There was so much that happened that summer, I have tried desperately to think of some way to condense it all without writing an entire book within a book. Bob, of course, took over the household completely. He used my car as if it were his own, driving me each noon to the little private summer school where I taught drama in the afternoon.
What he did during those times I never questioned.
I understood that he had business around town or that he was working on some “business deal” with a bunch of stockbrokers and lending companies that would allow him to retire in five years as a millionaire. All of his money, over a hundred thousand dollars, he claimed, was tied up either in this venture or in overseas banks where he could not draw it out.
His financial demands grew as time went on. At first, it was twenty dollars every once in a while. And then it was a hundred for “a deposit on a surprise,” and a thousand to “make a fast trip to Europe to see if I can get some of my funds released.” I had to dip mightily into my meagre savings and get a new loan on the car, as my hundred dollar a week fee for part-time time teaching was my only income during the summer.
In retrospect, I am utterly amazed that I never once objected, never questioned Bob about a single thing that he took or “borrowed” from me. I was an absolute slave, desperate for the love that he avoided giving me until I became a nervous wreck, yet willing to put up with any deprivation so that I could be assured that love was mine to have.
There were so many things that I tolerated, yet there were three basic acts or themes that troubled and distressed me the most, and all of them had to do with Kathy.
First, there was the continuing presence of Kathy in conversations when Bob and I were making love or preparing to do so. This would occur in various ways, but the one incident I remember clearly, was fairly typical of them all. On this particular evening, Kathy had paraded around in front of us in her baby-dolls more than usual, and would sit looking at TV with her legs purposefully pushed apart, the fuzz of her nymphet mound visible at the loosely fitted crotch.
On another occasion, Bob had invited some friend of his over to watch Kathy strut around and model her new bikini, and she did such a provocative job of twisting and contorting in front of them that I (and she too) had no doubt of their arousal.
But on the specific evening I remember so well, I saw Bob pretend to be half asleep while his eyes remained open just enough to observe each move and twitch of Kathy's lovely flesh as she twisted around in her seat. My eyes were trained too, trained on his trousers. I saw it rise from limpid flatness until there was the clear outline of his erect penis beneath the trousers that were tightly stretched from the position in which he was sitting. It was so clear, in fact, that the head and ridge was completely discernible.
An hour later, as we lay together on the bed, Bob began to stare at me with a peculiar expression. He kissed me hard on the mouth, tasting and nibbling at my lips, then moving back to look at me again.
“Your mouth is very much like Kathy's,” he commented with a certain huskiness that was not usually there. “And your breasts, they're still inverted… the nipples, I mean. So are hers. Here… kiss.”
Bob pushed me down to his belly and I began to lick his hairy flesh, then envelope his stout manliness with my lips. I knew what he was thinking, and yet I fought to deny it. I was not Denise. I was Kathy. I was Denise in presence, but I was Kathy in his mind.
“Have you ever had a doctor check her to be sure she's still a virgin?” he asked me later as we fingered each other and kissed.
“I don't see what good that would do,” I tried to get rid of the subject quickly. “If she's not a virgin, there's nothing a doctor can do to make her one.”
“I wouldn't worry so much about the boys, Denise. Have you ever noticed how she stays locked in her room with her girlfriend, this Mary Clauson?”
“She spends the night with her,” I said indignantly, pulling away from him. “All girls spend the night with their friends. So what?”
“I wonder what they do together?” Bob seemed to muse pleasurably, licking my nipples and using his fingers on me in both places, “I wonder if they play with each other… naked together… in bed…”
“Bob, please… oh, darling… darling,” I objected, moving my hips to the rhythm of sensuousness he elicited from me. “Can't you talk about something else when you do that… I'm… o-o-oh, I'm just about to come, darling. Please… talk about something else…”
And when I looked down at his penis, I saw that he had already had a climax. I immediately confronted him, accusing him of using me to get so worked up about Kathy he couldn't control himself.
But would you believe it? That man actually talked me out of it, made me seem like a dirty minded slut, while he denied any such thoughts himself.
