Judith Krantz (13 page)

“I had no idea Gregory Nelson had a son who was interested in ranching,” Valerie continued. “I’ve just had the most amusing inspiration. This year I’ve been assigned a child’s room, and now that I’ve met Casey I’m going to do a young boy’s room. Can’t you just see him tucked up in bed with his little head crammed full of Western fantasies? I happen to know where I can lay my hands on two of the most extraordinary, museum-quality, antique rocking horses—then Navajo rugs, of course, and piles of Navajo blankets in the corner. I can do the upholstery and bedspread in leather, even the walls if I can find just the right color. Cacti everywhere, in big square terracotta pots. Barn-door red for the moldings, don’t you think, Casey, and coils of rope piled on top of each other for lamp bases? A saddle mounted into a night table—why not?”

“Will there be a bookcase for comic books and Western magazines, Valerie?” Casey asked. “That’s all a kid really needs.”

“I shouldn’t think so. No, absolutely not. A bookcase, certainly, but not for comics. He can keep them in the bathroom. They’d spoil the look.”

“Mustn’t have that,” Casey said. He drank half a glass of red wine and refilled his glass, the expression on his face carefully unreadable.

“You
do
see. I knew you would.” Valerie looked about, smiling, aware of the becoming color of her leaf-green pants and shirt, so satisfactorily crushed in that superior manner that only pure linen has. Gregory Nelson actually her distant cousin? What a piece of luck. Imagine Great-Grandfather having let the connection drop and Father having managed to forget it. Trust Californian cattlemen for that kind of insular social myopia. The Nelsons must own every tugboat in the New York Harbor, to say nothing of Hoboken,
Boston and Lord knew where else. Tugboats weren’t oil tankers, of course, but oil tankers weren’t what they used to be.

“Cousin Casey,” Fernanda purred, “now that we’ve discovered each other, I have to tell you that nothing, absolutely nothing you read about me in Andy Warhol’s diaries is true. How he could have dreamed up that business about me and Joe Dallesan-dro and Mick I can’t imagine, but—”

“I didn’t read it,” Casey Nelson said tersely.

“I was thinking of suing the estate when the book came out, but I took my lead from Halston, when he was still alive. He said it wasn’t worth it—it simply spreads the original lie. Do you think that if Andy were still alive he’d be dropped by all his friends, the way Truman was? Poor Truman—he always said that I was exactly the way he’d imagined Holly Golightly. The movie part was originally written for Marilyn Monroe anyway, not Audrey Hepburn. Don’t you just adore Tru?”

“ ‘Adore’ isn’t a word I’d pick for Capote.” He sipped more wine.

“Well then, just who is your favorite author?” Fernanda asked, leaning forward so that the luscious half-moon of her almost-uncovered breast nudged the back of his hand.

“Louis L’Amour.”

“Who?”

“L’Amour. Louis L’Amour.”

“Hmmm—but that sounds utterly fascinating. Where do you find his work?”

“Everywhere.”

“Oh,” Fernanda said in disappointment, “I thought it might be something special.”

“It is,” he told her, and gulped the rest of his glass and refilled it again.

I’d better rescue the poor slob, Jazz decided. Nobody deserved both Valerie and Fernanda trying to impress him at one time, no matter what he’d done.

“Casey,” she said imperiously, standing up and tossing her hair so that for an instant she scattered a
gossamer cloud of gold dust on her shoulders. “Dance?”

“Christ, yes!” he said fervently, and rose immediately, still holding the wineglass. Jazz approached him with little importunate dancing steps, her sliver of gold no more than a blatant invitation to easily imaginable delights, and for a time-stopped moment everyone at the table gasped at her. Casey Nelson took one, big, fast, eager step forward, tripped over Fernanda’s foot and sent the glass of red wine flying. It covered Jazz’s dress from top to bottom.

“That’s three,” Jazz announced with an unsurprised hoot of laughter. “With six you get egg roll.”

F
ernanda dug her nails into her palms in annoyance at finding herself so unceremoniously deprived of her new cousin. He was difficult to talk to, but a man as clearly masculine as Casey Nelson was worth working on. It was only a question of finding out what plucked his banjo, catching his full attention, and then watching him fall. Obviously he felt that he had to watch his step with his new and distant relatives, or he wouldn’t have been able to conceal some reaction when she had allowed her breast to touch his hand.

