Thy Neighbor's Wife, page 15
Without the underwriting and risk-taking of the great insurance companies, Bullaro believed, the United States could not have achieved the economic miracle of the past century, and as a young agent in its Los Angeles office he read with pride the history of the New York Life Insurance Company, which since 1845 had shared in the grief and glory of American adventure. New York Life helped to finance the Industrial Revolution, it insured the lives of wagon-wheeled travelers to the California gold rush, it invested many millions in government bonds to support American military efforts in Europe and Asia.
While John F. Kennedy had not been a policyholder, the company had insured the lives of nine earlier Presidents, including both Roosevelts and two victims of assassination, Garfield and McKinley, as well as such venturing individualists as Harry Houdini and the astronaut Virgil Grissom, Charles Edison and Walter Chrysler and General George Custer, whose last stand in 1876 at Little Big Horn had been insured by New York Life for $5,000.
When Bullaro joined it, the insurance company was established as one of the nation’s five largest, maintaining 360 offices around the country with nearly ten thousand full-time employees, and an equal number of independent agents working on commission; but Bullaro nonetheless felt personally involved with the firm, being by nature an organization man who could identify with corporate goals, and he soon was cited for promotions. In 1962, having fulfilled the company’s highest sales standards, he was made an assistant manager. In 1964 he was appointed to a regional managership, was given a large raise, and purchased a spacious home in the Los Angeles valley suburb of Woodland Hills. He was a member of the local Rotary Club and the Junior Chamber of Commerce, a fund-raiser for United Way, and an adviser to the Boys’ Club of Hollywood where he had once worked. He was also on the board of the Valley Oaks Church of Religious Science, having abandoned the casual Catholicism of his Italian father and the stronger traditions of his Jewish mother.
As a teenager in Chicago, living in a lower-middle-class neighborhood where anti-Semitism was prevalent, he had never revealed to his friends his mother’s Russian-Jewish heritage. Fearing social ostracism, and hoping to blend in with the Christian majority, he had once belonged to a neighborhood youth club affiliated with the Episcopal Church. But after his family had moved to Los Angeles in 1951 at his mother’s insistence, she having grown weary of Chicago’s cold winters and the crowded urban apartment house in which they lived, Bullaro became more accepting of himself.
He felt less self-conscious and ethnic in the sprawling open atmosphere of Southern California, where there were no insular neighborhoods dominated by the Irish or Italians or Slovaks or Germans, feuding factions united only in their animosity toward the blacks and Jews. Los Angeles was a relatively young and rootless city unconnected to Old World ties and traditions; here the settlers had not come from Europe but from other cities in America—they were native-born, secure in their national identity, and they did not seek shelter or strength in ethnic alliances. Their reliance on the automobile made them a very mobile society, less circumscribed and entrenched than most Chicagoans or New Yorkers, and in the balmy Los Angeles climate even the slums, the white rows of palm-shaded shacks, seemed vastly preferable to the dark, dank tenements of Chicago in winter.
As with thousands of other westward-moving people who were establishing California as the fastest-growing state in the nation, Bullaro saw the shift as rejuvenating and emancipating for both himself and his family. His father, who had initially been reluctant to leave the prospering barbershop in Chicago, soon found work at M-G-M studios and was cutting the hair of Clark Gable, Fred Astaire, and Mario Lanza. His mother, who after eighteen years had recently had another child, was now joyfully preoccupied in California with her infant daughter and was less intrusive into her son’s personal affairs. Though she had sought to discourage him from leaving Los Angeles in 1955 for New York University, and was later disappointed when he stopped seeing the young Jewish woman that he had been dating, she did not object to his courtship of Judith Palmer, and in 1958 she attended the wedding, conducted by a Congregationalist minister.
