House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  For some reason the music sounded like something he had heard a thousand times even though he knew he had never heard it before, and Phyllis Blaine’s hand still rested on the back of his, and he couldn’t figure out why he was thinking about Gus and why he was thinking about that thing in the train station that he didn’t even know he remembered anymore, except that here it was, everything as clear as it must have been the next morning. He remembered that when the kid started running, he hopped down onto the track himself even though he had no idea what possessed him to do a thing like that. Put that fucking thing away, he said to Jimmy, and then he was down on the track and the other kid, Angel’s friend, was down there with him, and they were trying to see how you could pick up this kid and get him up on the platform without him falling apart in their hands. There was a lot of blood under his head and it didn’t look like they should be moving him. Except of course for the train. He remembered looking up at the track and that headlight and being more scared than he had ever been in his life. Still, there he was, kneeling down on the track with a train coming and blood all over his hands from the colored kid’s head, and then he heard the shriek of the train’s brakes, really a shriek, exactly like someone screaming. Fiore said, I’ll get his legs, and when he touched the kid, the leg flopped around like it was just a stick and the kid groaned, so at least he was alive. And then Fiore said, Hold it, hold it, because the shrieking was dying down. And then it stopped, which meant the train was stopped. So he said, Let’s get the fuck out of here, and they pulled themselves back up on the platform and ran out of the station, Fiore and Jimmy and Angel, with the blood still running down his arm from where the box cutter got him, and Angel’s friend. They never found out what happened to the kid on the tracks, whether he died or not.

  And then Fiore realized why he was thinking about all this now and what the connection was. The connection was fear. Because he was afraid now, and he couldn’t remember ever having been afraid of anything since that night on the train tracks.

  But this Blaine business was different. Fiore had dealt with dangerous men his whole life, and this guy was just a banker. He shouldn’t have been afraid.

  But he was.

  The music came at him in a roar of complicated sound.

  Gabriel Enriquez studied the files on the flight out to Oklahoma City, familiarizing himself with the details of Bolling’s investments. He was met at the terminal by a Mexican holding a hand-lettered cardboard sign that said LAYNE BENTLEY. The Mexican wasn’t pleased that the banker they sent was Hispanic, and so young. He was a wise man in a simple way and he grasped at once the signification of the choice. Gabriel only made matters worse by getting into the front seat of the car with an offensive disregard for social distinctions. One was a handyman and the other was a banker. Differences mattered.

  They drove in silence until the city rose up ahead of them, flanking the highway on both sides.

  “This is a larger city than I believed it would be,” Gabriel said in Spanish.

  Miguel’s eyes darted across to his passenger but he didn’t turn his head. The accent, he knew at once, was not Puerto Rican but he didn’t know how to locate it. There was a stilted singsong to it that made the words sound effeminate to his ears. “Yes,” he answered in Spanish. “A big city. You are not Puerto Rican. Cubano, perhaps?”

  “My parents, yes. Cuban.”

  “But you are American?”

  “Yes.”

  He had known Cubans in Mexico and found them to be earnest and serious people, but the American Cubans were earnest without seriousness, filled with an exaggerated self-importance. His own children called themselves Mexican, although they, too, were born in the United States of America. This one called himself American.

  The silence returned to the car while Miguel thought carefully about what he would say. Ten miles passed in this fashion and the city was now behind them. “Señor Bolling was a fine man,” he said at last. “Even now that he is gone, his memory is owed much respect.”

  “Yes, I understand that,” Gabriel said.

  Miguel said, “And the señora is very young. Do you understand that also?”

  “No,” Gabriel said, “I wasn’t aware of that. But I understand what you are saying.”

  When the señora, as the driver insisted on calling her, came in to meet her guest in the large drawing room, as cool and dark as a cave, she, too, seemed surprised to see that they had sent a young latino. She hung back in the doorway a moment as Gabriel Enriquez came forward to greet her. The draperies in the room were all drawn, letting in only a soft, earth-colored light. Was darkness, he wondered, a sign of mourning? It seemed to him he had read something about that once. Or was it merely that she throve in shadow, like an orchid?

  When she moved forward, her dress billowed about her like a cloud, gentle and formless, a lightning-lit cloud of red and gold peonies on a pastel background. Just from the tautness of her arms, he sensed the firmness of her body.

