Private Demons

by Robert Masello

  Hallie had shown it to Lisa, and all the other girls, in Milan.

  “Well, nothing makes a man come around sooner than thinking he's about to lose what he thinks he's already got locked up,” Lisa said. “So let's make sure we have such a good time tonight, our pictures wind up in Women's Wear Daily tomorrow.”

  Hallie laughed, and Lisa said, “Did you see that photo of Angela that ran two weeks ago?” She hooted out loud and said, “She'll be doing Weight Watchers ads if she doesn't cut it out.”

  When they pulled up to the door of the club, the taxi meter read $8.50, and Hallie pressed a ten into the tray. “Just keep it,” she said, sliding across the seat after Lisa.

  The cabbie said, “This could be free if you wanna give me your phone number.”

  “No, thanks. I'd rather pay.” She closed the door after her, and Lisa was already laughing.

  “You think these guys ever succeed with stuff like that?” she said.

  Hallie just shook her head in wonderment.

  The Pleiades, like most chic New York clubs, looked like nothing from the outside—just a darkened glass door behind a velvet rope. Hallie and Lisa had their invitations in hand, but the guy inside the door hardly glanced at them. Hallie stuffed hers back in the pocket of her overcoat, which she then deposited at the coat-check. Lisa, standing in front of a smoked-glass mirror, ruffled her hair and said, “I forgot to ask you—you know anybody here?”

  “No. I've never even been in this club.”

  “Oh, well, that much I've done. Follow me.”

  They went down a short hall, deeply carpeted and dimly lit, and into a large room with a low ceiling, a long bar, and a sunken center; there were cocktail tables and black leather chairs set around a dance floor that nobody was dancing on. There were maybe a hundred, a hundred and fifty people already there, and the noise level was pretty high. The music was vaguely rock ‘n’ roll, but sung in French, which to Hallie sounded kind of ridiculous. Europeans could do lots of things real well, but rock ‘n’ roll just wasn't one of them.

  At the bar, Lisa commandeered two of the stools—tall and sleek, with padded seats also made of black leather—and caught the eye of the nearest bartender.

  “What'll it be?” she said to Hallie.

  “White wine.”

  “Chardonnay or Chablis?” asked the bartender, a guy who looked to Hallie like an ad for the Nazi youth movement.

  “Chardonnay,” Lisa answered for her. “Make it two.”

  Even before the drinks could be put down in front of them, a man in a smartly cut Armani suit—Hallie could identify a designer at twenty paces—signaled the bartender that these were on him. He took out a gold cigarette case, offered cigarettes to Lisa and Hallie, and after they'd declined, lighted one for himself.

  “You are Lisa Bennet, yes?” The accent, like the suit, was Italian.

  “Yes . . . and thanks,” she said, touching the rim of her glass. “Do we know each other?”

  “I have seen you at parties . . . once, on Enrico di Gennaro's boat in Ibiza. I am Carlo Guardi.”

  “This is my friend, Hallie Patton.”

  His eyes slid over toward Hallie, without his head even moving. Then, almost imperceptibly, he nodded.

  She nodded right back.

  “So tell me, Carlo,” Lisa said, “what's all this Swinburne stuff? Who is he?”

  Lisa was taking the up-front, direct American style that Hallie knew the Euros loved. They thought American girls—by which they meant models, actresses, and debutantes—were so wonderfully challenging and straightforward. They also thought they were easier, and cheaper, to get into bed.

  “Swinburne?” Carlo said, with a shrug. “I do not know. An Englishman, I think. I just come to the parties.” He shrugged again, but the look on his face was anything but uninterested. His eyes flickered hungrily over Lisa's red mini-skirt. Hallie began to feel distinctly de trop.

  “Swinburne won't be here tonight,” said a man who'd come up behind Carlo. “He's been dead for over ninety years.”

  This guy was another interesting mix—mostly Chinese, but with an English accent and French clothes. Hallie pegged the jacket and slacks as Saint Laurent.

  “Well, he sure does send nice flowers,” Lisa said.

  “I sent the flowers,” the man replied. He introduced himself as Duncan Kwan.

