Everything and More (29 page)

“There’s a big block of U.S. Steel shares in my trust.”

They both chuckled, as if this linked them.

“And what about the U.S. Army?” she asked.

“No separation until the medicos release me. I’m an outpatient at Birmingham—that’s the military hospital in the San Fernando Valley. Every Monday I hitch over there.”

“And the institute?”

“One of the doctors is a Kraut, and he told Lissauer about me. Lissauer’s letting me use that room out back gratis, and also share the models. He’s really okay. But nervous as hell about everything. Can you imagine? He checked with city hall to make sure it was legal, me sleeping in the garage room—his own damn property! Jesus, I never saw anybody shake in his boots like that.”

Gerry made no further passes, and at seven he refused her dinner invitation. He also refused a ride back to the institute. She stood at a drawing-room window watching him curve down Belvedere’s broad, well-lit gravel drive in an infantryman’s efficient slog.

Except for that one disintegrating moment in his arms, she was more at ease with him than she had been with anyone in her life, including Roy Wace. With him she felt in complete charge, mistress of her body and mind and emotions. A delicious sensation of power. She stretched her slim young arms above her head. I’ll make him wild for me, she decided. Then I’ll play it cool and watch him crawl. She felt no vindictiveness, only a sense of playing an exhilarating game.

  
25
  

To Althea, the amazing part was how easily she and Gerry Horak melted into a couple.

Their relationship, deeper than she had believed possible, was
urgently, relentlessly erotic, the more so for the purposeful lack of physical contact. They were two warriors engaged in warfare. Gerry was intent on waiting for her signal—her surrender, as she thought of it—and she went through torments to control herself from reaching out and touching his dark-haired hand. Not to give way first had become the most significant battle of her life. Thus, in an atmosphere of overheated sexual craving, their relationship remained what was then called platonic.

At the institute, they worked side by side, sharing lunch—she had requested Belvedere’s stolid, plain-cooking chef to give her extra sandwiches each day. When the second session ended, they would load their easels and large cherrywood paint boxes into the station wagon; these lengthening days of May and early June, as well as weekends, they painted Belvedere’s shaded dells and sunlit vistas. Gerry never offered advice, yet she improved immeasurably by working at his side. She copied his use of large arm movements rather than delicate swerves of fingers and wrist, she learned to splash on color with wholehearted confidence, and, like him, she worked in abandoned exhilaration. Once finished, though, her work brought actual tears of frustration to her hypercritical eyes. When stood against the poolhouse walls alongside Gerry’s, her canvases were outlandishly amateurish. His paintings dazzled the eye, arrested the mind, haunted the soul—he was top-notch. Yet he destroyed most of them with furious strokes of a palette knife.

“Why do that?” she asked.

“It’s total crap,” he said.

“What are you, fishing for compliments? It’s terrific!”

“Yeah, terrific crap. Ahh, fuck, I’m no English gentleman. Romney or Gainsborough or one of those old dead guys, they could handle all this careful landscape. I’m not la-di-da enough to paint Belvedere.”

“You haven’t liked anything you’ve done of the models at the institute, either.”

“How could I when you’re the one subject that gets my nuts aching? Painting you, there’d be no problem.”

“How would you pose me?”

“Standing inside there.” They were working near Mrs. Cunningham’s greenhouse. “I’d show you behind the glass, alive, aloof, trapped in your goddamn unattainable virtue. Well?”

“Well what?”

“Model for me.”

“Oh, I don’t know. There’s my own work.”

“The world’ll survive without a week’s production.”

“Thanks.”

“And what about us?” he asked roughly. His eyes glittered, his angrily set jaw was dark—he shaved every morning, but by afternoon his face showed five-o’clock shadow. “Althea, what about us?”

Triumph bubbled warmly through her. I’ve won, she exulted.

He stood behind her, clasping her shoulders. His fingers caressed the musculature of her collarbone, dispatching excruciatingly sweet sensations through her breasts to center in the nipples. She could smell the odor of his sweat mingling with paint, feel the hot emanations of vitality, and she leaned back against the solid flesh, craving with every nerve to feel him inside her. She was weak and trembly, she was mush. She hadn’t won at all, but had again fallen into that disintegration where her free will no longer existed.

She managed to pull herself from his caress. “My parents are coming home at the end of the month,” she said, moving a few steps away from him.

“Who gives a fart? I asked you a question.”

“Will I sit for you?” she asked, knowing her bitchiness added to her attraction for him.

“Oh, hell! Why play the snow maiden for so long? I’d swear you’re not cherry?” It was a question.

“That,” she said, “is for me to know and you to find out.” Her facetiousness rang phony in the afternoon shadows.

He lowered one thick eyebrow, squinting at her. “I’ve never felt like this with any other broad. We’ll be terrific together. You’re going to love it—and me.”

“Think so?”

“Absolutely. And the portraits of you are going to be hot-damn masterpieces.”

That night for the first time he accepted her dinner invitation. She told Luther the table was not to be set in the hexagonal breakfast room where she routinely ate without her parents, but in the echoing formal dining room.

Cecil Beaton birds hovering around them, she and Gerry faced each other across yards of candlelit antique mahogany. A last-ditch effort on her part. She intended proving to herself that Gerry Horak was a nobody, a cipher, a crude Hunkie laborer. So what if he were warm, vital, outrageously talented, and had sex appeal that could melt a marble block? In the Sheraton chair usually occupied by her tall, dinner-suited father, he sat wearing Army fatigues streaked with cerise paint, showing not the least anxiety about which fork to use for
what course as he ate hungrily. Shouldn’t his rotten table manners cure this tumultuous beating of her heart? Yet in the serene candlelight she accepted that Gerry Horak was made of incorruptible elements, the material of genius, which defies and renders meaningless the barriers set up by class and money.

