Naked Came the Stranger

A DELL BOOK

Copyright 1969 by Penelope Ashe

(Penelope Ashe is the pseudonym for twenty-five
Newsday writers)

Second Dell printing – April 1970

To Daddy

Screwed. It was, Gillian realized, an obscene word.
But it was the word that came to mind. Screwed. It had been, after
all, an obscene act. She tried not to think about it. She was
driving, floating actually, toward her new house, floating past the
freshly butchered lawns dotted with the twisted golden butts that
were the year's first fallen leaves, past the homes built low and the
swimming pools and the kempt hedges and all the trappings that went
into the unincorporated village of King's Neck.

Screwed. The word kept coming back to Gillian Blake. Small wonder.
For on that bright first Friday morning of October, Gillian had
discovered through relatively traditional methods –
specifically through the good offices of the Ace-High Private
Investigators, Inc. – that her husband had been spending his
every weekday afternoon in an apartment leased by one Phyllis Sammis,
a twenty-two-year-old Vassar graduate with stringy hair, gapped
teeth, horn-rimmed glasses and peculiarly upright breasts. Gillian
Blake had paid the Ace-High people six hundred and seventy-five
dollars (including expenses) to learn that William – or Billy,
as he was known to the rest of the world, or at least that portion of
the world described in certain circles as the Metropolitan Listening
Area – had been leaving his office every afternoon at 2:45,
taking a taxicab to the northeast corner of Seventh Avenue and 23rd
Street, walking a half block south, climbing two flights of stairs
and entering the apartment rented by Phyllis Sammis, recently hired
production assistent on
The Billy & Gilly Show.

Now Gillian was floating slowly past the road signs (
Stop
and
Hidden Driveway
and
Slow Children
and
Yield
and
Stop
again). Floating. It was this floating feeling that
had drawn her to King's Neck in the first place. King's Neck, a
boomerang of land twisting out from the mainland into the waters of
Long Island Sound. Floating, floating toward the three-bedroom,
two-bath, two-car house that was, as the man said, within easy
commuting distance (forty-one minutes) of Manhattan and within sight
(nine miles, through leaves) of the Connecticut shoreline.

Screwed. It was not so much that William Blake had cheated on
Gillian Blake. Nor even that Billy had cheated on Gilly. In a sense,
a quite real sense, he had cheated on that portion of the world known
as the Metropolitan Listening Area. For William Blake was half of
The Billy & Gilly Show,
fifty per cent of "New York's
Sweethearts of the Air," part of a radio team that five times a week
dispensed a blend of controversy, information and … love. The
show, so the announcer said every weekday morning at five seconds
past nine, provided "a frank and open look into the reality of
marriage in the crucible of modern living."

What held the show together (every poll indicated) was the quality
of the marriage, the fact that this was a meeting of minds as well as
bodies. The fact that every woman listening (the listenership was
eighty-four per cent female) sensed that this was the way marriage
should be. In cheating on Gilly, Billy had cheated on an audience
that regularly numbered over eight hundred thousand – or at
least he had cheated on eighty-four per cent of that audience. It
was, when you considered it, an act of breathtaking infidelity.

Floating then into the circular driveway, mashed gravel, one and a
half acres, imitation Tudor, water view, $85,000. There were several
possibilities. She could, and the thought seemed strangely appealing
at the moment, put arsenic in William's morning coffee. She could sue
for divorce in any state in the Union and get it, along with a fair
share of William Blake's not inconsiderable inheritance. These
alternatives were considered, savored, ultimately discarded. The
difficulty was that either course of action would mean the demise
of
The Billy & Gilly Show.
And the show was what kept
Gilly alive.

The car was parked. The keys were in her purse. Still, Gillian
Blake did not move. There was yet another possibility. Gillian Blake
could even the score. Absurd? Well, why not? King's Neck could be her
laboratory, her testing ground. She could, with the cool detachment
of a scientist, gather all the raw data necessary to determine how
other marriages were faring "in the crucible of modern living." In
the process, Billy would be screwed. Good and screwed.

She stepped from the car then, walked over fresh slate to the
front door, past the bogus pillars, through the twin front doors. The
clock showed it to be three in the afternoon. William was, if the
pattern of the past week held true, mounting the down elevator from
his office, mounting the downtown taxi, mounting a mousy
twenty-two-year-old girl with remarkable breasts. Damn Billy! Damn
him anyway! But why all this outrage? Gillian realized it was not
simply that William Blake had made a mockery of her marriage. Even
worse he had made a mockery of her radio show. The show had started
as a cliché, patterned after a formula that was perfected in
the thirties. The thing that had kept it alive was Gillian Blake. And
vice versa. It was what defined her, fulfilled her. It was what had
saved her marriage this long, and it had quite possibly saved her
life.

Gillian did not take full credit for the success of the show, even
in her thoughts. It was, after all, a smooth division of labor.
Gillian had proved adept at dragooning the squadrons of sociologists,
the marriage counselors, the new authors, the broad spectrum of human
engineers, onto the show. A few of the guests were clients of
William's youthful public relations firm. Billy clarified, condensed,
summed up – seldom departing from the role of straight man.
Gilly stimulated, interpreted, played devil's advocate.

It had become so much more than a radio program. It had become, in
time, an ideal marriage placed on display every morning for eight
years, a model marriage that had been celebrated in three national
magazines (one cover), a sophisticated blend of two disparate
personalities.

