Too Much Too Soon (50 page)

You shit, you nasty shit.
“Curt she’s just as miserable about this whole mess as you are.”

“Who’s miserable?” Curt asked, the false jauntiness buoying his tone.

“Maybe she’ll get over it.”

“Either she will or she won’t.” He straddled a high stool, tapping on the empty mug to mark an end to this dubious personal conversation before he returned to Metshtchersky and the imaginary problems besetting the metro project.

*   *   *

At work the following day Joscelyn heard that Curt had left for Lalarhein where Ivory was
overseeing the work on a city rising on the sand near Pump Station 5, Malcolm’s mark on the desert. The huge increase in oil prices had heaped wealth on the arid little country and there were networks of new roads and lavish aqueducts. Daralam now boasted a Sheraton and a marble-faced Hilton. The beggars were gone, the old British homes of the aristocracy had been replaced with modern palaces. The Daralam airport, completed in 1971, also an Ivory project, was the country’s pride, with its magnificent mosaics, restaurants, mini-hotel for laid-over passengers, movie house and swimming pools—one for men, one for women.

A few weeks later she heard that Curt was in Venezuela to inspect the Texaco refinery project. Then he was in Kenya, in Bangkok, in Gabon, in Idaho, in Alaska. Word seeped back from the exotic sites around the globe that the Big Boss was on a rampage.

In November Joscelyn’s section of the subway project was completed. She received a note from Australia. Curt’s energetic handwriting with the thick downward strokes stood out from the paper as if in bas-relief:
I won’t be in Los Angeles, but my house is your house.

Having given up her furnished single when she went to Washington, she took him up on his offer.

Honora’s magnificent camellias along the curving driveway had been disastrously sheared to resemble a privet hedge. Inside, the airy, rambling house sparkled and shone with every kind of polish, so at first Joscelyn couldn’t
understand why the rooms seemed like roped-off exhibits in a museum. Finally she realized what was missing. Honora. Her sister had spent a lot of time in the little flower room off the kitchen, composing blossoms and greenery from her gardens into loose, pretty arrangements; she had left her books and magazines facedown to mark her place; she had filled bowls with nuts, candy, fruit—she had imbued the house with life.

Each weekday morning at quarter to nine Joscelyn drove to work. At Ivory the engineers in her level were at liberty not to come in at all until they were assigned a new project. In the past she had spent these inevitable hiatuses with Honora and Lissie. Now she sat in her little glass-walled office on the tenth floor of the new wing of the Ivory complex and read back issues of
Civil Engineering.

After a week or so of boredom, she booked herself a round-trip ticket to England.

Making one of her frequent transatlantic calls to Honora, she broached the subject casually. “I’m thinking of taking a holiday.”

“Here, Joss?”

“I haven’t made up my mind,” Joscelyn hedged.

“If you were, it’d be better for Lissie over Christmas. Remember? I told you about the problems she had at first getting accustomed to the auditory trainer. And you know how far English schools are ahead of ours—she’s swamped, poor baby. Daddy and I’re tutoring her in the literature, and the school gave me
the number of a nice young Indian for the maths.”

“How’re you doing?”

“Mavis”—Honora worked for Lady Mavis Harcomb—“has given me complete charge of a terrace in Belgravia and a garden in Bloomsbury.”

“So everything’s coming up roses?”

“I’m working seven days a week,” Honora said, her soft voice practically inaudible under the hum of the line. “That makes life bearable.”

Joscelyn canceled her BOAC flight.

She could never shake the belief that the five indoor servants and seven full-time gardeners were sneering at her for that most shameful of diseases: loneliness. On three successive weekends she took an ocean-view room at the Miramar Hotel, which was less then twenty minutes away in Santa Monica.
Let ’em figure me for the world’s most popular houseguest.

On the third Saturday evening, as she ate her solitary dinner in the hotel dining room, the thought of returning to the impersonal room weighed unbearably on her. Instead of taking the elevator up, she went to the reception desk and checked out. Before nine she was home in Bel Air.

Figuring a brandy would blur her depression, she crossed the dark hall to the family room, where the bar was.

As she pushed open the twin doors, lights blazed at her. It took her a moment to accept the misshapen mound on the area rug as two entwined naked bodies.
The servants are certainly
taking advantage
, she thought, backing away.

