“You, stay?”
Actually Venus was thinking of leaving. Going for a long walk or a fast run.
“You stay.”
But she was compelled to stay, too, and she would be leaving soon enough, she reasoned, returning to a city a lot less forgiving than Paris, to a land of women very different from Claudine.
“For a little while.”
“Bien...merci.”
That cell phone was a nuisance, Venus realized. She turned it off and put it in her briefcase for safekeeping.
“Young Venus…so young.” Claudine pulled at her shirt again. “I am sorry about the telephone.”
“It’s nothing, Claudine. It won’t bother us now.”
“Tell me of Lydia. I feel her. I see her, too. So many times.”
On the other hand, Venus suddenly thought, maybe she should go. There was the apartment on Rue Saint Séverin, a small affair, but that could be a good thing. It wouldn’t take too long to pack.
On the chair in the corner of the living room, Claudine’s cat had fashioned a bed for itself out of the clothes that Venus had accumulated there in the past two weeks. She had not spent anytime to speak of at Rue Saint Séverin since first meeting Claudine. She had felt more comfortable here for some reason.
“Tell me about this, Venus.”
Still maybe it was wise to go there now, to collect herself in peace. The night had become so heavy.
The cat lifted its head and gave her a haughty look, full of feline insight and disdain. Venus never cared for cats and this one was the worse one yet. A spoiled little thing, chubby, arrogant, and petulant. It would, she realized, take hours to get all that hair out of her suits.
“Come,” Claudine beckoned, pulling at her sleeve.
The cat began a cough that threatened to produce a hairball, if necessary. She would leave in a little while, she decided, feeling yet another tug on her shirt and seeing the look in Claudine’s eyes.
“Come, Venus.”
Venus surrendered, captured by a cat, a woman’s whispers, her shirttails.
_____
“Beaumont, you’re white as a ghost. You want to talk about this?”
It was more than a pinprick. “No thanks, Paula.” It was a knife stab. “I’m going home.” Of jealousy.
_____
They were on the bed again. Claudine lay across it. “She does things to you that you cannot do to yourself, non?”
Venus winced at the bluntness of it, the crude and awkward English Claudine often used to inevitably express things so well. It was strangely endearing. She wished she had met her first.
“I am wrong about it?”
“No, Claudine.”
“Oui,” Claudine announced triumphantly. “C’est vrai. I know about such things.”
Venus ran her hand along the smooth white thigh. She was contemplating making love to her again. She was thinking also about other things.
“Tell me, Venus. Your Lydia? She is beautiful also?”
“Claudine, she is not my–okay, yes.”
“Yes. I knew yes. Here.” She removed the shirt Venus still wore. Venus shivered in the chill air.
“Quel âge?”
She gave her a critical look. “Quel âge as-tu?”
“Trente-sept.”
“She’s forty-two, but she doesn’t look it. You don’t look thirty-seven.”
Claudine wrinkled her nose and laughed. “You Américains. What does thirty-seven look like?”
Venus shrugged. It looks like–
“Lydia…this Lydia. She is not your woman, yes?”
Lydia, Lydia. “Yes, she is not.”
“Ah…so beautiful Lydia is married and Venus wants to sleep with her. I think to have her. Oui? This woman with…what…blue eyes…brune hair? This woman with legs like mine? Yes, I know already this, too–feel me here.”
She felt her there.
“We feel the same, Venus. Bon chance pour moi, d’accord?”
“Clau–”
“Feel these too. Même chose. Just like mine, I know it.”
Venus pinned her to the bed and debated her next move. She should never have said yes to Dr. Kristenson. She should never have made love to her wife. She was a girl competing with a woman. Non? The woman beneath her embraced her again, like she had for weeks.
“Almost the same, aren’t we, Venus? I know.”
“You are a tart–you know that, too?”
“Mais oui!”
“You’ve heard that before, I see. At least once.”
“Oui, oui, Venus. More than once. And tramp and whore and demimonde. It’s good, our difference? The real difference between Lydia and Claudine? Good for you. Good for me.”
Her eyes blazed with daring. Venus reached past her for the shirt.
“Non! You make love to her, maintenant. You fuck her now, Venus, because she wants you to. Parce qu’elle est dans le besoin…feel her there…there, oui.”
She pressed Venus’ hand to her sex. Venus dropped the shirt.
“She is there, votre dame. You feel her, non? I know you feel it. Nothing is wrong,”
“Claudine–”
“She needs it now…elle est dans le besoin, Venus…maintenant…you see her?…ah, you do…feel her here…ici…ici…”
She could feel her. Perfectly.
“See her here, Venus. Her eyes? Elle est ici…ici…je suis ici…”
She saw her eyes. She could smell her perfume mingling with Claudine’s in the bedroom, smell it in her hair. Her hair was hanging in her eyes like it had the night at the hotel on her birthday, after she had finished off two martinis for liquid courage. She brushed it out of her face. She was near her mouth again. No gin on her breath tonight. No wife in the shadows. The same mouth, the same shade of red, the same soft and wet of them, the lips parting the same as they had. Même chose.
