by Janice Weber
“It won’t be soon enough. You wouldn’t happen to know where Bobby was last night, would you?”
“No. Why?”
“Something happened to his ear. He said he caught it on his comb. Looks to me like someone bit him. Paula’s furious.”
“Vicky, get a grip. No one could bite the president without the Secret Service going ballistic. Maybe Paula did it herself.”
“She and I were in Seattle. You’re no help at all, Fausto.”
“You’re asking for answers outside my area of expertise, dear.” My imagination, or had a little spark returned to his voice? “Did Paula get her tea yet?”
“You ask me every time and every time the answer’s no,” Chickering sighed. “Maybe you should stop asking for a while.”
“Poor Paula. How she must suffer.”
“If you see Rhoby, tell her I’m looking for her, would you?”
“Of course. Bye-bye, dear.”
Good old Fausto: he had given Chickie pebbles for pearls. A call came from Duncan, about eight this morning. “Okay, where is she?” he demanded. “This is Duncan Zadinsky.”
“At the White House, my boy. I believe that’s where she still works.”
“Not Justine, you fool! I’m looking for Leslie!”
“I haven’t seen her in days.”
“What? You sleep with her then don’t even know where she goes?”
“Now that’s an interesting bit of information, Duncan. Where’d you get it?”
“Off Justine’s pager! It’s no secret! The whole town knows! Look, I need to speak with Leslie this second.”
“Try the president’s hot line,” Fausto snapped, and hung up. He immediately dialed Justine. “I understand your pager’s been getting a workout. You haven’t been keeping your charge under very good control, my dear.”
“I’ve got a full-time job,” she snapped. “He’s a loose cannon. I told you he was getting out of hand.”
“In that case, we’re going to move things up a day.”
Short silence. “That’s going to be a major pain in the ass.”
“Take care of it.” Fausto hung up and called Tuna. “Get your people ready to go tomorrow.”
“You can count on me, my friend.”
I felt sick. Walked to Connecticut Avenue. Another hot, dense night, gagging with rain: all the sidewalk cafés were retracting their tables. I cut over to Fausto’s street. Since my last stroll here, a few trees had yellowed. Didn’t jibe with the eighty-plus temperature. Another autumn already? Each year it filled me with ever more desperate premonitions. I hurried past the dying leaves: since last October I had unwittingly learned a few more words of their secret language.
Red Corvette in Fausto’s driveway, exactly where I had left it before my date with Bobby. Downstairs, lights in his music room. I crept to the window. Fausto was playing Chopin’s Fourth Ballade. I felt a stab of envy: pianists were so lucky. They got to do it all: melody, harmony, rhythm. No interpretive arguments, no backstage seizures from accompanists. No problems with intonation, no welts on their necks. And a glorious repertoire. From the shadows of lust, envy, and longing, I watched him play. His hands moved so gracefully and familiarly over the keys. Drove me mad. Why didn’t I just leave a dying man to his labyrinth? Fausto would never need me. I almost went home. Then the wind stirred and I smelled the foreboding breath of autumn. Suddenly it didn’t matter what games he and I were playing: they’d soon be over.
Flat yellow leaves scurried over my feet as I let myself in. Stood outside the music room as the ballade rushed to a dark, tumultuous end. I knocked. My pulse ran wild as I heard footsteps. The door opened. Fausto’s round eyes flared but his mouth didn’t move. I was acutely aware that I had interrupted him and that he knew I had killed Simon. Hell, he probably knew I had been hanging off Barnard’s balcony. I wanted to put my arms around him, tell him I was harmless, get invited back upstairs. “Sorry to drop by like this. I saw lights and thought it would be a good time to pick up my violin.”
The little pink mouth altered: perhaps my lies had amused him. “Come in.” Fausto’s Hawaiian shirt fluttered as he went to the bar. “What can I get for you?”
Gin and an erection. He looked awful. “Have you seen your doctor?” I asked.
“Tomorrow.”
“You haven’t had another spell?”
“All quiet. Cheers.” We clanked glasses. “Where have you been?”
Jails, cemeteries, England. “Waiting for you to call.”
