Beast (21 page)

"Do you know why?"

"You're going to tell me, aren't you?" He slid off her but stayed close, belly to hip.

"Yes. You see, there was this priest in New York. And Mary's parents made her go to confession. She went once, and it wasn't as bad as she thought, so she went back. Father Tata—that was his name. Isn't that a funny name? It's Italian. Anyway, Father Tata was kind to her." Louise couldn't keep from laughing again. She found this story so silly. "Mary just kept on going and going to confession. Everything the priest said to her seemed so beautiful and wise. So that, after a while, she just went to hear his voice on the other side of the cubicle. Sometimes she would come to my house afterward and swoon and fall back on my bed, talking about how deep his voice was, how intimately he understood her. Then she would get out her rosary and pray to the Holy Mother that he would give up the priesthood.

"We would both laugh at it. I mean, we knew him. He was big and bald, though we decided he had nice eyes. I can sympathize better now. I mean, there is a real seduction to having someone listen and know you, accept you just as you are." Louise paused. "You're not bald, are you?" Then she remembered the damp hair she'd fell last night when he'd let her fingers get close to his head. He had more hair than usual; it was long.

Mary's story, though, had lost some of its humor. She asked, "Do you suppose that's all this is, Charles?

That I have fallen in love with my priest?"

He burst out laughing, though he dutifully tried to calm himself so as to take her question as seriously as she'd meant it. "No," he said. He squeezed her, still grappling with how funny he found this. "Or perhaps we should shoot that Father Tata." He told her. "Louise, I am performing no holy service here. I am selfishly involved in the pleasure of your company, that is. in the delight of your sweet, open spirit, your frighteningly active mind, and in the voluptuousness of your body."

"But that's what I'm saying. I'm not always this open with people," She took this back. "I'm
never
this open. You're like that to me. My confessor." She rolled into his chest, put her arm about him. and kissed him extravagantly on the neck, with mouth and tongue along the warm, faintly salty, thick muscle that broadened out at the back of his shoulder. When she felt him shiver, she let out a soft cackle. "And maybe just a little bit more." She traced his shoulder with her hand. "Though, when I feel your body, I know you are finer, stronger than Father Tata." She pressed close and whispered, "My handsome priest." She murmured in his car, "Give me, Father, something to regret."

"You are blasphemous," he said as he rolled himself up on top of her again.

She laughed. "I am impossible. My parents say so, and all my aunts and uncles agree. I am 'a handful.' "

"Yes," he said. "That you are. And I am never so happy as when my hands are full of you." He slid his arms under her, between the sheets and her skin to her buttocks, where his palms pressed two handfuls

of her tightly against him.

She threw her arms around his neck and nestled her face in the crook there. He held her like this, in an embrace that was strangely less sexual, more the shared closeness of two people discovering, admitting, their friendship. Well, a little bit more than friendship. Better than friendship. Body to body, heart to heart, soul to soul in the dark; as close as two people can be without one of them being inside the other.

As they began the dance again that would broach this distance, Louise knew she had made a leap of faith when it came to her pasha: She trusted him with her private self.

He made her want to look not just
at
herself but
into
herself. He made her believe other aspects about her, beyond her looks, might be as wonderful or even
more
wonderful. He accepted and liked the whole of her; he believed in her. Strange paradox; With him, Louise felt herself begin to shine in the dark. This was what she grew to love best about her pasha—who she was in his presence.

Her entire family remained ill to one degree or another, save an elderly great aunt who was easy to dodge. By day, Louise checked on her parents and Mary, Mary's cat, the Bear, and a few others.

Seasickness, however, generally meant people wanted to be left alone. Thus her missions of mercy took little of her time. Mostly she slept, trying to recover from her night's activities. Then she roamed the ship waiting for nightfall. When the sun began to set, she headed for the Rosemont suite, standing outside the door until the inner corridor became lightless, then she knocked.

Once inside, she became a different person. No, she became herself. She censored nothing, except perhaps questions that she knew were not welcome. If her pasha could accept her so completely, she reasoned, then she could accept the personal secretiveness he insisted upon. Beyond this, she proceeded with abandon. She made love in whatever way felt good and natural to her. She spoke of that which was on her mind at the moment.

The situation—an interested lover in the enveloping dark—invited confidences, Louise knew; it invited murmurs of things she might not speak of in the light. Yet she couldn't see how this mattered. Her Charles-of-the-Atlantic-Crossing was very clear about the ephemeral nature of their relationship. She would never see him again.
Fine. Perfect
. That which burns quickly, burns brightest.

The fragrance of ambergris itself in a perfume is referred to as amber notes or simply amber.

