This Fierce Splendor (61 page)

Mounting the stage wearing a clinging knit dress, the Mistress of Ceremonies had geranium-red lips and looked like she’d have become someone’s mistress without too much ceremony. There was a slight, intriguing hard edge to the lean, beautiful woman. Her hair, long and black, caught the smoky light from the spots like vintage Cher Bono as she welcomed the audience.

“Ladies who come here are usually celebrating something,” she observed, and looked around the room, randomly choosing tables, asking for the
occasion. There was a doe party for a young girl who was getting married in a week; a group of student nurses who’d gotten their caps; a woman leaving for the Air Force. One divorce. (A burst of sympathetic cheers. The M.C. sent over a certificate for free drinks on the house.) There was also a busload of bank employees from Chicago. They were toasting the night with margaritas, in a way that would probably have started a stampede of investors withdrawing their money if any of them had been there to see it.

“Illinois girls know how to party
hard!
” The M.C. grinned. “And that’s good. Let’s take a poll, ladies. How many of you have never seen any man besides your husband or your boyfriend in the altogether? Let’s see your hands!”

Many hands rose. But not Jennifer’s. Jennifer’s hands had welded themselves to the sides of her chair.

“Enlightenment awaits!” promised the M.C. in high good humor. “Tonight you’re going to see
everything
of three gorgeous guys and find out how the men in your lives”—she winked—“measure up!”

Amid the howling approval around her, Jennifer tried to sink as low as possible in her chair without disappearing under the table; she spared a thought for her poor mother, receiving the news that her only child had suffered a fatal heart attack in a nightclub featuring male strippers.

She made it halfway through the first act. But when the macho hunk onstage five feet from her dropped his hands to the waistband of his skin-tight glitzy slacks, and made teasing motions that
indicated he was going to divest himself of them, she vanished into the restroom.

Feeling like an idiot, and a coward, and a mouse creeping out of a knothole, she emerged when the music and explosion of whistling and foot-stomping applause had faded into the lower roar of excited conversation that signalled the end of the first act.

A waiter taking drink reorders from the table of graduate nurses blocked the narrow path to her table. Standing patiently, listening with a reddening ear to the M.C.’s bawdy routine, she heard a woman seated nearby say, “Deb, look at that—the guy who just came out to change the tape. Is he
cute
!”

As she turned her head to the array of sound equipment edging the stage, Jennifer was wondering mildly how women could bring themselves to go into ecstasies over another of these vacuous, beef-on-the-hoof jocks. Then her gaze lit upon the tall blond man in wheat jeans and a white sweatshirt, who stood by the sound table with a tape in his hand.

Never had she seen a face like this one. Carved in simple planes, it contained a strict beauty that carried no trace of prettiness. His hair had the diffuse brightness of sunlight pouring through spring water. Under sable eyebrows, a dark fringe of straight lashes defined eyes of haunting crystalline blue. Small smile lines framed a wide mouth. The pure facial structure gave the indelible impression of strength, intelligence and a certain refined tenderness—it was a face built for sweetness. But the brooding eyes were a cynic’s. He was here, yet remote from all this; detached. That,
and the straight classical proportions below made him look like a statue of the young Alexander.

Jennifer heard the woman seated in front of her who’d been addressed as Deb breathe, “What a babe!” While Jennifer disapproved of the extravagant phrasing, she had to admit to some echo of the sentiment inside herself. Here was the expected coronary, but caused by a man who was fully clothed. With a flash of humor, she thumped a fist lightly against her chest and said, “Pump, heart, pump.”

Her own record with men was not what anyone would call impressive. In her dreams she was brave, polished, even a little wild. In reality, she was a worrier. No one ever worried the way she could. It was the one thing she did really well. And because one of the things she worried the most about was men, there she had erected her strongest defenses. Not a prickly person, she was prickly with men. She wasn’t good with them. She just wasn’t. Attractive males, with their lavish egos, ruffled her the most. Perhaps it was because she was such a plain daisy herself. With her brown hair and brown eyes, she was the very fabric of average. She had a face right off a Norman Rockwell
Post
cover, the picture of wide-eyed Americana. It was a sincere face, at times even a merry one, but in a crowd heads had never turned to look at it.

