Perfect Freedom (73 page)

He felt himself stiffening with desire and took a few paces around the terrace. He had needed a girl. It changed everything. For the first time in weeks he found himself thinking ahead to an hour from now, to tomorrow, without the awful sinking emptiness in the pit of his stomach.

He went in and took a leisurely sponge bath from the pitcher of water on the washstand. He dressed in shorts and shirt, considering a walk into town to look for her if she didn't come back soon.

He was spared the trip. She returned just as color was beginning to flow into the sky. He was at the table trying to make time pass with a Spanish lesson when he heard her footsteps stop at the end of the terrace. He looked up and saw her standing there holding a little bundle at her side. They stared at each other for a moment and then he jumped up and went to her. When he reached her, he looked down into her eyes and they exchanged a questioning look. He leaned over and kissed her, reaching for the intimacy that had been interrupted by his falling to sleep. She accepted his kiss and lifted her bundle and explained slowly in simple words that she had brought some things so that she could stay.

So that's all right, he thought, and smiled and nodded his approval.

She looked up at him with little expression in her almond eyes and round, smooth, untroubled face. She was thinking that he was splendid with his fine, big body and his rosy skin. Her eyes slid from his immaculate linen to the golden hair curling close around his head. Most splendid, and smelling so good. She thought he must be very rich to smell so good.

He saw her eyes widen in a way that made him laugh softly from deep inside him. Taking the bundle from her and putting it down, he reached around behind her and unfastened her blouse and removed it. “No shirt here, you understand?” he insisted.

He shed his clothes and put her hands on his cock. It was erect by the time he drew her to him to feel her nipples hardening against his chest. Sex might partially restore him to life, but he was glad that she had imposed limits. What she permitted, although surprisingly sophisticated, was like children playing together. If she had allowed him to take her, there would have been the risk of a commitment he wasn't ready for, might never be ready for again. He didn't know how much was left of him that could be deeply touched and he was afraid to find out. Thought exposed feelings that were still raw and bleeding. He welcomed the mindless pleasure of his body, her breasts pressed gently to him, her hand holding his cock as he turned back toward the bedroom.

That evening over their simple meal, the phrase book at hand, he told her that he was married and had two children but that he hadn't seen any of his family for more than a year. In fact, he hadn't ever seen his second child but that was too complicated to explain.

She accepted his information with equanimity. She was accustomed to living each day as if it were all of life and the fact that he was learning to speak to her so gently and kindly was more real to her than any shadowy wife he had left behind. Surely he wouldn't bother to learn words if he wasn't going to stay with her awhile. She would serve him and give him pleasure. That was all a man could want of a woman. When he told her that he didn't know how long he would be staying in Puerto Veragua, he put into words her own simple knowledge that no one knew what the next day would bring. He hadn't said that he was going. She would watch for signs that he considered the place his home, at least for a little while, and then she might commit the great sin, even if it gave her a baby. Her father and brothers would know what to do about that. She had a friend who had had a baby without being married and her family had immediately found her a husband, an ugly old man whose wife was dead. She wouldn't mind being given a husband if first she could sin with this beautiful foreigner.

He tried to tell her about the world he had left behind but all she really grasped was what she had already suspected—that he was very rich, beyond her capacity to understand riches. This was just the contrary of the impression he was trying to convey but his vocabulary was too limited to make her understand what it meant to be disinherited. There was so much to explain, so much that he didn't completely understand himself.

“Grande. Muy grande,”
he said with an expansive gesture, caught up in his memories of the marble house on Fifth Avenue where he had passed his youth, the house where he was no longer welcome.

