Lace

by Shirley Conran

  The first edition of VERVE! had a good cover but it was not well printed. It was way over budget and the advertising was sparse. Nevertheless, they all had secret joyous moments when women on buses were seen to be reading VERVE! or someone was spotted actually buying the thing from a newsstand.

  The second issue contained better text, better pictures and marvellous beauty coverage, but again, it was badly printed. Again the ads were sparse, and it was a day late on the stands.

  The third issue was always the test, after initial curiosity had died down. For the third issue they had to go bigger. Pat frantically tapped her secret network of moonlighters—journalists on the staff of other publications who were prepared to make extra money by unofficially and anonymously taking on extra work. The third edition was still thin on advertising, because the agencies weren’t prepared to take space in the early issues of a magazine that had now lost its novelty value but wasn’t firmly established. They were sitting back and waiting to see whether VERVE! was going to be a fast folder.

  But the third issue had an exclusive Jane Fonda cover, and a lead interview that they were able to tag “How to Enjoy Your Man in Bed” and link with their sexual pleasure survey.

  The ads came in for the fourth issue and VERVE! took off.

  Kate was frightened of her new happiness. Everything was going too well; she was frightened of allowing herself to be vulnerable again. She already knew that what triggered love for her was harsh rejection and an abject, humiliating need for approval. She knew that as soon as she fell for a man, she turned into a grovelling doormat and asked to be kicked in the teeth. She knew that the last thing she needed in a permanent mate was another man who would make her feel unlovable.

  So she was terrified of admitting to herself that she was in love. She hesitated to commit herself. In order to test the strength of her feelings for Tom, she started going out with other men, rather as some women flirt in front of their husbands with men who don’t interest them in the slightest. It wasn’t difficult for Kate to find other men, because success is a powerful aphrodisiac. Besides, at thirty-nine, Kate’s invisible, sexual glow was as much in evidence as it had been when she was seventeen. For the next few months, tough Burt Reynolds look-alikes waited for Kate in the small reception area of the VERVE! office. Kate broke dates with Tom at the last minute, and other men’s shirts and shaving gear were obtrusively obvious when he stayed overnight at Kate’s apartment.

  Tom scratched his head and decided to turn a blind eye to her odd behaviour. He seemed to be the first man (except maybe for Scotty) who was genuinely fond of Kate as opposed to being irresistibly attracted to her. He loved her for what she was, and he didn’t demand what he realised she couldn’t yet give him—her trust. So although he found it difficult, Tom ignored her exasperating behaviour, ignored the muscular hulks in the lobby and her other little tedious traps to test his love. Tom understood Kate’s insecurity better than she did herself, and the reason was that he had suffered similarly.

  One Saturday afternoon, after she had asked some question about his family, Tom clasped his hands behind his head as Kate snuggled up to his bare chest. “To a certain extent, I can understand how you feel about your father,” he said, “because what I resented in my life was my mother. She was a very domineering, typical Ukrainian boss-mother. If I asked my father for anything, he’d say, ask your mother. He was a huge, strong man—he ’d been a professional fighter—so physically he would never lift a finger to his wife or to me, because he was afraid of really hurting us. And my mother knew this, so it gave her complete control of the household. He would decide whether Roosevelt was right to appoint Eisenhower supreme commander in Europe, but he wasn’t allowed to decide whether I could have a new pair of shoes—because she made all the decisions. I resented her complete control and the way she threw it in his face. They had an argument or a fight every single day for thirty-seven years, after which she died. I still resent those arguments. I also resented the fact that she always criticised everything I did. Nothing was ever good enough for that woman. I felt guilty because I wasn’t good enough for her and guilty because I felt resentful.”

  “That’s how I felt, too. What did you do about it?”

  “Look, I’ll show you.” He gently pushed her aside, jumped out of bed and padded back with his wallet in one hand. “I look at that.” He pulled out a white business card upon which was scrawled in capital letters FUCK GUILT.

  “I taught myself to accept guilt and then forget guilt. Sometimes I have to say I’m sorry, and sometimes I have to compensate for some revolting thing I’ve done. But then I simply go out and get on with my life, and somewhere up in the heavenly accounting department, I assume that an angel is adjusting my profit-and-loss sheet. I’m sure I’ll end up showing a net profit.”

