The requirement of flamenco singing to be somewhere off the notes and seldom on them suited Maddie. She had a dreadful singing voice, couldn’t even carry “White Christmas.” It was as though she couldn’t hear herself. When she went around attempting Broadway numbers for example, such as something from Phantom of the Opera or Evita, Mitch would wince and look sick. “Don’t cry for me Argentina …” Ughh. He was thankful that no words had been set to Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloé,” although there was Maddie’s humming, which also had the disease.
Now well into her flamenco duet, faking it, keeping a partial beat behind so she could imitate, she got reckless, missed one of the higher notes so badly that she kept veering with it and was unable to recover.
She segued into a laugh.
Broke herself up.
She took off the guitar and set it aside. Mitch thought that next she’d switch off the stereo.
She stepped forward onto the bare floor. The bright rhomboid was like an inaccurately aimed spotlight catching the lower half of her. She raised her arms above her head, straight up and stiffly like a gesture of surrender, then relaxed them a bit and formed them into an arch, the wrists gracefully rounded, the fingers close to touching. She tensed her buttocks, tucked them, causing a thrust to her pelvis. Raised her chin, put stretch into her neck, turned her head a quarter turn so her point of view was away, over that elevated shoulder. All her weight was on her left foot.
What sort of posturing was this? Mitch asked the situation. Did she have in mind some sort of yoga exercise?
She snapped her fingers like castanets and began.
First, a single stomp with her free foot, the substantial heel of her shoe brought down with such force it was like the report of a shot.
It was now obvious why the carpets were rolled out of the way.
Maddie tattooed the bare, hardwood floor with her heels, did a rapid-fire series of flamenco stomping with both feet.
What came to Mitch’s mind was the demonstrative protests of a spoiled child who hadn’t gotten her way; however the incongruity of that association was at once made apparent by Maddie’s mature figure, the way her movements were causing her fully formed breasts to respond, the triangular forest of fair floss at her intersection.
Now she went into long, dipping strides, an exaggerated, haughty prance and some swirls. Punctuated with exclamation points of stomping.
Where and when had she learned this? Mitch wondered. She was no María Benítez but obviously this wasn’t her first go at it. The people who lived in the apartment below had never complained. As far as he knew.
Fists on hips, elbows out, she flamencoed past him and on into the living room. Typically, her attitude shifted from aloof to defiant to sensually promising. She knew the apartment by steps, its dimensions, so there were no collisions (another of her enemies, collision), only near misses. Even though Mitch doubted she was entirely there. With make-believe overlaid upon her blackness, something that was ordinarily easy for her, made easy by the blackness, she was probably somewhere in Spain. Seville perhaps. Being a Carmen.
On her way back from the living room she paused to flamenco in place a short ways from him. Facing him, she came closer, and even closer and did five sharp stomps that seemed to Mitch to be expressions of reprimand. He saw himself in her mirrored lenses. Their convexity distorted him, gave him a big, lopsided nose.
Maddie snapped her head back dismissively and spun away, holding the imaginary hems of imaginary flouncing petticoats.
The music ended.
The Gipsy Kings were gone.
The apartment had been so full of sound it now felt vacant.
Mitch, the spectator, was stuck in place by the sudden quiet. It wouldn’t take Maddie long to detect him, he knew. She had collapsed over the fat arm of a sofa chair down into its lap. Was breathing hard. Should he speak up, pretend he’d arrived that moment, hadn’t witnessed any of her performance? He’d merely inquire about the furniture being out of place, the carpets, and accept any fib she offered.
He’d do better than that.
He silently removed his shoes and stocking-footed it out to the foyer. There he put his shoes back on and, imitating his usual arrival, opened the entrance door noisily. Called out to Maddie. Slammed the door shut.
