Case of Lucy Bending (30 page)

"The symptoms," he answered. "But the cause? And more important—the cure?"

It did not exist, he decided, in his relations with wife, children, or anyone else. The malignancy was within, and growing. He knew its sharp teeth and feral grin. It was, he knew, devouring him.

"It is in your mind—is that not so?"

"Yes."

"Well, you have a good mind; you know that. Use it."

He brought his feet down. He fished melting ice chips from the bucket, filled his plastic glass. Poured in more vodka. He stood at the railing, looked out over the darkness of the glittery sea.

Slyly, unbidden, the thought crept in that his deepest want might be to live as a virtuous man.

This fancy, a mutter of foreign words, was so strange to him that he could taste but not determine its flavor. It tantalized and touched. He could walk around it, inspect, but he could not recognize it.

"To live a virtuous man?" he asked aloud, puzzled. "In this day and age? For what reason?"

"For no reason," he answered. "An act of faith. An affirmation."

The stars spun their ascending courses. He heard the dry rustle of fronds. The surge of the sea was in him; he felt its push and ebb. And below, the cinder whirled to a merry calliope tune.

Never had he felt so deeply the mocking strangeness of life, its inexplicableness. The whole world was terra incognita, and its inhabitants condemned to stumbling. Craziness was everywhere, and only the maddest survived.

"What are you going to do?" he asked aloud. "Live a virtuous life?"

"Explore the possibility," he replied.

Then naked savages came running at him from the darkness, hugging themselves and mewling. He showed his teeth as they scampered up onto the terrace and danced about him, as if he was the sacrifice.

Everyone who knew Jane Holloway thought her a vain woman, but she was not. She had no excessive love of her own person, nor did she derive a sensual pleasure from pampering and adorning her body.

She was proud of her body, true, but in the way the owner of a grand house, a thoroughbred, or a well-made machine might value and respect his possession. It deserved care.

So much for her appearance. When it came to achievements, Jane Holloway felt she had even less reason for vanity. Other women might think her life full, pleasurable, and rewarding. She found that gap between reality and her wants a humbling irritant.

She liked to think she was ambitious rather than greedy. She knew she was possessed of a pawky mind, limitless energy, and a fierce desire for money and power, which seemed to her the levers that moved the world.

She had concluded, without being familiar with the term, that life was a zero-sum game, and she had no intention of being a minus. With such a belief, it was inevitable that all her relationships, even with father, husband, children, should be adversary.

On Monday morning, she slept late, then drowsed awhile, listening to the sounds of Maria getting Gloria and Eddie off to school. She heard her husband depart for his bank in the big Mercedes. She drifted back to sleep again, and finally awoke close to 10:30
A.M.

Before showering, she phoned former Senator Randolph Diedrickson. The old man said he was suffering from a particularly painful bout of rheumatoid arthritis, and intended to spend the day in bed. But he urged her to come visit him and brighten his life.

"You do me more good than a shot of cortisone, my dear," he assured her in his fruity rumble.

She showered and groomed herself, applying her brilliant makeup swiftly and expertly. Because the senator would be in bed, and she sitting alongside, she decided to wear a cheongsam of butter-colored silk. It had a mandarin collar, frogs of black braid, and was slit up to the hip on one side.

She wore no undergarments.

Thirty minutes later she was driving south on A1A in her small white Alfa Romeo convertible, the top down. She stopped for a light at Atlantic Boulevard, and a truck driver in the next lane, looking down into her car and seeing her bare thighs, made loud kissing sounds. She gave him the finger before zooming ahead.

She turned west onto Commercial Boulevard and stopped at a liquor store to buy the senator a bottle of Southern Comfort, which he dearly loved. She was at his home a little after noon, and was admitted by Renfrew, the black houseman.

The senator, wearing wrinkled cotton pajamas, sat propped up in an old, dark oak, four-poster bed. A sheet and light wool blanket covered his lap. Scattered on the bed were manuscript pages of his memoirs which he had been reading with the aid of a small magnifying glass.