The female partner had spied her. Blond mermaid hair streaming over improbably large breasts, she sat up and gave Joscelyn an unembarrassed, complicitous smile.

The man rolled over to look at her. It was Curt.

Her brother-in-law’s nudity embarrassed Joscelyn so profoundly that she lost all sense of where she was, yet despite the blood flooding her face and roaring behind her ears she found herself noting that Curt was far better endowed than Malcolm had been.

“Aren’t you away with friends for the weekend?” His voice had its usual irony.

“Got back early and needed a nightcap . . . .” she mumbled. “When did you get in?”

“Late this afternoon. Be a good girl, will you. Toss us those clothes.”

She went to the couch. The air here was tainted with lush perfume, the acridity of sweat and the flat odor of sex. Her clumsy throw strewed garments short of the rug. The blond rose on long, shapely legs, bending for a dark, full skirt that she casually put on before tossing Curt his shorts.

As he yanked them on, he said, “Winners of the Jon Hall, Dorothy Lamour look-alike contest. Lindsay, you’re too young—”

The girl gave a throaty laugh. She appeared totally at ease half naked. “Sweetie, it’s Linda, and Dottie had a wonderful retrospective at the Academy.”

“That’s right, you told me that you’re a member in good standing of SAG. Linda, this is Joscelyn. Joscelyn, Linda.”

“Hello, Joscelyn.” Linda swung her hair back and raised her hand in a salute.

Inarticulate fury overcame Joscelyn, a sense of being violated, of witnessing some unspeakable orgy that debased not only Honora but Curt as well. She wanted to shake this vain slut until her big, naked breasts fell off. She nodded coldly.

“Now for the drinks. Joss, what’s your poison?”

“Changed my mind, thanks.” Joscelyn bolted across the room to push open one of the sliding glass doors to the terrace. Linda’s actressy chuckle followed her as she ran along the brightly lit pergola to her rooms, where she hugged her arms around herself as if the temperature were below freezing.

Sunday morning there was no sign of Curt or Linda, but to avoid any chance of confronting them, Joscelyn had breakfast at Ship’s in Westwood, spending the morning in aimless driving, the afternoon at a matinee of
The Godfather
, afterward eating pizza and salad across the street from the movie theater. Darkness was filling the canyon when she arrived back at the house. She had every
intention of going directly to her rooms, but as she started along the pergola she realized that Curt was sitting on the terrace.

“Evening,” he said.

I can’t avoid him forever
, she thought. Her knee and hip joints felt stiff as she walked toward him.

He raised his glass. “This is a pretty decent Moselle. Care too sample it?”

“Sure.”

She sat on the wrought-iron couch next to him, watching as he took the wine from the Georgian silver cooler and filled one of the half dozen rock-crystal glasses that the servants routinely set out—in Curt Ivory’s homes nothing was stinted or done meanly.

“Sorry about last night,” he said. “I never figured on you walking in. She’s gone, by the way.”

Sipping the cool, pale wine, Joscelyn attempted to speak in the same light tone that he had. “I guess now that you’re home I should find my own place.”

“If you’re going to be a Fundamentalist about the Lindas of the world, yes,” he said.

The setting sun cast its last, most intense, reddish light on the eastern rim of the canyon, where Honora’s belvedere stood. Staring up at the airy, octagonal structure, Joscelyn said, “Honora’s my sister.”

“But these days hardly my wife.”

“There’s been a parade of Lindas these last few months, hasn’t there?”

“Look, last night it was rough, and I
apologize. But Joscelyn, facts are facts. I’m a single man nowadays, and I get myself fucked.”

He said the last sentence arrogantly, and suddenly she had the feeling that he hoped she would report both this conversation and the Linda incident to Honora.

“I suppose better the Lindas of the world than another co-venture with Crystal,” she said, regretting her words immediately.

Prepared for Curt’s least pleasant smile and some biting repartee, she glanced through the dusk at him. She was utterly appalled by his expression of guilt-stricken misery.

Joscelyn had always regarded pity as a denigrating emotion, one that lessened the person at whom it was directed. Yet now, looking at her brother-in-law’s set profile, she felt a great surge of compassion that in no way diminished her long-term feelings for him.

