Lovers (19 page)

The volume of space she had established between them, never violated, seemed solid and impenetrable to her. The two of them were frozen by the habits she had so carefully, stealthily nurtured, year after year, Victoria realized. He would never make the first move. Suddenly she couldn’t endure the measured formality of the music for another instant.

An agony of impatience, a snapping of her inhuman determination, a shrugging-off of years of self-government possessed her as she rose from the couch, murmuring something about another tape, and mounted to the third step of the library ladder that stood next to the nearest bookcase. She rummaged there with her back to Angus, tears of anger and frustration filling her eyes. She heard his footsteps, and suddenly his arms clasped her waist. She went utterly immobile as she felt him fumbling at the zipper on her jeans. She didn’t move or speak when she felt his warm, shaking fingers moving down her bare stomach to the very edge of the springy hair between her legs, but only braced herself against the railing of the ladder so that she wouldn’t fall. Let him do what he would, she thought, oh, please, let him do what he would, and when he turned her around and buried his thirsty mouth in the dark bounty that was so marvelously bared to his warm, warm lips, her silence spoke for her.

They stood there for long minutes, too overcome even to groan, as he pressed his head into her belly and explored her with his avid, parched lips and his piercing tongue, her voiceless assent more powerful than any words could have been. He kept at her relentlessly, even when her hands tore at his hair and she ground herself against him, until he became afraid that she would escape him into a bliss he couldn’t share. He picked her up and carried her
into the bedroom he’d never seen and laid her down on the bed he’d imagined so often and covered her face and mouth with mad, wild, hasty kisses as he tore off his clothes and pulled off her sweater and released her breasts from their bra, as swiftly and hungrily as a criminal. He handled her roughly and ruthlessly, lost to all tenderness, arid she responded with a raw willingness that made her as brutal as he was. His last thought was that later there would be time to caress, to speak, to kiss, as he grabbed the club of his penis in his hand and jammed it into her with a violence he had not known he was capable of. Again and again he shoved, his teeth grinding, clumsy, urgent, savage, falling on her like a starving animal on a piece of meat until he was entirely enclosed by her tightness and warmth.

“Yes!”
It was the first word she had spoken, and it was all it took to make him buck into the most severely exquisite orgasm of his life. When it was finally finished, he flung himself back, his heart pounding, almost unconscious with relief, until, after a long while, he returned to his senses and realized that Victoria was lying motionless beside him, still panting with a fierce, unrelieved tension.

“You didn’t …”

“No,” she whispered, and Angus bent over her with his lips open to suck her quickly into the climax she had almost achieved in the living room. As he parted her legs, more gently now, he saw the bloodstains on the sheet below her. “I’ve hurt you!” he exclaimed, suddenly aware of his savagery, his selfish relentlessness.

“I wanted it.” She sounded vulnerable, wounded and deliriously alive, utterly made flesh.

“You’re bleeding.”

“Yes.”

“You … it was the first time.” He was blankly incredulous.

“Of course.”

“Victoria, you couldn’t have, you couldn’t have waited!”

“I touched myself … and thought of you.”

She laughed low in her throat, a purely female laugh,
and he was gripped by a wave of emotions—unutterable gratification, violent flattery, amazed love, and unbearable curiosity—emotions primitive and deep and almost too much to endure, so that he wanted to bite her until she bled, to hit her until she cried out, to kiss her until her lips were raw, to bind her to the bed, to mate with her, blindly, until they were both reduced to husks. I
touched myself and thought of you
. He was hard again, he realized, and now he guided his penis with delicious, careful slowness into her wanting, waiting, welcoming body, feeling with his fingers, which were suddenly delicately sensitive, the folds and concavities of her lower lips, which had been swollen by an onrush of readiness for the past hour. He filled her with a steady, stern penis, hard in that second hardness which lasts so much longer than the first, and he kept it there, motionless, plugging her full of him, while he played with the plump, burning, hesitating rosette of flesh that was the key to her satisfaction. Whenever he sensed that she was about to come, he took his fingers away, only putting them back when she had forced herself to lie quiet again, impaled on his penis, her mouth open in an unuttered plea. She had waited for him. Now she must wait until he chose to release her. Never had he known a woman who understood his demands without words, never had he had anyone so at his mercy, never had he wanted to kill as he came, kill in a carnal ecstasy of total possession, and when he finally burst into her again it was only after finally, almost unwillingly, permitting her the splendid fruit of satisfaction, the terrible, triumphant satisfaction she had waited for so long.

