Judith Krantz (9 page)

Only a dermatologist could have come close to guessing Fernanda’s age, and only in a bright light. She knew, without vanity, that she looked as if she were in her late twenties. But if she were seen next to Heidi? The difference between being far and away the prettiest thirty-nine-year-old woman in the world and being a normally pretty fifteen-year-old girl is encompassed in just one word: youth. And youth, authentic, heartbreaking, flushed youth, was the only thing she could no longer attain.

Fernanda had never been a great beauty—she was a perfect miniature in the sheer intensity of her prettiness, widely skirting the more serious realm of beauty—but as far as men were concerned, and her concerns had always begun and ended with men—being pretty was far more to the point than being beautiful. Beautiful could frighten them, pretty made them approach.

Fernanda had been at her teenaged prime in the mid-1960s and she had kept a sixties look stubbornly and instinctively, without any of the thoughtful premeditation with which Valerie approached her appearance.

She was five feet five and her silver-blond hair hung long and straight, almost to her waist. She needed to have her brown roots lightened every two weeks, but staying blond was worth any amount of trouble, in Fernanda’s opinion. Shorter strands of hair were encouraged to fall over one eye or even into her mouth, to be casually puffed away in charming impatience. Her eyes, as bright and vividly turquoise blue as the tile in a swimming pool, were always heavily fringed in frank layers of black mascara; her small, fine nose and tiny, delicate nostrils had the charm of a child’s. Her mouth was dainty yet deeply curved and it pouted in an enchantingly infantile way above her well-formed chin. Her skin was so perfectly pink and
white that it gave her the quality of a very expensive doll who had been dressed as a hippie by accident rather than design.

Fernanda always wore tight, low-slung jeans or the shortest of leather miniskirts with close-fitting vests that were cut to deliberately reveal the exquisitely feminine curve of her belly and the dimple of her belly button. She had dozens of pairs of pointy-toed Western boots in every kind of leather, a closet full of lavishly decorated cowgirl jackets, and pounds of silver and turquoise jewelry. Her furs came from the Fendi sisters, dyed in mad colors, worked with beads and insets of fabric.

Rounded, appetizing, tiny-waisted, a lush little tidbit of a female with delectable breasts and bottom, Fernanda could still display every inch of her slender and rigorously trained body. Her midriff, her inner thighs and her upper arms, those places where skin texture first changes as the tightness of youth is lost, were still in splendid shape. She had worked for that body, taking everything nature had given her and maintaining it with daily exercise classes and a strict diet, as vigilant as an obsessive curator of rare manuscripts.

She knew, for Fernanda was shrewd, that she dressed right on the borderline of bad taste. She produced herself in the wild-thing spirit of the girls in the ads for Guess?, except that she didn’t reveal glimpses of her lingerie since she never wore any. When she checked herself out in her full-length mirror she made sure that she looked like a biker’s wet dream, yet Fernanda Kilkullen could never be mistaken for a slut. Headwaiters, doormen and salespeople knew instantly that they were confronted with the kind of woman for whom they reserved their best service. Only a supremely assured thirty-nine-year-old who looked, in all the essentials, like a kid, could get away with that stunt.

It would, of course, have been simplicity itself to slide gracefully into a way of dressing that was fashionable, suitable and yet youthful, but youthful wasn’t
young
. Young was Fernanda’s operative word. Young meant men, constantly available men, lighthearted men too young to have ever considered that one day they might find themselves on the verge of middle age. Everything she put on her back, every hair on her head, every fresh coat of mascara, was intended to signal to these men that she was fuckable.

Fernanda was ruled by the pursuit of sex. A few centimeters of flesh between her legs explained her actions, her motives, her directions, her past and her future.

Her earliest memory was of her first orgasm, self-induced when she was supposed to be taking an afternoon nap. She could tell, from remembering the cot and the very color and texture of the blanket, that she had been less than three years old at the time, yet as soon as the wondrous surprise faded she had realized, with the kind of absolute knowledge that is inborn, that no one must find out what she had just discovered.

