The Stallion (1996) (38 page)

“I suppose I could take a sabbatical next year and devote myself full-time to your project.”

“Do that. I don’t like part-time employees or part-time commitments.”

An hour later Loren lay on his stomach on the floor of the bedroom. Roberta walked around the room, a Scotch in one hand, a Chesterfield in the other, alternating her attention between the sculpture of the ballerina and her naked husband, lying with his hands handcuffed behind his back. A drum table that had held a lamp made a temporary pedestal for the bronze.

She put the cigarette aside and picked up a whip. Loren cringed, but he smiled and lifted his bottom, welcoming the sting. She flicked the whip and added another narrow red welt to the four already on his hinder cheeks.
“Ooh!”
he grunted. “Ooh, Jesus, honey. That one was a little much.”

“It’s too bad we have to hide the statue in the bedroom,” she mused.

“Not forever,” he said.

Roberta stared at him. He was disgusting. She had long since ceased to find any stimulation in binding him, cuffing him, whipping him. She did it and she would continue to do it, because she knew she could never endure life with him if she didn’t dominate him.

“Betsy’s flight will be coming in about now,” she said.
“We really should invite her to stay here. She
is
your daughter, after all.”

“She’d never accept an invitation,” he said. “If she were here, instead of in a hotel, she couldn’t sleep with Perino—or whoever she’s sleeping with these days.”

“I want to talk to you about the stockholders meeting.”

Loren grinned. “Maybe we’d better do that later. I’m not exactly in the posture of a corporate executive, am I?”

Roberta raised the whip over her head and brought it down hard across his shoulders. He yelled.

“I want to talk about it now, while you are the way you are. I want to try to prevent you from destroying yourself.”

Loren writhed, twisting his neck, trying to see if she’d drawn blood. She had.

“Listen to me,” Roberta ordered. “With Randolph voting the foundation stock again, you can put him back on the board of directors.”

“You’re damn right,” he muttered.

“Well, don’t.”

“Whatta you mean, don’t?”

“Randolph was Number One’s flunky,” said Roberta. “Now he’s yours. The court pushed him out and put in a conservator once. It can do it again. His judgment on the Froelich & Green deal was so conspicuously bad that—”

“My
judgment, you mean.”

She slashed him across the legs. “Have it your way, but listen to what I’m telling you. Tom Mason’s not a bad director. He’s not in Perino’s pocket. The dealers like the idea of having one of their own on the board. You drop him after one year—”

“I don’t have control of my own goddamned board of directors!”

“You’re not
supposed
to have control. You can’t run the company the way Number One did.”

“I can’t run it
anyway.
Little by little, it’s being taken away from me.”

“You hate Angelo Perino. But you’ve gotta fight him smart, the way you’re fighting him by hiring the professor. Give that a chance to work. A confrontation tomorrow could be the gunfight at the OK Corral.”

“I’m gonna beat him smart or I’m gonna beat him crude. One way or another…”

The stockholders meeting was a surprise to Angelo and Betsy. Loren moved that the existing directors be reelected for another year. They had expected a brutal confrontation, and it did not happen.

The directors met after lunch to hear a presentation from the president of the company.

Angelo came equipped with specifics, some of them presented on charts.

“The day of the fossil-fuel car is limited,” he said. “That is the basis of everything I have to say to you. The Big Three are working on electric cars. They’re under heavy pressure from the federal government and from California to do just that. We are number four in the industry. We entered the eighties selling a sixties car, the Sundancer, and it nearly killed the company. The Stallion is more of a success than any of us could have hoped. But we are about to enter the twenty-first century, still selling twentieth-century cars. GM and Ford and Chrysler can survive longer than we can, doing that. If they get ahead of us in the development of an electric car, it will kill us. We’ve got to be first.”

The other directors—Loren and Roberta, Betsy, and Tom Mason—were not readily convinced. Even Betsy expressed her uncertainty.

“You’re talking about betting the store, Angelo,” she said. “We have to be damned sure we’re right. The Big Three can make expensive mistakes and survive. We can’t.”