During the four business days that Millicent was in London, they met in Victoria’s apartment as early as possible every night, leaving their offices separately, taking separate taxis, using separate keys, and, once they arrived, going directly to Victoria’s bedroom and falling upon each other in a thunderclap of such intense passion that it never lessened, never allowed them time to pull apart, stop, and take
account of the situation. They were too euphoric to think or plan, too anesthetized by the growing discoveries of each other’s bodies, to spare time in talk.

Eventually, Angus had to drag himself off to his home to sleep a few hours, shave, shower, dress, and eat breakfast as if nothing were out of order in his routine. Their days passed in a feverish dream as they attended the usual round of meetings and presentations, surrounded by their unseeing co-workers. Victoria’s body was camouflaged in the reliably hard chic of her clothes, and if anyone had inspected her flushed face closely, the only conclusion they might have drawn was that she’d had a good night’s sleep or had somehow managed to get some sun. Angus found he could run the company on autopilot for a few days. When they both happened to be in the same meeting, they never dared to look directly at each other; when they had to lunch with a group of Oak Hill executives, they barely managed to swallow, although not one of the men around the table noticed that Angus Caldwell and Victoria Frost were any different from their usual efficient, businesslike, good-humored selves.

“What’s going to happen now?” Victoria made herself ask, the night before her mother’s return.

“The only thing I can think about is how we can be together. We can’t … sit around and
wait
till she goes out of town—that’s out of the question.”

“But the two of you have social obligations almost every night, there are no excuses you can make.”

“
I just don’t know what to do.”
He sat up in bed and buried his face in his hands.

As she had expected and feared, Angus wasn’t ready yet to tear his life apart, Victoria reflected. He hadn’t allowed himself to realize that of course it all must come tumbling down before it could be built up again with her. It was too soon for him to face the reality that he had to turn his back on everything he’d taken for granted, too soon for him to acknowledge that she must replace her mother, her unloving, ungiving, unnatural mother, whose punishment
had been too long in coming. But Angus was still only thirty-nine, he had as much time ahead of him as they needed, and she would wait. Wait and wait. Now that she was sure of him, how much easier it would be. Hadn’t she waited since she was sixteen for him, held herself out for endless, arid years with nothing but her will and her love to keep her going? She couldn’t risk a wrong move now that she had achieved the victory that had never seemed impossible. She had always known that she must eventually win Angus away from her mother. He had belonged to her from the minute she had first seen him.

“We could get a place near the office,” Victoria said hesitantly, as if she hadn’t meditated long on the question. “We could meet there now and then … at lunch or right at the end of the afternoon, before you have to be home—you could be out having an early drink with a client or playing bridge—we could manage an hour here and there.”

“Oh God, darling!” He buried his face in her shoulder. “An hour! An hour’s nothing!”

“But what’s the alternative?” she asked.

“None,” he groaned, “none.”

Within a few days, Angus had rented a well-furnished studio apartment that was only a five-minute taxi ride from the offices of Caldwell & Caldwell, and had arranged for regular maid service. They met there whenever they could, sometimes by rigorous planning, jointly managing to avoid their business lunches, and sometimes at five in the afternoon. However, their busy schedules, which depended on fulfilling the demands of so many other people, made their times together few, short, and maddeningly unpredictable. The weekends, which the Caldwells usually spent in Southampton from the spring through the fall, were especially difficult to endure, and Millicent Frost Caldwell’s brief trips out of town still remained their only periods of genuine freedom.

