her name was. Round-faced and with fluffy hair that Ellie declared was dyed. And a flirt if there ever was one. Ellie often said she didn’t see how Joe could stand the way she acted, and Marvin had to agree that he didn’t either. Not that she ever did anything, likely. He’d told Ellie that, right out, and she’d sort of agreed with him, though she still had certain reservations on the subject.
But she would insist on rubbing up against a man when she danced with him at a party, and she’d sort of accidentally let her knee touch his if they sat at table together, and little things like that. And she had a way of getting a man to go out in the kitchen with her alone at their house to help make drinks at a party, and she’d drop remarks that had double meanings if you looked for them. And kissing you behind the kitchen door if you’d had enough to drink and didn’t push her away in disgust.
That had happened to Marvin once several years ago, and he still remembered it vividly and felt a little squirmish inside when he did. He never would forget the look on Ellie’s face that night when he and Suzy finally came back out of the kitchen with a tray of drinks, but she didn’t say a word to him about it right then. However, they were hardly out of the house and started for home when Ellie had lit into him, demanding to know just what he and Suzy had been doing alone in the kitchen all that time.
He hadn’t dared tell Ellie the truth. How Suzy had caught him unaware and pushed her body against him and lifted up her face with parted lips, and how something had come over him and he’d kissed her. He was heartily ashamed of the incident mostly because he had really enjoyed it while it was going on.
He had puzzled about that for a long time afterward. He just couldn’t understand how a supposedly decent man could enjoy kissing another woman while he was very much in love with his wife at the same time. That is, really like it, the way he had with Suzy that night. He knew, as honestly as he knew anything, that he didn’t really want another woman sexually. Yet, for a minute or so he had wanted Suzy. He had finally decided it had been too much liquor that was to blame. And after that he had been careful not to take more than two or three drinks in any one evening, particularly if Suzy was around.
At home alone with Ellie it was different, of course. Neither one of them were prudes about drinking or sex. Several times since they’d been married they had cut loose in the evening and got good and tight together at home, and the results had been wonderful. They had done all sorts of wild and crazy things in bed, things that a lot of people would probably call indecent, but neither of them had been the slightest bit ashamed of it the next day when they sobered up and remembered what they had done. They had actually talked about it, and agreed that it was a good thing for married couples to do once in awhile, and Marvin felt sure that if more people did it there’d be less fooling around outside the home.
It was dark outside by the time he had finished these thoughts, and the fast train was rolling smoothly up the coastline toward Sunray Beach and Ellie, and Marvin felt warm and good and smugly self-righteous when he thought about what the other delegates were doing back in that Miami hotel. The car wasn’t crowded and he had a whole seat to himself, and he opened the newspaper and glanced at the headlines, and he was dozing off a little when the conductor tapped him on the shoulder for his ticket.
He gave it to him and chuckled as he said, “Sorry to cause you so much trouble, but I guess you’re going to have to stop and let me off at Sunray.”
The conductor punched the ticket with a smile and assured him they didn’t mind stopping, and that if Marvin wanted to take a little snooze to go on and do it because the conductor would promise to wake him up personally in time to get off.
Marvin thought that was nice of him, and he did doze off some more, and the next thing he knew the conductor was tapping him on the shoulder again and the train was beginning to slow down. Marvin yawned and looked out the window and saw the big neon sign of the Sunray Motel sliding past, and suddenly he was wide awake and excited to be getting home. He got his suitcase down from the overhead rack and went back and was waiting in the vestibule for the door to be opened when the train ground to a protesting stop.
He stepped down onto the cindered walk quickly, and there was bright starlight and a little sickle of moon in the sky, and he breathed the good fresh air deeply into his lungs and it smelled good after sitting in the smoker so long.
The train just barely came to a full stop, then picked up speed and glided away and he stood there and watched the lighted cars slide past until there were just the twin red lights receding and fading into the night.
