She could never think of herself as easy. She had not been
brought up that way. She did not not love her husband. She
loved him. Of course she did. But when a man put his arms
around her, and his chest was broad, and he was tall, strong,
comforting, and comfortable, and his voice was deep and
reassuring, and his shirt and coat smelled like a man, things
just seemed to happen.
The war was partly to blame. The war had changed everybody.
Things were not the same. When absence, uncertainty, and loss
were always just around the corner, you took comfort when and
where you could. Once upon a time, married women mostly
didn’t. In early 1946, even in Philadelphia, they mostly did.
The war was over but many husbands were still over there. In
early 1946, it still felt like the war.
Glenn Miller could also take some of the blame. The band
played on the radio and it made her need to dance, and once
she needed to dance she went out looking until she found
herself dancing. When Glenn Miller’s music was fast it was
fun. She danced wild, with a smile. And when it was slow and
sexy, she danced unsmiling with strong arms around her, with
her cheek up against a man’s solid chest, smelling the man’s
smell, and she didn’t want to take herself away.
The factory could take another part of the blame. She hadn’t
been brought up to grease engine components for trucks, but
that’s what you did in the war. Grease, wrap, pack into boxes,
away they go in an endless stream from the production line to
the trucks that carried the men, the munitions, the supplies.
The factory work was over now, but she’d almost never forget
the feel and smell of grease. But you could forget sometimes,
when you dressed up, put on your make-up, put on the perfume,
and went out to dance.
Glenn Miller and Moonlight Serenade. You just had to dance
with a man and let him hold you close. The song of the war,
for her, was Moonlight Serenade.
The war was over but Eddie was still over there, somewhere in
southern Germany. She hadn’t seen him for more than two years.
Maybe he’d come home soon.
In Philadelphia, she had danced that night to the music of
Moonlight Serenade. Once more. Another night of dancing and
another man holding her close. Another man, in her bed,
holding her close.
How many men had there been? She hadn’t counted. To count was
to know, and she didn’t want to know. If she counted she’d
have to admit to herself she was easy, and she had never meant
to be easy. That wasn’t the intention. It wasn’t what it was
all about.
Another night, another dance, another man. Not a new man —
just Marty, who had been in her bed four times or maybe five,
but she wasn’t counting. Marty had been invalided out of the
army on a pension in 1943. There appeared to be nothing wrong
with him. He danced superbly. In bed, she looked for scars on
his body, and found none. Marty, she realised early on, was a
rogue. But he was a charming rogue, and he was always there.
He looked like Artie Shaw, but so did a lot of men in 1946.
Marty liked her breasts, but so did a lot of men. Petite
ladies with prominent bosoms never had to wait long for
gentlemen dance partners. It’s your good fortune, her mother
had said to her when she was a teenager, to have inherited the
excellent bust of the Whitman female line. You’ll never want
for a man’s attention.
Marty was dirty, of course. All men were dirty. She could put
up comfortably enough with being penetrated, with having her
breasts mauled and slobbered on, because she loved to dance
and she adored to be held and cuddled. But they all wanted
more — all manner of things, all dirty, even Eddie, who was
the nicest man of them all, and whom she loved with all her
heart. One day Eddie would come home and he would hold
her close all the day and night. Until then, she had to dance
and she needed to cuddle. There were things you put up with to
get it.
It was Saturday morning, April 1946, after a Friday night of
dancing. Marty was still in bed asleep. Marty didn’t like to
get up before eleven at the earliest. He said he was a man of
the shadows, and he probably was. Marty had used her body to
his satisfaction, and he slept in peace. Later, he would get
up, get dressed, drink a coffee, and leave with an easy smile
and a wave. Maybe she would dance with him again, maybe not.
Maybe Eddie would come tomorrow.
It was Saturday morning, April 1946, and at nine o’clock
exactly the doorbell rang. In her dressing gown and slippers
she opened the door and saw the man she most did not want to
see in the whole world.
“Mrs. Edward Thomas Browning?” he asked, not quite meeting her
eyes.
She didn’t answer. Couldn’t.
He gave her the telegram anyway. “Sorry, missus,” he said, and
ducked away down the path as fast as he decently could.
She stood with the telegram in her hand. The war was over. The
telegrams were not supposed to come any more. For the women of
America, that was all in the past. Happy days were here again
and there’d never be another war. Sorry, the man from Western
Union said.
At the kitchen table she slit the envelope open with a knife.
Truck accident. Eddie drove trucks. Eddie was dead. The war
was over but Eddie had died in Germany after the war, killed
in a truck accident.
Sorry, the man from Western Union said. She sat at the table
for a long time and thought about nothing very much except
cruel absurdities. It was 1946 and the war was over. Men
weren’t supposed to die. She couldn’t get that out of her
head. Like an impassable barricade, it blocked other thinking.
Abruptly, she stood up and moved purposefully to her bedroom,
threw off her gown and slid beneath the blankets. “Marty, you
bastard,” she hissed, punching him hard on the chest with a
balled fist.
“What the hell?” He was surprised but not angry. Marty was
never angry. He was too cool and sly, a man of the shadows.
She wrapped a hand around his sleepy cock, and it hardened
instantly. She swept aside the blankets and curled over his
body to put the thing in her mouth.
“What the hell?” Marty was really surprised. He’d begged but
she’d never done that. She’s only done it with Eddie just
once, hated it, and swore never again. Never again, Eddie, it
will never happen again.
She sucked on Marty’s stiff cock, doing the dirty thing he
wanted. She would do all the dirty things today, because
that’s what would keep him with her. She needed Marty to stay,
all day at least and for as long as she could fight off the
pain. She could not bear to be alone. Marty could do what he
wanted, as long as he stayed.
Marty gushed into her mouth in no time at all, and she
swallowed the stuff with a grimace.
“Oh, babe,” he said luxuriously, his hands tousled in her
hair. “What’s got you so stirred up?”
She lifted her head and looked at his handsome, idle face with
its blue-black shadows and its pencil-thin Artie Shaw
moustache. Marty was the wrong man, but he was a man, and for
today that was enough.