“Takes me a long time before I start, and then, whammo!” He threw a glob of chrome yellow on the foreground. “Where are we going after we get out of here?”
* * *
She drove him to Belvedere. For the first time in her life, she felt no embarrassment about bringing someone to her home. In fact, for some unfathomable reason she wanted Gerry Horak to view the imprint of her matrilineal wealth.
“Well?” she asked as Pedro opened the gates.
“Am I meant to be intimidated?”
“Aren’t you?”
“Sure,” he said, glancing around at the grove of magnificent, fresh-leaved sycamores. “The place gives me a hard-on, I want to throw you into the backseat and hump you. Sex and money have a lot in common, at least if you’re a painter. No good painter is a eunuch, and to clear his mind he needs plenty of poontang. He also needs a sucker to buy his work. That’s the two necessities for a painter, pussy and patrons.”
“And here I am, both,” she said. One of the peacocks preened by the tennis court’s protective green fencing. “If you’re trying to shock me, you aren’t.”
“Like hell I’m not. Nobody’s ever talked to you like this, have they, you proper little rich debutante?”
“Let’s get one thing straight. I am not a debutante, I never will be. I’m an artist.”
“Not yet you aren’t, baby, not by a long shot,” he said. “Maybe you could be if you set your mind to it. We’re alike, you and me. Both hard-minded as nails.”
“I’m tougher than you.”
“Like hell.”
“Oh yes I am. Nails aren’t hard, they bend. Me, I’m a diamond. You’ll find out.” Althea brimming with vital energy, pressed on the accelerator, and the wagon skimmed over gravel. It seemed to her she had spoken the truth. At this minute it was beyond belief that she had ever in her life not been confident.
“What does your old man do?”
“Nothing.”
They were approaching the house, and he glanced expressively up at the expanse of rose-hued bricks for which a Georgian house in Kent had been torn down. “In a pig’s ass, nothing. Men cut off their left ball for a joint like this.”
“You really think the crude talk is adorable, don’t you?” she said. “He performed his life’s labors in a single day. He married a Coyne.”
He jerked around to stare at her, his eyes goggling with surprise gratifyingly akin to hers when she’d first seen his painting. “Your mother’s a Coyne?”
“Grover T.’s daughter,” she said.
“Jesus! But didn’t the old buzzard die in the 1800’s?”
“Nineteen-eleven. Mother’s out of his third wife.”
She led Gerry through the big, silent rooms, showing him the dining room’s Beaton mural, the drawing room with its Danilova portrait of Gertrude as dowdy Madonna, the study lined with da Vinci sketches taken from the Coyne Fifth Avenue mansion before it was razed. She took him upstairs to view the delectable Sargent of her voluptuous grandmother at twenty.
When they entered Althea’s room, Gerry reached out for her, grasping her upper arms, pressing her against the wall, thrusting his leg between hers. He was her height, but stocky, broad-boned, resilient of flesh—and amazingly warm. His hard penis thrust against her pelvic bone, opening a wildly incandescent tingling in her moist vagina. A passion she had never before experienced enveloped her, and she put her arms around him, his mouth met hers, and she opened her lips, returning his kiss. Suddenly all her newfound confidence evaporated and she was a small, helpless animal, as trapped as she’d ever been with her drunken father. But this was infinitely worse, for at those times she retained a sense of integrity because the act was being done to her, against her will.
She jerked away, her breath coming fast.
He examined her with the same intense squint he had focused on the model this morning. “What gives?”
“I just don’t care for the caveman approach,” she said, pinning her cool, pale hair back in its knot, feeling a modicum of self-possession return to her.
“You wanted it as much as I did.”
“Of course. With Gerry Horak, what woman wouldn’t?”
“I’ll wait. You’ll come begging for it.”
She laughed. “Modest, aren’t you?”
“Baby, that was me kissing you. The chemistry went clear off the scale.” He spoke without gloating, his dark-stubbled face impassive. “Don’t worry, I’m not about to push you. It’s up to you to set the time.”