He could see by her expression that Luisa was forming a vague picture of something vast and glittering like places she had seen in movies with rows of girls dancing in them. He saw the massive dark reality: the glass and wrought-iron portal, the bleak marble entrance hall; the silent, black-clad figure of Morris, the footman, holding open the elevator door; the curtained opulence of drawing room, dining room, music room, and library; the more cheerful comfort of his mother's study, the vast, rarely used ballroom, the bedrooms above where everybody could at least escape one another; and the distant shadowy regions behind closed doors where the servants lived and worked, the forbidden region that had excited Lance's curiosity simply by being forbidden. Closed doors, the life outside the limits fixed by family tradition, had exerted a powerful tug on his imagination from the beginning.

He was the repository of the glorious tradition. His mother had instilled in him, a fatherless child, the sense of being the fruit of an immaculate conception, wholly hers. The atmosphere he breathed was almost too rarefied to support human life. He felt at times that he would suffocate if he didn't throw open the doors that enclosed him but as he grew up he had given her nothing specific to complain of. Everybody agreed that his manners were exquisite. He never raised his voice or laughed immoderately. He deferred to the opinions of his elders. He was able to satisfy her that he had learned that most essential element in a gentleman's equipment, self-control.

But little things he was scarcely aware of revealed an unspoken tension. He sometimes failed to answer when he was spoken to, lost in absorbing thoughts of his own. He had developed a slight twitch in the corner of his mouth and he had a nervous mannerism of combing his yellow hair with his big-knuckled fingers. A cousin at a family gathering told him that when his heavy lids were lowered over his very blue eyes, his face acquired a strange, hooded look, almost like a mask. “Restless and dangerous,” the girl had called him, to Lance's delight. Had his mother noticed that look? She had apparently been better prepared for his rebellion than he.

A rebellion against nothingness. The world of the Vanderholdens—no joy, no tragedy, no uncurbed passion, no creativity, no ambition, no adventure—was built on negatives. There was something in the air that supported his rebellion. The world outside was changing. The fighting men had returned to civilian life, claiming their rewards for killing. Class and social distinctions were blurring. The sense of immutable order that he remembered from his prewar childhood and early youth was gone. He had the feeling that the Vanderholdens were obsolete, that he was an anachronism.

Once his mother had issued her edict, barring her door to him and cutting him off without a penny, he had had no choice but to rebel, although he found it difficult at first to put rebellion into practice. He learned eventually that he could at least be a sexual rebel; he had had plenty of shackles to cast off in that respect.

Both he and Pam had been virgins when they went to their marriage bed and it hadn't occurred to him that a well-bred woman, a lady, would find any pleasure in the sight of a naked man. His sexual initiation had embarrassed him so deeply that he had suffered a momentary failure, and after that the dread of being impotent had led him to hurry through the act so that there would be no risk of his not being able to carry it to a conclusion. He told himself that a “nice girl” like Pam wouldn't want him to elaborate or prolong it. Except for the professional expediency of his affair with his Broadway costar, he had been faithful (husbands and wives were
always
faithful) and he had remained so until his spectacular success on the stage had permitted him to send Pam and the baby to the country for the summer while he led a bachelor life during the week. Before he knew it, he had abandoned himself to a life of joyful promiscuity, discovering that lots of women, even “nice” ones, liked looking at naked men.

He was first taken over by three women from the show who lived together, and they spent many inventive days and nights discovering everything that three women and a man could possibly want to do together. A procession of women followed. Sex was a wonderful, new, narcotic world and he plunged into it wholeheartedly, sensing that he had finally found himself. It was another break with the rigid conformity of his past, just as deciding to be an actor had been, and confirmed his growing awareness that his whole life was going to have to be a constant breaking away, a remodeling of everything he had been trained to be.

He meant nobody any harm and because his sexual partners were experienced there were only occasional tears and heartbreak. For the most part, that summer had been a composite of hot, sleepy afternoons and cool, promising dawns, lying in darkened rooms with the sound of muted laughter in his ears, his nostrils full of heady, female smells—perfume and flesh and secret essences.

