ALICIA

By Ed

Adultery was unthinkable!  I was certain of that - until my wife's best
friend, Alicia, exposed my flawed character and humbled me into dust.  Judy,
my wife, and I had known Alicia more than fifteen years before she hired me
as a consultant for her statistical research firm.  Her husband had left her
for a younger woman, a secretary in his office, several years before I
stumbled.

A year before her divorce, Alicia had rented a remote vacation cabin with
her teen-age son and daughter to seek refuge from domestic strife as far
from civilization as she could get.  They planned to spend the summer
together hiking through Vermont's Green Mountains and then to enjoy the
remainder of their vacation from the cabin's home base.  Alicia had hoped a
summer-long separation from her husband might give him time to come to his
senses and to reaffirm his marriage commitment.

On their first hiking foray, Alicia impaled her leg on a rusty spike
protruding some six inches out of a broken fence post.  Swabbing and dousing
the deep puncture wound with an antiseptic and pulling away embedded animal
hairs driven into her leg by the corroded point, she trusted in the efficacy
of her tetanus booster shot and then neglected a developing abscess for
three weeks, all the way up to the Canadian end of the Long Trail and back
again to their cabin.

She stayed with her children, not wanting to cut short their vacation, even
after she became ill with fever from the livid injury below her throbbing
knee.  Discoloration and swelling expanded upward, distressing her enough to
ask her son to drive to a phone to consult a doctor.  He tried, but could
only reach answering services that informed him, "The doctor is unavailable.
Please leave your phone number with a message, and the doctor will return
your call."  Of course he couldn't, because the phone was in a general store
several miles down a logging road from their isolated cabin.

Assessing alternatives, he attempted to phone his father and then called his
mother's sister, a nurse, whom he was sure could recommend an appropriate
treatment for his mother's painful scratch.  His aunt suggested aspirin and
an extended soaking of the wound in a hot Ringer's solution, not realizing
how long the infection had incubated nor how deeply it had penetrated.  He
didn't sound particularly concerned about his mother's minor wound, so she
told him if Alicia didn't feel better and couldn't find a doctor by the
weekend, she'd make the long drive up from Manhattan and come visit.

Alicia was a person who always minimized her own discomfort, convinced that
nature if given a chance, would eventually heal most ills.  Hospitals for
her were places to fear, places where one was as likely to catch a fatal
disease as to obtain a cure.

Five days after that first attempt to seek professional medical advice and
subsequent failures each day thereafter, her fever rose to 106.  She
realized from her pain and from the angry discoloration creeping up her leg
that the infection had spread into her knee.  Her now alarmed son insisted
he drive her to the emergency room of the nearest hospital, some thirty
miles away, where she arrived incoherent in delirium.  Unable to reach his
father, he made the decision to give immediate permission for a surgeon to
amputate his mother's right leg to save her life.

Waking, but still groggy from anesthesia, Alicia felt for her swollen knee,
praying to find her body intact.  She'd known even before she first asked to
consult a doctor that she'd neglected the infection far too long.  Her son
held his mother's hand and wiped tears from her face as they listened to the
soothing voice of the recovery room nurse.  She told them that his mother
was fortunate her surgeon had been able to save eight inches of her thigh,
an ideal length for a prosthesis.  He had given her the "fanciest amputation
in the book" by folding a flap of muscle tissue and skin over her severed
femur.  A resident plastic surgeon had scrubbed in for observation, and the
primary surgeon asked him to close the wound with almost invisible stitches
from behind to give her stump a smooth and seamless padded cushion so she
could put all her weight on it and wear an artificial leg in comfort.

Before beginning her vacation, Alicia had asked my wife and me to keep her
small business on hold, and answer her mail.  Judy and I made the five-hour
drive to Vermont to comfort her and to reassure her about her office,
expecting to find her disconsolate and withdrawn.  When we arrived, she was
already up and out of her room in a wheelchair visiting another patient.
She reacted with tears of her own to Judy's sorrow and to our compassion and
distress over her misfortune, but grateful to be alive, she soon distracted
herself and began to thrash out a new research project that she herself
proposed.  Discharged after five days with orders to return for treatment,
therapy, counseling, and checkups, she departed in a wheelchair with Judy
and me to her cabin.

