’s the matter, Sunny,” the doctor urged. “I
didn’t mean to get fresh just now. Forget it, will you? That’s the price
you pay for being so damn beautiful.” He smiled disarmingly.
“It’s okay,” she said, letting him persuade her that he meant no
offense.
“You’re worried and you’re not eating right,” he said briskly. “I’m
going to put you on a diet, to gain, and some tranquilizers.”
She protested but he wrote a prescription for her. “It’s for the baby,”
he said. “You don’t have to live on them.”
Sunny got off the examination table, holding her sheets around her.
“Are you getting a divorce by any chance?” Settick asked, unable to
resist.
“We don’t need to,” she said cryptically.
He surprised himself by recalling at that moment the questions on incest
one of his patients—was it Sunny?—had put to him: just a fleeting notion
that crossed his mind and left it the moment he saw her out the door.
* * * * *
Sunny’s letters to Laura and her talks with Dr. Settick were her only
relief from solitude. Laura was the sole person she could tell
everything to. Her notes were restrained at first, but Laura’s warmth
and concern shone through her answers and gave Sunny the courage to be
honest.
“It takes two to dissolve a marriage, just as it takes two to make one,”
Laura wrote. “So Page can’t call it quits by himself, whatever the
heartless law books say. Fight for him. He’s worth it. Or at least he
_will_ be when he grows up and realizes life is more important than
arbitrary rules.”
Sunny reread the letter a dozen times. And from then on her own letters
were graphic charts of her heart and mind. She described the long gray
days that not even a sweet spring breeze could brighten. And the nights,
infamous in the poems of separated lovers, and hourglass-endless.
“I like being mad at Page,” she wrote Laura. “It gives me energy—keeps
my pride alive. I think how mean I’ll be when he comes home. And when he
begs me to take him back—oh, how tender and passionate! I have only one
fear, Laura—that he’ll never come. The longer he waits, the more I
wonder. Maybe I’ll have to start crawling again after all.”
Sunny took Laura’s sympathy with gratitude, with greed, but it didn’t
replace her husband. And it was all Laura could give her.
* * * * *
Page’s _Sunday Magazine_ column was getting noticed. It was funny, a
little rough and overstated, but clever. Sunny loved it. It surprised
her and made her laugh—and then weep because he hadn’t shared it with
her before he shared it with the public.
She cut out the columns, pasting them in a scrapbook. The best she taped
to her mirror to memorize:
“It’s like a gold yoyo,” he said of a modern canvas. “If you want it
you’ll pay anything for it. If you don’t, nothing is too damn much.”
He quoted a famous movie producer signing a witless young lovely for a
new film: “Never mind about the lines. Just be sure to bring your face
along.”
Sunny yearned with a choking envy to share all this with him: the
excitement he felt as his name gained currency, the pleasure of turning
out quotable prose, the odd thrill of having your words read by people
you would never know. To be denied her part in his blossoming career was
one of her worst burdens.
One morning, after reading his newest column, she suddenly chucked her
pride and wrote him a fan letter:
Dear Mr. Pringle,
If a lady is single
And wants you to chase her,
Adore and embrace her,
Should she ...
Be sexy and clever?
Or wait here forever?
Your columns are funny.
I hate you.
Love,
Sunny
She mailed it on a Monday morning in April. Tuesday was the first of
May, and it was the day Page called her after nearly three dismal months
of silence.
When the phone rang she ran to it from the kitchen as if she had been
expecting it. With trembling hands she lifted the receiver. It might be
Dr. Settick, after all. He had called her several times and once ended
up asking her to dinner.
“Hello?” she said.
“Sunny?” It was Page. His voice sounded a little unsure, but there was
no mistaking it.
“Oh, Page!” She pressed a hand over her mouth for a second and then said
weakly, “How are you?”
“I’m miserable,” he said. “How are you?”
“Oh, darling!” Her heart kicked joyfully. “Are you really miserable?”
“Aren’t you?”
“Yes; God, I can hardly stand it. Did you get my poem?”
“Honey, it was beautiful. It was immortal,” he said.
“Page, can we meet somewhere? I mean—”
“Yes,” he said and she knew at once he had been thinking about it hard.
He wanted to see her so much that he knew an argument would end up in
his ignominious surrender. “Can you have dinner with me tonight?” he
said.
