Jenna Takes the Fall

by A. R. Taylor

  Jenna didn’t want to hear about which paintings, because if she did, yet another worry would barrel into her world, another disreputable person crossing her path, about which she could do nothing anyway. Legard and their work together were too much a part of her “getting well” plan, and more info might destroy what she wanted to walk toward, not back away from. Worse still, this theft business sounded a lot like the convoluted machinations of overprivileged New Yorkers. She hadn’t understood those folks, still didn’t, as she was pretty sure she had been duped in a fashion she couldn’t face right now. But she did want to know about the Veuve Clicquot sender. “Someone sent me a bottle of this stuff, out of the blue, to the hotel. Very mysterious. It wasn’t you, was it?”

  “Of course not. I didn’t even know you were here.”

  “It freaked me out, and now the bottle just looks at me accusingly. ‘Drink me, drink me, if you dare,’ it seems to say. I thought I’d go to the caves and see if I could find a clue.”

  “The widow Clicquot was one of the first female owners of a Champagne winery, developed new methods supposedly, all kinds of good stuff. She was important in the industry.”

  “The count makes wine, or Champagne, at least he says he does. He sure does have a lot of the stuff piled up.”

  “Too weird. Too nineteenth-century, if you know what I mean.”

  “I don’t know. I’m suspicious of everybody, and I see plots everywhere.” As she sat there now, she began to reflect on the word “widow.” Could the mysterious sender be Sabine Hull, the only widow she knew?

  They sat quietly, sipping on the golden Champagne, watching the fire, as the whole room steadily warmed. Inti cranked open one of the windows, pulling his sweater over his head, flinging it down on the couch. Jenna stood to take off her own heavy scarf and then, like falling into a warm embrace of maleness and heat, she moved into his arms. She had had no love for so long and had nothing now that protected her at all from his warmth and passion. He was an ardent lover, and he touched every part of her as if meeting a woman’s body for the first time. She adored his youthful kindliness and vigor, and it encouraged in her a wildness that had only come out before in her riotous lovemaking with Vincent Hull. This time it came out with a rush.

  She wanted to take the lead and did so by keeping control of herself despite every touch of his hand in any soft spot having an almost instant orgasmic effect. Instead, she pushed him onto his back and began to slide slowly down his chest with her breasts brushing down across his skin softly, as he stared up at her, sometimes eyes closed, sometimes wide open, smiling, laughing even. When she reached his sex and his thighs, he wanted to move into her, but she held him back, taking up the condom in its little package by the bed and ripping a corner with her mouth. “I saw this on TV.”

  “Watching porn again, are we?” Inti managed to get out.

  “Just one of those late night things. Two girls who sell sex toys and stuff. This time they used a banana.” She pulled the thin condom out of the package and slid it into her mouth, bending down over him, and then she rolled it with her tongue onto his penis. By this time he could stand it no longer and turned her over, moving into her, and at the end they made enough noise to wake everyone in the hotel. Fortunately, there were no other guests.

  “The staff will have to suck it up,” Inti said, sweating and laughing but suddenly, without waiting at all, he wanted more. “So to speak.”

  “No, no, I have to rest a moment.”

  “That’s my line, isn’t it?” They lay alongside each other, his arms encircling her from behind, as she fell into a happy, grateful sleep. Not much time must have passed, though, because she awoke with an anxious start. Birds had begun to sing in the darkness, and she looked down at Inti’s comely face. He opened his eyes and pulled her toward him, and this time she let him touch every secret, wet inch of her body, passive, until at the last, when he entered her and brought her as close to ecstasy as possible, she held on, held out, and squeezed him hard deep within her groin muscles just as he had his climax. He cried out, and only then did she succumb to her own pleasure.