“In here!” he heard her shout, which reassured him that his ruse had worked. On the way to her he exaggerated the sound of his walk on the bare floor, his own flamenco. For some reason he felt a flush of well-being and realized it probably should be attributed to the stealing he’d done, his brain having processed it and triggered some neurotransmitters. Overanxious endorphins, no doubt. He’d gotten about a two-thirds erection while stealing Maddie, which, he had to admit, was rather gluttonous considering how erotically sated he’d been with her little more than a dozen hours ago.
She was still in the sofa chair, knifed cross-wise, legs over one of its arms, head resting upon its other. She was perspiring. Her hair was damp and stringy. Her mouth let it be known that it expected a hello kiss.
Mitch delivered it. An upside-down kiss, noses to chins, brief, not so brief that she didn’t get in a single dart of her tongue.
What a rascal she is, Mitch thought. He was such a fortunate lover.
“Home early,” she said.
“Rearranging the furniture?” he asked.
She didn’t reply.
“Felicia’s been helping you, I hope.” The live-out housekeeper.
Mitch still didn’t get the fib.
“Warm in here,” he said after watching a rivulet of perspiration run from her collarbone to an aureole.
“The air conditioning is on,” she said.
“Won’t do any good with the terrace doors open. Besides, aren’t you afraid your finches might fly out?”
“They wouldn’t. They’d never betray me.” The birds had returned to the aviary, were chattering, sounded as though they might be commenting on the merits of the Maddie performance and having an after-show bite.
Mitch went to close the terrace doors. He caught a glimpse of office workers gathered at some of the windows of the fluorescent-lighted spaces across the way. Gapers, voyeurs. What were they expecting, an encore? He was tempted to flip them off. Instead, he decided what had been had been and just closed up.
Maddie was gone into the bedroom.
Mitch put together a vodka and tonic and took a couple of gulps before attending to the carpets and furniture. He got everything back in position by the time Maddie returned.
She’d showered. Was now in a long, pale silk kimono tied by a sash fringed on its ends. Mules of a matching shade with a pouf of Maribou on their insteps. She went directly to the sofa, as though knowing it was back in its familiar place. Sat and crossed her legs. The silk poured expensively around her.
“I’m having a drink,” Mitch said, “want one?”
“Just a Perrier, thanks, and, as Mother Elise would put it, avec glace.”
While Mitch decapped the Perrier and poured he thought the wish that there was some way of obliterating Elise from Maddie’s mind, cauterize her, at least stick her in some way out of the way sepulchral niche.
Maddie chug-a-lugged the Perrier and chewed on the ice. “I’m too fair-haired for a convincing flamenco,” she said.
“Huh?”
“A black wig might help but I’d still otherwise be blonde. Unless, of course, I wore a merkin and that would be a mess and a bother. Anyway, you didn’t seem to think much of my dancing.”
Mitch tried to choose what he should say. Her teeth crunching ice didn’t help.
“You didn’t applaud or anything, not even a bravo,” she said.
“How did you know I was watching?”
“I sensed you were.”
“Don’t give me that.”
“I always know.”
“Come on.”
“Okay, I usually know.”
A dubious grunt from Mitch.
“Sometimes I know,” she a
dmitted in a tone that implied rock bottom.
“Okay, where was I standing?”
She told him precisely. “I got a whiff of you when I went by and on the way back I zeroed in.”
“You have an uncanny sniffer.”
“At times it can be less than a blessing,” she said. “Like this morning in the reception at Ronald’s office. As you know it’s not all that large, and a man waiting there smelled as though he hadn’t been able to wait … more than once. Phew.” Ronald Albertson was her attorney, an earnest fellow, who looked after the interests of the Strawbridge family.
“So you went out this morning.”
“Had to sign things.”
“Couldn’t they have been messengered to you?”
“I wanted to go out.”
Mitch assumed her business with Ronald involved contributions she was making to her causes such as the United Nations Children’s Fund and the World Wildlife Fund and AIDS research. She gave on a regular basis to these, and to numerous others when they appealed to her. It then occurred to Mitch that the Elise fund had made a pitch for a new apartment in Barcelona and decided that had probably been Maddie’s business at Ronald’s. What would happen, Mitch wondered, if she turned Elise down and instead gave to preserving the population of the Louisiana black bear?
