Word: mistressful
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Most of the time, Joan Foster is the quietly unremarkable wife of a humorless student radical. In odd stolen hours, she plays mistress to an avant-garde artist who serves as a kind of latter-day Mad Hatter. From both husband and lover, Joan cleverly hides two secret shames: the fact that she produces feverishly romantic gothic novels and her pre-diet-pill memories of a miserably obese childhood. Both are telltale signs of a temperament too florid to suit the doctrinaire, modernist tastes of the men now in her life. One day, seized by a fit of automatic writing...
...second and third sequence, in the late sixties and early seventies, Finney has discovered the dry look and found a mistress, and the Elliots have 'worked out' an arrangement which, both for their consciences and their pocketbooks, hardly works out. "I go through the motions as a providing father as long as you leave me to my own extra-marital devices," Finney stipulates, and the bitter humor is not lost as he agrees to go on as a couple "provided we stay out of each other's personal affairs...
...film, if not the war, ends at the outset of this decade. Finney has begun to chafe and drink under the pressures of holding on to his mistress and landing a higher-level job, and now looks forward to a day when "people will stay together because they really want to." Roberts has become almost catatonic, neglects her housework and her appearance, and stoops, desperately, to the last ploy she can think of to blackmail Finney back: "If you walk out that door," she threatens, "I'll klll myself, and the kids too." But when he goes she pours...
What he really loves is his automobile. He overlooks his wife with her hair up in pink rollers, sagging into an upside-down question mark in her tight slacks. But he lavishes attention on his Mercury mistress, Easy Rider shocks, oversize slickers, dual exhaust. He exults in tinkering with that beautiful engine, lying cool beneath the open hood, ready to respond, quick and fiery, to his touch. The automobile is his love and his sport...
...nothing that Dame Agatha Christie used to be called the mistress of the last-minute switch. For years before her death a year ago at 85, her publishers let it be known that they held two novels "in a vault"-naturally-for posthumous publication. The rumor ran that, not wanting any literary hack to mishandle her characters, Agatha Christie had left books satisfactorily killing off her legendary sleuths, Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple. Sure enough, Poirot came to a violent end in Curtain, when it was finally exhumed and published last year...