Thy Neighbor's Wife (17 page)

“Well,” she asked, as he continued to stare at her in silence, “are you going to join me?”

Bullaro was as excited as he was confused by the suddenness of what was happening. She looked at him inquiringly, her fingers on the buttons of her blouse.

“I guess we know what we’re doing,” Bullaro said finally, putting the aspirin on the bureau and walking toward the closet. He took off his shoes and undid his tie, though keeping his eyes fixed on her as she resumed undressing. She hung her blouse carefully over the back of a chair, placed her jewelry and glasses on the desk, and removed her skirt. Unhinging her brassiere, Bullaro saw her large breasts, and then her firm thighs and buttocks as she turned, completely nude, toward the bed. She climbed under the covers, waiting as he removed his trousers and shorts. He was fully erect, and as he walked self-consciously across the room he was aware that she was now watching him.

She said nothing as he got into bed, but he quickly felt her hands moving across his chest and stomach and down to his penis. He lay on his back, doing nothing as she stroked him, and then moved on top of him. She was the aggressor, the manipulator of every move, and he was enjoying her sense of domination. She seemed so different from his wife and other women—she did not seek comfort in words, or try to embrace him, or kiss him, or ask to be kissed. It was as if she wanted him in a purely physical way, free from emotional distractions, and soon she had straddled him and had inserted him in her; and for several moments she
moved up and down with her eyes closed until, her grip tightening on his hips, she sighed softly, and stopped.

“That’s better,” she said.

“Better than an aspirin,” he added, seeing her smile. Then she turned over, indicating that she was ready to satisfy him, and he moved on top of her and he came quickly.

They were in bed together no more than ten minutes. They remained there a while longer, then she got up, put on her glasses, and began to dress. Her figure, Bullaro noted, was voluptuous and mature, and yet so incongruous with her small boyish face and her gamin hairstyle. Sexually she was like a man—the first hit-and-run female he had ever met.

“Tomorrow night,” she said, as she finished dressing with her back to him, looking at herself in the mirror, “you can come to my room.”

She turned toward him, and he nodded from the bed. Then she walked to the door, opening it slowly to be sure that no one was in the corridor; and, waving to him, she left, pulling the door softly behind her.

B
ARBARA CRAMER
, born on a Missouri farm, perceived as an adolescent that she had been an unwanted child. Her mother, who was thirty-nine at Barbara’s birth, had produced two other daughters nearly two decades before, when her marriage offered hope if not always happiness; but the unexpected arrival of Barbara in 1939 in a remote farmhouse that still had no interior plumbing promised only more drudgery and a continued commitment to a dismal domestic ritual.

Since Barbara shied away from her mother’s sullenness, and since her older sisters had both left home early to marry, escaping to lives only moderately less grim, Barbara grew up with a minimum of female influence. When she was not attending the one-room Osage County schoolhouse—within which the sixth-and seventh-grade students sat in the front rows, to which the lessons were directed, while the younger ones sat in the back, absorbing whatever they could—she was helping her father on the farm, hoeing the garden, feeding the chickens, even driving a tractor through the wheat and corn fields.

The farm was seven miles from the closest town of Chamois, and Barbara’s social life was restricted to a few friends on adjoining farms, most of them young boys with whom she played sports and from whom she soon learned about sex in an open, natural manner. One day when she was ten, she saw two boys she knew
standing inside a barn moving their hands in front of them; and, after one of the boys called for her to join them, she approached closer and saw that each was stroking his penis.

Though she had sometimes seen her father nude when he bathed in a galvanized tub near the kitchen, she had never before seen an erect penis, and she reacted with unflinching curiosity. When the older boy, who was thirteen, asked if she would like to touch it, she did; and when he showed her how he wanted her to massage it, she obliged and she was more surprised than shocked later when she felt the throbbing and saw a creamy substance seeping up through her fingers.

As the younger boy masturbated himself to a climax, the older one kissed her, and she felt not abused but warm and wanted. After this, she and the older boy often masturbated one another in the hayloft; but, without ever discussing it, they sensed the peril of additional exploration and went no further.

Sex was never discussed in the Cramer household. When Barbara began to menstruate, her mother merely provided her with several small pieces of white sheets, told her to line her panties with them, and to burn the sheets later. It was the custom of fanning women in that region to save old sheets and rags for this purpose, since modesty more than economy prevented them from buying the Kotex sold in the general store.

