House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  It was just about the longest speech Schliester had ever made in his life, and certainly the longest anyone had ever made to Gus Benini, who didn’t have the attention span to listen to long speeches. The nervous little man took a couple seconds to think it all over, walking around in a circle in front of Schliester. Who gave him some time but not enough. When he thought Benini was ready to listen to more, he said, “Ten percent. And I throw in helping you pick the marks because I’ve got all their paperwork and I know who’s good for how much.”

  Which is how Gus Benini and Frederick Linkletter became partners.

  14

  She knocked on Jeffrey’s door first. He pulled on the terrycloth beach robe just before he opened the door and noticed the brief flicker in her eyes, like a shutter clicking open and closed behind a lens, that told him she had come to the wrong room. But her smile was ready in an instant. She was wearing a pool robe herself, and her hair was wet. The robe came only to the top of her thighs. Sexuality radiated off her the way hot land shimmers light.

  “I was at the pool and I saw your light,” she said. “Is there anything you want?”

  “Everything seems to be fine,” Jeffrey said.

  She turned to go.

  Jeffrey hesitated in the doorway, his eyes on her as she started away from him, wondering what would happen if he asked her to come back. She would turn back to him. She would come into his room. He was sure of that. He could almost hear her name forming on his lips and he could feel the urgent pull of desire. What the hell was happening? he asked himself. First the affair with Elaine Lester. Now this. How old was she? Twenty-five? Less. Certainly less.

  It took an effort of will to step back from the door and close it, but he had never been short of will. He closed the door but stayed right there, just on the other side. Listening. He didn’t hear a sound. Was she barefoot? It seemed to him she was. And the hallway was carpeted. Or was it? No, it was a wood floor, polished wood, dark and aged. Even barefoot, she couldn’t have walked away without his hearing. Then she was waiting, too.

  He saw his hand, as though it were someone else’s hand, reach for the doorknob. And then it stopped, and his brain told him why. She wasn’t waiting for him to open the door. She wasn’t waiting for him at all. He could sense her presence only a few feet away in the midnight stillness of the house. His breath seemed to ratchet through his chest like the last raindrops dripping off the eaves and so he held his breath to keep from giving himself away. A few seconds passed. A few more. And then he heard the faint rap of her knuckles on the door across the hall.

  He turned away and walked across the room to the window, where he could look out at the pool, rippled with a night breeze, lit now only by the moonlight. He cursed himself for still being too much like the goddamned banker he had been as recently as yesterday. He had felt, from the moment his plane took off from LaGuardia this morning, that a new part of his life had begun. Whatever he had been before this moment, he was something else now, someone else now. So he cursed himself for not taking this woman when she seemed almost to be offering herself. Right now Chet Fiore wasn’t telling her there was nothing he wanted. Chet Fiore wasn’t sending her away. In his mind’s eye he could see Fiore stepping back from the door, inviting her in. He could see her moving into the room. And then, as he saw Fiore turn to her, the woman in the moonlit room wasn’t Rachel Bolling, it was Phyllis. Fiore’s eyes on Phyllis. In her nightgown. In the Bedford Hills living room. Fiore’s eyes examining her long legs, the tousled flow of her hair, the cling of the silken fabric on her hips.

  Nonsense, of course. He was jumbling things together, Fiore and his wife, Fiore and his daughter, Fiore and this young woman his daughter’s age, or at least more his daughter’s age than his own.

  Maybe, he told himself, it was going to take a little time for him to figure out exactly how to go about being this new person he had become.

  But he didn’t doubt for a moment that he could do it.

  Or that he wanted to. The one thing that was clear was that he was once and for all irrevocably finished with that young man who set off for New Haven so many years ago, harnessed to the burden of generations of Blaines and Tripletts, a burden that stretched far back into a horse-drawn, gaslit past. Consideration for others and ruthlessness with himself—that was the formula he had been bred to use, pushing himself to success, ingratiating himself with those around him. And what did it get him? A magnificent apartment on Fifth Avenue, yes. And, yes, a beautiful home in Bedford Hills. Also a wife he didn’t love and a daughter who ran away from him at the first opportunity.

