Chapter 6. Bed and Bored.

Trudy Parker rested her beautiful blonde head against the pillow and sighed.

It was 11 o'clock at night and the novel closed, with Trudy's finger inserted between pages 64 and 65,

had long since failed to maintain its initial slender promise.

It lay against the silk sheets with the author's face on the back cover looking up at her sadly

and reproachfully. In real life it was difficult to believe that any man finding himself

where the author was would have had reason for either sadness or reproach. The sight of Trudy's breasts

inadequately concealed behind the fabric of her flesh-coloured silk nightdress might indeed

have provided that vital Philip to the style which the book so desperately needed.

Trudy sighed again, and wished that she did so because she was tired rather

than bored. The writer's style, though plodding, laboured and tortuous, fell just short of that

exquisite tedium which can produce a printed soporific. On the contrary, it lumbered into the

category of work that asks questions it cannot answer,

raises expectations it can never fulfil, and leaves the reader asking not for more, but

something, in other words, unsatisfied.

Trudy stuck her tongue out at the laborious author and placed him face downward on the marble-topped bedside table.

What the hero's philandering wife did when she found out that her

philandering husband had fallen in love with his philandering secretary would never be revealed to her.

The prospect of not sharing any more of their overlapping lives,

which seemed to commute between Madison Avenue and Adirondacks, came as a relief.

Trudy studied her even white nails and reached idly for an emery board.

Somewhere in the distance came the mournful cry of a coyote.

...