  “Then I guess you already know who we are.”

  The Italian looked a little perplexed; he couldn't decide if Kwan was going to be a problem, poaching on his territory, or a help—drawing off Hallie so he could concentrate his full firepower on Lisa. But Duncan made it easy on him, by turning to Hallie and saying, “Why don't we take a table? I've been standing all night.”

  Lisa smiled, and said, “Remember—WWD tomorrow.”

  Hallie took her little beaded clutch-bag off the bar, and with Kwan at her side—they seemed to be exactly the same height—walked around to a set of carpeted steps and down into the sunken area cluttered with tables.

  Kwan seemed to be an awfully popular, or at least well-known, guy at the club; men and women were always stopping him to say hello, kiss him on the cheek, whisper something funny or scandalous in his ear, using all sorts of languages and accents. Hallie wondered how he made sense of it all. And she wondered why his name seemed somehow familiar.

  He pulled out a chair for her at a little table down front, just off the still-empty dance floor, and then sat down beside her. A waiter instantly appeared at his elbow.

  “What is that?” he said, pointing to Hallie's glass.

  She told him.

  “Let's graduate,” he said, and told the waiter to bring a bottle of Cristal.

  Had Chardonnay become hopelessly un-cool? she wondered.

  “I was afraid you'd be too tired to make it tonight,” he said.

  “Too tired?”

  “I heard that the shows in Milan were hard work this year.”

  So besides her name and address, he knew that too. Not that it would have been hard to find out. But it made her a little uneasy that he'd bothered.

  “No worse than last year,” she said. “Last year, one of the runways collapsed.”

  “Yes, I remember. A friend of mine, Angela Cummings, was in that show.”

  So he knew Angela too. What didn't this Duncan Kwan know? Or who?

  “That's why I took the precautions I did.”

  “Precautions?” Hallie felt like she was in some kind of quiz show.

  “To make sure you'd come to our party. I sent flowers to your good friend Lisa, as I thought you might come together, and an invitation to the office of Lucien Calais, in case you didn't. I never heard back from Lucien—he's away on business, I presume?”

  Hallie didn't know how, or what, to answer; this was all suddenly getting too deep, and more than a little uncomfortable, for her. Why was he so interested in Lucien? What was the connection?

  “He's a busy man,” she said of Lucien, trying to sound noncommittal. “I never know what he's up to.”

  “Oh?” Duncan said. “I was under the impression you were quite close.”

  He'd certainly done his background check, Hallie thought. But something else told her it might be wise to play ignorant for a while, and possibly learn something of use to Lucien. What, exactly, she couldn't say.

  The waiter reappeared, with an ice bucket and two fluted glasses. He held out the bottle for Kwan's inspection, then opened it, with a muffled pop, and poured. Kwan waited for the foam to subside, then angled his glass toward Hallie's.

  “To our meeting, at long last.”

  At long last?

  He touched the rim of his glass to Hallie's. On his left wrist he was wearing a gold bracelet.

  “I've seen your picture many times,” he said, “but I think they haven't done you justice.” He was looking at her rather fixedly, but it was hard for her to see his eyes; the room was eccentrically lit, and Kwan was wearing aviator-style glasses that had slightly tinted lenses. “Lucien's
a lucky man . . . or at least he should be. Perhaps he doesn't know how to treat a lady. Not many men do.” He sipped from his glass. “It's one of the things that I pride myself on. I do know how to treat a lady to all that she deserves . . . and to all that she secretly desires.”

  Hallie could hardly believe that she was hearing all this, and despite her best efforts, she couldn't rein herself in entirely. “If her desires are so secret,” she said, “how do you know them?”

  “I'm a good guesser,” he replied, smiling smugly. “A very good guesser.”

  Over the years Hallie'd met her share of conceited, arrogant men—more than her share, if it came right down to it—but this guy Kwan was in a league by himself. She began to wonder if he'd ever invited Lucien to this party at all; it seemed to her that he had only one thing on his mind, and that was putting the moves on Lucien Calais's girlfriend while he was out of town. If Kwan knew so much about their relationship, he probably knew that too. But talk about obvious.

