Lovers (18 page)

On her Saturdays she slowly filled the bookcases with cannily chosen volumes, books she knew Angus owned, found in secondhand stores throughout the city. An old mahogany library ladder stood in a place of pride in the living room. Victoria spent nothing on art and little on objects, keeping the rooms uncontrived and uncluttered. Here and there she placed a few creamware bowls that she kept filled with apples and nuts, and there were always several sturdy, well-tended green plants near the windows. The dismal kitchen was repainted a glossy white and given a Mexican tile floor and new working surfaces. Each piece of tableware was old blue-and-white china or pottery in an artfully careless mixture of patterns. Victoria found usable, if battered, copper pots and pans and treated herself to a first-class set of cooking equipment, for in spite of her education she had made herself into an excellent plain cook. There was a large, worn, well-scrubbed, painted kitchen
table with unmatched country chairs sitting on a rag rug above which a painted tin chandelier cast a cozy light.

It was as homey an apartment as any man could want.

Within less than a year, Victoria began working exclusively on the many-faceted Oak Hill account. She had been studying the food industry since her sophomore year in college, and by now there wasn’t an outstanding campaign for food advertising in the history of advertising with which she wasn’t familiar, or a food industry magazine she hadn’t read for years, never mentioning this interest to anyone.

When Millicent was out of town on business, if Angus happened to be in New York, it became quite natural for Victoria to invite him over for dinner from time to time. She cooked for herself, she told him, as a rule, and there was always enough for two. What was more simple, it seemed, than for her to put another plate on the kitchen table, open a bottle of wine, and spend a casual evening talking shop, talking books, talking politics and art and any other topic that two intelligent people would discuss if they worked together?

Victoria didn’t allow herself to reveal the slightest hint of emotion other than impersonal friendship during these evenings. She made half a glass of wine last her all night, so that she was in total command of herself at all times. She was never caught watching him with too long a look, or using any of the recognized feminine flirtation techniques, not even subliminally. She couldn’t make herself into anything other than a female, but it was not as a female that she presented herself to Angus, or as connected in any way at all to his wife. Millicent Frost Caldwell ceased to exist as her daughter spun a complicated, age-old spell in which she became almost completely an interested listener and an interesting talker, someone to whom the life of the mind was deeply important.

During these long evenings, Victoria always sat at a distance from Angus that encouraged conversation yet was just too far away to permit any deeper proximity to be established. When it became time for him to leave, she
managed to be busy with something in the living room that had just caught her eye, so that she could wave him impersonally out of her front door. Even when he was sitting at the kitchen table and they were ready to eat, she kept an impassable space between them, scrupulously handing him a bowl or platter or jug across the large table, never bending over to serve him or fill his glass. He had never been invited to take a look at her bedroom in the usual way people show off their apartments in New York, and gradually he realized that he never would be.

Victoria always changed before she expected Angus for dinner. She took off the dark, austere, almost too-old-for-her clothes she had adopted for the office right from the beginning of her job and put on casual garb—old, well-washed, rather oversized jeans, and equally well-worn T-shirts or sweaters. She chose these in colors like apricot or old rose, pastels that weren’t fussy but that reflected their warmth on her skin. She always wore a bra under these tops so that her full, thrusting breasts were held firmly in place, but she never wore panties, since it made an important difference to her to be able to feel the rough denim rubbing so intimately on her body, warning her constantly of the role she had to play. She let her hair fall down to the middle of her back, well brushed and loose, she put no makeup on her perfect skin and no makeup on her clear eyes. She looked incredibly young and careless and innocent.

Young, indeed, she was, and infinitely careful and utterly without innocence except for the merely physical. Victoria Frost knew very well that, over the course of time, she was driving Angus Caldwell slowly insane with desire, but she made no move, no sign, gave no word. Everything, she vowed to herself repeatedly, must come from him. She would do nothing to encourage him, nothing to allow him to think that she craved him with every inch of her skin, every cell of her brain. Her victory must be total.

Gradually, even when there was an opportunity for him to possess a woman in a way that would leave no trace, no
attachment, Angus Caldwell found himself unwilling to plunge into an unknown body attached to an unknown mind. What he had thought of as a necessary release, a short adventure, began to seem merely shabby when the thought of Victoria came into his mind. He could see her so vividly in the enchanted quiet of her apartment, like a clearing in the woods in its restful colors, with her particular glowing calm, her lovely but impersonal smile, her ready understanding of his ideas, her attentive ear, her interesting opinions.

There was, Angus thought, as he began to look forward more and more eagerly to his dinners with Victoria, only one odd note. Neither he nor she had ever mentioned to Millicent that they met when she was away. They had never discussed this omission. It had been mutually and wordlessly understood from the very first time he had visited her apartment that Millicent would not find acceptable these few hours they spent so harmlessly together. Was this another example of Victoria’s tact, that tact she employed so successfully in dealing with clients, or was it because he was, after all, her boss, or was it some sort of reaction to the undercurrent of edgy discomfort he always felt running so strongly between mother and daughter when they were, so infrequently, together? It was far too late to ask Victoria a question about this matter, and in any case he blessed the silence, for Millicent’s watchful, growing jealousy included all of the many dozens of women he worked with, and wouldn’t have stopped at her daughter, in spite of the fact that Victoria gave her no cause.

No cause. Victoria gave him no cause to think of her with an almost uncontainable, growing lust, yet lust was precisely what was consuming him. He burned, day and night, with lust for a girl who had just turned twenty-seven, a girl who wanted nothing from him but a quiet evening from time to time, a girl who didn’t even bother to put on makeup for him, who never came close to him, who never offered any personal information about her life that might
have fed his imagination, a girl who had taken him into her life as a friend, nothing more.