As a child she had shared a room with Valerie, and her biggest problem had been to find excuses to lock herself securely in the bathroom so that she could give herself up to the slow process of bringing herself to the peak of pleasure, for an orgasm was never quick with her, but required long, gentle, well-lubricated, carefully heightened, deliberately quickening strokes of her fingertips, and if she was distracted by footsteps in the hallway outside she had to begin all over again. Worst of all, she often had to give up entirely because Valerie, impatient, would demand to use the bathroom.

After the divorce and her mother’s move to Marbella, they had both been sent to a strict, New England all-girls boarding school, with roommates and no locks on the doors. There Fernanda discovered the safe retreat of the reading room of the school library. She staked out a deep, comfortable chair in a half-hidden corner. She would grab a book, throw a raincoat or a polo coat over her lap, let the book fall open on the arm of the chair, close her eyes as if she’d gone
to sleep and, undisturbed, spend hours surreptitiously bringing herself to an orgasm. She would pretend her fingers belonged to a man, a faceless, nameless man, a man who was her absolute and adoring slave, a man who wanted nothing for himself, who existed only to bring her bliss. No one watching her could have guessed what she was doing because she had so mastered the art of concealment that when she finally reached the ultimate moment only her lips tightened as she held her breath.

Fernanda’s clandestine activity in the reading room was the focus of her days. She did her studying in the dorm, after dinner, with enormous concentration, so that her late afternoons were always free. She had little spare time to make friends with her classmates. During those heady years of change in the sixties that even reached their secluded campus, at meals she half-listened to girls debate issues that seemed utterly unimportant to her.

Only sexual gratification interested her deeply, but she never betrayed herself. Her need to hide, born in infancy, had been reinforced year after year by her mother’s demeanor. Fernanda had been deeply marked by the emotional atmosphere in which her mother moved: cool and reserved except when she spoke so bitterly about their father. Valerie, in many ways an imitation of her mother, only made things worse. Vacations and summers at the ranch had certainly not led her to confide in her father, and year by year an unreasoning fear of him grew, for, more than anyone else in the family, Fernanda had the feeling that he could somehow sense her one preoccupation.

A week after graduation from boarding school, Fernanda met Jack Donaldson, who had been out of Harvard Law School for five years. Almost thirty, the brilliant lawyer had been incredulous when he realized that this ravishing morsel of an eighteen-year-old had never had a serious boyfriend. Such girls, in his experience, weren’t supposed to exist in the era of Woodstock. He proposed marriage immediately, before anyone else found out about her.

On their honeymoon Jack Donaldson began to wonder if his fantasy of awakening an ignorant virgin had been foolish. He used every technique that had ever worked with other women, he was as gentle and tender with Fernanda as possible, but soon, intoxicated by her body, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from entering her and, aroused by a half hour of foreplay, coming quickly. Once he’d reached his own climax he’d try to satisfy Fernanda with his fingers and his mouth, but she always pulled away. It doesn’t matter, darling, she’d say, it’s just not that important, I don’t care, honestly.

When Fernanda became pregnant with their first child, Jack Donaldson put the problem on hold. Perhaps the hormones of motherhood would provide the answer to her lack of arousal. Was she always going to be frigid, Donaldson asked himself wearily after their first son was born.

Their second son was born in 1973, when Fernanda was twenty-two and by that time he had almost stopped caring. She was utterly faithful as far as he knew, she was always pliantly available when he wanted her, but she couldn’t respond beyond a certain point and there was nothing more he could do about it.

Other men lived with the same situation, with wives less adorable than Fernanda. He never knew that after he’d made love to his wife and had fallen soundly asleep, she left their bed and made her way to her bathroom-dressing room, where she gave herself the slow, gradual, practiced, stealthy orgasm that she couldn’t have with him.

If only, Fernanda would think, oh, if only she didn’t
know
each time Jack started making love that no matter what he did to her, his aim was to come inside her. If only she weren’t conscious of that need beating away under every caress, inspiring his every touch, if only she weren’t so aware of his attempts to hide his impatience, if only she weren’t perfectly aware that he was wondering when he could decently allow himself to enter her. If
only he didn’t rush so
.
He honestly thought he gave her plenty of time, more than enough, but he never, ever did and she really couldn’t expect him to, not the way men were. No matter how hard Jack tried, she could never
count on him
, as she could count on the faceless, nameless, selfless slave in her fantasy.

