The Stark Truth

by Peter Israel

  “In that case,” I said with a smile, “we’d probably recommend a change in legal representation.”

  “Oh, come on, Tommy,” she said, her lower lip protruding impatiently. “There have to be ways around it.”

  Indeed there were, and in idle moments I’d thought of more than one. I had, I should add, plenty such idle moments, because trusts and estates work, while it involves endless detail in the preparation and filing of documents, seldom requires more acumen or experience than is possessed by a paralegal, or even a smart secretary.

  At the same time, Kitty was right in theory: in certain economic climates the kinds of investments we habitually made in behalf of our estates could mean an erosion of capital. But practically speaking, the subject never came up. Most of the estates I dealt with were considerably larger than Edgar Sprague’s, and all my widows really cared about, from a financial point of view, was that the bills be paid and their monthly allowances forthcoming.

  Of course, they had other needs, too.

  “Let me ask you something else,” Kitty went on. “How much are you billed out at? I’d guess between two hundred and two fifty an hour. Am I close?”

  “Very,” I said. “Actually, it’s been two twenty-five, but it’s about to go up.”

  “Whew,” she said. “But how much of that is yours to keep? Including your profit share?”

  Another sore point.

  “I’m afraid that’s none of your business, Kitty.”

  “In other words, you’re getting screwed?”

  “I didn’t say that,” I answered, though in fact I was. It irritated me too that she should know it, or suspect it.

  “You’re too discreet,” she said. “But suppose an estate were willing to kick in a percentage of its profits? On top of the fee?”

  “Oh, we’d have to turn that down. We don’t operate that way.”

  “I’m not talking about the firm, silly,” she said. “I’m talking about you.”

  “Oh? Well, I’d have to refuse that, too.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s unethical. Not just vis-à-vis the firm, but professionally unethical.”

  “Come on, Tommy,” she said impatiently. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not.”

  “But why?”

  “Because that’s the way it is,” I answered stiffly.

  “Is that it? Or is it because your name—your father’s name—is on the door?”

  A third and, as far as I was concerned, final sore point. She must have seen it, too, that she’d overstepped. Her body made a withdrawing, recoiling movement into the couch.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “But you did,” I answered, further irritated because she couldn’t possibly have known how she’d offended me. My attitude toward my father—the Senator, as some in the firm referred to him—had by this juncture in my life crystallized into a perfect ambiguity. In fact, had Kitty understood that, she wouldn’t have withdrawn at all; on the contrary, she’d have closed in for the kill.

  She fell silent, her eyes still fixed on mine.

  “I don’t think I understand what you’re after, Kitty,” I said.

  “What am I after?” she asked. “I thought I made that clear. I want to make money with the estate. I also want somebody who’s not going to fight me every step of the way. I want a partner.”

  “Then I really think you’ve come to the wrong man.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I do,” I said.

  With that, I must have glanced at my watch. My meeting had already started. She must have noticed it too, for she stirred as though to stand up. Then, catching herself, she let her body subside back into the corner of the couch, her arm draped across its leather back. She gazed at me darkly, her scarlet lower lip protruding again. Then her eyes narrowed ever so slightly, and her cheekbones stretched into the beginnings of a smile.

  “Come on, Tommy,” she said. “I told you I wanted us to have some fun.”

  There it was again, insistent as on that first night, the unmistakable invitation. In anyone else, her blatant way of offering herself, half reclining on my couch, might have struck me as vulgar, even whorish. Maybe it did in Kitty, too; maybe that’s even what attracted me. But I found myself perched again on that strange, deftly balanced seesaw of irritation and arousal which she alone knew how to manage. The previous time she’d let her end go, dumping me hard, but this time, twenty-one stories up in the January gloom, the seesaw dipped the other way, pulling me forward over her.