  “So how well do you know Lucien?” she asked. She couldn't imagine they were friends.

  “Oh, not well,” he admitted. “We had a little business to conduct.”

  “Business?” she said innocently. Now maybe she'd find out something worthwhile.

  “Yes . . . we're both in the shipping business. You mean, he's never mentioned my name to you?”

  “I'm afraid not . . . imagine that. But as I said, we don't see as much of each other as you seem to believe.”

  For the first time, she thought he might believe her on that score. He's so vain he thinks everybody's talking about him all the time, she figured.

  The waiter returned, just long enough to top off their glasses with the champagne.

  “Perhaps you've just forgotten,” Kwan resumed. “Lucien's interested in the shipping line I own.”

  Hallie felt like she'd inadvertently forced him to put some of his cards on the table; he'd expected her to know who he was and be suitably impressed—like the other women who'd been kissing his cheek and fawning over him—but so far she hadn't been cooperating at all. Now he had to lay some of it out for her.

  “I own something called Gold Prow,” he said. “We operate out of Hong Kong and Taiwan. I had hoped to get to know Lucien a little bit better tonight . . . but perhaps things will turn out for the best after all.”

  A woman in what looked like a French maid's costume bent down to whisper something to Kwan, who listened without looking away from Hallie. He laughed softly, nodded, and said, “Yes, anytime now.”

  “She wanted to know if the entertainment could get underway,” he said to Hallie. “I told her to go ahead.”

  “There's going to be entertainment?”

  “Oh, of course. The Swinburne Society's famous for it. Don't tell me you've never heard of us either?”

  Hallie smiled and opened her hands, as if to say, “Can you believe it?”

  “Then you're likely to have a memorable night.”

  Hallie wasn't sure if she liked the sound of that.

  “Who is Swinburne anyway?” she asked.

  Duncan Kwan shook his head, disappointed in her. “A famous poet,” he said, “though even at Eton—my mother's a Brit, in case you're wondering how I went there—I could hardly bear to read his stuff. Nobody in the Society could. ‘When the ways of the sun wax dimmer,/Wings flash through the dusk like beams;/As the clouds in the lit sky glimmer,/The bird in the graveyard gleams,’ “ he recited. “That's about all I remember.”

  “If you never liked his poetry, why did you form a society around him?”

  “Life-style,” he said. “We liked the way he lived . . . the things he liked to do.”

  The girl in the maid's uniform—a short, stiff black skirt, black stockings, a white apron and cap—returned to their table and handed each of them a slim little stick about eighteen inches long. Smiling at Hallie, Duncan flicked his stick in the air, making a little whistling noise. “It's all in the wrists,” he said.

  Two other girls, also dressed as maids, were distributing similar sticks to all the other guests. Hallie looked around the room for Lisa; she spotted her, still by the bar, still being hit on by the Italian. A maid handed Lisa a stick, and gave another one to Carlo, who flicked the maid on the rear with it as she turned to go. The maid wagged a finger at him, as if to say, “Naughty, naughty.” Lisa, looking very surprised, glanced over toward Hallie's table, and their eyes met. Lisa held up the switch, in wonderment, and Hallie held up hers to show she'd gotten one too. Lisa mouthed what Hallie took to be "Womens Wear Daily.”

  But more and more, Hallie was getting the feeling this wasn't the kind of party to get, or want, any press.

  A man at a neighboring table got up, came over to Duncan, and said, “Shall I?”

  “If everyone has his rod,” Duncan said, “I don't see why not.”

  The man smiled at Hallie—he was on the spindly side, with a pale blond mustache, and had a length of white cloth tied into a sort of bow at his neck—and said, “I don't believe we've met—Percy Renwick.”

  “Hallie Patton,” she said.

  “A pleasure . . . and I hope not the last.”

  He turned away, and strolled into the center of the empty dance floor; the tables, fully occupied, were all around him. He introduced himself—though most of the crowd already seemed to know who he was—and welcomed everyone to what he called “another of the Swinburne Society's impromptu entertainments.” Fingering his white cravat, he said, “You see, Duncan, some of us haven't forgotten how to tie them.”

