The Last Bastion

by Peter C. Wensberg

  “God,” said the Architectural Critic, “what a spiel. Imagine being trapped in there all afternoon.”

  “Are you connected to the Cabots?”

  “Only by marriage, thank heaven. My second wife. I was a Cabot for twenty-seven months.”

  “Was she the one …?”

  “Yes. Devil of a time keeping it out of the Sphere, too.”

  “The name of this club is the Somerset Club. The members are all graduates of Harvard. Once a year they put on a show and most of the actors dress up like women. You can bet they have some high old times, ha, ha. I guess it would be a few laughs at that to see those old duffers in drag.”

  “He seems to have muddled us up with the Somerset, the Tavern, and the Hasty Pudding. Should I set him straight?”

  “I didn’t much care for the old duffer remark.”

  “Let’s tell them what we think of their snobby old club.” This time the entire group gave tongue since the Nebraska couple had learned how, the drug distributor did not care for the three men who looked to him like government officials, and the homeless man like a restless baby had been wakened by the cessation of movement. With a clang of the bell, Trolley Twelve headed for Fenway.

  “Isn’t that remarkable,” said Walter Junior, as the trio started up the street together.

  “Boston has always been an unruly city.”

  “As the British discovered.”

  “Still, it’s a great old town.” For whatever reason all three were smiling as they walked along past black wrought iron and hibernating magnolias.

  “Of course it is,” said Roger, “of course it is.”

  Chapter 26

  Demi and Owen came back laughing about another terrible dinner, this one in Chinatown. Telephone communication had magically been re-established. They apologized to each other about their ill-fated movie date, she hadn’t been feeling well, she said, and he threw himself on the mercy of the court. With a minimum of persuasion Demi had agreed to meet him for dinner. He had called her the next morning and she confirmed the time and place. She seemed warm, even eager, on the phone. Owen’s day had crawled by, an eternity of anticipation. Kevin, the suit in the Governor’s Office, had recommended the restaurant to Demi as serving the best Chinese food in the city. Owen was not completely unhappy to find the food mediocre. “I wish I had ordered spaghetti,” Demi said as they were putting on their coats.

  “I’m not sure we didn’t.”

  She had insisted on paying, saying it was her suggestion, and her turn anyway. Then she asked him if he wanted to come to her place for a drink. Owen said yes if I can pay for the cab. It was snowing again and the snowplows were out. Something about the night in Chinatown and the soft snow and their destination made them silent in the taxi for a few minutes. Owen reached for her but she said wait till we get home, and they found things to laugh about again. The one thing they never talked about was the Charles Club. Every time Owen had been tempted to ask her about Seymour he had hesitated, afraid to rock the boat.

  Her apartment, on the first floor of the house, was white and filled with soft leather furniture and soft rugs. They came out of the noisy street and the snow into a hush. She pulled off rubber boots and told Owen to take off his wet shoes. There were two glass tables: one a low coffee table, the other a dining table encircled with four white chairs. Flowers floated in the center of each sheet of glass. There was no mess of books and magazines; no disarray. Owen felt she must have prepared the room for his eyes. He hadn’t imagined she lived this way. But, he reminded himself, there was a lot he didn’t know about her. She waved a black bottle at him from the little white lacquer bar table and he nodded. He was absurdly happy to be there with her in her apartment where everything felt warm and pleasant to the touch. He dug his toes into the soft carpet. The leather of the couch and chairs was a shade she described as taupe. As she fixed the drinks he heard a plow scrape by outside. A week ago I couldn’t talk to her, he thought. Now, with any luck, I won’t be able to get a cab home. She switched on an audio deck and it produced soft bouzuki music, the only Greek flavor in the room. Demi offered him a heavy crystal glass—her own in her other hand. He stood up and kissed her and after a moment she pulled away. “Here, don’t make me spill them.”

  They sat together on the wide couch and drank and then kissed again. “Don’t you like my apartment?”

  “Course I do.”

  “Well you haven’t said anything. Usually that’s the first thing people say when they walk in. I’ve worked hard on it.”

