Too Much Too Soon

by Jacqueline Briskin

  She went to the couch. The air here was tainted with lush perfume, the acridity of sweat and the flat odor of sex. Her clumsy throw strewed garments short of the rug. The blond rose on long, shapely legs, bending for a dark, full skirt that she casually put on before tossing Curt his shorts.

  As he yanked them on, he said, “Winners of the Jon Hall, Dorothy Lamour look-alike contest. Lindsay, you’re too young—”

  The girl gave a throaty laugh. She appeared totally at ease half naked. “Sweetie, it’s Linda, and Dottie had a wonderful retrospective at the Academy.”

  “That’s right, you told me that you’re a member in good standing of SAG. Linda, this is Joscelyn. Joscelyn, Linda.”

  “Hello, Joscelyn.” Linda swung her hair back and raised her hand in a salute.

  Inarticulate fury overcame Joscelyn, a sense of being violated, of witnessing some unspeakable orgy that debased not only Honora but Curt as well. She wanted to shake this vain slut until her big, naked breasts fell off. She nodded coldly.

  “Now for the drinks. Joss, what’s your poison?”

  “Changed my mind, thanks.” Joscelyn bolted across the room to push open one of the sliding glass doors to the terrace. Linda’s actressy chuckle followed her as she ran along the brightly lit pergola to her rooms, where she hugged her arms around herself as if the temperature were below freezing.

  53

  Sunday morning there was no sign of Curt or Linda, but to avoid any chance of confronting them, Joscelyn had breakfast at Ship’s in Westwood, spending the morning in aimless driving, the afternoon at a matinee of The Godfather, afterward eating pizza and salad across the street from the movie theater. Darkness was filling the canyon when she arrived back at the house. She had every intention of going directly to her rooms, but as she started along the pergola she realized that Curt was sitting on the terrace.

  “Evening,” he said.

  I can’t avoid him forever, she thought. Her knee and hip joints felt stiff as she walked toward him.

  He raised his glass. “This is a pretty decent Moselle. Care too sample it?”

  “Sure.”

  She sat on the wrought-iron couch next to him, watching as he took the wine from the Georgian silver cooler and filled one of the half dozen rock-crystal glasses that the servants routinely set out—in Curt Ivory’s homes nothing was stinted or done meanly.

  “Sorry about last night,” he said. “I never figured on you walking in. She’s gone, by the way.”

  Sipping the cool, pale wine, Joscelyn attempted to speak in the same light tone that he had. “I guess now that you’re home I should find my own place.”

  “If you’re going to be a Fundamentalist about the Lindas of the world, yes,” he said.

  The setting sun cast its last, most intense, reddish light on the eastern rim of the canyon, where Honora’s belvedere stood. Staring up at the airy, octagonal structure, Joscelyn said, “Honora’s my sister.”

  “But these days hardly my wife.”

  “There’s been a parade of Lindas these last few months, hasn’t there?”

  “Look, last night it was rough, and I apologize. But Joscelyn, facts are facts. I’m a single man nowadays, and I get myself fucked.”

  He said the last sentence arrogantly, and suddenly she had the feeling that he hoped she would report both this conversation and the Linda incident to Honora.

  “I suppose better the Lindas of the world than another co-venture with Crystal,” she said, regretting her words immediately.

  Prepared for Curt’s least pleasant smile and some biting repartee, she glanced through the dusk at him. She was utterly appalled by his expression of guilt-stricken misery.

  Joscelyn had always regarded pity as a denigrating emotion, one that lessened the person at whom it was directed. Yet now, looking at her brother-in-law’s set profile, she felt a great surge of compassion that in no way diminished her long-term feelings for him.

  “Curt,” she said softly. “Look, I didn’t mean to snipe at you. The truth is I’m very sorry about . . . well, the way things turned out with you and Honora. What’s the use of keeping up a running battle. You’ve always been my friend.”

  “Thanks, Joss,” he said, and continued to gaze at the slick dark water of the swimming pool. It seemed to her that his expression and posture were yet more disconsolate.

