“Hello?”
“Mama, it’s Lena. Sorry to have been missing in action today. I slept late. Any chance you can tear yourself away from the crocheting? Turns out I’ve got all my Christmas shopping left to do. Great. I’ll be there to pick you up in fifteen minutes."
She zipped up her small roller bag and checked her briefcase to make sure the brown notebooks were inside. Then she locked her private closet door, what Harry called "Marlena's den of iniquity."
It contained a black satin eyeshade, lingerie, a Yahtzee game, and a bong, amounting to a kit for entertaining Harry.
She took the elevator up one floor to Harry's penthouse level.
After unlocking hisarryH suite and entering, she placed her urgent message on the fireplace mantle. A man of routine, this time of year Harry always turned the gas fireplace on first thing upon coming in; he'd be sure to see the note.
“Hi, Martha,” she said to the Finnish maid standing outside with her cart, waiting to enter. “Haven't seen Mr. Drake today, have you?”
“No, ma'am. Merry Christmas, Ms. Marlena.”
“You too, Martha.”
Twenty minutes later, as the cleaning lady left the suite, an air current was sucked in by the quick movement of her cart as it banged against the door. The current caught and rode on a draft that happened to be coming from the fireplace. Then it swirled around the pink linen envelope, caught an edge, and finally tumbled it off the fireplace mantel.
The distress signal from Marlena to her lover drifted like a snowflake, riding the air current toward the white marble floor, floating down, down, down and then entering the copper log-carrier. There it flopped over and was wedged to the side by a pile of small twigs, becoming invisible.
On such small motions may one's fate depend.
Chapter Ten
A weak ray of sunshine slanted across Hatter’s Field, briefly highlighting a jagged, towering peak called the Hat, which would be the main field of action during the upcoming Christmas Fire Night bonfire.
But from the perspective of Harold Augustus Drake, fuming on the outskirts of town late Tuesday morning, it all looked like a fucking field of fucking inaction.
Negotiations in Laramie had broken down once again. Then his mobile phone battery died, and so he was rendered helpless when the front end of his black Mercedes 200SL sports car slid into a ditch at the tail-end of a mile-long pileup of stranded vehicles.
He was trying to be patient so as not to elevate his blood pressure, which his doctor in Casper had warned him about. But an hour later, when at last a county sheriff's car slowly approached with red lights flashing and tire chains grinding, Harry was out of patience and his jutting jaw line was aflame.
A round-faced deputy slowly rolled down his window and inquired laconically into his particular tale of woe. Then, when the officer saw who he was, his tune changed. Before the deputy moved on to the next vehicle, Harry was afforded the use of the officer's mobile phone to contact his secretary, Carlotta, at his office in the hotel.
As he waited for his private tow truck to show up, Harry began singing to pass the time. He had a decent tenor voice and a good memory for off-color lyrics from the wild parties of bygone fraternity days.
Smokey the bear, Smokey the bear,
Has a prick like dynamite, covered with hair.
When he plucks his magic twanger, the girls all shout with glee.
He can shoot a wad of jizzum 'cross the state of Tennessee!
He followed this up with a George Cohan medley--"Yankee Doddle Dandy," "It's a Grand Old Flag," and "Over There."
When Harry tired of the sound of his own voice, he then set about recalling the names of friends with homes in Palm Beach or the Caribbean. If this bullshit mobile phone were working, he would have been on it making arrangements to escape. That's how disgusted he was with the Laramie deal and the damned winter weather, by Mungo.
A conservative man by nature and breeding, Harry Drake was often reckless in his business deals and in his relationships with the fairer sex. Some would argue these are not mutually exclusive traits in powerful men, even into the second millennium. But, provided the status quo suited him, Harry was not one to flee from it, and this engrained trait was the source of some current conflict with his mistress.