Just as Marvin had anticipated, he was the only passenger to get off the train. There was a dim light inside the waiting room and he walked up there and looked in, but wasn’t surprised to find it empty. It was well past ten o’clock and that meant that all the business places were closed up tight and all the residents were asleep or at least snugly inside their own homes.
He walked around the waiting room and there wasn’t any taxi, of course, but he didn’t mind at all. The six- block walk to his home was exactly what he needed to clean the city air out of his lungs.
Pleasant Street, leading away from the depot, was tree-lined and lighted with street lamps at every second corner. Marvin walked along it briskly, glancing pleasurably at the well-kept lawns and houses as he passed them. The Burkes and the Chadwicks and the Evanses. Solid, substantial homes with neat, palm-shaded driveways and carefully-tended tropical shrubbery in the yards. All of them dark, now, except Dr. Higgens’ three-story house on the corner of Pleasant Street and Starfish Lane. There was a dim light downstairs as Marvin went by, and another in a third floor bedroom.
He wondered if someone in town were sick and hoped it wasn’t serious, and then he quickened his pace just a little as he recalled that he had been away from home four whole days without any word, and that Sissy had sniffled a little the morning he left and Ellie had said she thought she’d better keep her home from first grade for a day or so just in case it did develop into something the other children could catch.
He knew it was foolish to let a night light in the doctor’s house worry him about Sissy, but he pushed on a little faster anyway, turning into Lily Lane three blocks from the depot. It was a winding street in a newer part of town, and all the houses were modern and had larger grounds than in the older part of Sunray, each with private driveways leading up to secluded houses that were set well apart from their neighbors.
As he climbed the slope toward his own driveway, Marvin thought pleasurably how it would be when he got home. He had his latch-key, of course. Ellie and Sissy would be sleeping soundly in the adjoining bedrooms upstairs and he wouldn’t have to wake them to get in. They both slept very soundly and they weren’t expecting him.
He’d leave his suitcase downstairs in the hall, he decided, and go into the kitchen quietly and get two glasses and the bottle of imported cognac that Ellie kept pushed back on the top shelf for special occasions.
Then he’d go upstairs on tiptoe and into the big front bedroom where starlight would be shining through the two open windows and making enough light to show Ellie lying asleep in bed.
She mostly slept on her left side with her cheek pillowed on her arm, and the cover was always slipping down from her right shoulder and leaving it bare.
He’d kneel beside the bed, he thought happily, and waken her with a kiss on her bare shoulder, and she’d lift up her head sleepily, not quite knowing who it was or what was happening, and then he’d kiss her hard on the mouth and she’d come fully awake and cling to him and kiss him back.
Then he thought of a better way. He’d close the door through the bathroom into Sissy’s room and lock it first, and then he’d undress without turning on a light and go around the bed and slip under the covers on the other side of Ellie without waking her.
There was a sort of good animal smell that came from Ellie’s body when she was asleep. Different from when she was awake. Marvin always thought of it as a sensuous smell. He often waked up in the night with her lying close beside him, and he’d smell her smell and snuggle a little closer to her and bury his face under the covers against her back and breathe in deeply of the lovely fragrance that was his wife.
And almost always it had a powerful stimulating effect on him. He didn’t intend to waken her and he tried not to, but generally she’d seem to sense how he was feeling, even in her sleep, and she’d turn slowly and languidly to him, and sometimes he thought she didn’t even wake up fully even when it was all over, but he didn’t mind that because she was loving and willing whenever he wanted to, and he considered that all a man should want from his wife in the middle of the night.
He reached their driveway and it wound up between a double row of hibiscus to the front of the house which he could scarcely see from the street. He followed the drive up and around, and stopped suddenly when he saw a dim light behind drawn shades in the front bedroom window.
He saw at once that it wasn’t in Sissy’s room, and he stopped being frightened. It wasn’t actually very late and there was no reason in the world why Ellie shouldn’t still be awake and up. She might even be reading in bed,
