Lace II

by Shirley Conran

  * * *

  It was a typical New York small gallery opening. Clutching glasses of white wine, intellectual men wore jeans, and intellectual women wore Martha Graham robes or black dresses: standing with their backs to the dramatic photographs of Sydon battlefields, they bitched about the gallery owner, the other critics, and Beverly Sills. Mark Scott said even less than usual as Anstruther led him from the Village Voice critic to the New York Times critic, then turned to a small blond woman who was actually inspecting the pictures through huge, tortoise-shell spectacles.

  “These pictures of the little girl are shocking,” Judy said. “I’d like to discuss what we could do about it in VERVE! magazine. And I like your other work. We can’t use war photography, but I’d like to see your portfolio. I’d like our art editor to see your work.”

  Suddenly, another man was at her elbow, a tall, muscular, swarthy man with coarse features and an expression that veered from anxious to menacing. “Everything all right, Judy?”

  “Yes, Tony, everything’s fine. Would you mind getting my coat, please?”

  Judy turned back to Mark. “Tony is just being protective, he’s a little overzealous sometimes. He thinks I work too hard and I do too much and that people take advantage of me. I’m afraid he’s especially protective when he sees me talking to a handsome young man.”

  “Then let’s talk where Tony can’t see us. How about dinner?”

  * * *

  Tony’s daily aerobics class at VERVE! had been an instant success, and Judy fell into the habit of inviting her friends in to work out, instead of taking them out to lunch.

  As Judy told Pagan about her new friend, the war photographer, Lili pulled on several pairs of dirty leg warmers, all full of holes. “Zimmer calls these my refugee rags,” she laughed as she arranged the knitted layers over her black sweat trousers, then flopped over to tie her shoes with the well-trained suppleness of a Degas figure.

  Pagan could admire with detachment the beauty of the slim young woman; Pagan had always been blithely unconcerned about her appearance until she met Christopher.

  After forty minutes in the exercise class, Pagan’s face was flushed with effort and she was gasping for air. On either side of her, Judy and Lili seemed to be barely sweating. “Thank God I’m going home at the end of the month, much more of this would kill me,” Pagan panted.

  Tony’s glistening muscles were set off by white satin shorts and a white T-shirt with rolled sleeves. His muscles bulged, knotted, quivered, and twitched as he demonstrated the next exercise in front of a panel of mirrors that now lined one wall of the VERVE! boardroom.

  “This exercise increases flexibility.” He demonstrated. “Feet apart, pointing forward. Now bend your knees, shoulders down and relaxed—don’t stick your ribcage out, Pagan. Now move your hips forward right, back, left, swing your hips in a circle. Don’t move any other part of your body.” Blank-faced with concentration, he rotated his pelvis.

  Somebody snickered. “Go to it, Tony.”

  Tony stopped moving. “This isn’t funny. It’s a basic jazz isolation exercise, also found in many other schools of dance.” He scowled. “Even classic Eastern belly dancers perform this movement…”

  Without thinking, Pagan interrupted him. “No, they don’t, Tony. Belly dancers don’t bump and grind, that’s far too crude a movement. They sort of … shimmy all over.”

  Tony didn’t like being contradicted. “No girl gets to be the King’s favorite unless she can shake her ass, and if she won’t practice her exercises, she’s whipped by the chief mistress of the harem.”

  Stubbornly, Pagan said, “I don’t know where you studied your Eastern philosophy, but you’ve got it wrong. There’s no such person as a chief mistress; a proper harem is run by the King’s mother and the Chief Eunuch and no wives would ever be beaten because Royal blood must never be spilled. They used to strangle naughty wives with silken bowstrings.”

  Judy didn’t want Pagan to tease the not-overbright exercise instructor. “Okay, everybody, that’s enough,” she ordered. “Let’s switch to inner thigh exercises and stop this nonsense.”

  The girls groaned and started spreading out on the floor. As they stretched out on foam mats, Judy muttered to Pagan, “If they’re not gay, they’re health food nuts, or Harvard Business School robots, or Eastern philosophy freaks. I sometimes think that Mark Scott is the only normal, good-looking guy in New York. And that’s not saying much!”

