If he could look at Lathrup that way, at her thighs and bourgeoning breasts—the more bourgeoning because of the wanton way she'd constricted their swelling roundness—and her hair and lips and eyes ... he could look at any woman that way, feel the same way about any woman attractive enough to catch his eye and even some who were the opposite of attractive, but who had something about them that stirred men of primitive instincts to a frenzy of desire. The more coarse and slatternly the woman the more some men seemed to be stirred.
Not that Lathrup was coarse and slatternly—just the opposite. And Roger was the kind of man who would be repelled by a real slut. She gave him that much credit. He was nothing if not fastidious, he would seek to pluck only the unique and delicate blooms that grew very high up, on trees of rare growth arching above white marble terraces, their branches stirred by breezes from the blue Mediterranean, or the New York equivalent of such blooms.
What kind of woman was Lathrup anyway? A hard, executive-type woman two-thirds of the time, a woman some people might wonder about and even just possibly think a lesbian—although there was little about her to suggest that—and then, all woman, so completely feminine that she could bring a man to his knees before her with a single provocative glance.
How could she hope to compete with a woman like that? And she no longer wanted to, because Roger was clearly unworthy of her, not the kind of man she'd thought him, not the eternally devoted lover who had found in her alone something special that he had been searching for all his life, just as she had been searching....
She stiffened suddenly, an intolerable anguish arising in her and making it difficult for her to breathe. Roger had arisen from the table again and was moving out onto the dance floor with Lathrup held firmly in his embrace. The orchestra was playing a waltz now and the tempo of the music was slow and sensuous and Lathrup had abandoned all pretense of reserve.
The way their bodies blended, seemed almost to melt together, was more outrageous than the Village cellar wildness she had pictured to herself a moment before and which she would not have hesitated to engage in if she'd felt that Roger had wanted to feel that close to her in a defiantly intimate way.
This was a more outrageous intimacy, because it was unmistakably the clinging embrace of two lovers in a darkened room, behind the privacy of a securely locked door.
Neither of them seemed to care that the dance floor wasn't quite that dimly lit and that their completely shameless amorousness would be observed by everyone on the floor. And then she saw that they were kissing each other just as shamelessly, that their lips were meeting and clinging, and that one of the kisses seemed to go on and on.
She had opened her lips and....
Oh, dear God, how could she endure watching them, knowing what such a kiss could mean, how it could burn and scorch and drive a man and woman deeply, truly in love, to the kind of madness that wasn't in the least profane when it was sanctified by that kind of love. But when it wasn't—