“What was it with all that sneaking?” Maddie asked.
“Sneaking?”
“The way you snuck out to the foyer and slammed the door and all that?”
He was cornered.
“What a loony way to act.”
“You should talk.”
“Me? I’m unceasingly sane.”
“I left my folio out on the landing,” he fibbed.
She crunched more ice rather menacingly and then let him get away with it, did about a seventy-five percent version of her best smile; anyway enough of it to cause nice commas at the corners of her mouth. “I love you, precious,” she declared unequivocally.
“Love you too,” he said on the way over to her. They kissed a fairly lengthy one and held on after it. She told his ear: “I bought something for you today.”
From her kimono pocket she brought out a small, leather-covered jeweler’s box, gold-embossed and worn at its edges.
Fitted within the box’s creamy velour interior was a pair of cuff links. They were Edwardian, guilloche green enamel and gold centered with rubies and diamonds. Even before taking them up Mitch believed they were Fabergé. And yes, there was the hallmark in Cyrillic on the underside of each line: along with the initials of the work master Hjalmar Armfelt. “The man at the shop said they’re the real thing.”
“They are.”
“He said people used to make Fabergé imitations and some still do.”
“Yeah.”
“He also said these had once belonged to Cary Grant, that they were a gift from Barbara Hutton when Grant married her in 1943. Believe that?”
Colorful provenance. Shades of the days of Laughton and Sons, Mitch thought. The cuff links must have set Maddie back at least twenty-five thousand. He took another admiring look at them before placing them back in their velour bed. “You shouldn’t have,” he said.
“Well, I have.”
“Whoever you bought them from will take them back.”
“No returns. He made a point of it. I’ll bet it even says so on the sales receipt.”
“How did you pay for them?”
“By check.”
“Just stop it.”
“No, you stop it. I know you like the cuff links. I heard your breath do a little catch right after I heard the box snap open.”
“Not true.”
“I listened for it.”
“Whether I like them or not doesn’t matter. The fact is you’re way over your quota.”
“It’s a silly arrangement.”
“It’s what we agreed on.”
“You bullied me into agreeing.”
“I’ve never bullied you. Frankly I doubt anyone ever could.”
“Okay, I’ll put it another way; you suckered me into it. I was led to believe you’d eventually come around to seeing it differently.”
Setting a quota had seemed to Mitch to be a solution. Until then Maddie had squandered money on him. Hardly a week passed that she didn’t buy him something extravagant, something he himself couldn’t so easily afford:
A thirty-four-thousand Gerald Genta perpetual calendar watch, a six-piece set of Hermès luggage (the overnight bag alone cost four thousand), ten suits in a range of fine worsteds and gabardines by the leading tailor in Milan (she sent his favorite-fitting one as a model and, for the while it was away, fibbed that it was misplaced at the dry cleaners), a Watteau sketch of a nude adolescent girl done in black and sienna charcoal which she hung to the left of his side of the bathroom vanity. For morning and evening inspiration, she said.
That was not to mention the less-costly things she splurged on, that she shrugged off as mere fripperies. Solid-gold Bulgari comb, Bucellati letter opener, Cartier lacquered fountain pens (everyone should have a spare) and so on. Necessary unnecessaries: antique English paperweight from Shrubsole, box of silver dominoes from Asprey, lots of things from Asprey.
Mitch enjoyed being the recipient of such largesse. Who wouldn’t? However, for the sake of his male stuff, the health of that gender-conscious part of him that couldn’t be merely a stand-in for the role of provider, he had to put a stop to it.
Maddie reasoned: What difference did it make whose money was spent? Why not just blend his lesser amount with her greater and let it be theirs? Sure, have Ronald put hers and his into a sort of financial blender and press the frappé button. Besides, giving to the one she loved as well as those who needed was a major pleasure for her. Would he deprive her of it?
