Nor All Your Tears

By Louis Charbonneau

A woman he can never have.

On the cusp of forty, advertising artist Charley Morton was comfortable, if not content, with his life. The married father of two had grown to accept the monotony of the daily grind. All that changed when a chance encounter with a gorgeous new coworker turned Morton’s quiet suburban world upside down.

Jeri Adams is young, beautiful, and the target of every bachelor in the office. Morton knows he shouldn’t be thinking about Jeri, let alone feeling jealous. He has a wife and a family to consider. All he can do is dream of Jeri. But the dream is not enough.

As attraction twists into obsession, Morton finds himself willing to do anything—abandon his wife and children, sabotage his career, perhaps even murder a rival—in order to win Jeri’s affection. He just can’t let her go…even if it destroys him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781936535927

Louis Charbonneau

Louis Charbonneau, a native of Detroit, Michigan, served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II. While producing a variety of fiction over more than a quarter of a century, he has also been a teacher, copywriter, journalist, newspaper columnist and book editor. Under his own name and pseudonyms, he has written more than twenty novels in the fields of suspense, science fiction, and Western adventure.

Book preview

Charbonneau

1

It began for Charles Morton on a day in August. He was having lunch in the company cafeteria with George Olson, another of the artists in the advertising section. Morton had just got back from his vacation, a typical family vacation during which he had taken his wife and their two children to the Grand Canyon. In a vague way, perhaps, he had been trying to recapture something on the trip. Helen and he had gone to the Canyon the second summer of their marriage, before Jimmy was born.

It was while he was on vacation that Jeri started to work for the Tribune. He learned that later. At the time all he knew was that he had never seen her before.

He had finished his lunch and George was working on his dessert. Morton went back to the counter to get another cup of coffee. The girl was standing at the end of a short line waiting in front of the coffee urn. He went to the end of the line and stood behind her.

She had blonde hair, cut short and tangled in a deceptively casual way. She was wearing a pale yellow cotton dress without sleeves. Its round neckline, low in back, exposed the smooth, clean line of her neck and the slope of tanned shoulders. The dress did a lot for her. There was something about the way it pulled tightly across her shoulders which called attention to the firm suppleness of her back. And the spareness of the dress above the waist, in contrast to the soft fullness of its skirt below, accentuated the girl’s slenderness. It made her look small, almost fragile. Morton was startled to see that she was quite tall. He was five feet ten, and she was not much shorter than he was. The top of her head was level with his eyes.

When she pulled the tap to fill her coffee cup, he was acutely conscious of the honey tones of her arms, and of the fine hair burned gold by the sun.

She turned away from the coffee urn and looked directly into his eyes. The moment was a shock. It seemed to him that in that sudden meeting of their eyes there was an immediate, mutual recognition of each other. On her lips was the soft suggestion of a smile.

Then she was gone. He stood there for several seconds, staring after her. The man behind him stirred restlessly.

Hey, let’s get going, he growled.

Hastily Morton filled his cup. He got it too full, and his hand was not steady. By the time he got back to his table, the saucer was full of coffee. George Olson stared at him quizzically as he sat down.

What the hell’s the matter with you?

Morton answered the question in his mind with a half-flippant candor which was often in his thoughts but seldom in his speech: I just fell in love. Aloud he said, We’ve got a new girl, haven’t we?

George grinned. Which one?

Morton looked around the cafeteria. The girl was sitting across the room at a table shared by another girl, a small brunette. At the moment he saw her, the blonde was laughing. Seeing her head thrown back, the red mouth open and white teeth flashing, he had the strange sensation that he knew the sound of her full, warm laughter.

Which one do you mean? George repeated, interested.

In the yellow dress.

George stared across the room. That one? His voice held incredulity. It made Morton look at him sharply, and he was surprised to find that he was annoyed.

George raised his eyebrows. She’s okay, but she’s hardly what I’d leave home for. Now you take this kid in the red sweater. …

A girl passed by, carrying a tray held under her breasts as if she were presenting them on a platter. She was one they saw regularly during the coffee breaks and lunch hours, and sometimes in the corridors of the building, a girl not much more than twenty, with startlingly full breasts that were always straining against tight sweaters. She invariably made Morton feel slightly uncomfortable. There was a quality in both her body and her manner that was too … aggressive.

