Contrary Pleasure Read Online Free Page A

the back nine and then I blew up on that dog of
a seventeen. Came in with five over par.”
    Bess was hunched forward in her chair, her expression serious. As usual,
she had a curiously rumpled look. She was always shining clean, but oddly
disorganized. She was a big, strong-bodied, high-breasted woman who seemed to
be always pulling and wrenching at her clothes. They never seemed to fit,
always too tight or too loose in the wrong places, slips showing, sweaters
coming out of skirts, heels coming off shoes, straps breaking. She seemed to be
in continual stubborn conflict with her clothing, unable to subdue it. She had
too much pale brown hair of a texture so silky that it would never stay the way
she wanted it.
    For a long time after knowing her, Ben had wondered how a woman who
always managed to look rumpled could emit such a strong flavor of desirability.
She seemed so utterly unconscious of her body, so perfectly willing to collapse
into any posture regardless of how unflattering it was. And then it had come to
him that she was one of those people to whom nakedness is a natural state. She
was tight in her skin, resilient with health, uncomplicated as a puppy. He had
felt an amused and pleasant desire for her for a long time, and he was certain
she was unaware of it, and equally certain that nothing would or could ever
come of it. The advantage was that it always made him feel good to be near her.
He liked her and knew she liked him. Sometimes he had a strong urge to smooth
back that glossy brown hair and, perhaps, scratch the nape of her neck.
    Eighteen years ago she had run away from Sarah Lawrence and married a
wild and improbable young man named Carney, a black Irishman, a brawler, a
laborer, a poet of sorts. Three months later, in Philadelphia, he took violent
exception to a comment about his bride, a comment made in a place to which he
never should have taken her. He did mighty damage and walked out with her,
walking casually, taunting them, laughing low in his throat, walking a dozen
feet before someone threw a knife into the back of his neck, dropping him in
the quick spineless death which is a bull ring art. She came back to her
father’s house, wearing a disturbingly vacant smile, her emaciation accenting
the first evidences of pregnancy. She was eighteen and Quinn was nineteen when
David was born. They had been playmates. Quinn, for perhaps the first time in
his life, felt needed. The families approved the marriage. Not only did it seem
sound emotionally, but it looked like a healthy move for the Stockton Knitting
Company. Bess’s father’s firm had weathered the early depression years very
well, but not so well but that both firms could not benefit from a merger. The
difficulty, Ben discovered later, resulted from the very thoroughness of the
audit which had to precede any merger agreement.
    Not long after the marriage, while the audit was in process, her father
went home from the office in the middle of the afternoon and drew a hot tub and
opened his wrists with a single-edged Gem razor blade and drifted peacefully
out of life, listening to the afternoon game on the bathroom radio, lasting
long enough, perhaps, to hear the Yankees pile up a substantial lead in the
bottom of the fifth. His badly depleted stock interest in his own firm had to
go on the block to cover his speculations, and the interests which took over control
wasted no time in moving everything movable to a low-wage area in the backwoods
of Tennessee where, ever since, they had profited mightily.
    Ben heard a note of uncertainty in Wilma’s voice as she said, to Bess,
“Well… I suppose if Alice did volunteer… but I do think we ought to have
them stay here with us.”
    “She can do it so much easier, Wilma,” Bess said. “She’s got that cute
little guest wing George put on last year, with the little terrace and private
bath and everything and the little stove-refrigerator gadget for breakfasts.
Newlyweds don’t want to be right in