When Leta stormed out of the house a week previously, having become fully disgusted
with her husband Ora, she had not considered that a simple drink to soothe her
nerves at their regular haunt would result in a resurrection of feelings she
had not experienced since her previous husband Al had died 16 months earlier.
While working in the house or yard, she would frequently feel waves of heat
flowing through her, followed by a tingling sensation and then a slight burst
of excitement. Finally a soft coating of perspiration would escape from her
skin.
Florence
suggested that she might be going through menopause.
“But I’m
only 34 years old!” Leta protested.
“Well,
it isn’t the flu,” Florence countered. “What else could it be?”
Leta was
beginning to formalize the answer, and if she was correct, she could never tell
her prim sister-in-law.
She
began to notice that these flashes were frequently triggered when she was
reading the newspaper or when she passed a group of men working or even when
she was sitting in the café having coffee with one of her friends. A man would
catch her eye, and she would feel flush. Or she found herself stopping simply
to watch a man at work. Or even turning back the newspaper to look at an
advertisement.
The man who
had approached her in the blind pig had awakened in her desire, which she had
not felt fully since her husband Albert was alive. This powerful, distracting
and sometimes even debilitating sensation never happened when she was with Ora,
but almost any man on the street could trigger it.
At
first, she tried to avoid situations where the wave of desire might occur, but
this soon proved to be fruitless. Like an adolescent boy, her sensation could
be triggered by nearly anything or anyone. She fought it, but felt it anyway.
Ora was no help. He was neither romantic nor erotic. He rarely touched her or
was affectionate. Even in bed, he kept to his side, ensuring that their bodies
never grazed each other, even unexpectedly. This left her feelings ample
opportunity to continue to grow away from him.
On a
Saturday night, Leta was sitting with her friends Hazel and Mark Kruper at their
local haunt. Ora had worked late, then collapsed, and her children were with
their father for the night. She had been agitated and anxious all day, and she
and Hazel agreed that a drink might do
her good.
Understandably
for a Saturday night, the place was filled with merry people—individuals,
couples, groups of younger people seeking romance—and they were forced to stand
in the smoke-filled room. As Prohibition was still the law, the space was
closed tight, so they couldn’t help but breathe it in. The proprietor had set
up a couple of electric fans, but they did little more than to keep the room
from becoming unbearable.
Leta was
not sure if she noticed the fellow first or the other way around, but every
time she would look in his direction, she would see that he was looking at her.
Once he even raised a glass, and she smiled.
“What was that?” Hazel asked.
“What was what?” Leta replied innocently.
“You just made the kind of expression my daughter does when
she sees a boy she knows.”
“Really, Hazel,” Leta remarked, “I’m a married woman. Why
would I be smiling at other men?”
“I don’t know, Leta. You tell me.”
Leta rolled her eyes and turned her gaze.
“Oh, look,” she noted. “Mark found a table.”
“Thank goodness!” Hazel exclaimed. “My feet are killing me.”
While she lost that particular fellow in the crowd, Leta’s
senses had been awakened, and sometimes when Ora was out with his friends and
the children were safely tucked in bed, Leta would take the bus to a speakeasy
she knew about outside of her neighborhood. She told herself that she needed a
break from the challenges and discomforts of her life, and the only way she
could feel like she was getting one was to travel a distance to where no one
knew her. But she could not fool herself, not fully. She desired the romantic
and lascivious attentions of men. She needed a relatively safe location in
which to experience this.
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