It still disturbed Anne to be in a room with a TV set turned on.
She found her escape in books. If it had not been for the town library, inadequately stocked as it was, her life would have been impossibly grim.
In June 1989, five months before her seventeenth birthday, Anne graduated from high school. Anne had gone to the ceremonies by herself, feeling miserable and alone amidst her happy classmates and their families. When she got home, she found MarieClaire propped against her pillows, her eyes staring vacantly at the TV screen.
Nearly an hour passed before Anne realized she was dead.
Anne pulled down the toilet seat and struggled to her feet. She washed out her mouth at the big marble sink and brushed her teeth. She still felt drunk, but at least the nausea had subsided and the floor was holding steady.
MarieClaire’s death freed Anne. She took a job in a local health clinic, and when she had saved a little money, she enrolled at a nearby two-year community college. She did so well there that she was able to transfer to the University of Vermont on a scholarship. At the university she blossomed. She chose biology as her major, and she excelled at it, much to the surprise of the male-chauvinist head of the department. Even with the scholarship, she still had to work part-time as a receptionist at a medical center to support herself, but for the first time she began having a social life. Her astonishing good looks, hidden from the world during her high school years, were hidden no longer. Male students followed her around like a permanent band of courtiers, constantly vying with each other for her attention.
She lost her virginity to her piano teacher, a handsome, charming professor in the school’s music department. He threatened to kill himself if she didn’t consent to marry him. She agreed reluctantly, but was able to back out at the last minute when he confessed that he ad been married twice before and had five children.
She graduated from the university with honors and went to work at a biological supply house in her hometown, Burlington, Vermont. After two years there she had made up her mind to go back to college for an advanced degree. She had decided to pursue a career in biology, probably as a teacher.
But that decision got canceled.
One day Dalton Stewart walked into her lab, flanked by his chauffeur-bodyguard and a couple of assistants. He was looking for the head of the accounting department. It seemed that he had just bought the company, and he wanted to see the firm’s financial records.
He was tall and charming in a worldly way that impressed Anne enormously. He was also very rich—the ultimate eligible bachelor.
People magazine had recently run a story on him, detailing his high-powered business and social life. He had dated many celebrities, and there were always rumors flying in the gossip columns about whom he might marry next.
On his way out of the building, he returned to the lab and Jupiter’s laugter ù 55 handed Anne a note that sent her pulse hammering: “You’re an extraordinarily beautiful woman. Will you have dinner with me tonight? I’m staying at the Ethan Allen Hotel. Please call me there.”
Anne didn’t call him. She had a date with her boyfriend, Matty, and she had no intention of breaking it, even for Dalton Stewart.
The idea of going out with him terrified her, anyway. He was divorced, nearly twice her age, and impossibly glamorous. And she was put off by the implicit assumption in his note: that she’d come running just because he was who he was.
To her astonishment, he reappeared in the lab the next day and asked her to dinner again. She blushed and stuttered, but turned him down.
This time she lied and told him she already had plans for the evening.
He persisted, and finally got her to agree to see him the following Friday. He was supposed to be at a business conference in Barcelona, but he said he’d change his plans just to see her.
Her friends in the lab, meanwhile, were going quietly berserk.
They couldn’t believe that she had had the nerve to give him such a hard time. She should jump at the chance to go out with him, they insisted. Anne wasn’t so sure. She couldn’t understand why someone like Stewart should show any interest in her in the first place. They couldn’t possibly have anything in common. The day before their Friday date, she called his office in New York and canceled.
Anne removed her dress and her underclothes and stepped into the shower. She turned the water on as cold as she could stand it, let it run for a few minutes, then mixed in the hot until the spray felt warm and soothing. She stood under it for a long time, until she was aware of nothing but the pleasant sensation of the water beating down on her shoulders and back.
Dalton Stewart had refused to give up. The more she resisted him, it seemed, the harder he tried. Finally, in the mistaken belief that the only way to discourage him was to go out with him and get it over with, she agreed to a date.
And some date it turned out to be.
Stewart suggested they start early and do a little sightseeing.
At five P.M. his chauffeur drove them to the Burlington airport.
They boarded his private jet and circled over Lake Champlain.
Anne was delighted. She pointed out some of the landmarks of the city of Burlington below.
“Have you ever seen the Eiffel Tower?” Stewart asked.
Anne laughed. “In Paris? No. Someday, though.”
“How about right now?”
“Right now? What?”
“Let’s go see the Eiffel Tower.”
The twin-engine Lear altered course to the east, climbed to thirty thousand feet, and flew to France. They talked through the evening and had dinner on the plane. After seven hours, just as dawn was breaking across Paris, Anne looked down and saw Sacre-Coeur, Notre-Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, and, of course, the Eiffel Tower. The magic of the moment moved her to tears.
Through some friend in the French foreign ministry Stewart arranged for customs at Orly Airport to admit Anne into the country without a passport, and they had breakfast at a lively cafe on the Left Bank.
After that they spent the day shopping and touring the city in a limousine. He had rented a double suite for them at the Hotel Meurice on the rue de Rivoli. Their windows looked out over the Tuileries and the Louvre.