  The other side of the card said FUCK ’EM ALL.

  “It helps me keep cool,” Tom explained, “stops me from paying too much attention to other people’s opinions instead of relying on my own.”

  Kate nestled closer to him.

  “There’s one further thing we have to discuss,” Tom said quietly. “I’d appreciate it if you don’t fake orgasm ever with me again. Keep it for these handsome hairy hulks that leave their shirts here.”

  There was a pause, then she said sulkily, “I don’t always.”

  “I know,” he said gently, pulling her to his chest, and stroked her hair softly, as he carefully said something that he’d been meaning to say for a long time. “Kate, darling, sex is the closest possible communication between two people and faking is lying.” He gave an exasperated sigh. “I can’t think why women do it.”

  “Out of politeness, sleepiness or feelings of inferiority,” Kate said defensively. “I suppose I do it because I’m frightened that I’m not up to standard; I don’t get there in ten point nine seconds or whatever the going rate is.”

  “What’s the point? Where is it going to get you? Why don’t you help me to make you feel wonderful? Faking isn’t helping, it’s sabotaging yourself and our relationship because you’re sometimes too damn prim to tell me what you want, you silly little prude.” Tom nibbled her left earlobe. “You have as much right as a man to an orgasm and the way you reach it is your business. You know what’s right for you and until ESP is with us, it’s up to you to show me, otherwise how the hell am I to know?”

  So Kate told him a bit. Then she told him a bit more.

  Then Tom swung into action and pulled out his entire repertoire. First he went down on her, and then she went down on him and then they tried it on the kitchen table and knocked the milk jug over, so they moved to the living room floor and took up sixty-nine positions on the carpet and then Tom impaled Kate and staggered around the living room thus, and all the time they asked each other all the relevant questions, such as do you like it like this, harder, softer, faster, slower, and then Tom produced a little packet and said don’t for God’s sake sneeze and he laid out three lines each on the low glass table in the living room and offered Kate his hollow gold telephone dialer from Tiffany’s and she dutifully said it was wonderful, which was nothing less than the truth . . . except that it left Kate with a slight chemical tang at the back of her throat and in her heart. Compared with the dizzy excitement that Tom aroused in her, the coke didn’t quite make it. Somehow the whole scene hadn’t been about loving, but about scoring.

  “How was it for you this time?” asked Tom tenderly, and she started to say wonderful, but then heard herself say, “. . . Darling, if we’re telling the truth . . . I thought it was strung-out and artificial.”

  A flash of blind panic crossed his face, followed by a defensively aggressive expression that meant he was about to hurt this person as hard as he could for attacking him when he had laid down his defenses and offered her his all. He opened his mouth and was about to tear her to pieces so that she’d never be able to put herself together again, when he paused to consider. Then an expression of relief crossed his face and he said softl
y, “I know what you mean.”

  Kate said tentatively, “I think I like you better than that.”

  Tom said, “I think we both like each other enough not to play games.”

  Suddenly Kate was no longer afraid that he might despise her or leave her if she didn’t perform satisfactorily. She no longer felt that she had to impress him or seek his approval.

  “It’s not that I don’t like conformist sex, I just don’t like it according to the self-improvement books,” she confessed. “I’m conformist all right, but I can’t perform if some dominant person in bed is determined to make me come, or if I feel that some invisible doctor is nodding wisely as he watches my efforts from the ceiling.”

  She wriggled onto her bare stomach on the greengage carpet and propped her head on her hands. “What I really like sexually,” she said thoughtfully, “is corny rubbish. Candlelight and sheer chiffon and being pressed to his manly breast by his muscular arms and feeling the seas pounding relentlessly in my ears and fierce waves surging up the unresisting beach as I sink back and he murmurs thickly in my ear, God, darling, I never knew it could be like this.”

  She turned to Tom, also lying naked on the green carpet, and added, “Corny rubbish is what really makes me feel sexy.”

