Too Much Too Soon

by Jacqueline Briskin

  Her conquest was borne away. Crystal, feeling drained by the exertion of her vivacity, decided not to try the thousand-year eggs or shark’s fins or whatever other strange food was being served. As the two-story room cleared, she glanced toward the rear bay window. Standing alone, Curt lounged against the arch with that air of relaxed energy most women seemed to find devastating. Maybe he had married poor Honora, as everyone said, but Crystal bet he made her life a misery with his chasing.

  She inhaled deeply and ran her tongue over her lips. Pushing her way around two large groups which were meandering toward the dining room, she went toward him.

  “If it isn’t the belle of the ball,” he drawled, raising his highball in a mocking way.

  His sardonic grin, or so Imogene said, was sexier than straight, unadulterated musk, but Crystal considered it nastily arrogant. His topaz eyes were bloodshot. He’s sozzled, she thought in surprise, and was delighted afresh with her own sobriety. “Why don’t you stay where you belong?” she demanded.

  “The Weis mailed me an invitation.” He finished his drink. “And where’s your esteemed husband?”

  “You have no right to be in San Francisco,” she said belligerently.

  “Oh? Is there a warrant out for my arrest?”

  “After what you did to Honora—”

  “You don’t say her name,” he interrupted in a low growl.

  “She’s my sister.” Crystal sounded defiant.

  “That,” he said, setting down his glass, “is impossible to believe.”

  “The way you treated her, you deserve to be shot!”

  Two women with glossy black chignons turned to look at them.

  “Quit shrilling like a two-bit hooker who’s lost a trick,” Curt hissed.

  She was too angry to be intimidated. “Hooker?” Her voice rose yet higher. “Is that what you think of my sister?”

  Jerking open a French door, Curt gripped her arm and yanked her outside. The entire first story was surrounded by a pillared porch, and as she stepped onto the painted sequoia planks, she was aware of the chill air, aware that her bare flesh was rising in goosebumps, a discomfort that refreshed her. The summer night was clear, with a full, brilliantly white moon. She felt immortal, clean and strong. She did not need to evade his rough grasp. She was in control, and therefore it was all right to allow him to propel her down the steps to where thick, rattling shrubbery cast impenetrable shadows.

  He released her arm and she stared at the man who had reduced her sister to a pathetic, pleading, unwed mother. “You’re an animal,” she panted. “I can’t bear to think of you with poor Honora—”

  “You conniving cunt, I told you not to say my wife’s name!”

  “You’ve stolen both my sisters.” With a stab of sadness she thought of dark-eyed, tender Honora, beloved companion of her girlhood, and of skinny, mean-mouthed little Joscelyn, who suddenly seemed so dear. “My sisters are all that ever meant anything to me,” she said. Choking back a sob, she accepted that this unplanned remark was her life’s deepest truth: Langley, a charming, boozy loser, had always stood at the periphery of her existence; her elderly, stubborn husband was as inconsequential to her as that dull, sweet infant, her son. Males, all of them. Another species to be wheedled and coaxed and tamed. My sisters, she thought, they’re the meaningful part, the mainstay of my life. Tears of unendurable, irreconcilable loss prickled behind her lashes.

  Then, swiftly, her grief converted itself to rage. Rage at Curt, rage at his gender. Men, she thought with an all-encompassing blaze of hatred. Men, with their strong, grasping hands and powerful wrists, men with their ridiculous pride in that bludgeoning dagger of flesh.

  With a sudden motion she raised her right hand, hitting below Curt’s cheekbone with her full strength. At the loud report of her hand exhilaration charged through her, and a slap wasn’t enough. The blood drumming deafeningly against her ears, she used her large, emerald-cut engagement stone as a weapon, catching him close to his left eye, scratching viciously.

  “Bitch!” He grabbed for both her wrists.

  There was a long moment when neither moved. By the reeling, shadowy moonlight she could see that her diamond had caught his flesh and a droplet of dark blood was oozing down his high-boned cheek. An incandescent heat flooded through her and she struggled to mark him again. His manacling grip tightened. She bared her teeth, hurling herself forward to bite his jaw. He stepped back, and she lunged again, her stiletto heels catching in the wet grass as she jerked and swiveled in an attempt to consummate her animus.

