Thy Neighbor's Wife Read Online Free PDF Page A

her hips moving from side to side, he could hear her sighs of pleasure as he tightened his grip around her hips, faster, and then her loud cries as she came in a series of quick convulsions that he could feel as fully as he now felt her hand reaching back to hold his tight testicles exactly as he liked to have them held, softly, then more firmly as she sensed the throbbing, shuttering start of sperm flowing upward and gushing out in great spurts that he grabbed in both hands as he closed his eyes and felt it squirt through his fingers. He lay very quietly in bed for a few moments, letting his muscles relax and his legs go limp. Then heopened his eyes and saw her there, as lovely and desirable as ever.
    Finally he sat up, wiped himself with two pieces of Kleenex, then two more because his hands were still sticky with sperm and lotion. He rolled the tissue into a ball and tossed it into the wastebasket, not concerned that his mother might recognize it in the morning when she emptied the baskets. His days at home were numbered. In a matter of a few weeks, he would be in the Air Force, and beyond that he had no plans.
    He closed the magazine and placed it on the top of the pile in his closet. He put the wooden stand back under the bed. Then he climbed under the covers, feeling tired but calm, and turned out the light. If he was lucky, he thought, the Air Force might send him to a base in Southern California. And then, somehow, he would find her.

TWO
    I N 1928 the mother of Diane Webber won a beauty contest in Southern California, sponsored by the manufacturers of the Graham-Paige automobile, and one of the prizes was a small part in a silent film directed by Cecil B. De Mille in which she portrayed the coy and pretty teenaged girl that in real life she was.
    She had come to California from Montana to live with her father, who, after the bitter breakup of his marriage, had quit the Billings Electric Company and found work as an electrician in Los Angeles with Warner Bros. studios. She was much closer to her father than her mother, and she also wanted to escape the harshness of the rural Northwest where her parents had so often quarreled, where her grandmother had been married five times, and where her great-grandmother, while swimming in a river one day, was killed by an arrow shot into her back by an Indian. She had arrived in Southern California convinced that it would offer more fulfillment than the limited horizons of the big-sky country.
    And it did, in most ways, even though she would never achieve stardom in the several films in which she appeared in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Her satisfaction came rather from a sense of serenity she felt in Los Angeles, a sunny detachment from the grim girlhood she had known in Montana. In Los Angeles she felt free to pursue her whims, to revive her early interest in religion, to walk in the streets without wearing a bra, eventually to marrya man who was almost thirty years older and then, seven years later, to take a second husband who was five years younger. Southern California’s characteristic disregard of traditional values, its relatively rootless society, its mobility and lack of continuity—the very qualities that had been a burden in her family’s past in Montana—were accepted easily by her in Los Angeles, partly because she was now sharing these newly accepted values with thousands of her own generation, pretty young women like herself who had left their unglamorous hometowns elsewhere in America and had migrated to California in search of some vaguely defined goal. And while very few of these women would succeed as actresses, or models, or dancers—more likely they would spend their best years working as cocktail waitresses, or receptionists, or salesclerks, or as unhappily married women in San Fernando Valley—nearly all of them remained in California, and they had children, children who were reared in the sun during the Depression, who played outdoor sports the