When she met Sergio on Monday morning as she reported for work, she found not just another queen but rather a very royal, very grand, very petulant princess. He was young, with a beautifully molded chin and neck. His lips were pouting and provocative, and he had a classically voluptuous face and fairly long, glossy brown hair. He dressed in the height of Italian fashion, his pure silk body shirt unbuttoned to the navel, showing a great deal of his smooth tan chest, and his slim waist clasped by a heavy solid-gold link belt. His trousers might not have seemed too tight in a Spanish bullring, but on Seventh Avenue they made a definite statement.
Sergio, at that moment, was a very, very angry princess who had come back dreadfully bombed out from a much too brief vacation to find that his dependable workhorse of an assistant had been replaced by some little tricky numero Alan had put over on him in his absence. You could trust nobody in this business! A French twat. How was that for sneaky?
“Stop whimpering, Sergio. The girl has talent and you need her. If you’re planning on stamping your teeny-weeny feet and having hysterics, do it someplace else.” Alan Wilton looked at Sergio with scarcely concealed contempt.
“You’ll regret this, Alan.”
“Don’t you dare threaten me, you little cunt. You know who’s boss around here, don’t you? Don’t you? So, get those tight, little, fancy pair of buns of yours into the studio and start working. And if you’re planning to pull any of your Miss Bitch ratshit with Valentine—I really and truly would not, if I were you.”
Sergio left, slightly mollified by Alan’s words. In some situations he had a weakness for—being told what to do. Alan could be such a tough son of a bitch. He’d be damned if he was going to work right away, not now, with his cock suddenly so stiff that he had to get off or come in his pants. Sergio took the fire stairs up two flights to a public men’s room, which was known all over Seventh Avenue, along with several others. He looked quickly in both directions, made sure that no one he knew was in the corridor, and slipped inside. A dozen men were there, a few in low conversation, others roaming around nervously, some just standing and smoking, their eyes flicking from side to side. Sergio recognized an important menswear buyer, a Puerto Rican stock boy, the vice-president of a major department store, a blond male model, and a young wrapper for a dress manufacturer. He didn’t greet any of them nor did they greet him. Sergio’s heart beat hard as he fumbled in his pocket as if for a cigarette, making sure that the outline of his stiff prick was emphasized by his manipulation of the thin, tight fabric. One of the men, a stranger as conservatively dressed as a banker, came over to him immediately with an outheld lighter.
“How do you like it?” he asked Sergio.
“Up the ass.”
“You’ve picked an awkward place for that.”
“Yeah—you can’t have everything—so, you want to suck?”
“How could you tell?” The stranger’s lips were open with lust.
“ESP. Go in that cubicle, the third from the end—it’s the right height.”
The stranger obeyed immediately, locking himself in. Sergio sauntered over to the cubicle, the door of which was neatly punctured by a hole about four inches in diameter, padded comfortably by a rim of foam rubber. All the doors in the room had similar arrangements, the “glory holes” varying only in their height from the ground. Sergio stood as close to the door as possible, his back to the room full of men, and unzipped his fly, sticking his hard penis through the hole until his balls pressed closely against the door. The man inside, who had dropped to his knees, took Sergio’s cock in his mouth with a muffled moan of ecstasy. His own half-stiff penis was already out of his tweed trousers, and while he grasped Sergio with one hand and sucked passionately, he used the other hand to rub himself with a hard, merciless stroke. Sergio stood perfectly still, his hands at his side, his eyes closed, lost in the delicious tugging, licking, pulling sensations he felt on the other side of the door. He knew dimly that he was going to disappoint the guy inside. He was so ready, after that tongue-lashing of Alan’s, that he came in less than a minute in a series of wildly relieving jerks. The stranger in the cubicle had barely started to really work on Sergio’s prick when his mouth was filled with sperm. He gulped it frantically, trying to hold the pumping cock in his mouth as long as possible. But, once finished, Sergio unceremoniously removed himself from the glory hole, zipped up, and was out the door in a practiced movement. The stranger, cursing under his breath, carefully eased his distended, purple, and aching penis back into his pants and left the cubicle. He was going to try his luck again—he couldn’t settle for a nothing quickie like that, not after coming in all the way from Darien for it.