Bullaro’s marriage to Judith Palmer greatly advanced his quest for assimilation. He felt that her acceptance of him was almost tantamount to his admission into a desirable club to which a majority of citizens belonged, and it was no longer necessary for him to think of himself as a member of a minority group, a fractional American. Her father, a top executive with a Los Angeles aeronautics firm, had personal connections in the industrial-military complex that was investing billions into the California economy, and in him Bullaro saw an ally in the corporate hierarchy to which he himself aspired.
From the moment he met her, Bullaro had been attracted to Judith’s wholesome good looks, and her fair complexion, cheekbones, and short blond hair reminded him of the actress Kim Novak. While at parties Judith drank more than any woman he had previously known, he attributed this to her liberated background and possibly to the influence of her convivial father, whom she adored. Since the drinking did not detract from her poise in public, Bullaro was not unduly concerned, although he was aware that it had an invigorating effect on their sex life. After parties and much drinking, she became extremely responsive and uninhibited in bed, and on such occasions she performed fellatio with uncommon skill and ardor.
Otherwise she was sexually passive, and this seemed to be increasingly prevalent as their marriage moved through the 1960s. It was as if the illicit premarital passion that they had enjoyed with one another in the 1950s had languished with legality, and it now required added stimulation for revival. Also, as they had children, first a son, then a daughter, Judith was often tired in the evening, and Bullaro sometimes welcomed this because, with his increased responsibilities at New York Life, he was able to work at home late at night while the family slept.
He enjoyed living in the Woodland Hills house, it being the first house that he had ever owned after a lifetime of dwelling in apartments. It was a beige ranch-style house with a heavy shake roof, and in the front were planted pine trees, sycamores, and a pepper tree. A semicircular driveway cut through the dichondra lawn, and in the garage were two cars, Bullaro’s new Oldsmobile and an older Thunderbird that had been a gift to Judith from her father. The interior of the house suggested a Spanish influence, and there was a brick fireplace and an oval table which served as a bar and on which were bottles of California wines.
On weekends the couple sometimes had dinner out with Bullaro’s colleagues from New York Life and their wives, and they would all return home for an after-dinner drink. One evening they were joined by a man from the John Birch Society who showed a political film on the Conservative party and was anxious to solicit Bullaro’s help on the formation of a Birch chapter in Woodland Hills.
Although Bullaro had become more conservative politically since the death of Kennedy, he was far from ready to become a Birch activist; and while Bullaro was as surprised as his friends by the recent race riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles, and was affronted by the recurring disturbances on campuses, he also recognized within himself a grudging fascination with the way young people were now expressing themselves. He was impressed by their openness and their assertiveness in defending minority groups and opinions, and by the ease with which they found time to indulge in sexual freedoms that Bullaro could only envy.
On Sunday mornings, after telling Judith that he was going off with his bicycle-riding club on a cross-country trip, as was his custom, Bullaro would sometimes peddle alone for fifteen miles to Venice Beach, where large numbers of students and hipsters and artists and dropouts gathered in the coffeehouses or along the waterfront, sitting in the sun conversing among themselves, or reading avant-garde paperbacks that Bullaro had never heard of. As he slowly rode his ten-speed bicycle along the palm-lined path, wearing his NYU sweat shirt and sneakers that he knew were too white, he could see the colorful plastic Frisbees spinning softly in the sky and the long-haired couples strolling along the beach, and sometimes as he rode past the open windows of seaside apartments he caught glimpses of young people walking around casually in the nude. Bullaro often smelled the fragrance of marijuana in the air, and from the cafés he heard guitar music and folk songs making a mellow mockery of his materialistic world, and at such times he was tempted to step down from his bike and politely approach these tranquil strangers at their tables and try to reason with them and perhaps convince them that he was a part of them, that he too was skeptical of the system, and was personally unfulfilled despite his seeming success. But he continued to peddle onward rather than subject himself to what he foresaw as their ridicule, and he perceived his Sunday bike rides through Venice for what they probably were, an exercise in self-pity, a search for a solution to a problem he could not define. He knew only that, in his thirties, he felt old and very alienated.
