Love's Golden Spell

by William Maltese

  Christopher’s hair was gold. Christopher’s eyes were gold.

  She wouldn’t think of Christopher’s hair, or his eyes. She wouldn’t think of him, period. He had lost something in his transition from boy to man, just as Janet had lost something in her painful journey from girl to woman.

  The car stopped. She didn’t wait for the chauffeur to get out and open the door for her. She opened it herself. She wasn’t a pampered woman who couldn’t take care of herself without a paid retainer’s assistance. Those women were of Christopher’s world. She was of quite another. Those women draped themselves in animal skins that brought the leopard, cheetah, lynx and tiger to the brink of extinction. Janet wanted to save those animals. Not just the ones killed to satisfy some society matron’s twisted notion of fashion. Not just those massacred to bolster some hunter’s macho image. Rhinoceros were slaughtered for their horns, believed to restore sexual prowess to impotent Asian men. Elephants were killed for their tusks, made legal tender by uncaring speculators.

  Christopher had a room full of elephant ivory. With each elephant killed, the source of that ivory was depleted by one. Christopher became richer. When all the elephants were dead, like the quagga and bluebuck were dead, Christopher would be a very rich man.

  Damn it, he was rich enough already! He shouldn’t think of how to add more money to the family coffers. He should take steps to insure that his children would see live elephants instead of just pictures of them.

  But Christopher was childless. He wasn’t married. Janet felt funny inside as she swept through the doors of the Carleton Hotel. The hotel was part of a vast complex of boutiques, movie theaters and restaurants, none of which claimed her attention. She wasn’t all that interested in the spectacular view of city lights from her hotel window, either.

  The bed had been turned down by the night maid. Janet searched a suitcase for her cotton pajamas. Her negligee was in the closet, but she didn’t want it. It was too provocative against her skin. She shouldn’t have brought it. It was extra baggage. Pajamas were more practical where she was going.

  The negligee was black silk. Christopher had dressed her in black silk, like a doll, tossing her aside as soon as a honey-colored diamond came along.

  The phone rang. Her sweet visions were of his calling to apologize—better yet, telling her that he realized who she was, that he was angry for not realizing it right away, that he wanted to see her again. She was a fool for letting them get off to such a ridiculously bad start. There were memories to talk about after sixteen years.

  It was Jill. She wanted to make sure Janet was back safely. She wanted to satisfy her curiosity. Tim and Roger had rushed her away from Lionspride grinning from ear to ear like two Cheshire cats. “Janet really landed herself a big one this time!” Roger had said as they drove off.

  Janet was in no mood to talk about Christopher. She wanted to forget him. All the interesting tidbits Jill wanted to hear hadn’t happened. “Did you get the tapes ready for shipping?” Janet asked, using business to counter Jill’s snooping. There was silence at the other end. “Well?”

  “You’ve the tapes,” Jill said. “Don’t you?”

  “How could I have them?” Janet asked. Frustrated. Something was wrong. She didn’t need this. “I stayed at Lionspride, didn’t I? You called to see whether I was back. Right? Right!”

  “But he said…,” Jill replied, leaving the sentence hanging.

  “Who said what?” Janet asked, her heart sinking.

  “The man who stopped us at the gate,” Jill continued tentatively. “He told us you wanted the tapes to play for Mr. Van Hoon at the house. He ran them back to you. Didn’t he?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Janet said, keeping her cool. There was no need to take out on Jill what wasn’t her fault. It was logical for her to have accepted the information as given. Everybody had video equipment nowadays. Christopher could afford the very best. “I’ll talk to you in the morning, okay? I’m a little tired right now.”

  “But what about the tapes?”

  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow!” Janet insisted with finality. She hung up the phone, her hand gripping the receiver so tightly her fingers were bleached white across her knuckles. “That rat!” she forced out between clenched teeth. He was a liar like his father! If Donald Geiger hadn’t distracted him with that diamond, he would still be lying, insisting he wanted fair payment for tapes that he had no intention of letting her have.

