also by FRANK BALDWIN
Balling the Jack
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 by Frank Baldwin
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Hachette Book Group
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First eBook Edition: September 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-08283-9
For Lora
Contents
also by FRANK BALDWIN
Copyright
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
Mimi Lessing stirs her hot cocoa with a spoon and then lifts the cup to her lips. She sits at a small table in Liaison, a café and consignment gallery in the West Village. She came from work, through the storm, and drops of rain still shine in her hair. But her table is near the fireplace, and the fire and the hot cocoa have warmed her. She wears a white silk wrap blouse, open at the neck to reveal a thin gold necklace with a single pearl at its center. When she is nervous, like now, she touches the pearl for comfort.
“You must have some questions, Mimi.”
She looks into her cup and then lifts her eyes. “No, you’ve really thought of everything. Thank you.”
The woman across from her is fifty, French, and elegant, with touches of silver in her cropped hair and a red scarf tied expertly at her neck.
“No questions?” she asks.
Mimi shakes her head, so the older woman starts to gather up her papers from the table. She slides contracts and song lists and seating charts into a lavender binder, raises the binder to her chest, and then lays it down again on the table. She looks across at Mimi.
“I was your mother’s idea, wasn’t I?” she says.
Mimi puts down her cocoa. “It isn’t that,” she says quickly. “I’m grateful, really. You’ve done a wonderful job.”
“What is it, then?”
Mimi’s fingers find the pearl and press it into the soft well of her neck.
“It’s just… I don’t want the magic of the day to get lost… in all the details.”
The woman reaches across the table and touches Mimi’s cheek. “To be twenty-five,” she says, smiling. “You’ll have magic, Mimi, I promise.” She rises from her chair, her long legs elegant in a black pantsuit. “Do you know the key to magic?” she asks, gathering a red shawl around her shoulders.
“No,” says Mimi.
“Preparation,” she says. “I’ll call you next week.”
Mimi watches her make her way through the quiet café, then sighs and finishes her cocoa. The ceiling lights are dim and far apart, but the glow of the fire plays over her pure complexion.
She looks out across the room, at the three paintings that hang on the far wall. Her eyes are soon drawn to the last of them, a Spanish hilltop wedding scene. It is beautiful in its simplicity. A single table for the wedding party and guests, with the bride and groom at its head. Their hands are clasped together, their eyes joyous. Mimi smiles wistfully. No seating charts or song lists, no wedding planner.
“Can I get you something else?”
The waiter’s voice breaks her reverie. “No,” she says. “Thank you.” She looks again at the painting, then stands and puts on the beige fitted jacket of her work suit. She lifts her purse off the chair and walks to the front of the café, where she pauses for a moment in the doorway, looking out at the driving rain. She readies her umbrella and steps out the door.
The café is nearly empty now. Soft piano mixes with the murmur of the few scattered patrons and the occasional hiss of the steamer from behind the counter.
Through the streaked glass of the front window I can still see her. I take a sip of cappuccino and watch her red umbrella disappear into the night. I look into my cup and then back at the painting on the far wall. I study the eyes of the Spanish bride. The artist has captured them perfectly, captured the moment when a young woman passes from innocence. I take another sip and lay the porcelain cup on its saucer.
Soon Miss Lessing will pass from innocence. I take a dollar bill from my wallet and place it on the counter, and stand and pull my raincoat around me. It took me nearly fifty years to find her, and six weeks is all the time we have left alone together. Enough time, I hope, for her innocence to restore my own.
CHAPTER ONE
Some of us guys who put no stock in the next world like to lean pretty hard into this one. I lean hardest on the weekends.
Most Fridays I set aside for the gang, but thanks to Pardo, I’m on my own tonight. Pardo had pitched Sid’s bachelor party as a “low-key affair.” Nobody told that to the girls. They turned out to be a lot friendlier than anyone bargained for, and when Jeremy, wrecked from shots and still reeling from the show, staggered home to find Cindy waiting up for him in a teddy, offering a little late-night relief in exchange for some honest reporting, the guy stuck his neck right in the noose.
By eight the next morning the bride was on the warpath, crying on the phone to her bridesmaids and threatening to call the whole thing off. “Don’t tempt me,” said Sid through his hangover. By evening it was all back on schedule, of course, but now everyone in the gang is pulling wife or girlfriend duty for the next two weekends at least.
Everyone but me.
I’m single and free, and if tonight goes the way I want it to, I won’t miss the guys at all. Beer, poker, camaraderie — I’ll take them nine Fridays out of ten. Tonight, though, I’ve got a shot at the water of life.
All day at my desk it’s been building in me. I could hardly keep my mind on the new account. It’s a tough one, too. Art Jensen, a Queens beauty shop maven with a Mafia don’s regard for our Tax Code. By rights he’ll owe a couple of hundred grand, minimum, but if I can’t figure a way to tell him “refund” come April 15, he’ll be calling our senior partners at home. That’s what I get for being the new guy.