  She set her monogrammed glasses on the flagstone and reached over to take his hand, squeezing it comfortingly. He did not draw away, but there was no response from his warm, lax fingers, no answering pressure of palm; she might as well be a woolen glove, yet she found herself incapable of releasing her hold.

  Before the breakup of the Ivory marriage, Joscelyn had mentally placed Curt so far off limits that she had never once indulged in a fantasy of them united sexually. He was her brother-in-law, the husband of the adored sister who had taken a mother’s place, he was tabu. But on learning of his well-marked liaison with Crystal and seeing at firsthand one of his flings, an aperture in her mind had opened. And sitting on the dusk-heavy terrace, feeling the warmth of contact, it seemed to her that the physical aspects of her love might not be so hopelessly unrequitable.

  Timidly she began tracing the pulse and strong tendons inside his wrist. He appeared too sunken in his brooding to notice: this casual inattention, rather than frightening off Joscelyn, made her imagine herself his long-married wife consoling him for some ineluctably rotten break.

  Out of the depths of her body came a rush of desire, an urgent and pure sensual arousal that she had not experienced since Malcolm’s death—indeed, she had decided that this side of her lay buried in Forest Lawn with him.

  “Curt,” she whispered, in one movement rising to kneel in front of him. Like a supplicant she rested both hands on his thighs. “Ahh, Curt . . . .”

  Now her fingers were acting of their own volition, rubbing the white duck fabric over the firm musculature.

  He tensed and a shudder ran thorough his legs. She mistook this tremor for answering passion.

  “I can’t bear seeing you so miserable,” she whispered, her right hand edging upward.

  He gripped both of her wrists, wrenching her hands from him.

  “I care so much, Curt.”

  “Oh, Christ, haven’t I enough to bear?” he asked in a harsh, strangled whisper. “Joss, please, for God’s sake please will you leave me the fuck alone.”

  At this instant the automatically timed lighting system came on, shining on Curt’s expression of revulsion.

  She jumped to her feet, in her clumsiness overturning the glass. As it rolled noisily across the uneven flagstones the blood rushed hotly to her face. It figures, doesn’t it? she thought. Me, the husband killer, the ugly cockroach Sylvander sister, the one woman alive who turns Curt Ivory off.

  With what appeared a tremendous effort, Curt managed his caustic half smile. “So now you understand about Linda et al, Joss. Women can’t keep their hands off me.”

  She didn’t realize until hours later the kindness of his awkward little joke, his attempt to return them to normality. At this moment humiliation was burning in her blood and all she could think of was getting away from him.

  “Have a dinner date,” she mumbled. “Byee . . . .”

  She barged through the house. The next thing she knew she was in the enormous garage, gunning her Porsche, then digging down the driveway. But after the electrified gate doors had swung open for her she slowed. Her mind was blank of everything except Curt’s expression, and she had no idea of how to escape the horrified topaz eyes. It took her nearly five minutes to recall that a block or so from the Miramar was a lively looking bar that she’d never entered.

  The place was jumping, obviously a pickup joint for the young, gorgeously tanned crowd who looked as if in their combined lifetimes they had experienced not a single rejection. Joscelyn settled into an inconspicuous table in the corner, ordering several drinks in rapid succession in an unsuccessful effort to erase that image of Curt.


  “Hello there,” said a masculine voice.

  She looked up. Her vision blurred and she opened her eyes wide, then squinted to get a proper bead on the man standing over her. He was even more out of place here than she, this conservatively dressed business type with his dark suit, bulging, pregnant belly and thin, lined face. He was smiling.

  She smiled back. “Won’t you join me?”

  “It’s too noisy to get acquainted here,” he said. “Maybe we can find a quieter spot.”

  “Great idea,” she said, opening her shoulder bag for her American Express card.

  But he gallantly insisted on paying her check. When she stumbled on a curb in the parking lot he put his arm around her, squeezing her to his soft body as he led her to a Ford sedan. “It’s a rental,” he explained. “I’m in LA on business and staying at the Ramada Inn. What say we adjourn there?”