  He was sick of it all.

  He smiled at the outline of his image that looked back at him in the window glass and told himself that he was going to enjoy being an outlaw.

  The ceiling swung in a stately arc, bridging her nose, so close there wasn’t room for her head in the room. No, that couldn’t be. It was silly. No room in the room. Of course there was room. There was always room. She started to giggle.

  And then there really wasn’t room because her own voice, cackling like a hen, filled the space like marshmallow goop floating under the ceiling, coating the walls, caulking the cracks, white caulking because they called it white noise, smoothing into the walls, coating them even though it was too hot for a coat. Or even a shirt.

  Naked on the bed, she watched the flow of her voice while the cold conditioned air pecked at her skin.

  Eddie floated somewhere in the space above her, somewhere between her voice and the ceiling. His hand looked as big as a clown’s hand. Except that clowns have big feet, they don’t have big hands. But she couldn’t see his feet, so that must mean he was standing on the floor.

  Shit, he was big.

  It was scary, him being so big, and his hand so big. Like a clown’s hand.

  It felt so soft she wasn’t sure she could feel it at all. But she tasted blood and she felt that her mouth was crooked, so that her top teeth and her bottom teeth weren’t in line with each other and wouldn’t meet, wouldn’t ever meet again.

  She tried to make them meet.

  He drifted in and out of focus, and she asked herself where the blood was coming from. It was warm blood.

  And then he hit her again going the other way, so she closed her eyes and didn’t see anything else.

  Well, she said, I shouldn’t have done that. But it wasn’t clear what it was she shouldn’t have done.

  At least it didn’t hurt. Except for the taste, bloodtaste, she didn’t feel it at all.

  Across the hallway from Jeffrey’s room, Chet Fiore answered the knock on his door, barefoot, bare-chested, wearing only the slacks he had worn to dinner that evening. He didn’t need to open the door to know who had knocked.

  He had gone to Blaine’s room after dinner, where the banker outlined a plan to assure that Bolling would come to the right conclusion about their proposal. All it would take was a few phone calls on Fiore’s part.

  Fiore made them, using Blaine’s cell phone. There was a telephone in the room, of course, but he didn’t want Bolling to have a record of the numbers he called. He was careful because he didn’t trust cell phones. He didn’t identify himself by name, and his end of the conversation was so guarded it sounded to Jeffrey as though he were talking in code.

  He turned off the phone, handed it back to Jeffrey, and went back to his own room to wait for the knock on the door he knew would come when the rest of the house was asleep.

  She didn’t say anything when he opened the door because she didn’t have to. She didn’t ask him if there was anything he wanted because she knew there was.

  She stepped past him, moving into the room. He closed the door without a sound and slowly, quietly, turned the dead bolt. He watched as she looked around, taking in the room as though she had never seen it before. Everything he had brought with him—clothing and toiletries, perhaps a book, perhaps some papers, for she knew that this man and his friend had come on some sort of business—had been carefully
put away, so that the room bore no sign whatever of his presence there. As though he was not quite real, she thought. The bed didn’t appear to have been disturbed. The television wasn’t on and hadn’t been when she knocked. She knew he had been waiting.

  She arched her back and the robe slipped down her body like a caress. He moved to her with no particular sense of need or urgency. He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around, letting his eyes take in her nakedness as though she were something he was considering buying.

  His indifference had always been his special gift to women. They took it as an index of his power, and also, in a sense, as an index of their own power. His coolness and distance freed them for a sexual relationship that for once wasn’t simply the product of the sweaty importunings of a man.

  He put his hands on her hips and waited, motionless, silent, and faintly smiling while she undid the top button of his pants. Her hand reached inside, past the hardness of his penis to cup his balls in her palm. Her other hand opened his zipper with one smooth pull. His pants fell to his ankles. His hips were narrow like a girl’s, his butt small and taut. Her lowered eyes studied him. The fingers of one hand prowled his skin while her other hand slowly and gently massaged his testicles. She moved her hips so that the head of his penis nestled into the thick tangles of black hair, as dense as the most intricate of nests. Then, when she was ready, she guided him into her with her hand, her lips parting wetly to welcome him.