  He introduced himself. “Mr. Blaine asked me to come see you to discuss some of your late husband’s investments,” he said.

  “I know why you’re here, Mr. Enriquez,” she snapped in a tone of petulant impatience.

  Of course she knew. It had been arranged; she sent the car for him. His words must have sounded condescending, he was afraid, as though he took her for some vacant plaything. He had meant no condescension but he didn’t know how to fix it.

  She offered to show him to his room, and when they got there he found his suitcase, which the driver had taken from him, already on the bed. He took a moment to examine the room and his eyes fell almost at once on a pair of paintings that hung side by side on an otherwise unadorned wall. They were done in oils, he saw when he moved to them for a closer inspection, but the paint was applied so finely, the muted colors washed in with such subdued delicacy, that he had taken them at first for watercolors. The figures, the buildings, the landscape beyond the village were all suggested in the gently curving geometry of the shapes. There were no straight lines and there was no modeling, as though each person and each object somehow shared its identity with the objects before it and behind it and with the spaces between. There was no distortion, no subjectivity, no point of view.

  “Yours?” he asked, turning to look at Señora Bolling over his shoulder. The signature at the corner of each painting was a simple lower-case r.

  “Yes,” she said. “The village where I was born.”

  “You must have loved it,” he said.

  She looked at him a moment and then turned away without answering, as though he offered her a challenge she didn’t care to accept. She stopped with her hand on the open door and suggested a swim and lunch before they got down to business. He would find bathing suits in the dresser, she told him. The pool was right outside his window. He would have no trouble finding it. “Your hips are so narrow,” she said, “I hope you’ll find one that fits. My husband’s friends,” she added, then hesitated before finishing the sentence, “were heavier men.”

  And then she was gone, having given him, just in those last words, a glimpse into the loneliness of her life.

  She was in the water when he got there, swimming strongly. He watched her, spellbound by the power and beauty of the most perfect body he had ever seen. In the only suit he found that wouldn’t have fallen off his body, the blatancy of her beauty read out with embarrassing clarity.

  He plunged into the water and easily crossed half the length of the pool before he broke to the surface near the lane where she was swimming. She stopped when he reached her, the two of them treading water. She was breathing heavily from the exertion, her breasts rising and falling in her black suit just below the splintered surface of the water. She invited him to join her for a few laps, and he set off at once. He was a powerful swimmer, strong in the chest and shoulders, but she caught him in the turn and he let her set the pace from that point. He sensed that she was taking it easy on him and would have had no trouble outdistancing him
if she chose to. He felt her presence in the water beside him.

  Before they had finished the first full lap, the rhythm of his arms and legs, the flow of the water along his body took over and the swimming began to feel effortless, as though the pool were a river carrying him with it, his mind maintaining the contact with her simply as a matter of will and acquiescence. By the second lap he was conscious of feeling utterly free of his body, borne along by an energy in his arms and legs that seemed limitless. He lost track of time and place, lost count of the laps, as they crossed the length of the pool again and again.

  And then she stopped, resting her arms on the lip of the pool, and he stopped beside her, neither of them for a moment capable of speech. She threw her wet hair back from her face with a toss of her head and climbed out of the pool. She led him to a pair of chaises set side by side, and they stretched out next to each other. For a moment the silence was broken only by the sound of their own breathing and the lapping of the water in the pool, still stirred by the echoes of their passage through it.

  He heard footsteps and opened his eyes. A short, square-faced Mexican woman stood over him, transferring laden plates and full glasses from a wide wooden tray to a table that stood between them. She said nothing and padded off when she was finished.

  “You swim well,” Rachel said, breaking the silence.

  They talked pleasantly while they ate, about his childhood in a Cuban community in Florida and hers in Mexico. When they had finished eating, he asked her if she wanted to talk about her investment accounts.

  “I don’t think Mr. Blaine understands how little I care about these things,” she said.

  “Then why am I here?”

  “It was Mr. Blaine’s idea.”

  “And you didn’t want to say no to him?”

  “Perhaps that’s it, yes,” she answered enigmatically.

  She reached a hand over, lightly touching his chest with the tips of her fingers. “You didn’t happen to notice the cut-glass bowl in the bathroom?” she asked.

  “With the silver spoon next to it?” he said. “Yes. I noticed it.”

