Too Much Too Soon (59 page)

Dipping another berry, she praised God for giving us Friday.

Over the weekend of course there would be no hearings: the PR man had returned to New York on an afternoon shuttle, Arthur Kohn had escaped to his farm in Delaware. Curt had told the limo’s chauffeur to drop him at a Hertz rental agency, leaving Honora with the assumption that he was off to some luxurious private rendezvous with his bony model. Joscelyn, after showering and changing to hip huggers and a new white sweater, had said that she was off to visit her old Georgetown haunts—
her
face was seldom photographed and in a sports outfit and contact lenses she would be incognito. After her sister had left, Honora had expelled a long, trembling breath, like an invalid after a series of grueling medical tests.

The next day, while Lucien was lunching with Coralie, he heard in the quiet street below the brisk rattle of a cabriolet suggestive of an elegant carriage being drawn by a horse whose easy trot
—

Without a warning tap, the front door of the suite opened.

Honora jerked involuntarily, swiveling to
see who it was.

Curt, dangling the key by its metal tag, stared back at her in equal surprise. “The desk said you and Joscelyn went out.”

“Only Joss.”

The little jug had toppled and cream was soaking through her old Liberty blouse into her brassiere. She removed her ruined little supper from her torso, a fat strawberry rolling to lodge between her faded jeans and the couch pillow. Recovering it, she scrubbed the whitish patch on the upholstery with her napkin.

“Honora, leave it alone,” he said.

“The cream’ll stain.”

“There’s no need to make a major production. I’ll pay for the cleaning.”

“A little water’ll do it,” she said, starting for the bathroom.

“Will you for God’s sake sit down and quit acting like a Mexican jumping bean?”

“I’m not.”

“You’ve had the itch the entire time in Washington.”

He knows about the dreams
, she thought. Then told herself it was a sure sign of mental disorder to imagine that another person knows what transpires within your skull. “You’re right, I have,” she admitted, dropping the napkin. “You know me and my hermit streak.”

“The fishbowl’s gotten to you?”

“A bit.” She shrugged. “Weren’t you off for the weekend with Marva Leigh?”

“She has a session in Rome, some big layout for a French magazine,” he said. “I drove the
hell into Virginia.”

“Virginia?”

“Birthplace of presidents,” he said. “Now I’m starving. Was that your dinner I made you spill? Come on, you need a bite, too.”

She pulled the wet blouse away from herself. A restaurant full of well-dressed Washingtonians ogling them?

“A sandwich or a burger,” he said. “You’re fine like that.”

“What makes you so sure I’m coming?”

“That guilty look,” he said, and grinned.

*   *   *

“Have another half,” he said.

“I’m stuffed up to here.” She touched her throat. “Curt, what on earth possessed you to buy six sandwiches?”

“Memories of a starving youth.”

“Several times I’ve thought about that.”

Taking a bite, he looked up at the red light blinking atop the Washington Monument.

Had she presumed too much by referring to a past that he never revealed publicly? She, too, peered at the honey-lit obelisk, which was twinned in the oily blackness of the reflecting pool.

They were sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and a chill breeze came off the Tidal Basin. She wore her old, oversize fisherman’s sweater, he a gray sweatshirt. The
Washington Post
protected their jeans from the cold marble steps, and a larger paper bag was open between them. The khaki-clad ranger leaning against one of the Memorial’s columns behind them
had not intervened, so she assumed it was okay to picnic here.

“I’ve had a few thoughts of my own,” Curt said. “For example, that question about Marva Leigh?”

“It seemed obvious you’d be with her.”

“Hmm?”

“It’s hardly a secret that you’ve been getting laid.”

“And you have, too?”

In an earlier age an honest response to his question would have crowned her with the virtues of chastity, modesty, self-control. In the final quarter of the twentieth century, though, the truth would make her suspect. Curt could easily believe she had developed lesbian tendencies (Vi?) or turned into a weirdo with onanistic fetishes, or—most shameful—her estrogen level had taken a premenopausal plummet. She gave him what she hoped was a wordly smile.

He peered at her, then said quietly, “Honora, one thing you should know. My major criterion for a female is that she not in any way remind me of you.”

