Angelique Rising

by Lorain O'Neil

  Gliding out of the bathroom to Wyatt in her lavender beadworked Anthony-designed birthday gift dress, Wyatt was in awe. She'd pulled her hair back, away from her face, but left it long and loose down her back, a lush foaming wave curling delicately at the ends. Angelique knew her unbraided hair was the kind people longed to stroke which was the reason she seldom went out in public with it unbraided --people actually did stroke it. Angelique would be standing in line at a checkout counter or some other public place and boom! Some stranger's hand, usually a woman's, would suddenly be caressing down her back. And she couldn't have that, not with the physical effect it had on her, that darn, Robert had discovered but so far Wyatt had not.

  As far as the effect Angelique had on Wyatt, she knew he savored her beauty but in a different way from other people, beyond what other people felt. For him it wasn't just the beauty, it was a need for her, almost as if something about her was filling him, making him whole. She knew this because she felt the exact same way about him and she didn't understand it one whit.

  "You are... beyond expectation Mrs. Cochran," he blinked in approval.

  "Thank you for the dress," she murmured.

  "I believe I will be putting in a large order with Mr. Rodriguez --you are a vision, Angelique."

  "And how many Cochrans will be viewing this vision tonight, Wyatt?"

  "Well, me and you, my parents, George, Uncle Malcolm, Tinka --Uncle Malcolm had her officially made a Cochran when the blood tests came back-- and Maureen, who isn't a Cochran but since I gave her my name she hasn't given it back. So altogether, eight people."

  "That's not so bad."

  "Famous last words. Come, Johnson is waiting."

  "Why don't you drive?"

  "I pay Johnson twenty-four/seven. He might as well drive us, that way I can spend my time looking at you. Besides, he prefers it to sitting here and he'll be the one driving us all to the club after we've each had a glass of champagne or two I expect. You're not used to having him around yet are you?"

  "It is kind of weird, an assistant at your beck and call to do whatever you want for you anytime you want it. Is that how all rich people live?"

  He laughed.

  "Angelique, Johnson's duties are far more advanced than what you see. Trust me, he is a well paid professional and worth every penny. Now come. Five people are waiting with the proverbial baited breath to check you out. And George is no doubt hoping he can snag another one of your good-luck kisses, the last one having been so remunerative."

  "That uncle of yours... how come he's so creepy? No offense."

  He led her across the entry hall of his house and outdoors onto the front stone portico.

  "You picked up on that?" he asked as Johnson held the car door open for her and she climbed into the back. Wyatt walked around to the other side of the car and let himself in beside her.

  "Doesn't everyone?"

  "Good lord no. Most women are fervidly drawn to him."

  "Are you kidding?"

  "I suppose I should tell you the story of Uncle Malcolm," he rolled his eyes, "every family has its black sheep."

  She glanced at the back of Johnson's head as he pulled the car out onto Wyatt's long tree-lined driveway.

  "Oh don't worry about Johnson, he knows all about Uncle Mal. All right, well, you know my grandfather founded my company, right? It was supposed to go to his eldest son, Malcolm, to run for the betterment of the family once Gramps retired."

  "But what about your father?"

  "He, the younger brother, was supposed to be brought in later. Gramps didn't want my father at the company until Malcolm was firmly entrenched. Gramps didn't think my Dad was strong enough, translate that ruthless enough, to work at the company without a hard ass riding roughshod over him."

  "Your Uncle Mal is a hardass?"

  "He's a lot more than that. So Malcolm was all set to come in, and this woman shows up in Gramps' office claiming Malcolm had raped her, she's going to go to the cops. Malcolm swears on the Bible --and I mean that literally-- he doesn't know who this woman is, never saw her before in his life. Gramps believes Malcolm, at which point the woman pulls out her trump card. Hands Gramps a baby. Tinka. Gramps gets tests and guess what. The woman Malcolm swore he'd never met in his life was the mother of his child. Malcolm's credibility was shot to hell so Gramps started investigating and what he discovered shocked the living daylights out of him."

  "What?"