Toward the end of the meeting, Tom Mason spoke. “I have to think about whether I can sell electric cars in Louisville, Kentucky,” he said. “If I can’t, then nobody else can sell them either, because I’m a pretty good auto salesman, if I do say so myself. That’s the key, isn’t it? Can we sell them? The question isn’t, will they run? The question is, will anybody buy them?”

“Tom,” said Angelo, “I can’t quote this exactly right, but somebody once said that the key to selling a product is to
make what you believe in and make other people think that’s what they wanted all along.”

“We’re considering a major corporate commitment here,” said Roberta. “How would you react, Angelo, if I move that we defer a decision for six months, while you explore the technology further and refine your idea even more?”

“I’ll accept six months,” said Angelo, “providing two things. First, that it’s understood that we’ll be spending money on research and development during that six months. And second, that it’s understood that I’m going to build this car, with XB Motors or without it. If this board decides not to build the new car, I’ll resign and build it on my own.”

“This company will own the research you’ve done,” said Loren.

Angelo shook his head. “If it rejects my conclusions, I will be free to go ahead on my own. In other words, Loren, what XB has is the right of first refusal.”

Just before the XB corporate Learjet swung around toward the taxiway, a car pulled up beside it, and very quickly, an additional passenger hurried up the steps and entered, before anyone watching could see who it might be.

It was Betsy. The jet would land at Boston before it went on to Westchester Airport. She would fly from Boston to London. Angelo had already told the pilot and copilot that he would require absolute privacy during this flight.

Betsy did not wait until the jet swept off the runway and into the night sky over Detroit to strip naked. “Tell ’em to fly fuckin’ slower,” she whispered. “An hour and a half is not enough time for me to give you your birthday present.”

It
was
his birthday. It was his sixtieth birthday. As she undressed, he opened the Dom Pérignon that lay on ice in the chest under the front seat. Caviar lay in the same ice. Betsy knew that a birthday party awaited him when he reached Greenwich, which he would do in a little more than two hours. This one, she had promised him, almost within earshot of her father, would be better.

“Take your clothes off,” she urged him. “Goddamnit, we don’t have much time.”

After a quick toast with the champagne and a bite of the caviar, they stretched out on the settee that had been formed by folding down the arms on the center-facing seats.

“I can’t give you what I’d like to give you on your sixtieth birthday,” she said. “A car. A boat. Hell, even a watch. Cindy’s a wonderful gal, but she wouldn’t—well, never mind. There’s something else I can give you. Relax…”

“Betsy…”

She began licking his balls, sucking each testicle gently into her mouth and licking it there before she released it. With long strokes of her tongue she licked his shaft from the base to the tip, then all around. She drew him into her mouth and, sucking, pulled away, again and again.

“You know I love you,” she whispered. “It’s never been any other way.”

“I love you, too, Betsy. God Almighty, I—”

She sucked on him so hard she stopped his voice. Murmuring words he couldn’t understand and probably wasn’t meant to, she moved her head up and down and slathered him, mixing the juices he was beginning to make with those from her mouth.

“Sir…,” a cold, steel voice said over the intercom, “I’m sorry, sir, but we have a telephone call coming in for you. Overseas.”

Betsy grabbed the telephone handset from its hook on the bulkhead. “Who…?”

Her eyes flooded instantly with tears, and she handed the telephone to Angelo without a word.

He put it to his ear.

“Daddy? This is John,” said a child’s voice, with an English-schoolboy accent.
“Happy birthday!”

For a second Angelo was speechless.

“How nice of you to call.”

“It’s very late here, you know. I called your home first. Mrs. Cindy gave Nanny this number, saying it would reach you on an airplane. Are you really in the air somewhere, Daddy?”

“Yes, son, I’m in the air between Detroit and Boston.
Mommy is with me. She’s catching a plane from Boston to London and will be home with you tomorrow.”

Betsy wept. Angelo struggled not to.

“I wanted to wish you a happy birthday,” said John. “I know you are sixty years old. That is a good age to be. Happy birthday, Daddy!”

“Oh, thank you, John. It is
wonderful
of you to call. I know you called because you love me, and I love you, too. Very much.”

