A Certain Age (28 page)

“I don't want to stop,” she confesses.

He closes his eyes and pulls his hand free, and she holds the back of his neck and leans into his chest. Well, his pulse is certainly faster
now,
she thinks, listening to the eager contractions of muscle. Thump-
thump
! Thump-
thump
! His breath is humid in her hair. She laughs against his shirt and murmurs, “At least that's over, anyway. At least we can't regret we never even kissed.”

He says, “Are your servants living in?”

“I think so. They're supposed to be.”

He strokes the back of her hair. She thinks maybe she'll lift her head and kiss him again, just to see what's next; and then, belatedly, she realizes what he meant about the servants and her blood goes whoosh in her veins. Is it really possible? Of course it is. There's nothing to stop them, is there? No parents and chaperones, no unhealthy repression of the sexual instinct. She's
almost sick at the prospect, dizzy with either daring or anticipation or fear. What would Father say? Father doesn't matter anymore. Father doesn't exist. This kiss—this act—a declaration of independence.

She lifts her head. “Are you going to kiss me again, or are you going to take me home?”

He reaches back and unwinds her arm, kissing the inside of her wrist as it passes by. “Take you home, I guess,” he says, and he releases the floor lever with his left hand and presses the reverse pedal with his right foot.

THEY HEAD WEST, TOWARD QUEENS
Village and Jamaica Avenue, and the sun is starting to fall, casting a glare across the windshield. The empty roads fill suddenly with traffic, and Octavian steps gently on the brake and slips the engine back into low gear.

“What's the matter?” Sophie asks.

“I think it's the racetrack,” he says. “It's Belmont day.”

“Belmont day?”

“The Belmont Stakes. Big race for three-year-olds. The track's right over there. Belmont Park.” He lifts a single index finger from the steering wheel to point north.

“I didn't know you followed the races.”

“An old hobby.” He pauses. “I saw Man o' War win the Dwyer Stakes a couple of years ago, over at Aqueduct. That was some race.” Another pause. He rubs the wheel with his thumbs and adds, “That was the last time I went, actually.”

“Horses and airplanes.” She laughs. “That's you, exactly.”

“Is it?”

“The past and the future, running inside you like parallel lines. And you want to straddle them both. You see the beauty in both. Horses
and
airplanes.”

The car ahead lurches forward. Octavian moves the throttle, and the Ford follows, into a skein of dust, growling with effort.

“Maybe,” he says.

They've stopped at a drive. A long line of cars waits to emerge from the beaten earth of a parking area. Octavian sticks out his head and addresses the driver of an elderly electric Columbia runabout. “Hey, buddy! Who won?”

“Pillory!” the man calls back. “Beat the favorite by three lengths.”

Octavian pulls back in and turns to Sophie, smiling perhaps as wide as she's ever seen him, smiling like a hungry crocodile, teeth aligned in perfect order. “Well, that's something, anyway. I just won a hundred and forty bucks.”

BUT SOMETHING HAPPENS, AS THEY
cross the Queensboro Bridge and crawl back into Manhattan. The mood shifts and falls, like the sun dropping behind the buildings to the west, and the echoing metropolitan noise petrifies the air between them. Sophie, thinking for maybe the hundredth time about the kiss at the airfield, feels for the first time that they have done something wrong.

“I don't know . . .” she begins as they turn down First Avenue.

“Know what?”

“Whether you should stay the night!”

“Stay the
night
?” He sounds stunned.

“Didn't you mean . . . ?”

“What?”

“When you asked about the servants.”

The uptown traffic is sweating and impatient, all eager to get home after a long day's toil. The Ford has rumbled to a stop. In the face of this banal detail—people navigating the city's dirty, crowded, eternal grid—Sophie is overcome with embarrassment. Octavian's hand on her breast—how shameful! When, just that morning, her father was deemed guilty of her mother's murder.

“Sophie,” Octavian says, “I didn't mean . . . What I meant was that you shouldn't be alone. All by yourself in that house. I meant that we would find
someone to stay, if the servants weren't there when we got back, because the reporters might find you, or some crazy fellow who's fixed on the trial, or God knows what else.”

