The LeBaron Secret by Stephen; Birmingham

like owning a single earring, or inheriting only half of Aunt Sarah’s Spode. And instantly in the mirror the scene is transformed from her suburban dressing room to the summer moonlit terrace by the pool, where the two of them are alone. Smiling, he lets her slide the bikini briefs down the length of his body with its smooth swimmer’s muscles, and she finds him, as she knew she would, in a state of violent, stallion arousal. She sits on the moonlit chaise beside him, and kisses it. “You are so lovely!” he whispers, and cups one of her breasts in his hand, brushes his lips against the nipple as she studies his swollen member in her hand, so like Eric’s, and yet somehow wildly different . Alix leans forward toward the mirror, and the ivory-handled hairbrush falls into her lap, and she presses the handle against herself, just as Peeper is pressing himself against her now. In the mirror now her face is flushed with sexual excitement, which makes her beauty seem only more luminous. Between her legs, the handle of the brush presses more persistently.
    Now the second part of her fantasy begins, for Eric has joined them, and one of them has entered her from the front and the other from behind, and now she is complete, filled up with both of them. But of course this would never happen. Eric would never participate in such an outrageous, orgiastic tripling—sober, hardworking Eric and merry, carefree Peeper, the two opposing halves of that same split cell—but Alix can imagine it, anyway. In her imagination, there are no limits to the distances the three might go.
    No, she will have to settle for Eric and Peeper separately.
    And of course Eric will find out about it. She will have to confess it to him, and he will react to the news with a murderous frenzy of jealous rage—rage! But she will blame Peeper. In a torrent of tears, she will say, “But, darling, he forced me to! I must have been out of my mind to let him, but he looks so much like you I couldn’t seem to resist him—it was all so sudden, I felt so helpless! Oh, darling, forgive me—it will never happen again, I promise you!”
    (But it might happen again. That would show Eric again.)
    But Eric will not forgive her, ever, and in his rage he will kill Peeper, and now that familiar feeling of disorientation and anomie settles upon her, as the rest of the dreary scenario plays itself out, a feeling of cockroaches crawling around her heart.
    Now Peeper is dead, and Eric has divorced her. She has gotten to keep the house, an arrangement that is almost standard in these cases. Eric has given her custody of the girls, and a large financial settlement. But what future does a thirty-six-year-old divorced woman with two teenage daughters have in a place like Burlingame—while Eric has gone off and married whoever she is?
    But wait. Eric will be in prison. But perhaps not. A sympathetic judge—male, of course—will acquit him of the murder of his brother, or recommend leniency. Eric was the wronged party, it was a crime of passion. Temporary insanity. Gentlemen of the jury, I charge you that the defendant is an upstanding member of this community, a pillar of his church, with no previous record of criminality. Standing before you is a decent, God-fearing citizen, driven to a murderous rage by the lustful, willful actions of his former wife. I therefore recommend …
    And so Eric will go off and marry whoever it is, and she will be left all alone in a big house in Burlingame, a divorced woman with two grown daughters, invited nowhere, a social pariah whom no man except a common gold digger will want to marry. She will lose her membership in the Burlingame Country Club. This is also standard in these cases. The club wants no single or divorced women. The widows of deceased members are bad enough. The club is obligated to keep those women on. But to single women and divorcees there is no such obligation. The Francisca