“I love you, Daddy. When will I see you?” “I’ll be in London soon, John. And we’ll go boating together this summer in the States.”

“Yes! Well, Nanny says these calls are frightfully costly. I’ll say good night. It is very late here. Nanny had to wake me. Good night, Daddy.”

“Good night, John.”

Tears glistened on Angelo’s cheeks as he put the telephone back in its cradle.

Betsy wept. “I swear I didn’t arrange that,” she sobbed.

He reached for her and drew her into his arms. “I wish you had. That was a fine birthday present.”

“Better than mine,” she whispered. She sighed loudly. “Well, let me finish giving you mine.”

He kissed her fervently. She broke away from his kisses and plunged her face into his crotch. She worked on him with renewed energy. What she did was all but painful. But it was the best kind of pain a man could imagine.

“I wonder,” said Robert Carpenter to Cindy, “if it would be possible to meet François DeCombe. I wonder if, when I buy another sculpture, I won’t have the biggest private collection of his work.”

“You’ll have three,” she said. “A man in Paris has five. Even so, you will be one of his best collectors. If you want to fly up to Quebec and see him, I’ll call him and tell him you are coming.”

They sat together over lunch at La Grenouille. Carpenter, it seemed, was unknown in New York, yet was able to get reservations wherever he wanted to go.

“I should be grateful,” he said. “I am immensely interested in him and am wondering if he would consider doing a portrait sculpture. Oh, not of me, you understand. Of a friend. From photographs. For a gift.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “You’ll have to ask him. I doubt he’d work from photographs. He works with live models. Maybe…”

Carpenter smiled. “A change of subject. I’ve learned I have been tremendously ignorant. I did not realize you are Mrs.
Angelo
Perino and thus the wife of an eminent
automotive engineer and designer and president of XB Motors. I had thought of you as just an art dealer.”

“Actually,” she said, “I was, some years back, a racetrack groupie and later even a test driver.” She grinned broadly. “Tell me you were once a navy frogman, Mr. Carpenter.”

“I’ll tell you I’m Bob and not Mr. Carpenter,” he said.

“Well, I’m, of course, Cindy.”

“I’m afraid I’ve never been a frogman, Cindy. The most adventurous thing I ever did was to fly for the Air Force—and all I flew was a big, lumbering radar picket plane. The most exciting thing I ever did was meet you.”

She shook her head. “No, no, no, Bob,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“I won’t deny I’m flattered. But I’m the most committed woman you will ever meet.”

Carpenter drew a deep breath, paused, and blushed. “Tell me,” he said. “Who’s the man over there? With the woman in red. He looks so familiar.”

“That’s Vincent Gardenia, Bob.”

“Trying to change the subject … Will you forgive me if I seemed to be trying to come on?”

“I’ve known cruder approaches,” she said.

“I couldn’t help it.”

“Maybe you could have. Do you want me to call DeCombe for you?”

“I don’t know. I think I’ll explore your offerings and see if maybe there’s something different I might like better.”

Cindy grinned wickedly. “I know what you might like better. Let’s talk about art.”

In April, people did not have to show passes to go on the Greenwich beaches. The weather was warm but the water was not yet warm enough for swimming. Van had come down from Cambridge this weekend and was staying at his grandmother Alicia’s house. He and Anna sat in the sand at Greenwich Point, watching a spring storm building to the west

The sun still shone through gaps between gray clouds. The water was green and pitching, with small whitecaps.

Van wore a dark blue sweatsuit. Anna wore a gray hooded sweatshirt and a pair of red shorts. The sunlight warmed her legs.

They were alone except for a man walking his dog. He had passed them with a friendly nod and was now two hundred yards away. Van, whose arm was around Anna’s waist, slipped his hand up under her sweatshirt and fondled her breasts. They had been small and firm and pointed when he first saw and touched them. They were fully matured now: larger and softer. She rarely wore a bra.

Van was finishing his second year at Harvard. He was getting good grades and it seemed likely that he would be accepted if he applied to Harvard Law. He hadn’t decided to do that, but it was definitely an option he was considering. Anna would graduate from Greenwich Academy next year.