Her contention was sensible. And comfortable for her. Her nature was to be generous. After the robbery of the Laughton store she’d offered Kenneth whatever it would take to restock and restart. Kenneth appreciated her willingness to help but couldn’t see any direction other than out.
At various other times she’d also proposed putting up the money for an upscale store for Mitch. They’d be strolling upper Madison and come upon frontage space for lease and she’d ask his opinion on whether or not it would be a good location.
She’d slip in the topic during their pillow talks. Her insight told her that having such a store was his latent ambition. He never said it was something he craved. However he did contribute to visualizing a store with her, enjoyed doing so, often got carried away with that and allowed his enthusiasm to turn him inside out.
It had happened recently. Realizing how exposed he was at that moment she’d taken a shot. “We should stop talking about it and do it,” she said.
Nothing from him.
“You deserve to be well-known for your taste in jewelry and all you know about it.”
“Yeah.” His enthusiasm having retreated.
She’d gotten exasperated. “What is it with you? Are you afraid people will point you out as a bounder who lives off his wife?”
“Bounder?” A new old one. Where did she dig that up?
“Bounder,” she maintained.
“Maybe that’s it.”
“Another sample of double standard. A kept woman is entirely acceptable, even fascinating, but a kept man …”
“All men are kept in some way,” Mitch asserted philosophically.
“As are women.” Maddie shrugged.
They laughed at the truth.
So, a quota was the compromise. It put a cap on the amount she could spend on him each month. She abided by it diligently for a while but subsequently only once in a while, maybe half the time.
Mitch never made it a combustible issue. Actually, as time went on he became more reasonable about it, several times came close to admitting that he was macho stubborn and she was right. He shouldn’t squelch her generosity.
But not in this instance with the Cary Grant-Fabergé cuff links.
He calmly insisted Maddie return them to the store.
She calmly told him before she’d do that she’d give them to just anyone. “You don’t understand,” he told her. “I seldom wear cuff links and I already own three pair. Only a couple of my evening shirts have cuffs that require them.”
“That never occurred to me. So, we’ll have to have some shirts like that made for you.”
“I prefer regular cuffs.”
“Oh,” she acquiesced.
“But these links are exquisite, Maddie, and thank you anyway.”
“No harm done,” she said blithely. “I’ll take them back and get you something else.” And then, without a pause: “What’ll we do for dinner?”
“Want to go out?”
“Not really. Did you have a proper lunch?”
“No.”
“That’s not smart. It’s essential to us that you take care of yourself, precious. Can’t have your energy level getting diminuendo, can we?”
Mitch tried to think of another way he should take that. He’d known men who were the last to know they weren’t keeping pace. Just recently he’d read an article that dealt with the inequitable allotment of sexual potential to the genders. Maddie certainly had a wealth of passion, a swiftly replenishing fortune. Was free to spend all she wanted on him.
“I could whip up a tuna and something casserole,” she said. “We haven’t had one in weeks.”
Mercy, Mitch thought. He resourcefully reasoned: “Felicia left the kitchen all tidy. Be a shame to mess it up. I’ll go out and get something.”
“Suits me,” Maddie said, settling the matter with a loud, languid sigh.
Mitch changed into a pair of cotton tans and a sweatshirt worn once but not sweated in. When he returned to the study he saw Maddie was having a silent conversation with herself. He sat across from her in his usual chair and read much of that day’s Times and a little here and there of last week’s New Yorker.
Around six he put a bit of cash and credit cards into pocket and went down to find dinner. He had in mind some take-out from Barney’s, a variety of delicacies, goose paté plentifully truffled, some kind of cold pasta maybe, certainly a loaf of well-done, crisp-crusted peasant bread. He’d munch on the heel of it on the way home. They’d eat on trays, find a movie on television, a Robert De Niro gangster or the like, one that on some previous similar night he’d narrated much of the action for Maddie so now she knew what was happening from the dialogue and sound effects.
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