A cow, he said.

Moooo, George said, grinning again.

He finished his coffee and started to get up.

You ready?

Not yet. See you in the lounge.

Don’t let her get you too excited, Charley. Helen will wonder where all your energy came from tonight.

Morton smiled. George walked off, heading for the recreation room where they customarily sat out the lunch hour reading the paper or a paper back novel, sometimes joining in a game of bridge, often just dozing. As soon as he was gone, Morton glanced again at the girl. He wished that George hadn’t mentioned Helen’s name.

The girl moved her head, and Morton had the impression that she had been watching him. He wondered if it was a casual, curious glance in passing, or if she had been really interested. The thought made him smile ruefully. Young, beautiful girls weren’t in the habit of staring at Charles Morton. He knew that there was nothing about him to excite any romantic flutterings in a girl’s heart. His was a quiet, too serious face, with a mouth that smiled tentatively, as if it were not sure that it was all right to smile. He wore heavy-rimmed glasses that had a tendency to slip down his nose slightly, and he had a habit of shrugging them back up by frowning and wrinkling his nose. He was thin, and there was an impression of boniness about his body. He had only one feature which was arresting, incongruously beautiful—his hands. They were long, sensitive, graceful. An artist’s hands. But young, beautiful girls didn’t notice your hands.

Morton watched the girl as she talked, studying her face, mostly in profile. He thought she was exquisitely beautiful. Hers was not the perfectly symmetrical face with giant eyes and tiny features seen in a million magazine illustrations. It was a much more interesting face, one that he would like to draw. Its features would be easy to capture. The lips, soft, coral red, generous, on the brink of a smile. The nose, strongly bridged, a clean straight line. The forehead high and intelligent. The eyes, clear and bright, a slate-blue with gray tones. Their sparkle could be seen across the room.

She was sitting close to the windows, and sunlight glinted off the pale blonde hair, gave a golden hue to her neck and shoulders. She sat quite erect, with a poised, gracious, almost regal air that was both inviting and intimidating. Like a manikin. Watching her, Morton felt a twinge of excitement. He remembered that to George she hadn’t looked like anything special, and this astonished him. He sat staring at her through most of the lunch hour, while she talked and laughed with the dark-haired girl at her table. She didn’t look at him again. When she left the cafeteria, he felt let down, as if all the brightness and color had suddenly been washed out of the room.

Throughout the afternoon he kept thinking about her. Working at his drawing board, he found himself trying to capture the slender line and shape of her neck. It took him most of the day to finish a rough layout for an ad which should have been completed in an hour.

By five o’clock he had talked himself into the conviction that he was being adolescent. Driving home, he began to feel amused. The seven year itch, he thought, arriving about five years late.

The thought brought a tentative smile to his lips.

2

Long before the evening was over, Charles Morton knew that George had been right. The incident with the girl in the cafeteria had been stimulating, starting the chain of reactions familiar to every male. He sat in the living room pretending to watch television, occasionally glancing at Helen, mildly surprised at the desire he felt, and he was conscious of the underlying irony of his reaction.

There were hundreds of thousands of stimuli. There was the girl walking in front of you on the way to the bus, her hips swinging under a cotton dress. There were the bosomy advertisements in Life or the Post. You could go to a movie and watch Anita Ekberg take a deep breath or Marilyn Monroe open her mouth just before her moist lips met those of a husky young man. If you stayed home, there was always a girl taking a bath in silhouette for a soap commercial on television, or the carefully detailed description of a moment of passion in a paper back novel.

That evening Charles Morton didn’t need a novel or a movie or an advertisement. And he didn’t need encouragement from Helen—something he never got any more.

The kids were in bed by nine-thirty. Jimmy was eleven and Michele two years younger. Their bedtime hours were regulated by the television programs they were allowed to see, but nine-thirty was the maximum, and they were pretty good about accepting the rule. Credit that to Helen, he thought. He had never been very good with the kids, and he knew it, but strangely enough Helen, who hadn’t wanted children, had turned out to be an excellent mother. She had been able to strike a nice balance between the firm and the loving hand. On his own, Morton would have made a mess out of raising the children, because he was never able to say no and stick to it.

