Everything and More (48 page)

When she looked at the clock it was 8:20. She had been in this room for nearly an hour. She tore off every garment she had worn with Roy Wace as if the pale silks were Heracles’ cloak burning into her flesh. Glimpsing her pale, twisting reflection in the pier mirror, she went over to stand in front of it.

She gazed at the long, tanned body with its stripes of milky white flesh where her bikini swimsuits covered as if she were confronted by a revelation. This yellow triangle, these full, firm breasts with wide-aureoled apricot nipples comprised her adulthood’s victorious battlefield. When this was a hairless, breastless snake of a girl-child’s body it had endured the ultimate, bloody defeat. This was the body that had carried her through her sentence of childhood, this was the body that she and her friend Roy had clothed in motley. This the body Gerry Horak had awakened and briefly eased of its guilts, this the body that he had impregnated, then casually abandoned. (Rancorous, festering memories of waiting eternal hours outside a shack covered with Algerian ivy, then hearing from a cheesy blonde that he had walked out on both of them.) The body that husbands and lovers had worshiped and roused to climax, yet ultimately had left unsatisfied. She cupped her large resilient breasts, slipping her hands down her sides. How strange that none of her triumphs and torments had left a mark on this body.

After Gerry’s desertion, she had attempted to destroy the baby—and herself, too—by swallowing a great number of pills. But she and the child within her had survived. During that first month of world peace, she had married Firelli—she continued to address her first husband as he was known to the public—in an Episcopal rite performed by a British Army chaplain under the broad, dangling crystals of a Zurich hotel chandelier. Closing her eyes, she could quite clearly see her bridegroom’s wrinkled fingers trembling as they caressed this body, which he was incapable of taking. She had trusted Firelli then, she trusted him still. A luxurious sensation. He had given her son his name—that self-chosen, exuberantly Italian nomenclature. He had given her freedom.
It’s clear as houses that you must get on with a real life and a real husband, Althea, little love, and I seem to be lasting forever.
After the divorce he still imparted his doting, prideful affection on the boy, and on her. If Charles had inherited Gerry’s
creative talent, such a gift surely would have been ascribed to the octogenarian English maestro, but Charles, thank God, might have been parthenogenetically conceived, so like her side was he.

She went into the dressing room, reaching for a robe.

It’s been over for ten years, she thought, mentally articulating each word. It should be nothing to me what Gerry Horak does, or where he is. It’s a crazy, fantastic chance, nothing more, that he, of all men, is attached to Roy Wace. Why should I care?

I’m no longer that miserable, endlessly weeping, suicidal idiot that he left without a good-bye, and in the oldest of lurches.

Yet she was so distracted by the fierce tangle of love, pain, loathing, outraged pride, and unrelinquishable, punitive jealousy that she kept envisioning her hands cutting off the air in Roy’s rounded, freckled throat. It was torment for her to know she was in the same city with the pair.

Why should I stay in Beverly Hills?

There’s no need.

Nevada is the capital of divorce.

Tightening the sash of her tailored white silk robe, she walked along the corridor with its musty tapestries to inform her son of her decision to head for Nevada.

One of the guest suites had been refurbished in Black Watch plaid for Charles’s visits, and a faint, permanent hint of boyish sweat hung in the warm air. He had surrounded himself with the sports paraphernalia of his international boyhood: foils, fencing masks, tennis and squash rackets hung on the walls; a large old sea chest held every type of ball; baseball and cricket bats ranged along the wall where the doting Cunninghams had ordered a hi-fi built in for him.

On the carpet below the turntable, Charles sat with his rather long chin resting on his scabby knees as he listened to his “father’s” latest LP: Beethoven’s Fifth.

Smiling, he raised a hand, a greeting that indicated conversation should wait until the record ended. Althea, surrounded by the triumphant theme, sank into a plaid chair. To constrain her impatient, relentless turmoil, she focused her attention on her son.

Charles had tow hair (hers had been this identical near-white until puberty) of straight, fine-spun texture that, despite recent combing, flopped over a high forehead. He had her refined bone structure. In the French khaki shorts and white shirt that was the summer uniform of the Lexford English School in Geneva, his height seemed precariously fragile, yet he managed to convey an impression of lean power, not the obtrusive strength with which Grover T. Coyne had amassed his incalculable wealth, but a more subtle quality, the self-possession
that universally hardens the ruling elite.

As the boy nodded in time to the Firelli interpretation of Beethoven, his well-shaped, narrow lips were folded in the calm line that she, as a frantically self-conscious girl, had unsuccessfully attempted to form with her own mouth. His eyes were closed. Open, their hazel would show keen intelligence and a hint of remote wariness that was utterly lacking in fear. Though bound with the strongest of silver cords to her son, Althea freely confessed to herself that her tie was not milky pale, tender maternal love, but proud, admiring respect.

Charles knew how to rule. He controlled others at Lexford School not with his revered patronym nor with the huge fortune that would be fed to him through a complex root system of trusts, but by an innate, rational ability to subdue his few inherent failings and call upon his numerous strengths.

Althea saw her son as the vindicatory reverse of her own fabric: the chromosomal weaving had endowed him with the desirable qualities that she lacked—ordered self-assurance and the ability to govern the ominous world of people. She did not realize, because it had been years since Charles had succumbed to an unfettered display of affection, that the seamless wall he had erected around himself was weakest in her direction. He loved her.

