An Idol for Others (17 page)

Clara was waiting for him. She didn’t press him with questions about Mrs. Wilton. He assured himself that nothing had changed while being aware that something had. He felt recharged with vitality. He was in a better temper with her than he had been for the last couple of weeks. She hadn’t hemmed him in. He could strip with all the girls at the theater, but he didn’t want to slip from the tether, whose constraint had become essential to him. He had to show Clara that he still needed her. He needed to need her for life to evolve in the way he had chosen.

When he took her up to bed, he was very aware of the gadget cutting him off from complete access to her body. He wanted to be married and start having children. That would be the ultimate fulfillment. The excitement of knowing that he had come within seconds of filling Sophie’s body with his life had made him feel like a god.

The next day, David showed him a letter from the film company that had signed Greg Boland. It was cautious but didn’t flatly reject the idea of financing the play. Walter spent the rest of the day in a state of high euphoria. Clara had been right; they could beat the world together. The little interlude with Sophie was so unimportant that it might not have happened. Then he received a letter from Johnny the following day saying that he had heard Michel Leclos had been killed and was trying to find out whether his rights would be affected.

Walter was plunged into gloom. This was an omen; he would never do the play. Clara was somehow to blame. With the might of the Washburns behind them, it would have been only a small stumbling block. International strings would have been pulled. Without them, or similar powerful backing, he might as well give up. The only success he could count on was in bed. His thoughts turned once more to Sophie.

He was glad when Clara decided to stay home that night to write the family lawyer about French inheritance laws. His plans were immediately made. He attended most performances because he learned a lot from audience reactions, but it wasn’t required. When he reached the theater, he conferred with David and was lent the keys to the garage apartment. As soon as the performance started, he caught up with Sophie as she was leaving the theater and murmured brief instructions. He went back and watched the play for a few minutes so they wouldn’t be seen leaving together.

He enjoyed taking his clothes off for her again. She was chattily enthusiastic about his body, and he was pleased to find it responding so vigorously to a girl who meant nothing to him beyond her physical perfection. The only moments he found genuinely exciting were when they were joined in a natural state and he could indulge in thoughts of filling her with child. Again, he remained within her until it was almost too late, while she begged him to go on to the end. They stayed for an hour and then returned to the theater, separately for the last 50 yards; and he watched the second half of the performance.

The following week Clara received voluminous replies from her lawyers and stayed at home for two nights in a row to attend to her correspondence. On each occasion Walter took advantage of David’s and Sophie’s hospitality. It was an escape, a momentary relaxation of his growing restlessness as time passed and hopes of a production faded. Maybe Clara was right. Maybe they shouldn’t rush into marriage. David had always insisted it was a mistake. Sophie meant nothing, but at least she offered him a further exercise of his masculinity. On the second night, David came rushing up to him as he reentered the theater.

“Thank God, you’re here,” he said, keeping his voice down. “You may be in trouble. Clara’s been here.”

Walter’s face froze. “Really? Why?”

“No particular reason, as far as I can tell. Checking up on you, maybe. I did what I could. I told her you’d been around all evening. I said I’d seen you here just a minute before she turned up.”

“Thanks, old pal. When was she here?”

“She left about ten minutes ago. She wasn’t here long. Less than half an hour.”

“I see.” His mind worked rapidly, setting up a line of defense. “As far as she knows, I could’ve come back right after she left and been gone only 20 minutes or so. Is that it?”

“That’s the way we could make it look in court.”

He curbed an impulse to follow her home immediately; it would only make him look guilty. He would go through the rest of the evening in an ordinary way and give himself plenty of time to prepare for an interrogation. “OK, so I went for a walk for 15 or 20 minutes,” he told David. “She said nothing about wanting to see me for any particular reason? I mean, she didn’t say she wanted me to come right home?”

“Not a word. She carried it off very well, but I don’t think she liked not finding you.”

“This is ridiculous. I’m barely 20, and I’m already behaving like an old married man.” He gave David’s back a pat and went in to watch the end of the play.