A crazy delight wriggled through her. She blew out her breath, and while the cloud evaporated in the floodlit night she cautioned herself that from the beginning Curt’d had a smooth line.

“So there’s nobody current?” he asked.

“Talk about being pointed.”

“Lissie’s never mentioned any uncles,” he said.

“So you’ve got me pegged as a dog?”

“No, not at all. I see you with some tweedy country type, veddy British, who’s got you down to Kent to work miracles with the ancestral yews.”

“Let us not forget the rhododendrons that Great-Grandpapa brought home from his Himalayan expedition.”

They laughed.

“So tell me honestly. Was it only guilt that made you agree to dine
avec moi?
”

A couple was lumbering up the steps. The man, hearing Curt’s voice, squinted down at them. His porcine young face pulled into knowing lines, and he put his arm around his girl’s fake fur coat, drawing her toward them.

“Hey, you’re Curt Ivory, aren’t ya?”

Honora stiffened.

“So?” Curt replied.

“Sharp of me to recognize you in them clothes,” the intruder said, adding in a confidential tone, “In my opinion you’re getting the bum’s rush.”

“Maybe,” Curt said brusquely.

“Let Morrell’s crowd come up with something big, that’s what I was saying to Shirl here. So you and Mrs. Ivory—Honora—are having a little moonlight picnic, except”—a humorless bray—“there ain’t no moon.”

Curt shoved their unopened Styrofoam cups back in the deli bag. “Let’s have the coffee someplace else,” he said, jogging down the steps.

She hurried after him, not catching up until
they were behind the Memorial.

“The bastards,” he growled. “They see you on TV and they think they own you.”

“He was trying to be supportive.”

“Supportive my ass. Honora, couldn’t you see he was grandstanding for that fat bitch.”

He strode in silence to their parking place by the grandiose gilded statues of winged horses given to the country by Italy. Gunning the engine, he dug onto the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway. When they were passing below the overhang of the Kennedy Center she turned on the radio, switching until she found WGMS, the classical music station. After two solemn chords, she said, “Brahms.”

“One.”

“No, Three.”

The full-bodied orchestra calmed her, and possibly soothed him, too. At any rate, he slowed to a legal speed as he drove through the rustic woods, turning off at Massachusetts Avenue.

Pale glints through the dark trees were the only sign of the well-set-back mansions—this was Washington’s embassy row. He turned and turned again. Here there were no sidewalks and the darkness made the narrow road seem deep in the country. Parking on a shoulder overhung with unpruned box, he cut off the motor, turning the key so that the majestic music continued to roll over them.

“The coffee must be iced by now,” he said.

“I didn’t really want it anyway . . . .”

Her words faded away because Curt had
rested his arm on the back of her seat. A VW bus passed, shivering the warm car in its rush of air, and by the beam of headlights she saw his expression, watchful, waiting.

Honora, sweet, look at me.

I love you.

You are love.

That hadn’t been a line, but when he’d said it she was nineteen, so maybe she
was
love.

His eyes glinted in the darkness. He was still watching her.

An unbearable tightness constricted her chest: she could hardly breathe yet the lower part of her body was loose and quivery. By some mysterious communion she accepted that Curt would never make the first move, her rejection at the Mamounia had been too all-encompassingly physical for that.

But what about her?

Maybe she was misreading his signal. Maybe all of those erotic dreams had befuddled her. What was sadder than a middle-aged woman making a pass at a man who prefers lolling amid young, gorgeous, firm flesh? Men wore the years with unfair lightness, and he, monstrously rich, in his attractive prime, could have the most beautiful women in the world—he
did
have them. Maybe her semi-ex-husband was hoping she would bring up the subject of divorce.

Rejection would do more than destroy her modest self-esteem. Rejection would annihilate her.

The long, Brahmsian chords had never pulsed
more slowly.

“Curt . . .” Leaning forward, she pressed her cheek to his.

His irregular breathing sounded through her, echoing the thud of her heart. She pressed kisses near his ear, along his jaw, and was surprised by the salty wetness on his cheeks. The violence when their lips came together stunned her. Literally. She felt herself losing consciousness and clutched him as if he were a swimmer come to rescue her from the green depths of the ocean—yet she longed to drown in this kiss.

