Private Lies (15 page)

Ken shook his head. "Not terrible. Practical. Maybe if
we explained it properly and sincerely, Eliot would consent. Is he that much of
a monster?"

"Funny," she said. "He said you were a
different kind, not like him. He was right. You don't understand his mentality.
How do you think these people have preserved their fortunes over generations?
By sentimentality? Eliot is not a monster, but he will do what he has to do if
he feels betrayed or if his fortune is threatened. I'm sure of it. Believe
me."

She paused, feeling the eruption of anger inside her.
Instead of raising her voice, she clamped her teeth together and spoke in a
whisper, her tone emphatic:

"I will not leave Eliot Butterfield without my
possessions. If that makes me a greedy, covetous woman, so be it. I've earned
them and I intend to keep them."

Her sudden eruption seemed to shock him. His face became
ashen, his expression troubled. An angry burst of regret had exploded inside
her. How dare Ken come back into her life, disrupting her peace, challenging
her comfort, making her feel again? Just when she had learned to live without
feeling, without love, without passion.

Suddenly she broke away and ran along the footpath, heading
back to the car. She heard him moving swiftly behind her, catching up just as
she opened the car door.

"It needed to be said," he told her as he slid in
beside her.

"No, it didn't," she protested, concerned suddenly
about this strange reversal in their roles. "You pushed it, remember. Now
that you see it can work, you get cold feet."

"I was simply exploring other alternatives," he
muttered, still obviously shaken by her response.

"You sound as if you'd like to keep things as they
are. And it makes me worry now that you'll want Eliot to catch us, force the
issue."

"And what would we gain by that? A lifetime of
resentment."

They were silent for a long time. Finally, he turned the
ignition and started the motor.

"Maybe it was cold feet," he said.

"Why now?"

He looked troubled, vague, as if his mind were searching
for an explanation.

"Maybe the power of it frightened me. Seeing it
happen. How simple it was." He was silent, his gaze drifting toward the Potomac.

His words had frightened her as well. She could not deny
it. Nor could she deny the shame that her practicality engendered in herself.
It stunk of greed. It wasn't heroic, wasn't noble, wasn't loving. Stop that,
she screamed inside herself. She had been a victim for too long. Ken had given
her the means to fight back and she had no intention of surrendering now.
Hadn't Eliot manipulated her into signing that horrible prenuptial agreement?
It was time to undo that travesty.

"What's wrong with wanting to take charge of our own
lives?" she asked. "Do it our way for a change?"

"Not a damned thing," Ken replied. He seemed to
have conquered his private war with doubt.

"We mustn't turn back now," she told him firmly.

"No way," he agreed.

Her iron resolve surprised her. It was a far cry from the
young girl who had given up love for ambition. Never again, she vowed. She
would give up nothing. She moved toward him again and they embraced, lingering
together in a long, loving kiss.

Ken drove the car in silence. He had turned off the Washington Memorial Parkway and was heading south. After a while the roads became two-lane
and threaded through the browning hedgerows and horse meadows of the Virginia countryside. Again Carol lay in the crook of his arm as he drove.

"I'm pinning my hopes on Africa," Carol said
suddenly.

"You and Francis Macomber," Ken said.

"Macomber?"

"A Hemingway character. He went to Africa with his
wife to reclaim his manhood."

"And did he?"

Ken nodded and smiled.

Suddenly he stopped the car in front of a colonial structure.
A sign outside read STONEWALL INN.

"Eliot wanted you to see American antiques," he
said. "The reservations clerk told me they're loaded with them."

Carol followed Ken into the reception area. He signed the
register while she looked over the posted menu at the entrance to the
restaurant.

"First things first," he said as they followed
the clerk to their room. He gave the young man a five-dollar tip, then looked
up and winked at her. "That was for not noticing we had no
suitcases."

In the room was a bottle of champagne and an opened can of
beluga caviar over ice with pieces of toast and a variety of condiments.

"You're an incurable romantic," she said.

"Not really," he said, kissing her ear. "I'm
trying to manipulate you into making love to me."

"I'm easy," she laughed.

