Fine, let them have him, I thought uncharitably. Maybe I’d see the wisdom of Selma’s words when I’d advanced as far into middle-age stagnation as she had. Now of course I felt rather embarrassed that I had given away so much about myself.
“Selma, this is meant to be you telling me about your life rather than the other way around. So when can we start?”
She sighed. “I don’t want to do face-to-face interviews until I’m a little more settled with you. Nothing personal. You want to know the truth? I’m embarrassed and ashamed by what I have to tell you and I’d prefer to do it privately. And I don’t want anyone in this house to overhear me. You’ll get your material, Lee, you’ll just have to agree to work a little differently with me. Or maybe I should look for someone else?”
But I was already far too intrigued and I guessed she knew that.
“Whatever you want is fine with me,” I said quickly. It was clear she already knew how the story was going to be told. She was going to tell it. All I was going to be was the conduit through which she told it. Wasn’t that what most people probably thought my role was anyway? A siphon. But I liked to think I was more than that. I turned to her. “You have an office here, don’t you?”
“On the top floor, although in fact it’s Buzz’s. He takes care of everything up there.”
Aha! Was he up there now? Had he been in the house all along?
The front door slammed. Selma’s reaction was instantaneous. She jumped up and her face went dead white.
“Talk of the devil,” she said.
My hands began to shake slightly. And when he came into the room they began to shake a lot.
He was even more gorgeous than I remembered. I managed to get to my feet and stood there wobbling a little. I didn’t know what to do. Would he come over and kiss me hello? Would he make any reference to our last meeting?
He did neither. He just stared at me.
“Hi, honey,” said Selma. It was little more than a whisper. She turned to me. “You’ve met my husband, haven’t you, Lee?”
CHAPTER 7
BUZZ FOLLOWED ME HOME.
I walked back from Selma’s telling myself firmly that that was it, he was married and there was no way that my thing with him would be going any further. Thank God I had found out in time, before I was in too deep to be able to resist him.
I was letting myself in through my front door when he came running round the corner and up the steps behind me.
“You forgot this,” he said, pushing me inside and placing Tommy’s Aiwa tape recorder on my hall table before scooping me up in his arms and slipping his hand up the slinky jersey knit skirt I had selected to impress his wife. He caressed my buttocks before moving his fingers around to execute a strange little flicking movement over my clitoris that nearly made me come on the spot.
I was stupified. I more or less collapsed in his arms and together we slumped to the floor and made love there and then in my hallway, crushing the mail that had come through the letterbox while I was out.
Afterward he reached beneath us, fished out my bills, and read them to me.
“You owe AmEx seven hundred quid. Visa only four hundred. Poor Visa. Graham and Green are having a sale. Twenty percent off everything down in the basement until Christmas. Better hurry over there with your Visa. Let’s see, what’s this? Corney and Barrow. Wine merchants. Only you didn’t order any wine during the month of November. Just two thousand bottles of Smirnoff. And the gas man came. You were out. He says he was a hunk. You missed him. What a shame.”
I didn’t respond. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. I got to my feet, silently berating the body I no longer felt was my own for refusing to listen to what was going through my mind.
I went into the kitchen and began to make myself a cup of coffee and tried to collect what wits I had left, if indeed I’d ever had any in the first place. What in the world had I been thinking?
“Okay, so why didn’t you tell me you were married to Selma?” I said as soon as he joined me in the kitchen. The question I should have asked him before he got me down on the floor.
“Why didn’t I tell you I was married to Selma?” he repeated. “That’s an odd way of putting it. I kept waiting for you to mention my wife.”
“How was I supposed to know you were married?”
“The usual way.” He held up his hand with the wedding ring on his finger.
Damn! Damn! Damn! I’d never even noticed. How could I have been so stupid?
“I thought you weren’t saying anything deliberately, that you were trying to be cool about it,” he said. “Actually I did bring it up, in your bed, that first time, but I had a feeling you weren’t listening properly. You interrupted me, said you were going downstairs to make a sandwich so I took that to mean you thought sex with a married man was no big deal. I should have persisted.”
“Yes,” I shouted at him, appalled at what I had done, “you should have. You’re married. You had no right flirting with me like you did.”
I was making like it was his fault but I’d flirted just as much.
“You appear out of the blue on my doorstep and completely knock me out. What am I supposed to do? Turn you away? It’s called sexual attraction. Chemistry.”
Now he was making like it was my fault.
“It’s just I had no idea she was married,” I pointed out in a pathetic attempt to get myself off the hook, “and I don’t think my agent did either. Does anyone know?”
“Of course people know. The entire cast of Fraternity knows. Why would we keep it a secret? Just because it was never in the newspapers, you assume no one knows? It was just a small registry office wedding but there were two witnesses. But we chose not to broadcast it to the world just yet. Selma’s in no hurry to tell the press.”
“Why do you think that is?” I was intrigued.