  When the sun shone through the shutters, Jenna arose before he did and watched as he slept. She felt wonderful, alive after all, not like a dead person crushed under the body of someone else, also dead. Creeping into the minuscule bathroom, she splashed water on her face, still flushed and overheated, dressing quickly, for no good reason she could discern, not having any plan. It was a Sunday, after all, but for a moment she sat down in a chair and watched as Inti turned away from her, the covers falling slightly off his back to reveal a couple of moles and a remarkably straight spine. She could see out of the window a few families walking to Mass, always the grandmas in the lead. Just as her own had been, she remembered. Maybe she needed to find a French granny, someone to advise her on her future. Jenna leaned forward to press on Inti’s shoulder, and he rolled over immediately, drawing her toward him, but she pulled back. “I have to go.”

  “To where? It’s Sunday.”

  “Back home,” she said, laughing a bit.

  “Right. The hotel. You’re running away from me. And after last night.”

  “No, no, I’m just not used to so much . . . I don’t know . . . contact. We’ll see each other soon.”

  “I’m supposed to leave in three days.”

  She struggled now. “Then we’ll make a plan.” She got her jacket and purse off the chair.

  “Okay, be a woman of mystery. But I can find things out.” He rolled over on his stomach and put a pillow on top of his head.

  “Idle threats.” But she wasn’t so sure, and she worried about Inti’s parting shot. It would be a big story, and he needed one of those. It wasn’t just a slim little one-line scandal. It was the kind of story with edges, depths, about race and sex and betrayal, with greatness in it somehow. Trying to switch off these sickening thoughts, she drove the Renault through what were by now familiar fields, at last coming to her “home.” Hurrying inside, she sat on her bed trying to think of someone to call. Could she confide in someone? Oh how she wished she could speak to Jorge, just to go through all that had happened, just to laugh and cry and explain it all somehow. Did Tasha regret the plot she had concocted with the lawyers? How had she gotten them to agree to it, and why would they have? The African-American angle still didn’t work for Jenna, and she pictured her now in a Park Avenue apartment, elegant and rich, bought off just as she had been.

  What time was it in New York? Probably not too early to call. She dialed Rudoph Hayes and waited until finally a woman answered, sounding quizzical as to her identity, but then the lawyer picked up. “Jenna, or should I say Cate? I’m surprised to hear from you on a Sunday.” He sounded sarcastic and not happy.

  “I just, I’ve got no one to talk to, so I had to speak with someone who actually knows what happened.”

  “You want to vent or something like that?”

  “Not quite,” but she caught the edge in his voice.

  “So, you’re unhappy in some way?”

  “I live in a hotel, I have no friends, only an old man who restores paintings.” She hesitated, but said finally, “I met a young man, he’s great, a journalist,” not admitting that she’d known him before.

  “What?”

  “He wrote about coyotes up in Rye.”

  “Could you have picked anyone worse?”

  “I couldn’t pick anyone else at all. Everybody in this town is over seventy.”

  “You can move. You can do anything you want. The world’s your oyster.” She grimaced at the cliché.

  “I don’t want to move. I don’t know where to go, since I’ve never been anywhere except, now, France. I’m like a prisoner.”

  “Stop right there. You’re richer than anyone you know, richer than most people have ever dreamed of. You’re lovely and bright, and if I may say so, spoiled. You need to comprehend reality and get a grip. People are starving. They’ve lost their parents and at ten years of age have to wor
k digging through garbage. Look around carefully at that world and then call me up again, and we’ll discuss your problems.”

  “Oh, well. . . .” She broke down into loud sobs.

  “Get a book called Urn Burial by Sir Thomas Browne, the finest prose writer in the English language. He talks about being dead. Think about that. Vincent died, you know, and he left behind a wife and children and many who actually loved him, me for one.”

  “I’m sorry, really.”

  “You were just a blank girl with no particular identity who worked for Vince and did . . . I don’t know what else. Now you have millions of dollars and can do anything you want. My heart aches for you.”

  That Sunday slowed way down after this conversation. She had to get away somewhere, somehow, but she didn’t have any ideas, and the length of her sojourn here was part of her contract. For a time, she circled the old chateau wall, thinking furiously about what she should do next. Buy a house? She could. Buy a farm and raise chickens? She could. Buy a large chateau like this one, she could do that too, but it would be ridiculous. She would totter around like a character in a romantic novel, lighting candles, drinking brandy, taking young lovers. “My god,” she cried out loud, “you’re only twenty-five!”

