He started for the door, stopped, and turned back.
“One more thing, Emmett, and I’ll put it to you simply. You want a job, something to do, I’ll find something in Washington for you. The Supreme Court—that I’m not sure about. I don’t know if you have the nerve for it. Anything else, though, and I’ll play along. But, Emmett, when you want another term in the Oval Office, my Oval Office, without earning it, then I’ve got to say no, absolutely no, Emmett. You had your chance in the White House. You messed it up. You can’t have it again. Sorry, Emmett. That’s life. Good luck.”
Without another word, the President walked out of the salon.
Earnshaw remained where he had been standing for long minutes. He felt no more anger toward the President, because gradually, his anger had been redirected against himself, against wasted years and neglected opportunities and the small shock of realization that most of his life had been lived and that none of it could be lived over again and that he was an old man in retirement when almost all of the world was young and active.
The cigar between his fingers had gone out. He flicked off its long gray ash, applied a match to it, took several puffs, and finally dropped the tasteless cigar into the crystal tray. He had failed to help Brennan, and he had just remembered the President’s having told him that Nikolai Rostov was in the next room. Earnshaw did not know Rostov, but he did know what he owed Brennan. Certainly, he owed him one last try.
He returned to the Salle des Gardes.
He was searching for Wiggins when he saw the President’s youthful aide advancing toward him.
“The President asked me to introduce you to Mr. Rostov,” said Wiggins.
“Yes, I’d like to speak to him.”
“I thought you had before. When you and Sir Austin Ormsby were together, the man standing behind Sir Austin was Mr. Rostov, and I thought you both spoke to him.”
“I didn’t,” said Earnshaw.
“Now I’m afraid you’ve missed him, sir,” Wiggins said.
“I’ve just been looking for Rostov, but one of his colleagues tells me that some kind of emergency matter came up fifteen or twenty minutes ago, and Rostov had to leave in a hurry. I’m afraid he’s not expected back tonight. Perhaps you can see him another time.”
“Another time,” said Earnshaw dully. “Thank you.”
Wiggins looked off cheerfully. “There’s the call for dinner. I’m famished. Sorry about Rostov.”
Earnshaw stood alone before the brocade-covered door. He observed the guests leaving for dinner. He had no desire to face the guests again, or himself. He would plead illness and depart at once, to seek refuge in the easy oblivion of sleep. Or more likely, this night, suffer the uneasy oblivion of sleep. For his debt to Brennan remained unpaid, and this weighed heavily on his conscience.
Still, as someone used to tell him, there was nothing as futile as regret. It was Simon Madlock who used to tell him, and now he tried to blame Madlock for his lot. But it was no use.
He could feel the airy confidence, gained in overcoming Marshal Chen, slowly seeping out of him. Soon his deflation would be complete. Not a foreigner but an American President had undone him. He had been reminded of what he had almost forgotten for a day. That he was now, and would be for all time hereafter, The Ex.
TO CELEBRATE the approach of midnight, “the five-piece orchestra in the Petit Chateau de Legrande had at last given up its boisterous head-spinning, hip-swiveling ye-ye music to launch into a medley of sweet and slow vintage French melodies. The girl singer on the bandstand, with the hoydenish haircut and figure, cuddled the microphone seductively and swayed to the rhythm so that her shimmering rhinestones caught the lights and sprayed their reflection across the living room. Now the singer, as if a reincarnation of Edith Piaf, began to sing hauntingly and sadly, soft and low, of love sought and love lost.
Outside, at the stone rail of the balustraded terrace, Matt Brennan felt the music and the song drift over him, and his hand touched Lisa Collins’ hand. Both continued to gaze out over the illuminated rear garden of Legrande’s chateau. First came the wide moat with its silver carp flashing and its white swans gliding among the water-lily pads. Beyond the ancient bridge were the narrow gravel walks, the center one leading through towering cypresses toward a grotto that was now the haven of a reclining sculptured Venus, once the possession of a Renaissance cardinal. Another path curved between columnar junipers into the exquisitely landscaped flower beds bursting with geraniums and roses and surrounded by rhododendrons. The third path disappeared into a century-old orchard of lime and lemon trees that screened the modern heated swimming pool.