“Oh,” she says miserably. The car moves forward again, another few feet.

“The thing is, Theresa's expecting me for dinner.”

“Of course.”

“I'm already late.”

“Then you should hurry back.”

“Sophie, don't be sore. I can't just—I can't be cruel. I owe her everything. There's—well, there's more to her than you think.”

“I don't want you to be cruel. Didn't I say that already?”

“I'm sorry. I shouldn't have kissed you like that. I've been regretting it ever—”

“Don't! Don't regret it. It's just a kiss. She has to give us something, doesn't she? She doesn't get to keep all of you.” She stares down at her lap, her rumpled navy skirt, her stained white gloves clutched miserably atop. The necessity of Octavian's leg right up against hers, on the narrow seat of a Model T.

He brings his fist down on his leg and swears under his breath.

The lurching seems to be making her a little sick. She turns her head again and looks out the side, where a flower shop is just closing for the evening. A man in a dirty apron rolls in a green-striped awning. Roses are in season, blooming inside every inch of the rectangular plate-glass window, and a sign in the corner reads
WEDDINGS GLADLY CATERED FOR. INQUIRE WITHIN.

“Horse and airplane,” Sophie murmurs to herself.

“What's that?”

She turns back and reaches for his hand. “I'm not going to make you choose. I'd never do that to you. You were meant to make some other girl happy, some
woman,
and I'll just take off and soar into the sky, and no one will catch me.”

He doesn't reply, and the rest of the drive is just like that, New York talk
ing around them, life going on, stopping and starting, noisy and arrhythmic, and Sophie thinks,
So this is good-
bye.

BY THE TIME THEY REACH
the house on Thirty-Second Street, the sky is purple and the sun has fallen behind the buildings to the west, and Julie Schuyler has taken possession of the topmost step, wearing a beaded dress that catches a glitter or two from the streetlights. A sparkling clip adorns the side of her bobbed hair, sagging a little, as if she's just returned from a night out. Or maybe desecration is the intended effect? She rises to her feet when the Ford pulls up to the curb.

Octavian peers across Sophie, through the passenger window. “Who's that?”

“Julie Schuyler.” Sophie tugs ferociously on the door handle. “There might be news.”

But Julie just brushes down her dress as Sophie climbs out of the car. Her smile is crimson and insincere. “I thought you shouldn't be alone tonight. I can see you've already had the same bright idea, however.”

Behind Sophie, the other door slams shut. Octavian, revealing himself. Julie's gaze lifts, takes in the sight, and returns to Sophie. Her eyebrows, freshly plucked, are high and delicate on her forehead.

“Mr. Rofrano was just taking me home,” Sophie says.

“I'm sure he was. And now that I know you're in good hands, I'll be on my way.”

Sophie turns her head. Octavian's still standing by the driver's door, watching them. His hands rest lightly on the frame, dressed in leather driving gloves. His flat cap is drawn low over his forehead.

She turns back to Julie. “He wasn't staying, though.”

“No?”

“No. Just took me for a drive. I needed a little air.”

“Is that so?”

Sophie holds up her hand. “Word of honor.”

The crimson lips part a little. Maybe it's a smile, maybe not. You never really know with Julie; you never know exactly where you stand with her. That's part of the thrill, isn't it? Unpicking the threads of her costume.

“Well, then.” Julie Schuyler lifts one bare hand and makes a shooing movement toward the Ford, sending a tangle of gold bangles to crash around her elbow. “We'll just send him back to Mama, won't we.”

JULIE SCHUYLER ALWAYS KNOWS WHERE
the skeletons lurk in the closet, and she likewise always knows where the bottle of liquor lurks in the cabinet. She produces one now and holds it high, examining the label against the light. “Kentucky bourbon, by God. Where did you get this?”

Sophie shrugs. “I don't know. It's my father's.”

“Nothing more suitable to zozzle us tonight, then.”

“I don't want to get zozzled.”

