The Spiked Heel

She arrived home for the Thanksgiving holidays and casually announced she was not returning to school, much to her parents’ bewildered dismay. She moped around the house until January, doing a lot of reading. She read books about women mostly, Gone with the Wind and Forever Amber and Saratoga Trunk and Rebecca and Wuthering Heights. She was a rapid reader, but the books did not tell her what she wanted to know, and in truth she really didn’t know what she wanted to know. In January, she enrolled at a secretarial school. Cara was a smart girl and the rigors of the stenographic course were duck soup to her. When she completed the course, the school placed her with an architectural firm.

She met a young architect named Fred Ransom there. For a while, she thought she was in love with Ransom. He was a big man with fiery red hair and sparkling blue eyes, an impudent smile on his mouth. He owned a tastefully furnished apartment in Tudor City, and she spent a weekend with him in that air-conditioned fortress, telling her parents she was spending the time with an old college chum in Pennsylvania. She discovered she was not in love with the young architect. She grew bored with his red hair and blue eyes, annoyed by his impudent smile and callow face, and then frantic to the point of tears by his curiously detached way of toying with her breasts.

She left him on Sunday afternoon. There was a deep sadness within her, and when she went home she took a cleansing hot shower, the water scalding and purifying. She tried to read a little then, wondering what was becoming of her, wondering what was happening to her, answering stupid questions from her mother about whether or not her girl friend had been happy to see her, and whether or not she had met any nice boys on the trip.

She was well aware of her parents’ anxieties concerning her state of spinsterhood. Sometimes, in her impotent fury, she wanted to unleash the whole sequence of her amours on her unsuspecting mother, but she knew the knowledge would kill her, and she still held a somewhat grudging respect for the symbol of purity her mother represented.

She quit the architectural firm the next week.

She took a job at Macy’s as secretary to the stationery buyer. The stationery buyer was a married man, but he intrigued her until the revulsion of what she was doing struck her. She pulled out of the romance and out of Macy’s, taking a job with a law outfit, and then a job with an importer-exporter, the pattern always repeating itself, pattern upon pattern, as endless as her search. And always the patiently entreating eyes of her mother, wondering if her daughter would die a dried-up virgin. The notion would have been amusing, were it not for the harsh kernel of truth beneath it. The will-o’-the wisp Cara chased was not even a real thing in her own mind. She had no preconceived notion of what her man would look like. And in her desperate search for him, she remained a mental virgin, outraged by the liberties her body took. She sometimes stared at herself in the full-length mirror of her closet door, stared at her naked body, the globes of her breasts, the flatness of her abdomen. Even naked, she looked virginal, darkly secretive, wide-eyed in innocence. The contradiction of her physical appearance was sadly amusing. She knew that everyone on the Grand Concourse considered her a “good girl,” but she wondered how long it would take for her cloak of respectability to wear shabby and thin. The idea frightened her a little.

When she took the job with Julien Kahn, Inc., she took it with a new, steadfast determination. There would be no affair this time. This time, this time…

Her brief excursion with Raymond Griffin was something of an experiment with her. The other men she had known, though widely divergent in physical characteristics, had all possessed an almost animalistic power which glowed like a consuming fire in their eyes.

Griff was not like that at all. There was a quietness about him, an almost shy nature. He was a good-looking man in a quiet way, with a nice smile and a vacillatingly serious and jovial personality. He had not, upon first sight, stirred anything but curiosity in her well-curved bosom. But he had appealed to her. She was devout in her determination to throw off the pattern, and Griff had presented himself to her, and he had taken a place alongside her mother as another symbol of purity. And besides, his proposal had really been quite the cutest she’d ever received. She’d gone out with him.