“You must understand,” he explained to me with such conviction. “In my work, the mind is trained to disassociate itself from the body, from the purely physical pleasures of the flesh. I was talking and thinking about Kathy with sincere concern, while the physical closeness with you and the manipulation of our sex parts caused me to come to orgasm. There was no connection, Denise. Any connection was only in your mind, not in mine.”
When it would happen the next time, he would always have another excuse, and the end result was always that it was my fault for having these ideas. Yes, I really believed at the time that I was to blame. It never occurred to me that we could both be somehow a part of the same evil thing.
The second event of the summer that had me really torn apart was the episode with the “spy-scope.” Bob kept insisting that something was going on between Kathy and Mary Clauson, the cute little blonde who double-dated with her and was her almost constant companion.
One evening when Mary was spending the night with Kathy, Bob signaled me to follow him up the stairs after they had gone up to Kathy's bedroom. He took me with him into the big storage closet in the hallway and turned on his flashlight.
“See the two little scopes there,” he whispered, indicating two objects that seemed imbedded into the back wall of the closet and looked like miniature telescopes or jeweler's devices for viewing gems.
“I installed them this afternoon when Kathy was at the movies. I use them in my work all the time. They consist of wide-angle photographic lenses with a viewer. The front lens is miniaturized. It sticks out in the bedroom like the head of a small pin, unnoticeable. Here… look through this one.”
As I put my eye up to the device nearest me, Bob peered through the other one. Almost the entire bedroom was completely visible to us. Kathy was taking off her bra, while Mary sat on the edge of the bed in her bra and panties.
“Bob… you must be mad!” I said almost aloud.
“Sh-sh!” he shushed me up, his strong hand squeezing my forearm until I thought it would break. “I didn't set this up for our amusement, you know. I'm seriously concerned about the abnormal sex habits of your daughter.”
I was terrified. I was terrified and uncomfortable. I felt like the vilest mother in the world as I realized Bob was watching my own daughter peel her panties down seductively as Mary said something to her that caused both girls to laugh. We could only catch a word every now and then. One thing I was sure that I heard was, “Bob flips… do this,” from Kathy.
She paraded all around the room stripped naked, projecting her growing breasts, wiggling her torso so that they bounced and quivered, so that her buttocks and thighs fairly danced with the obscene undulations of a strip artist or go-go girl.
“Bob… we can't do this,” I whispered to him.
“Sh-sh,” he responded again, this time slipping his arm around my waist and drawing me close to his side, “See what they're doing? I told you there was something to this.”
“Oh, Bob,” I objected, keeping my voice low, “they're just kidding around. I understand men do more than that in the shower room when they're joking or something.”
“You should know. Look.”
Mary stood up from her perch on the bed and removed her bra. Her breasts were smaller than Kathy's and the nipples quite large. I recall frowning at the unattractiveness in comparison.
The two girls stood together in front of the mirror, admiring themselves, then Kathy reached over and slipped a finger beneath the elastic waistband of Mary's pants.
“Oh… no,” I moaned under my breath, and I felt Bob's grip around my waist tighten.
They were both smiling at each other in the mirror, almost laughing. Kathy tugged downward at the pants until Mary's light blonde triangle was exposed. I caught my breath and I felt like I was going to faint dead away. My hand brushed past Bob's trousers.
“Bob… why…?”
“Sh-sh!”
He had exposed himself in the dark there and he was totally aroused. But I quickly looked back into the bedroom, torn between two terrible concerns. When I looked back through the scope, I felt like laughing out for sheer joy. What an evil person I was, we both were, for letting our minds imagine so much. Kathy and Mary did a quick dance in front of the mirror, laughing and giggling, then put on their baby-dolls and lay on the bed to read some pop music magazines.
“Why… why did you have it out like that?” I confronted Bob as soon as we got into our own bedroom a few minutes later, “You were about to… you were bursting with passion, Bob. I think…”
“Yes, I can imagine what your dirty little mind was thinking,” he popped back at me, pulling off his shirt and throwing it in a corner. “I can't understand how such an attractive woman as you, such an irresistibly erotic woman as you, can have so little self-confidence. You seem to be incapable of realizing your own attractiveness to the male.”
