Love, power, riches, success, a good marriage, exciting sex, fulfillment, are not impossible dreams. They can be yours if you want them.
DR. JOYCE BROTHERS
The only means of advancement are talent and calculation.
BURCKHARDT
D
OCTORS, dentists, lawyers hang their various diplomas on their of-fice walls; Pauline Marshall's ofof-fice at Opulent Interiors was dec-orated with giant framed photographs of the magazine covers on which she had appeared. The earlier covers showed her for her beautiful face and figure, for the clothes she was modeling, but the last few displayed her for her triumphs as THE WOMAN WHO CARES ABOUT THE DECOR OF YOUR HOME, A SUPERACHIEVER WITH STYLE and AMERICA'S MOST GLAM-OROUS WORKING WOMAN UNDER THIRTY."I'm not very bright, but I'm practical," she told interviewers, with the disarming modesty which is an absolute must for the ambitious.
She was practical about everything. Marianne Hardwick's ideas about equal commitment in love which Hardwick had complained about ex-plained perfectly to her why the marriage had failed; and no doubt she would have found it preposterous, if she had known about it, that Mar-ianne had broken with Mark because he wanted things his own way.
Pauline Marshall never expected any man to be fair or considerate; she never dreamed of equal love and respect, give and take, hurt for hurt.
Her relationship with Hardwick was based on something far more sub-stantial.
"The way to enslave a man is to be his slave," she advised a trusted friend, an advertising executive, who came to her office to discuss busi-ness and find out, while she was there, the secret of catching and hold-ing a rich man who was also young, handsome and brilliant into the bargain. "Let him be the boss."
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"Pauline, nobody would believe me if I quoted the editor of Ameri-ca's fastest-growing magazine saying that."
"Well, then, don't quote me."
"Come on, darling — you a slave?"
"I've always tried to be a complete woman," replied the former model, smiling contentedly.
"And how am Ito become a slave?"
"Get on your knees. Give him everything he wants."
"Oh, Pauline," cried the friend despairingly. "How can you tell what a man really wants!"
America's Most Glamorous Working Woman under Thirty raised her dark, perfectly arched eyebrows. "Have you ever seen a pig at a trough?"
"Not everyone had the privilege of growing up on a farm, dear."
"You can learn a lot growing up on a farm. You find out it's no use trying to improve the character of any living thing."
"Meaning?"
Pauline sighed, feeling alone in her wisdom. She understood every-thing better than anybody else she knew. "Men don't want this kind of woman or that kind of woman, they want all women. And they don't want you to nag them about it."
"You're telling me to give up my man as soon as I've got him?"
"All I'm telling you is, don't be hard on him . . . don't be jealous . . . don't turn your body into a prison for him," replied Pauline with the unhurried complacency of a woman who had legs and breasts to stun the world and eyes as moist as her lips, visible proofs that there was nothing hard or dry about her and she had nothing to fear from compe-tition.
NOT that she would tell her friend everything. She herself went one bet-ter than not being jealous. When she first met Hardwick she realized immediately that the last thing the restless young husband needed was another commitment to a one-to-one-relationship, and had the happy in-spiration of arranging an orgy for him.
He had relied on her ever since.
At parties she was quick to notice if Hardwick's glance lingered on a pretty face, and would make friends with the women who attracted him, invite them to lunch and gossip about the details of her sex life, turning their heads with her confidences. There is no way a man can seduce a woman as easily as through another woman. Pauline Marshall helped to seduce women for Hardwick and then helped to keep them away; she served him a bachelor's dreams, just as another girlfriend might have cooked rich, spicy dishes to keep him happy. She would even be jeal-ous, a little — just so he would know she cared, but not enough to be
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tiresome. Mistress, procuress, hostess of occasional orgies starring Hardwick as the one and only male, she absolutely refused, however, to allow herself to be touched by anyone but him — even though he urged her sometimes to try a threesome, assuring her that he wouldn't resent a girl.
That was the one thing she wouldn't do for him.
"You belong to all women, but I belong only to you," she would whisper into Hardwick's ear, locking him into her arms.
Never wanting to give him cause for jealousy, she hired only women and bald or gray-haired men to work on the magazine — the kind of seasoned professionals who knew everything about the business and were used to running things themselves but who, having lost their executive positions, found it difficult to get any job at all because of their age. It was their wealth of experience that made Opulent Interiors such a suc-cess, though of course they wouldn't have had the opportunity without Ms. Marshall's concern for Hardwick's peace of mind.