“Your pianist is looking for you. He sounds distraught.”
“Maybe Justine’s about to punt him.” I walked to the piano. “Did Rhoby invite you to some sort of luncheon?”
“Me? I’m the wrong gender.”
Not a word about Chickering. I diddled with his music. “What are you working on?”
“This and that. Old friends. Everything comes back so quickly. Hard to believe I’ve been away from it for so long.” Fausto tugged a tiny twig from my blouse. “Rolling in the grass, dear?”
I watched his slow fingers snap it in half. “I rode with Bobby for exactly one hour. We did nothing but talk.”
“Really now!” Fausto lit a cigarette. “Talk about what?”
“The weather. Jojo.” Go, Smith. “You and Louis Bailey digging a bullet from his crotch.”
Fausto went absolutely still. “He told you that?”
“He knows I won’t repeat it.”
Through hot white clouds, Fausto’s eyes burned a hole in me. Maybe he was trying to decide if I had killed Simon for business or pleasure. “Entertaining story, isn’t it.”
“I liked the part about you leaving him in your apartment for a week.” Finished my drink. “Where’d you and Louis run off to? Bayreuth?”
“Oxford. Louis was experimenting with endocrine extracts. I was his guinea pig.”
“You volunteered for that kind of stuff?”
“It was the sixties. I was curious and idealistic.”
Forget idealism: Fausto had been either collecting or disbursing chits. Huge ones. “Did he discover anything?”
He puffed away. “We’re still working on it.”
“What does that mean? You’re still eating spleens in the name of science? Maybe all that shit is what’s giving you the convulsions.”
He only stared at my thighs. “I’ve been thinking about you,” he said finally. “Would you play something with me?”
Hadn’t been expecting that. “What did you have in mind?”
“Whatever pleases you.”
“I’ve had two drinks.”
“I’ve had four.”
He was bigger. However, chamber music being an exalted form of foreplay, I chose the Brahms G Major Sonata. It reflected the willows outside. Before tuning my violin, I poured myself another drink. “When was the last time you played this? Thirty years ago?”
“Something like that.” He watched me tighten the horsehair on my bow, straighten the music stand. Even after I was ready, he kept looking. Finally he cleared his throat and played the first serene chords. I smiled: Duncan would have required a two-minute chat about tempo and three pages to settle into a compromise. Fausto just read my mind. I envied the ivory beneath his fingers. Twined my notes around his and rolled with him through a shaded vale that opens only to people making music. As usual with Fausto, in music as in life, he knew my part intimately. I felt enclosed and protected. I had met so few, so pitifully few, men who could rise to that minimal challenge. They were the only ones worth going to the precipice for.
Long, languorous piano introduction to the second movement: if Fausto were trying to woo me, he was succeeding. We slid into a gentle trance beyond time, perhaps beyond passion. I needed another belt of gin before facing the last movement: like much of Brahms, it was about death. Strange that playing those pieces made me want to live forever. The music ended but my pulse just got thicker.
“Thank you,” Fausto said finally.
I packed my violin. He
followed me to the foyer. I had one hand on the doorknob when his fingers closed around my wrist. Thunk went my case on his antique sideboard as he backed me against the door. Fausto’s warm tongue took over mine. His hands swept over my neck, down my back and between my legs, as if we had already rehearsed this a thousand times and I had shown him where all the secret places were. Oh God, there was no beast purer than a man finally consummating his lust. Fausto was humid and rhythmic as the ocean: thought I’d fry when his mouth found my nipples. No way we were going to make it upstairs. “Do it here,” I said, unzipping my pants. Didn’t care how. I just wanted something of his inside of me.
Fausto kneeled as if he were about to propose. He peeled off my pants: years out of the loop and he did a better job than Bobby Marvel, who practiced daily. It had been a while since I had been near water and I knew I smelled like an animal. Welcome to the she-jungle, Fausto. He swung my leg over his shoulder and put his tongue into the core of me. Immediate enslavement: tongue was twin of cunt. Better suited to the terrain, capable of infinitely greater delicacy: when his soft flesh met mine, pushed just an inch inside where all the thunder lay, there could be no escape. That Fausto should be able to poise my entire existence on the tip of his tongue was both horrifying and inevitable. When I felt myself slipping away, I wrapped my legs around his neck so that he wore a necklace made of woman: drown in that, sir. He only made low sounds of pleasure, perhaps triumph.
