Nobody's Fool

thermometer set at eighty. Her office at the college was the same. Mechanically gifted, Deirdre had managed to disassemble the thermostat, disengage the device that prevented individual tampering, and boost the temperature there too, although she did not, so far as Peter knew, run around the office in her bra and panties. “I like it hot,” she explained the night he discovered that she had the heat set at eighty. “I like to
be
hot,” she purred, taking his hand and slipping it into her panties by way of illustration.
    It had taken Peter nearly three months to discover he could do with a little less heat. What had been exciting back in September—stopping by Deirdre’s little cottage on his way home from the library and finding her seated on her broken-down sofa, cross-legged in nothing but her bikini panties, sucking noisily on a peach and watching television in the dark—now seemed to Peter just a little unhealthy. In September he’d felt his dick rise in anticipation of this heartwarming spectacle as he hurried up the crooked little walkway, dodging the low-hanging tree branches. Now, in mid-November, it was his stomach that threatened to rise when he visited Deirdre and inhaled that first breath of fetid, tropical air. Both the atmosphere of the cottage and Deirdre herself seemed to be deep in the process of fermentation.
    Also, her behavior seemed to be getting progressively more decadent, a circumstance that no longer thrilled him. Her eating habits in particular revolted him. She liked to share food with him while she was eating it. Overly ripe peaches were her favorite, and she liked to masticate a mouthfulof peach partway, then kiss Peter, so that he got to share. “I want us to have identical sensations,” she explained. Peter doubted they were having identical sensations. The fact that Deirdre was apparently enjoying herself in all of this suggested to him that they couldn’t be.
    Deirdre was, in fact, the reason he had insisted on visiting Bath over Thanksgiving, a trip they could not afford and which was certain to infuriate Charlotte, who dreaded such visits and who made clear that she considered it cruel and unfair to expect her to make the journey at Thanksgiving and then again at Christmas. Deirdre too had pouted, pleading with him not to go, not to leave her alone for the long, four-day weekend. In fact, she’d made him several explicit erotic promises if he’d agree to stay in town, promises that made him all the more determined to get away from her long enough to clear his head. He wondered if it was clear enough to call her now and found he was dialing the phone on the end table before he could decide.
    â€œHi,” he said softly when she’d answered the phone and accepted the charges. “Sorry to have to call collect. I don’t want this to appear on my mother’s bill.”
    â€œI knew you’d call,” she said, as if she’d just been arguing the matter with someone and was saying I told you so. In fact, it occurred to him that she might have someone with her. He wasn’t sure someone as constantly horny as Deirdre would be able to go the distance of a long, chaste holiday weekend. Maybe she’d invited half a dozen little Malaysian neighbors over to take turns until he got back. They’d discovered that she seldom wore clothes when she walked around the cottage, and they’d taken to hanging around on their back patio, grinning and clucking and waiting for a glimpse.
    â€œHow could you know I’d call when I told you I wouldn’t?” Peter said.
    â€œI know
you,
” she said. “I know what a dirty little boy you are, and I knew you wouldn’t get laid in your mommy’s nice clean house.”
    â€œClean doesn’t begin to describe it,” Peter told her.
    â€œI said you should have stayed with me.”
    â€œAccording to Charlotte, my mother’s the reason I hate women.”
    â€œThe cow had an idea?”
    Peter let this go. He didn’t like for Deirdre to say nasty things about Charlotte, but in this business of infidelity it wasn’t easy to draw lines. He wasn’t sure he was in any position to criticize his lover for being unkind to the wife he was cheating on. “Do you think I hate women?”
    â€œAs long as you love me, I don’t care.”
    Peter considered this. “Don’t they make you surrender your membership in NOW