  "Malcolm is a sexual sadist. True sexual sadists are actually quite rare but Malcolm is one. He got his jollies by hiring prostitutes and doing some pretty unpleasant things with them. Turned out that's what Tinka's mother was, a pissed off pros who ended up with a mighty big grudge against Malcolm, not to mention a baby. So Gramps decides no way he's going to turn his company --his baby-- over to Malcolm. Instead he gives Malcolm a big chunk of money and tells him to go start his own company --in other words go away. My Dad sees that deal and since he didn't want to work at the company under someone else's thumb anyway, he says give it to him too. Gramps does."

  "That's how you ended up heading it?"

  "Yes. But I found out about Uncle Mal on my own. When I turned eighteen he tried to recruit me into his preferred sexual activities."

  "You?"

  "I was a young horny teenager who didn't know any better, Angelique. So I went along until it got severely kinky, then I bailed. But I have to admit, he did teach me some stuff. I warned George what was probably coming on his eighteenth birthday, he stayed well away from it. It's a subject we never discuss in our family. I'm sure you can understand why."

  "But what about Maureen? Your ex-wife? She grew up with the guy! And Tinka! Do you think he--"

  "Yes, everyone wondered about that, but the answer is no. Uncle Mal told me once, Never shit in your own back yard. He has not touched Maureen or Tinka, though sometimes I think Maureen wouldn't exactly mind. Pretty whacked out, huh?"

  "It does take a bit of getting used to. I've never been to a birthday party with a sexual sadist."

  "How would you know? Oh, come to think of it maybe you would know. But other people don't. To the world Malcolm is a successful financier and a philanthropist too. That Performing Center of his doesn't earn him any profit. Now I'm sure Malcolm gets a good tax write off on the whole thing, but still, he advances the arts in this city big time and charities line up at the Center's door hoping to have their fundraising events there, Maureen handles that part for him. He runs all kinds of non-profit programs out of the place. And whatever he does with his private life there's never been so much as a hint of scandal. I think he learned his lesson with the whole Tinka affair. Or perhaps he honed his techniques better." He squeezed her hand. "Don't worry, you're safe. Like I said, he doesn't target the females of the family. I asked him to stay away from you all this week at the Center and he did, didn't he?"

  "I never saw him, but I was locked away in the recording studio most of the time."

  "What were you recording?"

  She gleamed.

  "Made you a birthday present."

  "You have me intrigued, Mrs. Cochran."

  "As well you should be. You're not the only one in this marriage who can do sneaky Wyatt, which don't for one moment think I haven't tumbled to: 'Here, Angelique, you'll like this one --it's strawberry!'"

  He picked up her hand and kissed her knuckles in the luminous sunset.

  "No jury would ever convict me," he said in a low undertone as his eyes darkened with intimate affection, "not after they got one look at you."

  "What you do to me, Wyatt," she sighed, unraveling, the words caressing her tongue and stirring him considerably.

  They spent the rest of the trip slyly peeping at each other salaciously, thinking of their nights together. Angelique accepted their bedroom experiences as the norm, she had no ready comparisons. But Wyatt, no, he knew something strange was going on. A little bit of the newness should have been wearing off for him. The intensity perhaps shifting from new and exciting to exp
ected and comfortable but that wasn't happening. No, each time he took her, the excitement, the newness, the oh-my-godness of it was still there, if anything it was increasing. Not that he was complaining.

  "Hello, hello!" The door to the parental Cochran home swung open and a woman ushered them inside. The house was large, not a mansion, but located in an obviously affluent neighborhood. "I have so been looking forward to meeting you, Angelique."

  "SHE'S HERE!" Wyatt heard a Tinka-shriek.

  "It's a pleasure to meet you Mrs. Cochran--"

  "Please call me Beth--"

  "HI! HI! I'm Tinka, Wyatt's cousin, I saw you perform at the Gala and Gawd I couldn't believe it, it was fantastic, when you--"

  "Tinka, give her a moment to breathe please," Wyatt chided.

  Tinka was about Angelique's age but in appearance they were markedly apart. Tinka was petite but stacked, with butchy black hair in a curly perm, but with a light, blowsy air about her, almost like a tiny firecracker about to go breezily bouncing about the room.