Alicia had been in excellent physical condition before her surgery and
assured us she could recover as well in the country as at home in the city
while continuing to share the remainder of the summer with her distraught
children.  All our attempts to reach her husband still resulted only in
message accumulations on his answering machine.  As she completed her
medications and regained her strength, she occupied herself by training to
exhaustion, stretching her torso for flexibility, exercising with free
weights, and walking with one crutch as well as two, learning to support her
reduced weight on her hands instead of on the crutch pads under her
shoulders.  She saw no reason to abort her children's long anticipated
vacation, and no reason to confront her husband or return to her work until
she'd learned to live with and to accept her shattering loss.

By the end of the summer, she'd again learned to walk on her hands as she'd
done as a girl and even to do vertical push-ups from a handstand, a feat
she'd never before been able to accomplish, but now could, enabled by her
thirty pound weight loss.  She moved with confidence on one crutch nearly as
fast as her children could walk.  With two crutches, using a step-through
gait, her kids had to jog to keep up.  Both her hands developed calluses on
the outer edges of her palms where she grasped the handles, and her dresses
and shirts wore thin where the crutch pads rubbed under her arms.  The
muscles in her arms and upper body filled out, triggering her remark that it
would be easier on her wardrobe if she continued to hop about on one leg,
especially if she could go halves with a left leg amputee who wore the same
shoe size.

Weeks after all tenderness and swelling in her bound stump had abated and
stabilized, her prosthetist made a plaster cast of her thigh.  She
impatiently awaited his fabrication of her artificial leg, bewildered
meanwhile by her husband's ill treatment.  Alicia couldn't understand his
antagonism or how a person who had once loved her could now be so cruel, so
thoughtless, so uncaring.  Embarrassed by her appearance, he refused to
accompany her anywhere, and when asked, even denied to a client that she was
his wife.  Confronted, he attacked, telling her, "I won't have a one legged
freak for my wife!"  He escalated fights, using Alicia's leg as an excuse to
shun her even when they were alone together at home.  Without her knee, no
artificial limb could ever enable her to walk again with elegance; crutches
for her were easier, faster, and far more graceful.  Alicia suspected her
husband's persecution was due more to his wanderlust than to his revulsion
at the sight of her imperfect gait or to her impaired body, although his
antipathy was evident whenever he stared at the pinned up flap on her jeans
or gazed at the disconcerting emptiness below her skirts.

His evasions and cessation of intimate contact were unremitting, so in her
distress she determined to do everything in her power to recapture his
attentions, to force him to acknowledge her worth, and to make him show at
least minimal courtesy toward his still beautiful wife.  Doubting by now
that her prosthesis could ever alter his attitude, she'd parade her
mutilation before him; she'd flaunt the actuality of her amputation so he
could not possibly continue to ignore it or deny her.  She created occasions
to confront him in the presence of others, especially at his office.
Dressed in a short skirt to display her single shapely leg, she wore
pantyhose with the right leg cut off and sewn closed to a snug fit against
the end of her stump, so he could get occasional glimpses whenever she
deliberately exposed it as she moved or sat.  His secretary turned beet red
when Alicia commiserated with her about the rings under such young eyes,
asking if she slept well.

Alicia knew that her immodest public displays were atypical, not at all like
the behavior of other amputees she'd met, all of whom took pains to appear
as ordinary as possible.  She would never have evolved into such an
aggressive exhibitionist had her husband been supportive.  He must have
known that his antagonism motivated her displays, because he stopped all but
necessary communications with her.