His tongue slid into her open mouth, and at its liquid caress the delicious, itching, wanting, tingling wetness rose through her vagina—empty, oh so empty lo these many years—dissolving the boundaries of her innermost womb, rousing some mysterious level of her being that had nothing yet everything to do with carnality. She reached for his erection, he whispered some wordless endearment. Either she pulled him down or he pressed her back or they were sinking together into the depths of the car seat. She crushed her belly to his, and the separating denim maddened her so she fumbled with her own zipper, squirming as she skinned the jeans and cotton underpants around her knees. Taking his hand, she guided it to the hot, slick wetness.

“Oh Christ . . . Honora . . . love . . .”

She caressed the tendons of his neck, reaching inside the sweatshirt to curve around his shoulders, the well-developed bicep muscles,
his nipples. His fingers were rubbing her wet flesh tantalizingly. She unzipped his fly, encircling the hard silkiness of his naked penis, longing for a contortionist’s agility to kiss it. Kicking off her pants, spine curved against the door, one foot on the floor of the car, the other lifted, she spread her thighs, helpless before the demanding, blinding approaching torrent that awaited her.

The instant he slid into her, she gasped aloud, a high, surprised cry. “Oh love, Curt . . . love . . . love . . . .”

They lay in the awkward position until their breathing calmed.

“Honora?” he said in her ear. “I haven’t done it in a car since I was a kid.”

“Thank God it wasn’t bucket seats.”

They both chuckled in the darkness.

“Your poor back,” he said.

“I’m not a kid.”

“Thank God for that.” The Brahms had just reached the final movement as he shifted from her with a kiss. “I owe you one, so what’s say we adjourn to the hotel.”

“Somewhere else,” she said. Her clenched tone came from beyond her volition. She wanted them back in the green, unknown sea without a past or a future—or a House subcommittee.

They drove like adolescents, he with his arm around her, she with her head on his shoulder, surrounded by the marshy smell of sex and the musical selections of WGMS—before they moved out of reception range, the ravishing first-act love duet from
Otello
brought stinging tears to her eyes. Curt turned off I-66 and they traveled on a deserted road, passing dark, scrubby woods marked with haunted names, Manassas, Bull Run. Unwilling to break the spell of their flight from the city, she did not ask where they were going. He turned right onto a graveled drive, braking in front of a trim fretwork sign:
THE JEFFERSONIAN
.

“I came past here this afternoon,” Curt said. “It’s one of those new hotel-condominium complexes around a golf course.”

“Perfect,” she said.

The elderly black desk clerk on late-night duty, apparently impervious to newsprint and TV, read the names Curt printed on the registration card without goggling.

“Nice to have you with us at the Jeffersonian, Mrs. Ivory, Mr. Ivory. You want privacy? Hmmm . . . . 914’s vacant. Very quiet out there, if you don’t mind a few ducks.”

A fancifully antiqued map of the private roads was handed over, and the dark, wrinkled finger pointed the directions.

The three-room condo was lavishly yet not unpleasantly beruffled, everything in the same blue and white cotton. Curt unplugged the television and radio. Honora sat on the print bedspread calling Joscelyn, unsurprised when, after ten rings, the Ivory private line automatically switched to the hotel circuit. Leaving a message that she would be back sometime Sunday, she hung up, yawning and stretching. She was groggy. The engorged urgency of the parked car, the operatic romanticism of the drive had vanished, and from her solar plexus spread a warm, weary, near comradely contentment that Curt and she would soon be sharing this canopied double bed.

“Still sleep with the windows open?” Curt asked.

“Unless Lissie’s sick.” She covered her mouth for another yawn.

Between the cool, flowery sheets, he put his arms around her. “Zonked?”

“Totally.”

“Me, too.”

They kissed lightly and in less than five minutes were sleeping as they had their thousands of nights, she curled naked around his naked back, their legs entwined.

*   *   *

“Curt,” she said.

He was jerking fitfully and muttering primitive, strangled sounds.

“Curt!” She prodded his shoulder.

He jerked awake. “Wha?”

“You were groaning.”

The mattress shifted as he rolled over to face her.