Satisfying her lover's lust, his vanity, earning money for him with the magazine, she was convinced that she was the only woman for him, and was fond of him chiefly for that reason. His money was the least of it.
He made her happy. By responding to her manipulative skills as she ex-pected him to, he was the living proof of her intelligence, her sophisti-cation, her knowledge of human nature. Besides, they had a future. It was a settled thing in her mind that they would get married, she would hand over Opulent Interiors to one of her bald assistants, move up to the post of executive vice-president of HCI, and have a baby.
Still, there was his wife!
His wife. His maddening, vain compassion for her. His maddening fear of his father-in-law. In all the publicity about Opulent Interiors and Chicago's superwoman, Pauline had to pretend that she was still looking for Mr. Right; she had to keep her own apartment and although she was occupying the wife's rooms in the Hardwick house, she couldn't change the decor. There was always some little thing to remind her that their relationship wasn't legitimate. The weekend they went skiing in the Laurentians, for instance, she would have preferred to go to Aspen, where the Hardwicks had a ski lodge, but because the Montgomerys had a place there as well, Kevin took her to Mont Tremblant instead.
The worst of it was the waiting. True to her philosophy, she didn't argue, didn't complain, didn't tell him what she was thinking; she let him have his way in everything — she didn't want to press him to break with his wife — yet she was growing more and more impatient, espe-cially since her gynecologist had told her that the incidence of breast cancer was lower among women who breast-fed an infant before they were thirty.
When they got back from Mont Tremblant and Sypcovich called to 164
report that he had a film for her, her joy was indescribable. She was glad to see Hardwick go off to Santa Catalina the following weekend, leaving her free to arrange her surprise for him. The certified check for
$62,500 which she handed Sypcovich to cover his $50,000 bonus and final expenses left only a few thousand dollars in her account, but she felt she had made a good investment.
By the time Hardwick got back to Chicago on Sunday evening, she had the projector and screen already set up in the library to show Mas-terson's movie. And not a moment too soon.
"Marianne wants to move back here," Hardwick told her gloomily as she settled him with a drink in his grandfather's worn green leather armchair in what had been the smoking room when the solid old man-sion on Chicago's Near North Side was still a new building. "I don't understand what's got into her!" he confessed with a puzzled frown.
"When I called her a week ago — remember? — she sounded great on the phone, everything was fine, she didn't even mind I wasn't coming to see her. Now she's all woe. She misses the city and she wants to come back, she wants to get involved in politics, campaign with Gene McCarthy against the war, agitate for women's rights — God knows what else. I'd die of boredom. It'll have to be a divorce if she insists on coming home. That's where I draw the line."
"What did you tell her?" asked Pauline, sitting on the armrest of his chair and massaging the back of his neck, his comfort her only concern.
"I sympathized with her, of course," sighed Hardwick, stretching his legs. "I took her point. I only wondered whether it wouldn't be unfair to the children. We'll think about it, I said. We left it at that." He drew a line on the carpet with the heel of his shoe. "To give her her due, she didn't try sex on me. She spent the whole weekend curled up — thank God for that much. All the same, she's a clinger, and I'm tired of it."
"She knows you feel sorry for her, so she takes advantage of you,"
said Pauline in her lazy voice, as soft and strong as her fingers.
"Correct. I must have burned up half a million gallons of jet fuel by now, going down there to see her. Wait, that's not quite right — I should deduct two-thirds on account of the kids. But that still leaves us with a hell of a lot of energy burned up in the name of human kindness."
"Relax, relax, unwind, darling, your neck is getting tense."
"I certainly won't let her spoil things," said Hardwick, reaching back to pat Pauline's arm.
She rewarded him with a lick behind his ear, thinking that they would be married within six to eight months, and she would have a child be-fore she was twenty-nine. However, she saved her news until after din-ner. She wouldn't have dreamed of telling anything important to a man until his stomach was full.
"You still look worried," she said when they were having their after-
dinner coffee and were once again free of the servants. "Don't let her upset you. My guess is that she only thought of coming back because she had a tiff with her lover. For all you know, they've made up by now and she's happy to stay where she is."
"Yeah, wouldn't that be great!" Hardwick exclaimed fervently. "I wish to God she would get a lover. Then I could leave her without hav-ing to worry what she would do to herself."
"I wouldn't say anything, darling, but she's making you feel guilty!