He accepted the gift of Southern Comfort with pleasure, and asked Renfrew to pour them each a small wineglass of the stuff. Then the houseman departed, closing the heavy bedroom door softly behind him.

It was a cluttered, overbearing chamber with wildly flowered wallpaper, a large collection of framed, autographed photographs, and a wood-bladed ceiling fan that stirred the air without cooling it. The sofa and chairs were carved walnut, upholstered in worn velvet. A dry sink with a white marble top served as a bar.

Jane Holloway pulled up a chair to the right side of the bed, since that was the side where the slit of her cheongsam would open up if she crossed her legs. She lifted her glass.

"To your health, senator."

"And to yours, dear."

They talked idly awhile of national and local politics. Diedrickson might be out of office, but he was hardly inactive. Then Jane Holloway crossed her legs. The cheongsam fell open. Diedrickson's eyes drifted downward.

"Senator, about this business with Rocco Santangelo and Jimmy Stone ..."

"Ah yes . . . And how is that project proceeding?"

"Fine, from what I hear. The factory is on schedule, and those men have done everything they said they would."

He nodded his massive head. "I would have expected nothing less. As I told you, my dear, both men are whom they purport to be. They are employed by a very wealthy and capable individual known as Uncle Dom. I have had, ah, certain small dealings with him in the past and can vouch for his probity. He is not a man to be taken lightly."

"But something has come up that I'd like to talk to you about."

"Of course."

She shifted position on the overstuffed armchair. The panel of the cheongsam fell away. The length of her smooth tanned thigh was revealed. The senator never took his eyes from that gleam.

Jane told him of Ronald Bending's suggestion that he and Jane's husband conspire to remove Luther Empt from active participation in the pornographic video cassette processing venture.

"After the factory is completed and in production, of course," she said.

The senator sighed heavily. "Never underestimate the duplicity of your friends, my dear," he advised. "And what was your reply to this proposal?"

She answered that she hadn't said yes and she hadn't said no, since an immediate decision was not required. She also told the senator she had demanded a ten percent share for her role in convincing her husband to go along.

"You never disappoint me, dear," the senator said with a benign smile.

Jane added that Bending had objected to her ten percent, at first, and pointed out that it would give the Holloways a controlling interest. But she had calmed his fears by intimating that she might possibly join forces with him rather than with her husband.

"Very clever," the senator said, pulling thoughtfully at his rubbery lower lip. "This Ronald Bending, is he a Jew?"

"No."

"You are, or have been, uh, intimate with him?"

"Yes."

"He has money?"

⁴
'Not as much as my husband."

The senator wagged his big head sorrowfully. "My dear, on several occasions in the past, my avuncular advice has been solicited by young ladies in situations somewhat similar to yours. I have told them all the same thing: 'Never fuck a man who has less money than you.' However, in this case the damage has been done, and we must devise a plan so that you may profit rather than suffer from your, ah, generosity. Would you mind pouring me just a little more of that soothing elixir? You might also lock the door, that's a good girl."

She did as she was bidden. She handed him the wineglass of Southern Comfort, then sat sidesaddle on the edge of his bed. The cheongsam gaped. Her bent leg was uncovered. She looked at the senator gravely.

Her face was as hard and smooth as her unlined body. A keen, spade-shaped face, the thinness of the lips painted over with thick vermillion. The eyebrows had been plucked and black-penciled at a slant that gave her a vaguely Oriental look.

Green eyeshadow made her dark eyes more luminous. A blush of rouge accented her cheekbones. People said "Striking" more often than "Beautiful." It was an artful mask of a face, not designed for smiling.

"I think," Diedrickson said, "before we even consider what your options might be, it would be wise to discuss fundamental motives and aims. I have always found it lightens the task of decision making wonderfully. Dear, what is it, precisely, you want from life? Money? Financial independence?"