“Try,” says Julie, and voilà, they're sitting on the parlor sofa, trading the bottle between them while the passing headlamps trace, at irregular intervals, along the cracks in the drapes. Julie lights a cigarette and asks what Sophie's planning to do now.

“I was thinking of applying for a job in an engineer's office,” Sophie says, swishing the bourbon in the bottle and wishing she liked the taste. She thinks,
Octavian's having dinner with her now, remember?
Octavian's kissing her now, and you
told
him he could, you little fool, you stupid noble little girl. You sent him off to her.

Sophie draws breath, tilts back, and forces the burn down her throat.

“A job? What about your money?”

“I don't know. It's Father's money.”

“Well, it's yours now, isn't it? I mean, once he's—
well
.”

Once he's dead. Obviously, Father will shortly be sentenced to death, won't he? For the crime of capital murder. And soon after that, they will carry out the sentence. Swift, efficient justice. A life for a life. One man to the gallows, another man to Mrs. Marshall. Sophie all by herself.

She lifts the bottle and swallows again.

“That wasn't very tactful, was it?” Julie says. “My apologies. I know it's dreadful. He's your father, after all.”

“Yes.” Sophie's eyes are stinging. She blinks and says, “I don't know about the money. I haven't thought about it.”

“What a good girl you are. Thank goodness you've got me to think about it for you. All that lovely dough, divided into loaves between the two of you. You could open your own engineering office, if you like.” She swallows, much more luxuriously than Sophie, cigarette balanced between her fingers, and hands back the bottle. “You could do whatever you want.”

“I don't know how I can touch his money.”

“You'll find it in you, I'm sure. We always do.”

The third swallow isn't so bad. Sophie feels she's getting the hang of this. She wipes the corner of her mouth with her thumb and asks Julie if she can try her cigarette.

“Have your own,” Julie says generously, and she reaches for her pocketbook and rummages inside. Her cigarette case is enameled in a giddy red-and-white design, edged with gold. She produces a long, new cigarette and sticks it between Sophie's lips. “You really need lipstick to do it properly,” she advises.

“I left my lipstick behind at the hotel.”

“I've got some.” Julie paints Sophie's lips, working around the unlit cigarette. Her eyes narrow in concentration, and Sophie notices she's got blacking on her eyelashes, and a very thin line of kohl articulates the shape of her eyelid. When she draws back to judge her handiwork, she looks adventurous and unnaturally wide-awake, as if her blue irises are jumping from her face. “There. Much better,” she says, and she sets aside the lipstick and lights Sophie's cigarette with a match struck from the side of her red-and-white enamel case.

LATER, WHEN THEY'VE FORAGED FOR
dinner in the icebox and both servants have failed to turn up, Sophie invites Julie to stay for the night. She
glances at her slender gold wristwatch, and then at the plain black-and-white clock on the kitchen wall.

“Well. Since you so obviously need me.”

“I don't need you.”

“Yes, you do. Someone needs to take your mind off the fact that your beau is having dinner with another woman at this very moment, and probably more than dinner.”

“He's not my beau.”

“But you're in love with him.”

“It doesn't make any difference, does it? Nothing makes any difference.” Sophie shuts one eye and stares at the inch or two of bourbon remaining in the bottle, which stands in the center of the table, like an honored guest. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”

“That's Shakespeare.”

“Yes.”

Julie wags a finger. “You're not allowed to go flinging around Billy-boy at a time like this. Willy-nilly.”

“Says who?”

“Says me. You can jus—you can justify anything with a little Shakespeare. Give yourself a nice glossy shield of—cleverness.”

“But we
are
clever, darling. We're awfully clever. Look at us!” Sophie opens her arms. “
You're
going to start an engineering firm with me, and
we're
going to share a grand apartment and have lots of lovers and never,
ever
get married.”

“Says who?”

“Says me. That's what I'm going to do.”

Julie shakes her head. “You can count me out, sister.”

“Oh no you don't. You're brave enough to get me into this, but you won't see it through?”

“But it's different with you. It's
your
money. Or
will
be yours, when your father—well.”