Guilty Pleasures (44 page)

“There is no need for cheap theatrics, Serge! I’m in love with Millie. I want to be with her. You don’t have to threaten me.”

“Willie, I’m never, ever cheap. I give it away once in a while, but I’m never cheap. And I never idly threaten.”

Millie’s return to the kitchen curtailed the exchange. Hendricks arrived cheerfully whistling a show tune. Soon the plaintive strains of a violin announced the arrival of the musical accompaniment.
 

At eight, Russell Gordon and his lady-love arrived. Hendricks dashed out with champagne, returning for the first course.

“So? What’s she like?” Serge asked.

“Very pleasant, not at all his usual type. She’s a very bright-looking girl.” Hendricks zoomed off with the soup tureen and an ice bucket filled with pink champagne ice cubes. He came back for more wine and a basket of crusty still-warm bread rolls. “Have you got butter? The real stuff? She wants real butter!”

“Hallelujah, a real woman!” Serge served dewy curls of butter into a shallow silver shell. “Here you go.”

Lance, in a daze, kept quiet.
 

Serge ignored him as he laid out the malignant-looking—but delicious-smelling—grouper onto a bed of greens and drizzled lemon butter over it to be spirited away by Hendricks.

The strains of the violin rippled into something gypsyish and wild. Hendricks carried in the sad remains of the grouper with its gaping head and denuded spine, and carried off the duck to a similar dire fate.

Serge whipped up the chocolate soufflé for the fondant and rinsed the raspberries. He set up two flat matte-black plates which he ornamented with a delicate green lacework of mint sauce under Lance’s admiring gaze.

The chocolate fondants puffed into splendour and were immediately removed from the oven, placed on the mint-bedecked plates and heaped with the scarlet raspberries. Serge dusted icing sugar over the berries and handed the confections over to Hendricks. It smelled absolutely irresistible.

The violin moaned out a sad tale of forlorn love all through dessert, then suddenly fiddled out “Here Comes the Bride.” Millie and Hendricks came in with soppy smiles on their faces.

“He proposed!” Millie chortled. “The great Russell Gordon got down on bended knee and proposed. Get out a bottle of champagne, Hendricks, on the house!”

“Yes, Miss Deafly! Lovely girl, lovely! This is what makes life worth living.”

Serge fixed him with an eagle eye. “You’re not thinking . . . with the merry O’Donnell widow?”

Hendricks looked shyly at the floor.

Serge waved his spoon. “My man, at your age!”

“Mr. Moreno, love has no age, nor can we shirk when it calls. Only a coward runs when love beckons.”

“Shit! You are so fucked, Hendricks!”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Moreno, very often and very well. Thank God.” He danced off with the champagne and the flutes, followed by Millie wearing a huge grin at Serge’s discomfort.

“I can’t believe this. Every fucking idiot in creation is pairing off. This happens every ten or twelve years, Willie. It’s like a natural cycle of disasters. Hormonal, must be, or pollution. Fuck!” Serge grouched and grumbled away under his breath, heaving things about violently, swiping with vicious fervour at the counter surface.

Lance smothered a chuckle at his outraged indignation.

Serge turned suddenly and glared up at Lance. “Be good to my baby, Willie. She was very hurt once, and she deserves the best. Whatever it is you’re hiding better be harmless shit. You know how I won free from that bordello, Willie? I killed a man.”

Lance raised an enquiring eyebrow. “You
killed
someone?”

“Yes. And I liked killing him. It healed me. He was my regular, came in every week. He liked hurting me, Willie. I used to lie there, biting that pillow, his sweat dripping on me, imagining him dead. And one day . . . why, I took a little bitty knife from the kitchen, and when I knelt down before him . . . I just flashed it out . . . one little cut.”

Lance was shocked into silence.

Serge chuckled. “You could say he came a gusher! He screamed, and nobody came running. They were used to screams, see, it’s part of the business. So, he bled to death and I took his purse. I ran, Willie. I ran to the port and stowed away on a steamer that did the Bosporus run. So now I’m not a virgin, in any sense you could imagine.” He reached out with his small, but astonishingly strong hand and gripped Lance’s wrist. “Be very, very careful, Willie Peckerless. You get my drift?”

Lance nodded. “Listen to me, Serge. I love her. I’m giving up my entire life to be with her. Everything. If I hurt her, believe me, I’m not walking away whole.”

“Good. We understand each other, then.”

Lance and Serge stepped away from each other as Millie and Hendricks came in chattering away happily, aglow with reflected joy.
 

“Well, Serge, we might get to stage another wedding come July. Gillian and Russell want me to work on a proposal for the catering, at his place, for a hundred and fifty people. He has a lovely garden.”

“Millie, that’s fantastic. But we’ve never worked away from home before. We really have to think it through. Let’s see how we get through Saturday first.”

“Yes, of course! No pressure! One day at a time, and tomorrow Deidre Ferguson-Barr is having her Merry Widows’ Annual Celebration.”

Lance finished wiping down the counters and the hob. He sidled up to Millie. “Have dinner with me?”