Anne had dreamed for a long time of seeing Paris. Now there it was, right outside her window. She felt giddy, euphoric. In her entire life she had never been any further from Burlington, Vermont, than Boston, Massachusetts.
They had dinner at L’Hotel with a famous French actress and her producer husband. Anne charmed them with her provincial Canadian French, and the producer offered her a part in his next movie.
Everyone drank a lot of wine, and the mood was festive.
At one point Dalton leaned close and whispered in her ear.
“Can I ask you an important question?”
Anne shook her head playfully. “No. Only silly questions are allowed today.”
“Okay. A silly question then. Will you marry me?”
Anne felt her heart flip. “That is a silly question,” she replied.
Later, at the Brasserie Lipp, they sat at a crowded table with
!
more famous people—many of them acquaintances of Dalton’s —and drank more wine. There was a well-known American TV journalist and his writer wife, and so many others who came and went during the evening that she lost track. During the quieter moments, Dalton continued to press his case for marriage, painting a stirring picture of what a wonderful life they would have together. She protested. They barely knew one another, after all.
On their way back to the Hotel Meurice at three in the morning, Anne, sleepstarved and bleary with jet lag, said she’d at least have to have some time to think about it. In the elevator up to their suite she said yes, she probably would marry him. Dalton completed his whirlwind seduction that night in bed. Anne succumbed almost with relief.
The best surprise was how exciting the sex was. In retrospect, much of it had to do with the circumstances—the wine
, the sense of dislocation, the removal from everything familiar—which let her surrender so completely to the sensual side of her nature. She had had sex with four other men—the music professor, Matty, one previous boyfriend, and another professor, who had forced himself on her in his office. None of them had given her pleasure like this. If she wasn’t yet in love, she decided, it was certainly a great beginning.
A month later, Anne Marie Beauregard and Dalton Francis Stewart III were married at a small private ceremony on Long Island. Dalton apologized for insisting that everything be done so quickly, but there were so many demands on his time, he felt that if they didn’t get married now, the opportunity might be lost forever.
After a short honeymoon in the Caribbean, Dalton parked Anne in his estate on Long Island and went on with his life as before. She rarely saw him anymore. The last time had been a week ago. He was just back from somewhere and on his way to somewhere else. They had dinner and spent the night at the family’s brownstone on Fifth Avenue. The next morning he was gone.
The sex that night had been rushed and perfunctory. Dalton brought her some gifts and asked her if there was anything she needed. Otherwise, he was his usual distant, distracted self.
Thinking back on that incredible courtship, Anne now saw it in a new light. Dalton had approached their relationship as if it were a contest and she were the prize. Once he decided he wanted her, he had gone after her, pulling out all the stops. And her early resistance had only increased his determination. He wouldn’t quit until he had subdued her.
She had consented, she realized with some mortification, just because it was so much a part of her nature to be agreeable. He had bulldozed her, and she had been too polite and intimidated to resist, or to insist on a larger say in matters. She hadn’t negotiated with him.
She had surrendered to him. And now that he had the prize, his interest in her had faded. Professions of love notwithstanding, he didn’t seem to want a real relationship. He didn’t seem to care who she was or what she wanted out of life.
She had tried to persuade Dalton to let her take a job in Manhattan—she had been offered a research position at the Rockefeller Institute that she very much wanted to take—but he had talked her out of it. He told her that her social status made any job, especially a career, out of the question. While he succeeded in the world of business, he expected her to succeed for them in the world of society.
It wasn’t enough to be rich, he insisted; one also had to know the right people, do the right things, be seen at the right places. It was up to her to see to these matters. That was to be her career.
She had tried, but she had little feeling for society and its demands, and no desire to rise in it. It was all painfully boring and phony.
And then there was the matter of children. She had told him before they were married how much she wanted children—how important a family was to her. He had agreed enthusiastically. It was important to him also.
But he had insisted from the very beginning that she use birth control.
One night, after a particularly torrid bout of lovemaking, he asked her if she was remembering her pills.
“What if I said no?” she asked teasingly.
“I’d be upset,” he replied.
Jup1tens L)augnter ù
“Why? I thought we were going to have children. Why wait?
I’m ready now.”
“No, you can’t,” Dalton replied, his voice suddenly tight.
“I can’t? Why not?”
Dalton remained silent.
“You’re frightening me, Dalton,” she said. “Talk to me. Why can’t I?”
Dalton sat up in bed. “I’ve got a problem,” he whispered. “A bad gene. It can be inherited. It causes severe retardation.”
Anne could scarcely believe his words. She felt as if he had punched her in the stomach. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she demanded. “You owed it to me to tell me.”
Dalton hid his face in his hands. “I know. I know. I wanted to.
Believe me. But I was afraid you’d back out of the marriage.
I didn’t want to risk losing you. I’m sorry, Anne. Honest, I am sorry.”
Anne felt cruelly deceived nevertheless. Life without children would be unthinkably empty. The following day Dalton made a lot of apologies and excuses and vaguely promised that if there was no other solution, they would adopt.