I don't want you to be too mad at her — after all, she's the mother of those two beautiful boys. But on the other hand, if she gives you noth-ing but trouble and then makes a fool of you — that's not fair."
"If she would just find herself another man, I could get a divorce and not even her crazy father could object."
She jumped up and stood in front of him, clapping her hands to get his attention. "But darling, that's just what I'm trying to tell you, you're not listening!" she chided him, laughing, turning around on her toes, abandoning all restraint. "She does have somebody!"
"No such luck!" replied the obstinate husband. It was an old tune -la mia Dorabel-la capace non e!
Pauline tugged at his wrists to pull him to his feet. "Let me show you something, it's in the library. You can leave her, divorce her and she won't be able to blame you — it's all her doing."
Hardwick's ruddy face grew pale. "That sounds too good to be true."
`EVERYONE'S a nudist these days, it doesn't necessarily mean anything,' he thought as he sat in the library and watched his wife walk about top-less on the deck of the Hermit, with a strange young man beside her.
When the young man put his arm around her and lifted her breast with his fingertip, Pauline switched off the projector. "See what I mean? She's having the time of her life, and when you go all the way down there to see her, she nags you!"
"Keep it rolling, let's go over the whole thing from A to Z," Hard-wick insisted in the dry voice of a corporation executive who wanted to know all the details. "By the way, how did you get this stuff?"
"I bought it," she said proudly, looking him straight in the eye. "I paid sixty-two thousand five hundred dollars for it. I would have paid anything to stop her making a fool of you. Aren't you pleased with me?"
"I must pay you back," Hardwick replied evenly.
She switched on the projector, and his wife and the stranger came to life again.
"Well, it's certainly a weight off my chest," Hardwick commented a little too loudly. "Good luck to them. . . . The only thing that both-ers me is the ramifications. . . . They're lying on that mattress — they aren't doing anything, but that creep touched her tits when they were 166
walking around. My cousins could use this to try to prove that Creigh-ton and Ben aren't my kids. They might disinherit them, if anything happened to me. I'll need to have every copy of the film destroyed.. . . Otherwise, of course, this is a wholly positive development."
Talking made the watching easier, at least until he saw his wife lean over the stranger (and the stranger disgusted him, so he saw her lean over a disgusting stranger) and take this disgusting stranger's revolting prick into her mouth.
It was obscene.
The t6mm uncut footage, at times blurred and out of focus, pro-jected on the portable screen, looked cheap. But even if it had looked expensive it would have been obscene, because it was false. Like all sex films, it was as grotesque as a film of a concert without the music, showing the members of the orchestra bobbing their heads, screwing up their lips, puffing out their cheeks, moving silent bows across silent strings, going through all sorts of contortions — what a vile falsehood such a spectacle would be, passed off as a Beethoven symphony! The movements of the lovers' bodies told nothing about the beating of their hearts, the acro- batics of copulation communicated nothing of what they felt; what lived inside was shown as something outside. Hardwick didn't reflect on the falseness of the film, but he felt it; it made the whole performance even more deeply offensive, and when he remembered, in a lucid moment, that she was doing for that disgusting stranger what she had always re- fused to do for him, for her husband, for the father of her children, he couldn't contain himself: he grabbed the projector, ripping the cord from its socket, and hurled the thing against the wall.
"I'll kill him!" he screamed over the din of banging metal and break-ing glass. But then, instantly recoverbreak-ing that iron self-control so char-acteristic of men of power, he added quite calmly, "I'll have him killed."
Pauline Marshall stood there aghast and unbelieving.
Shaken in her judgment of the man whose weaknesses she thought she understood, she made the mistake of answering all his questions about the stranger on the Hermit, her detective, the cameraman.
"I don't hold back, I tell you everything, I'm the only person you can count on," she cajoled him desperately, too upset to realize that she was telling him that he could be fooled by everybody else. "You need a woman you can trust!"
When she had told him everything she knew, Hardwick dialed the housekeeper and informed her that Miss Marshall and her maid were leaving and would need help with their packing.
"You can keep your job at the magazine as long as no one hears about this," he said to his former mistress.
"But Kevin, you're bored with your wife," Pauline said, crying, laughing, begging. "She hangs around your neck and weighs you down 167
— now you can shake her off, and she's the one who's responsible!
Don't you understand? It's just what you wanted. You're the injured party!
You can be rid of her and she can't even complain. Don't you see? You're free and it's all her fault!"
Hardwick looked at her with hatred. "If you had loved me, you would never have shown me this."
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