An imperious child with a bad stutter that took years of practice and an iron will to conquer, young Harry had been adored by his older sister, Susannah, who'd gladly indulged his expressed wish that she exclaim “hail, Augustus!” whenever he entered the room.
His mother thought the sun rose and set on Harry.
His father was less sure his sulky son deserved the adulation surrounding him, but Nicholas was seldom there, and when he was at home, he was in bed reading a newspaper. Harry therefore grew up seeing himself as a superior being whom women automatically worshipped, whether from afar or close-in.
Yet he always tried to behave in a gallant way toward the weaker sex, so as not to leave himself open to complaint.
All in all, he believed there was much cause for dissatisfaction going in the other direction, however. For instance, he'd lavished all his worldly goods upon his beautiful wife, only to find her indifferent toward himself and his castle. So he'd sought attention elsewhere. But lately, he'd been getting a rash of shit from his mistress, which was an unexpected, unwanted development.
To hear her tell of it, she was a miserable bird singing alone in a gilded cage. But Marlena couldn’t very well complain about her accommodations. The Alta Hotel had won a five star Michelin rating in 1976. Their affair could go on indefinitely, from his perspective, so long as they didn’t have to talk about it. In the past, they'd talked about the hotel, which suited him fine.
There simply weren't enough hours in the day for a man of business to waste time conversing with women.
The single exception had been Chloe Vye, brainy, beautiful, and gracious, a triple threat. He'd ardently enjoyed her company growing up, and he wished, in retrospect, they'd managed to pull off their foiled elopement.
They would have made a great couple. Chloe was steady as a rock, comfortable with tradition, and also, like him, she'd come back after traveling the world to live and work here contentedly.
As for Lila and Marlena, they were forever and tiresomely chomping at the bit. Lila was a fag hag of the first order; she was at her happiest touring Europe with some dickless wonder.
Marlena was that anomaly, a loner who worked hard at her career and also loved sex. It was precisely that combination which had drawn him in the first place. But of late she'd developed an annoying habit of demanding more emotional attention. She sometimes behaved like a clingy schoolgirl.
It wasn't his responsibility to make the needle move for her, was it? So the more she craved his attention, the less he gave.
Harry had gone to business psychology camp at Harvard last summer, so he knew his way around terms like “X and Y management styles,” “Transactional Analysis,” and the “'I’m OK, You’re OK’ personality.” He went out of his way to make Marlena feel that she was OK, even if he himself felt uncomfortable about her encroaching presence in his personal life and her off-putting harping on something she called "emotional intimacy."
What this was, he hadn't the foggiest idea. He had much more interest in new ways to get his rocks off.
At first, it had all worked satisfactorily. He had the best of two worlds--a glamorous, stay-away wife and an adoring, part-time mistress. Lila had her freedom to roam. Marlena had the run of a fairy-tale establishment.
The bloom departed the rose when Lila came home and demanded to have a child, despite her doctor's opinion that she had a deformed uterus.
His gall was still rankling over Bob Drummond, so he wasn't about to cater to Lila's whims. But, if he toured Europe with Marlena while Lila sulked at home, there'd be hell to pay. So, since the hotel had been opened, Marlena was allowed to trot on back home to Dimmer.
That, he'd thought, was the end of their affair--sad,
perhaps, but inevitable. Truthfully? He'd felt a tad relieved.
Yet somehow, against all the odds, Marlena had wormed her way back in. Bottom line, she'd used the milk-toast husband as a pimp. Coddie had caught him at a weak moment, and he'd paid for her return, getting part of her time on national promotions.
At first, they were caught up in the thrill of re-igniting the flame, having sex twice a day, jetting around the world. But now there was a lot on his plate. The affordable housing deal in Laramie, which had seemed in the bag, was anything but. It was taking extra time and effort to get the interested parties to come to the table and be bought off.
Outside of an occasional day trip to Santa Monica, days or weeks would pass when she would be at the hotel, waiting. Tough shit. He was sticking to the deal.