  Angelique entered the Cochran home gracefully, surveying the expansive living room, so tastefully done. Most of the furniture was eggshell white, the carpet a pattern of delicate flowers, the walls a display of oil paintings and photographs. The home had obviously been designed and decorated by a person of discerning aesthetics.

  The only disconcerting thing in it was a man, Malcolm Cochran, postured by a fireplace staring raptly at Angelique, his expression guarded and unreadable. Beside him sat a woman, obviously Maureen. She too was regarding Angelique intently but with an empty immutable smile, the synthetic one she wore when she was worried how her smile would look. She visibly tried to soften it as Angelique's gaze swept over her, her resentment transparent, unsubtle. Maureen had a rather limited capacity for sincerity.

  "Hiya, Angelique," a familiarly roguish voice called, "you drinking again yet?" George was standing behind a bar holding a raised cocktail glass. She stifled an embarrassed smile as he knew she would.

  "She'll have water, George, she's performing later," Wyatt said giving his mother a caustic look, instantly eliciting some potently raised maternal eyebrows that just as instantly wiped the offending look from Wyatt's face. Wyatt's mother was a slightly portly woman, perfectly dressed, who gave an air of great refinement, a person who'd lived with a husband and sons long enough to know how to not take any crap from them.

  "And this is my husband, Henry," Beth said nodding attentively to a man who looked strangely similar to Malcolm but younger and without the swarthiness. Wyatt's expression grew cross as he recognized the element of force in his father's smile.

  "How nice to finally meet you, Angelique," he said and she caught the minor barb there, "please come in. I believe you have already met my brother, Malcolm; these are his daughters, Tinka and Maureen."

  "Once again, a pleasure, Angelique," Malcolm said with a peculiarly thin half-smile, like he was hoping to provoke a nervous reaction from her. She didn't like him speaking her name.

  "Yes," she stumbled a lackluster response, "a pleasure."

  "You look very fetching in that dress," he said, "is lavender your favorite color?"

  "Um, yes," she responded nonplussed, it wasn't true.

  "Angelique," the seated woman hummed in a honeyed voice trying for diplomatic but achieving only flippant, "welcome to our family, how divine that you and Wyatt have found each other." It'll last another week tops, her manner definitively implied.

  Angelique turned to Wyatt's ex. There was one word to describe Maureen, Angelique saw, and that was sexy. She was blonde with pouty lips (Angelique suspected collagen involvement), a perfect face, and Angelique understood instantly how Maureen had gotten Wyatt to the alter.

  "I can't WAIT to see you perform tonight, your dress at the Gala was to die for, you were the bomb, I don't know how you stayed up! I'd have been scared stiff flying around on those things and--"

  "Tinka, I'm sure Angelique finds her fan adoration quite boring," Maureen interrupted in a voice of cold politeness carefully denuded of any fan interest let alone adoration. "So tell us, Angelique, all about the wedding. We haven't been able to get a thing out of George here." Her eyes zeroed in on Angelique's ring, scrutinizing it. "What did you wear? Wang?" Somehow she managed to get three syllables into the word.

  Angelique sat on a pale blue circular couch surrounded by Cochrans awaiting her answer and decided oh what the hell, she might as well dive in.

  "If you want to know about my wedding you'll have to ask Wyatt I'm afraid," she replied cheerily, "I don't remember a thing about it." She turned to Wyatt. You explain it, buster.

  George grinned at Wyatt in utter ebullience as the shockwave reverberated throughout the seated Cochrans.

  "You don't remember... your wedding?" Wyatt's father asked, the tone of irate reservation in his voice increasing exponentially.

  "I got her drunk," Wyatt said in a laconic grunt.

  "Plastered. Sloshed. Smash-oh-laahed," George added helpfully.

  All righty Angelique thought enjoying the rich showstopper irony --they'd all assumed she'd used her wily ways to trick Wyatt into marriage and had just learned it was quite the other way 'round. Wyatt stared at them, resolutely daring any of them to make a comment. Malcolm was the first to recover.

  "Quite a bit different from your wedding, Maureen," he buried his fangs for the pure amusement of it, "motivationally I mean."

