"Oh, Brant!" Syl said, half-laughing, but upset all the same because she thought he needed some warmth and love in his life. She squeezed his arm.
Her hair hung down her back that evening, and she had threaded a ribbon through it. She looked no older than eighteen, as she had promised.
Brant enjoyed that evening as he had enjoyed nothing before in his life. The men all looked at her hungrily, lustfully, for she was as gay, laughing, as a young girl; but she had eyes only for him, her date. There was nothing in his life as beautiful as Syl that evening— Syl dancing close to him, her perfumed hair grazing his cheek; Syl hanging on his every word, ignoring every other man in the room.
Outside the private club, afterward, he kissed her unexpectedly and felt her lips part under his, tasting of the bourbon he'd used to spike their drinks. Suddenly, she'd blinked her eyes and stiffened, pulling away quickly, pretending she was high.
"Ooh—I don't even know if I can stand straight. Guess you'll have to carry me home. But oh, Brant, it was such fun!"
"We'll have to do it again," he said slowly, feeling the unfamiliar tightening and swelling in his crotch, trying to slow his breathing—damning himself for being gauche and hating himself for being young.
Abruptly, needing to break the silence, Sylvia began to talk about having to leave.
"I—I have to go back sometime, Brant. Besides, I have a movie to complete, and—well, Europe is my home now, it's where I belong."
She saw the look on his face, and groaning inside herself, she touched his arm pleadingly.
"Come with me? Oh—but I mean it. You need Europe; you need change, travel, to find out what the rest of the world is really like. You need—you need to live, and to love, and, yes—even to be hurt. You need to learn how to feel. How can I describe it?"
She threw her arms out in a wide, dramatic gesture, and he began suddenly to laugh, throwing his head back, feeling the excitement and the strange new and forbidden tingle that started in his groin and spread all over his body.
Yes, he decided then. She was right; he needed to feel. He needed to get away, to see new things, meet new people—learn about life. And—he was rich, which helped. For the first time in his life, Brant began to realize how free and independent the money made him.
"Syl—let's go. Let's go—oh, I don't care! Tonight, if we want to. Will you let me stay with you?"
In his young, eager selfishness it never occurred to him that she might have someone else, some man in her life. But she, with her own kind of selfishness, did not care, either. She was caught up with the excitement of the moment, of feeling young, loving him. She caught his hands.
"Brant—Brant—of course you'll stay with me! Come on, let's hurry! We have to go back and pack and make reservations, and while we're doing that, I'll tell you all about it—about life in France and Italy and London and—oh, it"s all going to be so wonderful!"
She stopped, giggled. "Just think, we might even run into Fay and Richard. Imagine their faces if we do!"
At the thought, he laughed, too. She had brought laughter into his life, and he felt as if he'd only just learned how to laugh and have fun.
Syl taught him much more; she taught him everything. It was inevitable that it should happen, after all, and it did. She was too weak and too willful to let herself fight the lust she had begun to feel for Brant, mixed up with the real love she had for him; he was too young and hotblooded to let her stop him. She taught him slowly and with infinite patience that was rewarded by his retention and practice of everything she could show and teach him about sex. They made love endlessly and tirelessly—he was her young stud, her rich young lover, and she was the envy of all the other women in her set.
Under the warm sun of the French and Italian Riviera, Brant's body tanned to a golden brown as his hair bleached and grew longer. He became indolent, easily bored, and even more arrogant—except when he made love to Sylvia. With her, he was always tender, always seeking, speaking only to her of love, of caring. He grew, also, more sure of himself as a man and as a lover.
Brant had quickly gotten used to the money he had inherited and the power it gave him. He bought and learned to race fast cars and boats; he skiied on snow and in the water and took risks. He gambled in the casinos, and inevitably, too, he discovered other women. But they were all too easy and therefore eventually boring, without challenge. They offered themselves to him, and he took what they offered if he felt like it, but there was really only Syl for him—only Syl he could burrow into, stay in, let himself care about. With his youthful, selfish arrogance, he expected her to be all his, waiting for him; his alone, while he, being a man, could take what he wanted and needed of the other women who threw themselves at him.