  SIX

  On Monday morning she drove to Monsieur Legard’s studio, though she wasn’t sure whether to be relieved that Inti hadn’t gotten in touch with her yet or worried. At least she had a place to go, and her maître had a big new job awaiting her. The count’s Bartholomeus Spranger, for that was the painter of the awful Aries–Aphrodite work, stood propped up on an easel. When she had a chance to look at it more closely, she caught a resemblance between herself and Aphrodite, curly blondred hair, widely spaced eyes, breasts and shoulders exposed, embracing the god with thick hairy thighs, his sex hidden behind a shield. Did she spot a freckle? Hardly, but she gazed up at the portrait and thought, goddess of love indeed. What lay beneath the lawyer’s hatred of her surely involved an image exactly like this one of an old man and a young girl frolicking, naked and unrepentant. Legard seemed to note the resemblance as well and stole a look at her several times to gauge her reaction, but she refused to meet his eyes. Without talking of any of this, they shared a coffee in silence and then got to work.

  In the afternoon, her day was ruined. Legard had a copy of the International Herald Tribune on his desk, and despite previous vows, she paged through it. Until now she had avoided newspapers altogether, fearing any mention of Vincent Hull’s name, perhaps even more frightened that the story the-powers-that-be had concocted would unravel or be revealed as impossible or worse. The story she looked at today involved a memorial service held over six months later, awfully long, it seemed to her, after his death. Even given his status and worth in the world, the story didn’t occupy the first page, but appeared deep in the paper, and it revealed tidbits from the will about disposition of the Hull property. His wife and assorted foundations got mostly everything, but there was a bequest for Tasha, forgiving her loan on a large coop apartment, and its address. Sure enough, Park Avenue. In and of itself, the gift was not too extraordinary, since he had forgiven other loans as well, but several shadow trusts had aroused press suspicions, and Jenna suspected hers to be the largest.

  Old questions were rehashed, especially the fact that when the EMTs found Jenna awaiting them, the dead man had been splayed out on the floor in a most exposed condition. She had given the police a timeline, but the Tribune reporter questioned this because his research suggested the death had happened much earlier, though he could not confirm this with hospital records. No autopsy had been done or been requested, and the Medical Examiner signed off on the cause of death as a “myocardial infarction.” Away and gone and quick. The family could have arranged anything they wanted, so maybe they were just so embarrassed as to what had happened that he had to disappear immediately. It made her sad, all this, since the Irish worshipped their dead, and they hung out with them until the last moment before they went underground. That’s what Jenna would have done for him, if she could have.

  As she paged through Urn Burial—the lawyer had thoughtfully overnighted it to her—she wondered how long it would take the reporters to find out that she too had received a bequest. She didn’t know the steps Hull’s moneymen had taken, since it had all happened so fast, but she assumed they hid her name carefully, perhaps under some corporate heading? Had they backdated the will and stuck something in there, or perhaps her money had not come directly from him but from some other corporate entity, of which there were many, so she wouldn’t appear in the will at all? Then again, wouldn’t they have wanted her name in there and not Tasha’s, since wasn’t her job to deflect attention away from Tasha?

  Drinking yet another cup of Legard’s strong coffee, Jenna read from the lawyer’s favorite book: “But who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried? Who hath the oracle of his ashes, or whither they are to be scattered?” Alas, the book actually did involve dead bodies. Before seeing this, she had thought the title a metaphor or something, not a book about real human beings no longer with us. Where was Vincent Hull buried? Perhaps in an urn like this old Renaissance person? Someday, somehow she would find out.

  “What are you doing, Cate?” He pronounced it “cat” and shook his index finger at her, frowning.

  “Reading a book about the ashes of dead people and where they end up.” She put the slim volume down near a can of linseed oil.