  She released her grip on the phone, her fingers hurting as she uncurled them. She paced, but it didn’t help. She lay down on the bed. She would sleep and worry about this in the morning. She didn’t need the tapes. She could say the Van Hoon wildlife collection contained extinct species, and Christopher couldn’t deny it. There were people who had seen the trophy room, and they could substantiate her story if Christopher called her a liar. Of course, a picture was worth a thousand words. Television audiences were visually oriented.

  He was less flippant about the threat she offered than he appeared. The Van Hoon name was vulnerable to attack after all.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to clear her mind. She was enveloped in the smell of exotic perfume. She had splashed the fragrance on extravagantly at Lionspride after finding a sixteen-ounce bottle in the bathroom. She had used too much; she smelled cheap. She felt cheap. Christopher Van Hoon’s toy, his plaything—tossed aside when he tired of her.

  She wished he could be guiltless. It was his father— and the Van Hoon tradition most of all—that she hated. If she was obvious in pinpointing the extinct animals before the cameras, it was because she wanted Christopher to convince her she was wrong to condemn him. At eighteen, he had promised he would never kill another animal. Or was his promise never to kill another gazelle? It didn’t matter. It was a lie. He had said she could have the film if she stayed for supper. A lie. She had endured the brunt of his amusement for nothing. He had been laughing at her.

  She got up, stripping off her pajamas, and went into the bathroom to take a shower. She scrubbed her body until her skin was raw, exchanging the exotic muskiness for the antiseptic blandness of soap. She would wash away all memory of him.

  Her pajamas reeked of the perfume. She threw them in a corner and climbed into bed naked. She wanted to sleep, but the caress of the sheets against her nakedness was sensuously distracting. When she did sleep, she dreamed of Christopher.

  He was young. He was standing in the shade of a blue-gum tree. He didn’t need the sun in the sky, because he carried sunlight in his hair, in the glow of his eyes, in the tan of his skin. Janet was in the dream with him. She was happy. God, it was so good to be happy! Ahead of her stretched unlived years of pain in which her father and husband died and left her. She would pick up the pieces each time she had this dream, remembering how it was to live in innocence, to laugh and touch in innocence, to kiss in innocence. Was it wrong to want it back?

  She was filled with loss and futility when she awakened. She was Janet Westover, not Janet Kelley. She was twenty-nine, not thirteen. She was a widow, not a virgin. She wasn’t innocent, and there was no bringing back the past.

  A knock on her door brought her back to reality. A second knock made her moan and wish whoever it was would go away. She was tired. It had taken her an eternity to get to sleep, and now this. She opened her eyes, surprised to see that the sun was shining through the window.

  “Give me a minute!’ she said, throwing back the blankets. “I said, just…a…minute,” she erupted irritably as a third knock sounded. Her robe was in the closet, hanging next to her black silk negligee. She put on the robe, securing the belt at her waist. She opened the door.

  He was standing there with his blond hair and golden eyes, deeply dimpled cheeks, and wide smile. “Hi!” he said. She was dreaming. His left hand was behind his back, his right hand extending a bouquet of golden roses. She could smell the heady fragrance of the flowers.

  “There’s only one thing I want from you!” she said, wishing he w
asn’t so handsome, wishing his eyes weren’t sparkling with good-natured humor.

  “And surprise, I brought that, too,” he said, producing the tape spools from behind his back. “I did promise them to you, didn’t I? In exchange for supper, wasn’t it?”

  “I suppose you spent last night erasing them,” she accused, taking them anyway.

  “Janet, Janet,” he said, his low voice as teasing as it was chiding. “May I come in?”

  “I’m not dressed,” she said, watching his wide smile spread.

  “I know,” he retorted.

  “No, you may not come in,” she replied. He was too handsome, too charming, too capable of being nice one minute and hurtful the next.

  “Then will you come out?” he ventured playfully. “I’m taking a look around one of the Van Hoon gold mines this morning, and I thought you might like to ride along.”