She took another composing breath and sat on the window seat. “What lies beneath this tough-he-man exterior? Tell me about yourself.”
“I’m not one for going into the personal past, or hearing anybody else do it, either.”
“Thank God. I meant your career.”
Before the war Gerry had been represented by Longman’s on Madison Avenue, the most prestigious gallery in the country. He was their youngest artist and had been bought by important private collectors, including her Aunt Edna. When he talked about the sales, faint sweat glossed his face—he had not lied about equating sex with money. Yet this equation, she understood, came not from warping meretriciousness but from the quixotic innocence of a true artist: as he had told her, his two needs were women and the acceptance of his work that money proved.
She had guessed correctly about the laboring background.
“In case you’re thinking I’m some kind of highfalutin guy who puts on a tough act, my grandfather came from Bohemia as a contract laborer—that’s a good deal lower than a slave—to Lackawanna Steel. He was killed in a routine accident.”
“My grandfather owned Lackawanna before it was absorbed into U.S. Steel.”
“Probably some flunky of his refused to pay for the rail that would have saved my grandfather from falling into the blooming pit. What’s one more Hunkie more or less?” He leaned back in the window seat, both amused and bitter. “My brothers still work for the Lackawanna division.”
“There’s a big block of U.S. Steel shares in my trust.”
They both chuckled, as if this linked them.
“And what about the U.S. Army?” she asked.
“No separation until the medicos release me. I’m an outpatient at Birmingham—that’s the military hospital in the San Fernando Valley. Every Monday I hitch over there.”
“And the institute?”
“One of the doctors is a Kraut, and he told Lissauer about me. Lissauer’s letting me use that room out back gratis, and also share the models. He’s really okay. But nervous as hell about everything. Can you imagine? He checked with city hall to make sure it was legal, me sleeping in the garage room—his own damn property! Jesus, I never saw anybody shake in his boots like that.”
Gerry made no further passes, and at seven he refused her dinner invitation. He also refused a ride back to the institute. She stood at a drawing-room window watching him curve down Belvedere’s broad, well-lit gravel drive in an infantryman’s efficient slog.
Except for that one disintegrating moment in his arms, she was more at ease with him than she had been with anyone in her life, including Roy Wace. With him she felt in complete charge, mistress of her body and mind and emotions. A delicious sensation of power. She stretched her slim young arms above her head. I’ll make him wild for me, she decided. Then I’ll play it cool and watch him crawl. She felt no vindictiveness, only a sense of playing an exhilarating game.
25
To Althea, the amazing part was how easily she and Gerry Horak melted into a couple.
Their relationship, deeper than she had believed possible, was urgently, relentlessly erotic, the more so for the purposeful lack of physical contact. They were two warriors engaged in warfare. Gerry was intent on waiting for her signal—her surrender, as she thought of it—and she went through torments to control herself from reaching out and touching his dark-haired hand. Not to give way first had become the most significant battle of her life. Thus, in an atmosphere of overheated sexual cra
ving, their relationship remained what was then called platonic.
At the institute, they worked side by side, sharing lunch—she had requested Belvedere’s stolid, plain-cooking chef to give her extra sandwiches each day. When the second session ended, they would load their easels and large cherrywood paint boxes into the station wagon; these lengthening days of May and early June, as well as weekends, they painted Belvedere’s shaded dells and sunlit vistas. Gerry never offered advice, yet she improved immeasurably by working at his side. She copied his use of large arm movements rather than delicate swerves of fingers and wrist, she learned to splash on color with wholehearted confidence, and, like him, she worked in abandoned exhilaration. Once finished, though, her work brought actual tears of frustration to her hypercritical eyes. When stood against the poolhouse walls alongside Gerry’s, her canvases were outlandishly amateurish. His paintings dazzled the eye, arrested the mind, haunted the soul—he was top-notch. Yet he destroyed most of them with furious strokes of a palette knife.
