Her Hungry Heart (18 page)

He had been right all those years ago. For them there would never be a beginning, a middle or an end to their love story. It would just be. Everything they would ever have together would only work in a wholly selfish sexual world for them. That was the power of their attraction. It was
what gave them continuity, just being together, in flagrant sexual bliss. It was there they created their world, there that they would live free in wild sexual abandon. It was enough for them that they were there. Enough that destiny had slapped them in the face.

They kissed several times as they walked arm in arm from the studio, down the stairs and into the library. She ordered smoked salmon sandwiches and quails’ eggs for lunch for them in the library, a bottle of Pouilly Fuissé, and hot black coffee.

One of the revelations about their relationship was they never had to talk about it, nor did they talk very much about anything else. The outside world simply didn’t enter their life. And so they were both easy about whatever it was he had to say to Barbara. It could change nothing for them. It was a luxury a woman rarely has with a man, a luxury two lovers rarely have. Neither of them was blasé about that, nor unappreciative.

He stood by the window, looking out on Fifth Avenue, then turned to face her. ‘You can imagine my surprise when I went with Mimi to the flat on Central Park West and saw your photographs in several silver frames dotted around the living room.’

‘Yes, I can.’

‘She describes you as her best friend, the person she would most like to emulate when she grows up. Barbara, Mimi loves you.’

‘Yes, I know, but as a friend. Mimi and I are the best of friends. We have taken care, very great care, not to strain our friendship by taking liberties with it. Mimi has remarkable qualities, that’s what draws me to her.’

‘Yes, she is an admirable child. She always was. Even as an infant she had a self-contained, silent quality about her. She was a very good baby. Once I was over the emotional impact of our reunion, we picked up as if there had been no separation at all. It’s as if those years apart never existed.’

They were gazing directly at one another. She sensed that he wasn’t going to ask her about Mimi, and that somehow made her feel uncomfortable. She volunteered, ‘Yes, I did know she was your daughter right from the moment I met her. It was an extraordinary coincidence that brought us together. And no, I never told her I knew you. It wasn’t possible. It was a matter of loyalties. I think you can appreciate that. Loyalties, and an understanding of your predicament: having to do what you thought best for Mimi, even though she might not think so herself, gambling that the choices you made for her were the right ones.

‘When you appeared several days ago, well, it seemed somehow awkward, not at all the right moment to tell you about my friendship with Mimi. I don’t think you or she know how the lies you have had to live with to survive have affected you, or the people who have become involved with you. You and Mimi have built a wall of silence and secrecy which I doubt will ever be penetrated. I felt compromised by my loyalties in that room in the Plaza, but then I was able to see clearly my position in your lives. I have, you see, been true to all of us, you and Mimi and myself. And that, Karel, will not change. I intend my relationship with Mimi to remain as it is. Best friends. I see no reason for that to change.’

A discreet knock at the door. She crossed the room to open it for Lee. There were smoked salmon sandwiches: small squares of brown bread, thick butter and succulent slices of Scottish salmon, with a lick of lemon juice and lots of freshly milled black pepper. Barbara took a porcelain plate and placed several small sandwiches on it while Karel poured the wine. She went to sit on the arm of a leather winged chair. The chilled wine was dry, with just the right hint of fruitiness. Its taste seemed perfect. Karel sat in the same chair and took one of the sandwiches she offered him. Very cautiously – no need to spill a good wine – he pulled
her off the arm of the chair into his lap. For some time they sat there savouring their sandwiches and wine. She was able to reach for the bottle to refill their glasses without disturbing them. He raised her hand and kissed it. Then, gazing into her eyes, he told her, ‘Her name is Lydia. It was a marriage of convenience arranged by our parents. We were both very spoilt, frivolous and young, with no interest in settling down to marriage. She was amazingly beautiful, selfish and capricious. Manipulative as hell. There was in her a basic dishonesty. She had no sense of loyalty, could never really understand right from wrong. She was amoral. But very beautiful and flirtatious. We disliked each other, except for the sex. We knew that two days after the engagement. The sex worked for us, but we had no illusions. We saw it as a saving grace to the marriage, nothing more. We were in an unworkable situation. Neither of us wanted to marry, and most certainly not to each other. But we would not go against our families, even though the more I came to know her, the more I considered talking to my father, at least making an attempt to get out of it. I was spared that. Lydia and I made an agreement, we had to. She became pregnant with our son. It was more a pact. Since it was to be a marriage of convenience that neither of us wanted, we would allow ourselves the freedom to go our separate ways, as long as we kept up a façade and were discreet. We ignored each other’s lovers, our promiscuity. Lydia resented her pregnancy, giving me a son, and laid claim to him as if she’d produced him by virgin birth. But that didn’t stop her from abandoning him when it suited her. Mimi was conceived during a yachting trip around the Greek Islands, a family affair where we had to put on a good show for both sets of parents. Lydia’s second pregnancy was easy and she was happy. Those nine months were the best we ever had together. But once Mimi was born, neither of us was able to settle. Fact is, we were incompatible. Oh,
there were times when she was great with the children, but she was never with them for very long. She was always travelling.

