The Fire Night Ball (5 page)

The Age of Reason.

“What is, dear?”

“Oh, did I say that aloud? HMC--that's what Daddy called Holy Mother Church--decreed that seven is the Age of Reason. Of course, Daddy would try to talk a leg off a wooden Indian. 'Marlena Mae, at your Age of Reason, you'll know it all.’ I didn't realize he was putting me on.”

“Your father was the most charming man I ever knew,” commented Chloe agreeably. “Why don’t you and Faith come over around seven thirty tomorrow night for Sunday supper? Plan to stay over if you like.”

“Count on me for champagne.”

“Only if you want it, dear. We've got wine.”

“Oh, but I do. Bubbly and Faith, a trippy combination. Like taking mescaline and then going to church on Good Friday. Hopefully by tomorrow evening I’ll have recovered from our brunch and will be able to keep something down.”

Chloe scrutinized her. “Stomach’s bothering you, dear?”

“I guess it's the jitters. It’s been a long time since I sat down and had a heart-to-heart with the Gestapo.”

Chloe choked on her wine. “Lena! Isn't that what Granny Bellum used to call Faith?”

“She did, and with good reason. On the other hand, I’m looking forward to our pajama party on the solstice without any reservations. Remember, you promised to tell me Cassandra’s story Wednesday night. But I wonder what makes you think I own a pair of pajamas?’

“Would you prefer we have an evening in the raw, like they do on the New York stage these days? I’m game if you are.”

There was a hint of mischief in Chloe's amber eyes. Marlena returned it, twinkle for twinkle.

“Why shut my mouth, Doctor V. Once upon a time, I was a patient of yours. What if I told on you to the state board? You could lose your license!”

“But who would believe you? You know my reputation is impeccable.”

Marlena threw up her hands in mock despair. “Isn’t it dull being an icon of respectability? Tell you what. I'll take you on as a project, turn you into a cougar.”

Chloe shook her head.

"No? Hmmm. What else could I do to make your stainless life more exciting? You don’t happen to have a secret rich boyfriend stashed away somewhere? I could try to steal him away with my mesmeric powers. That would be an exciting game to play!”

Chloe’s unreadable gaze bore straight into her cousin’s sparkling, blue-green eyes. There was a pregnant pause, the air suddenly growing heavy.

“What would you do with another one, dear?” asked Chloe in an even tone.

Marlena’s cheeks reddened. She looked away.

"Who told you?"

Chloe's face was neutral. “It's the coconut hotline here, darling, only without the coconuts. But in fact I didn’t learn your secret from anyone here. “

“Then how did you? We’ve been so careful!”

“A colleague at a conference in San Diego saw the two of you at a Santa Monica hotel. He knows both Harry and Lila quite well, only he didn't know who the beautiful lady on Harry's arm was. From his description, I figured out the mystery woman had to be you. So, do you want to talk about it, Lena? We go way back, Harry and I.”

As the final sentence lingered in the air, Marlena’s eyebrows shot up. Chloe bit her lip, as if regretting the words.

“So do Harry and I, five long years now. I’m a big girl, Dr. V. I make my own decisions." Marlena added dramatically: "Two can play at keeping secrets, you know.”

Marlena picked up the phone and dialed Ho Jo's, remorse churning in her belly.

Since arriving for this reunion, she'd been second guessing Chloe's motives and putting off Faith. It was high time she did the right thing by both mother figures, get this family reunion back on track, no matter how hellishly weird the aura was getting.

“Hello?”

“Mama, it’s Lena. Sorry to have been missing in action today. I slept late. Any chance you can tear yourself away from the crocheting? Turns out I’ve got all my Christmas shopping left to do. Great. I’ll be there to pick you up in fifteen minutes."

She zipped up her small roller bag and checked her briefcase to make sure the brown notebooks were inside. Then she locked her private closet door, what Harry called "Marlena's den of iniquity."

It contained a black satin eyeshade, lingerie, a Yahtzee game, and a bong, amounting to a kit for entertaining Harry.

She took the elevator up one floor to Harry's penthouse level.

After unlocking hisarryH suite and entering, she placed her urgent message on the fireplace mantle. A man of routine, this time of year Harry always turned the gas fireplace on first thing upon coming in; he'd be sure to see the note.

“Hi, Martha,” she said to the Finnish maid standing outside with her cart, waiting to enter. “Haven't seen Mr. Drake today, have you?”

“No, ma'am. Merry Christmas, Ms. Marlena.”