When he died in a car accident in 1976, leaving Fernanda millions, Jack Donaldson hadn’t worried about her sexual inadequacy in years. He had other girls who responded lustily to his advances, and toward Fernanda he felt only faint resentment, and the love of a man for a sweet child.

Briefly Fernanda had mourned him, or rather she had mourned their seven-year marriage, not one day of which had fulfilled her. Then, free, rich and twenty-five, she set forth on a quest to find the right man for her needs. A young man, a man who could last and last forever. Somewhere there had to be a man who would make her have the orgasm she’d never had except by herself.

Why had she actually
married
any man, Fernanda asked herself now, on the way to the ranch, as Jeremiah turned the car radio to one of California’s New Age music stations and synthesized harpsichord music filled the car.

Four young husbands and dozens of young lovers in the last fourteen years—it wasn’t the life her mother had brought her up to have, God knows, but each time she went to bed with a new man some constantly renewed spring of optimism, or perhaps mere desperation, made her hope that this time it was going to be right, going to work, going to be magic.

Jim Flynn, Hubert St. Martin, Hayden Smith and Nick Nicolini had all been younger than she when she met them. Each of them had been so entranced by her exquisitely sexy prettiness that they had been capable of miracles. At first each one had made love to her three or four times a night. Always, that last time, they were slow to arousal, almost lazy, almost not caring, without the fatal urgency that chilled her, and sometimes she experienced a small, brief spasm that was—
almost—an orgasm. Perhaps it was actually a real orgasm, she wondered, the kind other women had with men, but there was no way to know. Certainly it didn’t come close to what she could do to herself.

Soon, oh much too soon, each of her husbands, like each of her lovers—like every damn man in the world—wanted to make love less frequently. If she was dealing with a lover, Fernanda simply dropped him. But with a husband she found herself faced by the need to pretend to have an orgasm or else deal with an utterly predictable discussion that reminded her of the unbearable tedium of her first marriage. Sooner or later, when she couldn’t endure faking orgasms anymore, divorce became inevitable.

Thirty-nine, Fernanda thought, and still chasing an experience she
had
to have. Thirty-nine and still feeling that heavy, tormenting, almost crampy fullness, like a bowl of warm water carried between her legs, whenever she thought about a man who could last long enough in bed.

Thirty-nine was a sickening age, the worst age she could imagine. One day, not so long from now, she’d wake up to find she was forty-three, forty-five, even forty-seven. One day she wouldn’t be able to pass for a pretty girl no matter how well she took care of herself. And only a
very, very rich
woman could hope to attract young men after a certain age.

She hadn’t reached that age, not yet, oh no, not nearly yet, that fearful juncture of time and gravity was still far away. But a number of Jack Donaldson’s millions had been spent in the circuit from one playground of the world to another. She was still well off, no question about it, still able to buy everything she needed, but not nearly as rich as she’d
have
to be as she grew older. Everything was a question of degree, wasn’t it? It was unbearably difficult to be facing her fortieth birthday except as a very, very rich woman.

As they turned off the highway and the car began to climb the road that led to the ranch, a familiar thought crossed Fernanda’s mind. One day, when her father died and they could sell the ranch, she and her
sisters would become so rich that she could scarcely imagine it. Hundreds of millions, for each of them. But when? How long would she have to wait? Would the money be there before she needed it, while she still had her looks? Or would it only come when it was too late?

A
s darkness fell on Sunday night, the Fiesta was approaching its height. The big band had struck up a medley of Glenn Miller arrangements, and at the first notes of “Midnight Cocktail” a mob had taken to the dance floor. Each of the families that received an invitation to the Fiesta was allowed to bring all their children over sixteen, and the teenagers were wildly rediscovering Swing, their parents were energetically trying to remember it from old movies and everyone over fifty was showing them how to do it as it was meant to be done. The Fiesta guests always dressed up for the occasion: the men in elaborate cowboy gear even if they never rode; the women in outfits that ranged from four-thousand-dollar fringed chamois dresses to Scarlett O’Hara-inspired hoop skirts.