“The same, Venus.”
The tongue was teasing just the same as she would. Venus bent over her. What do her eyes say tonight? She says yes. Or does she say no, never? No she says maybe, maybe, maybe. Always maybe.
“Elle est dans le besoin.”
Her soft, wet mouth. It was too soft, too tender not to touch again.
“Venus.”
She had them to herself now. Two teasing lips. Too teasing. Venus parted them with her fingers and moistened them with her tongue. She had been so tender to these lips, lips that couldn’t bear to kiss her or speak her name, lips that might never speak to her again. She did not want to return to that, to angry Lydia. She could feel her fuming across the sea, plotting exile. For what reason no one could say. For a wrong that the woman could never legitimately claim.
Venus closed her eyes. She had been so sweet to her, so gentle in her mouth. She lay her cheek against it. It was just as soft as she remembered. She had the desire to crush it now, and an awful sense that she was, for the very first time in her life, floundering in the universe. A hand reached out for hers. She clasped it. There was no ring on it tonight, nothing cold.
“Maintenant, Venus. Now…now.”
She put her hand over her mouth and entered her.
_____
“Trouble at work, darling?”
“It’s…I can’t discuss it, Helaine…rather complex.”
“Indeed? Is there anything I can do to make things rather less complex?”
“You’re doing it.”
_____
“Ah, Venus. Aimer…à demain. It is oh-kay, non?”
(Ah, Venus. To love until tomorrow. It is okay, no?)
Chapter 24
Boldly
You know you’ve screwed up your romance when all the mystery and uncertainty you’ve come to depend upon suddenly evaporates from it and you’re left instead with a pile of absolutes you never wanted to know about. Like here’s the answer to: I wonder when she’ll call me again? NEVER. And here’s the answer to: I wonder if I should call her? NO.
But look on the upside. You’ve finally got the answers to life
’s most frequently asked and certainly most plaguing questions. You and 39,538,316 other human beings on this planet.
It’s funny, though. It’s not the kind of knowledge people tend to share.
“What’s with you? Did something go down in Paris or what?”
“No, Mama. Nothing went down in Paris.”
“You still sick about that man?”
“What ma–oh, that one. I don’t know. I guess so.” Her mother thought it was about a man. Fine. It’s about a man then.
“What about Sebastion? Oh, we liked Mr. Jones, Venus. Call him, won’t you? No point in making yourself sick over this other guy. Who is he anyway? He can’t be all that.”
“It’s not him so much, right now.” She hoped to switch the subject but realized too late that it would just change over to work and this was essentially the same issue.
“Work then, baby?”
“Yes, Mama, work.”
Scandal was imminent and extreme measures had had to be taken to preempt Silas Goodman from opening the can of worms that had become Soloman-Schmitt these days. In fact, her career might have been on the line hadn’t Paula proved to be so adept at scandal control.
Now losing her job. She wasn’t sure how she truly felt about that aspect of the situation. “It’s just work, Mama.” But she sure didn’t want her name dragged through the mud by the tabloids. She could guess how that would feel, how her family would react to it all.
“That why you come back so early?”
Yeah, actually, but she really didn’t want to go into it. “We got it all resolved, Mama. It’s fixed now.”
Paula had hatched a bold counterattack and had just unveiled it in her office yesterday, the first day in the full week that Venus had been back that Lydia could seemingly tolerate being in her presence. The joint president sat in the chair right next to hers, a pillar of salt for the entire hour it took Paula to present the defense strategy. Venus had wanted to interrupt the session, to scream I’m sorry, but she was ambivalent about the matter by now and, in truth, not convinced anymore that she had done something she was supposed to feel sorry for.
“Everybody’s got secrets,” Paula had asserted, dramatically emptying the contents of a big, fat folder onto her desk. “And so does Goodman, that son-of-a-bitch!”
And so he had, much to the relief of the three women in a room, conspiring to pull him off his high horse. Photos, tapes, restaurant tabs, jewelry receipts, income tax evasion. These are the kind of things that indiscreet people with soapboxes and agendas never think about when they’re scrutinizing someone else for their indiscretions, when they’re just too distracted with very private plans for a very public hanging.
The ladies had Goodman real good, thanks to busy Paula Treadwell. The soon to be ex-member of the board of directors of Soloman-Schmitt would never know what hit him.
Lydia felt bad already. “But what will he do?”
Paula scoffed. “He’ll resign ‘to spend more time with his family.’ Get it?”
Oh, yeah. Now she did.
_____
Six in the morning. There was virtually no one at the club and JP Beaumont was alone in the Olympic size pool, executing her thirteenth lap in the far lane when Venus came in. Absorbed in her favorite exercise, Lydia wasn’t aware that someone had intruded on her solitude.
Absorbed in her own concerns, Venus wasn’t aware that the swimmer was JP Beaumont. All she observed was that the woman slicing through the water did so with great skill and strength. She took the lane on the opposite side of the pool and picked up her pace.