“You too, Martha.”

Twenty minutes later, as the cleaning lady left the suite, an air current was sucked in by the quick movement of her cart as it banged against the door. The current caught and rode on a draft that happened to be coming from the fireplace. Then it swirled around the pink linen envelope, caught an edge, and finally tumbled it off the fireplace mantel.

The distress signal from Marlena to her lover drifted like a snowflake, riding the air current toward the white marble floor, floating down, down, down and then entering the copper log-carrier. There it flopped over and was wedged to the side by a pile of small twigs, becoming invisible.

On such small motions may one's fate depend.

A weak ray of sunshine slanted across Hatter’s Field, briefly highlighting a jagged, towering peak called the Hat, which would be the main field of action during the upcoming Christmas Fire Night bonfire.

But from the perspective of Harold Augustus Drake, fuming on the outskirts of town late Tuesday morning, it all looked like a fucking field of fucking inaction.

Negotiations in Laramie had broken down once again. Then his mobile phone battery died, and so he was rendered helpless when the front end of his black Mercedes 200SL sports car slid into a ditch at the tail-end of a mile-long pileup of stranded vehicles.

He was trying to be patient so as not to elevate his blood pressure, which his doctor in Casper had warned him about. But an hour later, when at last a county sheriff's car slowly approached with red lights flashing and tire chains grinding, Harry was out of patience and his jutting jaw line was aflame.

A round-faced deputy slowly rolled down his window and inquired laconically into his particular tale of woe. Then, when the officer saw who he was, his tune changed. Before the deputy moved on to the next vehicle, Harry was afforded the use of the officer's mobile phone to contact his secretary, Carlotta, at his office in the hotel.

As he waited for his private tow truck to show up, Harry began singing to pass the time. He had a decent tenor voice and a good memory for off-color lyrics from the wild parties of bygone fraternity days.

Smokey the bear, Smokey the bear,

Has a prick like dynamite, covered with hair.

When he plucks his magic twanger, the girls all shout with glee.

He can shoot a wad of jizzum 'cross the state of Tennessee!

He followed this up with a George Cohan medley--"Yankee Doddle Dandy," "It's a Grand Old Flag," and "Over There."

When Harry tired of the sound of his own voice, he then set about recalling the names of friends with homes in Palm Beach or the Caribbean. If this bullshit mobile phone were working, he would have been on it making arrangements to escape. That's how disgusted he was with the Laramie deal and the damned winter weather, by Mungo.

A conservative man by nature and breeding, Harry Drake was often reckless in his business deals and in his relationships with the fairer sex. Some would argue these are not mutually exclusive traits in powerful men, even into the second millennium. But, provided the status quo suited him, Harry was not one to flee from it, and this engrained trait was the source of some current conflict with his mistress.

An imperious child with a bad stutter that took years of practice and an iron will to conquer, young Harry had been adored by his older sister, Susannah, who'd gladly indulged his expressed wish that she exclaim “hail, Augustus!” whenever he entered the room.

His mother thought the sun rose and set on Harry.

His father was less sure his sulky son deserved the adulation surrounding him, but Nicholas was seldom there, and when he was at home, he was in bed reading a newspaper. Harry therefore grew up seeing himself as a superior being whom women automatically worshipped, whether from afar or close-in.

Yet he always tried to behave in a gallant way toward the weaker sex, so as not to leave himself open to complaint.

All in all, he believed there was much cause for dissatisfaction going in the other direction, however. For instance, he'd lavished all his worldly goods upon his beautiful wife, only to find her indifferent toward himself and his castle. So he'd sought attention elsewhere. But lately, he'd been getting a rash of shit from his mistress, which was an unexpected, unwanted development.

To hear her tell of it, she was a miserable bird singing alone in a gilded cage. But Marlena couldn’t very well complain about her accommodations. The Alta Hotel had won a five star Michelin rating in 1976. Their affair could go on indefinitely, from his perspective, so long as they didn’t have to talk about it. In the past, they'd talked about the hotel, which suited him fine.

There simply weren't enough hours in the day for a man of business to waste time conversing with women.

The single exception had been Chloe Vye, brainy, beautiful, and gracious, a triple threat. He'd ardently enjoyed her company growing up, and he wished, in retrospect, they'd managed to pull off their foiled elopement.

They would have made a great couple. Chloe was steady as a rock, comfortable with tradition, and also, like him, she'd come back after traveling the world to live and work here contentedly.

