Community of Women by Lawrence Block

thought, again, about Elly Carr.
    Elly was very lovely. That was the first thing—Elly was beautiful, and Maggie couldn’t help thinking of her in sexual terms, imagining herself cupping Elly’s girlish breasts in her own trembling hands, imagining Elly’s mouth kissing her and Elly’s hands stroking her body in return. In her mind she could taste Elly’s mouth, could sense the thrilling contact of Elly’s bare flesh against her own. Elly’s legs all tangled up with her own legs, Elly’s body pressed tight against her own, Elly, Elly Elly Elly—
    She had never before attempted to seduce a woman in Cheshire Point. The arguments Dave had advanced were not ones which had not already occurred to her a thousand times, arguments which flooded into her mind every time she felt herself attracted to a woman in the exurbanite community. But this time she was not going to repress her desires. They were too strong. A lover in Greenwich Village could not dissipate her insatiable ache to get Elly on a bed.
    And it was not as though she would be breaking up an ideal marriage. She was hardly the home wrecker type, and she had no intention of taking Elly away from her husband. Elly would go on being married to Ted Carr, and Maggie would seduce her and they would have their fling, and in time Elly would be back in Ted’s arms and none the worse for wear.
    And Ted Carr had no right to expect fidelity from his wife. That was another point, and a pretty damned valid one. Ted Carr would and did go for anything in a skirt. He had tried, more than once, to go for Maggie. Not knowing that she was a lesbian, and firmly convinced that he was Christ’s gift to American womanhood, and strongly attracted by her breasts and hips and all-around sexuality, he had made his passes. It had been, if nothing else, a little awkward.
    She had solved it neatly. She had told him, gently but firmly, that if he bothered her again with his sexual suggestions she would cut off his manhood.
    This worked. He had turned a rather attractive shade of green and had stalked off, never to offer his fair white body to her again. An emasculated Ted Carr would be like an unarmed gunman or a defrocked priest, and the thought alone was enough to put him off permanently.
    Ted Carr, though, was a louse.
    That was the whole point. He was a louse, and he was cheating right and left on Elly, and what was sauce for the gander was undeniably sauce for the goose as well. Which was why the thought of introducing Elly Carr to the highways and byways of female homosexuality did not exactly strike Maggie as patently immoral.
    Her eyes were still closed. She was thinking back now, thinking all the way back to the first time. It had been years ago, many years ago. It had happened at her high school, a fancy girls’ boarding school in New England where only girls from the better families were accepted.
    And, she thought, where more subjects were offered than were listed in the school catalogue.
    Her first two years had been virtually sexless. The very few dates with boys had done nothing to her virginal status. She was sixteen, in her junior year, before sex reared its lovely head in the majestic person of a girl named Lily Raines.
    Lily was tall and slender, a senior girl with a shock of jet black hair and the hollowest, deepest eyes Maggie had ever seen. Maggie was working on the school yearbook, which Lily Raines edited, and they became friendly. That was the beginning.
    The friendship ripened. They talked about everything, were together constantly. They discussed sex and love and life. They sipped wine behind closed doors.
    And one night it went a little further than that.
    They were in Lily’s room. The dark-haired girl put a stack of records on, mood music with muted horns and a few thousand violins. “Let’s dance,” she suggested. “I haven’t danced with anyone in ages.”
    They danced. They had been drinking red wine and it had gone to Maggie’s head. She was a little