The music from inside blended with the vista ahead, and for Matt Brennan it was the first mellow and romantic interval of the evening.
He had escorted Lisa to the dinner party with reluctance. He had endured a long and emotionally charged day. By eight o’clock this evening, he had been exhausted. Yet, knowing that he had let Lisa down once, he could not disappoint her a second time. Her enthusiasm for the Legrande dinner party surpassed and overcame all his other considerations. Lisa had heard that the fashion designer gave this party once a year, at the height of the collections, not only for the elite among the fashion press and store buyers but for a most fabulous cast of characters who flew in from every corner of the Continent to attend it. Lisa had been told that the party would be “lavish and wild and unforgettable”—her words—and since she was twenty-two, and still in the process of gathering experiences to paste in memory’s scrapbook, Brennan hadn’t the heart to deny her this special night.
Brennan had arranged for the rental of a chauffeured limousine for the evening. They had been driven outside Paris, on the route to Versailles, and taken the turnoff into the small French village of Vaucresson. While Lisa had been excited by the prospect of the new night, Brennan’s weary mind had still been mired deeply in the events of the old day. Even in the moments preceding their arrival at Legrande’s party, Brennan’s mind had lingered behind in Earnshaw’s suite, reviving Earnshaw’s promise and wondering if Earnshaw had succeeded in seeing the President and had managed to gain Brennan entrée to Rostov at last.
But from the moment that their limousine had drawn up in front of the Petit Chateau de Legrande, Brennan had been forced—at the outset unwillingly, but soon quite willingly—to relinquish introspection and the day past for extroversion and the evening present. With wonderment, he had led Lisa beneath the entry arch and stood with her in the graveled courtyard of Legrande’s chateau.
Behind the hump of bridge that crossed the moat, the restored seventeenth-century chateau had been an enchanting sight. Wisteria and roses climbed the weathered yellow stone of the mansion to the height of the carved dormer windows set in the slate-covered mansard roof. At both corners were ancient round towers, illuminated by glowing lanterns. Despite the scurrying parking attendants, the village police, the curious neighborhood children, the unending stream of arriving guests, the first view of the storybook Petit Chateau de Legrande had been magical.
After that, Brennan and Lisa had gone inside, and once inside, they had found the magical serenity rent by a bedlam of unremitting madness. No sooner had they left the frescoed central hall to enter the largest of the three living rooms, and been introduced by the bacchanals to the bacchanalia, than Lisa had surrendered her hesitation to gaiety and Brennan had surrendered his sobriety to light-headedness.
Legrande himself, sporting an open-throat silk shirt and velvet slacks, carrying a bottle of champagne in one hand and his favorite fluffy white Angora cat with its diamond-studded collar in the other, had shrilly welcomed them. Immediately, they had been thrown into a maelstrom of several hundred guests. They had wandered from room to room, and in every room there was a buffet table laden with drinks and exotic foods, and Lisa had taken champagne punch at each buffet and Brennan had taken whisky straight. The music had blared steadily. The raucous conversations and shouts and quartets had been pitched higher. And the alcohol had
risen mistlike to invade their heads.
The dancing in every room had been frenzied, primitive, uninhibitedly sexual. Beautiful young men and women had seemed glued together, gyrating, making love with their clothes on, and here and there wildly drunk young actresses and mannequins twirled in reckless abandon, holding their skirts above their waists, revealing animated flesh and pantie briefs, while their male partners discarded their shirts and shoes to join in the revels. Behind a statue of Neptune a middle-aged Frenchman had been locked in embrace with someone else’s wife, her arms around his neck, his hands clasped beneath her buttocks. On an eighteenth-century Savonnerie rug, eight drunken women and men, in various states of undress and a common state of hilarity, had been kneeling and playing strip poker. Nearby, two guests had removed Legrande’s Italian mandolins from the wall and were strumming them, while a third guest had pulled down a Japanese mask and was trying to mimic the antics of a Kabuki dancer.