As for Lila and Marlena, they were forever and tiresomely chomping at the bit. Lila was a fag hag of the first order; she was at her happiest touring Europe with some dickless wonder.

Marlena was that anomaly, a loner who worked hard at her career and also loved sex. It was precisely that combination which had drawn him in the first place. But of late she'd developed an annoying habit of demanding more emotional attention. She sometimes behaved like a clingy schoolgirl.

It wasn't his responsibility to make the needle move for her, was it? So the more she craved his attention, the less he gave.

Harry had gone to business psychology camp at Harvard last summer, so he knew his way around terms like “X and Y management styles,” “Transactional Analysis,” and the “'I’m OK, You’re OK’ personality.” He went out of his way to make Marlena feel that she was OK, even if he himself felt uncomfortable about her encroaching presence in his personal life and her off-putting harping on something she called "emotional intimacy."

What this was, he hadn't the foggiest idea. He had much more interest in new ways to get his rocks off.

At first, it had all worked satisfactorily. He had the best of two worlds--a glamorous, stay-away wife and an adoring, part-time mistress. Lila had her freedom to roam. Marlena had the run of a fairy-tale establishment.

The bloom departed the rose when Lila came home and demanded to have a child, despite her doctor's opinion that she had a deformed uterus.

His gall was still rankling over Bob Drummond, so he wasn't about to cater to Lila's whims. But, if he toured Europe with Marlena while Lila sulked at home, there'd be hell to pay. So, since the hotel had been opened, Marlena was allowed to trot on back home to Dimmer.

That, he'd thought, was the end of their affair--sad, perhaps, but inevitable. Truthfully? He'd felt a tad relieved.

Yet somehow, against all the odds, Marlena had wormed her way back in. Bottom line, she'd used the milk-toast husband as a pimp. Coddie had caught him at a weak moment, and he'd paid for her return, getting part of her time on national promotions.

At first, they were caught up in the thrill of re-igniting the flame, having sex twice a day, jetting around the world. But now there was a lot on his plate. The affordable housing deal in Laramie, which had seemed in the bag, was anything but. It was taking extra time and effort to get the interested parties to come to the table and be bought off.

Outside of an occasional day trip to Santa Monica, days or weeks would pass when she would be at the hotel, waiting. Tough shit. He was sticking to the deal.

From the outset, they'd agreed no strings were attached. Obviously, each had other obligations, even if they could be characterized as unhappy marriages. Whose marriage wasn't unhappy? Why should theirs be any different?

He felt no more obliged to be faithful to Marlena than he did to his wife, who had shown her stripes early in the marriage by running off with her personal trainer to Ibiza and thumbing her nose under the guise of "free love." Free, my ass. He paid the bills!

“If you want to cry on Dimmer’s shoulder about life's problems, it’s no skin off my hose,” he’d said in late October, emphasizing the ticklish point he was making by scratching his cock. She'd been putting out feelers about the holidays. Would she be deprived of their mutual orgasms again, like last Christmas?

Why not shift to Dimmer this mother-fucking intimacy thing?

“It’s only natural for the two of you to stay in touch,” he pressed on, giving her a sidelong look of appraisal.“Dimmer’s someone you can communicate with, probably better than you can with me.”

That had forced a rise out of her. He was amused by how Marlena managed to feign a high-and-mighty tone, despite her hurt feelings.

“If I wanted someone who communicates better than you, my love, I’d get a cat. Anyway, I never talk to Coddie anymore.”

He knew that was a lie.

The truth was, she called Dimmer almost daily, and they talked at length. He knew because her hotel phone line was bugged.

He could feel the muscles clenching under the scar along his jaw-line that came from a knife fight in a Soho alley in a quarrel over unpaid gambling debts twenty years ago.

Dimmer and Marlena were long-time business associates, and he didn't really think there was anything more to it than that. But, she shouldn't have lied.

Lying had been Lila's downfall, too. To be more precise, it was Lila's blatant, assertive disloyalty to a degree which was staggering that had driven Harry to crave a submissive woman. Marlena wasn’t even capable of the kind of promiscuous misconduct Lila had rubbed his nose in. Moreover, he wasn’t fooled by Lila’s current pose of repentance. Tigers didn’t change their stripes.

Marlena had always been a purely submissive partner. Granted, this was a one-way street, but in the affairs of
his
heart, a one-way route was the only one he would allow inside.

To put it in business terms, from then on, he had the two beautiful women in his life pegged as unreliable suppliers.