Her prosthetist, admiring Alicia's assertiveness, introduced her to another
young amputee, introverted and withdrawn, whom he hoped Alicia, with her
uninhibited personality, could encourage.  Unlike her unhappy friend, who
was embarrassed by her amputation and sequestered herself, Alicia's
unhappiness focused on her husband's defects, not her own.  Excursions
together enabled her new friend to develop composure with others' inevitable
curiosity, and Alicia in turn experimented with her, assessing different
ways to dress becomingly.  While evaluating their appearance in jeans, she
discovered that they both looked better, and the empty pants legs were
easier to manage, if they turned them inside out and rolled the empty
sleeves up from the inside rather than pinning or folding and tucking them
under their belts.

Yet, no matter how she dressed or what she did, Alicia recognized that
camouflage wouldn't deter her husband's passive aggression.  She had
experienced his rejection even before her accident and realized that her
long awaited prosthesis was of no avail, even though it enabled her to
appear with him in public unremarked, indistinguishable from her former
self.  By wearing her prosthesis she could avoid attention whenever she
wished, yet she rarely used it as she determined to continue her defiant and
unequivocal confrontations with her husband so long as he remained
intractable.

Accused of being an exhibitionist, she'd show him a real one!  Unable to
please him either with crutches or by wearing her unobtrusive new
prosthesis, she persuaded her prosthetist, against his advice, to fabricate
a hollow Duralumin peg leg for her and to finish it with a glossy black
enameled shaft.  He asked if she wouldn't prefer a bone finish so she could
go to masquerade balls disguised as Captain Ahab!  She replied that since
she'd removed her wedding ring, she thought the sight of an attractive
unattached woman with a peg leg would compel men's fascinated attention,
attention she candidly sought in response to her husband's rejection; it
would also free her hands, and by its shock-value might goad her estranged
spouse into terminating his verbal abuse.  If not, she'd at least have a bit
of revenge and experience some satisfaction, by displaying her piratical
appearance, of seeing him embarrassed among their friends and his clients!

Deciding at first to experiment with the peg only at home, she found she was
able to stand and rest on it almost as if she were sitting on a stool.
Because it was all but indestructible, easy to use, comfortable, and light,
she overcame her original reticence at appearing with it in public.  She
fantasized that when she wore it to work, as opposed to feeling inhibited,
she would thrill with everyone's fascination.  It excited her to imagine the
head-turning reactions of her surprised and curious associates who would
marvel at her overt display.  She learned to prefer either the crutches or
the peg to her cosmetic leg as she recognized and welcomed strangers'
frequent flirting ploys to meet her.  They wore watches but asked her the
time or carried briefcases and asked directions, all the while attempting to
start trivial conversations, unable to tear their eyes away from her peg or
the empty space of her missing limb.  Some brazen few, with whom she
flirted, even apologized and requested permission to photograph her.

Her first prosthesis never attracted the erotic notice she deliberately
instigated.  As a present to herself, asking Judy and me if we didn't also
think as she did, that her thin Duralumin crutches were more flattering and
less conspicuous than either her plain crutches or her eye-catching peg, she
purchased half a dozen new crutch pairs with different enameled colors.  Her
favorites were a tossup between a polished white pair and a black pair, both
of which she used with a high-heeled shoe.  She wore the various crutch
combinations as if they were matching ornaments, taking pains to color
coordinate them with her clothes, accentuating the shapely silhouette of her
slim body.  Responding to our appreciation of her svelte facade and her
fluid movements, she posed for us on one crutch as an exotic dancer, miming
with it as if it were her compliant partner.  Asking if we realized how well
she could dance, she demonstrated it by wedging her stump between the crutch
uprights and resting on the crossbar handle.  She embraced the crutch,
balancing and pirouetting alternately on it and on her foot.  She performed
a similar intimate dance with Judy by supporting her light weight with her
stump held tightly against Judy's hip, holding Judy close with pressure from
her stump and her arms as if they'd practiced together for years.