“Who can say?” Buzz shrugged. “I think she’s a bit nervous about the public’s reaction to her marrying a boy toy. Doesn’t bother me but she’s quite sensitive about it. There’s twenty years between us. Might not look too good. But the other thing is, she hasn’t introduced me to any of her friends in New York yet. They know about the marriage but I don’t think she’s told them how old I am. I think she’s scared they’ll be unhappy about the age gap. To tell you the truth, I think she may have even lied about it.”
“When does she plan on telling them?”
“She’s going over there at Christmas. Alone. I don’t know why she’s so sensitive about it but I’m not going to argue. Any way she wants to play it. I keep trying to tell her they probably all know anyway. That sort of gossip travels fast.”
“Well, it’s going to come out in the book,” I said, referring to her marriage. “She was quite open about it to me or didn’t you notice.”
Actually, it wasn’t so much that she was open about her marriage, it was the way she was all over him that I couldn’t get out of my mind. From the minute he’d walked into the kitchen she’d metamorphosed into a lovesick Stepford Wife. After she’d introduced us, she’d flitted about the kitchen making him coffee, arranging cookies on a plate, while I traipsed after her trying to say good-bye so I could extricate myself from the ghastly situation I had found myself in. But I couldn’t get her attention; as soon as he appeared it was all focused on Buzz. She chattered to him incessantly. Honey, I’m making coffee. You want it in here or shall I bring it up to the office? How was the meeting? I made a reservation at Orsino’s. I’m taking you there for lunch. No calling for Bianca, she was taking care of him herself. Every now and then she crossed the kitchen to touch him. She clasped his upper arm. She patted his cheek. It was as if she’d done something wrong and was trying to make it up to him. I was freaking out about whether she’d pick up on any spark of electricity there might be between Buzz and me. But at the same time I couldn’t help observing that even though she was the star, she was his boss, she had the money and the big house, it was he who clearly had the power in the relationship.
>
“Sure,” he said, “she introduced me as her husband. Why wouldn’t she?”
“Well, she didn’t mention you before you arrived on the scene,” I pointed out. “Not once. And she seemed sort of proprietorial.”
“Oh, I know what that was all about. You’re an attractive younger woman. She was stating her territorial rights over me.”
“You make it sound like you’re her possession.”
“Got it in one. She owns me.” He laughed.
“You don’t mind?”
“What’s to mind? I have a good life with her.”
Do you still fancy her? was what I was dying to know but didn’t have the nerve to ask.
“Where did you meet her?”
“I met her the very first time she came over to talk about the series. I was a young agent representing one of the cast of Fraternity. She was pretty forward. She introduced herself to me, asked me to lunch, asked me to represent her, asked me . . .”
“Asked you to fuck her?” Why was I being so coarse? The truth was I was spellbound by his revelations in an awful, gruesome way. I wanted to hear all the lurid details even though I knew I would probably be sickened by them.
“More or less.” He grinned. “If the Diva wants something, she goes after it, wants control of it. I was sort of swept along in her wake. Although I admit I was impressed by the notion of being involved with a name actress.”
At least he was up front about being a starfucker.
“Did she ask you to marry her? Get down on one knee?”
I was joking but he didn’t smile.
“Not quite. Probably because we were in a restaurant. Valentine’s Day. But she did get me a ring.” He flashed the signet ring on his pinky at me. “She came over all teary and sentimental. What could I do?”
Run like hell!
“Listen, I care about her,” he said, looking steadily at me as if he could see what I was thinking. “I really do. Or at least I did. She may not be in the first flush of youth but her career as a soap opera actress is on the up-and-up and I’m right there to mastermind it. We’re a good partnership. And it’s a great house, don’t you think?”
There was something cold and clinical about the way he was describing the woman who had been his bride for so short a time. I could detach myself and listen to him talk and know that he sounded like a potential monster. Yet at the same time I could revel in his words because they validated my passion for him. I felt desperately sorry for Selma. I had wondered what she meant when she said she was ashamed and embarrassed by what she had to tell me. Could she have been referring to her marriage? And if so, would she come clean and admit she knew the husband she adored saw her as little more than a business partner?
“You said she’s not exactly in the first flush of youth. How old is she?”
“Fifty-five but you never heard it from me.”
So he was thirty-five. Younger than I was.
I had turned away from him when he had been talking about Selma. Now he came up behind me and put his arms around me, his hands coming up under my sweater before I could stop him, stroking my breasts.
“You’re so soft,” he whispered. “She’s getting older, you know. Things change for women in their fifties. She’s getting so dry, like she’s been baked, left too long in the oven. She’s not my little cupcake anymore.” He sounded genuinely wistful.
I hated myself. I could feel my body responding to him even though my mind was in shock at how cruel he was being about her despite the fact that he had obviously cared about her once. It wasn’t so much sexual attraction as sexual addiction to him. And it wasn’t as if I even knew that much about him. I tried to think back to the time before Tommy when I had gone out on dates. Hadn’t there been that period of getting to know a person before you let them tear your clothes off? Hadn’t I known all about a guy’s family, how many brothers and sisters he had, all that first-date stuff, before I let him kiss me? I’d let Buzz get as far as actual penetration knowing more about his wife than I did about him.
And as for what he said about Selma—God knows, it would happen to me too when my time came.