From the outset, they'd agreed no strings were attached. Obviously, each had other obligations, even if they could be characterized as unhappy marriages. Whose marriage wasn't unhappy? Why should theirs be any different?
He felt no more obliged to be faithful to Marlena than he did to his wife, who had shown her stripes early in the marriage by running off with her personal trainer to Ibiza and thumbing her nose under the guise of "free love." Free, my ass. He paid the bills!
“If you want to cry on Dimmer’s shoulder about life's problems, it’s no skin off my hose,” he’d said in late October, emphasizing the ticklish point he was making by scratching his cock. She'd been putting out feelers about the holidays. Would she be deprived of their mutual orgasms again, like last Christmas?
Why not shift to Dimmer this mother-fucking intimacy thing?
“It’s only natural for the two of you to stay in touch,” he pressed on, giving her a sidelong look of appraisal.“Dimmer’s someone you can communicate with, probably better than you can with me.”
That had forced a rise out of her. He was amused by how Marlena managed to feign a high-and-mighty tone, despite her hurt feelings.
“If I wanted someone who communicates better than you, my love, I’d get a cat. Anyway, I never talk to Coddie anymore.”
He knew that was a lie.
The truth was, she called Dimmer almost daily, and they talked at length. He knew because her hotel phone line was bugged.
He could feel the muscles clenching under the scar along his jaw-line that came from a knife fight in a Soho alley in a quarrel over unpaid gambling debts twenty years ago.
Dimmer and Marlena were long-time business associates, and he didn't really think there was anything more to it than that. But, she shouldn't have lied.
Lying had been Lila's downfall, too. To be more precise, it was Lila's blatant, assertive disloyalty to a degree which was staggering that had driven Harry to crave a submissive woman. Marlena wasn’t even capable of the kind of promiscuous misconduct Lila had rubbed his nose in. Moreover, he wasn’t fooled by Lila’s current pose of repentance. Tigers didn’t change their stripes.
Marlena had always been a purely submissive partner. Granted, this was a one-way street, but in the affairs of his heart, a one-way route was the only one he would allow inside.
To put it in business terms, from then on, he had the two beautiful women in his life pegged as unreliable suppliers.
Strike one for Marlena.
Though Harry had intended to imply to Marlena by his encouraging her to confide in Dimmer that he was looking for less, not more, communication in their connection, she, to his mind perversely, took it the other way.
As if to convince her lover she needed no one but him, she began to reveal more and more personal things from her past, even far back into her childhood in Alta. Suddenly, by Mungo, Harry knew more than he had ever wanted to about Marlena or any other broad!
One night, while they were watching the news on television, a story was aired of a celebrity who claimed she'd been molested by her father when she was a child, leading to various dysfunctions in her emotions and behaviors as an adult. A long time had elapsed between the occurrence of the events and the histrionic star's memories.
“I have a hard time getting worked up over that kind of garbage,” Harry commented. “The bitch is just trying to get attention.”
“Actually, it happened to me,” Marlena blurted out, then blushed furiously.
He stared at her, at a total loss as to what to say. Finally he stammered, "Are you sure? Maybe it was a dream.”
From her glimmering face, he could see he was expected to go on pretending he cared about her childhood. The past was the past; let it lie.
"So, what happened?"
"When I was almost seven, I was confined for nearly two months with scarlet fever. As it happened, my father had been laid off from the electric plant while they did work on the boilers. My mother's father had suffered a stroke, and she was in New York. For a time, I was home schooled by Dad, in our cabin in New Gillette. That’s when the stroking of my private parts began, sometimes when he was singing songs to me or I was reading books on his lap. Sometimes it happened when I was in bed. I would lie very still, pretending to be asleep. The only time I felt safe was when I was in my grandparents' pink house, here in Alta."
What was a man supposed to say? Only degenerates, Southerners, and Mormons went in for getting their jollies off children. As repulsed as he was by her story, he felt obligated to continue showing some interest. “Did you tell anyone?”