‘In Paris she met and fell in love with the painter Auroyo. She took our son with her, and left Mimi to me. She was famous before the war for being his mistress, and then as his model. My son was painted, too. Auroyo disliked the name Lydia, he called her Marianne. She was obsessively in love with him. On rare occasions, when she was jealous of the other women, or of his fame, she would desert him and come home to us. He would come after her. That was the pattern of their lives and, to be honest, I didn’t care one way or the other about her or the life she had chosen to live. I had Mimi, the women I wanted, my estates and money. I lived as I pleased, went where I wanted to go. Mimi was happy, a bright, loving child. When she did see her mother, she thought her a beautiful princess from some fairy tale. Her wet-nurse, Mashinka, and Tatayana, her nanny-cum-tutor, were her real mother-figures. And she had me, an adoring father, who took her with me most everywhere I went. Ours was a bad, worse than bad, a rotten marriage. But we never dissolved it. Finally Lydia abandoned us for good.’

Barbara was amazed by the story. Paintings of Marianne were adorning every great modern museum in the world. Barbara had spent innumerable hours studying the Auroyo paintings of her. They were works of twentieth-century genius. The model’s reputation was legendary. Karel was being generous about her compared to the stories that circulated in the art world. Her tantrums were notorious.

‘Auroyo fell in love with an eighteen-year-old beauty, a would-be painter called Clementine. He brought her into their villa in the south of France and used her for his model. His relationship with Lydia was finished but she clung on, until she manipulated the girl out of the house and herself back into Auroyo’s favour.

‘Once I was out of Czechoslovakia I went to her in Paris and warned her of what I thought was coming. I begged her and Auroyo to leave France. I even suggested that she should come with or without Auroyo – to England with us and then on to America, if it could be managed. I would do what I could for them. I wanted her to care for the children, I had a war to wage, a country and a heritage to fight for, as well as my family.

‘She was appalled at the idea of leaving Paris or Auroyo. We parted on very bad terms for the first time. Auroyo did his best for them during the Occupation, even though he was finished with her. He saved my son, but she, by her own vanity and selfishness, ended up in Belsen. There were four American passports delivered by Mr Bensen the other night. They were for my son and Lydia, as well as Mimi and myself. I found her, you see. She had only just survived Belsen concentration camp. She has been ill for a very long time, and would not travel until her looks and her health were restored. She and my son arrive in a week’s time.’

He eased himself out from under Barbara and kissed her on the forehead before removing the empty plate from her hands. He placed several more sandwiches on it. He filled their glasses, sat on the arm of her chair, and ate one of the sandwiches and drank from his glass.

‘I don’t know what I am meant to say to all this.’

‘Nothing, there is nothing to say. It doesn’t call for comment. What it’s telling you is that I’m trying to put a family of sorts together for Mimi and Laslo, no matter how complex, how fragmented it may be, to give them a home. I intend to make our family work this time because we all of us need the support of a family to get on with our lives. Where my marriage failed, our family will not. Neither Lydia nor I have any illusions about our marriage. It didn’t work before the war, nor will it now. But we need each other. Lydia intends to do her best for the children, but we are talking of a wrecked woman trying to put a severely
damaged mind and body together again. I’m telling you all this because I want you to understand that when I walked in here several days ago, I had not planned for us to happen again, although I had hoped it might. Now that it has, not to tell you would have been to deceive you, and that I could not do.’

‘And if, when you came here the other day –’ He interrupted her guessing correctly what she was going to ask.

‘I would have told you nothing. I would have handed you the flowers, then taken you to lunch and said thank you for a great wartime frolic. But, the way it is between us, you had to know that my first priority has to be the family, at least until the children are grown and have made lives for themselves.’

Any other woman would have read that in half a dozen different ways, all promising a future. Barbara had no need to play that game with herself. She had seen too many women make that mistake and pay for it with broken hearts and bitter recriminations for perfectly good lovers. Instead she asked the only thing that seemed relevant to Karel’s story. ‘How much of this does Mimi know?’ Rising from the chair to walk to the desk, she sat on its edge, next to where Karel was now standing.

