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Most of us lead two lives — real and fantasy. The housewife imagines herself leading a life of luxury, surrounded by jewels and furs; the businessman imagines himself away from the rat race, painting or fishing by a quiet lake. The schoolboy dreams of someday having wealth and power. And then there are sexual fantasies — wild dreams that we seldom expect to see come true.
Is it best to repress our desires and fantasies, or to bring them out into the open and act upon them? Does their repression lead to sickness, or their fulfillment bring shame? No one has yet been able to answer these questions satisfactorily.
In this story we see two people whose married life suffers because they hide their real desires from each other. Marlene and Charles Metcalf are unhappy and unfulfilled in their sex life, yet rather than communicating their fantasies to each other, they act them out with strangers. The results are inevitable.
THE WIFE’S YOUNG LOVER — the story of a modern marriage.
Green Street comes snaking furtively out of the quagmire of the slums — a cobbled road not much bigger than an alley with derelict buildings, condemned tenements and warehouses lining either side. It ends at the junction with Broad Street which, although also a slum street, is respectable in comparison with Green and has functioning enterprises and businesses — such as pawn shops and saloons.
In front of one of these saloons, the Golden Garter, young Billy Wilson had set up his shoeshine box. He had considered the location carefully, tempted to work outside the pawn shop because the men who came out of that establishment would have money, having pawned their watches — or someone else’s watches, more likely — but Billy had figured that the drunks staggering out of the Golden Garter would be more generous.
Billy was poor. He was a good-looking kid, with crisp hair and a wiry body, but his clothing reflected his penury — a ragged T-shirt and jeans that had been stained with shoe polish. But he was not inordinately poor for that section of the city, where everyone was poor. He was a cheerful lad who whistled while he worked and shined a shoe with dexterity and class.
He had just finished polishing a pair of expensive but ancient brogues and was waiting for another customer when he noticed a gleaming Cadillac cruising slowly down Broad Street. He looked admiringly at the car. Then he looked to see who the driver was, figuring that only a pimp could have a car like that in a slum like this.
But a woman was driving.
She was going past very slowly, looking out. She was about thirty years old, Billy figured, and good-looking. She had blonde hair worn in a style that must have taken her hairdresser ages to make look casual. Her mouth was full and sensual, her eyes smoky gray. She looked sort of excited, Billy thought. He figured that she was lost and had driven into the slums by mistake and was bemused by the whole situation.
Fictional reading for entertainment purposes only.