  Hallie noticed that six or seven other men in the room were now wearing them, some of them with wing collars. What, she wondered, was the significance of all this?

  “For those of you who are newcomers,” Percy said, glancing over at Hallie, “a word of explanation. The Swinburne Society was formed, oh, some twenty-odd years ago, on the playing fields of Eton . . . those same fields where Algernon Swinburne himself once played. And where all of us learned to wear this devilishly handsome necktie.”

  There was a smattering of laughter.

  “To become a member of this highly select society, an applicant had first to pass a number of rigorous tests. He had to commit to memory at least a dozen stanzas of our eponymous poet—'By the North Sea,’ as I recall, was a popular choice—”

  “That's what my lines were from,” Duncan said to Hallie.

  “—he had to be a hale fellow well met, and most important of all, the qualification without which all others counted for nothing, he had to have been soundly birched by one of the masters.”

  At this several of the men in the white ties flicked their switches in the air, laughing loudly.

  “I got my dozen,” Percy threw in, “for tipping a punt on Founder's Day.”

  “I helped you,” shouted another Brit, somewhere near the bar.

  “Yes, you did,” Percy said. “And you got another dozen for playing Fives past midnight.”

  Hallie was starting to feel like she was in a foreign country, where she didn't speak the language.

  “And Duncan, if I'm not speaking out of turn, received his for a rather notorious infraction with a girl from town.”

  Duncan looked pleased to have it mentioned. “It's only because of my mother's family,” Kwan whispered to Hallie, “that I wasn't expelled altogether.”

  “What luck,” she said.

  “Get off already, Percy!” shouted the Brit from the back, and two others chimed in with, “Hear, hear!” and, “We've had enough of your ugly mug!”

  One of the men started singing, words that made no sense to Hallie: “Blades on the feather, hands between our knees . . .”

  Others joined in, boisterously. “We'll all pull together,” and then something about swearing “by the best of schools,” all in a rough, schoolboy fashion. She gathered it was some kind of school song from Eton, and she was wondering why they didn't just hold these little reunions of theirs in some pub on Lexington Avenue. Percy held up both of his p
ale, thin hands, and after giving up trying to be heard over the growing chorus, shouted, “Then let the games begin!”

  Someone must have cued the music track, because the singing was instantly drowned out by a thumping disco beat. The lights in the room all went off, except for the spotlights trained on the circular dance floor. Duncan was refilling Hallie's champagne glass, and she hoped that he could see better than she could.

  There was some wild trilling laughter, and the three girls dressed as the French maids skittered onto the dance floor. Each of them was now holding two feather dusters, one in each hand; flinging them the way a cheerleader might fling pom-poms, they launched into a very tightly choreographed dance routine. Only instead of pretending to be leading cheers, they pretended to be dusting and cleaning, which, as far as Hallie could judge, involved an unprecedented amount of bending over and shaking their behinds. They were all wearing frilly white panties that twitched with their every movement.

  The crowd hooted and cheered.

  The music came up even louder and three men bounded onto the stage, all of them carrying flimsy wooden chairs and wearing white ties, like the one Percy had worn, black trousers, and short black jackets that stopped at their waists. All of them looked to Hallie like Chippendale dancers—tall, hunky guys with bare chests, narrow hips, longish hair. Maybe this was where they did their moonlighting.

  With the music still pounding, the men plopped the chairs down and synchronized their movements with the women. There was a lot of hip action, a lot of pelvic thrusting, and eventually the sexes paired off . . . and each of the pairs started to enact the same basic scenario at different spots on the dance floor. The men, pouting like naughty boys, whipped one hand to the belt of their trousers, and then whipped it away again—whipping off their trousers at the same time; underneath, they were wearing brightly colored G-strings, with bulging, suspiciously full pouches in front. Placing both hands fiat on the seats of the chairs, they presented their rear ends to the pretty maids, who stripped their dusters of the feathers at the end and without falling out of time with the music, began to swat their bottoms with the sticks.