“Why do that?” she asked.
“It’s total crap,” he said.
“What are you, fishing for compliments? It’s terrific!”
“Yeah, terrific crap. Ahh, fuck, I’m no English gentleman. Romney or Gainsborough or one of those old dead guys, they could handle all this careful landscape. I’m not la-di-da enough to paint Belvedere.”
“You haven’t liked anything you’ve done of the models at the institute, either.”
“How could I when you’re the one subject that gets my nuts aching? Painting you, there’d be no problem.”
“How would you pose me?”
“Standing inside there.” They were working near Mrs. Cunningham’s greenhouse. “I’d show you behind the glass, alive, aloof, trapped in your goddamn unattainable virtue. Well?”
“Well what?”
“Model for me.”
“Oh, I don’t know. There’s my own work.”
“The world’ll survive without a week’s production.”
“Thanks.”
“And what about us?” he asked roughly. His eyes glittered, his angrily set jaw was dark—he shaved every morning, but by afternoon his face showed five-o’clock shadow. “Althea, what about us?”
Triumph bubbled warmly through her. I’ve won, she exulted.
He stood behind her, clasping her shoulders. His fingers caressed the musculature of her collarbone, dispatching excruciatingly sweet sensations through her breasts to center in the nipples. She could smell the odor of his sweat mingling with paint, feel the hot emanations of vitality, and she leaned back against the solid flesh, craving with every nerve to feel him inside her. She was weak and trembly, she was mush. She hadn’t won at all, but had again fallen into that disintegration where her free will no longer existed.
She managed to pull herself from his caress. “My parents are coming home at the end of the month,” she said, moving a few steps away from him.
“Who gives a fart? I asked you a question.”
“Will I sit for you?” she asked, knowing her bitchiness added to her attraction for him.
“Oh, hell! Why play the snow maiden for so long? I’d swear you’re not cherry?” It was a question.
“That,” she said, “is for me to know and you to find out.” Her facetiousness rang phony in the afternoon shadows.
He lowered one thick eyebrow, squinting at her. “I’ve never felt like this with any other broad. We’ll be terrific together. You’re going to love it—and me.”
“Think so?”
“Absolutely. And the portraits of you are going to be hot-damn masterpieces.”
That night for the first time he accepted her dinner invitation. She told Luther the table was not to be set in the hexagonal breakfast room where she routinely ate without her parents, but in the echoing formal dining room.
Cecil Beaton birds hovering around them, she and Gerry faced each other across yards of candlelit antique mahogany. A last-ditch effort on her part. She intended proving to herself that Gerry Horak was a nobody, a cipher, a crude Hunkie laborer. So what if he were warm, vital, outrageously talented, and had sex appeal that could melt a marble block? In the Sheraton chair usually occupied by her tall, dinner-suited father, he sat wearing Army fatigues streaked with cerise paint, showing not the least anxiety about which fork to use for what course as he ate hungrily. Shouldn’t his rotten table manners cure this tumultuous beating of her heart? Yet in the serene candlelight she accepted that Gerry Horak was made of incorruptible elements, the material of genius, which defies and renders meaningless the barriers set up by class and money.
Luther, a sneer on his lips, served them ice cream made from strawberries grown in the kitchen garden.
Gerry said, “So this is how Coynes live.”
“The rest of the family look down on us for roughing it out in California.”
“Things are tough all over,” he said. “Where’s the brandy?” he asked. “I always thought you rich bastards ended up meals with brandy.”
“It’s not been put into law yet.”
Not smiling, he gazed at her in a way that made her breath catch. “Althea,” he said, and came around the table, taking her hand, leading her into the hall, where the only light was taupe candleflame that flowed from the dining room. His eye sockets were darkly moist hollows compelling her. She leaned forward to kiss him.
When the kiss ended, they were both shaking.
“Where?” he said into her open mouth.
“My room,” she said in a low, unrecognizable murmur.