The nights and days of frantic, endless loving began to take their toll of Sylvia, for Brant was almost insatiable as a lover. Under the harsh and burning sunlight, he began to notice the new, slight lines on her face, an almost imperceptible softness of her thighs and breasts. He became more open and blase about his other women; and one day Sylvia caught him making love to her new maid and threw a fit of screaming hysterics. She was almost ugly in her rage, and he slammed out of her house sulkily. When he returned repentantly that evening, she had gone out to dinner with the Spaniard, Morales, who was directing her new movie. Burning with an unfamiliar, jealous rage, Brant went to a party thrown by an expatriate Englishman and stayed until the end, becoming involved in his first three-way sex orgy that night.
Filled with remorse afterward and a sick kind of disgust, he went back to the villa. Syl was still with Morales. They lay together, sleeping, in her bed, which had been their bed. The covers, trailing onto the floor, exposed her body to the waist; her heavy breasts and tangled hair were half-covered by the man's revoltingly hairy body.
All injured vanity and hurt pride, seething with a mixture of rage and hate and pain, Brant walked out— left her house and took his own apartment in the same city. He would show her! He became a member of the most depraved and decadent set in Rome, going with both women and men according to the circumstances or as the inclination took him. He joined in orgies, experimented with drugs, made the scandal sheets regularly.
Having wanted only to punish Brant, and frantic now because instead of merely getting jealous and returning penitently to her, he had instead seized on her infidelity as an excuse to leave her, Sylvia tried to get him back. She telephoned; she wrote him letters; she made tearful scenes in public. He was coldly adamant.
She came to his apartment one hot noon, pounding on his door and screaming insults until he opened it to her. As soon as she saw him, she began to cry, her voice pitiful, pleading.
"Oh, God—don't you see that I love you? I love you, Brant. Don't hurt me anymore. Stop punishing me!"
"Sorry, but you blew it. You told me I should learn about life, Syl, and I've only just begun to learn. From all kinds of teachers, too. Man, am I learning!"
His voice was cruel, mocking her—her tear-ravaged face, her too-lush body, her lack of pride.
She couldn't speak, and he hammered home tire last bolt, the last and most painful insult.
"It's over, Syl. Find another gigolo, another stud, huh?"
"Do you honestly believe that's all it was, Brant? Do you?"
She had stopped screaming at him, her voice suddenly quiet, ragged-sounding.
"What was it, then? Was I looking for a mother, you for a son? Well, maybe that was it—maybe that's all it was. I wanted a mother, and you— What was it you wanted, Syl? Someone young and untiring to fuck you? Ah, who knows, who cares? Sorry, Syl, but I've still got a lot to learn, and you have already taught me everything you know."
He was standing in the doorway of his apartment; he hadn't let her come in, and the door opened wider behind him, the girl of the moment looking out sulkily. Sylvia knew her—she was the young French starlet who'd had the ingenue lead in her last picture.
"Cherie! It's cold in bed alone."
Something in
Sylvia's face, in her sudden stillness, made him reach his hand out to her almost instinctively. Had he really needed to be so cruel? Why had he felt like lashing out at her?
"Syl.. ."
"It—it's all right, Brant. I'm sorry. It really is okay now, I mean—I think I understand. I won't bother you again, I promise."
She turned, went running down the steps, her heels clattering. Why did she always wear such ridiculously high heels? He started halfheartedly to go after her, but the girl clutched at him from behind, her greedy fingers spread over his crotch. Shrugging, he went back inside with her. She was still new, very young and wild and experienced—he hadn't yet got over craving her body.
Inside, the air conditioning hummed softly as they twisted and turned in bed. The thick, soundproof walls shut them up in a cocoon of their own breathing and broken sounds and words.
Outside, in the sunlight, Sylvia died without a sound under the wheels of a taxi that came careening around a corner just as she reached the street, still running. She died very quickly, and an ambulance shrieked up soon after that and took her broken body away. Brant knew nothing about it until the next day.
