Read Online Contrary Pleasure by John D. MacDonald - Free Book Online Page B

And see if you can stay out of those card games after the
meeting like last time.”
    “Sure. But don’t wait up if you’re tired, honey.” After he was out of the
house, he stopped in the driveway and lighted a cigarette and looked for a
moment at the stars. The studio windows were lighted. It was beyond the garage,
about forty feet from the back door of the house. He thought of David in there,
and he hunched his shoulders a bit and walked quickly to his car and got in and
turned around and drove out the length of the driveway, pausing by the rural
mailbox, then turning toward the village, the heavy convertible dropping
swiftly down the twelve-degree grade, falling smoothly down through the night
by the lighted windows of the old houses on the hill. He turned toward Stockton
and felt good that it had been so easy this time, and felt slightly querulous
because it had been so very easy, felt a contempt for Bess for making it that
easy. They did not know—not one of them knew—how great had been the change in
him in the past few months.
    Yet perhaps Alice, his twin, suspicioned an
emotional change. Their emotional involvement was intricate, beginning in the
shared womb, evolving through the slow days of childhood, so that without
conscious thought, with no exercise of logic, with nothing observable, she
could yet sense change, the information transmitted along channels unknown to
the untwinned and only suspected by the twinned. It
had always been that way. A wordless knowing. And lately he had gone out of his
way to avoid being alone with her. This was a physical reaction she could
observe and he knew she had. But awareness of change had antedated his caution.
She would never ask. He knew that she would never ask because they had always
known what the other one was willing to talk about.
    Yet he was afraid he would tell her. Not because she was his twin.
Because, rather, of the wish to have someone know about it. Someone who would
do nothing. Perhaps the way a man will brag of a successful crime to someone
who is a known criminal. Not that Alice had ever erred in this way. But being
twin, she shared guilt.
    “Alice, I am having an affair with one of the girls in the mill.”
    Not even one of the office girls. A mill girl. He would say that and
Alice would not see Bonny. She would see some crow-voiced wench or rolling
haunch and brows plucked to thin lines and too much makeup. Or maybe she would
see Bonny without being told, and know how Bess and David were a part of it,
making it happen.
    Making it happen in such a strange way. There had always been, for him, a
quickening male excitement in going out there where the looms roared and
clattered, where the factory girls called shrilly to each other over the
continual din, moving with practised sturdy
swiftness, deft and sweaty, with knowing eyes filled with promiscuous
insolence, daring him to take closer notice of buttocks and breast. It always
made him think of a peasant village where the magpie girls worked the clothes
white on river-bank rocks. They managed to bring to these dingy clattering
floors a flavor of gossip and intrigue and speculation and body awareness.
    One day in March he had left his office where sleet was crinkling against
his windows, and he had gone restlessly to wander through the narrow aisles
where the girls worked. It was late in the afternoon, and nearly dark outside.
He saw a girl he had not noticed before. She was waiting for the checker and a
new setup. There was a slimness about her. A daintiness and the wilted look of
physical tiredness. He walked slowly. She did not see him. She stretched then
as he came near her, and she yawned, fists next to her ears, feet planted wide,
arching her back so that as he watched her the shirt she wore pulled free from
her slacks and he saw in the shop lights the smooth miracle of her young waist,
the downy spinal crease at the small of her back, and there was about her,
poised there, the breathtaking perfection