Manhunt. Volume 5, Number 5, May 1957

We went into the house through a kitchen. She pulled the drapes across the windows in the front room before turning on a pair of lamps. I looked around. The room was expensively furnished. There was a fireplace in one wall; three logs were burning slowly. To my left was an open room that had been furnished as a study and behind me was the kitchen. To my right was a closed door.

“The bedroom,” Edie said, following the line of my eyes. She smiled then and slipped out of her fur coat. Whisking the green beret off of her head, she said, “Your coat.”

I shrugged out of it and she put it with hers in a small closet near the front door.

I looked her up and down then, making no attempt to hide the fact that I was taking a surface inventory. She was wearing slacks; they were dark green and showed off her figure.

My hands felt damp. I wiped them on my thighs.

She smiled and waved her arm toward a low sofa in front of the fireplace. “Make yourself at home, Matt. What’ll you have to drink?”

“Anything.”

She went into the kitchen. A moment later I heard the slam of a refrigerator door and then the crack of an ice cube tray being opened. I walked to the kitchen entry and stood there looking at her.

“Bourbon?” she said over her shoulder.

“With something sweet.”

She mixed the drinks and we went to the sofa in front of the fireplace. I sat down.

“Do you like music?” she asked.

I shrugged my shoulders.

“I like the classics,” she said.

There was a record player beside the sofa with a record on it. She clicked a switch on the player and music, low and soft, filled the room. Then she sat down beside me and put her leg against mine all the way up.

I looked at her.

“Why do you want me?” she asked over the rim of her glass, her eyes probing mine.

“Why does a man want any woman?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I want you to tell me.”

I thought about it. Why did I want her? What crazy thing was it that had me sitting with her in the front room of her place? Me, a guy with a helluva sweet wife and a decent future. Why the hell was I here? Why was I jeopardizing everything I had and everything I might have? There didn’t seem to be a logical answer.

“You can’t tell me?” she said softly.

I stared at my feet. “No.”

I felt her hand crawl over my thigh then. “Don’t let it bother you, Matt,” she said. “I’ve never had a satisfactory answer either.”

I gulped my drink and put the glass on the floor.

“Matt?”

Twisting, I looked up at her. She was smiling cozily.

“I want to dance for you,” she said.

“Dance?”

“You’ll like it,” she said softly.

Too puzzled to move, I sat there on the sofa watching her. She began to sway with the music coming from the record player. Her mouth was fixed in a half-smile, lips open, straight white teeth gleaming. Her eyes became slits. She whirled around the room, head high, breasts straining. I watched her, fascinated. And then she was back in front of me, her body swaying suggestively. I saw her hand go to the buttons on the front of her blouse. The buttons came open and in one swirling motion she stripped out of the blouse and flung it away from her. She wasn’t wearing a bra. The naked half of her body was a honey-colored sheen in the lamplight, breasts tip-tilted. She turned her back to me. One hand opened the slacks above her hip and the slacks inched down. Suddenly she whirled around and the slacks dropped to the floor. She stepped out of them and danced forward and into my arms.

I wrapped one hand in her hair and jerked back her head. Her hands ripped open my shirt as I mashed my lips against hers.

Finally, I picked her up and carried her across the room. She kicked open the closed door.

It was dark in the room and hot. My body was wet with sweat. Edie stirred beside me.

“Cigarette?” she said, and her voice cracked.

I felt her groping toward the table beside the bed. She sat up and a moment later a match flared. She had two cigarettes in her mouth. I watched her light them and then she flicked out the match and stretched out beside me, putting an ashtray on her flat stomach.

We smoked in silence.

After a long while she said, “Tell me all about you, Matt.”

I told her. And later, when I had finished, she sucked in a deep breath and said, “Will you stay with me all week end? We won’t even have to go out of the house.”

I put one arm around her shoulders and squeezed her. “You’ll have to blast me out to get rid of me, baby.”

She laughed softly then and sat up straight, spilling the ashtray. She reached for a lamp and turned it on, and then brushed the ashes out of the bed and looked down at me. She was smiling.

“I’ve got a secret,” she said slyly.

“Yeah?”

She turned away from me and leaned over the side of the bed. I heard metal clicking against metal and I started to shove up on one elbow.

“No,” she said without looking at me. “Just stay where you are.”

I heard a sharp click then, and a whirring noise. After that her soft laughter. Then her voice: Talk dirty to me, Matt. I love it.