Valentine would have liked to stay out of Sergio’s way. He wasn’t nasty to her in any straightforward manner to which she could, at least, have reacted, but his unfeigned air of absolute disdain seemed to fill and solidify the space around them. However, their work kept them together constantly, often bending over the same piece of fabric or paper, constantly needing to consult on this matter or that. He had taste, she granted, particularly in the firm’s specialty, women’s sports separates made in fine wools and cashmeres, leather, linen, and pure silk. Although Wilton Associates was only six months old, it was solidly capitalized by Alan Wilton, who had formerly been a partner in an enormous dress business. Valentine gradually learned, through office gossip, that Wilton had sold out his former partnership when he and his wife, the daughter of the bigger firm’s founder, had been divorced. No one seemed to know any details about his past since they were all, like Valentine, fairly recent employees. Sergio was the exception. He had worked for Wilton at his former business and had gone with him when he left it.
Sergio was engrossed in the preparation of Wilton Associates’ summer line, but not so involved with his own designs that he didn’t find time to incorporate large numbers of Valentine’s ideas in his own sketches. Often he re-sketched her drawings without bothering to make any changes in them at all.
One afternoon, about two months after Valentine had been hired, Alan Wilton asked her to come to his office.
“You haven’t asked, Valentine, but I want you to know that I think you’ve added something very important to the look of our line.”
“Oh, thank you! Has Sergio—”
“Sergio’s not famous for sharing credit—he’s said nothing. I just happen to have a very good memory.” The wildcat eyes looked steadily into hers. “Will you have dinner with me this Friday? I’d like that very much—or do you have to be somewhere for the weekend?”
Valentine felt a shock run right up into her hair. Until this minute Alan Wilton had treated her with pleasant formality on the frequent occasions when he came into the studio. She found him intimidating, although she would never admit it to anyone, not even to Elliott.
“No! That is—I’m not going anywhere for the weekend—I’d love to have dinner.” She was thoroughly confused.
“Perfect. I’ll pick you up at your place then?” Valentine had a vision of this exquisitely dressed man climbing six flights up to her loft in the light of the forty-watt bulb that lit her staircase.
“That might not be a good idea.” Idiot, she told herself, that doesn’t make sense. “I mean—the traffic—Friday night. Why don’t I just meet you somewhere?” What traffic she asked herself, mortified. On Friday night all the traffic was leaving the city.
“Whatever you say. Come for a drink at my place first and we’ll go on to Lutèce. You can tell me how it compares to La Tour d’Argent.” He looked at the white work smock she was wearing. “It’ll give you a chance to wear one of your Balmain dresses. And we can chat about dear, old Pierre. I haven’t had dinner with him in at least three years.”
“I think Sergio needs me,” she answered hastily.
“Well, there’s certainly no doubt about that. Shall we say eight o’clock? I live in the East Sixties, here’s my address. It’s an old town house. Just ring the bell on the outside and I’ll let you in. It’s
the first door straight ahead.”
“Yes. Well—until Friday then—” She left his office precipitously, realizing too late that she would probably see Wilton a dozen times before Friday in the course of her work.
Valentine arrived at Alan Wilton’s door wearing a short, soft, black chiffon dress with an open matching jacket, trimmed in black satin ribbons, of her own design and workmanship, which Balmain would have been proud to acknowledge. She expected to find his home decorated in the spirit of his office, which incorporated all the executive clichés of gray-flannel walls, a black-and-white geometric David Hicks carpet, and furniture of polished steel and glass, an office as severely masculine and strictly organized as the man himself.