One of the few disciplines he had imposed on himself during Pam's absence was regular attendance at an athletic club for a workout and massage, not out of vanity but because his role in the show was physically demanding and he had to keep trim as an antidote to women and late hours. He found one day that old Mac, the regular masseur, had been replaced by a youngish guy who introduced himself as Jim. He was probably in his mid-thirties, with a powerful bodybuilder's physique and an open, amiable, all-American face.

He had a light but manly scattering of hair on his chest that Lance envied. Women sometimes called him a sissy for being so hairless. When Lance lay down on the table with a towel draped loosely over his middle as usual, Jim told him that he could work better without it and Lance pushed it off indifferently.

After a few minutes, he began to wonder if he should have hung on to it. There was an insistent caress in the skillful professional hands that he felt sure must be intentional and caused a surprisingly pleasant fluttering in his groin. If a guy could make him feel this good, he shouldn't complain, but it raised unexpected questions. The oil Jim was using doubtless had something to do with it but that was a technicality. He hoped that what he was feeling wasn't visible yet.

Unless he misinterpreted the hands' intentions, he was confronted at last with forbidden sex. He had heard endless joking references to cocksucking and buggery, especially during his stint in the navy, but he had never quite believed in homosexuality. School was the place where boys were supposed to play with each other, but except for a friend who had declared his love amid tears on the day before their graduation, he had never seen anything of it.

He had begun to see quite a lot of it in the theater but it still seemed to be considered rather a joke. There were several effeminate boys in the show who flirted with him unabashedly but even they didn't seem to take it seriously. As he went about his business in the theatrical district, he was aware of guys who looked at him in a particular way but in their case it was more frightening than funny. They looked like trouble. He was committed to opening all the doors that had been closed to him, to casting off whatever shackles remained, but he reluctantly admitted to himself that he might not be ready to plumb all the depths.

As the massage progressed from neck to shoulders to arms and chest, there ceased to be any doubt; this big muscular guy was a pansy. The way the hands moved in his armpits and over his nipples was less massage than a search for erotically sensitive areas. Lance's cock lay between his legs but its stirrings grew more pronounced. He had never felt so naked in his life. He didn't care if the masseur thought he was a pansy, too, but feeling himself on the verge of erection raised doubts about his equipment. He had never seen a guy with a hard-on so he had no way of knowing how his measured up. He wasn't attracted to Jim in any way that he recognized as attraction but he couldn't deny that the guy was making him feel sexy; and if it showed, he wanted it to be worth looking at. He hadn't had any complaints, but women probably weren't reliable judges.

He felt a growing purposefulness in the way Jim lifted one of his legs, bending it at the knee, and held it against his chest while he went to work on the inside of his thigh. His hands swept down over it so that they brushed against his cock. Lance's breath caught as it swelled lethargically and began to stiffen. There was no doubt of its showing now. An explicit forbidden move might still shock him into calling a halt but so far he felt no inclination to interfere.

The masseur moved Lance's foot down to the end of the table to straighten his leg. His cock rolled up and lay on his belly. His cheeks burned with shame but he made no move to hide it. An involuntary moan escaped him as a hand stroked it to complete his erection. Jim put it in his mouth. Lance's body leaped and he uttered a cry of astonishment or protest and then lay back and was still, acquiescing.

He couldn't stop him without making a scene. He had a hard-on. Jim wanted it. Lance admired people who knew what they wanted and took it without apologies, regardless of consequences. He was having his cock sucked by an expert. Sex was sex, even with a guy. Another door had opened.

Jim's mouth was much bigger than a woman's; he felt as if his cock were being swallowed. He closed his eyes and abandoned himself to pleasure. He was being brought to a climax with startling rapidity. He made small, murmuring warning sounds and to his dismay, Jim desisted. He gave Lance's shoulder a tug in a way that told him to roll over and Lance held his cock and placed it under him as he did so. Lance remained frustratingly close to orgasm and wondered if he was expected to reciprocate in some way. He had let the guy give him a hard-on, for God's sake. What more did he want?