The makings of a fire had been prepared and Ken lit it
while they both watched it burst into flame. Then he uncorked the champagne,
poured it into glasses, and spread caviar and all the makings on a piece of
toast for her. He popped it into her mouth.

"Hmmmm," she said, delighted with both the
wonderful taste and the idea. "You see," she said.

"See what?"

"Not all the good things in life are free."

"Not all," he said, taking her in his arms,
kissing her deeply. Then he began to undress her.

Later, after they had made love, she grew thoughtful.
Something he had said nagged at her.

"What is it?" he asked. She was suddenly aware
that he had been studying her face. Then she remembered.

"This Macomber, the man who found his manhood in Africa." She turned to look at him. "What did his wife find there?"

"Her freedom," he said, reaching out to caress
her hair. "She shot him dead."

ELIOT SAT ALONE in the Norfolk Hotel's terrace restaurant
sipping his coffee. Although it was too early for it to open, a modest tip to
one of the kitchen workers had organized the coffee and solitude.

Jet lag and anxiety had made it impossible for him to
sleep. He looked at his watch. In an hour they would meet Jack Meade for
breakfast, go over the safari schedule, check out of the Norfolk, and start the
eight-hour drive to their first camp in the Samburu.

A lingering anxiety had dogged him for the past few months,
ever since the idea of bringing Maggie and Ken to Africa was broached. If
anything, it had become even more urgent.

Nairobi had already begun its
languorous morning stretch, rising slowly into the sun, which by noon would
scorch the city and peel away its fragile veneer of civilization.

Eliot had learned that the best method of rating a city was
by the way its people were shod. Studying feet raising dust in the broken paved
street, he could spot sandals made of old tires, battered shoes with cracked
tops, raised heels of dirty pumps which made a feeble effort to appear
fashionable, and, only occasionally, the slick shined shoe of the poseur who
carried a briefcase, although he might be a waiter or clerk in some fly-blown
Nairobi café or butcher shop.

He could spot one or two fairly decent shoes, but it was
far too early for those. Besides, the people who ran things rarely walked.

This part of Nairobi always depressed him, although the
oasis of affluence provided by the Norfolk Hotel was isolation enough from the
mean streets where mismanagement, confusion, and poverty walked hand in hand.
There was a good life here as well, but that was in the suburbs, where the
Europeans residing there made a grand attempt at the good life. It was not the
way it had been under British rule, but they could still buy servants cheaply
and live the illusion of colonial grandeur.

For him, of course, this was political Africa, not the real
Africa, the wild Africa where those magnificent creatures who shared the earth
with man were losing their war to survive.

He mocked himself over his propensity to reflect on the big
issues, the so-called universal themes. Man and his future in a world of
diminishing resources. Man replicating himself at a faster rate than the
technology to manage his absorption. The disappearing rain forests and the
thinning ozone layer. Man's losing battle with the priorities of his survival.
And his vulnerabilities. The power of greed, the joy of war, the lure of
heroism, the urge for immortality. The big questions, the grand themes. He had
dedicated his mind to the contemplation of these issues, to deciphering the riddles,
to discovering greater and greater levels of knowledge and awareness. He had
given his life to it.

He sipped his coffee. There was much to be said for Kenyan
coffee. He was also a man who cultivated his palate for food, trained his ear
for music, concentrated his eye for dance and art, and had nurtured his
intellect. He had always revered the value of art, the exquisite aesthetic, the
wonder of the mind. Thinking, contemplating, reflecting, learning, were the
ways he spent his most productive waking hours.

He took a piece of folded yellow lined paper from an inside
pocket, unfolded it, patted it flat, and spread it on the table. The immutable
laws of numbers were indivisible from logic, he instructed himself. There was
no way to maintain his present life-style on a net income of no more than
thirty-five thousand dollars a year.

Granted that this was well above the statistical average of
what constituted a living wage for a family of four, it was hardly enough to
finance the kind of life-style he had maintained for years. He chuckled wryly.
By that standard it was below the poverty level.

