Thy Neighbor's Wife Read Free Page A

he lived, he could feel the tension and apprehension, and he wondered what his father would choose to complain about today.
    In the past, if there had not been complaints about Harold’s schoolwork, then there had been about the length of Harold’s hair, or Harold’s late hours with his girl, or Harold’s nudist magazines that his father had once seen spread out on the bed after Harold’s had carelessly left his door open.
    “What’s all this crap?” his father had asked, using a word far more delicate than his grandfather would have used. His grandfather’s vocabulary was peppered with every imaginable profanity, delivered in tones of deep contempt, whereas his father’s words were more restrained, lacking emotion.
    “They’re my magazines,” Harold had answered.
    “Well, get rid of them,” his father had said.
    “They’re mine! ” Harold suddenly shouted. His father had looked at him curiously, then began to shake his head slowly in disgust and left the room. They had not spoken for weeks after that incident, and tonight Harold did not want to repeat that confrontation. He hoped to get through dinner peacefully and quickly.
     
    Before entering the house, he looked in the garage and saw that his father’s car was there, a gleaming 1956 Lincoln that his father had bought new a year ago, trading in his pampered 1953 Cadillac. Harold climbed the steps to the back door, quietly entered the house. His mother, a matronly woman with a kindly face, was in the kitchen preparing dinner; he could hear the television on in the living room and saw his father sitting there reading the Chicago American . Smiling at his mother, Harold said hello in a voice loud enough that it would carry into the living room and perhaps count as a double greeting. There was no response from his father.
    Harold’s mother informed him that his brother was in bed with a cold and fever and would not be joining them for dinner. Harold, saying nothing, walked into his bedroom and closed the door softly. It was a nicely furnished room with a comfortable chair, a polished dark wood desk, and a large Viking oak bed. Books were neatly arranged on shelves, and hanging from the wall were replicas of Civil War swords and rifles that had been his father’s and also a framed glass case in which were mounted several steel tools that Harold had made last year in a manual-arts class and which had won him a citation in a national contest sponsored by the Ford Motor Company. He had also won an art award from Wieboldt’s department store for his oil painting of a clown, and his skill as a woodcraftsman was most recently demonstrated in his construction of a wooden stand designed to hold a magazine in an open position and thus permit him to look at it with both of his hands free.
    Placing his school books on the desk and taking off his coat, Harold opened the magazine to the photographs of the nude Diane Webber. He stood near the bed holding the magazine in his right hand, and, with his eyes half closed, he gently brushed his left hand across the front of his trousers, softly touching his genitals. The response was immediate. He wished that he now had the time before dinner to undress and be fulfilled, or at least to go down the hall to the bathroom for quick relief over the sink, holding her photograph up to the medicine-cabinet mirror to see a reflection of himself exposed to her nude body, pretending a presence with her in the sun and sand, directing her dark lovely lowered eyes toward his tumescent organ, and imagining that his soapy hand was part of her.
    He had done this many times before, usually during the afternoons when it might have seemed surreptitious for him to close his bedroom door. But, despite the guaranteed privacy behindthe locked door of the bathroom, Harold had to admit that he was never completely comfortable there, partly because he really preferred reclining on his bed to standing, and because there was insufficient room around the