He walked home and found her waiting, tight-lipped. She was sitting in the living room and didn’t move when he entered.

“I hear you came to the theater,” he greeted her. “Anything up?”

“You’d know more about that than I.”

“I mean, was there something you wanted to see me about?”

“Yes. I wanted to see why you’re so anxious for me to stay home these days.”

“I thought you had things to do that were more important than hanging around the theater.”

“You too, apparently. What happened to your sacred duty to watch every performance?”

There was no doubt that this was to be a serious confrontation. He concentrated his guards to parry her attack; but in the back of his mind, his observer’s eye remained alert. This was a classic scene of drama, the wronged wife, the guilty husband; and he wanted to record it all and see how the drama was expressed in gesture and intonation. “I got bored tonight all of a sudden. I walked down to the beach and back. It seems we just missed. David says you left a couple of minutes before I came back.”

“David! How convenient. That little Sophie wasn’t there either.”

He met her eye easily. There was an attacking edge in her voice, but he kept his light and disengaged. “What do you mean?”

“That’s a simple English declarative sentence. Perhaps you’d prefer to make it a French farce.
Sophie n’était pas là non plus
.”

A nice touch; he noted it. “You took a head count of all the apprentices, and Sophie was the only one who wasn’t there?”

“The only girl. Curious coincidence department.”

“Not really. You know she doesn’t live there. I guess she goes home when she hasn’t anything to do.”

“And you follow her? Or does dear David let you use his place for a quick fuck? Anything for his beloved Walter. He was flustered. I can tell you that. I almost went down there to find out but decided not to lower myself. I suppose I should expect this sort of thing. You’re such a baby.”

So much for the garage; he couldn’t risk using it again. He must never forget that her mind was as agile as his. “So I’m supposed to have had a quick fuck with Sophie, as you so elegantly put it. What do I do now? Utter an impassioned denial?”

“I don’t care what you do. You can have your Sophie, if you have such primitive tastes. What I can’t stand is your thinking you can make a fool of me.”

He sat down and wondered why he had moved at that particular moment. He looked as her and wished he could take her at her word. It would be so much simpler to tell her the unimportant truth and continue to have his plaything when convenient and without subterfuge. He smiled at her and put all his conscious charm into it. “Nobody can make a fool out of you, Clarry. Considering our sex life, do you honestly think I need anyone else?”

“I don’t know. You and your goddamned cock. People fall for you. I understand that. I understand something else too. I don’t care what you may think, girls are the same as men. If you start playing around, so will I. You’re not the only attractive man in the world.”

He sat forward, stung. She wouldn’t dream of giving herself to another man. He hated himself for having made her say it. Once said, it was the sort of thing that could grow into a possibility. “You know perfectly well, Clarry, you’re the only girl I want to spend the rest of my life with.”

Her throat worked, but she was not so easily disarmed. She fixed him with challenging eyes. “Thanks, but we’re not talking about the rest of your life. Were you with Sophie this evening?”

“Of course not,” he said, his voice still convincing but his eyes meeting hers with greater difficulty.

“If you’re lying, you’ll be sorry. You know I can find out. I’ve already decided to ask Mrs. Wilton about last week.”

He sprang up and turned his back on her, no longer able to face her. A show of anger was the only way out. “I won’t have this, Clarry. What’s it all about? Why have you got Sophie on the brain?”

“Because I’ve seen her put her hand on your cock, that’s why.”

He started to speak but couldn’t. He forgot to feign anger, as all that he counted on most in life seemed to crumble from under him. How could he expect her to love him if she had seen what she said she’d seen? He knew how much infidelity hurt. It had almost driven him crazy, and he had sworn never to be so affected again. The awful fact was that she might have seen Sophie touch him. They had exchanged secret caresses around the theater, no more than playful; but when described in words they sounded squalid. He turned back to her without looking at her and dropped into his chair and put his head in his hands and kneaded his forehead. “All right. I didn’t go to Mrs. Wilton’s,” he admitted, steeling himself for the end of his life with her and of all the ambitions he had centered on her.