She was threading through the cleared path to her table when one of the nurses interrupted the M.C. by calling out playfully, “Hey! Is the blond guy going to take off his clothes?”

Jennifer watched him pretend to ignore the remark as he wound the tape, his broad mouth
stretched in a smile that suggested he might be laughing inside.

Mock-indignant, the M.C. made a “naughty-naughty” sign with her index finger. “Have you no shame? The poor kid is barely seventeen years old—” Laughing protests and a suggestive comment or two around the room greeted the obvious fiction. Jennifer would have put his age at perhaps a year or two older than her own. Grinning, the M.C. continued, “I’m ashamed of you ladies and your carnal intentions. And in front of a minor! Anyway, he’s only the sound man, so—behave! Because I’ve got something here for all of you who luh-hu-uvv”—she gave the word three syllables—“law and order: a tribute to our gentlemen in blue! Here’s a man you’d love to go undercover with. For your entertainment pleasure, allow me to present Peter the Policeman!”

Jennifer landed in her seat just as a magnificent body in a motorcycle cop’s outfit—with silver helmet, shiny black knee-length leather boots, reflecting aviator sunglasses—landed onstage inside a swell of acclaim. Moving at full throttle and with dynamic professionalism to the theme from Peter
Gunn
, he was a riveting figure. If she hadn’t known he was about to take his clothes off, Jennifer almost might have enjoyed it.

The aviator shades came off to reveal lustrous black eyes. Beneath the discarded silver helmet was a shining mass of stunning ebony hair and Jennifer swallowed nervously. He slid out of his black leather jacket and began opening his blue shirt. Beneath was a finely muscled chest and taut stomach—Jennifer’s palms started sweating. The half-naked policeman began stroking his palms
down his midriff in time to the music, his hips moving. To a riot of encouragement, his deft fingers played with the buckle of his wide black belt. Jennifer had slid so low in her chair that her chin was nearly level with the table. But she was not too low to miss the policeman’s gesture toward her when it came. Fingering the buckle, crooking the index finger of his other hand invitingly, and looking right at her with a come-to-me smile, he showed her by look, by gesture that he wanted her to join him onstage and unzip his … Jennifer choked. The tables around her exploded with excitement and rippling laughter. Embarrassment hit her, so strong that it nauseated her and burned from the top of her head to her shoulders. Her face buried itself in the shelter of her table napkin.

Nor did she emerge. The banter and cheering around her told her that Susan had taken her place. The music evolved to a slower, more sensual beat. Her head came up in involuntary surprise and alarm when she heard Diane cry out,

“Oh, my God, will you look at that?
It glows in the dark!
”

The policeman’s G-string, glowing like a beacon in the blacklight, was moving with the supple rotation of his pelvis. The light changed again and she tore her gaze away and to the side—and discovered that the light-haired man at the sound table was watching her.
Yes, her
. The alluring blue eyes were holding her in a level study. As she sat very still, staring numbly back, she began to read in the perceptive depths of his eyes a heart-catching mixture of amusement, sympathy, and interest. For a suspended moment her heart beat
oddly as their gazes touched, and then she dragged her eyes away.

Looking everywhere in the room except the stage, in a harried effort to avoid the trauma of finding out how Peter the Policeman measured up (which was very well according to the wild response around her), she had time to wonder how much of what she had seen in those blue eyes was a trick of her imagination, or the stage lights, or even their breathtaking form. Subliminal chemistry was doing uncomfortable things to the inside of her, but she told herself it was probably due more to the awkwardness of all of this than to a direct response to a man who’d looked at her once. She was too self-conscious to risk another glance back toward him until the policeman had left the stage—out of uniform.

The blond man at the sound console was making an array of adjustments to the apparatus in front of him, the austere beauty of his hands outlined against the stark mechanics. The practiced movements were done by rote; the far-seeing gaze was softly unfocused as though his thoughts had drifted elsewhere. Appearing from a door on stage right, the M.C. laid her hand on his rear pocket and squeezed gently as she walked by. A tingle of laughter swept through the audience from those who had seen it. The M.C. looked back over her shoulder at the man and his ironical eyes lit slightly as he gave her a smile of bewitching reproach before leaving the area by a side door.