We went upstairs. We undressed. We got into my bed and we had sex twice.
And I learned something. That it is very easy to sit in judgment of other people—as I had done several times in the past—on the subject of sexual infidelity when you were not one of the lovers involved. But I had already slept with Buzz before I knew he was married and knowing I was experiencing severe doubts about Tommy. It doesn’t matter what other people say, it doesn’t matter what you say, unless you’re a block of wood your body takes over. What I had just done was morally reprehensible and no doubt I would pay for it but there was nothing—absolutely nothing given that I was a flesh and blood human being and not a saint—I could have done to stop it.
Then, as we were lying there, warm and relaxed, he murmured, “So what did you two talk about? What did she tell you?”
He was making an effort to sound casual but I felt his body tense beside me.
“Oh, she just wanted to meet me, I think, and you know you were wrong about her not having time to work with me. She really wants to do it and she’s going to do all the interviews by tape and give them to me to transcribe.”
I expected him to say how great that was but all he said was, “Well, believe it when it happens.”
“It almost sounds like you don’t want her to do this book,” I challenged him. And regretted it twenty seconds later. He probably didn’t like the idea of the two of us working together after what had occurred between him and me. And he was right to be concerned. I was going to have to think pretty carefully about whether I could handle doing Selma’s book given what had happened.
But it turned out that wasn’t the reason.
“I don’t think she should do it, if you really want to know.” He rolled over and looked straight at me. His eyes were inches from mine. “I can’t see how it can sell any copies. There’s no story. She’s just a soap opera actress. A picture book, maybe. Some kind of souvenir for the fans but I don’t see how you’re going to get much mileage out of Selma’s life story. I’ve already told her what I think and I’ll be honest with you. I’m going to try and talk her out of it.”
I rolled away from him slightly. I felt rather deflated by his lack of enthusiasm. Suddenly something struck me.
“Where does Selma think you are right now?”
“Returning your tape recorder to you.”
He’d been here nearly two hours. I threw back the bedclothes.
“Calm down. I often go out for hours on end. She’s not my keeper. But she did say she’d booked a table at Orsino’s for lunch so I’d better be heading back.”
He dressed in front of the window with his back to me.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” he asked over his shoulder, “why do you have all that furniture scattered around your garden?”
I was out of bed in a second. He was right. Looking down, I could see that the summerhouse doors were wide open and its contents littered all over the lawn.
“I have a lodger, remember?” I explained and reminded him about seeing Angel at Tesco.
“I’ll call you,” he said as he reached the door and looked back.
I opened my mouth to ask When? and stopped myself just in time. I listened for the sound of the front door slamming behind him but I didn’t hear it. And then, as I hopped from one foot to the other pulling on my jeans, I saw him appear below me in the garden. As he walked toward the summerhouse, Angel emerged, the shape of her voluptuous little body still visible underneath a pair of overalls. Her blond curls were fettered by a ribbon tied in a huge bow on top of her head, which made her look like Minnie Mouse. She was brandishing a paintbrush.
I watched in horror as Buzz held out his hand and she took it, smiling up at him. Did she recognize him as the man who had been with me in Tesco? I didn’t think she’d even noticed him but how could I be sure? Was he introducing
himself to her? Telling her he was a friend of mine? Was he totally insane? She’d already met Tommy and she was highly likely to see him again. She could easily tell him about Buzz. But then as quickly as I had begun to panic, I relaxed. I had a perfectly legitimate reason to know Buzz. I was going to be working with his wife and he was her manager. He had come around to deliver the tape recorder I had left behind. I couldn’t quite come up with why he’d chosen to go for a wander in my back garden but no doubt I’d get there.
Suddenly Angel burst out laughing. She seemed to be literally shaking with mirth. And she couldn’t take her eyes off Buzz. I wondered if she realized she was standing very close to him. They chatted for a few minutes and then he leaned over to give her a quick avuncular peck on the cheek. He didn’t see me watching as he came back up the garden but Angel did and she pointed to the summerhouse, miming that I should come down and see what she’d done.
I hadn’t been the only one spying on Buzz and Angel. When I entered the summerhouse I found a gangling youth having a bit of trouble with a paint roller over in the corner where the bed had been. He had stringy hair, sported pimples on his face, and a protruding Adam’s apple but when he turned to face me, I got the point of him. He had the bluest eyes I had ever seen, except they never looked in my direction. They were fixated on Angel’s tits.
“What do you think? It’s called Warm Lilac. Fred chose it. Fred’s my new boyfriend.”
“Hi, Fred,” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. “Angel, don’t you think you should have consulted me before you . . .”
“What? You mean about the color? You don’t like Warm Lilac?”
To be honest, if anyone had said I’m thinking of painting your summerhouse Warm Lilac, what do you think? the very sound of it would have made me throw up. But in fact I was pleasantly surprised. It really was warm and a very pretty shade and I had no doubt it would enhance the atmosphere of the little room. I felt she should have asked me before going ahead and painting my property, but what the hell. I should give her some leeway. Didn’t want to get a reputation as the Wicked Witch Landlady too soon.
How to Seduce a Ghost Page 10