Casey had potential, enormous potential, Fernanda reflected, as she watched him dancing with Jazz. He moved well, with an aggressive grace. But he was dancing with that bitch of a Jazz who looked determined to keep him all for herself, Jazz who had ten precious years of youth more than she had, Jazz who had committed the unforgivable sin of becoming world-famous, so famous that men would always find her fascinating no matter how old she grew. As much as she had disliked Jazz as a child, she really loathed
her now, Fernanda thought broodingly, her infantile mouth compressed into a thin pink line, her rosy pink skin going white with a wave of envy.

Restlessly, trying to shake off her darkening mood, Fernanda looked around the dance floor. Orange County gentry were not her usual style. Every man seemed to be a contemporary of her father’s, or a kid who belonged to some local family. She sighed and resigned herself to a dutiful-daughter evening, although how she could be dutiful when her father was dancing away, absorbed by some redhead who looked vaguely familiar, she couldn’t imagine.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” a man’s voice said. “Would you mind if I sat down?”

Fernanda looked up at a very young man in chinos and an open-necked khaki shirt that he wore with a military air. He was unsmiling, almost severe, his jaw firm and his broad shoulders thrown back as if he were standing at attention.

“Wait a minute—it
is
Sam Emmett—isn’t it?”

“Sure is, ma’am. I didn’t think you’d remember me.”

“I can’t believe how you’ve grown! Come on, do sit down, Sam. How old are you now, anyway? I’m all confused. I haven’t seen your mother in so long.”

“I’m almost seventeen, ma’am. Nobody else can believe it either. I’ve been growing about a foot a year, I guess, and I haven’t seen you in three years. I was just a kid then.”

“Indeed you were,” Fernanda murmured. Sam Emmett, the son of an old friend, had been sent away to a military academy in the East when he was thirteen and a half, a pudgy brat with a shock of surfer-bleached hair, and freckles scattered all over his bold little face. He’d been such a discipline problem that his parents had sent him away as a last resort.

“Well, am I still talking to terrible Sam, the holy terror of Laguna Beach?” Fernanda asked, amused.

“No, ma’am, I’ve shaped up. Next year I’ll be captain of cadets,” he replied in his new man’s voice.

“Your mother must be very proud.” He was one
of those teenagers who age as you look at them, Fernanda realized.

“Yes, ma’am. She says she is.”

“What’s all this ma’am stuff, Sam? I’ve known you for years.”

“That’s the way I address a lady, ma’am,” Sam Emmett said stiffly, sitting very straight.

“Is it indeed?” Fernanda chuckled. “That’s very reassuring. I feel safe knowing that there are still young men who know a lady when they see one. But please stop. Call me Fern or I’ll feel too ancient.”

“You could never be ancient, ma’am,” he said shyly.

Fernanda looked him up and down. Sam must be six feet tall. His rapid growth had left his frame appealingly gangly, his blond hair hadn’t yet darkened, although it was so short that it was almost a crewcut. He was a few months younger than her son, Matthew, yet in every other way in the last three years he had moved from the last border of childhood to the beginning of manhood, while Matthew was still firmly a teenager. Sam’s deep voice, the strong structure of his face, the determined set of his lips, the intense definition of his features, all set him apart from other kids of his age. True, he was shy. But that was to be expected.

“Are your parents here, Sam?”

“No, they’re out of town, so I drove over alone. I’ve had my license for almost a year,” he said, pride showing through his military varnish.

“Sam, listen, I have to go back to the hacienda to get a jacket—it’s so damp here. Could you drive me back in one of the Jeeps—I don’t like that road at night.”

“Sure thing, ma’am.”

Fernanda led the way to the Jeep that Jazz had used earlier, and soon they were back at the deserted hacienda.

“I’ll wait out here for you, ma’am,” Sam Emmett said.

“Oh, please come on in, Sam,” Fernanda replied.
“I don’t like going into an empty house by myself. It’s silly, but I always worry that there might be somebody hiding there.”

He jumped down from the Jeep and followed her to the door to her room, where one lamp was lit, standing outside as she entered. Fernanda opened the closet and fumbled around, searching for her jacket.

“Damn, I can’t find it—Sam, come here and look for my red jacket, will you? There’s not enough light in this room and, believe it or not, I’m color blind.”

As soon as Sam busied himself in the closet, Fernanda quickly and quietly locked the door of her room. She snatched a towel from her bathroom and threw it on the bed. Then she went to the closet and touched the boy on the elbow.