Barbara found the plain country women collectively unattractive, and it was not until she attended high school in Chamois that she met someone of her own sex that she considered physically appealing. Her name was Frances, and she was tall, dark-haired, and stylish, as popular with the boys as she was envied by the girls, all except Barbara, who, contented with her role as the class tomboy, did not feel competitive with feminine beauty. The two young women became quick friends, largely because they complemented one another: Frances was graceful and poised, Barbara driving and audacious. Barbara was unintimidated by boys, was quick to retort to their rowdy comments, and even sipped Bourbon from the bottles they occasionally sneaked into the school yard. The two girls were inseparable except during the
summer months when Barbara worked full-time earning money for her support.

One summer she was employed in a country store that had a gas station in front and a dance hall in the back, and, in addition to pumping Phillips 66 and selling household supplies, she served beer in the back to the farmers and local boys, some of whom had their hair cut in the current Mohawk fashion—heads shaved bald except for a strip of hair extending down the middle.

During the following summer, wanting to be further from home, she traveled fifty miles to Jefferson City, lived in a rooming house owned by a classmate’s aunt, and worked behind Woolworth’s soda fountain, idling away many lonely afternoons listening on the radio to Elvis Presley singing “Heartbreak Hotel.” Later she found a higher-paying job in a pants factory where, surrounded by cranky middle-aged seamstresses, she spent the day fingering crotches, zipping flies up and down, and thinking often of sex.

She was now sixteen and had recently lost her virginity to a Chamois student whom she thought she loved. He was more intelligent than most and was always careful to use condoms when they made love in his jalopy. Among their common interests was an abhorrence of farm life, and he spoke often of becoming a commercial airlines pilot. Though she did not consider herself sufficiently pretty or subservient to become a stewardess, she nevertheless applied to several airlines and asked to be based in St. Louis, but she was neither surprised nor disappointed when none accepted her.

While she did not know what she wished to do with her life, she was determined to avoid the hapless routine of rural poverty and childbearing that she had seen all around her. After graduation, she returned to Jefferson City as an X-ray technician in a hospital, and then moved to St. Louis with Frances to share an apartment. Frances had found a clerical job in an insurance office, while Barbara worked in the billing department of a cardboard manufacturer, a position she soon came to deplore. The female employees were segregated from the males, and in Bar
bara’s department were fifteen doleful, pinch-mouthed women totally lacking in humor and spirit.

Barbara had yet to meet a woman who seemed happy with her work. In her reading of books and magazines she had never read a story about a businesswoman, a career woman who was successful, respected, prosperous, sexually free, not dependent on a man—and yet this was the sort of woman that Barbara vaguely hoped to become, if not in Missouri, then somewhere else; and when Frances one night suggested that they move to Los Angeles and live with her aunt, Barbara was ready to leave. Barbara’s parents by this time were divorced, and her boyfriend had gone to Texas for flight training; she was leaving nothing behind.

Arriving in Los Angeles, she responded immediately to the mild climate, the palm trees, the cordiality of the new people she met. Here there seemed to be the perfect blend of work and pleasure, an emphasis on health and sports as well as productivity and materialism, and Barbara was confident that this was where she belonged.

Following a few weeks’ stay with Frances’ aunt, the two young women found an apartment of their own in Hollywood, held secretarial jobs that they considered temporary, and explored the city on weekends in a newly acquired used car. After months as a typist for the Encyclopedia Americana, Barbara found a better job in the contract department of a large automobile dealership, and it was here that she had her first affair with a married man, the boss’s son-in-law.

She accompanied him to motels during lunchtime and occasionally in the evenings, and since she liked the sex and was not interested in marriage it was an agreeable arrangement that could have continued indefinitely had he not become so emotionally involved and possessive. One afternoon in bed, after he had tearfully revealed to her his frustrations with his wife and his domineering father-in-law, Barbara knew that their affair should end before it became too complicated.

She found a new job in the insurance department of another auto dealership, where she met a tall, rugged salesman who dur
ing the basketball season played in the National Basketball Association. She communicated her interest in him and he quickly reacted, but when they went to bed he proved to be a careless lover, a big, aggressive, insensitive bull who came quickly and then wanted to sleep. But she was nonetheless attracted to his athletic body, and she tolerated in him things that she would never have condoned in another man, partly because he was something of a celebrity, a man with a name, pride, an ego, as well as boyish charm that he effectively used to sell cars to the short, flabby men who were his fans.

She herself was doing well in her work, demonstrating an extraordinary efficiency that was appreciated by her employers and resulted in salary raises and increased responsibility. On weekends when she was not working she went water skiing, or snow skiing, or spent the time reading; and the only disturbing event in the otherwise auspicious move to Los Angeles was Frances’ decision during their second year of living together to marry a man that she had been dating. Though her affection for Frances had never been sexually expressed, Barbara was strangely panicked by this news, saddened and confused; and later, when Frances moved out of the apartment, Barbara felt both abandoned and betrayed. She did not attend the wedding, nor did she ever see Frances again.