Her agility, playfulness, and confident outings gave her gratification from
displaying her flexible body and demonstrating her athletic skill, thus
reinforcing her self-assurance and ameliorating the pain of her ex-husband's
abuse.  Ever since her intensive body building exercises in the Vermont
cabin, she'd improved her ability to maneuver with either one or two of her
crutches.  She flowed along with the speed and poise of a gymnast on her
high-heeled shoe, much more gracefully than when she tried to hurry on her
prosthesis or hiked about on uneven ground or at home with her more
comfortable featherweight peg.  She strolled with a single crutch by
overbalancing her center of mass over its tip, much as a pencil balances on
its point, positioning the crutch against her thigh as she walked.  Like the
falling pencil, her momentum would carry her forward as she shifted her
equilibrium through each stride, holding the crutch firmly against her stump
while her ankle skimmed the shaft, assuring that the crutch's tip supported
her body by falling as if on a plumb line beneath her point of balance.  Her
foot and her crutch alternately traced the precise line of her chosen
course.  I loved to accompany her in order to share the many covert admirers
who observed the poetry of her movements.  We each took pleasure from
recognizing the other's gratification from strangers' surveillance.  Their
overtures cemented her conviction that her traumatic divorce had nothing to
do with her amputation; they proved to her that her exceptional body was
still breathtakingly glamorous not only to me, her intimate friend and
admirer, but also to the many who approached and sought her company.

Responsive to my obvious and constant state of arousal in her presence and
to the appreciation I displayed toward her ability to function so
efficiently, an appreciation radically different from her ex-husband's
unfeeling rejection, she avoided using her cosmetic prosthesis whenever I
was with her.  We both recognized my inordinate fascination with the hiatus
of her amputation.  She sought my companionship even as I sought hers.
Alicia knew that I admired her, enjoyed being her protective escort, and
that I found her altered body more alluring than any woman's normal body
could ever be, especially when she wore one of her tight sheath dresses and
balanced so skillfully with a single crutch or hiked about on that bizarre
black peg she displayed so provocatively.  I delighted in the company of a
stunning, uninhibited, unique woman, pleased to share the attention she
received, so without consciously intending it or admitting it, I revealed my
obsessive physical attraction toward her beautiful but different body
whenever we were together.

Judy observed me, aroused and infatuated, watching Alicia's movements, and
gave me an incisive warning.  "She arouses you so much you want to jump in
bed with me for physical relief every time you see her!  Alicia sublimates
her loss by being confrontational!  She's looking for acceptance.  Her
handicap isn't something she can turn off whenever it's convenient!  I feel
for her; your overcooked admiration blinds you.  She's endured her husband's
abandonment and wants to be desired, but deep down she knows most men reject
her.  She's vulnerable to predators!  Be careful!  If you hurt her, I'm
going to feed you rat poison!"

Months after I'd dismissed and forgotten Judy's admonition, Alicia and I
were in her study testing computer algorithms.  We took an unusually long
time to complete our work, because she had gone into her bedroom to dress
comfortably and reappeared in a mesh low-cut blouse with nothing underneath
except her unconfined breasts pushing erect nipples outward against their
revealing wrap.  Every time she leaned forward to view the monitor, she'd
press against me, squeezing my arm in her open cleavage as she flexed her
shoulders.  When we put the computer on standby, she shifted her seat, faced
me sideways, and allowed her short skirt to rise above her stump, turning to
press its exposed end below my belt as if by accident.  Her forearms rested
on my shoulder.  She leaned her head against mine, gently brushed my cheek
with her fingers, and spoke intimately to me of her frustrations, a
seductive invitation in her voice.  Restricting as her handicap was, she
affirmed what I already knew, that she rarely became angry or impatient with
the nuisance of her physical limits, and reveled in the erotic attention
given her; even in her secret dreams she was always an amputee.

She agreed with me that over the past two years she'd adjusted to her
divorce and to the prying questions and attentions drawn from acquaintances
by her accident.  She had never thought that her handicap made her
unapproachable.  On the contrary, she had learned to take unforeseen
pleasure in displaying her physical difference to men who were stimulated by
it, especially to me, enabled perhaps from combating her ex-husband's
rejection.  Yet, when she indulged herself with private imaginings, as she
was now doing, she wanted physical contact with an understanding partner.
She longed to assuage her frustrated passions with intimacies she no longer
enjoyed; she missed the touch and grip of her thighs against her lover.  She
knew from my responses that I desired her!  With a deep sigh, she pulled one
of my hands to her breast while moving my other hand over the end of her
stump.