Some weeks later, when the nightmares he had started having had become worse and more frightening in spite of all the excesses he had pushed his body into, Brant Newcomb went back "home." He was only twenty. He felt as if he had done everything; there had to be something new to experience, some way to stop thinking.
He joined the Air Force because he enjoyed the challenge of flying, was promptly commissioned an officer, and went into flight training to learn to fly fighters. He volunteered for Vietnam as soon as he could, and spent two years there flying fast jets at the time when the conflict was at its height. Then, still not having succeeded in killing himself in spite of all the chances he took and the extra missions he volunteered for, he came back to the States and resigned his commission—his tour of duty over, a free man again. Free of the monotony that was military life when he was not actually flying, he was determined this time to be freed of his nightmares and his ever-present demons as well. He went into analysis.
"You loved her. Why are you afraid to admit it?"
"Why in hell do you keep insisting upon that? I thought a psychiatrist isn't supposed to put words in a patient's mouth. No, I didn't love her. Christ, I've never loved anyone! But she was the first—naturally, that made it different."
"But that's not all that made it different, is it? She was your aunt, your mother's sister. You risked the church's excommunication for her. And she was the only woman, the only thing you ever really cared about, wasn't she? Why are you ashamed to admit to me now what you have already admitted under hypnosis? Because she was older than you? Or is it because of some deeply suppressed moral code, perhaps? Because it was incest?"
"J'accuse! That's what you sound like, do you know that? Ah, come on, man! Incest, shit! Syl was only my aunt, for Christ's sake! So at the beginning I suppose I made a kind of mother figure out of her, but later—no, incest never entered into it, I never gave it a thought. She was a woman. Great in the sack, but too damned possessive. And that's all."
"Is it? What about all the years before—before you saw her as a woman. The visits, the cards, the little gifts. You were a small boy then, and you loved her. Wasn't she the only person who really cared about you? And even afterward, wasn't that still soF'
"Goddammit, are you trying to say— Ah, yes, that is what you're saying. That Syl loved me for myself. To everyone else it's the money and the fact that I'm known as a cocksman, a stud."
"Yes, that's right. Is there anything else to you besides that? Do you ever give a woman, or any other person for that matter, any part of your real self? Sylvia was the only one to whom you gave of yourself, wasn't she? I think that with the others you only take...."
"You're smart, you know that? That's why I pay you too damned much money and keep coming back. But no—what is the real self? Has it ever occurred to you that I might not be real at all?'
"Very dramatic, Brant. But let's go back to Sylvia."
"Oh, damn Sylvia! Damn her, damn her! Goddam her for dying!"
"Ah!"
Seeing an analyst hadn't cured Brant of Sylvia's ghost, but he had learned at least to accept what had happened, and above all, to accept himself as he was. No regrets, no more self-torment for Brant Newcomb. When something started to bug him, he had learned to bring it out into the open and think about it objectively. He had even learned to think about Sylvia without too much pain, too much guilt. Poor, damned, darling Syl! Did she know, wherever she was now, that by dying she'd made him forever hers?
And then, from Sylvia, Brant's thoughts veered unwillingly back to Eve Mason, and the present. She had hair that felt like Syl's, and something else about her— perhaps her pathetic, foolish, useless defiance—that nagged at his mind. She had made him want to put her down, to defeat her and degrade her, to show the stupid bitch that after all she wasn't really different from Francie. It continued to irk him that he hadn't succeeded. And he wasn't used to regretting anything he did, either, except for Syl
Brant lay awake thinking a long time before he was ready to sleep, and then he fell asleep peacefully and quickly, his mind emptied of thought, decisions made.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
EVE WALKED INTO THE BOOM very slowly, her feet dragging, and from his place near the window, where he still stood looking out, David swung around to face her.