Aside from Legrande, flitting from group to group, Brennan and Lisa had known almost no one. They had eaten a little standing up, they had drunk a lot sitting down, they had joined in the singing and in the appreciation of each glimpse of low comedy.
Once Lisa had recognized a fashion buyer from New York, a stout female who was intent on loosening her girdle, and had asked her who all the guests were. The stout buyer had been only too eager to parade her knowledge of the celebrities and the gossip about them.
Backed against the pink wall decorated with trompe-l’oeil, the buyer had hoarsely identified various guests on the marble dance floor, at the heaping buffet, in the conversational groups among the régence furniture. There was the pipe-smoking female French literary agent, renowned for her lesbianism and an ancestor named George Sand. There was the Yugoslavian actress who’d gone water skiing in the nude at the last Cannes Film Festival. There was the English dentist with an office in Paris whose staff included two valets. There was the son of an Iranian shipping magnate who had invested two million dollars in racing cars and philately. There was the Lyon banker who kept his wife and mistress, and the children of each, conveniently under one roof. There was the homosexual American author whose creativity had been diverted to seducing adolescents in Naples and pontificating upon the death of the novel over television. There was the Deauville surgeon thought to have a secret vice (probably LSD) because his public behavior was perfectly normal. There was the mousy Marseille housewife whose only claim to fame was that she had once taken her traveling-salesman husband to court for having encased his better half in a medieval chastity belt. There was a Luxembourg journalist who… a Legrande mannequin who… a deposed Balkan king who…
And finally, there had been Brennan and Lisa, who by this time had wanted only a respite. Lisa had wanted to escape the music, the noise, the rocking instability of the revelers. Brennan had wanted fresh air to counteract the effects of his heavy drinking.
They had fled the room for the terrace and gone down to the grounds, traversing the moat’s bridge, making their way along the gravel path that led into the orchard. They had been enjoying their peaceful walk for ten minutes, when they heard the sounds of laughter and splashing. Coming out of the trees, they had reached the decking of the modern swimming pool, and they had halted with amazement.
A stark-naked French girl had stood poised on the diving board, arms above her, and then she had jackknifed into the water, where two older men and another girl, also naked, left the sides of the pool to swim toward her. Off to one side, before an open cabana door, a French girl, extremely tall, had been yanking her cocktail dress over her head and throwing it into the cabana.
Lisa had been dumbfounded. “Well, at least I can say that I’ve seen it,” she whispered, and then, clasping Brennan’s arm, she had added, “Let’s go back to the chateau, Matt.”
When they had climbed back to the terrace, they had lingered there and given themselves over to the less disconcerting and less threatening beauties of the gardens, and to their own musings.
And now the music behind them had become softer, sweeter, the accompanying sounds of revelry had become more sporadic and distant, and sanity appeared a possibility.
Brennan still felt high and good, and mellowing. All that had gone on this evening, he supposed, had nothing to do with the real world beyond the chateau. It had little to do even with Legrande’s own day-to-day world, where creativity and competition and advancement were his reality. For Legrande and most of his guests, Brennan supposed, a night such as this was an annual safety valve, releasing repressions, so each could act out year-long dreams without the punishments of law or of guilt. At the same time, Brennan guessed, there were those in the chateau tonight who behaved like this, lived like this, reckless and mindless, every day of their existence. He did not envy them. At the same time, he had to admit to himself, it had been fun, a change and therefore fun, and an exaggerated symbolic reminder of what life could be like if you were free and Lisa’s husband. Life could become what he thought no longer attainable for himself—not a continuous wild party, but a continuous source of experience and pleasure shared.
The melody of “La Vie en Rose” engulfed him. He looked at Lisa. “How are you feeling, darling?”
“Good. Sort of floaty and fine. But I think I’ve had enough, Matt. It’s been too rich. I want to get back into our snug little bed and feel safe with you and belong to you.”
He kissed her cheek. “All right. I was about to say the party seems to have settled down and they’re playing the first music tonight that a normal human being can dance to.”
“Would you like to dance? I’d like to.”
He took her arm. “Just one for the road. Then off to our chaste little bundling bed in our own little chateau in the Rue de Berri.”