In the office, when Angus saw Victoria in a meeting, dressed in the almost monastic black she favored, her hair so severely tamed, her attitude so cool, so competent, so in control that she could pass for a woman in her mid-thirties, all he could think of was how she looked when he had dinner with her alone. Then, when finally a chance of timing made it possible for him to be with her in her apartment, he could only think of how she would look spread out naked on a bed, stripped of those damn jeans and baggy sweaters, naked, her legs open, her eyes closed, naked, waiting for him, ready for him, crying out for him … Christ! He had to stop this, Angus Caldwell thought as he dressed for another black-tie benefit at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

And what did Victoria think of when she thought of him, Angus wondered as he leaned forward and examined himself in the mirror of his dressing room. Or did she think of him at all? Did she perhaps dream of one or another of the two young men she had recently lured away from the Grey Agency and with whom she now spent so much time in the office? Archie Rourke and Byron Bernheim, a highly coveted creative team, had been hired to work on the three low-calorie products Oak Hill was planning on introducing. Both of them were Victoria’s age, and before Grey they had spent three years at BBD&O, establishing a resonating reputation.

Rourke was a type any young female would find unsettlingly attractive, Angus realized grimly, Black-Irish handsome, so predictably rakehell, whiz-bang handsome it was almost laughable, with that Irish white skin and Irish blue eyes and thick black hair growing in curls too far down his neck, and that Irish way with women. If the talented bastard weren’t in advertising, he could run for any public office he coveted, and probably win on the women’s vote alone, Angus thought wrathfully. Yes, tough Archie Rourke, whose mother taught English in a public high
school outside of Chicago, whose father coached the football team; cocky, blunt Archie Rourke, whose way with words was as lively as his ambition, might make any girl think about him twice.

As for Byron Berenson Bernheim the Third, the art director of the two, he was more likely to be Victoria’s type, Angus reflected, his speculations making him more frantic by the minute. Bernheim was the product of a San Francisco family, a highly cultivated clan, with an intellectual mother who supported every cultural institution of the city and a banker father whose art collection was well known even in New York. He was taller than Archie, and leaner, with reddish hair, elegantly put together with none of the bulk that was visible under Archie’s jackets; he had a lively, interesting face and he looked as if he could handle himself well in any fight.

Damn them both to hell! And damn all the other men Victoria worked with and the unknown men she must go out with, although she never mentioned anyone’s name, and damn the museum only three blocks away from his home to which he and Millicent could easily have walked tonight if she weren’t wearing a dark blue Scassi gown that covered her bare arms with a cunning double layer of chiffon that hid the sagging flesh on her skinny frame, for no amount of exercise could overcome the effects of gravity. The dress had also been designed to display her three million dollars’ worth of diamonds. Millicent, so charmingly coiffed and made up by an expert who had arrived two hours ago, literally didn’t dare to walk any farther than from the lobby of their apartment house to the waiting door of their limousine, for fear of being mugged, even on Fifth Avenue.

A
few weeks later, Millicent Frost Caldwell suddenly took herself, her jewel case, three suitcases, and her personal maid off to London on the Concorde for several days of countering the raid she had just discovered Saatchi and Saatchi was going to make on their British Airlines account. Angus proposed himself to Victoria for dinner.

“Tonight or tomorrow?” she wondered.

“Tonight would be better,” he answered casually, “if it isn’t too much trouble?”

“How much trouble can it be to warm up leftover stew?” Victoria smiled, and walked quickly down the corridor to her own office to tell her secretary to cancel her date for that night.

“I brought you a Vivaldi tape you don’t have,” he said as she opened the door.

“Vivaldi and beef stew … are they compatible companions?” she asked on a laugh.

“Better save the music for after dinner,” Angus suggested. He often brought her new tapes simply because she listened to music attentively, with her eyes closed, and that gave him a chance to look at her for a mercifully long, unmercifully torturing time, without her being aware of his gaze.

Tonight, as they finished dinner and put on the tape, Angus sat back with his legs relaxed, in one of the leather armchairs, his eyelids hooding his eyes as Victoria leaned back on a russet linen couch. Her white jeans were so old that they hung comfortably at her waist without needing a belt, and her long hair drifted in soft strands over the dark peach of a sweater that had rubbed thin at the elbows. She looked as tousled and languid as a girl on a sailboat; she was so full of heedless, bursting youth that his heart reeled. He imagined painfully what it would be like to stroke her creamy cheek with his fingers, to kiss her at the base of her smooth, long throat. It seemed to him that the air in the room must be dense and smoky with his feverish longing to touch her, but no such awareness appeared to disturb her concentration on the music.

As the Vivaldi filled the room, Victoria peered through her amazing eyelashes at Angus, knowing from practice in the mirror that she could do so and still seem to have her eyes closed. His face revealed nothing, she thought in a sharp ache of need to touch his rough countryman’s skin, to touch his sandy, silky hair with her lips. She stirred restlessly on the couch. A few seconds after she changed her position, she saw him suddenly, with an almost angry expression, cross one leg over the other in a way that wasn’t characteristic of him. She took a deep breath, waited a minute, and then moved again, stretching her arms over her head as if she had a kink in her back. Still watching him through her lashes, she saw him bite down on his bottom lip and press his legs together more tightly than they had been before. Oh yes, she thought, yes, it has to come now, this moment she had been dreaming of and plotting toward for years, it was time, more than time, high time,
and if something didn’t happen now, tonight, when she had finally seen his excitement and measured the extent of his control, it might never happen, he might never come to dinner again. But still the Vivaldi continued and Angus remained seated.