  * * *

  Later, in the changing room, Judy reprimanded Pagan. “Listen, Tony hasn’t had the benefit of your background and education, so it’s unkind to tease him. He may be only an exercise instructor, but he’s a damn good one and I don’t want to lose him.”

  “He used to be only an exercise instructor.” Pagan wriggled out of the black leotard which made her legs look four inches longer and her hips two inches smaller. “Do you realize, Judy, that Tony’s turning into your shadow?”

  “Maybe he’s a little overdevoted, but it’s because he’s been a garbage collector, a guard in a detention center, a subway cleaner. He’s merely grateful that he’s now working in an attractive, clean office among a lot of attractive, clean women who all appreciate him.” Judy carefully smoothed on her coffee-colored silk lace teddy. “And Tony’s very useful, very strong, very willing to do odd jobs for me that don’t exactly fit into anyone else’s job specifications. And he’s touchingly devoted to me, simply because I gave him this chance. In fact, he’s almost become…”

  “…Your damned personal bodyguard,” snorted Pagan.

  “Is that such a bad thing, considering the state of Manhattan today?” Judy checked herself in the mirror. “As a matter of fact, if he’s becoming anything, he’s becoming my driver. I never realized how useful a driver could be, until Tony came along.”

  “They’re useful, but drivers can also be a royal pain in the ass,” said Pagan, wriggling into her sheer black tights. “They’re never there when you really want them, which is late evenings and the weekends; you always have to see they’re fed, and they’re often sulky. The only way to have really efficient transport is to have three drivers, each working an eight-hour shift. I must say, that would be heaven.”

  Pagan paused, as she remembered what her grandfather had once told her, after reluctantly dismissing his driver for theft. Her grandfather had said that passengers often forget to close the sliding glass panel between the front seat and the back and, consequently, a driver gets to know everything about his employer’s life, because the people riding in the back seat forget that the driver is a person, not an anonymous, automatic robot, not a piece of impersonal mechanism like a faucet. Pagan remembered her grandfather saying that a driver carried two dangerous weapons: his ears. “Be careful,” Pagan said to Judy.

  * * *

  Judy looked up from her laden desk, and jumped to her feet beaming with surprise. “Mark! I wasn’t expecting you until this evening. I’ve got a meeting in ten minutes.”

  He said nothing, looked at the four telephones on her desk, picked up the nearest one, and handed it to her. “The meeting can go ahead without you, surely?”

  Judy hesitated as he walked behind her, then she felt his right arm in the small of her back, pressing her against his frayed khaki sweater. She took the telephone from him. “Tell Tom to start the meeting without me, Annette.”

  “Miss Jordan, I have Los Angeles on the line.”

  Judy put her hand over the mouthpiece and looked at Mark firmly. “Just give me ten minutes, okay?”

  He sat down in her white leather desk chair, and Judy switched her attention to the telephone. “Swifty? Hi, how are you? About the 1979 agreement, there are a few points I want to clear up with you before we finalize.” She dragged a heavy file toward her.

  Exactly ten minutes later, Judy was still discussing subclauses, when she felt strong tapering fingers creep slowly up the inside of her thighs, stroking the petal-soft skin as the fingers moved upwards toward the neat globes of he
r buttocks in their covering of coffee-covered lace. Judy pressed her thighs together in discouragement. The fingers were not discouraged; instead they parted the thighs, pushing them apart so firmly that it felt almost painful; the fingers continued to stroke the pale skin, working relentlessly upward, then two hard flat palms molded themselves over Judy’s rounded buttocks and squeezed gently, savoring the firmness of her flesh in silken covering.

  Damn you, Mark, and damn your lovely hands, Judy cursed him to herself, as she stood over her desk and tried to absorb the complicated point which the agent was explaining over the telephone. Right now, she had serious things on her mind—and again she wondered, a little cynically, if Mark’s relish for making love in her office wasn’t a way of expressing his resentment against the career which, as she had explained to this unexpected, thrilling man in her life, always would be her first love.