‘Mimi seems to be fourteen going on forty. I’ve told her everything, more or less as I’ve told it you. I thought the truth about us, our limitations and human frailties, was better to be shown and accepted by Mimi than pretending Lydia and I are something we can never be. Rightly or wrongly, it’s better for us all to start to live together as we mean to go on. You see, something had to be said. Mimi had never been given an explanation for Lydia’s disappearance, nor her brother’s. I think in her mind she assumed they were dead, although I had always told her they were away and maybe one day might come back.’

He paused. The room was very quiet, Barbara and Karel
gazing into each other’s eyes, studying each other’s faces, feeling once again the beat of their hearts. The outside world and all the complexities that go with it receded, as if swept away by an imperceptible, warm breeze. Barbara opened the buttons on her shirt. Karel observed her with admiring eyes. She slipped her arms seductively from the sleeves and the shirt dropped on to the desk.

She caressed her breasts, took her nipples between her fingers and teased them, and closed her eyes for a few seconds savouring the excitement she felt in showing him her erotic needs. He removed her hands, turned them up and kissed the palms, licked them with the point of his tongue. He wrapped her arms around his waist and kissed her. Her lips parted and they felt the inside of each other’s mouths, the taste of each other. Karel picked up her shirt and helped her on with it. He held her close and told her, ‘Mimi has a long-time engagement with her schoolmates to go on a class outing to Washington D.C., an educational tour of the Capitol. I wouldn’t allow her to cancel it. I want her to carry on with her normal routine. Her life is about to change so radically when we start living
en famille,
I thought the trauma might be easier if we took it slowly. She has suffered enough of being abruptly uprooted. Is there somewhere we can go away for a few days, in the country, preferably by the sea? Just you and I and the sea, where we can be alone, lovers together, indulging ourselves in an orgy of sex. I have five days for us, if you are free.’

There could be but one answer to that.

NEW YORK
LONDON
PATMOS
1964

Chapter 16

Jay Steindler reached out in a half sleep for his wife. That was the way he liked to wake up, with the warmth of his wife’s body against his, to feel her enfolded in his arms. He loved Mimi’s body, the long slender back, her long limbs, the full, rounded breasts with their enticing, overly large, pale-peach nimbus, the narrow waist, the seductive curves of hip and bottom. He adored the feel of Mimi in his hands, her skin so soft and smooth, so sensual to the touch. He liked the feel of her flesh beneath him. He always imagined it as being sweet, rich and succulent. He often teased her about being his epicurean delight. But one thing he never did was to take for granted her being there. He sensed, although she had never done anything to suggest it, that Mimi was like a ball of quicksilver in the palm of the hand, mercurial, and with the least jolt capable of changing form, slipping through his fingers. Every morning of their ten-year marriage, when not away on business, he kissed her awake, and made love to her. And if he should awake and she was for some reason not there next to him, the day never seemed right.

Jay pulled himself up among the pillows and lit a cigarette. Dawn was just breaking the night sky. The light was sufficient to see her in the shadows, a silhouette lying on the chaise near the fireplace.

‘How long have you been lying there?’

‘Oh, not very long.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Fine, just fine.’

She rose from the chaise and walked back to the bed. He reached out to switch on the bedside lamp. She plucked the cigarette from his fingers, crushed it in the ashtray next to the stacks of books on the eighteenth-century black lacquer table next to the bed.

‘You smoke too much. You promised to cut down.’

‘I’m addicted, and I break promises. You seemed very pensive, a million miles away, over there on the chaise, in the dark.’

‘I was thinking about Barbara, what a good friend she’s been, the most constant influence, except for Poppa, in my life. The best and most important friend I have.’

‘And what about me?’

‘Oh.’ She smiled, embarrassed. ‘You’re different, in a category all your own.’

‘Is that good or bad?’

‘Not good, not bad, just special,’ she answered. ‘Remember we are giving a supper party for her this evening after the Museum of Modern Art exhibition.’

He raised the covers of the bed. Mimi slipped out of a long, luxurious, black silk kimono with amazingly wide, seductive sleeves, lined with a rich, plum-coloured taffeta that rustled with every move she made. She lay down next to him. He made love to her. Unfortunately for Mimi, the least exciting thing about their marriage was their sex life, but she went to great lengths so Jay need not know that. It was just one of those marriages where the sex was good, good enough for her to reach orgasm, on rare occasions very good, but never sex that was exciting and adventurous, stimulating to their lives. Not the way their work and social life were. They were cosmopolitan New Yorkers. They lived their lives through achievement, a life intermittently in the public eye, without the kind of time in the bedroom that great sex needs.