  He hadn’t moved all this while, and neither of them had spoken, but now he took a step forward, driving her backward, and then another and another until her spine was pressed against the wall. He arched his back, ramming his hips forward, skewering her to one point in the wall like a butterfly in a case, hair tangled with hair, bone grinding bone. He moved slowly in a circular motion, not releasing the pressure at all, not thrusting in and out, but rubbing, rubbing, rubbing, a steady, insistent rhythm that went on and on, endless and powerful, until her eyes misted and closed and her perfect white teeth bit so hard into her lower lip that she might have drawn blood. Her breath came in quickening gasps and then stopped entirely. Her body went slack and limp, and he realized she had been standing on her toes, hips thrust out to meet his, because now he fell out of her, still hard and straight, as the taut sheath of her inner muscles that had gripped him so tightly seemed to melt away like snow in the spring.

  “That was for you,” he said, the first words either had spoken to the other. “How about my turn?”

  She nodded her head in a weary but ready acquiescence.

  She walked to the bed and lay down on top of the covers, spreading herself out for him, legs open wide, arms reaching toward him. She sensed intuitively that he was one of those men who wouldn’t touch her sex with his hand and so she touched his, guiding him again into her. The tension of her muscles was beginning to return, but still she clamped her thighs together, knowing that after the overwhelming experience of two minutes before, it was the only way she could be as tight for him as she wanted to be.

  He took her with a brief and relentless ferocity that lasted barely half a minute, but half a minute that felt as though if it went on any longer he would churn her inside out.

  His body sagged against her chest and then he rolled over and lay on his back. It seemed to her that they were both asleep.

  The next thing she knew, she felt his hand brush the hair from her forehead and his lips were at her ear and he whispered, “You have to go.”

  She opened her eyes, bringing the room and the night, the memory of midnight’s passion into focus. “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Quarter to two.”

  She stretched languidly and smiled up at the face looming over hers. “I can stay if you’d like,” she said.

  “No bed checks?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He smiled. His front teeth were uneven, rotated slightly, a bit like the blades of a propeller, and the imperfection gave his smile a boyish sort of charm. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he teased lightly. “If you were my daughter, there’d sure as hell be bed checks.”

  Her arm pushed him gently to the side and she was on her feet. She moved to the middle of the room, where her robe had fallen, and put it on, belting it around her waist. Then she turned to him, standing over him where he lay naked on the bed, his head pillowed in his hands as he watched her.

  “I’m not his daughter,” she said. “I’m his wife.”

  Phyllis was just getting into bed when she heard the telephone ring in Jessica’s room. The first few days after Jessica was expected back from the Cape it rang often. Once or twice she answered it, even though she knew when she picked it up that she would have to confess that she didn’t know where her daughter was or when she would be back. Most of the time, though, she just let it ring. The calls dwindled and then stopped. Sometimes Phyllis wondered if Jessica was in contact with any of her friends or what, for that matter, they knew about her whereabouts.

  Tonight, though, because the ringing startled her, because it was so late, and because she was alone, she felt a sudden impulse to talk to whoever wanted to talk to her daughter. She darted across the bedroom and ran, naked, to Jessica’s room, where she lunged for the phone. “Yes?” she said.

  There was silence, and then a girl’s voice said, “Oh. Mrs. Blaine. I guess Jessica’s not there, is she?”

  Phyllis recognized Amy Laidlaw’s voice. She had always sounded younger than Jessica’s other friends, and tonight she sounded even younger still, like a child.

  “Amy, do you know where she is?” Phyllis asked.

  “No,” Amy said. “But she calls you, doesn’t she? Could you ask her to call me?”

  For some reason Phyllis was suddenly and acutely aware of her nakedness, as though there were something obscene about standing here in her daughter’s room like this. She dropped her hand to cover the wispy triangle of sand-colored pubic hair, inexplicably arousing herself with the light touch of her fingertips brushing her hair, lighter than the touch of any man.