I left the office at six, changed quickly at my place, then ran the sixty-hour work week right out of me. Started into the park in the last soft light of day, ran east to the water and then down along it, past the heliport, the ballfields, clear to the Brooklyn Bridge, touching the base of her and turning for home as the lights of the city came on and the cool spring night came down to meet me. After a long shower I poured a tall, bracing glass of Absolut and now I’m sipping it out here on the fire escape in shorts, looking down on the street below and thinking of the night ahead.
She’ll be a tough one, all right. The toughest yet. But what a payoff. I change into a soft shirt and slac
ks, lock the door behind me, and step out of my walkup and into the Manhattan night.
Broadway is no misnomer. Thank you, Spring. The women have put away their heavy coats and are out in blouses and shawls and hose. They are everywhere, stepping sensuously from cabs, gliding from the mouths of the subway. Alone, in pairs, on the arms of men. Even the billboards have caught the spirit. Angelina Jolie, wearing almost nothing, looks down from a movie marquee, and Drew Barrymore, in not much more, flashes by on the side of a bus. I turn onto Eighty-first Street, primed.
Her name is Melissa Clay.
Last Sunday I saw her for the first time in twelve years, the first time since I was a kid of fourteen and she, at eighteen, the hottest girl in our small American school in Tokyo. She was the eldest of three sisters, spaced two years apart, meaning that from the day I found out what my pecker was for until the day I left for college, there wasn’t a two-hour stretch when one of them wasn’t setting me off. Shana and Beth were star material, too, but Melissa was already a budding young woman, and to a kid of fourteen she was as magical — and as out of reach — as a princess.
The Clays were missionaries and summered, as we did, in a modest international resort community on a lake in the Japanese Alps. There were about a hundred of us families, most from the church but a few stray businessmen, too, like Dad, who rented the small log cabins from June through August each year for a couple of months of rustic living. There were no televisions, no telephones, even, and you hauled your drinking water from a well. They were simple summers, full of sun, exercise, and good country food. The missionaries came for the big church down by the lake, for their prayer groups and hymnals, and for the feeling of community they got from being with their own kind. The secular types, like my folks, came to beat the killer Tokyo heat, and when the religion in the air got too thick for them, they countered with the easy porch life of cards and afternoon drinks. As for us kids, we had the lake and, especially, the Boat-house.
The Boathouse was an old wooden wonder built onto the docks of the swimming area. It was open to the air, with low benches for lounging, a Ping-Pong table that worked on the challenge system, and a stereo in the corner, complete with a pile of last year’s rock records from the States. I was a crack Ping-Pong player, true, and a music hound, but I wasn’t thinking table tennis or the Clash when I grabbed my towel from the porch each morning, took lunch money from Mom, and promised her I wouldn’t be late for dinner. No, I hurried to the Boathouse because from there you could see the whole swimming area, which meant that morning to sundown, every day but the Sabbath, you could see Melissa Clay.
Jesus, she was something. Close my eyes today and I can still see her in that black two-piece, sunning on her towel on the docks. Two, sometimes three times an hour I’d walk by her, feigning interest in a Jet Skier or parasailer out on the lake. She’d be on her back, her eyes closed against the sun, and I’d get in a good two-second stare. Twenty minutes later, back in the Boathouse, I’d see her turn over, see Beth or Shana drip lotion onto her smooth back and rub it in, and I’d start down the dock again, gazing out at the mountains that rimmed the lake as if I’d just noticed they were there and needed to walk to the end of the dock for a closer look. The strings of her bikini top would be undone now, lying loose on the towel beside her, and if I timed it right, she would raise up on her elbows to read just as I passed and I’d get the barest hot glimpse at those magic breasts.
Once or twice a summer I’d hit the mother lode. I’d be horsing around with a buddy out on the raft and we’d look in and see her rise from her towel, walk to the diving board, dive gracefully into the cold lake, and start our way. As she moved smoothly through the water, her gorgeous face breaking the surface closer and closer with each breast stroke, even I — the smart-ass atheist — felt a bit of the divine spirit in the air. My buddy and I would lie down (on our stomachs, of course) and watch her through half-closed eyes, pretending to be jolted awake by the dip of the raft as she pulled herself up the short wooden ladder, dripping wet, her nipples hard as tacks through that black top. She’d smile beautifully at us and then, just as innocently as you like, tug casually at her suit bottom where it had bunched up under her sweet ass. Then she’d sit down, just inches away, squeeze the water from her blond hair, and ease onto her back, one golden leg straight out, the other knee pointed up at her grateful creator.
Gott in Himmel, as the German Lutherans used to say on bingo night, when Divine Providence delivered them the winning number. A half hour later she’d still be there, on her stomach now maybe, and we’d still be there, too, stealing looks up her legs, our hard-ons pressed into the raft, wondering idly what it’s like to die of sunburn, because there sure wasn’t a chance in hell that we could even turn over, let alone stand up, while Melissa Clay lay wet and perfect beside us.