  “It’s beautiful. I think it looks like you but I’m not sure. I don’t want to say the things other people say when they see it.”

  “You haven’t so far.”

  “Good.”

  He set his bourbon down on the glass table and kissed her again. Nothing but the kiss happened for a while. Then she said, “Let me show you the rest of it.”

  “I’m not interested in the kitchen.”

  “Then we’ll skip the kitchen.”

  “What’s left?”

  “The bedroom and the bath and two closets.”

  “Let’s look at them in that order.” Her eyes are huge, he thought, and seem to change. Tonight they were almost black. Her white silk shirt with the long full sleeves seemed to absorb all the light in the room.

  “I think I’ll show you the kitchen after all.” They finished their drinks while she told him the history of her kitchen and its appliances. She made them another Jack Daniel’s and managed to keep the butcher block center island work area—made to order by Somerville Lumber—between them until the tour was completed. She led him back to the couch and they sat apart while she told him how she found the place and bought the lease from the woman who had lived there before. He reached up and turned out the lamp beside the couch. Only the light from the kitchen let him see the glow of her blouse. They listened to the music for a while. She finished the rest of her drink and looked at him. “Tie my hands,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “Do it. Dominate me.” Owen looked at her. “Do it,” she said urgently. He pulled off his necktie and looked at her again. She crossed her hands and held them out and he tied them with the necktie crossing first one way and then the other. It was a silk rep tie with narrow stripes of yellow, blue and green. She lay back against the smooth cushions her eyes studying him, the violet lids hooded and heavy, her mouth open a little. He kissed it and it opened more. He decided he was not going to see the bedroom. He fell on her. He had never tied a woman before. No one had ever asked him.

  More than half the buttons of her fragile silk shirt were already open. Fumbling, but trying not to tear anything, he managed to get the rest undone. Then he realized it might have been a mistake to tie her hands first. He was determined to get the shirt off but he wasn’t sure how to do it She had a delicious beige bra on underneath and two long gold chains. He’d deal with all that later. She was not helping at all lying across his lap, a heavy load of limp woman, smelling luscious, smelling, he remembered, of Poison. Her breathing was as harsh as his own, but she definitely was not helping. “Hurry,” she said.

  He sat her up and jerked the blouse out of her skirt and up over her head. Then backing away a little to get more room to work he pulled it down her beautiful slender arms and wadded it up in a ball at the junction of her wrists. “Hurry up,” she panted, which did not help. He examined the brassiere and discovered it opened in back. Sliding around her he unclipped it, then realized that short of tearing the satin straps out it was not coming all the way off either. “Shit,” he muttered. He pushed the bra down her arms and shoved it into the blouse. He had to kiss her again. Her breasts were soft and warm and loose but he found that due to the accumulated clothing in front it was difficult to get to them. He tried to kiss her mouth again but found that hard to do satisfactorily as well. I can’t get at her, he said to himself in something close to frenzy. She’s not helping at all.

  “Hurry, goddamn it.”
/>   “Stop saying that. Let me untie you. This is ridiculous.”

  “No. Do it. Dominate me.”

  “I don’t want to dominate you. I want to love you.”

  “I said dominate me and that’s what I meant, you wimp, you … “She did not finish because Owen grabbed her and using a sort of fireman’s carry hoisted her over his shoulder and went in search of the bedroom. “Not there,” she hissed in his ear. “That’s a closet.”

  He found the right door, flung it open and threw her on the white bed more or less face down. All the lights in the room were on. While she bucked and struggled he quickly removed shoes and skirt and skimmed off her panty hose. “Stop it goddamn it,” she gasped into the eiderdown, “or at least turn out the lights.”

  “Just a minute,” he panted as he flopped her over and began to unravel the Gordian knot at her wrists. He needed light for the work. She was a lot of woman. It hadn’t been as easy to pick her up as he expected. He pushed the bra and the sleeves of the shirt up her arms and attacked the tie. “Hold still.”

  She managed to hit him in the eye with both hands. “Don’t,” she said through clenched jaws. “Leave that alone.”