  “If I suddenly started spouting purple prose, you’d only laugh,” said Tom with conviction, “and what’s more to the point, I’d feel like a fool. So I don’t know how I’ll handle the dialogue, but I promise you that next weekend is going to be in the land of corny rubbish. . . .”

  “. . . By the seaside?”

  “Connecticut,” Tom promised. “The complete experience. Sandy beaches, pounding spray, lobster dinner and galloping white horses. And there we will play at total corniness.”

  The following Friday evening, they arrived at a seashore cottage that belonged to a friend of Tom. On Saturday, they ran along the beach, climbed gray rocks with the wind whipping their hair, licked the salt from each other’s lips and ran along the lace-fringe of the gray ocean, barefoot, with their jeans rolled up. On Sunday Tom tried, and failed, to climb a pine tree, and then they went for a ride. (It had taken Tom over an hour on the phone from New York to arrange for the horses to be waiting for them after breakfast outside the cottage door.) Tom had been on a horse only once before, in his teens, when he’d spent a weekend on a dude ranch outside El Paso. Kate amused him with her prim English trot, and then she amazed him by making her bay hop, one foot at a time, over a fallen tree trunk. Tom couldn’t get his stubborn chestnut mare to move—she took no notice of the human on her back, but kept putting her head down and cropping grass in a determined manner, as if she intended to shave the whole of Connecticut.

  “Take up your reins and use your legs; squeeze firmly with your thighs,” Kate advised. Tom did, whereupon the mare took off as if someone had set fire to her tail. Somehow Tom stayed on, until Kate caught up and yelled, “Sit back and gently tighten up with your hands,” whereupon the chestnut suddenly stopped as if she’d been switched off, and Tom tumbled over her head.

  That evening, after sipping white wine in front of the flames and eating the regulation lobster dinner, Tom carried Kate up the open redwood stairs to their bedroom. They could see through the triangular window, beyond the dark pines to the starlit sea and the lighthouse, and they could hear the wind shrieking around the house and the rain slashing against the plate glass as they snuggled under the flowered quilt. Tom started to caress her. “Too tired,” murmured Kate, “too sleepy.” But holding her to him and stroking her softly, he slipped into her.

  And suddenly, through the mist of sleepiness, Kate realised that it was going to happen. It felt exactly as she had read it felt like. Soft, intense waves rather than her excitingly violent, direct clitoral orgasm. It was unmistakably different and it was undoubtedly happening. Kate felt fecund, indescribably female. She felt happy, she felt at last a complete woman. For a never-ending moment she gloried in it, then flung her arms around Tom and clung to him, held him tight in her arms; she was never, never going to let him go.

  “I did it, I did it!” she shouted.

  “No, I did it.”

  “Well, we did it.”

  Tom said, with considerable satisfaction, “I knew it would happen when you finally relaxed.”

  52

  KATE AND JUDY were waiting for Tom with growing irritation. They would now be too late for the first act of La Bohème, which contained most of the best arias. “Dammit, why doesn’t he call? After all, this is supposed to be a little party for your fortieth birthday, Kate . . . and it’s not as if La Scala popped over to the Met every other week,” grumbled Judy.

  “He was looking forward to it as much as we were, but he didn’t know how long the medical conference would continue, and you know he wanted to talk to some of the doctors afterward. After all, you started this fuss, you’re the one who wants him to sell the Hoffmann-La Roche shares.” Kate leaned back against the suede and stared at Judy through the haze of yellow flowers that stood on a low, smoked-mirror table.

  They were sitting on the beige suede couch in Kate ’s quiet living room. Leopard-skin and tiger-skin cushions were strewn on the couch, which ran thirty feet along the depth of the room. Above them hung a collection of paintings and engravings of tigers and leopards—some were primitive oil paintings, one was a charming child’s drawing. An exquisite Stubbs engraving of tigers was so ominous that the hairs almost rose on the back of your neck.