He had dutifully written a column of figures representing
expenses abstracted by his accountant. They included his office expenses,
alimony for Helen, tuition and support for the children, travel, entertainment,
books, telephone, utilities, and on and on.

Twenty-five years ago, his father had left him what was
once the extraordinary sum of four million dollars, a more than sufficient
amount, he once supposed, to provide the kind of net income, taking tax
loopholes into account, that could adequately support his life-style, the
centerpiece of which was the dedicated pursuit of those burning questions that
engaged his mind. A thinking man's life, was the way he put it to himself.

Before his father's death, the family business had been
able to supply enough money for these pursuits as well as the raising of a
family. He had married Helen, more as a way to validate to his father and
mother his adherence to traditional values than for any reason that had to do
with the usual emotional considerations.

That, of course, was his conclusion after the fact of their
divorce. Actually, it was Helen's assessment and it was unassailable. They had
two children, more attributable, according to Helen, to the potency of his
sperm than the frequency of their procreative activities.

Her divorce grounds were mental cruelty and, from her point
of view, she was probably right. On the surface she had been dutiful,
organizing his external life, enabling him to avoid the nitty-gritty of modern
living, mothering his children, keeping his house, supervising his meals,
clothing him properly, and generally upholding the appearance of a contented,
if not happy, marriage.

She became bored. He was sorry for that and, as befitting
his position and standards and on the advice of his attorney, had offered a
generous settlement for Helen to pursue a happier life free from his neglect,
but one that had immediately lopped nearly two million dollars off his net worth.
He hadn't then calculated the devastating effects of inflation on the
remainder.

Then, too, after the settlement, he had learned on good
authority that his wife had been less than faithful, taking a series of tennis
pros as lovers, a fact that underlined his naïveté, made him furious, and
prompted the immediate dismissal of his lawyer.

At the time of his marriage to Carol he hired another
attorney who was far less sanguine and far more ruthless. Eliot was determined
not to make the same mistake twice. Thus, to protect what was left of what he
thought was his "fortune," his lawyer had devised an aggressive
prenuptial agreement for Carol that was airtight, designed to protect him
against most eventualities, from cuckcolding to desertion.

It was this overzealous prenuptial agreement with Carol
that had come back to haunt him. The timing couldn't be worse.

Lifting his cup, he noted that his hand shook, causing a
drop to land on a certain row of figures. He was not a superstitious man, but
the placement of the drop of coffee made him pause.

The figure on which the drop had fallen was the most
baffling of all. It was the inventory value of all the purchases of antiques
and artwork that Carol had accumulated over the years of their marriage, her
entitlement by the agreement that he had promulgated. That figure came to
roughly $2.5 million. It was the "roughly," spoken by the accountant,
that finally got his dander up. He had reared up like a stuck pig, finally
losing his temper in the accountant's office.

Actually, it wasn't the accountant's fault. He had already
fired the business manager who gave him the primary news that his so-called
"fortune" was a myth, overcome by either his own financial judgment;
bad investments, most of them instigated by himself since he was not one to
follow other people's advice; or the other extreme, simple neglect. Then, of
course, there was his ridiculous divorce settlement.

The accountant, a large man named Bernstein, calmed him
down and explained that the value of "things" like art and antiques
had gone up higher than the value of money. In the eight years of his marriage
the two hundred odd thousand that Carol had spent on canny purchases in her
name had simply multiplied more than ten times. He had painstakingly made a
list of these purchases, twenty-three items in all. Then he had surreptitiously
photographed them and given the accountant the task of appraisal.

Roughly, two and a half million, Bernstein had said. A
burst of blood had clanged to the top of Eliot's head. Not a fortune by today's
standards, he told himself later, but she was a damned sight richer than he
was. He was, in fact, verging on being broke, living on capital that would
probably be depleted in a few months.

He certainly couldn't say he had been bilked by Carol,
despite the fact that the bills of sale were in her name alone. This did not
violate the "agreement."

What Eliot detested most, however, was the very idea of it.
The subject of finances was always far down the list of his priorities. In
fact, he rarely thought about it, devoting his energy to subjects that
interested him far more.