“Never mind my jacket, Sam. I don’t really want it.”

“Huh?”

“I just wanted to get away from that crowd and be alone with you, didn’t you realize that, Sam?”

“You’re kidding!” He stood still, half in, half out of the closet, too amazed to move.

“Yes, alone like this,” Fernanda said, and reached up and put her arms around his neck. Her pink tongue peeked out and tasted her pouting upper lip as she looked up at him with anticipation in her wayward turquoise eyes. A mischievous half-smile lit her face as she savored the novel idea that had brought her to her room.

“I never thought … you wouldn’t want …” The cadet backed away, still stiffly military, with an expression of alarm in his stern young eyes.

“Sam, stop. You might as well relax. Now sit right down here on this bed. I want to talk to you.” Fernanda employed the commanding tone of voice she used with her children, and he responded to her authority, lowering himself awkwardly onto the quilt that covered her bed. She sank down six inches away from him.

“Now Sam,” Fernanda continued, in a lowered
voice that no longer held any maternal note, a voice designed to forge a joking bond between them, a smiling, conspirator’s voice, “do you believe that I don’t know that before you came over to the table tonight you’d spotted me sitting there by myself? Didn’t it cross your mind at that moment that you’d like to—oh—I don’t know—kiss me, maybe? Touch me? Even … do certain things you’ve probably never done to any woman. Certainly not to a lady. Didn’t you have those thoughts earlier, Sam? Tell me the truth, on your honor as a cadet.”

“Damn! You’re teasing me, aren’t you? You only remember me as a brat. You don’t realize I’m grown up now. You think it’s funny to play this game with me, right, and then you’re going to tell my mother that I had dirty thoughts about you, aren’t you?”

“Neither one of us is going to say one single word to your mother.
Ever
. And I don’t play games with tall, grown-up guys like you. Did you have thoughts like that, Sam? You still haven’t answered me.”

“Well … maybe something about dancing with you, that’s all,” he mumbled.

“That’s better, Sam. Much, much better.”

“I don’t get it,” he muttered, but he did not rise from the edge of the bed. He sat up straight, his feet squarely on the floor, one hand flat on each thigh, looking straight ahead, at attention.

Fernanda made no attempt to touch him again, although he looked adorable and sulky and frightened, the lamplight reflected on his young skin, his young lips, the nape of his young neck. She lowered her eyes while she spoke so that she could watch the effect of her words on him. Her voice had become very soft and she was careful not to move, to preserve the distance between them.

“Hasn’t it ever occurred to you, Sam, that a woman like me might find something very … interesting … about a young man of your age? When you’re still as young as you are, Sam, you have … powers that older men don’t have. But you don’t have
the opportunities, do you, especially in military school? It doesn’t seem fair to me. All that power going to waste.”

She paused for a minute and caressingly repeated, “All that power.” She watched the boy tremble and grip his thighs with his hands as hard as he could. Such big hands, she thought, the hands of a full-grown man.

“Tell me something,” Fernanda asked, drawing out every word cajolingly, whispering as if she were begging him to tell her secrets. “Have you ever had a woman, Sam? On your honor? Have you ever had a naked woman in your bed, a woman who would let you do anything to her? Hmmm? I think I know something private about you, Sam. I think that in that military academy of yours, night after night, you get into bed and then you can’t fall asleep for the longest time because you get hard, Sam, your cock gets so terribly hard, so terribly big, because you need a woman so much, and the more you think about it the bigger and harder you get, so very hard that you think you’re going to die if you don’t have a woman … isn’t that true, Sam?”

“Stop,” he groaned, “please stop.” His legs were still firmly planted on the floor, but Fernanda could see that under the taut crotch of his chinos a heavy ridge of flesh was lengthening up flat against his stomach more than halfway to his belt. Sam sat completely immobile except for his hands punishing his thighs, afraid to make a move in her direction, too embarrassed to look at Fernanda but terribly aware of the uncontrollable excitement that her whispered words were causing. He still looked straight ahead into the dimness of the bedroom but he knew that his penis was jerking against the fabric of his trousers in a way that nobody could miss. Fern Kilkullen had dominated his sexual fantasies for years, but he was so shy that it had taken the greatest effort to speak to her tonight. Now he was terrified that he’d come in his pants if she kept on speaking to him like that.