  I kissed her, felt the soft, sweet fullness of her lips, mouth, the strong arch of her neck, as she kissed me back. Close up, the smell of her soared through my nostrils, overpowering, dizzying, and I spread her lips with mine, pushing my tongue upon hers in that uniquely human imitation of sex. Then I heard, or felt rather than heard, the quivering of laughter deep inside her, and she broke free, pulled her head back, shook it as though to free her mind. She pushed me a little away, her hands firm against my shoulders, and stared at me, eyes wide, wet, in her own version of desire.

  “Come to my apartment,” she said in a newly husky voice. “How soon can you come?”

  “Why not here?” I answered. “Why not now?”

  “In your office?” she said, startled. “What about the firm? What about your meeting?”

  “They’ll hardly miss me,” I answered, truthfully enough.

  “But what about your staff?”

  “It’s Friday. I’m about to let them go, anyway.”

  “But what if someone else comes in?”

  “No one will. If you want, I’ll lock the door, even pull the drapes.”

  She hesitated just briefly. (Out of decorum? Or because it was a little more than she’d bargained for?) Then:

  “Go take care of everything,” she said, gazing up at me.

  I stood, summoning up my usual urbanity before leaving, but she called me back insistently.

  “On one condition, Tommy,” she said.

  I looked back at her, still in that half-reclining offering posture, her arms spread, head lifted toward me, eyes now large and piercing black.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “That I’m the first”—with an encompassing gesture—“here.”

  Even now, I can’t help smiling at the scene. It was truly quintessential Kitten, how, at a moment of genuine and lustful desire, she yet dredged out this statement of quasi-virginal principle: that at least my couch, if not we ourselves, be pure and unsullied.

  “You are, Kitty,” I assured her, smiling. “Absolutely.”

  And I like to think that it was even true.

  4

  Doing full justice to the subject of Kitty and sex would require not only length but some considerable jumping forward in my chronology. Suffice it for now that she was open to suggestion, also that she had a predilection for certain materials and textures. Silk, for instance. (In fact, I think the most appreciated gift I ever gave her was a set of raw silk sheets, amethyst in tone, with matching comforter, ruffles, and whatever else it was that came in the set.) And leather, too, to judge from that afternoon, either against her backside or crushed under her bosom (with the drapes drawn, door locked, staff dismissed, my telephone messages unanswered on my desk). But what she really liked is, as I would discover, another story.

  Better, then, to leave the subject where it left off that Friday, that is, with the two of us standing on the sidewalk outside my office building in the enveloping darkness, where, as I recall, the first tiny flakes of snow had already begun to fall, a brisk dusting which, by the time I returned Sunday night, would have coated the city white. Upstairs, while we dressed and I phoned the firm’s taxi service, she’d invited me to come home with her. With appropriate apologies, however, I’d declined. As much as I wanted to, I told her, it would complicate my life beyond belief. I had, I said, a long-established date, and reservations to
match, to take my kids skiing in Vermont. And I was already running late. Given the weather and the Friday night stampede for those distant slopes, we wouldn’t arrive till the wee hours of the morning, which wouldn’t deter Starkie and Mary Laura from routing me out at eight on Saturday to beat the lines at the lifts. The prospect of forty-eight hours in their company, I said, a good fourteen of which would be spent behind the wheel while my children either slept or squabbled, hardly filled me with anticipation, but what was an absentee father to do?

  Kitty, I remember, barely heard my explanation, other than to say that she assumed even ski lodges had telephones, that I could call. I’d told her I would. It was characteristic of her, whenever I had conflicting plans to which she clearly couldn’t object (increasingly rare, in time), simply to turn off. So, on the sidewalk, she kissed me back rather perfunctorily, I thought, and quickly got into the taxi, shutting the door behind her before I could—fleeing the unwanted scene, in sum. I realized, as I waited for the second taxi I’d ordered, that at least the part about complications and running late had been true. The ski trip I’d described, though, had actually taken place the week before.

