Thy Neighbor's Wife Read Online Free PDF Page B

dictionary. As the women took their daily afternoon naps, and as her father worked at his typewriter—with a minimum of success—Diane would sit alone in her room quietly reading everything from Anthony Adverse to the plays of Shakespeare, from the Arabian Nights to Gray’s Anatomy , acquiring gradually a strong if erratic classic background as well as an intense sense of fantasy.
    Her fantasies were formed more clearly one afternoon after she had been taken to the ballet The Nutcracker . From then on, in her dreams, Diane saw herself as a glamorous girl in tights, twirling alone onstage in a graceful pirouette. She began taking ballet lessons once a week after school, but this was a privilege that her mother granted on the basis of Diane’s personal behavior and how well she performed various chores around the house. Her stepfather, with whom she felt uncomfortable, would often watch her as she practiced at home, would sometimes gently tease her as she held on to the mantel in the living room and pointed a leg high into the air. This sight did not please her mother, who, having already objected to her young husband’s attempt to display Varga pinups in the hallway, certainly was no less amused by the attention he was now giving to her budding twelve-year-old daughter. Late one afternoon, in a moment of petulance that shattered Diane, her mother remarked that it was most unlikely that Diane’s beauty would ever match her own.
    The situation at home quickly worsened for Diane later that year when her mother gave birth to a son and, two years later, toa baby daughter. Although Diane was approaching her teens, was becoming curious about boys and dating, she was expected to return home after school each day to help care for the children. This routine had continued more or less until she graduated from high school, whereupon she left home to live temporarily in the apartment of her mother’s sister, earning money for her keep and dancing lessons by working as a gift wrapper in the Saks department store on Wilshire Boulevard. Months later, not wishing to further intrude upon the privacy of her maternal aunt, who was then dating a married man who worked in the office of the Beverly Hills Hotel, Diane moved into the Hollywood Studio Club, where her mother had once lived, a residence for women in the movie industry. It was there that Diane learned of an audition for chorus dancers willing to work in a nightclub in San Francisco, and while this was a dubious opportunity for an aspiring ballet dancer, she had concluded that she was probably already too old, at eighteen, and far too undertrained, ever to master the delicate physical art that she performed with such perfection in her fantasies. So she appeared at the audition and passed the test. When she approached her mother to ask if she could accept the position, her mother replied, “Don’t ask me. Make your own decision.” Diane left for San Francisco not knowing whether her mother had granted her independence or was expressing indifference.
    Diane earned eighty dollars a week for doing three shows a night, six nights a week, dancing in the chorus behind such headline talents as Sophie Tucker. She wore a modest costume that revealed only her bare midriff, but while changing backstage she became exposed for the first time to group nudity, and she could see how her body compared to those of other women. It compared very well, and she was therefore not surprised when a friend in the chorus suggested that Diane might earn extra money as a figure model and gave her the name of an art professor at Berkeley who had paid other dancers twenty dollars for a brief photographic session in the nude.
    Timidly, Diane appeared at the professor’s residence, but hisdetached, formal manner soon put her at ease. She removed her clothes and stood nude before him. She watched him back away and heard the camera click. She heard it click again and again, and without any instructions from him she