But on Monday mornings, as if the Sundays had never existed, Bullaro was back in his suit and tie and driving his new car with enthusiasm toward his office—or, as on this September morning in 1965, he was a passenger on an airplane flying to Palm Springs to attend an insurance conference over which he would partly supervise. Among those invited were several dozen newly hired California agents of New York Life, and, for three days and two nights at a modern hotel in the desert, they would listen to speeches by senior executives, participate in seminars, and learn about the future goals of the company. The invited agents had already in their brief careers with New York Life proved by their records that they could sell insurance, which is a rare and special talent, for the agent must sell a product that the public subconsciously associates with death and disaster, and the natural resistance to it is so strong that agents initially confront repeated rejection.
One consequence of this, Bullaro believed, was that it made insurance selling less tolerable to women than to men; women tend to avoid situations that could lead to face-to-face rejection, whereas men become accustomed to it early in life when they begin to make sexual advances, and they soon accept rejection as a natural if not pleasant part of life. Bullaro noticed during the first day at the conference that there were only four women among the seventy new agents; one of the women, however, had surpassed nearly all of the men in sales, and Bullaro had already heard of her by reputation before meeting her in the cocktail lounge that first evening.
He had been sitting with three other executives when she entered the crowded room alone, and, after one of the men who knew her asked if she would join them, she did. Her name was Barbara Cramer. She was a petite, bespectacled woman in her mid-twenties with short blond hair and a well-proportioned body clothed in a dark tailored business suit; though somewhat plain, she was attractive in a boyish way. She sat next to Bullaro and, after refusing a cigarette and ordering a drink, she listened quietly but attentively as the men resumed their conversation. They were talking about the Keogh plan, a tax-free pension program for self-employed citizens that Congress had just passed, and, without abruptly interjecting herself, she nonetheless conveyed the impression that she knew as much as they did about the complexities of the plan.
The business discussion went on for an hour and two more rounds of drinks, after which the men stood to say good night and left Bullaro at the table with Barbara Cramer. Though she made no move to leave, she did complain of a mild headache, and Bullaro offered to get her an aspirin. The bar was crowded and so Bullaro walked across the lobby toward his room, which was nearby on the second floor. As he opened his medicine cabinet, he heard the door to his room close behind him. Turning, he saw that Barbara Cramer had followed him. She was standing next to the bed, and was smiling.
“I’ve decided,” she said, “that I probably need more than an aspirin. I need a good lay.”
He knew that he had heard her correctly, but even so he was astonished by her directness. His first concern was whether she had been seen by any of his associates as she entered his room. The regional vice-president was next door, and other executives were across the hall; but before he could say anything she had removed her jacket and her shoes, and was beginning to unbutton her blouse.
“Well,” she asked, as he continued to stare at her in silence, “are you going to join me?”
Bullaro was as excited as he was confused by the suddenness of what was happening. She looked at him inquiringly, her fingers on the buttons of her blouse.
“I guess we know what we’re doing,” Bullaro said finally, putting the aspirin on the bureau and walking toward the closet. He took off his shoes and undid his tie, though keeping his eyes fixed on her as she resumed undressing. She hung her blouse carefully over the back of a chair, placed her jewelry and glasses on the desk, and removed her skirt. Unhinging her brassiere, Bullaro saw her large breasts, and then her firm thighs and buttocks as she turned, completely nude, toward the bed. She climbed under the covers, waiting as he removed his trousers and shorts. He was fully erect, and as he walked self-consciously across the room he was aware that she was now watching him.
She said nothing as he got into bed, but he quickly felt her hands moving across his chest and stomach and down to his penis. He lay on his back, doing nothing as she stroked him, and then moved on top of him. She was the aggressor, the manipulator of every move, and he was enjoying her sense of domination. She seemed so different from his wife and other women—she did not seek comfort in words, or try to embrace him, or kiss him, or ask to be kissed. It was as if she wanted him in a purely physical way, free from emotional distractions, and soon she had straddled him and had inserted him in her; and for several moments she moved up and down with her eyes closed until, her grip tightening on his hips, she sighed softly, and stopped.