Helen was very good at saying no, to the kids or to him. She said it that night.

Morton went to bed early, making a point of it, but Helen stayed up watching a late movie. She didn’t come to bed until after twelve. He had been lying there, waiting. Sometimes when he would wait for her he would just fall asleep, but that night he was too ready, too much on edge, so conscious of his body that he seemed to be aware of the blood slowly stirring in his veins.

When he finally heard Helen turn off the TV set, flick off the lights and come down the hall toward the bedroom, his heartbeat quickened. He looked up and smiled at her, and she gave a brief smile in return.

How was the movie? he asked.

Oh, you know. I saw it once before, but I can’t stop once I start watching them.

He watched her undress. At thirty-eight she was plump, but still firm. Her breasts had always been small, but they were perfectly cone-shaped. She was one of those rare women who are more attractive naked than when a thin fabric hints sensually at hidden beauty. He remembered that moment of surprise on their wedding night when he had first seen her nude body—on rare occasions they had made love before they were married, but always in darkness, in the discomfort of the couch or the car. Even when she was young, Helen had contrived to look dumpy when she was dressed—she had no flair for clothes. Naked, she looked smaller, her body more curving, more feminine.

She went into the bathroom to finish undressing. She often did, more because it was convenient than from excessive modesty. It was a ritual as familiar to him as shaving, and one to which he usually gave just about as much thought, but this night he was irritated.

When Helen came out of the bathroom, she wore her nightgown. She turned out the lights and climbed into bed, lying on her side with her back toward him. He put his arm around her waist.

Goodnight, dear, she murmured.

So soon? His fingers slipped over the satiny fabric of her gown.

No, Charley.

His fingers stopped, resting against the slope of her breast.

Any special reason? It isn’t the time for—

I’m tired, she said. And it’s late.

For a moment he was silent, trying to control the rise of anger.

It’s been three weeks.

Do you count the days? The resentment that he would remember was in her voice.

Yes. Three weeks and two days.

She turned on her back and faced him.

Is that so horrible? Charley, we’re not kids any more.

We’re not fossils, either. His hand cupped her breast. You don’t feel like a fossil.

She pushed his hand away. I said no, she said. Her voice was sharper.

The anger came suddenly, mixed with a sense of guilt, which only served to intensify the anger.

That’s not good enough, he said.

He pulled her toward him roughly and brought his mouth down over hers. While she struggled, he reached down to pull up her nightgown. After a moment she stopped resisting. She remained passive until he had finished. The act was brief and unsatisfactory. He felt as if he had done something dirty.

Afterwards he lay on his back with his eyes open, his anger dulled and turning inward in self-contempt. Defensively, he tried to argue that Helen had refused what was supposed to be one of a wife’s obligations. But he knew that he had desired her because he had been excited by another woman. And he thought what a travesty it was on love for a man to take a woman in anger.

Then he thought about how it had been with Helen and him for a long time, and he tried to remember when they had made love spontaneously, with warmth and affection and a mutual need and a sense of belonging to each other. He couldn’t remember. He looked back over the months and the years, and he faced the fact that they had not really made love for an interminable period. Always there was her concern whether it was safe. And when they had gone through the motions, he had always been the aggressor, and she had merely accepted him, responding with automatic movements simulating passion.

Fulfilling an obligation.

The fact was bitter in his mind.

Then he thought about the slender blonde girl, remembering the graceful line of her neck and the strong curve of her back, dipping down to a slim waist. He cut off the memory, feeling the guilt return, and with it a deep sorrow.

He thought about what he was—a man of thirty-nine, the father of two children, a homeowner, settled, God-fearing, respectable, a faithful husband, an artist with a mediocre talent but an ability to get along with people, a personality leaning decidedly toward the conservative.

A man who was not in love with his wife.

He looked at her in the darkness. She lay on her side once more, turned away from him.

I’m sorry, he said aloud.

She didn’t answer.

3

The following day Morton found himself looking forward to the lunch hour. He searched for the blonde without seeing her. He was disappointed, but he was relieved