Anne stepped out of the shower and dried herself. She felt slightly better. She stood in front of the full-length mirror on the bathroom wall and studied herself in the bright light of the ceiling heat lamps.
Was she really beautiful? People always said she was, but she didn’t quite believe it. She thought of herself as very average.
Maybe that’s all beauty was—being quintessentially average. At the moment she looked more bedraggled than beautiful.
She wrapped a towel around her waist and walked back into the bedroom.
She shook her head. It hurt. She was still drunk.
She closed the drapes to shut out the lateafternoon light, then flung herself nude on top of the bed. The room felt hot, stuffy.
Her eyes wandered to the ornate molded plaster border that defined the edges of the bedroom ceiling. The corners were the fanciest—a delicate scrollwork of leaf clusters and other design elements she could not identify. Suddenly she spotted a small face, a chimera, hiding among the leaves. It appeared to be leering down at her. She squinted her eyes, but the face remained. Silly.
An illusion caused by the room’s dim light, she decided. If she opened the drapes or turned on a lamp, she knew, the face would disappear.
She kept her eyes fastened on the small face until she began to feel dizzy again.
She rested a hand on her breast and brought her other hand up between her legs. She closed her eyes and squeezed her thighs against her fingers. Through the haze of the wine, she felt a warm rush of desire.
She squeezed her legs together harder and dug her fingers into her breast.
Tears welled from the corners of her eyes. Why did she have to spend her life feeling lonely and unloved?
6
Dalton Stewart came out of Goth’s lab and walked straight to his rented Toyota Land Cruiser, parked just outside the building.
Waiting for him were his chief executive assistant, Hank Ajemian, and his chauffeur-bodyguard, Gil Trabert. Ajemian opened the back door for his boss and then slid in beside him.
Stewart removed the gold fountain pen clipped to his shirt pocket and held it out. A miniature microphone and transmitter were concealed inside. Goth had refused to allow any recording devices inside his office, so Stewart had resorted to using a bug with a remote transmitter. “Did you get everything?” he asked.
Ajemian picked up the portable laser-disk recorder from the floor and set it on his lap. “Came through perfectly.”
Trabert started the jeep and wheeled it slowly out of the weedchoked lot. Prince Bandar’s jeep was already bouncing down the hill, trailing a cloud of dust. Yamamoto and Fairfield, who had come out behind Stewart, were just getting into their vehicles.
Stewart craned his neck around to look back toward the lab’s entrance.
He was wondering what had become of the baroness.
He had hoped to speak to her, but she was nowhere in sight.
Stewart looked at his chief assistant, slumped forward in his wrinkled suit. Ajemian was short, overweight, and bald. He suffered from allergies that caused dark circles under his eyes and gave his Brooklyn accent an added overtone of nasal congestion.
He presented a dramatic contrast to his tall, slim, well-manicured WASP
boss.
“You heard it all,” Stewart said. “What did you think?”
Ajemian closed his eyes and sniffled. Some plant pollen in the air was making his nose run and his eyes water. “Goth sounds a little off the wall to me,” he ventured.
“You think so?”
“Well, you asked the key question,” Ajemian answer
ed, instinctively flattering his boss. “Where’s the proof? He said he doesn’t have any, so what the hell is he talking about?”
“You think he’s a fraud?”
“I don’t rule it out. More likely Goth is conning himself. He wants to believe he can do these things. Maybe he needs to believe it.”
“You think we should forget it, then?”
Ajemian pulled a tissue from his pocket and blew his nose loudly. He hated it when his boss put him on the spot like this.
“Well, what’s he offering us? Basically nothing—beyond his word. And I don’t think that’s worth much. As you yourself said—” “Stop quoting me, for godsakes. I know what I said.”
Ajemian nodded.
“I want to think about it,” Stewart decided.
Both men were clutching the edges of the seats in front of them to keep from being thrown around by the rough mountain road.
Stewart appraised his chief assistant. He was wearing that hangdog look he put on whenever Stewart was abrupt with him.
He paid Hank Ajemian a million dollars a year, along with stock options, a fat expense account, and a complete medical plan. And Ajemian was worth it. He didn’t have much imagination, but he was quick and savvy, and an absolute wizard with a balance sheet. He could cut corners and bend rules with the best of them. He knew how to pull out all the stops to outwit a rival in a deal or to confound and defeat an army of regulatory investigators. He could put together—or take apart—a deal like no one else Stewart had ever known. When Ajemian was doing the numbers, the competition didn’t stand a chance.
And Stewart trusted him. He was loyal. And it wasn’t just his personality that made him that way. He owed Stewart a lot.
In 1988 Ajemian had been hit by both the SEC and the United States Attorney General’s office in a Wall Street securities fraud case that sent him to the federal penitentiary in Danbury, Connecticut, for three years. When he got out of prison, in 1992, no one would hire him. He had a wife and three children, and he was reduced to sending his kids to live with relatives while he and his wife, Carol, cleaned offices to stay alive.
Tom Hyman Page 6