“Me?” I puzzled genuinely, taking off my blouse. “I'm talking about you getting so excited watching Kathy and Mary… your own private little peep-show to watch my daughter my dress…”
“Oh, good Lord!” Bob exploded. “Not that again. You have this morbid fixation, this ingrained idea that I am interested sexually in Kathy. You can't seem to realize, you refuse to realize that it is you who arouses me. You, Denise! I had my arm around your waist, correct?”
“Yes…”
You're wearing no girdle tonight, and no bra?”
“Yes.”
“Then don't you think that your presence was what excited me, Denise?” he asked, as if I were the densest person in the world. “You were so worried about things that were not even involved, I don't suppose you were conscious of the fact that my hands were caressing your buttocks, my fingers were feeling the yielding flesh of the underside of your breasts. Denise! You are a sexy woman, an erotic woman! When I am close to you, feeling your flesh like that teasing my hands beneath a minimum of clothing, I get passionate! Why do you keep torturing yourself and denying your sexuality? Why? Why? I want to make love to you, Denise. Yes! All week you have wanted to make love. Is it so strange, am I some kind of pervert because tonight, I want to make love to you?”
“No… no, darling… love me…”
And he did, more violently and satisfying than ever before.
The third incident of that summer was not so easy for me to put aside. I had rejected the others, relegating them at least to my subconscious where they boiled from within to tear me apart without my quite knowing or understanding what it was.
But this time it was different. We had been drinking quite heavily. Kathy had been staying out until all hours and acting very peculiar. She would often knock on our door after Bob and I had gone to bed, as if deliberately trying to keep us from making love.
And on that particular night when I had been drinking far too much, Kathy came in about one in the morning acting giddy and foolish. I knew she had been drinking too, but I was too ashamed of my own condition to mention it. We said a few words and then she went up to her bed.
Bob helped me upstairs, and I remember passing out almost as soon as I hit the bed. I woke up, still in a daze, about four o'clock. I needed to go to the bathroom. Bob was not there! I walked into the hall and saw his trousers and shirt across the railing at the top of the steps. I could hear voices somewhere and the sound of Kathy's radio.
I started toward her door, then I suddenly stopped in my tracks. I was shaking all over. I reached out to grab the doorknob, determined to break right into her room.
But I could not do it!
I froze right there, still trembling and chilled all over. There was a breeze coming through the hallway. But was it really that cold? The goosepimples stood out all over me, and only then did I realize that I was naked. I turned and went down to the bathroom. It was all I could do to function, my body was so tense, twisted up inside.
On the way back to my room, I seemed to hear voices from everywhere, the sound of a bed moving, little titters of laughters and pleasant sighs… and the music from the radio. I even thought I heard the refrigerator door close down in the kitchen.
I became dizzy and unable to stand up right. I was losing my balance. And the strangest thing was that I was so afraid to risk facing the truth, that hay biggest concern was that I might make some noise that would give me away. Carefully, I groped my way back into the bedroom, and seem to recall seeing Bob's blue silk pajamas lying across the foot of the bed just as they had been all day.
I awoke with a terrible start at 8:30. I don't know what awakened me. I seemed to hear the sound of a door closing, Kathy's door. But I could not be sure. I immediately jumped out of bed and put on my robe. My head seemed amazingly clear. I was not dizzy anymore. I was determined to have it out, to go right into Kathy's room and have it out. I was going to find out the truth, find out whether everything that I suspected was true, or whether I was out of my mind.
I stopped short when I opened the door to the stall. Bob was sitting at the top of the stairs, smoking a cigarette and wearing his blue silk pajamas. His blue silk pajamas! My mind seemed to snap, and I walked toward him wagging an accusing finger.
“Where have you been?” I demanded.
“Be quiet, dear. You'll wake Kathy,” he stated with amazing calm and aplomb, patting a place beside him for me to sit down. “I've spent a rather hectic night, but I think it's all for the best…”
“You… were in Kathy's bedroom?” I accused him outright, ”… in your underwear…”
“For God's sake keep your voice down!” he whispered sharply, grabbing my arm. “Kathy had been drinking. Chillie got her drunk and almost raped her. She was terribly upset. I could tell that when she came in. As soon as you passed out, I went in and talked to her.”