“That’s better,” she said.
“Better than an aspirin,” he added, seeing her smile. Then she turned over, indicating that she was ready to satisfy him, and he moved on top of her and he came quickly.
They were in bed together no more than ten minutes. They remained there a while longer, then she got up, put on her glasses, and began to dress. Her figure, Bullaro noted, was voluptuous and mature, and yet so incongruous with her small boyish face and her gamin hairstyle. Sexually she was like a man—the first hit-and-run female he had ever met.
“Tomorrow night,” she said, as she finished dressing with her back to him, looking at herself in the mirror, “you can come to my room.”
She turned toward him, and he nodded from the bed. Then she walked to the door, opening it slowly to be sure that no one was in the corridor; and, waving to him, she left, pulling the door softly behind her.
NINE
BARBARA CRAMER, born on a Missouri farm, perceived as an adolescent that she had been an unwanted child. Her mother, who was thirty-nine at Barbara’s birth, had produced two other daughters nearly two decades before, when her marriage offered hope if not always happiness; but the unexpected arrival of Barbara in 1939 in a remote farmhouse that still had no interior plumbing promised only more drudgery and a continued commitment to a dismal domestic ritual.
Since Barbara shied away from her mother’s sullenness, and since her older sisters had both left home early to marry, escaping to lives only moderately less grim, Barbara grew up with a minimum of female influence. When she was not attending the one-room Osage County schoolhouse—within which the sixth-and seventh-grade students sat in the front rows, to which the lessons were directed, while the younger ones sat in the back, absorbing whatever they could—she was helping her father on the farm, hoeing the garden, feeding the chickens, even driving a tractor through the wheat and corn fields.
The farm was seven miles from the closest town of Chamois, and Barbara’s social life was restricted to a few friends on adjoining farms, most of them young boys with whom she played sports and from whom she soon learned about sex in an open, natural manner. One day when she was ten, she saw two boys she knew standing inside a barn moving their hands in front of them; and, after one of the boys called for her to join them, she approached closer and saw that each was stroking his penis.
Though she had sometimes seen her father nude when he bathed in a galvanized tub near the kitchen, she had never before seen an erect penis, and she reacted with unflinching curiosity. When the older boy, who was thirteen, asked if she would like to touch it, she did; and when he showed her how he wanted her to massage it, she obliged and she was more surprised than shocked later when she felt the throbbing and saw a creamy substance seeping up through her fingers.
As the younger boy masturbated himself to a climax, the older one kissed her, and she felt not abused but warm and wanted. After this, she and the older boy often masturbated one another in the hayloft; but, without ever discussing it, they sensed the peril of additional exploration and went no further.
Sex was never discussed in the Cramer household. When Barbara began to menstruate, her mother merely provided her with several small pieces of white sheets, told her to line her panties with them, and to burn the sheets later. It was the custom of fanning women in that region to save old sheets and rags for this purpose, since modesty more than economy prevented them from buying the Kotex sold in the general store.
Barbara found the plain country women collectively unattractive, and it was not until she attended high school in Chamois that she met someone of her own sex that she considered physically appealing. Her name was Frances, and she was tall, dark-haired, and stylish, as popular with the boys as she was envied by the girls, all except Barbara, who, contented with her role as the class tomboy, did not feel competitive with feminine beauty. The two young women became quick friends, largely because they complemented one another: Frances was graceful and poised, Barbara driving and audacious. Barbara was unintimidated by boys, was quick to retort to their rowdy comments, and even sipped Bourbon from the bottles they occasionally sneaked into the school yard. The two girls were inseparable except during the summer months when Barbara worked full-time earning money for her support.