But when Wilton answered her ring he led her into a duplex that combined fantasy and fine art in bewildering profusion. A collection of rare Art Deco furniture was placed on brilliant Persian carpets; eighteenth-century Chinese chairs stood on either side of a splendid naked Greek torso of Alexander the Great; sinuous Cambodian dragons guarded an upright Ptolemaic sarcophagus. The colors were all rich and dark—wines, bronzes, lacquered shiny black, and terra-cotta. Mirrors were everywhere, competing for space with books, antique Chinese wall hangings, framed photographs, and small Cubist paintings, two Braques, one Picasso, several Légers. Leather and velvet sofas were partly covered with fur throws and unexpected pillows in silver and gold lamé. On every table stood an amazing clutter of vases and small sòulptures, Lalique and Gallé glass, Chinese ceramics, Assyrian stone figures, flexible metal fish. It was an apartment at once so personal that Valentine imagined that if she had the time to absorb and analyze it, she would know the man who had created it, yet it was so full of surprising contrasts and ambiguous juxtapositions that it might as well have been designed as camouflage.
Valentine was speechless. This was such a complete work of art that she really felt nothing yet but astonishment. Wilton waited, drinking in with pleasure this reaction on the part of his guest.
“I see,” she finally said, “that you do not believe that ‘less is more.’ ”
He gave her the first entirely open smile she had seen on his face. “I’ve always thought old Corbusier was unnecessarily dogmatic about that,” he answered, and began to show her around the two floors and the small formal garden with unabashed pride in his treasures. From the minute he had answered the door, Valentine had ceased to feel frightened by him. He seemed a different man entirely in his own home. He hadn’t mentioned “dear, old Pierre” once, and she felt, somehow, that he didn’t intend to tease her ever again.
Valentine had been taken aback when Wilton had mentioned dining at Lutèce. Even after a mere three or four months in New York she knew its reputation as the most expensive restaurant in town, supreme in its standards of haute cuisine. She expected the kind of grandeur she had read about in French magazines when they described the glories of Maxim’s or Lasserre. Instead, she found it was a narrow, friendly brownstone, with a tiny bar. They climbed up a steep, open, circular iron staircase into a small cream-and-pink room, lit entirely by candles, overlooking a garden filled with roses and other tables. There was not a single note of ostentation, yet the room breathed depths of luxury and comfort because of the use of the finest materials: heavy, pink linen tablecloths and napkins, fresh roses in bud vases, fine crystal, and solid-silver flatware. Even the waiters, in their long, white aprons, were protective and approving, instead of exuding the stiff pomposity that Valentine had dreaded in anticipation. As they drank Lillet on the rocks in delicate, round goblets with long, thin stems, Valentine inspected the menu, which, to her surprise, had no prices on it. Later she discovered that only the host’s menu had the prices listed, a delicate way of making the guest unself-conscious about the cost of his choice. Let the host wince—or, if he had to wince, let him stay away.
Although some of Valentine’s strange sense of shyness had been dissipated in Wilton’s apartment, where his objects provided a safe topic of conversation, after the business of ordering was over she suddenly wondered what on earth they were going to talk about during dinner. As if he sensed, her new attack of uneasiness, Wilton began to tell her about the history of the restaurant. He had been coming there since it opened.
“I hoped it was going to be a success from the first day,” he said, “but I was absolutely sure of it on the day I heard the owner, André Surmain, refuse to serve a regular customer iced tea with his dinner, although the man swore that if he didn’t get his iced tea he would never set foot in the place again.”
“I don’t understand,” Valentine said, confused.
“I knew that the place hadn’t begun to break even yet, but there was André, so determined to maintain the standards of French cooking that he preferred to lose a good customer than do what he considered an abomination, a desecration of great food. With nerve like that—he had to be a little crazy—how could he fail? And the man never did come back either.”
Valentine felt a return of her natural self-confidence. She wouldn’t let anyone drink iced tea here either, certainly not with the roast duckling garnished with poached white peaches she was eating.
Alan Wilton felt something stir inside that had been dormant for many years. It was an enchanting child, indeed. He had suspected it would be. So young, so innocent, in spite of its airs, so amazingly unspoiled in spite of its beauty. How restful, how touching, to show it a bit of the world. And how well it knew how to accentuate its type—slender as a young boy, tiny breasts, a curly, short cap of absurdly red hair above the simplicity of the black chiffon—how very well done.