“Can I!” she cried. “_Beg_ me, darling.”
“Please, baby. Please.... I have your poem in my pocket. Any girl who
can write such deathless verse deserves a filet mignon,” he said.
“Oh, you wonderful idiot. Darling, when will you pick me up?”
“Sunny, maybe I’d better meet you,” he hedged. He knew what would happen
to him if he got caught in that apartment again. Sunny knew too and she
couldn’t give up without trying.
“I’ve fixed the place up so nicely,” she said. “You won’t know it. I
want you to see the new curtains and—”
“No,” he said anxiously, and she was afraid of scaring him off. She gave
in with the hope that when they were physically close she could move him
better than she could on the phone. All she asked was the chance.
“Where are you staying?” she said.
“Let’s not get into that.”
“I’m not going to storm the gates, Page. I really need to now. What if
the baby comes and I have to contact you?”
“You can always call the office,” he said.
“Sure, and get told off again,” she reminded him. “Page, it might be an
emergency. I’m completely alone in this city. The only friends I had
were your friends and I never see any of them. And Jack and Laura are
gone now. About the only human being I see who gives a damn about me is
Dr. Settick.”
“How much of a damn?” he said, feeling an upswell of jealousy that
suddenly made him determined. “All right,” he went on, “but Sunny, play
fair. Promise me you won’t call unless it’s really urgent.” Somewhere in
the back of his mind was the unacknowledged thought that he secretly
wanted her to come; but he sternly ignored it.
“I promise,” she said. You can’t go to hell for breaking one lousy
promise, she reasoned.
“I’m on East Thirty-second Street,” he said with misgivings, and gave
her the number and the phone. If she ever showed up, his conscience
would blast him.
Sunny wrote it down on the phone pad with a sense of triumph.
They agreed to meet at a small restaurant on Tenth Avenue.
* * * * *
But Sunny had other plans. She knew Page would blow his top if he found
her in his rooms that very day. But she was as sure as love could make
her that his anger would die a quick death.
She heard the tremor of love and long denial in his voice. If it was so
desperately hard for her, a woman, to forbid herself the love she
needed, how difficult mustn’t it be for a man? A young vigorous
passionate man who adored his wife?
He’ll never resist, she told herself, laughing aloud with anticipation.
She made herself stunningly beautiful. She took pains she rarely
bothered with and hardly needed. But it made her feel irresistible to
know there was a sheen of exotic color over her eyes, an underfilm of
silver witchery on her lips, a fragrant mist in her swinging yellow
hair.
She was still slim enough to look chic in a small-waisted dress. It had
a full, soft skirt that hid her six-month stomach. She put on her
four-inch heels, her sequined cocktail hat, black gloves and purse, and
checked herself out in the mirror, ticking off each feature like a
C.P.A. going over his books. Her glamorous reflection surprised her.
She looked older, beautiful in an experienced way. It was not just the
makeup. It had something to do with the past three months of solitary
introspection and yearning. She was full of the new things she had
learned from the books, the new life she felt within her, and the new
depths and shadows her heart had explored. They changed her face. She
was no little girl any more. She was a lovely woman.
12
Sunny left her apartment early, hailed a taxi, and gave Page’s address
to the driver in a confident voice. When she got out in front of the new
apartment building, it was forty minutes before their date. She decided
he was probably taking his shower.
Inside the front door she found his mail box with a button beneath the
name. There was a small speaker and she knew he might ask through it who
was there.
_Well, the worst he can do is make me wait down here till he’s ready_,
she thought. Still, how much better to get a foot in the door. He’d
never be able to resist that foot—not when it was followed by her slim,
silky leg. So she boldly pushed the buzzer. A wave of goose bumps fanned
over her back and neck while she waited.
In a moment the speaker came on. To Sunny’s amazement, a feminine voice
answered. Sunny looked to see if she had pushed the right button. She
had. The voice repeated, “Who’s there?”
“The florist,” Sunny said. “I have a corsage Mr. Pringle ordered.”
“Oh. Okay.” The speaker went off and a buzz sounded. Sunny went inside
and up a flight of stairs. On the second floor she found his door to the
left of the landing. It opened before she could knock.