She cocked her head to one side, frowning briefly.

"That, of course," she said. "But not only that. What I want is
control

One of his shaggy eyebrows lifted. "I was not aware," he said with heavy irony, "that you had any problems in that area."

"At home, you mean?" she said. "It's true that I can more or less get my husband to do what I want. But I am still dependent upon him. Financially, and for—for status. Just as I was dependent upon my father and on my first husband. Things haven't changed all that much. It infuriates me that I cannot control my own life completely. This has nothing to do with feminism, senator. This is
me.
I know my abilities. I know what I am capable of doing. When I say 'control,' I don't mean only of my own life, my own destiny. I mean control over events."

"And over other people?" he said shrewdly.

"Well . . . yes, that too. I suppose what I'm talking about is power. The power to make meaningful decisions."

"Mmm," he said, sipping at his glass. "I know that feeling well. Everyone in Washington is infected by it. Being in the right place at the right time with the power to make meaningful decisions. There is no satisfaction in the world like it."

"Yes," she said excitedly, "of course you know. Senator, I can't endure the thought of living out my life as wife and mother. I don't want to be like most people who seem to have no power—or desire, even—to fashion their own lives. And they end up at their graves saying, 'What happened?' That's really what I mean when I say I want control."

He stared broodingly at her naked thigh, his thick lips going in and out like a feeding fish.

"Power!" he thundered suddenly in his orotund voice. "Power over people and power over events. You have a taste for it."

"I suppose so," she said, sighing. "But not power for the sake of power. That has no interest for me. But power to get things done."

"To get what done?"

"I don't know," she confessed. "Except that it must be something big, something important. If I don't find it, don't
do
it, then my life will be wasted. I know that."

"Something big," he repeated ruminatively. "Something important. Well, we shall see what we can do about that. Hmm ... I tell you frankly, my dear, what you say about Bending's suggestion I find somewhat disturbing. Such an action could quite possibly lead to an ugly dispute that might find its way to the courts of law. If that should happen, I assure you that Mister Santangelo and Mister Stone would not be happy. And I hesitate to imagine the wrath of Uncle Dom. He is a man who shuns public exposure like the plague. But perhaps from this nest of nettles we might, with care and attention, extract one perfect bloom. That is to say, dear, we might hoist Mister Bending by his own petard, and by so doing provide you with an opportunity to control."

She looked at him closely. "Do you really think that could be done, senator?"

"It might," he said slowly. "It just might."

She held her wineglass in her left hand. Her right hand snaked lazily beneath sheet and blanket, fumbled softly, found its way.

"There is time," she said. "The factory is still being built. So nothing has to be done immediately. But you'll think about

it?"

"I will that," he said, his old eyes glaring fiercely at her shining thigh.

Her cool fingers worked as she stared at that splendid wreck of a man. The mottled cheeks, the pendulous jowls, the speckled hands lying flaccid on the coverlet.

She had always thought of him with awe. He was a wealthy, cunning, and influential giant who had lived a long time and learned a great deal. He seemed to her outsize, a man who made midgets of other men, who by his very existence revealed their incompetence, superficiality, and puny powers.

Now, for the first time, it occurred to her that she had established a measure of control over this ancient hulk. She had brought him to a state of dependence. Not total, of course. But that, with planning and artifice, might be accomplished.

To test her strength, she spoke to him in a cruel parody of his own speech.

"Senator," she said briskly, "shall I endeavor to alleviate your pain?"

"Yes," he said. "Please."

PART IV

December began furiously, with three days of northeast squalls that rattled roof tiles and emptied the beaches. A Small Craft Advisory was in effect from Jupiter south to the Keys, and only the most obsessed surfers dared the crumpling eight-foot surf.

Then, overnight, the wind shifted to the southwest, the sky cleared, and white clouds flapped in a lapis lazuli sky as if they had been washed and hung up to dry. Swimmers and shellers came back to the strand. The sun was a beamy blur, and people stretched.