“Curt,” she said softly. “Look, I didn’t mean to snipe at you. The truth is I’m very sorry about . . . well, the way things turned out with you and Honora. What’s the use of keeping up a running battle. You’ve always been my friend.”

“Thanks, Joss,” he said, and continued to gaze at the slick dark water of the swimming pool. It seemed to her that his expression and posture were yet more disconsolate.

She set her monogrammed glasses on the flagstone and reached over to take his hand, squeezing it comfortingly. He did not draw away, but there was no response from his warm,
lax fingers, no answering pressure of palm; she might as well be a woolen glove, yet she found herself incapable of releasing her hold.

Before the breakup of the Ivory marriage, Joscelyn had mentally placed Curt so far off limits that she had never once indulged in a fantasy of them united sexually. He was her brother-in-law, the husband of the adored sister who had taken a mother’s place, he was tabu. But on learning of his well-marked liaison with Crystal and seeing at firsthand one of his flings, an aperture in her mind had opened. And sitting on the dusk-heavy terrace, feeling the warmth of contact, it seemed to her that the physical aspects of her love might not be so hopelessly unrequitable.

Timidly she began tracing the pulse and strong tendons inside his wrist. He appeared too sunken in his brooding to notice: this casual inattention, rather than frightening off Joscelyn, made her imagine herself his long-married wife consoling him for some ineluctably rotten break.

Out of the depths of her body came a rush of desire, an urgent and pure sensual arousal that she had not experienced since Malcolm’s death—indeed, she had decided that this side of her lay buried in Forest Lawn with him.

“Curt,” she whispered, in one movement rising to kneel in front of him. Like a supplicant she rested both hands on his thighs. “Ahh, Curt . . . .”

Now her fingers were acting of their own volition, rubbing the white duck fabric over the firm musculature.

He tensed and a shudder ran thorough his legs. She mistook this tremor for answering passion.

“I can’t bear seeing you so miserable,” she whispered, her right hand edging upward.

He gripped both of her wrists, wrenching her hands from him.

“I care so much, Curt.”

“Oh, Christ, haven’t I enough to bear?” he asked in a harsh, strangled whisper. “Joss, please, for God’s sake please will you leave me the fuck alone.”

At this instant the automatically timed lighting system came on, shining on Curt’s expression of revulsion.

She jumped to her feet, in her clumsiness overturning the glass. As it rolled noisily across the uneven flagstones the blood rushed hotly to her face.
It figures, doesn’t it?
she thought.
Me, the husband killer, the ugly cockroach Sylvander sister, the one woman alive who turns Curt Ivory off.

With what appeared a tremendous effort, Curt managed his caustic half smile. “So now you understand about Linda
et al
, Joss. Women can’t keep their hands off me.”

She didn’t realize until hours later the kindness of his awkward little joke, his attempt to return them to normality. At this moment humiliation was burning in her blood and all she could think of was getting away from him.

“Have a dinner date,” she mumbled. “Byee . . . .”

She barged through the house. The next
thing she knew she was in the enormous garage, gunning her Porsche, then digging down the driveway. But after the electrified gate doors had swung open for her she slowed. Her mind was blank of everything except Curt’s expression, and she had no idea of how to escape the horrified topaz eyes. It took her nearly five minutes to recall that a block or so from the Miramar was a lively looking bar that she’d never entered.

The place was jumping, obviously a pickup joint for the young, gorgeously tanned crowd who looked as if in their combined lifetimes they had experienced not a single rejection. Joscelyn settled into an inconspicuous table in the corner, ordering several drinks in rapid succession in an unsuccessful effort to erase that image of Curt.

“Hello there,” said a masculine voice.

She looked up. Her vision blurred and she opened her eyes wide, then squinted to get a proper bead on the man standing over her. He was even more out of place here than she, this conservatively dressed business type with his dark suit, bulging, pregnant belly and thin, lined face. He was smiling.

She smiled back. “Won’t you join me?”

“It’s too noisy to get acquainted here,” he said. “Maybe we can find a quieter spot.”

“Great idea,” she said, opening her shoulder bag for her American Express card.