Mimi loved Jay and her marriage, they were good. It was
the kind of marriage that allowed them their freedom and their secrets. Jay was the right husband for her because she never fully revealed herself. Mimi always held back. That suited Jay, as long as Mimi revealed enough of herself for him to love. Some said that was part of her charm, her vivacity, the self that always remained hidden. Men and women alike were attracted to her as they always had been since she was a child. She was not a woman it was easy to say no to. She seemed always to hold all the cards when she played games of seduction and charm.

Mimi Steindler lived in several worlds simultaneously. First the world her father had created for her and his family, one of culture and comfort, with a degree of old-world elegance. It was a geopolitical world of exiles and refugees still looking for freedom, still wanting to return home one day. She didn’t much like the people who populated her father’s world, because they lived only for the future and on dreams of what might be. It had always seemed strange to her that her father, who lived fully in the immediate present, should surround himself with such people. He had his hopes and dreams of a future, of a return to his estates and his homeland for himself and his children, but he was too much of a realist to lose the life he had in the hope of a new tomorrow. That tomorrow, he knew, might not come in his lifetime. So Mimi lived in his world, but never took seriously the hopes and dreams of the lost souls who sought him out. She was happy loving her father and having a family, even though her relationship with her mother, Lydia, was only mildly affectionate, and with her brother little more than that. No matter how complex the Stefanik family, it was Mimi’s, and she was grateful and proud of being a member of it.

She preferred her husband’s world. Like her father, he was a powerful charismatic man, clever, brilliant in business, a force in the publishing world who overshadowed his rivals. He had real power, enough for
him and Mimi to be reluctant celebrities living a closed, very private life when they chose to. Some said Jay and his publishing house controlled the New York literary world. Mimi didn’t know if that was true or an over-simplification of publishing gossip. She never bothered to ask Jay, since it didn’t interest her one way or the other. She could only think it might be true because her husband was a controlling sort of man. For all his liberal thinking, his Mr Nice Guy, he relished his power.

And then there was Mimi’s world. First and foremost she was a femme fatale with men, who, for the most part, made dizzy fools of themselves over her. After watching Barbara Dunmellyn for years, Mimi had learned what celebrated, interesting and vital men look for in a woman. She liked having them around her. She enjoyed the female power she derived from their carnal lust for her. Men wanted Mimi, she held a challenge for them. None had managed to achieve it. Jay came less close to it than he thought. Like Barbara, Mimi had the looks, the sexual hunger for men that attracts. But, unlike Barbara, she was neither particularly creative nor a considerable intellect. Although she could hold her own with academics, artists, the literary establishment, she hadn’t the inclination to exploit those resources in herself. Her assets – looks, charm, a certain entrepreneurial flair – came to her naturally. She used these resources to promote herself with the men of her choice and in business.

That was what Mimi had been thinking about sitting in the dark while Jay slept. Men. How much they meant to her. Her father, and then in her teens the horny young men who stirred her own sexual awakenings. Prodded her ego because they so desperately wanted her. The hopes and the promises of sexual delights that would come if she ‘went all the way’. Oh, how serious they all were, and oh, what a drastic step it would be when she finally did. Or so every physical education teacher told her, every girl friend
insisted. She had never felt that way. For her it was a natural instinct to give herself up body and soul to Greg Slater. He had been twenty-seven and she had been seventeen, a mature, sexually hungry seventeen.

It was her freshman year in college. He was her art history teacher and the moment she saw him she fell in love. He was handsome, classically handsome. He had a head not unlike a marble bust of some ancient Roman god. Dark, short, curly hair, a long straight Roman nose, the sexiest eyes she had ever seen. Eyes that were set on her from the moment she walked into his class. He had a sexual scent about him. He was strong and haughty, and he stalked her with his eyes as he moved seductively between the desks while he delivered his first lecture. By the end of class most every girl in the room had a crush on him. He stood at the door as the girls left and looked them over more closely as they passed by him. His eyes lingered that little bit longer on Mimi. She hesitated, only for a second, and gave him her most seductive smile. The way he smiled back made her tremble and she had hurried on. He was the first man she ever wanted sexually. She knew it was only a matter of time before she would have him.

That night in bed she caressed her own body, teased her nipples, fondled the soft inner lips of her cunt. Pretending, always pretending, it was Greg Slater making love to her. A teenager’s sexual frustration, a libido growing stronger with maturity. Desire to be with an older, sophisticated, very sexual man, to have him take her, was something real now, not just a fantasy to gossip with her girlfriends about.