Could I have then left?

Denying to myself how much I wanted her also, I attempted to distract us
both by calling attention to her peg, the first time I'd ever seen it
separated from her body, propped upright in a corner beside her many
crutches in their open wall cabinet.  In answer to my flustered question at
how she fastened it and why it didn't fall off without straps, she placed
both my hands on her stump, and asked me to stroke and massage it by pushing
against her thrusting resistance as she pressed between my legs.  She flexed
her remaining thigh muscles, working against my strokes, pushing in turn
against my hands, lifting her short stump up against me.  She then had me
rub lotion into it and draw a fitted cotton sock over its smooth raised end
before she hopped across the room to retrieve the peg.  She gave an
expressive look at my tense posture, a teasing and perceptive smile at my
deep inhalations.  She slowly dropped her skirt, inserted her stump into the
peg's molded socket, and explained how a vacuum formed to hold the peg in
place while she walked about the room to demonstrate various steps as she
drew her blouse over her head and dropped it beside her skirt onto the
floor.  Hooking her thumbs into her panties, she tugged them off, balanced
on her peg, and lifted her foot.  Wearing nothing but her peg, she walked
slowly toward me until our knees touched.  She placed my hand on the peg's
socket between my legs, and showed me how to release the vacuum so the peg
dropped at my feet.

Moistening her lips, she leaned her body into mine and kissed me.  She
pulled up against my chest and buried my face between her breasts as she
separated my legs by wedging them apart with her stump, worked at the zipper
of my pants, and groped inside with her right hand.  She breathed into my
ear and whispered, "This is the attention I've craved; take me!"  As I
attempted to draw away, she slid herself down onto her knee to replace her
right hand with her open mouth!

"Stop!  Alicia!  Enough!  Please!  We can't do this!"

"I'm going to pleasure you in ways you've never imagined!"

>From God knows where I finally gained the strength to push off from the
couch and stood, easily lifting her light nude body, but continued to
embrace her to prevent her from falling while she maintained her stump's
pressure against my aching groin.

I held her close; I couldn't compel myself either to release her or to push
away as she kissed me again, open mouthed, parting my lips with her tongue,
thrusting deeply into my mouth.  I could feel her warm lubricating fluids on
my exposed skin as she slid her pelvis against me.  Her responses to my
arousal at her stump's erotic caresses as she continued to thrust and lift
it between my legs had driven all reason from my mind.  She said, "I revel
in the feel of your hard body against me!  Like yours, my body too has
needs!  Some nights I've slept with a pillow between my thighs . . . driving
and sliding against it like this, pretending it's you.  How could I have
resisted you for so long a time?  -  The way you looked at me - the way you
undressed me with your eyes.  I adore your tender touch, your gentle kiss.
For months I resisted your invitations, debating whether to accept your
offers, because I knew you wanted me as much as I desired you!  Do what both
of us need!  Take me!  Enter me!"

I drew away from her probing thigh, stroked back her long dark curls, held
her face between my hands, and gently kissed her forehead;  "Alicia, my
Circe, I can hardly breathe!  Your Siren Song is more intoxicating than
drugs!  Lust has conquered us both!  Even now, this late, both of us have to
see why we can't fulfill our desires!  We'd betray everyone!  I do crave
you; we crave each other!  But I couldn't face myself if we don't stop now!
We've already gone too far!  If we ever marry, how could you trust me if we
deceive Judy?  Wouldn't you wonder if I'd deceive you too?  You want us to
do to Judy what your husband did to you.  Can we?  Can't we love one another
and be friends like we've always been - you, me, Judy, all of us together?"

Hardly able to stand upright myself, I pushed away and stepped back, leaving
her tottering.  Alicia looked at me in disbelief, breathing hard, her face
flushed with passion and incredulity, swaying precariously as she fought to
maintain her balance.  After a full minute of silence, naked, with her firm
breasts erect, she hopped to the front door, opened it and assailed me
saying, "You inconceivably boorish oaf!  Get out!  Now!  Go home to your
frigid wife!  I understand only now how she tolerates your impotence!"