She smiled and nodded. “I’ll cook.”

“No. I want to talk. We both know what happens when you cook.”

“Oh, all right! Spoilsport. Can we just pop into my house before dinner so I can change into something sexy?”

From the Diary of Millicent Deafly:

Will wants to talk tonight and invited me to dinner. Really, who understands men? My friends all complain that men only want to talk until they get them into bed. Will’s got me into bed . . . and into the bath, the lift, the pantry, the kitchen, and that one time in the parking lot . . .
 

Oh, never mind. Now he wants to talk. Go figure?

Okay, gotta go! He’s waiting for me outside! I’ll tell you how everything goes later.
 

Chapter 35

You might find yourself in the starling position of being the
virgin
in the relationship. What if she wants
you
to wear her clothes? That little lacy La Perla bra set she bought in cranberry-red XL-size wasn’t for
her
after all . . . what if she tells you she’s really into S&M and you’re slightly dyslexic and thought she
loved
Marks & Spencer?

Either brave it out and see if you like it, or run for the hills. We all have our limits. My advice is don’t do anything that makes you feel uncomfortable, such as wearing size seven Manolo Blahniks when you take a size twelve. Remember you have the right to say
no
.

It doesn’t make you a lesser man, just a bigger wimp.

—Sensual Secrets of a Sexual Surrogate

Dinner was at a small Italian restaurant close to Guilty Pleasures, Pistacchini’s. It was a gleeful pastiche of a Mafia Don’s hangout, where the waiters had chewed cigars behind their ears, popped gum, and wore Sinatra hats and aprons with faux bullet holes and bloodstains over their copious beer bellies.
 

Machineguns were hung on the wall, along with violin cases, bloodstained baseball bats, cement boots, and a framed flowered Hawaiian shirt with a bullet hole over the heart. Black framed portraits of several silver screen Mafiosi filled another wall, while a third wall sported a huge funeral wreath of black and red roses draped with a white satin banner reading MAY HE REST IN PIECES.

They sat at a small corner table with a red checked tablecloth and a candle in an old straw-covered bottle of Chianti. They ordered pizza and the house red, a house salad and garlic bread to start.

“So . . . you want to talk, talk. I’m listening.”

“Millie, you don’t know much about me.”

“Yes, I do. You have an Irish grandfather, kissed the Blarney Stone, your mom was not very, um . . . nurturing, and you have an amazingly agile tongue. Oh! You’re also well hung, and not Jewish.” Millie forked up a mix of lettuce, tomato and mozzarella dusted with oregano and chewed thoughtfully. “Wait? Is this what I think this is?”

Lance looked at her questioningly.
 

“I’m sorry. I really have let things go. I know you’re not going anywhere now. Do you think it’s time I added you to the staff and hired you for real now?”

Lance sighed. “No, it’s not that, Millie. As I said, you don’t know too much about me.”

Millie put down her fork. “Is it about the disclaimer? Because if it is—”

“Millie, please, babe, just let me talk—”

“You’re right. I’m sorry. Okay, so spill.”

Lance took a deep breath. “Here goes . . . I’m not really a cook’s assistant.”

“Yes, I know. Your last place of employment was a deli.”

“Millie, please. This isn’t easy.”

“God, Will, you’re scaring me!”

“I’m scared myself, okay? I don’t know how you’ll react to this. I’m at Guilty Pleasures under false pretences. I’m, well, I’m doing research for a book I’m writing. I’m a therapist, you see—”

“A book? About us?”

“No, not at all, I’m studying the correlation between alimentary and sexual disorders.”

“Sexual disorders?”

“Well, see, practically all women with sexual dysfunctions also have image issues, which leads to an ambivalent or antagonistic attitude to food, the same relationship they have with their own body. Denial of pleasure.”

“What kind of therapy
is
this, Will?”

Lance cleared his throat. “Sexual therapy?”

Millie carefully laid down her cutlery. “Are you asking me or telling me?”

“Telling.” Lance saw Millie shift in her seat. “Are you leaving?”

“You think I should? I haven’t had my pizza yet.”

“You’re not . . . shocked?”

“Surprised. Perplexed. Curious. What exactly comprises this
sexual therapy?
”

“Usually? Well, someone will be referred to me by their psychologist or psychiatrist, or sometimes a friend or a lover will bring them in. These are women who have difficulties relating to their own bodies. They don’t feel pleasure. They don’t even know what they like.”

“Good God, you have sex with them?”

“No! I help them find out what pleases them—how to express their needs and their wants to their lovers—and how to please themselves so they can teach others to please them.”

“How do you do that?”

“Well, I have this huge stack of fashion magazines, some of which are absolute treasures going back to the twenties. I get them to pick out a new look to symbolise their new sexuality—something that doesn’t have to please
anyone
but themselves. The woman they imagine they could be if they weren’t so worried about what everyone, including themselves, expected of them. I get them to imagine themselves as unconventional and free. Then we work on
becoming
that woman, a sexy woman who knows what she wants and demands it.”

“This helps them?”