"For God's sake, do you know it's jive in the morning? Who was the guy who brought you home? You were supposed to find Francie—that's why I've been sitting up here the whole goddam night while you partied. Eve—" As she moved slowly forward into the light, he really saw her at last, and she heard his indrawn breath. "God, you look terrible! Will you tell me what the hell happened?'
She was suddenly too tired to stand, almost too tired to talk. Why didn't he just take her in his arms and exorcise all the evil spirits, instead of acting as if she were on the witness stand? Why didn't he?
She went to him, stumbling, half-running, and pressed her body against his.
"David—oh, David, please! Just hold me. Just hold me, please!"
She waited for his arms to go around her, but instead, something in the rigidity of his body communicated itself to her, and very slowly she raised her head to meet his eyes.
"David?"
He could feel her body trembling against his, and tried to keep his voice level. What was the matter with her? What had she done this time?
"Eve, I have to know what happened. What are you trying to hide? Let's start with Francie, my sister. Was she there? And who in hell was the guy in the Mercedes?"
She moved away from him. He hadn't put his arms about her. She felt better, stronger, standing alone. She turned her face away from him so she couldn't see his cold, accusing eyes, and clung with both hands to the back of a chair for support.
"Eve!" He said again, more impatiently this time.
"All right, David. I'm trying to—to put things together so I don't sound too incoherent. Francie was there, but she wouldn't listen to me, although I tried to— She went away in the end, with a man they called Derek. They—he told me he's a psychiatrist. I tried to stop them, but he—wouldn't let me. He—"
"You're not making sense, Eve! He—who's he? The man in the car?"
"Yes! Oh, God, I told you he was dangerous, I told you! And then I forgot to remember— Brant Newcomb. Your client. He sent Francie to New Mexico with Derek. I don't think she wanted to go in the end, but he gave them money and sent her away. You know what? He auctioned her off. He really did. That's the kind of man he is; only he's worse!"
"This is—your story sounds impossible, Eve! Are you sure you were sober?"
"Sober? Yes, I was sober! Until he put something in the drink he gave me that was supposed to make me stoned out of my head like everyone else, only it didn't. No—don't interrupt me now, David. I have to go on talking, or I could never tell you—" Her voice drop
ped to a kind of breath-torn whisper, but she turned her head and looked at him now, and he saw the pupils of her eyes. Yes, she had taken something. David opened
his mouth to say something to her and closed it again.
"Well, you want to know, huh? You're sure you want to know what he did to me, David? He took me into his game room—that's what he calls it—it has mirrors and lights everywhere and an enormous bed—and he— he was like an animal. He was high on something, too, I guess. He tore my clothes off, and he hurt me when I fought him, and then—then everyone else joined in. I was the party, David. There was nothing I could do to stop them, although I struggled and fought They did everything they wanted to do with me, and they took pictures, and he said if I tried to do anything about it, he'd—no! I don't really want to talk about it; I don't want to think about that girl in the mirrors being me, me!"
She was gulping in deep breaths of air as if talking had exhausted her. David's voice shook, too, but she couldn't tell whether it was from shock or anger.
"My God, everything you've told me sounds like part of some crazy trip—some coke nightmare. How can you expect me to believe any of it? I've heard some stories about Newcomb, but dammit, the man isn't a maniac. Why should he want to rape you when there are a thousand other women he can buy with all his fucking money? And Francie—what about Francie? What really happened, Eve?"
"I don't know—I told you that, didn't I? And I'm not trying to explain his motives, I'm just telling you what did happen, damn you! It happened—I just wish I had dreamed it!"
She shrieked the words at him, and he stepped backward. Had the drug she had obviously taken maddened her? He'd never seen her like this before.
"I'm sorry Eve." He tried to keep his voice controlled and reasonable. He was hardly in the mood for an hysterical scene after an all-night vigil, and she seemed determined to make one. "I just find it difficult to believe that a man like Brant Newcomb, as filthy rich as he is, and a good-looking bastard into the bargain— why he'd want to rape you. Why you in particular? And you, why would you—" He stopped, wondering if he was going too far, especially in the state she was in.
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