Sunny found herself facing a valentine-pretty girl, very young, very
efficient looking, with her hands full of typed copy. The girl stared at
Sunny, fully as startled as her visitor. After an anxious pause she
said, “Was Mr. Pringle expecting you?”
“Apparently not,” Sunny said coolly. “May I come in?”
The girl hesitated briefly and then stepped aside. “Please,” she said.
“I—I should explain, I was just here to bring Mr. Pringle some notes I
took for him at the library. He doesn’t have time to do all his own
research, so I—”
“Oh, you don’t have to explain,” Sunny said with dangerous charm. “I
understand perfectly.” She looked sharply at the flustered girl who
lowered her eyes in confusion. “Of course you’re his secretary.”
“Yes. I’m Pat Burridge. I—hope you won’t jump to conclusions,” she said
with a clumsy laugh.
“Why not?” Sunny said.
“Oh, but really, it’s not what you think!” Pat cried, wide-eyed and
innocent as milk. But there were a few sour curds floating around. She
was ready to defend herself and fast if Sunny didn’t ease up. And she
was impatient to know who Sunny was. Sunny made her wait.
“What do you think I think, Miss Burridge?” Sunny said. “That you’re
sleeping with him?”
“How dare you!” the girl exclaimed.
“Well, Mr. Pringle and I have been having a little affair ourselves for
some time now,” Sunny said, pulling off her gloves. “I’m not surprised
he’s getting tired of me.” She gave Pat a critical going-over that made
the secretary frantic.
“Whoever you are, you have no right to talk to me that way!” she cried.
“Oh, hell, if you’re going to be a bitch, be a good honest bitch,” Sunny
said. The shock of the situation had frozen the fury in her veins and
given her a sardonic composure that staggered Miss Burridge.
“If you think I’m having _relations_ with Mr. Pringle,” the girl panted,
“it might just interest you to know that I’m engaged to a very nice
man.”
“Poor man. This will come as something of a shock, won’t it?”
“And I happen to be a virgin!” Pat declared.
“Fancy!” Sunny said, sauntering across the room. “All hail to the last
member of a vanishing race.”
“You have a filthy mind!” Pat said.
“And you have a filthy habit: sleeping with a married man.”
“Evidently I’m not the only one,” Pat snapped.
“Ah, but there’s a difference. I’m a married _woman_.”
“Besides,” Pat went on with noisy outrage, “Mr. Pringle is _not_ a
married man.”
“_Really?_” Sunny said with genuine astonishment. “Did he tell you
that?”
“He certainly did. His divorced wife calls him on the office phone all
the time but he has me tell her he’s out.” She evidently considered a
divorced man even less attached than a bachelor.
“Well!” Sunny said with sugary sarcasm. “I guess that makes it all right
for you to sleep with him, then, as long as your fiance doesn’t find out
what his bride-to-be does in her spare time.”
Abruptly Page burst into the room behind Pat, who turned around with a
gasp.
“Page, darling!” Sunny said, beautiful in her anger.
Page’s face fell. “Oh, God,” he said. “What are _you_ doing here?”
“Which one of us are you referring to, darling? Well? Go on, introduce
us.”
He looked distractedly from one to the other, caught between two
fighting females; a nightmare for any man. “Miss Burridge,” he said
resolutely. “My wife, Mrs. Pringle.”
Pat Burridge’s expression changed from anger through shock to
mortification. “Mrs. Pringle?” she repeated to him. “But you said—”
“Never mind what I said!”
“How do you do, Miss Burridge?” Sunny said with savage courtesy.
“I’d better go,” Pat said. “Here’s your key, Mr. Pringle.” She stopped,
raising a hand to her mouth. “Oh! I mean—Well, he only gives it to me so
I can bring him the notes when he’s not home!” she cried, and ran
weeping out the front door.
The Pringles were so mad at each other that neither of them could talk
for a few seconds. Finally Page said, determinedly calm, “You promised
me you wouldn’t come here. Your promises aren’t worth a damn, are they?”
“It’s forbidden for your wife to come here; only your secretary is
allowed,” she shot back.
“For your information, Pat Burridge comes over here nearly every
afternoon about this time with a bunch of research notes I’ve assigned
to her. She puts them on the desk and leaves,” he said.
“After she warms up the bed.”
“She doesn’t go near the damn bed!”
“Oh, an experimenter. She likes the couch in the living room.”