The final resounding drum notes of the coda rolled, and the needle automatically raised from the record.

“Where were you for dinner?” Charles was not whining, not reproaching, simply inquiring. His clear, rather deep contralto lengthened the A’s, American style, yet he somehow gave the impression of conversing in the purest Oxford accent. He spoke his various languages in the most cultivated tones—Florentine Italian, Parisian French, Castilian Spanish.

“I met an old friend, Roy Wace. Remember, I’ve mentioned her. We had a hamburger and a malt.”

“Our native food,” he said. It was a small joke for the boy held three citizenships: the Swiss of his birth, the British of Firelli, and American, by virtue of having been registered at the consulate in Zurich.

She smiled. After a moment she said, “I’m going to Nevada for my divorce.”

“Why?”

“It only takes six weeks there. I could be back in Geneva with you a little bit after your term begins.”

“Sounds a good idea,” he said. “You know, Aubrey isn’t such a rotten sort.”

“We’re still friends.”

“Without him, though, I feel closer to Father.”

“Me too,” she said.

The uncomplicated ease of their exchange soothed Althea. The single resemblance between her son and his natural father was this ability to communicate directly with her. This inheritance she seldom dwelled on. She had no desire to entangle the cresting emotions she bore Charles with the snare of love, hatred and bitter desolation surrounding her few months with Gerry.

Going to the shelves, she selected another Firelli album. “Brahms’ First Symphony?”

“Good,” he said.

“Would you like to go with me?” She fitted the record on the spindle. “I’ll be at Archie Coyne’s ranch near Reno. It must be deathly hot there now, but if you come, we could get in a few early-morning rides.”

“I’ve always wanted to try a Western saddle,” Charles said. Then his face lit in a seldom-used, ultimately disarming boyish smile. “Cowboys and Indians.”

She ruffled the fine, near-white hair, the only show of maternal warmth tolerable to either. “After the Brahms, it’s bedtime,” she said.

*   *   *

Two mornings later, when Roy called Belvedere to firm up their lunch date, Luther, the old butler, told her Mrs. Wimborne and Master Firelli had left town.

  
45
  

Roy, following Althea’s chary advice, did not tell Gerry about running into her old friend.

That first week of September, a heat wave clamped down on
Southern California. Light shivered above the softened asphalt streets of Beverly Hills, gardens wilted despite the constant whir of sprinklers, and blazing sunlight assaulted the eyes. Few of Patricia’s customers ventured from their poolsides.

Roy was like a medieval taster about her work: as an additional courtesy to her customers she had always taken the time to try on the various designers, ascertaining for herself how each garment fitted and hung. Now, in the empty, air-conditioned shop, she critically donned the autumn line, unable to prevent herself from eyeing all of the pale-hued size twelves that—with her employee’s discount—she could afford. Would this be an appropriate informal wedding gown? Checking invoices at her desk outside Mr. Fineman’s office, she found herself scribbling
Mrs. Gerrold K. Horak
and
Roy Horak
on her scratch pad then shamefacedly tearing up the sheets.

On Thursday evening, Mr. Fineman said in his New York intonations, “The way business is, Roy, you might as well take off Friday and Saturday.”

Gerry was in one of those hiatuses devoted to brooding that, though regenerative to an artist’s creativity, are more demanding than work itself. He was primed for a little fun. That weekend they lolled by the ocean’s crowded edge in Santa Monica and Roy turned crimson, popping out in freckles. They lugged a picnic basket to the Hollywood Bowl for a Peggy Lee concert, they finished a quart of 31 Flavors Fudge Ripple ice cream, they made love outdoors in the dappling shade of the pepper tree.

Sunday cooled off a little, and in the evening she barbecued ribs, which they ate while lolling on the hay-scented ledge. Darkness was falling.

“I’ve never been happy quite like this,” she said.

“Damn right,” he said, grinning.

“Gerry,” she blurted, not really considering her words, only her primal mating urge, “it’d be even more perfect, married.”

He pulled away, sitting up. In the dusk, his wide-planed face seemed thoughtful rather than angry.

Encouraged, she said, “We get along so perfectly.”

“Babe,” he said, his voice softer than usual, “we had this out in Paris. No permanent entanglements.”

“It’s been good for you, too.”

“Yes, but I’ve had in mind to take off and travel. Maybe Kenya. The colors and light there are meant to be a knockout.”

“I wouldn’t tie you down. You could come and go.”

“Promises are just hot air, Roy.”

“I mean them.”

“Sure you do. Now. But later they won’t mean a good goddamn.”

“Darling, I wouldn’t get in your way for the world.”

He held her wrist, his thumb moving gently on the inner veins. “Say, you aren’t knocked up, are you?”

She knew she ought to lie. But she was the world’s most rotten liar. “No,” she whispered.

“Well, then what’s wrong with the way we are now? Free. We have all the good parts.”

“I’d be so sweet to you.”

“Christ, Roy! Big deal if somebody mumbles a few words over us and we sign a certificate. How will that make you any sweeter, or our life any better?”

“It’s how people live,” she said. She might never get up the nerve again. “Didn’t we have to lie to the landlord here and tell him we were married before he’d rent to us? I can’t tell them at work that I live with you, or the Finemans would fire me.”

“You should have picked yourself a junior executive.” Gerry’s voice rang more loudly in the hot, barbecue-scented darkness.

“The minute you want out, you’re free to go.”