  "Perhaps you'd like to open your presents, Wyatt," Beth interjected with the lightning fast tact of a well practiced hostess rescuing the situation.

  "Wow," Tinka intoned, fixated on the image of a blitzed bride cornered into I do's by Wyatt.

  George shot a gloating look at Maureen. Bitch Central was smoldering, like she'd just bitten into a tamale while having an orgasm and learning her implants were leaking. Yesiree, he had the coolest brother in the world!

  Hors d' oeuvres were consumed, presents were opened, all was appreciated, the motions gone through. In actuality everyone was too stunned with the thought of Wyatt getting Angelique drunk in order to marry her to pay any real attention, until Angelique spoke.

  "Okay now mine, Wyatt," she smiled mischievously, decisions about how much to reveal filtering through her eyes, "but I have to explain it first. Remember when I took you hang gliding? I called in a bunch of favors and had five people up there taping us when we flew."

  "Why on earth did you do that?"

  "I wanted to make a video montage of us flying, I thought it would be cool. But," she cleared her throat meaningfully, "events overtook me so I only got around to editing the videos this week. I decided to make it your birthday present but when I tried to add the background music I couldn't find anything that fit and I must have gone through a hundred different tracks."

  "Heh, how about I'm Getting Married In The Morning, you could--"

  "George," Beth scolded, "go on, Angelique."

  "Then I thought of something. You know how some people keep diaries or journals under their beds? I kinda do that but with music, I write songs and record them for my private music library. And you had two songs in it."

  "You have a private music library? I'm in it?"

  "The first song I have about you, you're the music. I mean the music is what you would be if you were music --in my opinion anyway-- but the lyrics are you explaining to me that we were married. Obviously the lyrics wouldn't fit a hang gliding montage [well, obviously, he thought, dazed], but the music was you. So I went to the Center and hired an orchestra and recorded just the music, as an instrumental, and it fit perfectly!"

  "You hired an orchestra? Where did you get the money?"

  "From her account at the Center," Malcolm said evenly, "she emptied it out."

  Wyatt stared at Angelique in disbelief.

  "That was... all the money you had. Two hundred thousand dollars. You spent all of that on a birthday present for me?"

  "Wyatt, it came out great!" she said pulling a DVD with a bow on it from her purse and handi
ng it to him, her eyes twinkling with glee.

  He stared at her in humored horror. Nobody had ever done anything like that for him before. Tinka leapt up and in one fluid move snatched the DVD from his hand, raced to the flat screen on the wall and inserted the disc. It flickered on.

  Music began. Delicately. It teetered, recovered, appeared to find its footing. It was led by a full orchestra's violins exuding a sweetness as other instruments joined in almost in secret causing the music to swell, not crushingly, or even prodigiously, but in quiet understated power. Wyatt and Angelique appeared on the screen harnessed together under a vast white nylon-silk kite leaping in tandem from a cliff over the ocean. Instead of falling they were caught by the wind and swept upward into the sky as if gravity and time had dropped naturally away from them.

  The melody became curious but enticing as it grew, inviting listeners to come along with them, float, but then it grabbed. The kite dipped, tilting, rising through the air over the ocean waves and seaside cliff below, the faces of Wyatt and Angelique aglow. French horns joined in, their sound sharpening the tremulous sound of pianos and flutes to a potent timbre, possessing, then soaring. Onscreen Angelique and Wyatt ascended suddenly, as if Heaven itself had abruptly summoned them and the music exploded with crashing cymbals in splendor, fireworks, almost seizing its listeners to be conveyed away with them aloft through the clouds to someplace else, someplace that couldn't be imagined.

  Finally the kite descended, racing above the beach as the glittering sand flashed by underneath. The music ebbed gradually as if its work was done. The kite flared dramatically upward, silently stalled, then slipped backward alighting, settling Wyatt and Angelique smoothly down upon their feet. Still tethered together, laughing, they turned to each other, their faces radiant, blushing, obviously about to kiss just as the wing of the kite tipped shielding them from view. The tantalizing music closed in dying muffled echoes, then silence.