  His hair was gold, his eyes were gold, his skin was gold. She was dreaming. “What makes you think I want to see a gold mine?” she asked when he didn’t dissolve into thin air.

  “What woman in her right mind wouldn’t want to see one?” he countered.

  “So what makes you think I want to see a gold mine with you?” she amended. What was he trying to pull? She preferred him less friendly, less pleasantly playful, less the Christopher she remembered. She was vulnerable, and he was clever enough to see that.

  “What woman in her right mind wouldn’t want to see one with me?” he said. “So what do you say? You’re not crazy, are you?”

  “I’d be crazy if I did go with you,” she said, determined not to be persuaded. He was up to no good.

  “You make it damned hard for a man to apologize, Janet,” he said, shaking his head.

  Surely, he understood why this was so impossible. “That’s what you’re doing, is it?” she asked. “Apologizing?”

  “I behaved abominably last night,” he said. “I was hoping the flowers and tapes would say that for me, but I’m willing to eat more humble pie.”

  “Why?” she asked suspiciously. “That’s what I want to know.”

  “Why?” he echoed. “Because I finally remembered who you remind me of.” She didn’t ask. She couldn’t. He answered anyway. “A girl I once knew,” he said. His bright smile dimmed. “A funny thing: her name was Janet, too.” Janet was charged with emotions. There were memories of her alive within him. “But enough of that Janet!” he said, erasing the warm sensuousness of her discovery. “She was a child. You’re a woman. She was unable to reason as an adult. Your job demands adult objectivity. You wouldn’t peddle distortion just because it raises your television ratings, would you?”

  Christopher’s images of Janet Kelley were anything but pleasant, tainted by all that came after. Even if she had been a child at the time, he hadn’t forgiven her for thinking and reasoning as a child.

  “You’re telling me your family hasn’t exploited the land and the wildlife?” Janet demanded, drawing her robe more tightly around her. There was something about this man that physically affected her, something far more noticeable now that she was a woman.

  “It’s the nature of things to change,” he said “You told me that at the house. Nothing is static. Not Africa. Not its wildlife. Not its people. Many have prospered from Van Hoon mines. I guarantee fair wages and decent working conditions. And why condemn me for animals slaughtered in my grandfather’s and father’s times? Their generations lived the grand illusion of unending natural resources.”

  “That doesn’t excuse their excesses!” she said, vehemently. His rationalizations of innocence wouldn’t defuse her outrage.

  “I shouldn’t be expected to make excuses for people over whom I had no control,” Christopher said. Janet wasn’t responsible for circumstances over which she had no control, either. Her father had forced her to leave Africa, Lionspride, and Christopher. A thirteen-year-old girl doesn’t disobey a father loved for a lifetime. It was only now, sixteen years later, that she could say she had loved Christopher, maybe as much as she had loved her father. “I’m asking you to take the time to get to know me a 1ittle better,” Christopher said. “Is that too much to ask a woman who can bad-mouth me to a few million people at one shot?”

  “And by getting to know you, I’ll come to love you, I suppose?” Janet asked with sarcasm in her voice. She hurried on. Joking about her feelings for Christopher made her uneasy. “In one afternoon, you’ll convince me that a line of despots ended when your father died, you springing on the scene as pure as newly fallen snow.”

  “I’m Christopher Van Hoon, remember—not a saint,” he said, a wry smile playing at the corners of his sensuous mouth. “I’m not faultless. It would be wrong, though, to paint my picture blacker than it is. If a man isn’t patted on the back a few times in his life, encouraged for his attempts to make amends—no matter how feeble those attempts might appear—he’ll think further effort hardly worth the effort.”

  “I can’t believe you’re concerned about what I might or might not say about the Van Hoon family on television,” Janet said. He had shown his contempt for her and her position by engineering that embarrassing scene at Lionspride.

  “I’m not concerned,” he admitted, and Janet flushed with anger. Suspecting her ineffectiveness was one thing. Having it confirmed was another. “Actually you’re a surrogate,” he said.

  “For whom? For what?”