  Abruptly he released her wrists. She fell toward him, flinging her arms around him, a savage wrestler’s hold to crush and annihilate.

  In the same enveloping hatred, she reached down for the fly of his satin-striped trousers.

  A convulsive shudder passed through him. Then, bizarrely, unfathomably, they were meshed together, their locked bodies slowly lowering to the wet, stubby grass in a gladiatorial embrace. She drew his zipper down sharply, he shoved up her tulle skirts, exposing white thighs striated by taut black strips of garter. She was oblivious to the silk cutting into her flesh as he tore at her black panties. Inhaling the liquor on his breath, the odors of his sweat, she flung her legs around him.

  As he thrust into her she whinnied in triumph.

  And then her cherished control left her, and she shook with violent gasps that rose from the wellspring of her being.

  When awareness returned it was with a buzzing sensation of her extremities—fingers, toes, ears. He was sprawled with his full weight pressing her into the wet lawn.

  Abruptly he pulled away from her and rose to his feet. Shifting from the painful metal that she recognized as a sprinkler head that was digging into the small of her back, she stared up at him, a titan swaying over her. The light wavering across his scratched face showed a peculiarly boyish expression of shame.

  On the top step he halted to adjust his dinner clothes. Without a glance back at her, he followed the porch around curtained windows, the sound of his footsteps fading.

  Dizzily rising to her feet, Crystal suddenly recognized how drunk she was. Just like Daddy, she thought. Uggh. Bending awkwardly, she shook her full breasts into the wired cups of her Merry Widow, adjusting her strapless bodice, flailing moisture and grass from the diaphanous black folds of her skirt. She was wet through, shivering with the cold. Yet her nerves and muscles felt relaxed, a bone-deep calm. From a distant vantage point above her vertigo and nausea, she wondered whether the shuddering engulfment that she had just experienced was an orgasm.

  Holding on to the wood balustrade, she negotiated the steps, halting at the French door. A few groups still clustered in the vast, ugly living room, and it came to her hazily that despite her efforts she probably was exceedingly disheveled. She stumbled along the porch in the same direction as Curt.

  Rapping at a side door, she gripped the jamb, waiting. An elderly Chinese maid in a black silk uniform opened up; her wrinkled face showed surprise. Crystal pitched her voice commandingly. “I’m Mrs. Talbott. Bring me my white fox stole, and inform my chauffeur I’m ready to leave.”

  Waiting for the Cadillac on the gravel driveway, she thought of Curt Ivory’s expression as he had stood above her. Young, vulnerable, and hopelessly ashamed.

  Three

  1964

  Joscelyn

  25

  A few minutes before seven on a fine morning in March of 1964, Joscelyn pushed open the sliding glass door of her bedroom, stepping onto the terrace, startling a nearby covey of quail. The plump, crested birds rustled heavily from the silver-wet lawn, flying low above the irregular carpets of spring flowers that climbed the canyon wall.

  The gardens, Honora’s delight and obsession, a loving mixture of landscape styles, were at their best in the dawn stillness. Joscelyn, though, was not paying homage to the beauties of nature, but turning her left hand this way and that so the sun glanced off the facets of Malcolm Peck’s tiny round diamond. A softly amorous smile
transformed her discreetly madeup, clever face.

  It would require the meticulous scrutiny of an archeologist to uncover traces of the deplorably plain child in the woman Joscelyn had become. Those years of orthodontic misery had done the trick of correcting her overbite. Her thick glasses were gone, replaced by contacts that enhanced the clear, pale Cambridge blue of her eyes. The fineness of her hair was an asset for a pixie cut. At just over five nine, she had the Sylvander fine-boned slenderness.

  The ugly duckling had turned into a reasonable facsimile of a swan.

  Joscelyn’s self-identification, however, remained tethered to that homely little girl. No matter how skillfully she fixed herself up, her mirror ultimately reflected a gangly, humiliatingly flat-chested woman. She grudged herself one good feature. Her legs. Long and nicely curved, they were well displayed by her Courrèges minidress.