But when she snapped on the light of her blue-flowered bedroom, something happened. The erogenous frenzy drained from her, and she felt a sudden chill. She had returned to the place where the utmost betrayal had been forced on her. She stood unresponsive in Gerry’s embrace.
“Lovely hard swan-haired broad . . .” he muttered, kissing her forehead, her eyes, her throat. After a few moments he pulled back. “What gives, Althea?”
“I can’t,” she whispered.
“What the hell!”
“It’s impossible, Gerry,” she said wearily. “I’m sorry.”
He lifted her chin, peering at her. “You’re afraid, aren’t you?” he asked with a gentleness she had never heard from him.
“No.”
“Baby, baby. What’s got to you is this room.”
Without knowing her particular stigmata, he comprehended the truth.
“I’m sorry, Gerry,” she repeated helplessly.
“No sweat, my poor frightened baby.” He kissed her lightly on the forehead. “I should be furious at you for being a prick tease, and here I am playing the tender lover.”
“I’d hardly classify that last remark as tender or loverlike,” she said.
“That’s more like it.” He kissed her forehead. “That sounds like my cold, hard rich bitch.” With another light kiss he turned and trotted down the staircase.
Watching his squarish shadow recede down the elegant stairwell, she longed to call him back, but that ancient shame trapped her.
* * *
The following day her father called from Washington. “There’s a storm of work, planning this international conference before it opens in San Francisco next month. We can’t be back for a while.”
An exquisite relief drenched over her, though it was unaccountable why she, who had the perfect if never-voiced means of blackmail, should care whether or not her parents were in Beverly Hills to disapprove of Gerry Horak.
“. . . international conference,” her father was saying. “It’s called the United Nations. The papers have been full of it.”
Consumed by Gerry, she had been blind and deaf to news of the outside world, but she replied enthusiastically. “So that’s what you’re working on in Washington.”
“Big doings, toots, I have a part in big doings,” said Mr. Cunningham happily.
She laughed. “Love you, Daddy.” Which, God help her, she did.
* * *
The next afternoon Gerry began painting her. Or rather, posing her. Inside the greenhouse, he had her recline under baskets of yellow Comtesse de Breton orchids; he stood her against Mrs. Cunningham’s pride, a twenty-foot-tall piece of driftwood on which massed white Olga orchids glowed in a galaxy; he moved her from aisle to orchid-filled aisle, raising her arm, bending her knee, tilting her head: he examined her from every possible angle without opening his paintbox.
It was Saturday morning before he got the effect he wanted.
She was posed inside the greenhouse while he worked outside. He stared through the glass at her so long that her muscles began to quiver; then he picked up a brush and lost himself. Two hours later, she emerged to see what he’d gotten on canvas.
Her image, surrounded by a flock of voracious, birdlike orchids, half-veiled by the iridescent sheen of glass, had the chimerical quality of a woman gazing out of that mythical garden in the golden age before humankind had learned pain or weakness, a woman eternally young, invincibly strong.
“My God. Gerry . . . it’s staggering. Fantastic. Is that how you see me? Eve before the fatal apple?”
“Yeah, before Kotex or dirty diapers, when there was only endless musky fucking.”
She laughed, moving to view the vivid wet oils from a different angle. “Be as vulgar as you want. Nothing can make this less terrific.”
“Yeah, it’s good.” He gave an excited laugh. “God, Althea, I’ll paint you and paint you until the walls of every damn museum in the world are one gigantic Althea Cunningham orgasm.”
His words roused her, and as she gazed at the gleaming, magnificent portrait, undeniable proof of his love, passion suddenly overwhelmed her, dizzying her. She turned to him.
They clung, breast to breast, thighs quivering against thighs. “Come into the greenhouse,” he muttered hoarsely.
“The gardeners—”
“The hell with gardeners.” He curved her hand over his erection. “Do you feel that, Althea? I’ve had that hard-on for two months, since the morning I met you. The hell with the gardeners.”
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