The Fourth Side of the Triangle

He was in love with his father’s mistress. It was not as if the kiss symbolized a beginning; it was an ending, a climax of days and nights of exploration and intermingling of ideas and attitudes and laughter and close silences; a seal to a compact they — he — had never suspected they were making. I’m glad you waited, darling... It was the same with her; she had experienced the special quality of their relationship, sealed with the kiss. If there was a beginning at all, it was not the beginning of an affair; it was the beginning of a lifetime.

Suddenly the whole incredible structure crashed about his head. Whom was he punishing? His father, yes; but his mother more. Himself most of all.

It was not supposed to be that way. It was all wrong, twisted out of any semblance to the shape he had been fashioning. Everyone was going to be hurt — mother, father, himself... and Sheila.

He tossed for most of what was left of the night.

Dane awakened to a sense of purpose, almost recklessness. That was the way it had worked out. The hell with everything else.

But with breakfast came caution. Think it over, he told himself, don’t rush it, perhaps you’re reading a fantasy into what could have been a mere kiss of the moment, as meaningless to you as to Sheila. He did not really feel that way, and he was sure that Sheila did not; still, it had to be taken into account. Take a day or so to simmer down, to let matters adjust themselves to some realistic yardstick.

As the day wore on he found himself hungering for her voice. Work was out of the question. Suppose by his silence he made her think he was having second thoughts? She mustn’t think that, mustn’t. Besides... that voice, that deep and husky telephone quality it did not have at other times...

“Sheila! Dane.”

“I know.”

It was like warm honey, that voice.

“I’ve got to see you. Tonight? This afternoon?”

“No, Dane, I want to think.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“I love you, Sheila.”

She did not reply at once, as if she were fighting him, or herself. “I know, Dane,” she finally said. “Tomorrow.”

She came straight into his arms. There was a nerve in the hollow of her throat that jumped when he kissed it. It was some time before he said anything. Then he held her close and said, “Sheila, I want you to marry me.”

“I know, Dane.”

She knew!

“Then you will?” he cried.

“No.”

It was like setting his foot down where a step should have been, but was not. A scalding wave of humiliation washed over him; and suddenly he thought of his father. This was how his father would feel; this was his punishment for having planned the whole dirty thing. Was she laughing at him? Had she seen through him from the start?

He looked at her wildly.

“Darling, I’m not refusing you,” murmured Sheila, and she took his head between her hands and kissed him on the lips.

“I guess I’m too thick-witted to get it.”

“I love you, Dane. You can have me right now. But not as your wife.”

Not as my wife? “Are you married?” She was married...

“Heavens, no!” She laughed at that. Then she looked into his face and without a word went to the bar and splashed brandy into a snifter and held the glass to his lips. He took it from her roughly.

“You mean you’ll sleep with me,” he said, “but you won’t marry me.”

“That’s right, darling.”

“But you just said you love me.”

“I do.”

“Then I don’t understand!”

She stroked his cheek. “I suppose you considered yourself a thoroughly seasoned old rip, and here you have to discover that you’re just a sweet old square. No, not yet, Dane. I must get this over to you. It’s important to both of us.”

What she went on to say was not at all what he was expecting. She made no reference to Ashton McKell; she was not, after all, rejecting a new love in favor of the incumbent. She had known for some time, she told Dane, that she loved him.

“I’m speaking only for myself, dearest — I know my ideas are anti-social, and that society couldn’t exist if everyone acted according to my views. I’m essentially a selfish woman, Dane. It’s not that I don’t care about what happens to people; but I’m most concerned with what happens to me in this very short life we’re given. I suppose I’m a materialist. My notion of love doesn’t require marriage to consummate it, that’s all. In fact — I’m speaking only for myself — I reject the whole concept of marriage. I’m no more capable of being happy as a housewife, or a country club gal, or a young suburban matron than I am of renouncing the world and taking the veil.

“Maybe love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, as the song says,” Sheila went on, taking his cold hand, “but I’m an electronic-age-type dame. To me a ring on the finger is like a ring in the nose. What a mockery modern marriage is! No wonder divorce is one of our leading industries. I can’t stomach the hypocrisy of marriage, so I side-step it. Can you picture me billing and cooing ten years after in a vine-covered cottage beside a waterfall?”

She laughed. He looked at her woodenly.