  This upcoming weekend—shortened, as it turned out—I was to spend not in a Vermont ski lodge but in a secluded country inn, the quaint but luxurious kind, next to a frozen lake in northern Connecticut. It was a cognac-next-to-the-roaring-fire sort of place, with large and elegantly appointed rooms, an excellent cuisine, and a graceful discretion toward its guests. My companion was the estranged wife of someone I’d gone to college with, an attractive enough creature whom I’d prefer to leave nameless, for she figures not at all in my story except, perhaps, as an illustration of the effect Kitty Goldmark had already had on me.

  But one scene emerges from those interminable hours:

  I am alone in the bathroom, naked, examining myself in the full-length mirror. It is Sunday morning. The snow has stopped, and the plows, I’ve noticed from the windows of our suite, are working the road leading to the village. Otherwise there is no sound to be heard, just a wondrous rural quiet enhanced by the muffling cloak of snow. I am scarcely one given to navel-gazing, either of the psychological or physiological type, and I doubt greatly that I’d done it since my early teenage years, but that morning I stand there anyway, contemplating Stark Thompson at forty-one.

  Outwardly the same, no? But what of that still undefined stirring inside, the egg just beginning to fissure or, more accurately, the tombstone about to lift? Kitty’s doing, I suppose. Certainly it is Kitty’s doing that, in the course of said examination, there develops—grows would be better—a plump and hefty erection, for it is the first such since Friday, a lapse unusual for me and troubling enough, a harbinger of sorts.

  We Thompsons, I should point out, come mainly in one variety. The Senator and I share a strong physical resemblance. We’re tall and slender (although he developed late in life the pot which undoubtedly awaits me), with sandy hair receding off the temples, high foreheads, thin, fine features (a bit finer, it is said, in my case, perhaps my mother’s contribution), slate-blue eyes. We have swimmers’ bodies, long-limbed, with long fingers and long, narrow feet, and certain sports, particularly ones like swimming, track, racquet games, skiing, come naturally to us. In fact, the Senator liked to boast that he won the IC4A’s 880-yard run while an undergraduate (a feat I once, out of curiosity, verified) and skipped the Olympic trials only because he was too busy in law school to train. He was—and still is, so he would be the first to tell you—an inveterate and incorrigible womanizer. Of which more, in due course.

  Of our (apparently joint) appeal to women, what can I say? It seems to come naturally, almost like the sports. I’ve heard us both called handsome, and I know from my own experience that I seem to project an air—of sensitivity I suppose—which seems to inspire in women both older and younger some instinct at once to protect me and, conversely, to put themselves under my protection. From what I know of my father’s many dalliances, I’d say he was more the sweep-them-off-their-feet kind, an indication of his needs for dominance and admiration, as well as—

  Why is it, though, that I cannot—or could not—so much as look in the mirror that morning without evoking the comparison between us? Obviously the target of my introspection was more than my physical body. It was the old “buried alive” syndrome, my private version of psychology’s most recent “discovery,” the male midlife crisis. I would spare you—and myself—most of the details. Suffice it that, while I was listed as a partner at the firm, I wasn’t compensated as one, nor did I share in the annual divvying up of our profits. I had my salary, a token bonus, and that was it. This had been the Senator’s doing, though he’d contrived to miss the grim meeting at which Mac Coombs had put the choice to me. (As if, at the time, there’d been any choice.) Suffice it further that I was still only partially extricated from a marriage that had happened to me almost without my knowing it was happening, to a woman who seemed constantly to reappear in the various women I’d dabbled with since the divorce, such as my still sleeping companion. Forty-one, trapped, buried, while the Senator, almost twice my age, was working on his fifth marriage and none the worse for wear!

  But then there was Kitty.

  I walk back into the bedroom, where my companion lies peaceably on her side, her blond, shoulder-length hair curled under the collar of her nightgown. Why on earth, I wonder, do women like her wear these absurd, frilly-necked nightgowns on what is supposed to be a romantic weekend? And what, I wonder, would Kitty Goldmark bring along by way of sleepwear—other than her silken, sumptuous skin?

