Tempest in Eden

"I can't be responsible for them! The people you're describing are rarely art enthusiasts. My pictures aren't sold on street corners by some vendor in a raincoat who accosts passersby with a 'Pst, pst, want to buy some filthy pictures?' As my mother hastened to explain, I don't pose for erotica." Instinctively, her better judgment clouded by anger, she arched her back and thrust her breasts toward him. "Besides, these aren't exactly the overgrown melons that would cause a hedonist to slaver, are they?"

The moment the words were out of her mouth, she realized what she'd done and resumed her normal posture. The softly swelling mounds of her breasts resettled on her chest. As she had said, they weren't very large, but were ripe with womanhood, delicately tipped, and beautifully shaped. Ian seemed to have a difficult time forcing his eyes away from them before he turned abruptly on his heels.

"All right," he said thickly, "you've made your point."

"Not quite." Fueled by rage, she seized the opportunity to put forth her opinion. Few people really understood her work. For some reason that was incomprehensible to Shay, it often made people question her morals. She usually looked upon such narrow-mindedness with a degree of amusement. But Ian's censure not only aroused her wrath, but also hurt her deeply, which made her all the more defensive.

Too, Ian Douglas's heart and mind might reside on a spiritual plane, but as evidenced by his barely suppressed fascination with her breasts, he had a carnal side just as everyone did.

"What do you think I do when I pose? Rush up several flights of dank, dingy stairs to a cold-water flat with poor lighting and peeling wallpaper? Do you think the artist and I engage in all sorts of prurient activities after I've posed in lascivious—"

"Enough, Shay!" he shouted, spinning to face her. The hands he had sliced horizontally through the air froze at his sides. Her eyes locked with the blue ones over the tension-laden space between them. She didn't know which dumbfounded her the most, his overwhelming anger or his use of her first name. She stood shocked into mute immobility, holding her breath.

Had he been anyone else, she would have sworn he muttered a curse under his breath as he broke his frozen posture, turned away, and raked a hand through his hair. "No. That's not the concept I have of you or what you do," he protested. "It's unfair of you to label me as such a prude." He spun around to face her once again. "But what was I supposed to think? What kind of woman comes barging into a strange man's shower without the least bit of embarrassment?"

"Are you strange?" she quipped.

Her flippant retort only made him more angry. His hands formed hard fists at his sides. Deliberately she let her eyes travel down his body and up again. "The only thing I found strange about you was your choice of a song to sing in the shower. Knowing what you are, I'd have thought 'Rock of Ages' would be more appropriate than 'Good Vibrations.'"

She pulled the tea towel out of her waistband and lifted a few stray strands of hair off her neck with a negligent hand. She wanted him to know that his anger was of supreme indifference to her.

"I happen to like the Beach Boys," he said. "Also the Beatles and the Bee Gees and Blondie. Now let me tell you what I dislike."

"I don't—"

"I don't like women who are so insecure about their femininity that they try to assume the masculine role. Granted, you've got a pretty body, but you were right when you said it had nothing to do with what's inside you. Because I don't think there is anything on the inside. I think you're just a beautiful shell surrounding a vacuum where the soul of a woman should be. You're so busy playing at being a somebody that you don't really know who or what you are."

She gasped in outrage. "Go to—" She broke off the last word when she remembered his warning. Then in defiance she

yelled at him anyway. "Go to hell!"

She shoved the swinging kitchen door with unnecessary force. It banged against the dining-room wall as she stormed into the room. The noise caused John and Celia, who were standing just inside the front door locked in a passionate embrace, to jump apart, looking shamefaced and guilty.

"Oh, for pity's sake," Shay said in exasperation as she took the first few steps. "Why don't you two just go to bed and stop acting like morons?"

She thought that once she'd had a cool shower, brushed her hair and teeth, and climbed into the bed, she could dismiss what Ian had said as rubbish and fall into a dreamless sleep.

She'd been wrong downstairs, too, wrong to goad his temper, wrong to deliberately provoke his anger, wrong to curse at him. Curse at a minister! What was her problem? No wonder he thought so poorly of her.

Try as she did to block out his harsh words, they echoed in her head with the constancy of a waterfall. That they had been so close to correct made them all the more revolting.

Suddenly she heard the gentle closing of the bedroom door next to hers. Him again. Swearing that she wasn't interested in anything he did, she nevertheless listened avidly to the noises he made preparing for bed. When the house lapsed into stillness once more, she pounded the pillow, punishing it for her restlessness.

By what right did some rural preacher take it upon himself to point up all her personality flaws? Why should she care what he thought, what he said? Yet it wasn't so much his saying it, but the truth of what he'd said that anguished her.

She did play a role. For years she had felt empty inside, an emptiness that she couldn't put a name to but that seemed fathomless and impossible to fill. The body that had been preserved on canvas and in photographs was a valuable commodity, but it wasn't her. The husband she thought had loved her had actually been far more concerned about the way she looked and the things she did than with the way she felt and what she thought.

Anson Porter had been an ambitious young man on his way up the ladder of success in his accounting firm. His greatest goal was to achieve a full partnership in the company. He met Shay at an art exhibit. He wasn't there because he had an interest in art, but because one of the partners had sponsored a young painter who had done a series of nudes.

Shay, who was attending at the artist's invitation, liked Anson upon first being introduced to him. He asked endless questions about how the paintings featuring her had been conceived, how long she'd had to pose, etc. When he invited her for coffee afterward, she readily accepted.

That first date led to others, many others. They were happy; they were in love. When he proposed, Shay covered his face with ardent kisses. But soon after their whirlwind courtship and hasty marriage, it became apparent that even as Anson was grooming himself to become a full partner in the accounting firm, he was also grooming Shay to be his idea of what a full partner's wife should be.

She found herself driving a sedate car, dressing as conservatively and unimaginatively as all the other wives, and attending luncheons and bridge tournaments that she found tedious and boring with women she found stupid and shallow.

"You're what!?" Anson shouted one night when she told him about a job she had gotten.

"I said I have a job posing for a sculptor. He's—"