  “I might as well. It’s ruined.”

  “I suppose your wife gave it to you.”

  “She did as a matter of fact. It’s the only thing she ever gave me that I liked.”

  “Isn’t that a turn-on. Hurry up and get it off and get the hell out of here,” she said in her courtroom voice.

  The knot had been pulled tight and the bra straps kept slipping down her arms entangling his efforts to find the right loop to tug. Finally he reached in his pocket and pulled out a knife. As the blade clicked open she froze. She stared at him wide-eyed, her naked body rigid in the harsh light, her wrists tied in front of her like a victim’s. Owen cut the tie with one quick stroke. The knife was very sharp. He snapped it shut, dropped it in his pocket and flipped off the overhead lights. He sat on the bed beside her and touched her arm. It was cold and trembled slightly. He gently slipped the two pieces of necktie, her rumpled blouse and the little brassiere off her wrists and tossed them on the floor. Then he rubbed her hands and arms. “That was a dumb idea,” he said. “Do you want me to turn off the bedside lamp?” Since she didn’t answer he didn’t.

  During the night Owen woke to hear the plows go by again. That meant it was a heavy snow, perhaps the heaviest of the winter so far. Her warm length was stuck to his as tightly as if their skin had been grafted. Her breathing was slow and deep. He loved the way she slept. His own slumber was shallow, sound or movement always brought him to the surface. Lately, for the first time in his life, he found it difficult to go back under. He spent hours some nights moving his mind’s eye over the terrain of his life, observing it from far above. When he awoke in the morning he could not remember at what lonely canyon, what mesa, what bend in the road he had returned to sleep again. It didn’t seem to make a difference. Each morning was fresh to him. He was not tired at the beginning of a new day. He put his arm over Demi’s soft shoulder and cradled her head against his neck. Her breath was so warm it seared his throat. Her hair no longer smelled like Poison, it smelled like love. Suddenly he could not wait until morning to wake her. His arm tightened and she looked up at him.

  Chapter 27

  The day after the latest and least fulfilling meeting of the Strategy Committee, DePalma and Gland sought Miss Ontos in her office behind the front stairs. Through the partially open door they heard the disconnected rhythms of the Iguana and its impact printer, composition clicking away at the keyboard, a John Cage concerto pounding from the daisy wheel. “What an unearthly racket,” said Gland to no one in particular as they entered the cozy little room. Then, “I donated all this equipment to the Club, you know,” to DePalma, who knew all he wanted to know on the subject and more.

  Miss Ontos lifted her little pink fingers from the keys in surprise. She was in the midst of compiling the events calendar for the month of March, 1988 while the printer produced the members’ accounts for the month of February, her entry chore of the previous day. She rarely received visitors in her office except for the strained conferences with DePalma over the wine order once a month. Her heart rather sank at the unannounced entry of two of her least favorite members. It had been, until now, a productive, hence joyful, morning. The skeins of the Charles Club slipped from her hands and she smiled brightly, but did not immediately speak.

  After a pause DePalma said, “Good morning, Ontos.”

  Gland grunted a greeting.

  “Good day to you, Mr. DePalma, Mr. Gland.” She reached over, shut off the printer, and the echoes subsided. Like some Escher construction the room was nestled in stairs beneath the front steps of the building and at the foot of another stairway that began from a door behind the lobby bar and wound down under the main staircase. A single window looked out at grade level on the tiny yard, the iron fence, the sidewalk, the street, and Sarmiento’s shoes. The flat silver light of February shone in upon a space filled with carefully chosen objects, as decorative as their owner and as useful: an American Heritage dictionary, Roget, Fowler, and Bartlett; a Hewlett-Packard calculator; a fat orange Rolodex; long silver shears; a rookery of pigeonholes on one wall; soft carpet in a shade of pale green. A rolltop desk, whose carapace had never descended since Miss Ontos discovered it in a jumble of unused furniture in the old coalbin, filled half the room. Unlike such desks in other hands its multifarious contents were thoughtfully arranged. A bud vase with three forced jonquils sat next to the Iguana. Unfolding her white-stockinged legs, she detached herself from a semi-kneeling position in the computer bench and perched on its edge like a sparrow on the windowsill. “How may I help you?”

