Naked Came the Stranger - By Penelope Ashe Page 0,1

over fresh slate to the front door, past the bogus pillars, through the twin front doors. The clock showed it to be three in the afternoon. William was, if the pattern of the past week held true, mounting the down elevator from his office, mounting the downtown taxi, mounting a mousy twenty-two-year-old girl with remarkable breasts. Damn Billy! Damn him anyway! But why all this outrage? Gillian realized it was not simply that William Blake had made a mockery of her marriage. Even worse he had made a mockery of her radio show. The show had started as a cliché, patterned after a formula that was perfected in the thirties. The thing that had kept it alive was Gillian Blake. And vice versa. It was what defined her, fulfilled her. It was what had saved her marriage this long, and it had quite possibly saved her life.

Gillian did not take full credit for the success of the show, even in her thoughts. It was, after all, a smooth division of labor. Gillian had proved adept at dragooning the squadrons of sociologists, the marriage counselors, the new authors, the broad spectrum of human engineers, onto the show. A few of the guests were clients of William's youthful public relations firm. Billy clarified, condensed, summed up – seldom departing from the role of straight man. Gilly stimulated, interpreted, played devil's advocate.

It had become so much more than a radio program. It had become, in time, an ideal marriage placed on display every morning for eight years, a model marriage that had been celebrated in three national magazines (one cover), a sophisticated blend of two disparate personalities.

Marriage … show – it had been a curious relationship. When the show had begun, marriage was new. As the show took on a life of its own, the marriage became somehow less alive. Now, Gillian reflected, it was almost as though the relationship had been parasitic, as though the show had begun to suck the life juices from the marriage it honored. It was the show that ate up long hours with a new book; it was the show that had at first determined there would be no children (until William's sterility had been medically established); it was the show that had required the presence of the twenty-two-year-old recent graduate of Vassar. It was the show that prevented Gillian from contemplating such eminently logical solutions as murder or divorce.

Screwed. Gillian let her clothes fall on the dressing-room carpet and studied the mirrored full-length portrait of herself. She understood her value to men, had felt their reaction often enough. Guests on the show, construction workers, taxi drivers – they all reacted. And why shouldn't they?

Her skin, the color of India tea at summer's end, flowed nicely over a slender frame. The breasts were small but she wore them well at age twenty-nine. Her legs were superbly designed. The hips, though trim, were deceptively full. Gïllian advanced on the mirror, appraised the close-up image. Her long hair was light and now sun-streaked, gathered in a mist around her shoulders. If her lips were a trifle small, they nonetheless served to accentuate the perfectly straight line of her nose. The total effect was a blend of the aristocratic and the sensual.

Gillian turned from the mirror. The mirror, after all, couldn't reflect the most essential attribute of them all. Gillian walked to the bar, made herself a pitcher of martinis, sat drinking, naked in the Eames chair – cold leather against skin, nice. The major quality was something reactive, a chameleon quality that somehow enabled her to transform herself in the eyes of any man. She could become – and she had felt the process often enough to know its validity – pale of skin, full-breasted, intellectual, sexy, aloof. She could be whatever the man happened to be looking for at the moment. She could become any man's dream woman, and somehow accomplish it without relinquishing her own identity.

William had noticed this, had noticed it but never understood it. He had somehow confused it with coquettishness. Whenever a male guest would challenge Gillian, would display an intellectual vigor or simple male virility, Gillian would, as William put it so inadequately, "flutter her fan." William claimed to have developed an emotional radar to his wife's vibrations, but William so often missed the point, mislabeled the process. It was a process of becoming. It existed not in mechanical tricks but in acute sensitivity; it took place not in her physical alterations but