But she was fortunate in having befriended during this period a supportive and interesting man who, at seventy, was still very vigorous and debonair. He was one of the city’s auto kings, selling fleets of vehicles each week, and he had hired Barbara Cramer to help manage his insurance department. While he was shrewd and hard in his business dealings, he was always kindly toward her, and she saw in him the father she never had. He took her to expensive restaurants, convinced her that she was special, and encouraged her to pursue her ambitions without concern for the feminine tradition of restraint.

After a year with his firm, she was eager to find a job that offered more independence, and that was when she became an agent with New York Life. After buying from several retail stores
the lists of their top customers, as well as compiling the names of people she had met through the automobile business, she spent endless hours on the telephone trying to arrange appointments; and then, in the new red Mustang convertible that she had just bought, she drove to all parts of the city to speak to people personally about the benefits of buying more life insurance. Although she encountered as much resistance as any other agent, she succeeded where others failed because she was more persistent and also because she concentrated on groups of people that had been largely ignored, such as career women, particularly nurses, who, being in daily contact with death and accidents, were very susceptible to her lectures on the importance of being adequately insured.

During her first two years at New York Life, when she was totally preoccupied with insurance and was earning close to $30,000 a year, she had no real interest in men; and so, in the relaxed atmosphere of the cocktail lounge on the first night at the Palm Springs convention, it came as a surprise to her that she suddenly felt a strong urge for sex.

When she was introduced to John Bullaro, she found him attractive and was aware of his strong body. But after sitting next to him for an hour at the table, she sensed that he was not the type to take the sexual initiative—and therefore, when he volunteered to get her an aspirin, she decided to follow him.

J
OHN BULLARO’S
affair with Barbara Cramer, which continued through the fall and winter into the spring of 1966, was characterized by quick midday sex in motels convenient to the office, followed by her driving off to business appointments while he lunched alone pondering erotic pleasure and also feeling at times a dyspeptic aftertaste induced by mild guilt and rising anxiety.

He feared that sooner or later his liaisons with Barbara would be discovered by someone from the office and provoke a scandal that would jeopardize his career and his marriage; but so far nothing had happened to justify his trepidation. On the contrary, his life had improved since knowing Barbara Cramer—the sexual stimulation that she aroused in him had extended to his marriage, reviving his dormant interest in Judith and gaining her reciprocation. His career was also proceeding smoothly and he had recently learned that he would soon be sent by the company to New York City to receive top executive training in the home office.

Barbara was as pleased by the announcement as she had been professionally encouraging throughout their affair, and he was always impressed by her capacity to restrict their relationship to sex and shop talk without becoming emotionally involved with him and making demands on his marriage. She never telephoned
him at home or complained about his unavailability at night and on weekends, and she revealed no curiosity about his wife except once to express interest in the fact that Judith was trained as a nurse.

Barbara’s demeanor toward Bullaro in the office was flawlessly formal, even on days when they had gone earlier to a motel. Though they did not often have dinner together at night, when they did go out she occasionally picked up the check, and she sometimes paid their motel expenses. Once after he had been reluctant to accompany her to a particular motel because it was rather close to his home in Woodland Hills, Barbara had him wait in the car while she registered alone at the desk, and then she rejoined him with the room key in her hand.

She was the most independent, self-sufficient woman he had ever known, and while she intrigued him she also piqued him by her sometimes cool dispassionate manner in bed; it was as if their lovemaking meant no more to her than pumping gas into the red Mustang that she hastily drove to each business appointment. Still, if she were to become suddenly romantic, he knew that he would probably panic, and therefore he did not complain to her about the style of their relationship—it provided good extramarital sex that required little of his time and energy, did not threaten his job or marriage, and during the past year he had become accustomed to it and perhaps even dependent upon it.

And yet Bullaro’s uneasiness about it persisted. He could not overcome the feeling that eventually it would cost him dearly, and he was rather relieved by the fact that he would be leaving Los Angeles in the fall to attend the executive training program in New York. But a few months before his departure, the relationship with Barbara Cramer abruptly ended in a way that he had not anticipated.

After not seeing her for weeks—she had complained of being preoccupied with interviews—Barbara telephoned him one afternoon to say that she had recently met a man who fascinated her; and in a voice that sounded uncharacteristically timid, she admitted that she might be in love. The man was an engineer, she went
on, a brilliant technician who had worked on the rockets that had launched the astronauts; and while Bullaro congratulated her on her choice, he had the uncomfortable feeling that he was being unfavorably compared.