Luther, a sneer on his lips, served them ice cream made from strawberries grown in the kitchen garden.

Gerry said, “So this is how Coynes live.”

“The rest of the family look down on us for roughing it out in California.”

“Things are tough all over,” he said. “Where’s the brandy?” he asked. “I always thought you rich bastards ended up meals with brandy.”

“It’s not been put into law yet.”

Not smiling, he gazed at her in a way that made her breath catch. “Althea,” he said, and came around the table, taking her hand, leading her into the hall, where the only light was taupe candleflame that flowed from the dining room. His eye sockets were darkly moist hollows compelling her. She leaned forward to kiss him.

When the kiss ended, they were both shaking.

“Where?” he said into her open mouth.

“My room,” she said in a low, unrecognizable murmur.

But when she snapped on the light of her blue-flowered bedroom, something happened. The erogenous frenzy drained from her, and she felt a sudden chill. She had returned to the place where the utmost betrayal had been forced on her. She stood unresponsive in Gerry’s embrace.

“Lovely hard swan-haired broad . . .” he muttered, kissing her forehead, her eyes, her throat. After a few moments he pulled back. “What gives, Althea?”

“I can’t,” she whispered.

“What the hell!”

“It’s impossible, Gerry,” she said wearily. “I’m sorry.”

He lifted her chin, peering at her. “You’re afraid, aren’t you?” he asked with a gentleness she had never heard from him.

“No.”

“Baby, baby. What’s got to you is this room.”

Without knowing her particular stigmata, he comprehended the truth.

“I’m sorry, Gerry,” she repeated helplessly.

“No sweat, my poor frightened baby.” He kissed her lightly on the forehead. “I should be furious at you for being a prick tease, and here I am playing the tender lover.”

“I’d hardly classify that last remark as tender or loverlike,” she said.

“That’s more like it.” He kissed her forehead. “That sounds like my cold, hard rich bitch.” With another light kiss he turned and trotted down the staircase.

Watching his squarish shadow recede down the elegant stairwell, she longed to call him back, but that ancient shame trapped her.

*   *   *

The following day her father called from Washington. “There’s a storm of work, planning this international conference before it opens in San Francisco next month. We can’t be back for a while.”

An exquisite relief drenched over her, though it was unaccountable why she, who had the perfect if never-voiced means of blackmail, should care whether or not her parents were in Beverly Hills to disapprove of Gerry Horak.

“. . . international conference,” her father was saying. “It’s called the United Nations. The papers have been full of it.”

Consumed by Gerry, she had been blind and deaf to news of the outside world, but she replied enthusiastically. “So
that’s
what you’re working on in Washington.”

“Big doings, toots, I have a part in big doings,” said Mr. Cunningham happily.

She laughed. “Love you, Daddy.” Which, God help her, she did.

*   *   *

The next afternoon Gerry began painting her. Or rather, posing her. Inside the greenhouse, he had her recline under baskets of yellow Comtesse de Breton orchids; he stood her against Mrs. Cunningham’s pride, a twenty-foot-tall piece of driftwood on which massed white Olga orchids glowed in a galaxy; he moved her from aisle to orchid-filled aisle, raising her arm, bending her knee, tilting her head: he examined her from every possible angle without opening his paintbox.

It was Saturday morning before he got the effect he wanted.

She was posed inside the greenhouse while he worked outside. He stared through the glass at her so long that her muscles began to quiver; then he picked up a brush and lost himself. Two hours later, she emerged to see what he’d gotten on canvas.

Her image, surrounded by a flock of voracious, birdlike orchids, half-veiled by the iridescent sheen of glass, had the chimerical quality of a woman gazing out of that mythical garden in the golden age before humankind had learned pain or weakness, a woman eternally young, invincibly strong.

“My God. Gerry . . . it’s staggering. Fantastic. Is that how you see me? Eve before the fatal apple?”

“Yeah, before Kotex or dirty diapers, when there was only endless musky fucking.”

She laughed, moving to view the vivid wet oils from a different angle. “Be as vulgar as you want. Nothing can make this less terrific.”

“Yeah, it’s good.” He gave an excited laugh. “God, Althea, I’ll paint you and paint you until the walls of every damn museum in the world are one gigantic Althea Cunningham orgasm.”

His words roused her, and as she gazed at the gleaming, magnificent portrait, undeniable proof of his love, passion suddenly overwhelmed her, dizzying her. She turned to him.

They clung, breast to breast, thighs quivering against thighs. “Come into the greenhouse,” he muttered hoarsely.

“The gardeners—”

“The hell with gardeners.” He curved her hand over his erection. “Do you feel that, Althea? I’ve had that hard-on for two months, since the morning I met you. The hell with the gardeners.”

Her blood was on fire, and there was no argument in her, only this out-of-control trembling. Arm around her waist, he half-dragged her, half-pulled her into the greenhouse, where they sprawled on the tanbark, neither of them aware of the roughness, both groping to push aside the separating cloth. He lowered himself between her legs, and gasping, she looked up into that broad Slavic face which was transformed by passion yet blurred with tenderness; then she abandoned rational thought entirely, closing her eyes as she was caught up in ecstasy. This loss of control was not frightening or humiliating, but a kind of hitherto unrealized miracle. Almost immediately she gave a series of birdlike, involuntary coital cries, and he began his swift thrusting.