he might like her, it did not matter to him who she fucked or might be fucking when he was not with her. This was not the case with Linda.
No. With Linda, his imagination worked overtime, and double overtime. Always, of course, with that Air Force lt col of hers. The “aeronautical genius,” as Linda had referred to him more than once. That must have come straight from him himself, to her. Or from some of his buddies, maybe. If he allowed Linda to meet them?
Strange’s imagination had a way of slipping little pictures of Linda in passion up into Strange’s conscious mind when Strange wasn’t expecting them. Linda, with her head thrown back in ecstasy. Linda in the act of coming. Linda, arching and playing with her nipples with the first two fingers of both her hands. Linda with her legs stretched wide as wide, waiting for it, receiving it. All things, of course, which she had never done with Strange. But which Strange had always imagined her doing. And now imagined again.
But always of course with the “aeronautical genius.” The lt col was always curiously faceless in these images. But big. Broad-shouldered. Unhairy (Strange was hairy). Long-waisted. Narrow-assed. Beautiful in other words. And he had a huge cock. Much bigger around, much longer, than Strange’s own. And a long mobile sensitive questing tongue. Which he used beautifully, to great advantage. On Linda. Driving her out of her seclusion, out of her withdrawal, out of her mind with passion.
And driving Strange out of his mind with thinking about it.
If Strange was with a woman, and was drunk, and at one of those big parties, with lots of laughing, talking, and people, it was not so bad. If he was alone, or at the hospital, it was bad.
The other element he had gone into deeply which concerned Linda Sue was his loneliness. That didn’t make much sense, even to Strange. Strange had never been lonely in his life. Never, that is, until now.
Even back before they were married, when Linda was at home single and alone in Texas, and he did not see her except every year or so, Strange had not been lonely. When the war came along, after they were married, and she had been shipped back while he stayed on in Wahoo, he had not been lonely. He had never been really lonely on Guadalcanal and New Georgia. On his way back out, when the restaurant problem and his discharge had become uppermost, about half of the time he wished he was out of the marriage altogether. He certainly had not been lonely for her.
Now, he was lonely with a fierceness and a misery that were unbearable. When he was at a party, drunk, and with a woman, was when he was the most lonely. But it hurt less than when he was lonely alone or at the hospital.
At first, he had attributed the jealousy and the loneliness to love. Lost love. And being in love. Then in his deeper brooding, it occurred to him he had never been lonely away from Linda Sue, as long as he knew he had her there, waiting. And he had never been jealous of her, any more than of the Luxor girls, until he knew he’d lost her.
If these were murky glimmers of truth themselves, then his jealousy and his loneliness weren’t due to lost love so much at all, as to a sense of disrupted ownership.
And Strange was smart enough to know that no one had a right to own anybody. That not only wasn’t love. It was wrong. It was downright immoral. That was slavery.
And where did that leave him? he asked himself.
It left him a lot better off thinking about Frances Highsmith, and his debt to her. That was where. He got out and paid for his unbearable taxi ride. In the fall sunshine he turned to the revolving door of the Peabody. Its suave old Negro doorman, in Peabody livery, with his look of thousand-year-old patience, pushed the rotating door leaf for him.
In the frantic, uniform-jammed lobby, Strange looked around. Only, where in hell was Frances? And where in hell in Luxor was Frances to be found?
In fact, it was no trouble at all to find Frances. She was in the suite waiting, when he got there. And she was both drunk and furious at Strange.
“What the hell kind of shit was that?” she began. “Keeping me hanging around. And then standing me up for Annie