  The forces that had shaped Joscelyn—being motherless and virtually fatherless for her early years, the unsupervised custody of a series of aged, carpingly tyrannical nannies, having two lovely older sisters—had turned her into the harshest of self-critics. In order to feel worthy of the air she breathed, Joscelyn Sylvander must be the best. At Berkeley, one of only twelve female engineering students, she had ferociously honed her keen mind, making Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year, graduating Summa Cum Laude. At Ivory she had arrived early and lugged home a briefcaseful of work: within a year, without the Big Boss lifting a finger, she was promoted to project engineer.

  Her career gave her deep satisfaction.

  She relished the well-organized, mathematical thinking imposed by engineering. She took pleasure in facing concrete problems that couldn’t be altered by argument—as opposed to the decisions of, say, a psychologist or a lawyer. She enjoyed transferring thought to fact. Her work so immersed her that at the conclusion of each project she was overcome by a depression that was almost like a premonition of death. Though she took pride in being successful in a man’s world, during her worst moments she would ask herself whether anyone with her drive and discipline could be truly feminine.

  Unconsciously her left thumb rubbed her engagement ring, and she smiled. You’re my woman, Malcolm had said against her ear when he handed her the domed velvet box.

  The Ivorys owned a Bel Air canyon whose sides were as steep as those of a bathtub. In the rich, narrow valley nestled the house—or rather, a series of structures: Joscelyn’s cottage, the servants’ quarters, the guesthouse and the seven-car garage were connected to the main building by this winding, pergola-covered walkway. The rambling architecture with its exposed beams and honey-colored stone had the cozy charm of a miniature Cotswold village. Curt had done the design himself, a complement to the country gardens that Honora had begun planting in 1953, the same year that he had floated an enormous loan to buy out the ailing, septuagenarian George NcNee. (Joscelyn admiringly saw Curt’s acquisition of thirty overpriced Bel Air acres at such a time as illumination of both his openhandedness and his boundless, optimistic self-confidence.)

  She pushed open the glass door of the breakfast room. Her brother-in-law was eating scrambled eggs and bacon at the far end of the rough-hewn Welsh table. The years had served Curt well. A few strands of distinguished white showed in his dark blond hair, which was thick as ever. The grooves in his tanned forehead and smile lines fanning out from his unusual topaz eyes gave him the look of mature strength that is a prerequisite for true power.

  Glancing up from the Los Angeles Times, he nodded. He disliked early morning conversation, so Joscelyn slipped quietly into her chair, pouring herself coffee.

  She was finishing her second cup when Curt, without comment, handed her the financial section.

  Glancing down the columns, she saw what he intended her to read: TALBOTT’S FIRST AMERICAN COMPANY TO CONSTRUCT HIGHWAY IN AFGHANISTAN.

  “What about the road we built last year out of Kabul?” she asked sourly. “That Crystal!”

  Since the foggy evening she had slipped out of the Clay Street mansion’s side door, she had seen neither Crystal nor Gideon; she had never laid eyes on their two little boys.

  So out of touch were the Talbott and the Ivory ménages that they might have existed in different galaxies, with Langley as the sole space traveler. On his frequent visits to the States, the paterfamilias stayed both in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and on the first of every month he received from the London offices of each of his warring sons-in-law substantial sums that enabled him to reside with an excellent cellar in a large Sloane Square flat, and also to subsidize the delightfully early Victorian offices of Sylvander Press. Sylvander Press had thus far brought out five slender books of avant garde poetry and fiction, losing money on each, but when Langley clinked glasses with the flower of British publishing he was able to drop with casual modesty, “My house did the first Rupert Jacks, y’know.” Also he could tell himself that those monthly checks he deposited in his account were sound business investments for his sons-in-law.

  Joscelyn scanned the long column about Talbott’s other new projects. “She really spews out the hype, doesn’t she?”

  Curt’s eloquent lift of shoulders was as far as he would go in discussing anything connected to his estranged benefactor. He dropped his napkin on the polished old wood. “Tonight’s the planning pow-wow, isn’t it?”

  Malcolm was coming to dinner so the four of them could discuss wedding plans.

  “Tonight’s the night,” Joscelyn agreed happily.

  Curt let himself out the glass door through which she had entered, cutting across an allee of lawn, his shoes leaving dark prints on the dewy grass.