Charles Harcourt, Prince d'Harcourt

On the Nature and Uses of Ambergris

When a man—and not a young man, at that—is up two nights running, making love to a young woman of voracious energy with a seemingly insatiable interest in him and pretty much everything else in life, it is a fairly simple matter to get to nighttime again. One need only lie in bed until two in the afternoon, eat

"breakfast," bathe, shave, dress, then read the paper as one waited for sunset.

On the fourth evening of their trip across the Atlantic, the third evening of their affair, Charles had barely got his newspaper open when a knock came at his door. He looked up, frowning. The sun was low.

There was still enough light to read, if he stood by the window and strained his good eye. It was too early for Louise.

Nonetheless it was Louise's voice that whispered from the hallway. "Let me in, Charles."

He got up, irritated that she should not hold strictly to his rules. From his side of the door, he told her,

"No. It's still light. Come back in half an hour."

Out in the hallway, Louise, all but giddy, only laughed then suggested, "Take the key out and look through the keyhole." She touched the blindfold she'd extemporized moments ago. It covered her eyes, from her brow to the tip of her nose. She couldn't see.

There was silence on the other side of the door, a hesitation. Then she heard the rattle of the key coming out. After a moment, though, Charles's voice merely repeated, "Come back, Louise. I want to see you, but not now. Not like this. Come back later."

She stood there, nonplussed. "No." Her high spirits was seized by an instant of surprisingly sharp disappointment. "You didn't look," she accused. Then it occurred to her: "The hallway—perhaps the hallway is too dim for you to tell that—"

"Go away."

"But did you see?"

"See what?" He sounded annoyed. He wasn't going to cooperate.

"Open the door a crack. Look at me." With growing desperation, "Or just let me in. Charles. It's all right. I swear." Pleading, promising—not at all how she'd imagined this game—then complaining: "You don't trust me."

He laughed, a distant sound; he'd moved away from the door. "No. I don't."

She pressed her lips together, then had to grab out into the sightless dark—her fingers hit the wall then found the doorjamb—as the ship lurched more steeply than she was ready for. Silence, except for this, the bowel-deep rumble of engines.

Finally, she gathered herself enough to ask, "Charles, are you still there?"

"Yes."

"Cover yourself. I don't know, wrap up in one of your robes or thingies. Just look, come on, look!"

She wasn't certain what made the difference but after a moment the door unlatched with a click. Relief.

Reprieve. She
could
make him break from preconceived plan.

And, unexpectedly, her eyes knew light, a glow-passing through the folds of the silk underdrawers she's wrapped round her head, through her closed eyelids themselves. A shadow crossed in front of her. She jerked before she realized—Charles had touched the blindfold, her eyes. He was assessing it.

"My God—By Allah." The soft light opened all the way out, darkly golden, while his deep, rich voice began to laugh, "I see," he said, "that the vogue for colorful undergarments has made it to New York."

Hers were a fiery saffron, a beautiful, unusual color, trimmed in rose lace and dark coral ribbons. "And you know so very much about Western undergarments?"

Still laughing, he said, "My dear, for better or worse, I am a walking catalog of erotic embellishments, from most any continent you can name." He pulled her into the room.

The door closed behind her, the key quietly tumbling the lock. And, oh. the glow, the lovely glow of light—an obscure, luminous amber—with his shadow passing in and out as he turned her around. He assessed the knot in back, turned her around again, then all the way around once more till she felt dizzy.

After which, he took her jaw between his hands and gently kissed her eyes through the shadowy silk.

"Are the folds enough?" he murmured. "Can you really not see?" As if to answer his own questions, he touched her eyes again through the fabric.

Louise loved the feel of his fingers. She caught his hands and pressed his palms to her face. They smelled of soap or
eau de toilette
, the odor faintly oriental; the spiciness of dark incense, the coolness of earthy moss. Whatever he wore—and, though light, it was something more than merely clean skin—it was fragrant in the way of a sweet dark woods; redolent, she liked to think, of the lush, wet banks of the Nile.

She opened her mouth over his palm, biting, then murmured, "Half an hour ago, as I readied myself, the anticipation grew so keen that I began to shake." She laughed, lightly she hoped. "I got dressed all backward, my stockings on already before I'd even found fresh underthings. In the end, I dashed out with my knickers still in my hands. Just before I knocked, I tied them round my eyes. It seemed a better place for them, and I couldn't wait. I simply couldn't wait. Silly, no?"

His very serious voice said, "The effect is hardly silly."

Something leaped inside her. She reached out and found his chest. He had pulled back a step, either still caught in his reserve, his distrust, or simply looking at her: she couldn't tell which. While her own sense of touch was greedy for him. She dragged her fingertips down his broad pectoral muscles, downward over the smaller musculature that corrugated his abdomen.

Hers was an odd greed. Like she could store him up. She had touched him so much already that her hands, her body felt almost empty when he was absent from her. Even her spirit—