  “Great idea,” she repeated. God, am I ever drunk, she thought incredulously. What am I doing? Better an old slob who wants me than Curt who doesn’t.

  After locking and chaining the hotel door, he embraced her ardently.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Ted,” he muttered, offering no patronym.

  “I’m Joscelyn.”

  Sober, she would have been uncertain what to do next with this complete stranger, but being drunk she simply unzipped her skirt, stepping out of it. He was throwing off his clothes.

  The rolls of flabby chest and big belly were bluish white and covered with coarse brown hairs except for the smooth, bald band that marked his beltline. His uncompromising lack of physical grace pleased her. Here was a man who was suited to her. Hugging, they moved to the bed, and she was overtaken by the blunted desire that liquor imparts. She entered into Malcolm’s old call-girl game, making love to a stranger whose name might or might not be Ted, with a cold, clinical explicitness that left both of them gasping and drenched with sweat.

  Immediately afterward she fell into a stuporous sleep, jerking awake in the dark with a headache, a vile taste in her mouth, and oppressive thoughts of her dead husband, of her brother-in-law’s rejection.

  Turning on the bathroom light, she quickly gathered together her clothes. As she bent to adjust her small breasts in the bra, her partner drowsily folded his fat arms under his head. “Know my motto, Joscelyn?” he asked in a self-congratulatory tone. “The nearer the bone the sweeter the meat. The moment I saw you, so thin and prim in your blue outfit, I said to myself, ‘Ted, forget all these wild young chicks. The one over there by herself is the girl who’ll fuck your brains out.’”

  Since this was a compliment, Joscelyn formed a smile as she let herself out. By the time she was back at the Bel Air house her hangover had lessened while conversely that stupid pass she’d made at Curt gnawed yet deeper. To face him again was unendurable.

  She turned on her crooknecked desk lamp, methodically composing a letter of resignation on a legal pad, crushing the long yellow sheets four times before she had the right tone, neither recriminatory nor self-abasing, but businesslike. After typing the draft up on her letterhead, she folded it into an envelope, going over to the window.

  By now it was light out and the pool was white with Curt’s churning strokes. He swam savagely, as if trying to escape something or someone. She stood for several minutes, her cheeks indrawn with thoughtfulness as she watched him do his frantic laps.

  He didn’t desert me in my terrible time, she thought.

  Sighing, she tore the envelope in half, dropping the pieces in her wastebasket.

  She joined him for breakfast. Curt, as was his habit in the early morning, spoke very little, but he did inquire, “Good time last night?”

  “Super.”

  They would both ignore the previous evening’s incident, although whenever she thought of her hands caressing his thighs she would burn with shame.

  That morning on the way to work she rented a brand new, furnished one-bedroom. When she got home that evening the servants informed her that Mr. Ivory had taken off for an unspecified length of time.

  Seven

  1974

  Crystal and Honora

  54

  On the morning of March 22, 1974, at a few minutes past seven, Crystal was stepping cautiously along the planks laid across a corner of the acres of umber mud that had been hardpan when she had arrived yesterday. There had been no clouds then, and there were none now, but during the night she had been awakened by equatorial rain richocheting against the metal roof of Gid’s trailer.

  Though she had been told often enough about the humid heat of the Tasi copper and gold mining project in New Guinea, the physical actuality shocked her. The sun was already an electric hot plate relentlessly simmering the muggy air, and adding to the general discomfort were the nonchalant swarms of mosquitoes and the grinding, deafening complaints of heavy machinery.

  The Tasi Valley, whose topography was already rearranged by the Talbott crew, lay deep within central New Guinea’s Oranje Range—jungle-furred, mineral-veined mountains that had not yet been properly explored. At the cost of nearly a billion dollars in the next decade, this remote isolation would become a gold mine, an open-pit copper mine, smelters, a township. The Tasi was the largest project Talbott’s had ever undertaken alone, and Crystal, who popped up at sites to inspire her crews with her beauteous presence, was putting in her first duty visit.

  Above her, the grinning, shirtless driver of a Caterpillar circled his hard hat in a wild west salute.

  Crystal lifted a hand in response. The mushy ground was softer here, and her movement disturbed her balance. The board beneath her teetered.