Marriage … show – it had been a curious relationship.
When the show had begun, marriage was new. As the show took on a life
of its own, the marriage became somehow less alive. Now, Gillian
reflected, it was almost as though the relationship had been
parasitic, as though the show had begun to suck the life juices from
the marriage it honored. It was the show that ate up long hours with
a new book; it was the show that had at first determined there would
be no children (until William's sterility had been medically
established); it was the show that had required the presence of the
twenty-two-year-old recent graduate of Vassar. It was the show that
prevented Gillian from contemplating such eminently logical solutions
as murder or divorce.

Screwed. Gillian let her clothes fall on the dressing-room
carpet and studied the mirrored full-length portrait of herself.
She understood her value to men, had felt their reaction often
enough. Guests on the show, construction workers, taxi drivers
– they all reacted. And why shouldn't they?

Her skin, the color of India tea at summer's end, flowed nicely
over a slender frame. The breasts were small but she wore them well
at age twenty-nine. Her legs were superbly designed. The hips, though
trim, were deceptively full. Gïllian advanced on the mirror,
appraised the close-up image. Her long hair was light and now
sun-streaked, gathered in a mist around her shoulders. If her lips
were a trifle small, they nonetheless served to accentuate the
perfectly straight line of her nose. The total effect was a blend of
the aristocratic and the sensual.

Gillian turned from the mirror. The mirror, after all, couldn't
reflect the most essential attribute of them all. Gillian walked to
the bar, made herself a pitcher of martinis, sat drinking, naked in
the Eames chair – cold leather against skin, nice. The major
quality was something reactive, a chameleon quality that somehow
enabled her to transform herself in the eyes of any man. She could
become – and she had felt the process often enough to know its
validity – pale of skin, full-breasted, intellectual, sexy,
aloof. She could be whatever the man happened to be looking for at
the moment. She could become any man's dream woman, and somehow
accomplish it without relinquishing her own identity.

William had noticed this, had noticed it but never understood it.
He had somehow confused it with coquettishness. Whenever a male guest
would challenge Gillian, would display an intellectual vigor or
simple male virility, Gillian would, as William put it so
inadequately, "flutter her fan." William claimed to have developed an
emotional radar to his wife's vibrations, but William so often missed
the point, mislabeled the process. It was a process of
becoming.
It existed not in mechanical tricks but in acute
sensitivity; it took place not in her physical alterations but in the
eye of the beholder.

Hers was a talent that ought to be intensively exploited, thought
Gillian, before she fell asleep. It was a deep but disturbed sleep, a
heavy buzzing sleep that ended shortly after eight o'clock with the
arrival of an unfaithful husband.

"For chrissake, look at yourself," he said. "It's past eight for
chrissake."

"That's cute," she said. "Do you do the weather too?"

"I mean it, it's eight-damn-o'clock."

"So it's eight o'clock," she said. "So what?"

"Don't tell me you don't remember. The damn party begins at 8:30.
Oh no you don't, don't give me one of
those
looks. This wasn't
my
idea. You were the one who told me about it, an
end-of-summer blast, remember? Two houses over and one down. The
wops. Remember now?"

The details returned to Gillian – of course, the party
– and she stood up. Not until that instant did she realize she
was still naked. She walked over to William, brushed meaningfully
against him, then noticed the fresh lipstick prints on his collar.
Those slight red smudges – was it carelessness, stupidity, a
Freudian reflection of guilt? – irritated her almost as much as
the thought of his infidelity. That bastard.

"We don't have to go to the party," she teased. "We could stay
home and… oh… christen the new house properly. It's
been a long time, Billy."

"We've got to get a move on…"

"But isn't there anything you'd rather do?" she said.

"Any little thing I might do for you?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact there is," he said. "One little thing
you could do for me is hurry-the-hell-up and get into something
decent. It's bad enough we've got to go through this thing. Let's not
make it any more complicated than we have to."

But it was complicated, extremely complicated. For at that moment
Gillian was settling finally on her plan of action. As she selected
her dress for the party – emerald green, high in front, low in
back – Gillian found herself shivering. In anticipation.

The only uncomfortable moment of the evening came when their hosts
– Mario and Donna Marie Vella – greeted them at the door.
Donna Marie was short, stout and faintly mustachioed; she looked as
though she might faint dead away at the thought of having
the
Billy and Gilly in her home. And Mario's introductory act, his
welcoming gesture, was to hand William his business card, embossed,
indicating that he was the executive officer of both the Bella Mia
Olive Oil Company and the Fort Sorrento Construction Company.

"Charmed, I'm sure," William said, as only he could say it.

"We certainly appreciate," Gillian said, stepping on his line,
"your inviting us newcomers to your home."

After that, needless to say, matters improved. There was, as
Gillian had anticipated, a wide selection of men. Fat, thin, short,
tall, introverted, extroverted, dumpy, dashing – the full
assortment. She mentally resolved not to rush things. At first she
contented herself with remaining beside William, allowing him to
squeeze her hand and pat her cheek – doing what he had always
done, putting the model marriage on public display. Oh, you
electronic lovebird, she thought. William was, in fact, the first
subject, the first of the adult males residing in King's Neck to come
under Gillian's scrutiny that evening.

He was, she decided, the best looking man in the room. Best
looking, in the conventional sense. William had been told in his
youth that some day he would be able to serve as a stand-in for
Prince Philip. Now, approaching his middle years, he more closely
resembled the well-dressed dummies in the Brooks Brothers windows.
Bland. But he was still trim (regular workouts at the New York
Athletic Club), polished (Princeton), at ease with the mighty (scion
of the banking Blakes) and an asset to any gathering. The one
apparent flaw was a jawline that lacked definition. Oh, say it
– a weak chin.