Afterward I lay like a puddle on the floor. When he finally leaned down to kiss me, I smelled myself. The fragrance was like Man, but more complex. I tried to reach his penis. “Don’t bother, darling. Not now, anyhow.”
“Later?”
“I hope so.” Deep kisses. “You have a gorgeous body.” Job requirement. “Your mind’s not bad, either. It’s just that what I see is not what I get.” His tongue wet my throat, his breath dried it. “Drives me mad.”
Each of us became lost in our own contradictions and codes of silence. Eventually he slid my pants back on. “Hungry? I’ve got a few odds and ends in the fridge.”
We went to the kitchen. Leg of lamb, smoked duck, three terrines: some leftovers. I sliced bread as he brought a thick yellow soup to the table. “Mulligatawny. Careful, it’s hot.”
No kidding. I was searching in the refrigerator for yogurt when, behind me, a knife dropped to the floor. Fausto was staring at his hands.
“Upstairs,” he said. Didn’t have to explain what was about to happen this time. I slung his arm around my shoulder. We staggered out of the kitchen. “I’m not going to make it.”
“Yes you are cmon cmon one foot ahead of the other.” If he lost it halfway up the stairs, I couldn’t hold him. “Fight it. We’re almost there.”
He was only running on half a cylinder by the time we made the landing. His body was locking up as I loaded him onto the bed, rolled him toward the center, loosened his shirt. A moment of total quiet before convulsions shook him head to foot. They were worse this time and he made awful noises as he chewed up the tongue that had given me such pleasure just a few moments ago. In seconds the Fausto I knew became nothing more than an obscene mass of meat with defective circuitry. As it moaned and gurgled, I felt the same terror that had gripped me in the jungle: how easily nature stripped us of our cherished inklings of godhood. A momentary chemical imbalance and pouf! Gone.
Much more shuddering and he’d snap his neck. I could only watch as the spasms slowly petered out and Fausto lay still as a corpse on his embroidered sheets. I leaned over his heart, got a thump rather than a pulse. His breath again smelled as if his internal organs had been left out in the sun. Brought a wastebasket from the bathroom since the first thing Fausto had done upon waking last time was throw up. I petted his arm, waiting for intelligence to return to that waxen face, for speech to return to that mangled tongue. I whispered in his ear. He wasn’t bouncing back as quickly as he had last time.
Take a look around, Smith. This could be your only chance.
“Fausto,” I repeated.
Barnard’s dead. I slipped out to the hallway. The first two doors led to bedrooms that probably hadn’t been used since his mother’s wake. Third door was locked. Fausto didn’t give the slightest indication that he felt me taking the key from his back pocket. I entered his study, which looked like my little nook at the zoo: computers, printers, tape decks … Fausto had probably spent a lot of time here before remembering how to play the piano. No incriminating papers, not even a phone bill. I didn’t have time to poke into his computer. Almost missed the one-inch fax still in the machine. No headings to help me out with time or origin. It looked more like an error than a message.
SEE YOU AT DULLES TOMORROW NIGHT. ALL CLEAR. JAMES
James the mercenary? Why was he coming to town? Damn, the Queen was right. Witnesses were like little weights: wrap enough of them around your ankles and soon you’d drown. What was all clear?
Fausto lay on his bed exactly as I had left him. I returned his key. Still no color in his cheeks, no movement behind the eyelids. Wherever he was, it didn’t seem pleasant. It just seemed like … death. I took his hand. “Fausto,” I pleaded.
He shivered so I kept whispering. After a while he opened his eyes. Stared at the ceiling before facing his witness. “I must have had another spell.”
“Just a little one,” I lied. “How do you feel?”
Only strong enough to smile. “What time is it?”
“About one.”
“Just a little spell, eh? I don’t even remember getting up here.”
“It wasn’t your most graceful trip to the boudoir. How’s your stomach?”