  As she leaned forward to make another note, an insinuating finger traced the crease of her buttocks, and carried the movement down between her legs, transmitting a caress through the screen of silk and lace. His light butterfly touches felt like flames licking her legs. Most of Judy’s consciousness was now confined to that small part of her body which he was stroking, but she struggled to keep her mind on the representation agreement. She felt Mark’s fingertips carefully push aside the gauzy fabric and intrude between her moist lips. Then he knelt down behind her and his warm, wet mouth kissed the inside of her thighs, lightly at first, and then more and more hungrily as his fingers reached deeper into her. He pushed her thighs further apart and she swayed in obedience to his touch, helpless to regain control of her trembling knees.

  “Mark,” she whispered angrily, her hand over the mouthpiece, “darling, this is important! I have to do it.” Judy tried to concentrate on the long-distance conversation as Mark took another nip at her thigh and said, “I know you have to do it, darling Judy. You just go right ahead and do what you have to do, and I’ll do what I have to do.” He stood up behind her, reached his hands around her, unbuttoned her dress and slid each arm out of it. The dress fell to the floor. Then Mark pressed his body against Judy’s back and she realized that he was now naked and insistent. He ran his hands quickly up under the delicate brown silk and held her small breasts, slowly slipping into her as she tried to scrawl a note on the desk pad. He pulled her body back against his, rolling her small, hard nipples in his fingertips, and with her thighs braced against her desk she was trapped against him, the telephone still explaining into her left ear as Mark began to nibble the right ear. Damn it, she needed to hear Swifty’s opinion.

  Mark’s pile of discarded khaki clothes on the floor reeked of stale sweat and cigarette smoke, but his body smelled hot and musky, and she could feel him moving gently as his hips moved hard against her buttocks.

  She could no longer concentrate and there was now an inquiring silence at the other end of the telephone line.

  “Swifty, may I just look through the file again and call you back?” Judy asked weakly as Mark’s left hand slid down from her breast over the small curve of her stomach to plunge between her legs once more.

  “Okay, you win.” She dropped the telephone, twisted round, reached up with both arms and claimed Mark’s sun-blistered lips. Together they fell back into her chair. “You bastard, you’ll get me fired,” she giggled.

  “You liar.” He was still hard and insistent in her body, his right hand still closed around her breast. “The directors know you do your own research.” He kissed her hungrily, sucking her pink tongue into his mouth, as he pushed a pile of papers off her desk, then the page proofs of the next issue cascaded to the floor, followed by Judy’s in-tray.

  Later, they shared the shower in her silver office bathroom, water sluicing down his knotted brown back and her pale body. In the outside office, the secretaries grinned at each other. After ten years of that two-timing stuffed shirt, Griffin, the boss deserved a bit of fun.

  4

  December 2, 1978

  JUDY PINNED UP the December cover of VERVE! on her office wall. The latest in a long series of glossy triumphs was the photograph of Lili and Judy. Judy wore a simple, highnecked, madonna-blue silk dress and Lili wore a crisp, white pique dress with a low, square neckline, a tight bodice, huge puffed sleeves and a full skirt. Although they were holding hands, they looked different; there was an intimacy between them that was, simultaneously, natural but apart. How can a camera pick up something between us that we, ourselves, are hardly aware of, Judy wondered, stepping back to study the hypnotic double portrait of mother and daughter. Judy thought, I feel closer, more loving, toward Lili than I ever have to any other person. She is my only living blood relation and, at the same time, she’s a stranger, almost an alien.

  Lili entered Judy’s office, wearing the white pique dress, in which she looked like a Spanish Infanta; it was a ludicrous outfit for a Manhattan morning in late November, but one that would show up splendidly on the monochrome page prints: newspaper print. If you want to jump out of a newspaper page, always wear white or black or stripes, for maximum impact.

  “Nervous, Lili?” Judy asked.

  Lili shrugged. “What’s another press conference? Whatever we say will be taken down, twisted the wrong way and used in evidence against us.”

  “I still think Kate’s decision was correct.” Judy remembered Kate stuffing her underwear into a well-traveled Vuitton suitcase and advising, “The best think you can do, to take the heat out of the situation, is to hold a formal press conference just before the VERVE! December cover goes on the stands. Give the papers a fair crack at the story and they won’t want to buy anything from the paparazzi, who will then leave you alone.”