  I turn away from the prospect of my companion with its echoes of a life (my own) not so much misspent as unspent and, still naked, gaze out the windows, over evergreens bending under the weight of snow, over undulating fields and swards blanketed by snow. This pristine vista, I imagine idly, can have but little changed from what my New England forebears beheld, and the first settlers before them, and the Indians before them. It is now, in any case, that the aforementioned erection sprouts fully, inspired not, I am sure, by my brief historical reverie, but by the sudden intrusion of Kitty Goldmark into my consciousness, and more specifically by the fantasy which had bewitched me that first night when, to my immense frustration, she abandoned me on her doorstep. For if I could not have her then, spread on the night blanket of Central Park, now in my mind I am taking her, her glorious and aromatic body slithering beneath me on a couch of Connecticut snow.

  Against such powerful competition, what chance did my pale companion have?

  She seemed, to her credit, if not her liking, to understand this point.

  We had brunch in our sitting room, off a laden hot tray wheeled in with cheerful good wishes by the owner’s wife herself. I ate little, said less. Normally, my wit would have, risen gallantly to such a morose occasion and carried us, if not back to bed, at least to an afternoon’s horse-drawn sleigh ride before we headed back to the city and our separate lives. But the circumstances, obviously, were not normal.

  “You know, Tommy,” she said, the woman spurned, eyeing me balefully over her coffee cup, “I hate to say it, but I don’t have the slightest idea what I’m doing here.”

  “I’m afraid, my dear,” I replied, “that I don’t either.”

  We were back in the city by two. I deposited her at her door without ceremony. I’d done little, I supposed, to enhance my reputation, but what need had I of my reputation? By four, I’d crossed my new client and lover’s threshold, high above the slush of the streets, and when I came after dark, violently, throbbingly, her strong arms pinning my shoulders in a shouting match of passion, I felt my own body flying, soaring, wafting, to dissolve, most deliciously, on its swaddling, snowy blanket.

  5

  My earliest memory of the firm was the seals. I’m talking about corporate seals, those black- or green-handled objects, too heavy to be picked up comfortably but which punched out beautiful circular emblems on sheets of paper, white on white, which you co
uld not only see but touch, rubbing your fingers across the embossing. This was, my father liked to say, where my legal training began, as his had a generation before. On those occasions when I accompanied him to the office, which at the time was down on lower Broadway, I’d therefore be handed over to some secretary (who may, from what I later learned, have been more than a secretary, or not a secretary at all) and, seated at what seemed an immense mahogany table with a stack of watermarked bond paper, would punch out page after page of seals.

  These visits—how many there were I’ve no idea, and it’s possible there was only one—must have taken place in the late 1940s. I was conceived, so the story went, the night my father came home from the war, a full colonel, just as my older sister had been conceived the night before he went off. This was his method, I imagine, of keeping my mother occupied while he toured the globe with General Donovan, then later, in 1948, stood for the U.S. Senate. He served only one term, for reasons which remained muddy in the family version but which, I realized with some surprise years later, must have had to do with the simple fact that he knew he’d be defeated if he ran again in 1954.

  The law firm, the family history said, needed his attention. It was growing rapidly; so were his children. But all during my early boyhood, he was gone much more than he was there, officially on this or that government assignment or mission, but more likely, I now understand, as a means of getting away from work and family. That the firm grew and prospered had to do with the work of other people, the Mac Coombses, although I’m sure my father’s name and connections helped. At least some of his “missions” probably did involve intelligence work, for he belonged to that old-boy network that had evolved out of Yale and the wartime OSS; but others, I’m sure, involved a different kind of clandestine activity. Either way, as far as the family was concerned, we soon went our separate ways.

  A curious incident to illustrate:

  Some years ago, when Susan and I were in Rome—vacationing in Italy was something her family did—I noticed a blond woman staring fixedly at me while riding down in the hotel elevator. She was a little on the blowzy side, though fashionably turned out and still pretty. I was positive I’d never seen her before, but that didn’t keep her from smiling at me with evident recognition.