Almost a year passed, and their ravening desire for each other became stronger with every unexpected postponement
of a meeting, every time they had to tear themselves from an hour in their warm bed and put on their public faces. Unslaked desire, desire that grew stronger with its infrequent release, possessed them whenever they were not together, a gnawing undercurrent of permanent hunger, a confirmed addiction, an addiction they welcomed in all its manifestations.

“I can’t touch Millicent,” Angus confessed late in that year. “I haven’t touched her since our first time.”

“Has she said anything?” Victoria asked, screaming in her head for him to tell her, for God’s sake, tell her mother the truth.

“No, she’s let it go. Clearly she’s decided to blind herself, she obviously doesn’t want to know,” Angus said, and Victoria heard the clear relief in his voice with cold dread.

Not long afterwards, in early winter of 1981, soon after she had been promoted to senior account supervisor on all the Oak Hill accounts, Victoria faced the fact that it was too comfortable for Angus to have a lover who worked so closely with him, a lover who would do anything to be with him whenever he had a scrap of time for her, and a wife who was determined to ask no questions. Perhaps she could provoke some sort of showdown.

“Mother, I was thinking of coming to Jamaica for a week at Christmas this year … that is if you have room for me?”

“We’d love it,” Millicent said, hiding her surprise. “But I assume you’d like to bring a beau?”

“I hadn’t thought of that, but yes, as a matter of fact, I would. He’s no one special, at least not yet, don’t get your hopes up, but he’ll be an addition to the party. Thank you, Mother.”

She couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of playing that hand herself, Victoria thought, as she made a telephone call. Count on Millicent Frost to know how to sell a product, dead or alive.

In order to keep busy during her many empty evenings, she had never stopped seeing several of the increasingly
eligible men who continued to present themselves to her, only to go away eventually, disappointed in their failure to interest this somehow mysterious young woman who seemed to have escaped even a touch of the neediness they sensed in most of the other unmarried career women they knew. Victoria Frost had a monster job, she got more uncannily attractive every year, she’d never been serious about anyone … how could she not be anxious, at almost twenty-nine, to find the right man and take her rightful position in the world? Why did she seem so snugly settled in that mysteriously comfortable little place of hers that wasn’t even on a good street? There was no way she could be destined for the permanently unmarried life, happy as she seemed with the arrangement; such a life simply didn’t happen to girls like her, smart as hell, rich as hell, and yes, beautiful, for Victoria Frost had become a beauty in the last year or so. People agreed that she’d finally grown into her looks.

Victoria chose the most attractive of her many aspirants, Amory Hopkins, a thirty-five-year-old divorced stockbroker, decisively rich, unencumbered by children, tall, good-looking, well mannered, and possessed of a pleasant, quiet sense of humor. He had the necessary skills at sports, he danced acceptably well, he dressed most acceptably well, and he certainly looked as if he could fuck more than acceptably well, Victoria thought, as he accepted her invitation with deep pleasure. Her mother would be secretly salivating over him. Angus … the more agony Angus felt the better.

During the week at the estate near Montego Bay, Victoria deployed every weapon she possessed. Garden-variety flirtation was not among them—it was an art she had never practiced—but as she sat listening intently to Amory Hopkins, during the long conversations she instigated as they sat somewhat apart from the rest of the house party, she cut raw wounds into Angus that no amount of coquettishness could have made. Whenever her low assenting
laugh was heard, whenever she grew animated and leaned toward Amory to emphasize a point, running her fingers through her hanging tangled hair, Angus quivered with jealousy. Victoria cast aside her usual style and wore thin cotton sun dresses with nothing under them to restrain her full, swinging breasts, bikinis that revealed the disciplined richness of her thighs and the firm, tight line of her waist, short summer evening dresses that turned her flashing long legs into a scissors thrust to his heart.

Victoria was nicely charming to her mother. She was nicely charming to all the other houseguests. She was particularly nicely charming to Angus, as charming as if he were the elderly stepfather with whom she had a history of years of grateful affection. Whenever she found herself alone in her room, she congratulated herself on that training as an account executive which had made nice charm an automatic part of her repertoire, like a second skin. No un-nice, un-charming account executive survived, either at the top or the bottom of the agency business.