Laura couldn’t look at his face. She got up and went to lie on her bed.
They stayed up very late and Laura had too much champagne and Jack had too much ginger ale, and they talked endlessly and held one another’s hands tightly. And the next day they slept until four in the afternoon and got up smiling to treat Laura’s hangover and make the beds and shop for groceries together. And Jack introduced her to the butcher with, “Meet my wife. She’s a doll.”
Laura blushed crimson and the butcher laughed at them and tried to sell them some oysters. “You want kids? Buy oysters,” he advised. “Never fails. I know, I got eight.”
It was smooth and sweet the first few months; smoother than either of them had dared to hope. Laura was naturally mild and yielding; Jack, efficient and good-humored and terribly proud of her. As soon as they had enough chairs and crates collected to seat a fair number of guests, they threw a party and Jack’s office staff came to wish them well.
None of them knew he was a homosexual. Jack was a past master at deception. “You have to be if you’re going to survive in the world,” he said to her once. “It’s either that or retire into a rotten little prison with the rest of the gay people and spend your life feeling sorry for yourself. No thanks, not for me. Sex rules my nights. But by God, as far as the world knows, I’m a normal man from dawn to dusk. And there isn’t one guy in that office who’d question it.”
She admired him for it. Her own vagrant sensuality had dominated her ever since the fatal day she first recognized it, and her efforts to hide it or deny it had always backfired sooner or later. Jack filled her with determination to make herself a part of what he called “the real world,” the straight world. He made it seem very desirable to her for the first time.
Jack’s office buddies brought their wives, except for two dauntless bachelors who spent the evening berating Jack for treason.
“Are they gay?” Laura asked him in a whisper. “The unmarried ones?”
“Not gay, just scared,” he said. “Winslow is, though. That one over there with the gorgeous wife. Poor guy, I don’t think he knows it. They aren’t very happy.” And he nodded at the suave young man in his early thirties with a stunning and rather bored young woman beside him. Laura looked at the girl without a trace of desire and felt a quiet little spark of triumph. The future looked bright if she could be around so lovely a woman without even a hungry glance.
The autumn months passed uneventfully, and they got used to each other, and most of their worst fears abated. Jack never wandered around the apartment naked, out of instinctive respect for Laura. He did drop his socks all over the floor and leave his dresser drawers open. But he never lost his temper. He took her out to dinner once or twice a week, and he brought her flowers and books and pretty things that caught his eye in the windows of the stores he passed.
And he loved her. It sustained Laura through her low hours of doubt and confusion. She was the weak one of the two, and they both knew it. There were times when Jack had to be strong enough for both of them; times when Laura would cling to him weeping and tell him it was all a horrible mistake and she couldn’t live without Tris, no matter how godawful it would be.
And then he didn’t argue with her. He only said, “If you have to go, go, but come back. I want you here tonight at dinner time. I want you here in the morning when I get up. There’ll be women in your life, I’m prepared for that, honey. Tris won’t be the last. But there’s only one man, and there will only be one man and don’t you ever forget it.”
He sounded so sensible and firm to her that her unrest would disappear. Now and then, when she was not in a passion for Tris, they talked about it. And she would say, “I know it’ll happen one of these days, but I won’t let it hurt us, Jack. When I can think about it like this, rationally and without fear, I know I can handle it. I won’t panic when the time comes. I’ll just accept it as quietly as I can. I won’t let it touch our marriage.”
“Good girl,” he said and squeezed her arm.
There was no sex between them. Neither of them wanted it, and that was the way they planned it. Jack would make her take his arm when they went anywhere because he was proud of her. And he gave her a friendly peck when he left in the morning and when he came back at night. When she was frightened or depressed he held her and stroked her hair and talked to her the way she had always prayed her father would. And he liked to lie with his head in her lap and have her read to him before they went to bed.
But that was the limit of their physical contact. It was affectionate and gentle but utterly sexless. After the first few weeks, Laura began to like it. She had been shy at first and reluctant. But he didn’t force her, and after a while she welcomed his little gestures of love. They spelled security and reassurance to her. Suddenly it