  Lili came across the room and shyly kissed her mother on the cheek; they had never kissed on the mouth.

  Judy said, “There’s something I want you to have.” She opened her desk drawer and produced a small, silver photograph frame; in it was a black-and-white, much-creased, blurry snapshot of a laughing young man, wearing a wool hat with a tassel, and brandishing a bamboo ski pole.

  “That’s Nick,” said Judy, “your father.” She held out her little paw-like hands to Lili. On each central finger was a thick band of gold, mounted with a tiny, coral rosebud. “Nick gave me these rings when we said good-bye, he said they were to remind me that I could always depend on him. I’ve worn them ever since. Now, I’d like you to have one, Lili, so that you will feel you can always depend on me.”

  “I already depend on you,” Lili said, as Judy slipped the ring on Lili’s slim finger. “Maxine was so kind to me. And Pagan and Kate were so supportive about Simon. It helped me get through the humiliation and the pain.” She hesitated, then shyly said, “I’ve never really had a woman friend before, never felt this unconditional acceptance and silent affection.”

  Someone yelled in the corridor, then Pagan stormed in. “For God’s sake, Judy, the security in this building is ridiculous! Some lout’s just searched my purse!”

  “Sit down, you stupid Limey, Lili’s just telling me how warm and silent our relationship is.”

  Pagan flung herself onto the cream art deco sofa as Lili said, “I feel that I need female support to help me to learn to live on my own. After Simon, I’ve decided that I must live alone and learn to stand on my own two feet, or I’ll never know what I’m capable of, I’ll never get to know myself properly.” She looked at the endless, anonymous rows of windows in the opposite building. “I still don’t know who I really am, and I’m tired of relying on love to give my life some meaning.”

  Judy looked across the room. “A quest for identity is a journey that we all have to make.”

  “Spare me the psychobabble.” Pagan propped her red leather boots on the sofa.

  “Going through tough times is what forges your identity so fast that you don’t have time to notice it.” Judy walked to the door.

  Pagan said quietly, “I don’t think Lili and I would agree with you, tough times almost pushed us under. Friends are to
keep you afloat.”

  * * *

  Jostling photographers filled the VERVE! boardroom.

  Journalists rapid-fired questions: “How does it feel to be a mother, Judy?” “Have you seen Lili’s films?” “What do you think of the tire-calendar pictures?”

  Suddenly, “Who was Lili’s father?” the girl from the New York Post asked.

  “Lili’s father was a British student whom I met in Switzerland,” said Judy smoothly.

  Pagan looked carefully at the ceiling. No doubt there was an excellent reason for Judy’s little fib, but this was not the right time to ask about it.

  “Tits ’n’ ass, that’s all there is to Lili,” a balding photographer brayed over his shoulder, as he jostled past Pagan on his way to the exit. “None of these junior sex symbols turns me on, give me the mother. Fifty if she’s a day and she still looks terrific.”

  “Ms. Jordan is forty-five,” the VERVE! publicity girl said quickly.

  “Oh sure, another child bride.”

  Judy felt the first painful wrench of readjustment to the new status of motherhood as the press turned away from her and clustered around Lili. “Is it really all over between you and Simon Pont?” “Are you marrying Spyros Stiarkoz?” “Is this true about Senator Ruskington?” “Is it true that you’re pregnant?” “Is it true that you’re dying of cancer of the breast?”

  Lili smiled, looked somber, turned left, turned right, crossed and uncrossed her legs because, after a basic clinch picture with Judy, each photographer wanted an exclusive shot of Lili.

  “Can’t think why I came,” Pagan laughed at Tom. “Nobody’s interested in me or the benefit for the Institute that Lili’s promised.”

  As Judy listened to them, she suddenly caught sight of her reflection in the ornate mirror. Fifty if I’m a day, she thought bleakly. So that’s it, is it? You become a mother and next thing you know your life is over—bang—just like that. Tomorrow, I’ll give away this boring dress; no one’s gong to write me off just because I’ve got a beautiful daughter.