One Saturday a month the teenagers were allowed a dance in the Boathouse. Man, the charge those nights used to give me. If the Mets go to the Series this year, and the Series goes seven games, and on the morning of the seventh game our firm’s senior partner, Abe Stein, hands me two primo tickets and his granddaughter and warns me not to bring her home a virgin, then I might feel again the rush that would hit me as I walked down the quiet lake road, a kid of fourteen, to the Boathouse on the night of a dance. And not because I had any dance moves to try out or any real prospect at action, even. No, simply because I knew that Melissa Clay would be there and that she would come, as she always did, in a T-shirt and no bra.
I’m not saying she was a loose girl. Not at all. She was a sweet, healthy missionary kid who everybody loved — the pious adults, especially, because she never missed a Sunday service and always stopped to smile and talk when she passed them on the path. I’d bet all I have that she left for college in the States that fall with her cherry. She was a free spirit, that’s all, and so innocent that if she didn’t feel like putting on a bra under her tie-dyed T-shirt, well, she didn’t and that was that. No one made anything of it.
Except us horny teens. We were a raw bunch. Across the pond, my American cousins were getting drunk at thirteen, high at fourteen, and into girls — literally — a year later. Over in Tokyo, meanwhile, we were still learning grammar and algebra, of all things, instead of backseat moves and self-defense, and making it through to graduation without ever catching a whiff of a joint. Sex? It was a rumor, and a distant one.
That last dance of the summer, in her last summer at the lake, Melissa Clay looked as good as a girl can look. Dancing barefoot on the wooden planks of the Boathouse, the strobe light freezing her in magic pose after magic pose, she had me at the breaking point even before Tim Crockett asked her for a dance — or rather, took her hand and coolly pulled her out onto the floor, because Tim didn’t have to ask any girl. He was nineteen, in college, drank beer, smoked cigarettes, bought his clothes in the States, and, the word was, “knew what to do with it,” whatever that meant.
In the corner, all of us kids started elbowing one another, and, sure enough, Tim wasted no time putting his hands right on her. Put them on her hips as they danced, and sweet Melissa smiled and moved in close, turning innocently in his hands even, letting him drink in her taut ass, then moving away just as his hands slipped down to it. Seconds later he was in close again, and when this time he started his hands up her belly, she let them climb up to within a couple of inches of her carefree breasts and then, still smiling, took his wrists in her hands and moved them back down, then danced off a few steps and came back to him, taking his surprised hands in hers now and placing them on her belt, smiling like an angel as he lifted them, lifted them, lifted them to the very base of her perfect pair before she laughed, pulled them down, and danced away again.
No matador ever worked a bull as well. Or left one in worse shape. When the song set ended and Tim, trying hard to keep his college cool, stood in close and whispered a question to her, she laughed and shook her head sweetly. Ten minutes later we could see Tim sitting alone at the end of the dock, slugging back a
can of beer that he was using, I’m sure, to ice himself down with between sips.
We kids were about at our limit, too, and when ten o’clock came and the social chairman strolled in, switched on the lights, locked the stereo cabinet, and announced that the dance was over, we huddled in a pack on the lake road, calling good-bye to Melissa Clay as she disappeared around the bend with Beth and Shana, her laughing “bye!” still in our ears and the thought of those sweet breasts still in our heads as we synchronized our watches, nodded that we’d all follow through on it, and then raced home to our respective cabins to whack off, in unison, at precisely 10:17.
Damn. It all comes back like a movie. And then to see her again last week — unbelievable. I’d met Pardo at the Howling Wolf for a quick Sunday night drink and was walking home up Amsterdam, passing one of the tiny, one-woman Benetton shops that dot the avenues and stay open each night until ten. I glanced in the window and stopped dead. I walked to the glass. Twelve years, but I knew her instantly. Knew those quick, blue eyes. That angel’s face, the long, blond hair swept back now with a hairband. It was Melissa Clay.
I reached for the door but then checked myself. I watched her as she talked to a customer, standing as only a woman can, one small foot pointing in front of her and the other off to the side. Her legs were still thin and fine, but now they led up to a woman’s ass. I saw her customer laugh and turn with her bags toward the door, and I ducked quickly into a doorway before Melissa’s eyes could follow her and see me through the glass. I stayed in the doorway as the customer walked to the curb, waved down a taxi, climbed in, and sped away. I stayed another thirty seconds and then, not risking a last look in the window, started slowly up Amsterdam again, my mind already working a week ahead.
I had another prospect, true. Debbie Collins, a sassy dance major I’d known up at school and had run in to again at an alumni mixer two weeks back. She’d been a hot little number on the Hill and had lost nothing in the four years since, and I’d lain awake just the night before working out a plan of attack. As I turned onto Eighty-second Street, though, and made for home, I knew that Debbie Collins would have to wait. She was a treat, yes, but this city was full of treats. It held only one Melissa Clay.
Jake & Mimi Page 1