  He hadn’t done any cocaine in more than three years. That stuff cost him his job at First Boston, and he swore at the time that he would never go back to it. Now he wasn’t sure what he would say if she offered it.

  “My husband kept all the guest rooms well supplied,” she said. “I’ve lost my taste for it. Because of my husband, you understand. Because of the way he died.”

  Gabriel knew nothing of the circumstances surrounding Bolling’s death but it seemed to him that she wanted to talk about it, so he said nothing, letting his watchful silence open the way for her to go on.

  Her fingertips drew small circles on his chest and then walked slowly down his body, stopping when they reached his belly. The delicacy of her touch, so openly provocative, sent a shock wave of excitement through his body. A simple seduction would have been easier for him to understand, even being seduced by a young woman so recently widowed. But not while she was talking about her deceased husband.

  He felt in an instant almost shamefully young and guiltily naive, as though he should have understood what she wanted from him now, should have known how to reconcile her words and her fingertips. He felt stupid. Everyone knew that life was full of contradictions. Why was he so confused by them?

  “You don’t know how he died?” she asked.

  “No.”

  Her hand stopped moving on his body. “Toward the end of his life my husband got involved in some sort of illegal investment scheme,” she said.

  She felt a sudden knotting in the sheath of his muscle under her touch. Well, she thought, Mr. Gabriel Enriquez knows more than he is letting on. I have frightened him.

  “They warned him they could kill him if he betrayed them in any way,” she went on, as though she were telling a story. “I don’t know what happened, except that they did what they said they would do.”

  Of course Gabriel knew what the scheme was. He was the one who made it work. He felt the sudden coldness of sweat drying on his body. Images of Jeffrey Blaine’s handwritten notes literally flashed in his mind like so many pages spasmodically illuminated by lightning. At first the transactions always involved the Bolling accounts. After a week or so, other accounts came into play, with Bolling’s name soon vanishing from the records. What you’re saying can’t be true, he wanted to protest. Your husband’s death had nothing to do with this scheme you’re talking about. He was hardly involved at all. But even before any of this could be spoken aloud, he understood what happened, what must have happened, what had to have happened. Bolling hadn’t betrayed anyone. That wasn’t why he was dead. He was dead because his participation in the scheme had become unnecessary.

  Her fingers moved again, prowling to the top of his suit. And now her hand plunged under it, gripping his cock in a tight fist. “You were so hard,” she said, “so beautiful and hard. I hope I haven’t ruined it.”

  He could feel his penis throbbing back to life, in spite of the warnings that screamed in his brain like metal shrieking against metal.

  She leaned across the space between them. Her lips were at his ear. “You’re the bribe they’re offering me,” she whispered, her breath against his ear as thrilling, almost, as her hand. “You’re what they’re paying me for my silence.”

  Her fingers caressed the head of his penis, stroked the shaft. She slid from her own chaise, crouching on the patio tiles beside him. She raised the waistband of his suit and laid her head on his belly, watching the effect she was having on him. Her long hair, still wet, spread over his body, exciting him in ways that felt surprisingly new.

  She let go of him and rose to her feet, her bathing suit sliding down her body as if she were a snake slipping from its skin. His eyes went to hers, then down her body, past those perfect breasts, to the thick, dark tangle of her pubic hair, so dark and dense it hid everything. He lunged for her, plunging his face into the thicket, pulling her over on top of him, her legs wreathing his neck.

  He could feel the lightest touch of her lips on the tip of his cock, while his own tongue prowled inside her and his head swam dizzily with the complex fragrances of her body.

  He wanted her to stop, to wait, to let him have her first. She seemed to read his mind. He heard her moan softly as her hips writhed in response to the relentless prowling of his tongue, and he felt only the light, slick movement of his cock against her unparted lips.

  And then she moaned harder, her hips thrashing and churning, and all he knew and tasted and felt was the wonderful wetness of her cunt sliding across his lips, his chin, his nose. She pressed hard, her lips to his, and he plunged his tongue into her one last time and she stopped moving entirely and lay still.

  Slowly, like a sunrise, she rolled off him, crouching again by his side. She took him deep into her mouth, her hand wrapped tightly around him, working him with her tongue, her lips, and her hand all at the same time. He looked down and saw her head rising and falling, saw himself throbbing into her and out, and he fought to hold the moment as long as possible, to resist letting it end.