I think is this: Gerald died before be ever bad a chance to climbinto the saddle, but he tucked me good and proper just the same.
Okay; what other options were there?
None, Goodwife Burlingame said in the watery tone of a woman who is just a teardrop away from breaking down completely.
Jessie waited to see if the other voice-Ruth's voice-would weigh in with an opinion. It didn't. For all she knew, Ruth was floating around in the office water-cooler with the rest of the loons. In any case, Ruth's abdication left Jessie to fend for herself.
So, okay, fend, she thought. What are you going to do about thehandcuffs, now that you've ascertained simply slipping out of them isimpossible? What can you do?
There are two handcuffs in each set-the young voice, the one she hadn't yet found a name for, spoke up hesitantly. You've tried toslip out of the ones with your hands inside them and it didn't work...but what about the others? The ones hooked to the bedposts? Have youthought about them?
Jessie pressed the back of her head into her pillow and arched her neck so she could look at the headboard and the bedposts. The fact that she was looking at these things upside down barely registered. The bed was smaller than a king or a queen but quite a bit larger than a twin. It had some sort of fancy name-Court jester Size, maybe, or Chief Lady-in-Waiting-but she found it harder and harder to keep track of such things as she got older; she didn't know if you called that good sense or encroaching senility. In any case, the bed on which she now found herself had been just right for screwing but a little too small for the two of them to share comfortably through the night.
For her and Gerald that hadn't been a drawback, because they had slept in separate rooms, both here and in the Portland house, for the last five years. It had been her decision, not his; she had gotten tired of his snoring, which seemed to get a little worse every year. On the rare occasions when they had overnight guests down here, she and Gerald had slept together-uncomfortably-in this room, but otherwise they had shared this bed only when they had sex. And his snoring hadn't been the real reason she had moved out; it had just been the most diplomatic one. The real reason had been olfactory. Jessie had first come to dislike and then actually loathe the aroma of her husband's night-sweat. Even if he showered just before coming to bed, the sour smell of Scotch whisky began to creep out of his pores by two the next morning.
Until this year, the pattern had been increasingly perfunctory sex followed by a period of drowsing (this had actually become her favorite part of the whole business), after which he would shower and leave her. Since March, however, there had been some changes. The scarves and the handcuffs-particularly the latter had seemed to exhaust Gerald in a way plain old missionary-style sex never had, and he often fell deeply asleep next to her, shoulder to shoulder. She didn't mind this; most of those encounters had been matinees, and Gerald smelled like plain old sweat instead of a weak Scotch and water afterward. He didn't snore much, either, come to think of it.
But all those sessions-all those matinees with the scarves and thehandcuffs-were in the Portland house, she thought. We spent most ofJuly and some of August down here, hut on the occasions when we hadsex-there weren't many, hut there were some-it was the plain oldpot-roast-and-mashed-potatoes kind.-Tarzan on top, Jane on the bottom.We never played the game down here until today. Why was that, Iwonder?
Probably it had been the windows, which were too tall and oddly cut for drapes. They had never gotten around to replacing the clear glass with reflective sheets, although Gerald had continued to talk about doing that right up to... well...
Right up until today, Goody finished, and Jessie blessed her tact. And you're right-it probably was the windows, at least mostly. Hewouldn't have liked Fred Laglan or Jamie Brooks driving in to ask onthe spur of the moment if he wanted to play nine holes of golf and seeinghim boffing Mrs Burlingame, who just happened to he attached to thebedposts with a pair of Kreig handcuffs. Word on something like thatwould probably get around, Fred and Jamie are good enough fellows, Iguess-