Ten seconds later, empty. The pâté didn’t look much different coming up than it had going down. “Sorry, darling,” Fausto wheezed, falling back to the pillow.
I cleaned his face with a damp washcloth. “What brings these things on?”
“No one knows. They go away for years then come back. Always a little worse.” He closed his eyes. “Ah, that feels nice. You’re a wonderful nurse. I sense a great maternal instinct. Think about children someday, would you?”
“Cart before horse.”
He drifted off. “Don’t tell me you would require a husband first.”
“I was thinking more on the order of committed baby-sitter. I’m on the road a lot.”
“Don’t leave the child home. Take a nanny along. Take a few tutors. That’s what my mother did. We had a wonderful life.”
“Your mother was a special case.”
Long silence. Again I thought he had slipped back into his coma. Got rid of the puke and refreshed the washcloth under cold water. As I was daubing his forehead, Fausto half opened his eyes. “Did you enjoy your first marriage?”
“You mean my only marriage? It only lasted a few months.”
“Time isn’t everything. Answer the question.”
“Yes, I enjoyed it. Hugo was the perfect fusion of lover and father.”
“Not friend?”
“We didn’t know each other long enough.”
“Do you miss him?”
I only found out last spring that he hadn’t married me for love. Since then, I had stopped thinking of myself as a widow. “Not anymore.”
“I’m glad to hear that.” With an effort, Fausto rolled over. “Would you marry me?”
He had to be kidding. One, mixing business with pleasure was always fatal. Two, if Fausto hadn’t killed Barnard, he probably knew who did. Three, he lived in Washington. Four, I had never seen him with an erection. Five, I didn’t know what he had in store tomorrow night. Six, Maxine worked only with bachelors. Seven, he was sick. Eight, without him I would be condemned to my solitary mountaintop, perhaps forever.
“When?”
“Right now.”
“Aren’t you forgetting a few details? Blood test? Marriage certificate?”
“All in the drawer there.” Fausto watched as I studied the neatly typed forms. “I hope you’re not offended. I have friends at City Hall. Drop
in to a clinic with a few drops of blood tomorrow and send the results to the person on that envelope. Then we’re all set.”
He had listed the hotel as my local address. Some of the boxes, like my age, he had kindly left blank. “You cheeky boy.”
“Please. I am a man of exquisite forethought.” Maybe he was just an outstanding philosopher. “Tap six on the speed dial, would you?”
“Whom am I calling?”
“The judge. He’s a light sleeper.” Fausto listened as I held the phone to his ear. “Peter? Would you mind dropping by? Thanks.” He let me hang up. “You’ve got about ten minutes to think it over, sweet.” Kissed my hand. “Do something wild. Say yes.”
I went to the kitchen and cleaned up the remains of supper. In the bottom of the fridge was a bottle of excellent champagne that Fausto had probably put aside the same time he had fixed the marriage certificate. Three times I tried to think it over. Three times common sense was pushed aside, first by a heady bliss; next by an equally strong peace; and finally, by that soft laughter that made only a few appearances in a lifetime. I had a chance to go over the waterfall again: no greater thrill than that. At the end of the day, what was there to think about? Time was running out and I wouldn’t find another Fausto.
I was putting a few glasses on a tray when the doorbell rang. On the stoop stood a handsome man and two twentyish girls. He wore a fresh Italian suit: maybe Fausto had caught him on the way to work. The girls seemed the type that got up only at three in the afternoon and spent their lives demanding more allowance. “I’m Peter Finstein. Judge Finstein. You must be Leslie,” he said, shaking my hand as if he married people five nights a week. “These are my daughters Brittany and Carolina.”
More witnesses. “Come in. Fausto’s upstairs.”
Gaga over the interior decoration, the girls were obviously expecting a leading man on the order of Rochester or Carrington. They could barely mask their dismay as Daddy introduced them to the lifeless mound awaiting us on the bed. Looks weren’t everything, ladies: we’d talk again in ten years, after a few hundred prettier schmucks had bled you dry. “How are you feeling, Fausto?” the judge asked, wiggling his friend’s toes.
