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.
63
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.
“Nightmare?” She stroked his sweat-drenched hair.
“I’ve had ’em every night.”
“This hearing!”
“No, this woman!” He rubbed his stubbled cheek against her shoulder. “Any idea how polite you’ve been?”
“I thought I was being biting.”
“Polite,” he repeated. “In a remote, distingué way.”
“Flying six thousand miles to force myself on you isn’t exactly a sign of indifference.”
“In you, Honora, it could be construed as noblesse oblige.”
“What was the nightmare about?”
“I have it often. We’re at the Mamounia, and it’s the lovely, purified and honorable English lady versus the vicious former Austrian guttersnipe grown into major-league SS gauleiter.”
“Curt, I never once turned us into stereotypes.”
“You asked what I was dreaming.”
“But it’s not fair.”
“Since when’ve nightmares gone in for fair play?” he asked. “Or people, for that matter. Let’s face it, love, when you showed up on the Odyssey, you can’t deny I played the goose-stepping Nazi.”
She kissed the coolness of his eye socket. “Mmm, nice.”
His fingertip was tracing her collarbones. “I’d forgotten how much silkier your skin is.”
Silkier than whose skin? She briefly conjured Marva Leigh—or rather a loony image of Marva Leigh at the head of a long line of shapely girls with crocodile hides. Curt’s hand was moving down toward her breasts, and his light, subtle touch started a trembling that afflicted her like a form of paralysis. She could not move, yet her soul seemed to be flowing out in a stream toward his shoulders, his chest, his belly and thighs, his erection.
“Honora?”
“Ahh please, please, please.”
* * *
The following morning they woke to the drumming of rain. Beyond the looped-back blue and white curtains of the bay window, they could see large drops dancing wildly on the grayness of a man-dredged pond. A half dozen white ducks and their yellow ducklings had clambered beyond the narrow rim of concrete to huddle under the azaleas.
After dressing, they drove through the deluge to a logo marked on the map as Cracker Barrel General Store. Small and brightly lit, its shelves were stocked mostly with exotic, high-priced jars and cans. From the gondola and refrigerator unit Honor selected wholewheat rolls, eggs, bacon, double lamb chops, Boston lettuce, and a “home baked” pecan pie that appeared to be fresh. Curt added Beluga caviar, odd-shaped cans of French pâté de foie gras, glass jars of cornichons, various types of imported crackers and cookies, six quarts of ice cream in various flavors.
“Curt, we’re here for a weekend, not a month.”
Patting her backside, he said, “You’ve forgotten my appetite.”
He piled in a half dozen bottles of Mumm’s, toothbrushes and the new Irwin Shaw novel for Honora.
She never opened the book. Logs were stacked outside the back door, tempting Curt to build a fire that crackled from the moisture.
She sat on the hooked rug, looking into the flames. “‘What is love? ’Tis not hereafter,’” she recited. “‘Present mirth hath present laughter.’”
“You said it.” He stretched out on the hooked rug, his head on her lap.
By lunch the rain had lightened, but it continued the rest of the day.
Sunday morning, though, was a beautiful May day. The sky was clear and the temperature brisk.
Perfect weather, they agreed, for a hike.
Setting out on the gravel road that circled the deserted golf course, they took an unpaved country lane, and soon rich red mud clotted the soles of her sneakers and his loafers. Crossing a one-lane wooden bridge, they came to the white fences of a stud farm. The horses looked like faraway toys grazing up the hill near the white barns. One of the thoroughbred brood mares had wandered down to the road, her carbon-dark colt frisking around her.
Honora picked her way across the scythed grass to the fence, holding out her hand toward the colt. “I wish I had some sugar for Black Beauty,” she said. “Think he’ll grow up to be a racehorse?”
“A Kentucky Derby winner at least.”
“He belongs here, not running his heart out.”
“We’ll buy him.” Curt came to stand next to her. “He’ll be Lissie’s welcome-home gift.”
The breeze chilled the back of Honora’s neck. The voluptuous atmosphere of this weekend struggled against the harsher world of reality. “She has her term to finish.”
“It’s not the end of Western civilization, love, if she misses a couple of weeks. The hearing can’t run more than another day or so, then we’ll fly over to get her.”
“I have two jobs,” Honora mumbled. When she had put in her London call Friday morning, Vi had told her excitedly that two of the prospects had telephoned to give the go-ahead.
“That doesn’t sound like an insoluble problem. Didn’t you start out with a partner? Why not draw up the plans over here and get her to carry them out?”
“I can’t work like that. My best ideas come at the installation.” She stared at the cavorting colt. “Curt, I suppose we do have to talk about this.”
“By all means,” he said. “Let’s get it on the rug, our long-distance marriage.”
“This isn’t saying that I didn’t miss you while I was in England—I thought I’d die. But there were parts of being on my own that were good. And my work was one of them.”
“You’re somehow the last woman I’d expect to man—or is it woman?—the barricades with Bella Abzug.”
“Don’t be snide.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. Hell, sure I did. You’ve always had this dreamy quality—that’s what attracted me in the first place. I used to think I was protecting a fairy-tale princess.”
“And I,” she said unhappily, “always felt like a useless china figurine.”
He gripped her arm. “Whatever my faults, Honora, I never put you down. I’ve always told you how much you mean to me. Before you I was hollow, a shell of ice with a terrified, starving kid rattling around inside. You turned me into a human being; you gave me the gift of myself. And this weekend haven’t I made it clear how lost I’ve been without you?�
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“This has nothing to do with you, Curt. It’s me, how I feel. Can’t you understand?”
“No.”
“Think of it this way, then. We Sylvander girls are career-minded.” She despised her dumb-little-me conciliatory lightness. “I’m not in Crystal and Joss’s league, I’m strictly small time. But I can create gardens. People like my work. And working gives me a tremendous amount of satisfaction.”
“I know I’m a money-soiled oaf, but I’ve always had a problem believing in that art for art’s sake crap.”
“A major part of the satisfaction is getting paid for what I do. Darling, I’m not saying this to hurt you, only to explain myself.”
He picked up a pebble, hurling it over the white split-rail fence. The mare cantered away, the black colt racing gawkily after her.
“You’re still holding Alexander against me, aren’t you?”
Easy denials flooded to her lips, but the conversation had spawned a feverish need to bring him within the honest circle of her emotions. “I don’t blame you, Curt, not anymore. But knowing Crystal had your child made me feel even more extraneous . . . it still does.”
“So you’re going back to England?”
“Curt, why won’t you understand? This has nothing to do with him or with how much I love you—nothing can change my loving you. But you’re in business. When you make a commitment you stand by it. Well, I’ve made a commitment—two commitments.”
His pupils seemed to go flat. Her stomach plummeted and she had a sudden, terrifying conviction that his next words would inform her that she must make a choice. He’s going to tell me to pick—it’s either love and marriage or my landscaping, my imbalanced checkbook, my shaky independence.
Instead, he sighed wearily. “It’s embarrassing how much I need you.”
Weak-kneed with relief, she raised his hand and placed several kisses on his knuckles. “I don’t know how to handle this, my work and being with you. The truth is I haven’t been thinking at all this weekend.”
“That’s my wife,” he said, either cheerful again or putting on a good act. “Heart is in the right place, below the navel.”
Too Much Too Soon Page 47