It was a week before she took his class again. She dressed for it, made herself up as prettily as possible. But she was subtle. She knew her long blonde curly hair and stunningly beautiful violet eyes were her best assets, along with full, almost heavy, high and firm breasts and an amazingly narrow waist. She wore a tiny green- and – black-checked shirtwaist dress with long sleeves pushed up. It was cinched
by a wide black patent leather belt, and had a full skirt. On her feet, flat black ballet-type shoes. Mimi was aware of how very sexy she looked. She had turned enough male heads on the way from her house to the college to confirm her self-assurance. She entered the class and took her seat. She flirted with Greg Slater. He ignored her.

Mimi felt crushed as she left the college. She had been so certain he had wanted her. The pain of unrequited love, her first experience of it, was dreadful for her. She had never dreamed it could happen to her. She fled home where love was a certainty, where there was warmth and never rejection. Not even from Lydia, who, though unable to develop a strong mother-daughter bond with Mimi, was at least a good friend.

The following day with her sense of rejection under only slightly better control, Mimi attended her classes relieved that she would not have to see Greg Slater again for a whole week. But that did not stop her from day-dreaming about him on and off during the day. Just to think of him was to set some sort of sexual yearning in motion. And that was the state she was in when, as she turned the corner away from the school, he walked up next to her and suggested, ‘Let me take you for a coffee. I know a place where they have great cherry cheesecake. Put me out of my misery and say yes. I’ve been thinking about you ever since I saw you that first day in class.’ Mimi fell helplessly in love.

Three days later he invited her to lunch, in a small dark steak-house. They were all the rage at the time. Sirloin or filet mignon grilled over charcoal, with a green salad, was the extent of the menu. There was always a great bar, and a fancy dessert-cart. This place had wooden booths and sawdust on the floor. It was across the street from Hattie Carnegie’s. Mimi knew the exclusive ladies’ dress salon well. That was where her mother shopped. They sat next to each other and Greg was impressive. Erudite, one moment talking up to her, and the next telling her, ‘I wish we were
alone. So I could take you in my arms. Feel you close to me. Wouldn’t you like that?’ As he stroked her thigh under the table, caressed the side of her cheek, stole a quick kiss.

‘Yes,’ she answered breathlessly, struggling to keep herself under control.

He opened two more buttons of her blouse so he clearly could see the swell of her breasts. Mimi felt very grown-up and sophisticated, daring even, because she wore no bra. She tried to close the buttons again. They were after all in public. He told her, ‘Surely you are not going to play teasing games with me?’

But she did. He lived above the steak-house in a handsome duplex whose windows overlooked the street. There he opened her blouse and kissed her breasts. He laid her down and fondled her, but she managed to get away from him several times just before the main event. Mimi wanted him to be as much in love with her as she was with him. For several weeks she was in heaven, lost on a cloud of love. They teased her at home about the state she was in, but never probed as to just how serious her latest flirtation was, nor who the lucky boy was. They were more amused and pleased for her. They respected her right to be a teenager in love.

Then there came the night when he took her to a concert, Vivaldi, and afterwards to his flat. For Greg Slater, it had been a long seduction. Mimi had managed to dangle him longer than most students. But he would have her this night or would never see her again. She sensed it. She was frightened, she was in love and so very hungry for sex with him, but she had never done it, gone all the way. She insisted he put out the lights. He was a magnificent lover. When Greg kissed Mimi he devoured her, and she slipped away into another world. He knew how to excite her. He sucked on her breasts until she squirmed with pleasure. He teased and taunted her nipples with his fingers, nibbled at them none too gently with his teeth. He bit into her flesh
passionately. He licked her body, shocked her with his tongue between the cleft of her buttocks, and the way he used it on her clitoris. Mimi had him out of control with lust for her, and she enjoyed every minute of the state she had him in. She was reluctant when he wrapped her fingers around his penis, frightened to think he was going to push what seemed to her to be a massive throbbing organ into her. She wanted it inside her, but was afraid of the pain. She begged him to stop. But he would have none of that. He reassured her she could take him, that he could give her what she yearned for. Several times she pleaded with him to stop, but finally gave in to him. He was relentless in his fucking. She had to bite into her hand to quell the pain. Mimi was too ashamed to call out, and then later too shocked at her own passion for sexual intercourse to let him know the excitement she felt during the multiple orgasms he brought her to. Greg came copiously inside her and Mimi thought a man’s come a most wonderful sensation. To have the warmth of his sperm caressing her, was sheer bliss.

After he withdrew he collapsed on her and stayed that way for some time. Then he slid off her and, taking her into his arms, turned on the light. He was shocked at the tears he saw on her face. The spots of blood on the white sheet. He sat up. ‘You should have said. I had no idea you were a virgin. Why didn’t you say?’