  “Once in a while she calls,” Phyllis confessed, making a focused effort to keep her sudden confusion from revealing itself in her voice. The calls from Jessica were all brief. Just to say hello and that she was fine. She never stayed on the line long enough for Phyllis to ask any questions. “I’ll be glad to give her the message,” Phyllis said. “Are you home?”

  Amy gave a number with a 207 area code. That would be Maine. So she was with her father. Phyllis remembered Jessica telling her that Winston Laidlaw refused to let his wife have the Maine house. “As though she wanted it,” Jessica had said, but didn’t elaborate. What Phyllis couldn’t remember at the moment was the last time she had seen her own daughter naked. Sometime in her early teens, it seemed, the girl had become intensely fastidious about showing herself. Once, when Jessica was fourteen or fifteen, Phyllis walked in on her in the bathroom when she was drying herself after a bath, one foot up on the toilet seat, one heavy, dangling breast flattened against her leg as she bent forward, drying her calf with the towel. She turned away quickly, wrapping the towel around herself, and Phyllis laughed and said, “You don’t have to be shy, Jessica. I would have killed for breasts like yours when I was your age.”

  She saw her daughter’s shoulders turn scarlet, and after that she heard the turning of the lock whenever Jessica took her bath. (And yet, she remembered only now, puzzled by the paradox, Jessica swam nude in the Bedford Hills pool until Jeffrey put a stop to it.)

  Heavens, Phyllis thought, why am I thinking about this nonsense now?

  “I’m sorry,” she said aloud. “Could you give me that number again?”

  She found a ballpoint pen and a piece of paper in the table by Jessica’s bed. Amy repeated the number. “Please,” she said, “you won’t forget to tell her.”

  Her voice sounded so small and plaintive that Phyllis asked her if she was all right.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Amy said. “I am. Really.”

  Phyllis lo
oked at herself in the mirror after she hung up the phone. She touched herself again, this time on purpose, this time to finish what she had started by accident. She watched in the mirror as her finger slid between her lips. In her mind she heard the word cunt and in her mind it was Eddie Vincenzo’s voice, even though she could only vaguely remember what his voice sounded like, a word or two as they were introduced at the birthday party, just enough to shape a permanent memory of that crude Bronx accent, the d’s and the t’s so heavily dentalized. He was saying the word to Jessica, whispering it in her ear, praising her cunt, praising the softness of her cunt, praising the strength of it.

  Jeffrey had no words for his wife’s sex. You, he would say. You feel good, he’d say. Oh, you’re wet, he’d say. Let me play with you. In his mind, no doubt, he was avoiding offense, but in the end it seemed as though he made no distinction between Phyllis Armstrong Blaine and those few square inches of moist flesh between her legs.

  Fuck you, Jeffrey Blaine, she thought. Fuck you.

  Chet Fiore got out of bed and showered quickly, washing the smell of her off him. He had just buttoned his pants and taken a fresh shirt from the closet when he heard the sound of a car engine outside, something powerful, humming like a truck. He heard the wheels grinding slowly along the gravel of the drive. Outside lights came on, which he correctly assumed were part of Bolling’s security system. He heard the car door and then a house door and then eager but indistinct voices squabbling in Spanish. He thought he heard footsteps inside the house and then Bolling’s voice. He slipped on his shoes and walked to the door, opening it just as Blaine opened the door opposite.

  Clint Bolling hadn’t been expecting any visitors. When the motion sensors along the front drive detected the four-by-four approaching the house, a red light flashed in the east-wing room where Miguel, the gardener, handyman, and general-purpose security guard, slept. When the sensors continued to receive input after fifteen seconds, a buzzer sounded next to Miguel’s bed. Bolling had been asleep and didn’t hear the car come up, but when the outside lights came on, he became aware of them in a dreamlike sort of way. He stirred and felt Rachel’s reassuring presence in the bed beside him, and knew somehow that she hadn’t been there long. But that didn’t matter. It wasn’t unusual for her to come and go in the night. She was often restless at night, not coming to bed until dawn, spending the night reading or painting—she had a studio in the east wing—or writing endless letters to her three sisters in Mexico City, Vera Cruz, and San Vittoria. Even after sex she often got out of bed to spend the hours of darkness by herself.