  “For that other Janet who never gave me the chance to defend myself,” he said, filling her with the guilt she had tried to deny.

  “You seem extremely confident of your powers of persuasion” Janet said, stung by the accusation in his voice. He was condemning a virtual child for not allowing herself to be persuaded by letters still unopened and ribbon-tied. A young girl’s grief allowed no separation of grain from chaff, of son from father. By the time she could forgive the boy for being a Van Hoon, he was a boy no longer. He was head of Van Hoon Afrikaner Minerals. He was the only Van Hoon she had left to hate; a hate she had struggled to overcome, to no avail.

  Besides, the real villain was Van Hoon Afrikaner Minerals, a corporate profiteer. The hiring of her father all those years ago and the commissioning of his feasibility study for the Lackland Animal Preserve had been a cover for company machinations. Because of the attention drawn to the study, gold exploration could be conducted without arousing the suspicion of the competition or her father. When gold was found, Jack Kelley and the Lackland Animal Preserve project were dumped by the wayside, having served their purposes.

  Her father hadn’t survived that betrayal. He had been deeply committed to the preservation of African wildlife. His study had shown a locale excellently suited to that purpose. Sixteen years after he had submitted his paperwork to that effect, there were no animals in the area he had mapped out for Lackland. There were three deep holes in the ground, their openings surrounded by smoke-belching buildings that converted tons of crushed rock into ounces of shiny gold. Trains chugged where antelope once roamed. Winders, trucks, conveyer belts, drills and explosives bled sounds to a veldt that once knew only the sounds of animals, the wind, the rain.

  The impetus behind that perverted metamorphosis of the African landscape hadn’t died with Vincent Van Hoon, any more than it had died with Petre Van Hoon. Van Hoon Afrikaner Minerals remained a nefarious entity, guiding human actions from behind the scenes. Christopher Van Hoon, as sole heir to his father and grandfather, was Van Hoon Afrikaner Minerals. He was the personification of that evil, and Janet could fight it only through him. If she was his surrogate, he was hers.

  “I’ll give you fifteen minutes to decide whether you’re here to do a hatchet job or to do things fairly,” he said, tossing the unclaimed bouquet onto a nearby chair. The discarded roses bruised their golden petals on the chafing upholstery. “I’ll wait in the lobby.”

  The door closed behind him. She glanced at the travel clock on the bedside table. She needed to know how long she had. She picked up the roses, cradling their long stems in her arms, sme
lling their sweet fragrance. Bob had never bought her flowers. Bob was practical. Why spend money on something so transitory? Better a toaster or a tape deck. Now Bob was dead, his life as transitory as cut roses.

  Time was passing, seconds turning into minutes. She needed more time.

  There was no vase for the flowers. If she left them, they would wilt before the maid found them. The roses seemed important. Concern for them kept her from thinking about Christopher waiting in the lobby.

  She went into the bathroom and filled the sink, propping the ends of the stems in the water. Too many things died in Africa. Flowers. Animals. Dreams. Expectations. Love.

  “Damn!” she said, bracing herself against the edge of the sink. She was as conscious of the ticking in the other room as tourists were of Big Ben’s chimes at noontime.

  Less than fifteen minutes—that was what sixteen years of memories came down to. She could let the clock tick away the final ending, or she could hope for a miracle in a world devoid of miracles. She could hope to reclaim the unclaimable, even if Christopher offered no real solution. He wasn’t waiting to tell her everything was all right, the sixteen years forgotten. He was playing games—not because he saw her as a threat but because she was a woman. Success with any woman offered him consolation for an ego bruised sixteen years before when Janet had been unable to succumb.

  She wanted to be fair. She wanted more. Too late. Sixteen years too late. Fifteen minutes too late.

  Her robe was off before she reached the closet. She didn’t look at the clock, fearing what it showed.

  She dressed quickly, choosing a brown pullover. She had no trouble with the button and zipper on the matching slacks. The strap on her left shoe was less obliging. She softly cursed it into submission.