He quickly tried to persuade her to go out with him that night, but she politely refused. He called her a week later, but she repeated that she was now seeing only the engineer, adding that they were contemplating marriage. Bullaro finally conceded to himself that the affair was over, and that realization made him somewhat depressed.

He worked at the office through an uneventful summer, then took a short vacation with Judith and the children, and began anticipating his months ahead in New York. Though he would be in New York during most of the winter, he would be commuting regularly to Los Angeles on weekends, and as Judith drove him to the airport in September she said that she would miss him but took pleasure in the fact that this trip marked his rise to higher management. Judith seemed very cheerful and hardly sentimental as she said good-bye, and Bullaro boarded the plane feeling oddly disquieted.

It was a decade since he had last seen New York City as a student at NYU, and the company’s skyscraper on Madison Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street was within walking distance of his old apartment in Greenwich Village. Though he spent his first Sunday afternoon strolling through Washington Square listening to the folk songs being sung by students around the fountain, and admiring the young women in miniskirts with their nipples protruding through their T-shirts, he was not as drawn to them as he had been enticed by the image of youthful freedom along the beaches in California. He was now more committed to the company, was conscious of the honor of being one of eleven New York Life insurance men selected from around the nation to be trained as a general manager. After completing the course, Bullaro and the ten others would return to their regions to preside
over staffs of assistants and agents in a general office of New York Life. It would mean for Bullaro and the others more money and prestige, and an opportunity to move closer to the top.

The men stayed at the Roosevelt Hotel on Forty-fifth Street off Madison, and each weekday morning they took the subway or shared cabs to the New York Life building, except for Bullaro, who got out of bed earlier so that he could jog the eighteen blocks downtown as a way of staying in condition. While the sidewalks were not crowded at this hour, a few pedestrians stopped to observe him trotting past them in his dark suit and tie, his leather briefcase sometimes held under his arm like a football, and he half expected to hear a mock cheer or a comment that would reveal the impression he was creating, but all he ever heard above the noise of motor traffic was the rhythmic clapping of his heavy cordovans against the pavement.

Approaching the home office, Bullaro slowed to a walk and tucked in his shirt. The building was a gray Gothic skyscraper that soared thirty-four stories through a series of setbacks and terraces to a pyramidal roof topped by a golden lantern. On entering, Bullaro passed between ornamental bronze gates into a high-vaulted marble corridor that led to the ornate embossed doors of the elevators. The elevators moved quietly, and since the ceilings of the inner offices throughout the building were covered with noise-absorbing felt, the sounds of conversations and typewriters were muted. Bullaro felt like a parishioner in a cathedral, and his reverential attitude increased as he became more familiar with his firm and the history of insurance, which he perceived as a secular religion that offered value to life after death and catered to man’s natural fear of the hereafter.

Visiting the archives of New York Life during his first week in the building, Bullaro saw in glass cases the famous signatures of entombed policyholders: General Custer, Rogers Hornsby, Franklin D. Roosevelt; and there were also on display the photographs of disasters that had been costly to the company—the Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago in 1903 in which nineteen policyholders burned to death; the San Francisco earthquake of 1906,
which included in its devastation a branch office of New York Life; the supposedly indestructible
Titanic
, which sank in 1912 with eleven policyholders aboard, and the liner
Lusitania
, which was torpedoed in 1915 by German submarines, causing the death of eighteen passengers who had been insured by New York Life.

While various forms of maritime insurance had existed within seafaring nations since the Renaissance, Bullaro read that the practice of insuring human life in Europe after the seventeenth century had offended many church leaders, who denounced the underwriters as conjurers, death gamblers, and tamperers with the divine will. In several countries, including France, life insurance was banned until the latter eighteenth century; but in the major nautical nations such as England, where it had long been the custom to insure ships and cargo against storms and pirates, there was little resistance to extending the protection to include inland property and people.

Bullaro read that it had been the English who introduced insurance selling to America, but as a business it floundered through most of the eighteenth century partly because the majority of citizens in the agrarian economy of the time lacked the surplus funds or disposition to pay in advance for an imagined emergency. With the coming of the Industrial Revolution, however, American insurance firms began to thrive as the guardians of materialism, and as Bullaro read the current pamphlets and figures he learned that the top insurance companies had now become, in the mid-1960s, among the wealthiest private enterprises in the land, exceeding even the leading oil companies in assets.