“Sunny, cut it out. Pat is a nice decent kid, but I’m not sleeping with
her.” He glared at her over the back of a chair upon which he was
leaning stiff-armed.
“Why not, darling? You could climb in bed with her and still feel nice
and clean. After all, _she’s_ not your sister.”
Surprised at her, he answered, “I could, but I don’t.”
“I suppose she means more to you than your own wife!” Sunny cried
unhappily.
“How many times do you have to be told, Sunny? You’re _not_ my wife.”
“Then don’t introduce me as Mrs. Pringle. It might confuse people.”
“That was a slip of the tongue.” His anger blew itself out suddenly.
“Sunny, for the love of God, how could I make love to any other woman
while you’re alive? Do we have to shout at each other? This is our first
meeting in three months. Darling ... my love, my wife—”
“You just got through hollering that I’m _not_ your wife,” she wept.
“Make up your mind before I lose mine, will you?”
Page dropped his head in his hands to compose himself and then lifted it
to look at her. “I’m going to read you something,” he said, going to his
desk, “from an outline of American law.” He picked up a big black
leather-bound book with torn matchbook covers marking various pages, and
turned to an underlined passage.
“‘Where the parties to the marriage are closely related,’” he read her,
“‘—such as brother and sister or ancestor and descendant—the marriage is
void.’ _Void_, Sunny. ‘And a decree of annulment should be and
apparently is unnecessary.’” He shut the book and dropped it on the desk
with a bang, looking at her.
“What does it mean?” she said.
“It means we aren’t married. And there isn’t a damn thing we can do
about it even if we want to. We are automatically un-married, because
our marriage was never valid in the first place.”
“There _is_ something we can do about it,” Sunny said, trembling.
“What?” His face and voice were weary but, like her, in his heart he
kept hoping ... hoping for nothing less than a revolution in Heaven’s
laws and Earth’s traditions.
“Keep it a secret,” she said. “What the law doesn’t know the law can’t
very well change.”
He sat down heavily in his desk chair and said, “the law has eyes and
ears, Sunny. We might get away with it for a while, but—”
“I’d rather have that little while than nothing at all.”
He put his head down on his crossed arms for a minute and the sight of
him like that, near despair, twisted her heart. “Oh, Page,” she
whispered, afraid to touch him. She folded into the chair he had been
leaning on moments ago. “Can’t we live with it? Can’t we even try? Do we
have to be so damn tragically moral?”
“I’ve been reading,” he began, but she interrupted:
“So have I.”
“Have you read Freud?”
“A little,” she said.
“Have you any idea what a childish, immature, emotionally crippling sort
of thing incest is?”
“Page, we didn’t commit incest! It _happened_ to us!” she said
passionately. “We had no idea we were brother and sister. We chose each
other as normally and innocently as other husbands and wives.”
“_Did_ we, Sunny?” He spoke softly, looking away from her. It frightened
her.
“What on earth do you mean?” she said indignantly.
“I mean, isn’t it just possible that we recognized each other
subconsciously? People fall in love with the people who remind them of
themselves, Sunny. Couldn’t we have fallen in love and refused to admit
the awful truth we were half-aware of? Tried to hide and deny it so we
could get married with a clear conscience?”
“No!” she said appalled.
“Isn’t it possible that what we fell in love with and desired in each
other was our own selves, without ever permitting ourselves to realize
it? If we did that, we’re as guilty as anybody else who ever committed
incest.”
“We didn’t do it,” she protested. “Page, we don’t look _that_ much
alike.”
“Oh, don’t we, though!” he said, rising quickly and grabbing her hand.
“Look at my eyes. My hair.” He took a handful of hers and held it out so
her eyes could compare. “Same color, same texture, same everything,” he
said.
“A lot of people have hair like that. There aren’t that many kinds of
hair!” she said.
“Look, Sunny, even our hands,” he said, and though his was heavier and
hairier, the basic bone structure was the same.
But Sunny was incapable of hating their similarities. She lifted his
hand to her mouth and kissed it and suddenly he leaned over her, almost
tumbled into the chair with her, and kissed her mouth hard.
Before they knew it, they were making love in the chair. It was awful;
agonized, furtive, rushed. The chair tipped precariously. They hurt each
other, half on purpose. And yet, in spite of that, it was beautiful.