  The wall opposite consisted entirely of panels of smoked-mirror glass, each concealing liquor, games, TV, stereo, projector or other clutter. One complete side of the entertainment room was a sheet of sliding glass that led onto a leafy terrace, beyond which stretched a sumptuous treetop vista of Central Park. Opposite the window was a fifty-foot run of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lacquered Chinese red. Not all the shelves contained books; Kate ’s collection of antique snuff boxes stood on one; another held a small collection of terra-cotta ancient Greek votive statuettes and other shelves held small, charming objects—a seventeenth-century bronze of a man wrestling with a bull by Garnier, a tiny yellow Meissen patch-box that had once belonged to Madame de Pompadour.

  The lights were turned low. Instead of lamps, Kate created atmosphere with an intricate system of ceiling spotlights—just a single moonbeam if she and Tom were listening to Sibelius; a series of pencil-slim beams for parties, to spotlight their Mexican art collection.

  As they sat waiting for Tom, suddenly Judy felt a sharp, nasty feeling—a sort of yellow jab in the head—that, to her surprise, she immediately recognised as jealousy. Jealousy of Kate. Judy’s apartment was just as luxurious as this one, Judy was just as successful, Judy was just as attractive as Kate, in a different way, and Judy loved her man as much as Kate—and was passionately loved in return. But Kate lived with Tom; they went to bed together and didn’t always make love, they yawned together in the morning; Kate knew what Tom was like when he had influenza, and he knew how to look after her if she had a bad period. Judy longed to share that same intimacy with Griffin. Kate had her man, Maxine was happily married and so was Pagan—now that the medical world had decided to encourage heart-attack patients to make love—but Judy didn’t have what most women expected and took for granted, once they had it Judy felt ashamed of herself for feeling this way toward Kate but couldn’t stop.

  “When Tom bought the Hoffmann-La Roche shares nobody realised the harm that tranquilizers could do,” Kate was saying. “It seemed an ideal medicine for a world with plenty of harassment, plenty of tension, but not enough psychotherapists or mental hospitals.” She picked up a small, amber-inset, eighteenth-century pillbox and carefully examined the pattern without seeing it. “You know Tom’s view is there’s nothing immoral about tranquilizers; his view is that they’re not being prescribed or taken with enough caution.” She snapped the box shut. “He bought twenty shares on fifty percent margin at $16,000 a share and they’re now worth $48,000 each. He said this morning that’s a gros
s profit of $800,000, and apparently you’ve also benefited from an increase in the value of the Swiss franc during 1972, which makes it almost a million-dollar profit on one deal.” She looked straight at Judy.

  “He feels you’re ungrateful to complain. After all, he isn’t always successful with his deals and he wants to hang on.”

  “But it’s not as though it’s his only deal,” Judy said. “We’re deep into sophisticated engineering companies and computers as well as pharmaceuticals.” She sighed and looked at the low cedar table beside her. She picked up an enameled Russian bear. “You have such beautiful things, such a beautiful apartment, but Tom seems to see such an ugly future. Americans besieged on the energy front, deep into military muscle and popping tranquilizers as they work out interest rates on pocket calculators.”

  The door banged as Tom hurried in. He kissed both of them and ran for his dinner jacket. “You know how sorry I am to be late,” he called. He appeared in the doorway. “Kate, could you please fix this tie. Okay, Judy, I’m selling the Hoffmann-La Roche shares, not that I’ve changed my opinion, but we might as well take a profit and I think I’m going to leave it all in Swiss francs, I don’t see why this upward trend should stop. Where are my cuff links, Kate? Where’s Griffin?”

  “He couldn’t make it. His goddamn wife and her goddamn charity function.” Judy longed to hear Griffin call her to fix his shirt or find his cuff links. She yearned for this hurried intimacy as Kate stood behind Tom, pecked the back of his neck and then tied his black bow.

  Griffin and Judy had now been together for four years. Twice during that time they had fought bitterly and split up. The first time was after their first year, when they had a blazing fight about Griffin’s possessiveness. The second time had been after two years together, when Griffin’s wife, Delia, finally made a stand and demanded that he give up Judy. She hadn’t minded the models too much, but she felt humiliated and embittered by her husband’s open liaison with a successful, well-known woman. For the sake of his family and their years together she wanted him to attempt a full-scale reconciliation and an exclusive relationship with her again. His children had been brought into the row. His elder son had been bitter and scornful; his elder daughter had been so understanding that he had broken down and cried.