_____
“Jesus and Mary,” Chairman Ackerly said under his breath. “Nice work, Treadwell.” He chaired the board but everyone knew the real power behind it ultimately rested with Goodman, a behind-the-scenes kind of man, infamously strident and self-righteous, the type that people were loathe to have to confront, the profoundly difficult type who proved profoundly impossible to overthrow and way too handy at disposing with anyone who dared to try, as Joseph Ackerly had witnessed time and time again. The dossier in front of him was a dream come true and he couldn’t help feeling warmly toward the woman who had delivered it to him, even though Paula Treadwell did not generally kindle those kind of emotions in people.
“Not my work, Joe. Compliments have to go to JP Beaumont, I’m afraid. I tried to warn the man.”
“Truly amazing,” he murmured, practically fondling the contents. “I didn’t think Lydia had it in her, to tell you the truth.”
“Good. And lucky for our side, neither did Silas.”
He flipped through the evidence again. Boy-oh-boy, wouldn’t that vicious old fart appreciate this, he said to himself. It was head chopping Goodman style and he knew that it would, without a struggle, render the man instant history. He couldn’t wait for the board to convene next week. He intended to bring it to their attention today.
“You thank her for me, Paula. I’ve been wishing for something like this for years.”
_____
Lap nineteen. She was cognizant of someone else in the water. They both reached the same edge at the same time. Dive, tuck, roll, and kick off again. They were synchronized.
_____
Paula got an early start this morning, in her office by six-thirty. No assistants there and no Beaumont either. She liked it that way for the first fifteen minutes, but then it was too much peace and quiet for her to stand and when she discovered that she hadn’t a clue where the hot coffee was stashed or how to produce a donut she became restless and found herself roaming the corridors in search of a warm body or a vending machine. By the time she returned with one stale pastry and a tepid glass of water, there was a message already from Chairman Ackerly.
He had promised to give her a blow by blow of the board’s reaction yesterday. She would have to content herself till then with this abbreviated version. “Broke out the booze for this one,” it said. She was thrilled to hear it. “We faxed him notice of our findings.”
Message from Silas, too, though the rat wouldn’t leave his name. She recognized his gnarly voice anyway. “I will never resign,” he said, completely lacking in humility or the requisite conciliatory tone one ought to have under the present circumstances.
Paula was not faint of heart so she laughed out loud at his challenge. It was, she knew from experience, pure bravado. They always talk like that before they see the proof.
_____
Lap twenty-one for Lydia. The other swimmer was keeping up with her. That was only because she had been at it longer and she was getting tired.
_____
Without seeing the case against him, Silas Goodman had no idea how badly he was bleeding. In that state of ignorance, he failed to see the futility of defending his “good name” and it was only minutes after leaving his message with Paula Treadwell that he had the audacity to leave yet another one with the chairman demanding that he be allowed to address the board within the next seventy-two hours, the time, he predicted, that he would need to mount a successful counter-defensive.
Paula had gone to great lengths to leave all the parties concerned with the impression that Goodman’s fatal blow had come from JP Beaumont herself, and Silas, having no choice but to believe in it, was reeling from that perception, to the degree that he was no longer himself and that it clouded his judgment. In short, he was not up to the course he had embarked upon and he was not functioning as well as he thought. In this condition he seemed to forget entirely that a corporation does not operate like a democracy with all of its civil protections, a due process clause. He forgot that there are no such things as rights there, only privileges, and that in terms of class, one was either at the top or at the bottom. If one found oneself in the middle somehow and it could not be credited to nepotism or cronyism, then it was only temporary, the time spent there determined simply by how long it would take to rise or to fall. It had also slipped his mind that the only real concern of a corporation and its directors is the “happiness” of its s
hareholders.
_____
Lap twenty-seven. It seemed the other swimmer might actually overtake her. Lydia sucked in her air deeply before going under this time. She had not expected such a work-out this morning. Tuck and roll–she kicked off farther than before, striving to gain another length over her competitor.
_____
Whether happiness is derived from real profits or from imagined ones is not a relevant distinction in modernized economics. What matters most to a corporation is the shareholders’ perception of profitability. After all, markets are driven primarily on two principles: investors are confident therefore they buy; investors are not confident therefore they sell. Anything else is just gambling.
Irrefutably then, bliss is the actual commodity on exchange in the marketplace and the board of directors technically represents the corporation’s shareholders in their ambitious pursuit of it, acting utterly infatuated with the corporate officers in happy times and, in unhappy times, protesting too much and wanting the rascals out. It’s the same in politics. Consult Treadwell or Machiavelli.
Soloman-Schmitt was in happy times again, after weathering some frightening storms. It had Treadwell to thank for that and the board was necessarily in bed with her, head over heels in love with her protégé, Lydia Beaumont. Goodman’s crusade against her, prompted by what, who really knew, had proven to be a liability for him and they were glad to be able to end it all like this. Merely a formality, they granted him his seventy-two hours, at which time they hoped to see him capitulate and resign.
But Silas Goodman did not understand this. He could not see that, like the snake run over in the road and mortally wounded, he was coiling and striking at the air, his fangs broken and drained of their venom, his once elastic spine crushed beyond repair.
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