  Honora, wearing boots, jeans and a bulky old sweater, emerged from a coppice of wisteria trees. Curt held out his arms and she dropped her trowel, running to snuggle against him. Joscelyn felt a painful catch, reminiscent of the time she’d taken a train across the top of the Andes and her lungs had strained for oxygen in the cold, thin air. She touched her diamond talisman again and her breathing eased.

  * * *

  Malcolm had been invited for seven, and the case clock in the hall was chiming the hour as he buzzed from the wrought-iron electric gates that protected the mouth of the canyon a third of a mile away. Joscelyn buzzed back and went outside to meet him. As Malcolm got out of his gray Volkswagen, she was engulfed by that familiar sense of disbelief. How was it possible that Joscelyn Sylvander had snagged a man this spectacular?

  Malcolm’s boyish beauty could easily have made him a bit cheap, like a male model, but the gods had seen fit to mitigate his good looks with a few minor aberrations. His dark hair was untamable, rumpling foward to obscure the impeccable widow’s peak; his mouth, which was well chiseled and full without being petulant, had a faint white scar bisecting the lower lip, and on the bridge of his straight, masculine nose was a bump, as if a tiny bone had been broken during football scrimmage. The eyes were a pure gray darkened by the porch of his brow. (The deep set of his eyes made Joscelyn see a resemblance between Malcolm and Curt that was invisible to everybody else.) Her betrothed was a fraction over six feet: his wide shoulders, narrow waist and narrower hips made him seem taller.

  When not worrying that Malcolm would desert her, Joscelyn fretted about the adverse effects of their age difference. At twenty-four she was two years older—well, actually one year and eleven months.

  Last spring, before his graduation from Caltech, Malcolm had been recruited by Ivory, and had become one of the hundreds of beginning engineers swarming through the Spring Street office where she worked. (Ivory, outgrowing its original McNee headquarters, had spread out into various downtown office buildings.) They hadn’t met until the fall. On the morning of November 22, when the news first came from Dallas, the corridors had been filled with bewildered, lost-looking people: Joscelyn and Malcolm had comforted one another for the wounding, then the death, of President Kennedy.

  Malcolm was smiling as he came up the steps to her. The carriage lamp next to the front door shone on their embrace. Incre
dibly, he was as deeply in love as she, and far more open about showing it. He called her office several times a day, he brought sandwiches to her cubicle at lunchtime, he spent most evenings with her, and every weekend.

  “My geisha, waiting outside,” he said, kissing her lingeringly.

  Dizzied, she murmured, “Don’t get too accustomed to the good treatment, buster. It’ll never last.”

  He nuzzled her cheek. “About tonight, okay if we tell them we want the wedding small and quick?”

  “Exactly what I have in mind.”

  “And soon.” He hugged her fiercely. “Christ, am I ready.”

  Malcolm had an old-fashioned streak. Joscelyn, hon, I’ve always dreamed of having a virgin on my wedding night. And, at the advanced age of twenty-four and a half, she was amazingly that, still a virgin. Not because of moral compunctions or anxiety about unwanted pregnancy, but because neither of her serious boyfriends—soft-voiced Steve Kayloch at Berkeley and Marty Lausch, an electrical engineer at Hughes—had been ready for marriage, and to hop into bed with an uncommitted partner would be one more example of her inferiority to her sisters.

  She bit his earlobe gently, murmuring, “How soon is soon?”

  “However long it takes to get a license and blood tests.”

  The dinner table conversation covered everything but the wedding, slipping easily from chances of Ivory doing projects in new third world countries like Zambia and Tanzania to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam to Martin Luther King and the sit-ins in the south, to Herzog, which Honora was reading, to who would win the Oscars.

  When Malcolm first had started dating Joscelyn he had come to the house wearing his Ivory working uniform, one of two narrow, dark suits with a white, short-sleeved shirt and black knitted tie, but now, like Curt, he had changed to jeans and a checked cotton shirt worn under a sweater. Then, he had said very little, his gray eyes fixed on each as they spoke, giving Honora and Curt’s most trivial remarks his devout attention. Now, however, he appeared supremely at ease at the round dining table, laughing, interrupting.