“I see. You were with Sophie. You could count on David to cover for you.” She made a contemptuous sound in the back of her throat. David was the enemy. She didn’t care about Sophie. David, encouraging and protecting all of Walter’s weaknesses. She had never quite believed in the innocence of his interest in the pale poetic blond last year. The ambivalence of his lovemaking was a source of wonder and discovery, his infinite tenderness, his narcissistic pleasure in her infatuation with his body, his rare bursts of male aggressiveness. She had learned that it was an essential element to the magic she required in life and which he provided in such abundant measure. What could little Sophie, or any ordinary girl, understand of such things? It took a tough, masculine intelligence like hers to know them and cater to them. She knew the enemy. “Did he let you use his place?” she demanded.

“No. Certainly not I … we … She doesn’t have a gadget like yours. We haven’t really been to bed together in the real sense of the word. She just–I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I’m fascinated.” Her voice was cold and implacable. “Does she just suck your cock?”

“Don’t be disgusting.”

“If it’s disgusting, why do you let it happen? I like to suck your cock. What’s disgusting about that?”

“What we do has nothing to do with anybody else.” He dropped his hands and looked at her again, amazed that she was still speaking to him. She filled him with a sudden poignant awareness of how inconceivable life would be without her. He wanted to beg her forgiveness, but to do so would cause dislocation between them, like a picture set crooked in its frame. He had conquered her and asserted his domination of her. To retreat from that position might end this misery, but it would also end his hold over her. He knew instinctively that she wanted him triumphant in all circumstances. “It’s
not
the same for men as it is for girls.” he declared. “If I get a hard-on–Sophie has the kind of looks that do that to men–if she sees it and does something about it, what am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t much care. If you have a hard-on and she opens your pants and does whatever she does do, well, that’s that. But even you wouldn’t let it happen in front of the whole theater. You have to plan. You have to find a place to go. You have to invent stories about Mrs. Wilton. What about that?”

“I didn’t invent anything. Mrs. Wilton did invite me for a drink that night. You can ask her if you want. I made an excuse at the last minute.”

“And went sneaking off somewhere with Sophie.”

“I didn’t sneak. She asked me to come by her house. How could I expect anything to happen there, with her parents and everything? Before I had time to think, she’d taken me to her room and pulled her dress off. She has a beautiful body. That’s all there is to it.”

“And you didn’t really go to bed with her?”

“No, you know how I hate those things men are supposed to have for every occasion.”

“You simply romped around the room with no clothes on.”

“You can put it that way if you like.” Real anger was coming to his rescue. She was making him look ridiculous, but the heavens hadn’t fallen. He had done something wrong, but if she could practically make a joke out of it, it couldn’t be as wrong as he had thought. “You wouldn’t be in a state if I looked at a picture of a beautiful naked girl. The museums are full of them.”

She uttered her harsh abrupt laughter. “Really. You’re such a child. The next thing I know you’ll be masturbating.” Her voice suddenly lashed him. “Pictures of naked girls can’t touch you and suck your cock and make you come.”

“All right, Clarry. It was stupid and wrong.” The unexpected constriction of his throat made his voice a growl. She was hurt. He hadn’t realized how much hurting her would hurt him. What he had done with Sophie had nothing to do with Clara, but her finding out had a great deal to do with her. Was that the point of fidelity? He wanted to erase the last week and find words to prove to her that it hadn’t happened. “You’ve got to realize it wasn’t a great plot the way you make it sound. Not many girls are so open about wanting boys, as she calls them. She’s a nymphomaniac. She’s so dumb that she hardly seemed real to me. She is beautiful. I can’t help paying attention to beautiful people, but that has nothing to do with sex. Or not much. At least, it shouldn’t. I know that. Nobody exists for me the way you do. That must be obvious to you.”

“What’s obvious is what we’re talking about. If you think other girls wanting you will drive me mad with desire to keep you, you’re wrong. If you’re easy to get, I don’t want you.”