They gripped each other with hands like traps. They kissed each other
everywhere, desperate to leave a touch of love all over each other.
Sunny clung to him ecstatically, sobbing his name when he freed her
mouth for a second. He felt himself losing control, and the harder he
tried to fight free the more deeply entangled he became.
“Sunny, no,” he pleaded at the very moment that he was tearing the
buttons off her dress in a fever to touch her warm satin skin. “Oh, dear
God, stop me,” he muttered, kissing her all the while so that she
couldn’t answer him.
He wanted to punish her for making him do the terrible thing he had
resisted so long. He took a bite in her delicate shoulder that made her
sob with startled pain. His hands twisted the shining flesh of her back
and his lips bruised her full sweet breasts.
Sunny knew why he was doing it and at first she didn’t try to stop him,
hoping it might ease him. But it got too bad. She finally combed his
cheeks with her nails in self-defense and shocked him into gentleness.
After that they made love, as much love as blood and breath would bear,
until they were utterly worn out. Only sheer exhaustion stopped them.
* * * * *
The chill air woke them. Page got up and fetched a down comforter from
his bedroom and wrapped her in it, giving her a cigarette while he fixed
them a drink.
He had put on his bathrobe. His actions, as he poured the drinks, were
almost normal. But his grim-lipped silence belied them.
There was a mournful quiet, broken only by the rustle and crack of the
liquor flowing over the ice cubes. He walked over to her, handed her a
glass, and sat down on the rug beside her. They leaned back against the
sofa and drank. Page put an arm around her.
“Page,” she said. “Do you really think we can live apart when we love
each other like this?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted finally, and she wondered if it were the
first break in his armor of rectitude.
“Tell me you don’t want me, darling,” she teased.
“I can’t,” he said softly.
“Tell me you want me more every time we make love. Tell me that pretty
soon you won’t be able to resist me at all any more. Tell me we can try
living together again ... just for a while.”
He inspected his drink. “How do you feel right now?” he asked her.
“After we’ve made love. Tell the truth.”
“I’d be unbearably happy if I weren’t so afraid it will be the last
time,” she said.
“Is that all? No shame? No regret? No wonder, even, that maybe it’s
wrong?” He looked at her.
“No,” she said, sniffling. “I’m too glad to be back in your arms to care
about the rest.”
“Suppose,” he said, his voice still low, “that your father—_our_
father—went a little crazy and forced you to go to bed with him. I mean,
made love to you. Would you feel anything then?”
“Don’t you ever speak like that again,” she said rigidly.
“It’s exactly the same thing,” he said.
“It is _not_ the same thing! I grew up in my father’s house, I knew all
along he was my father. I could never let him touch me that way. He
could never _want_ to.”
“You’re saying the only difference between him and me is, you knew all
along who he was. If you and I had always known we were brother and
sister, you couldn’t let _me_ touch you, either,” he said. And he was
right.
Sunny groaned and hung her head. “Darling, I’m not much for logic,” she
said at last. “All I know is I’m miserably in love with you and I don’t
care _who_ you are.” Her voice rose, becoming stubborn.
He looked so unhappy that she set her drink down and took his face in
her hands, trying to kiss some cheer into him. But he stopped her. So
she stayed where she was, kneeling in front of him, afraid to look at
him again. In silence she began a tormented debate with herself,
deciding at length to make one final try; one ultimate sacrifice.
“Page?” she said unsteadily.
“Hm?” He fingered the slim knee winking out of her blanket at him.
“If I don’t have this baby—could we—would you live with me?”
He looked slowly up at her green eyes that glittered with tears and took
her hands. “It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?” he said. “You’re too
far along now. If you’d been willing three months ago....”
“I wanted the baby so much,” she whispered. “But I’d do anything to have
you back, darling. I almost wish I could tear it out now—” She stopped,
feeling the baby kick. It made her sick. Grasping one of his hands, she
put it on her abdomen and held it there fiercely, over his protests,
until he felt the solid thump of a small foot under it. He looked up at
her, astonished. At that moment, for the first time, his child became
real to him: a human being with a beating heart and moving limbs.
He got up and walked to the other side of the room and she could tell
from the inclination of his head that he was deeply disturbed.
“Can we live together if I destroy this child?” she asked.
“This child,” he repeated in a daze. “Our child. My son.”