“Well, no. Whom would I tell?”
“A priest or your mother. A psychiatrist, maybe, like Chloe.”
She shook her head. “I was too afraid of getting my father into trouble. It’s not like he raped me or anything. I believe he did it out of excess love and frustration. I used to think I'd dreamed it, but now I know better.”
The low class nature of Marlena's disclosure left a bad taste in Harry’s mouth.
Strike two.
Harry sometimes wondered what the big attraction in their affair was for Marlena. Social climbing, he supposed, but that wouldn't account for her obsession.
Women were susceptible to addiction when they were brought to climax for the first time, or so he'd heard. He had no doubt he was her sexual emancipator.
It was a fact, though, that she didn’t need him as much as she thought, though he wouldn't tell her so until he was ready to call it off.
If it was intimacy she craved, then she would have to get it from someone else, not him. He'd made it clear where they stood, but on this one subject, she deliberately turned a deaf ear and a blind eye, though her memory was flawless, like a steel trap.
When he was able to be with her, about once a month now, he'd always make it a point after sex to ask if she was happy. She would always say she was. Case closed. To his mind, there was nothing to fix in the relationship, even if some of the fire had gone out of it.
He couldn’t help it if he wasn’t one of those guys whose passion burned on unaltered. He wasn’t sure if guys like that even existed outside of romance novels.
Naturally, he wouldn’t ever let on to Marlena she didn’t exactly do for him what she used to do. That wouldn't be civilized. He tolerated the reduced temperature in their love life, like he tolerated everything else.
So he'd been genuinely surprised when a sudden climb in temperature occurred in a quarter where the fire had long been out. The fire starter was none other than his wife. Now she'd stopped gallivanting around the globe, he was treated to an occasional grapple in bed with the sexy, black-haired temptress, often after a heated argument. Violence seemed to get them both in the mood.
One tiny concern had sliced across his linear line of thought. After all her exploits, might Lila find him a tad tame? Perhaps his wife would enjoy a threesome; he certainly would! Some charming voluptuary might be enticed into the marital bed.
The ideal candidate? Marlena.
Midnight, on the last day of October, his mind was dwelling on these erotic thoughts while in the midst of watching soft porn on one of the televisions in his 4000-square-foot, seven-room penthouse suite.
&nb
sp; The bonfires had been lit in sequence, just as in the olden days, beginning with the big one up at the Hat. One could watch the festivities from the best rooms in the hotel.
For each of the three celebrations, in October, November, and December, Marlena would trump up a special event and build goodwill among the customers, at a minimal cost to him.
That night, the first of the Fire Night bonfires were flaming out, but his fires were raging. Marlena was giving him head in one of her sexiest get-ups. On the television set, a buxom wench in a tiny Scotsman’s kilt and nothing else was going down on Johnny Cum-Lately. A second lovely, naked young thing watched and made herself useful.
Aroused on several levels, he began to concoct his own fantasy.
How would it feel, he wondered, to be in bed with his lovely black-haired wife sucking his dick and his gorgeous redheaded lover playing with Lila’s breasts? His cock made an immediate standing ovation. That would be one affirmative vote, he thought.
Let's try it on the redhead.
And so, Harry wondered aloud if one day Marlena might find it interesting to be involved in a sexual adventure. Say, a three way, my love?
She drew back from him, and his cock fell.
"I find all that kinky sex stuff to be somewhat mechanical and off-putting," she said.
"Oh? I didn't know."
"Last spring I attended a Lifestyle Convention in San Diego, to check them out for our banquet business. They’re all swingers. The men are a bunch of weirdoes, and the way the women look at each other in the ladies’ room–or rather, the way they won’t look at each other–well, it creeped me out. It’s pathetic.”
“I was kidding,” he said. “Don’t give it another thought.”
The Fire Night Ball Page 5