  Gid grasped her elbow in his large, moist, steadying hand.

  “Careful, Mother,” he shouted.

  Blue eyes narrowed in concentration, she stared at the paved area surrounding temporary headquarters, focusing her attention on the nearest trailer along whose side was a spray-painted poster: WELCOME TO TASI, MRS. TALBOTT. The red letters shimmered in the heat. As her feet encountered the softening blacktop she let out a spontaneous sigh of relief.

  Gid and the project leaders, four muscular, tanned men who smelled of sweat and Cutter’s insect repellent and wore only khaki shorts with their mud-caked boots, looked expectantly down at her.

  “I ought to be used to it by now but I never am,” she shouted over the din. “First there’s the drawings, then the scale model. But the site itself is always the real miracle.”

  The engineers beamed.

  “Right on, Mom,” Gid said with his endearing smile. He jumped up the metal steps to open the trailer door for her.

  Then the two of them were alone, surrounded by the blessed air conditioning and the comparative quiet of Gid’s living quarters/office. When her sons had completed Stanford, Crystal had started them on their real education, as outlined by Gideon years ago: the two were shifting through the Divisions, and this was Gid’s fourth month at the Tasi.

  Touching her scented handkerchief to her face, she sat at his desk, which was cluttered with papers, notes, diagrams, empty mugs and a magnificent, creamy orchidaceous bloom in a Pepsi bottle. “What time’s that staff breakfast?” she asked.

  “Not until seven thirty. You have an entire half hour to recuperate,” he said, opening his refrigerator for one of the small Perriers that he had stocked for her.

  She took an appreciative swallow. “What’s being done about the mosquitoes?”

  “We’ve brought a duster in.” Gid had raised his left wrist and was fingering a shiny, unscratched new silver identification bracelet, an adornment that surprised Crystal: Gid lacked all vanity about his appearance. “Mom, tonight at the party there’s somebody I’ve been wanting you to meet.”

  Crystal, who had been following the flight of a small, iridescently crimson bird of paradise as it looped above the man-made desolation of mud toward the towering, moss-festooned trees of the uncleared jungle, jumped so that mineral water spilled. “Somebody? A girl, you mean?”

&n
bsp; “She’s of the female persuasion, yes. Don’t look so worried, Mom. She’s not a Melanesian.”

  “You know the rule. You and Alexander aren’t meant to date employ—”

  “She’s not one of us Talbott slaves,” he interrupted with one of his undisciplined smiles. “But if she were, the hell with rules.”

  “I hope you don’t show that attitude around the men.”

  “Mom, you know me better than that.” His voice softened. “Her name’s Anne Hunnicutt, and she’s pretty unique.”

  Crystal’s emotion was sharply delineated, recognizable. She was jealous.

  Jealous? Of Gid?

  Even with her beautiful, brilliant Alexander she’d never been one of those hedgehog mothers who shoot out bristles of antagonism toward every young female. So why should she now feel echoes of the desolation that had engulfed her after Gideon’s death?

  “Anne’s a homegrown product,” Gid was saying. “Born and raised in Berkeley.”

  “Why is she here?”

  “Her doctoral thesis is on the Massim and ambilineal descent—you know, am I my mother’s son or my father’s?”

  “You mean she lives with the headhunters?”

  “There’s no unattached heads around here—unless you count some of the rest of the Berkeley team. There’s about a dozen of them in a village a few hours from here by jeep.”

  Crystal formed an image of a thick-legged, earnest-jawed female anthropologist in a pith helmet stalking an immensely rich young bachelor remote from his natural habitat.

  Her blouse was sticking to her back like a hot poultice. “I have to get ready,” she said peevishly. “And Gid, can’t you do something about this desk?”

  While she took her second trickly, tepid shower of the morning, she decided that it was up to her to break up this unsuitable attachment. A decision that was translated into self-righteous maternal duty by the time she slipped into gauzy cottons that smelled of fresh ironing—Anina, as always, had accompanied her. Mitchell was already in Tokyo, the next leg of her journey.