  “But why, you poor thing? Get busy and clean this little spot here, where these flowers are, right down here at the bottom.” Of course he never would let her do any inpainting of this supposed masterpiece, certainly not at the center.

  She closed her mind off with such detail work, dabbing at the sweeping calendulas at the bottom right of the canvas with a cotton ball dipped in ammonia, trying not to consider all the dark thoughts crowding her mind. More than once she stood back to survey the entire erotic landscape of the piece. Much trouble with it, areas blackened, paint cracking around what once must have been a pink nipple, now turned brown. Aphrodite, languid in the embrace of an older but muscled-up man, showing off her body and her desires to the world. The worst, the blackest of her own thoughts: she would have to leave here altogether. She hadn’t figured out who had sent the bottle of Champagne, but somebody knew where she lived for sure. Was that what the bottle meant? “I know about you, and now you have to figure out who I am?” Or did it have some other meaning that she couldn’t fathom. Both Legard and Inti denied sending it, but maybe one of them was lying. She had never really believed Inti had appeared by chance in her current hiding place, but she couldn’t figure out how he had worked it out. She also didn’t know how completely the Hull minions had embroidered her story, her college history, her made up past life. If any other journalist picked up on these falsehoods, that person might be on her trail.

  In the evening, she invited Inti to come have a drink with her, to question him, and she sat drinking a glass of Champagne in the lobby of the hotel, to get the ball rolling. Staring down at a nice pair of dove gray high heels she had picked up in Reims, she wiggled her feet, the best part of her really, and she often thought Vincent had seduced her poolside that extraordinary night because he thought them beautiful. If only people would look down when they first met her, things might go better. Soon enough the very man she awaited appeared at the golden door of the hotel and sauntered over to her, yes, a confident young man, especially about love. “Can you order me some of that Champagne?”

  “Of course,” she said, and she spoke to the waiter in her now excellent French.

  They sat looking at each other, shyly, given their intimacy. When the drink arrived, Inti saluted her with his glass. “You, you. What will I do with you?”

  “I’m not yours to do anything with, except maybe lovemaking. There I am obviously your slave.”

  “Clearly, and I’m going to encourage that, but we may have to postpone our ramblings for the moment, sadly.”<
br />
  “Why?”

  “Work. I have to get back to New York. Listen, I need to warn you. The stolen paintings are a Fragonard and—”

  “We’re not working on anything like that,” she interrupted. “I would recognize one right away, at least I hope I would.”

  “Okay, well, the other one is a Bartholomeus Spranger, a big god and goddess thing. Looks hideous, but valuable, seventeenth-century.” He stuck out a color photo of the piece. Jenna coughed and then drank a big gulp of Champagne. The exact same painting she had just worked on, the one that sat at this very moment in the Legard studio. “What? Do you know it?”

  “I’ve seen reproductions of it. Sexy looking,” she choked out. “Ach, it went down the wrong pipe.” No revelations about stolen paintings would issue from her lips, she was sure of that.

  “I’ve got to get to Paris for my flight, tonight actually.” He reached out his hand and pulled her up. “Let’s go outside.”

  “Why do you have to go so soon?”

  “Stories breaking all the time.”

  “You’re always so mysterious. I don’t like mystery. Even trying to find out who sent me that bottle of Champagne is driving me crazy.”

  “But it’s you who are at the heart of a mystery.”

  “Real heroes often act in secret.” Inti looked at her, startled, but said nothing. “Ignore me. I don’t know why I said that. You’re not pursuing all this, are you, journalistically?”

  “No. Your particular enigma I have decided to let go.” The moon shone over the jagged walls of the ancient castle, like a romantic painting in and of itself.

  “It’s so beautiful here,” she whispered, and he enclosed her in his arms, but she hid her face from him, and her eyes filled with tears. Like many people in their early twenties who make a bad mistake, she knew she would have to lie for the rest of her life.

  “Can you stay in touch with me somehow? You don’t even have a cell phone.”

  “I’m not allowed to have one.”