The boys smiled as Gerald reached down to shake hands. He was disturbed and saddened when he noticed Jody without complete legs. Gerald said nothing but suddenly remembered watching the legless Vietnam veteran struggling to make love at the motel. Anita interrupted Gerald’s lingering silence to say that she had an appointment to keep, and so she excused herself and pulled the wagon forward while Jody and Will turned to wave goodbye.
Weeks would pass before Gerald would see her again, this time at a pool party in a trailer park to which he had been invited by a male friend who lived there. Gerald did not recognize Anita at first, focusing his attentions mainly on her slender and large-breasted body dripping wet in a swimsuit. His aunt Katheryn had been built along these lines, and so had his high school sweetheart, Barbara White, and his wife, Donna. But even after he had been introduced to Anita by his friend, he had not recalled their earlier meeting along the sidewalk with her children until she herself mentioned it.
He was also not feeling very sociable on this occasion. He had decided to come to the party at the last minute merely as a distraction from his difficulties with Donna. He and Donna had been quarrelling for weeks. A day earlier she had gone to an attorney to discuss getting a divorce. Gerald had begged her to reconsider, but she had been angry and unforgiving since learning that he had been having an affair that year with a pretty young woman employed with a public relations agency in Denver.
This had been his first and only extramarital experience in more than twenty years of marriage. He had often desired to stray from his understanding with Donna that he could look, but never touch, and he had even admitted in The Voyeur’s Journal to wanting other women. But oddly it had not been at his initiative, but rather the aggressiveness of the public relations woman, that had drawn him into his first affair. After decades as a spectator, and never a player, he had finally met a woman who apparently had her eye on him.
To a voyeur this was a novel and intriguing situation. He had not felt so desirable since his star-athlete days in high school. At first he thought he was imagining the PR lady’s interest; it was perhaps a symptom of male fantasy. He could not assume that her friendly manner and well-groomed appearance had anything to do with him personally; after all, it was part of her job to flash a smile and exude amiability while entering motel offices every week and dropping off tourist brochures and information about city-sponsored activities.
Still, when she proposed to Gerald that they make a date for lunch, or meet some evening for a drink, he began to think differently. In all his time in the attic he had never observed a woman quite like this one. She was a polished professional and was discreetly feminine in dress and manner, and yet she was openly seductive and apparently willing to take risks with a man she knew was married. She had even met Donna on occasion. But she also seemed to know when Donna and Viola, his mother-in-law, were out of the office, and only he was behind the desk to greet and converse with her—a circumstance that did, indeed, lead gradually to their meeting one evening in a cocktail lounge on the other side of town, and then to spending a few hours in bed together at a neighboring motel.
These meetings went on for months, and for Gerald it was exciting and unique; he was a guest in a motel with an unmarried woman who seemingly wanted nothing more from him than recreational sex and friendship. The sex was mutually satisfying as far as he could tell, although in a physical sense she did not measure up to his ideal. She was a slender woman with small breasts and little muscle tone. She looked better with her clothes on than off. But she was fun and frisky, and he saw no reason why their dalliance could not go on indefinitely—except that it did end, abruptly, after Donna learned of it.
Gerald guessed that Donna had been tipped off by one of the wives who co-owned one of the motels he frequented; but no matter, Donna had so much specific information about Gerald’s whereabouts that he made no effort to defend himself. He promised to end the affair immediately and he did. He did not want to lose Donna.
But she could not be pacified. She was a strong-willed individual whose trust in him had been shattered, and she determinedly proceeded with the divorce settlement that she obtained in 1983. She had already vacated their house on the golf course and resided elsewhere in Aurora. During this time her illness with lupus was worsening, and she was unable to maintain her normal working schedule at the hospital where she had risen to become the director of nursing.
Gerald reached out to her regularly, still with hopes of reconciliation; but as she remained adamant, he eventually gave up and contacted Anita Clark, the red-haired divorcée with the two young sons.