The preeminent insurer, Prudential Life, with $35 billion worth of assets, was $10 billion more affluent than Exxon, while the second largest insurer, Metropolitan Life, was $7 billion richer. Bullaro’s firm, worth nearly $14 billion, was fourth among the insurers, being behind the $20 billion Equitable and ahead of the $13 billion John Hancock. More than thirty other American insurers was worth at least $1 billion each, and every day of the week the insurance industry took in $120 million, or more than forty cents from every man, woman, and child in the nation,
while paying out only half that amount in such items as death claims and annuities. Ten percent of the nation’s gross national product was spent on insurance, a tithing to the gods of insecurity.

But despite the industry’s prominence, the men who ran the giant corporations remained largely anonymous, and if a newsmagazine wished to publish a lead story on the insurance business it would be unable to select a single recognizable face with a familiar name to put on the cover. Insurance seemed to cultivate among its leaders a quality of diffidence, and as Bullaro toured the executive tower in the New York Life building and looked up at the large oil paintings of past presidents that lined the walls—bewhiskered Victorians of the 1800s, bespectacled conservatives of the 1900s—he was impressed by the similarity of their expressions, their pervasive shyness and serenity: They were timid tycoons, and Bullaro wondered if his own personality and talent made him compatible with these eminent stewards of the public trust.

While he believed that he was sufficiently diligent and self-effacing to eventually qualify for the hierarchy of New York Life, he was never unaware of that deepest part of him that rebelled against corporate conformity, that was lured by fantasies of freedom, although, while in New York, he firmly repressed any expression of this. Each day at the home office, in manner and appearance, he was a model of the young executive on the rise. He seemed totally absorbed in the policies and theories of the company and in becoming knowledgeable about its newly structured major medical programs and group insurance plans. When he left the office, he often went out with his colleagues to dinner, but, unlike them, he did not stay out late drinking and he conserved his sexual energy for his weekend visits with Judith in Los Angeles.

The time away had a salubrious effect on their marriage, and each visit home was a renewed honeymoon. Judith, smiling at the
airport gate, very blond and comely and distinguished in the crowd, embraced him warmly and conversed with him enthusiastically in the car, and later, after seeing the children, they made love with a fervor reminiscent of their courtship.

But when he returned permanently to Los Angeles and accepted his position as a general manager with his own office in Woodland Hills, presiding over a staff that included nine underwriters, his relationship with Judith gradually reverted to the predictable routine that it had been before his trip to New York. After a domestic day of caring for the children, Judith went to bed early, while he occupied himself in the living room with the increased work produced by his promotion.

Though he had not spoken to Barbara Cramer in months, he had heard that she was now married to the engineer John Williamson, had kept her job with the company, and was maintaining her established sales standards. Bullaro had thought of writing her a note or calling her to say hello, but before getting around to it he met her one afternoon near the elevator in the main office. She was very cordial and Bullaro felt more casual about being seen speaking with her now that she was married; it never occurred to him, as they made a date for lunch later in the week, that their relationship might again become sexual.

But during lunch, in her inimitable manner, Barbara suggested that they go to a motel. Bullaro thought at first that she was kidding, but when she repeated it, adding that he could wait in the car while she registered for the room, he called for the check and left the restaurant with her. He was as awed as ever by her impulsiveness and boldness, and also excited as he anticipated their lovemaking; but after they had pulled into the motel parking lot and she got out to register, he waited uneasily in the driver’s seat, sitting lower than usual behind the wheel, questioning the wisdom of being here with a married woman while wondering whether she would sign her husband’s surname in the registration book. He said nothing, however, as she returned to the car with the room key, preferring at this moment to avoid any mention of her marriage.

In the room she hastily removed her clothes, and Bullaro saw again her remarkable body, and soon felt her aggressive touch as he lay naked on the bed and she mounted him. The ease with which she achieved her satisfaction, and the agile manner with which she pulled him on top of her without disengaging him, reminded him of a tumbling act in a circus, and confirmed as well that her marriage had neither altered her sportive style nor diminished her desire for supplementary sex.

After they had finished and were relaxing on the bed, Bullaro asked if she was happily married. She answered that she was, adding that her husband was the most remarkable man she had ever known; he was sensitive and self-assured and was not intimidated by her individuality. In fact, she went on, he was encouraging her to become more independent than she was already, hoping that as she attained higher levels of fulfillment and self-awareness she would reinvest these assets into their marriage. A marriage should promote personal growth instead of limitations and restrictions, she went on, and as Bullaro listened with a certain cynicism he assumed that she was paraphrasing her husband. He had never heard her speak this way before, and while he was still bewildered by her husband’s motives, and pondered what her husband would do if he knew what had just transpired in this bedroom, he remained silent as Barbara Williamson continued to explain for his benefit, and perhaps for her own, the kind of marriage she now had.