During the next five weeks Valentine had dinner with Alan Wilton some fourteen times. He introduced her to the authentic, noisy bistro atmosphere of Le Veau d’Or; the subdued, badly lit reverse chic of Pearl’s, where the thrill came not so much from the Chinese food, which no one ever admitted was only fair, but from the feeling of being a member of a privileged elite who had made it their own; and to the very special charm of Patsy’s, an unpretentious but expensive West Side Italian restaurant where entrenched Democratic Party politicians, and men whose methods of business did not encourage investigation, dined on some of the best Italian food outside of Milan. Mainly they ate at Lutècé, sometimes downstairs in the less formal, slightly larger dining room, sometimes outside in the garden, protected by awnings and tall lamps, which radiated heat on chilly nights, sometimes in the room in which they had first sat. Slowly Valentine came to know Wilton a little better. He was a man who had the trick of offering tiny bits of information about himself at odd moments and at the same time managed to convey, wordlessly, the fact that probing questions were not just unwelcome but out of the question. He had two sons, both young teenagers; he had been divorced for five years after a marriage of twelve years; his wife had remarried and was living happily in Locust Valley.
He never discussed business with Valentine. In fact, his chief interest seemed to be in Valentine herself, in her past life, which she gradually described to him in full detail. It was a relief to her to be able to stop misrepresenting herself. Now that she was really a designer’s assistant she could admit the truth about her years at Balmain. Yet somehow she didn’t feel free to be as easy and open with him as she was with Elliott. Although she could now relax with Wilton, his perfect manners constrained her own impetuous frankness.
She puzzled endlessly about her relationship to him. Everyone in the office knew they were seeing each other, since he had his secretary make all his restaurant reservations. Valentine managed to evade the questions her friend the receptionist and some of the more important women in the workrooms slyly tried to put to her. She thought she understood Sergio’s attitude completely. The more often she saw Alan, the more frigidly vicious Sergio became. Only natural, considering that she was a potential competitor for his own job with the unfair advantage of being involved in a man-woman relationship with the boss.
But was she? That was the stone at the heart of the question. They had established
a pattern in their evenings. She met Alan at his home for a drink, they went out to eat, they had a brandy or two in a bar after strolling a while, and then he took her home in a taxi, insisting on seeing her all the way up to her door. He invariably kissed her goodnight on both cheeks, in the French manner, but he never came in, although, after the first three evenings, Valentine always invited him to do so.
Wilton had subtle charm and formidable glamour. Valentine had never been courted by a man she took seriously, and she was beginning to fall more and more under his spell. He was the first man of the world she had ever known, but she had no basis of comparison to use as a yardstick to judge his impeccable behavior. After fourteen dinners she certainly expected something more than the kind of kiss one French general gives to another on dress parade! More and more frequently she found herself staring at his full mouth, imagining what it would feel like to her lips, until, with a start of realization, she dropped her eyes. Sometimes she noted a strange flash of what looked like pain in his expression, and she would hurry to distract him with an anecdote on the mad pace at Balmain’s because she feared, for no reason she knew, whatever it was that he might have been about to say. Yet, what was he waiting for? Was there something she was supposed to do? Some sign, some word? Did he think he was too old for her? Was she perhaps not his type? No, that, she concluded, was just not possible. No man would spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars to feed a woman who wasn’t his type, common sense told her that and common sense never failed. Perhaps because she didn’t know the right way to flirt, perhaps he was frightfully shy deep down inside, perhaps he had been so hurt by women that he didn’t want to get involved, perhaps—
Valentine was disgusted with herself. All these fake wonders and doubts when what she really wanted to know was when she was going to bed with Alan Wilton? Her twenty-second birthday had passed and she was still so intact a virgin that if she had still been a practicing Catholic she could have gone to confession without a blush. Why, even that dolt of an Elliott had never made a move—
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