“Ummm.”
He led her inside. The crystal chandelier had been extinguished, and except for flickering lights from the candelabra and a beam from a ceiling spot that fell on a Fragonard painting, the large classic room was shadowy. Guests still stood or sat along the walls, conversing or petting, but the atmosphere was one of midnight calm. On the area used for the dance floor a dozen couples moved easily, lazily, to the music.
Brennan turned, extended his arms, and Lisa came into them. With the palm of one hand caressing her back, the fingers of his other hand entwined in hers at her side, with her lithe young body pressed against his own, Brennan slowly began to dance.
He had not danced often in recent years, and now he felt graceless. But soon, as he moved slowly around the marble floor with her, the music welded their two beings into one, and they moved with rhythm and grace. There was one number, and as it segued into another, Lisa seemed to come closer to him. He was conscious of every contour of her body, every movement of it, and he held her tightly, his lips to her cheek, his body responding to her own.
The second number had ended, and they separated, observing the musicians putting down their instruments for an intermission.
Lisa held both his hands. “It was lovely, Matt.”
“You still want to go?” ; ‘Yes.”
They had started off the floor when a shrill voice called out Lisa’s name. They stopped and turned to see their host, Legrande, hurrying toward them with mincing steps.
“Lisa, dear child, my pet,” cried Legrande, “wherever are you going?”
“Home, to the hotel,” said Lisa. “It’s been a marvelous party, Legrande, but tomorrow’s another workday.”
“But the night’s not ended, and you must spare me one last minute,” begged Legrande. “Your friend—” He looked at Brennan. “You are Matthew Brennan, are you not?”
“The same,” said Brennan.
“I knew it, I simply knew it!” exclaimed the designer. “Dr. Fisher had seen you dancing and thought he recognized you, and he asked me your name—and I’m so forgetful—but I told him I thought it was Matthew Brennan—I simply thought so—I remembered it from when dear Lisa introduced us at my showing—and Dr. Fisher insisted I find you an
d verify it—and I have. I’m absolutely pleased with myself.”
“I’m pleased for you,” said Brennan with amusement. “You tell Dr. Whoever-he-is that your memory is intact. Thanks for an enjoyable evening, Monsieur Legrande. Good night.”
“Mr. Brennan, wait!” cried Legrande frantically, snatching for Brennan’s arm. “I promised Dr. Fisher that if I was right, I’d bring you back and introduce you. Oh, really, both of you, do allow me this pleasure. Only a minute. And a most, most remarkable man, Dr. Karle Fisher.” He paused, searching their faces. “You don’t know of him?”
“The creator of the bra-less bra?” asked Lisa hopefully.
The name Karle Fisher teased Brennan, but he could not place it.
“Really, dear Lisa, for shame, for shame,” sang Legrande. He edged in between his two guests and linked arms with them. “The universe’s foremost psychoanalyst, and you’ve not heard of him? His famous clinic in Berne? My dears, he’s Freud and Jung, he’s Merlin and Nostradamus, and a dash of Charcot, all rolled into one.”
Legrande was propelling them across the dance floor. “He’s the one who made the musty old Vienna couch passe, remember? He makes you recline in this deep, deep chair, and he administers his own psychedelic drug—a hallucinogen ‘—that exceeds lysergic acid and peyote and mushrooms and Zen. The verbal dam opens majestically, and in mere minutes, you are on an archeological expedition into your past with Dr. Fisher as your guide. No more grubby years on the doilies and sticky leather of some ridiculous couch, transferring to some Freudian wretch who insists you give up half your present life to understand the other half long gone. Now, with Dr. Fisher, with mind-expanding drugs and the disciplines of analysis, you can take the trip backward, then forward, in a dozen days. I promise you, my dears, Dr. Fisher is no quack. He’s read more medical papers to more medical conventions than I have shown original designs in my life. If Grandpapa Freud was the Galileo of the mind, then Karle Fisher is its Einstein… He’s in the next room. Much quieter that room, strictly reserved for talk, not fornication.”
The Plot Page 93