I must have been far more physically uncomfortable than she, bent over,
aching from the mindless pressure of unfulfilled desire as I walked to my
car.

Next month when our Visa bill came, Judy asked me, "What's with this $54
charge for flowers?"

Too embarrassed to explain, I said, "Both of us hate the artificial flowers
in church.  Maybe a gift of real flowers will give our pastor a shove."
While I never said I sent flowers to the church, I thought my Jesuitical
prevarication better than unambiguous truth.

Judy gave me a musing smile.  "For a moment there, I was considering rat
poison."

Over the next few months, Alicia and Judy talked on the phone and got
together as had been their custom.  They visited, shopped, used their season
tickets for concerts and theater performances at the Brooklyn Academy of
Music, and accepted a supper invitation extended to all of us from her
sister in Manhattan.  I always managed to devise a plausible excuse not to
accompany them.

One Saturday morning before Christmas I was sitting at a table in a
Starbucks, facing the door, enjoying a cup of coffee with my oldest son home
from college when I saw Alicia enter with her coat wrapped over and
partially concealing a single thin enameled white crutch underneath.  She
grasped its handle through a slit in her coat pocket, appearing to me as an
Olympic pole-vaulter arcing the vertical center line of her slim body over
the tip of her crutch, moving past the entrance into the shop on her elegant
high-heeled shoe, looking beyond me as if I were invisible.  She ordered
coffee, brought it to a table nearby and sat with her back to us.  When my
son spotted her, he rose, greeted and embraced her, and asked if we might
join her at her table.  I suspected the flush rising in her beautiful face
was not entirely due to the cold as she talked with my son about his studies
and pretended I didn't exist.

As she rose to leave, I said, "Alicia, can you forgive my neglect?  We've
been avoiding one another.  Would it be all right if Judy and I come by
tomorrow?  I want to at least partially expiate my ill-treatment with dinner
at a good restaurant, wherever you'd like; else, I'll choose."

My son could have had no idea why my voice sounded so apologetic, no idea
why her face was set so deadpan, and no idea why she hesitated so long
before she replied.  Finally, she relaxed, sat down again, propped her
pretty white crutch against my chair, leaned forward, and looked at my son.
"Would you mind bringing me a coffee refill?"

As he moved out of earshot, Alicia said to me, "You can't begin to
understand how angry I am!  I felt like a stupid fool!  God deliver me from
sanctimonious hypocrites!  You flirted with me for months, enticing me.  You
conned me with snake oil.  You seduced me!  When I succumbed to your
insistent sexual offerings, you rejected me as if I were a soliciting whore
at the very moment your every gesture was pleading for me to open my body
and give you my very being!  You even had the gall to sermonize like some
fundamentalist preacher!  Even now you sit there unable to see the sin
inside yourself you impute to me!  Only because our friendship has been so
longstanding do I hesitate, here and now, to murder you where you sit!  -But
old friends are too valuable to throw away, even when deceived, so we might
again be business associates, you and I; maybe even friends.  But for now,
in your own head, you're immaculate!  You whitewashed wall!  I look at you
and can hardly refrain from spitting in your face!  --
-- You have to be the most considerate and thoughtful gentleman I've ever
been privileged to meet!"

My son returned with the coffee in time to overhear Alicia's last remark.
She looked past him and further skewered me with, "I'm too preoccupied now
even to consider your invitation.  If she'd like, you can ask Judy to call
me so she and I might have lunch soon."

Rising, she kissed my son, turned away, tucked her slender crutch beneath
her coat and left the shop with everyone's eyes fixed on her back as we
watched her graceful ballet across the floor and out the door.

My son asked, "What in the world was all that about?"

I sat and took a long slow swallow of Alicia's abandoned coffee before
answering.

"She was preaching to the choir; she had no clue I already agreed with
everything she could say."

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