  “At the Strategy meeting last night it was decided to invite the important Boston clubs …”

  “Single-sex clubs,” Gland interjected.

  “… to a dinner at which we might share our views on the current crisis and our plans about how to deal with it.”

  “The crisis being the membership question?” Miss Ontos asked, crossing her short but shapely legs under their attentive gaze. She did not invite them to sit since there was but a single chair by the desk in addition to her bench.

  “Of course, what other crisis is there?”

  “Well, the rat crisis comes to mind. If it weren’t for Kitty who spends the day in here,” she smiled down at whiskers and eyes behind her wastepaper basket, “I should be quite at their mercy.”

  “Yes,” said Gland. “The House Committee has promised a report on that at the next General Meeting. Have they talked to you about it?”

  “Not as yet. The elevator crisis also suggests itself. We have had three incidents since Christmas. Our insurance company is decidedly unhappy.”

  “The House Committee plans to address that as well.”

  Miss Ontos began to describe her misgivings about the size of the oil bill, which did not quite qualify as a crisis, but she did not often get such an opportunity.

  “In any case,” cut in Gland impatiently, “we are planning a dinner about three weeks from today, early in March, a Wednesday or a Thursday evening I should think, but not on the ninth or the tenth when I will be in New York on …”

  “Let me look at the calendar.” She swung around, pressed several keys, and in a moment the screen of the Iguana displayed a crosshatch of thirty-one boxes. “The second and third are open. The seventeenth is St. Patrick’s Day, recorded, but as you know, not celebrated in Boston on a Wednesday.”

  “When will it be celebrated?”

  “From about the sixteenth through the twenty-third I should imagine.”

  “You keep the calendar on the computer?”

  “Of course.”

  “Damndest thing I ever heard of,” said DePalma.

  “Let’s shoot for Thursday evening the third,” said Gland, “but we’ll have to get the invitations out quickly.” Both men looked down at Miss Ontos’ curly black head. She nodded, quite f
amiliar with their euphemistic use of the plural pronoun.

  “And how many are we planning on?”

  “Fifty or so.”

  “Twenty or thirty.”

  “Somewhere in there.”

  “May I have a list of the clubs you want to invite?” She was already plotting how to manage this latest effort to cripple a carefully planned schedule. She would call her counterparts at the several clubs, alert them to the date and the occasion, get an estimate of how many would likely attend, then send out the invitations with the knowledge that the event would be stored on the other club computers.

  “I’ll give you a list this afternoon. No, I can do it off the top of my head,” said Gland. “The Tavern, the Somerset, the St. Botolph, and the Pilgrim, of course, representing the distaff side. What does that mean, by the by?” he asked, turning to DePalma.

  “I haven’t the slightest.”

  “A distaff is the stick which holds the unspun flax on a spinning wheel,” said Miss Ontos as she enlarged the box for March third to full screen size and with a drumroll of the keys entered the information about the dinner party. “Black tie,” she said firmly. “Cocktails at six-thirty and go in at seven-thirty. We’ll need an extra waitress. I’ll ask Old Jane for one. Over the years the distaff has come to symbolize women or women’s concerns.” She struck several more keys and after a gabble of code a menu appeared on the screen. “Here’s the carte for the Founder’s Day dinner two years ago. It was acclaimed as one of Anton’s … one of Chef’s greatest achievements. If you have no objection I’ll suggest it to him.” She looked up at them and smiled sweetly. “As opposed to the spear side, of course.”

  “The spear side?”

  “Yes, symbolizing the male or male concerns.”

  “Oh, yes. Of course. The spear side. That’s very good! But absolutely. The spear side.” Gland pushed DePalma out of the office and Miss Ontos could hear Seymour’s giggles as they mounted the stairs. She sighed and picked up the telephone; another burden for the broad muscular back of the lonely man in the kitchen.