“Give us the sound man!” came a shout from the banking group.

The M.C., who had begun to speak, ignored the interruption, but the call for the blond man spread
like a chant through the crowded room. Encouraged by a certain gleam in the M.C.’s grin, the clamor grew in momentum. More and more voices joined the swell. Raucous whistles rocketed toward the stage. Rhythmic clapping erupted. Breaking into laughter, motioning the rebels into order, the M.C. had to shout into the microphone to make herself heard.

“All right, all right! Talk about lascivious … I can see you’ve all had the same thought as I did two years ago when I came upon him sitting on the public pier dangling his toes in the lake, his jeans rolled up to his knees.…” She chuckled at the thunder of delight before her. “When I look for men to dance in my club, I’m looking for very special ones. They have to have better than good looks. They have to have better than good dancing ability. I go way beyond that. I look for men with that unique charisma that—well, you know what it does to you. As you’ve guessed, he’s not the sound man, he’s definitely not a minor and he definitely is the showpiece of the Cougar Club! Ladies, the Cougar Club is proud to present the number one male dancer in the Midwest. Here he is, our own native blueblood to make your blood simmer—”

Amid pandemonium, and Jennifer’s confusion because she had not really guessed that the blond man with the gentle gaze and face like a vision would strip off his clothes for money, he strolled onstage to the beat of “Stray Cat Strut.” It seemed profane. It seemed like Michelangelo’s David leaping down from his pedestal and performing a bump and grind on the Accademia Di Belle Arti floor.

And yet bump and grind this was not He was a
whimsical blue-collar fantasy in a light shiny hardhat. A form-fitting red plaid shirt molded to his upper body, leading the eyes irresistibly downward into the softly faded denim caressing his hips and long thighs. The pounding rhythm loved his hard body. There was a mesmeric quality, an almost playful kinetic energy to his natural grace. Moving to the music with easy sensuality, he pulled off the hardhat in a flow of athletic choreography. The light hair tumbled sensuously, and the blue and hot-silver eyes held a laughter that was at the same time innocent and full of utter deviltry.

“God, he’s so …” murmured Annette.

The quaking excitement inside Jennifer had nothing to do with embarrassment, though heaven knew she was embarrassed by what she saw, by what she felt. The icy ball that her stomach had become was melting all down the inside of her, through her nerves, into pumping pathways that led downward, inward.

He drew a woman from the eager audience. She came easily to him, and basking her in the flood of his radiant gaze, he lifted her hand gently to the top button of his shirt. Holding her smaller hand cupped inside his against his chest, he guided her hand slowly lower, and the buttons fell open as he moved himself, and her, to the music that had grown softer. Soft too was the brush of a finger under her chin, tipping up her face for a lingering kiss.

He let one arm shrug out of the shirt, then more slowly the other, the liquid sway of his hips still catching the beat. Jennifer could almost feel the softness of his bare flesh, the heat and steel that came beneath. Her throat could almost taste
the light tang of sweat that traced the intoxicating hollows stretched along his muscles. His vitality projected like rocket fire through the room, burning the imagination, flaming the watching bodies. At the edge of the stage he held out his hand to a woman seated below. When she stood beside the stage, hungry to touch him, he took her wrists in his hands and stirred her palms slowly over his lean hips and the compact satin flesh of his lower stomach. One of his hands slipped into her short curls, dropping her head lightly back to receive his kiss.

Smoky disco and husky harmonics poured over the stage and into the audience as another woman came forward. He carried her hands to his jeans and through the motions of dragging open the snap, dragging down the dense brass ribbon of the zipper, and peeling the pliant cotton fabric lower as though she were unwrapping hard candy.

Now, except for the slight fabric that left him exposed almost completely in back, he was nude. The purity of clean body lines in the ivory spot carried the wattage of chain lightning. The rim of the low stage filled four deep with women waiting breathlessly to tuck a folded dollar into the tiny garment he wore and to kiss the wide, smiling mouth.