He was hardly a spendthrift in the classic sense, certainly
not overly indulgent or addicted to conspicuous consumption. But he did enjoy
living well and all the emoluments of first-class services and custom-made
clothes. The fact was, considering his upbringing and inheritance, he was
accustomed to the so-called good life and, frankly, he was panicked by the
possibility of its ending. For that, he was totally unprepared.

Not that Carol was profligate when it came to money.
Indeed, to be fair, she could be considered frugal, although she had taken
clever advantage of what he was beginning to view as a "loophole" in
their prenuptial agreement.

He had married Carol primarily because she had the allure
of classic good looks, artistic credentials, and the ability to organize him,
taking up where Helen had left off. She had been devoted, supportive,
companionable, decent, and proper in every way. He was also flattered by her
willingness to marry him, a much older man. And he took pleasure in squiring
her around and showing her off, enjoying the aesthetics of her graceful ballet
dancer's carriage and movement.

How was he to know that suddenly his predictable world
would explode and he would discover that, for all of his life, he had lived
only within his mind, while his, heart, body, and soul had atrophied. One might
say that his intellectual pursuits, his devotion to the big issues, had stunted
him and undervalued the rest of him. Measured quantitatively, he had become
merely a quarter of a man.

His life was never about money. Even now it wasn't about
money, although money was at the heart of his present dilemma. Under ordinary
circumstances, he might have approached Carol, explaining to her that his
alleged fortune had evaporated and that their present life-style was at the end
of its tether. He would have presented her with the reality of their financial
plight. Because of this, she would have to increase her teaching chores. And he
would have to find himself a real job. He would also have to admit that,
according to their agreement, those assets in her name constituted their only
hope of maintaining that life-style.

Under ordinary circumstances, he might have offered such a
logical and realistic explanation. But that would be under ordinary marital
circumstances. Unfortunately, ordinary marital circumstances were not
applicable. These were extraordinary marital circumstances.

In fact, his life was now extraordinary.

Maggie had made it extraordinary.

He watched her coming toward him in silhouette, walking
with the bright ball of rising sun to her back as she came forward. As she
passed into the shadows, he saw the now familiar movement of her body, the
strong fullness, now swathed in khakis that emphasized her swelling hips and
wonderful breasts. She wore a wide-brimmed bush hat fastened with a string held
tight to her chin.

Seeing her coming toward him in this way made his heart
jump into his throat. It was truly extraordinary, the effect this woman had on
his ... he always searched his mind for some unique way to say it ... his
totality.

She looked cautiously around the deserted terrace before
she sat down beside him. His hand reached for hers and their fingers applied a
joint pressure. Again, she studied the deserted terrace, then brought his hand
to her lips.

"I miss you so," she whispered.

"Forced to be apart like this..." he began.
"I hate it." With his free hand he refolded the paper and slipped it
into his pocket.

"You mustn't brood about that," she said,
pointing with her chin. He had discussed it with her at length for the past six
months. "We're going to work it out."

"Contemplating is not brooding."

"I've left him sleeping," Maggie said, looking at
her watch. "He should be getting the wake-up call now. We're packed and
ready."

"So are we," Eliot said. "Soon we'll be on
our way."

"God, I hope it does the trick," she said,
pressing her leg against his. She bent toward him, whispering, "My
darling."

"Too late for second thoughts, I'm afraid," he
sighed, thinking also of the additional debt he had incurred in getting here.
He must be more positive, he berated himself. It can work. It will work.

Given the right circumstances, he and Maggie had convinced
themselves, it might be quite possible to create the moods, contrive the
circumstances, and arrange the opportunities for Carol and Ken to discover each
other in a romantic, hopefully erotic, sense. It was certainly a tantalizing
possibility. And an ideal solution for their dilemma.

For Maggie it would, of course, mitigate the guilt
engendered by her infidelity. For Eliot, it would provide the legal solution to
his financial troubles, the trigger to activate their prenuptial agreement.
This would have a further practical side in shifting the burden of total child
support to Ken and, if all went as hoped, perhaps allow him and Carol, too, a
reasonably comfortable future.