“But your clothes… I saw your clothes over the railing there when I got up to go to the bathroom at four.”
“So you did,” he agreed without hesitation. “I talked to her first until about two-thirty, and then I came in here to get my pajamas. I told Kathy I would sleep in the den so that if she needed me she could come get me without disturbing you. She was still quite upset. I changed clothes here in the hallway so I wouldn't have to leave my clothes downstairs.”
“No… no you didn't,” I said stiffly, determined to have it out, “Your… pajamas were still on the bed when I was up at four.”
“Oh? How were you feeling then? Was everything clear? No effects from your drinking?”
“Yes!” I blurted out, then I felt an awful headache coming on, “No-I was dizzy-”
“Blue pajamas-blue vertigo,” he commented, shrugging his shoulders and smiling at me, “It can happen to anyone. Probably fixated in your mind from the night before when they were there.”
“But you were-in Kathy's room-”
“Yes,” he said without hesitation, “I stayed with Kathy most of the night, with the exception of about an hour when I was in the den, twenty minutes fixing something to eat in the kitchen. I even lay beside her in the bed and let her cuddle close to me, put her arm around me. The girl needed it. She needed her father. Her mother was drunk!”
The last word seared through me like a hot branding iron. I turned away from him and wanted to cry. How could I believe it? How could I believe it, knowing what had gone on before, knowing that he had the means to watch her alone in her bedroom at any time through that spy device?
“Denise?”
“Yes, Bob.”
“The door was unlocked. Why didn't you come in and see for yourself when you were up at four?”
“I–I don't know. I wasn't feeling good.”
“You could have peeked in through the scope in the closet, Denise. If you were so worried, why didn't you do that?”
“Oh-I don't know Bob. I'm so-so mixed up about everything-”
“Denise, look at me. Look at me right square in the eye, and tell me you honestly believe I was making love to your daughter.”
“I can't-,” I admitted tearfully, about to go to pieces inside, but afraid to.
“I'll tell you another reason I stayed in there nearly all night with Kathy,” Bob announced, looking at me very seriously. “I wanted to see how deeply this phobia goes. You claim to love me, Denise. But you don't trust me at all. How can you say you love me when you don't trust me?”
How could I not believe him?
UNTIL Kathy left to return to her father three weeks later, I was in a state of emotional turmoil. One day, I would believe it was all in my imagination. The next day, Kathy or Bob would do or say something that brought it all back.
I went to the doctor complaining of nerves and he tried to get me to talk about the thing that was bothering me. Naturally, I refused, because I refused to recognize it myself. He prescribed some tranquilizers, but they only made me so sleepy that I fought hard to stay awake in the daytime and was even more nervous and restless when it was time to go to bed.
I drank excessively too.
“I love you so much, darling,” I told Kathy at the airport as she was about to go through the gate to her plane. “Please be a real good girl. You're such a fine looking girl. I want you to always remember how much I love you-”
I would almost choke on my words. I felt like bursting into tears one minute, and getting angry the next. My head was dizzy, and for some strange and inexplicable reason, I was terribly afraid to kiss my own daughter goodbye. Finally, I could contain myself no longer as I realized she was going and that I wouldn't see her again for nine months-if ever.
“You've got to tell me, Kathy!” I blurted out too loud, at least glad that Bob had been unable to come along with us. “This has been torturing me for three weeks. I–I've worried about the times you were alone with Bob so much. I–I love him, of course. But you are such a-an attractive girl-and the way you dress. And that night he was with you-all night. I want to know-what happened-”
“I hate to hurt you, mother dear,” Kathy told me with a flip, smarty attitude, gesturing provocatively and thrusting out her breasts. “But I suppose it's for the best since all this seems to be bugging you so. Bob's been screwing me the whole time! And he's very good at it. One hell of a lot better than Chillie, and so much cooler than those silly kids back home. Goodbye, Mother-”
I couldn't believe that I had heard correctly. I stood there in a trance watching her run out to the plane, her lovely legs attracting so much attention in the little short skirt she was wearing. Somehow, I managed to find my way to the bar and order a large double of scotch.