by A. R. Taylor
Hull stood up and opened a nearby storage bench, pulling out a towel. “I’ll turn around, I promise.”
“I don’t know if you’re to be trusted.”
“Nobody trusts me.” It was her turn to laugh, but he did turn his back to her, so she grabbed onto the side of the pool and pulled herself up, throwing the towel around her breasts and tucking it in at the top, the way she used to do at camp. “Can I turn around now?”
“Yes.” She grabbed her panties and bra and picked up her dress. Her shoes too she had to carry, as she didn’t want to bend down. Together the two walked, without saying a word, back to the house.
“Have a drink,” Hull said as they entered through the French doors.
“I have to change.”
“Yes, after that.”
Jenna flew upstairs, worrying that she was dripping as she ran, all over that lovely staircase. Fluffing her hair with the towel, drying herself off, she put on the only other dress she’d brought, a soft rose-colored shift. With a shock she realized it didn’t even cover her knees. Oh well, it was a good dress to get fired in. She pulled out her little blue sweater and slung it around her shoulders. Her feet she stuck into cork sandals. Alas, her wardrobe was almost depleted now, and she’d been here maybe three hours. Staring into the mirror, she started to make faces at herself and laughed, because after all, she had managed to look not only dumb and lazy, but vaguely depraved. It’s the heat, she said to herself, and prepared to meet whatever doom awaited.
As she descended that staircase fit for a king, she heard loud talking and followed it, only to find Hull in a book-lined library off the living room yelling into the phone. She hesitated in the doorway. “You’re goddamned right it is, you son of a bitch. You’d better figure it out before I can your ass.” He put his hand over the receiver and scowled at her.
“Oh . . . sorry,” she tried to back out.
“Stop being sorry. What the fuck do you have to be sorry about?”
Pulling her sweater around her shoulders, she walked out to get away from that awful man. If this enchanted fairy tale place she inhabited was over for her, then it would end, and she could do nothing about it. She almost fell down the steps into the living room but stopped short when she spotted an immense painting that covered an entire wall. Black pillars of paint over white space and strange misshapen balls on a red background squashed against each, and she recognized it at once as a Robert Motherwell. She cocked her head to one side trying to fathom this immense expression of what—of harm of some kind? Of pain at being crushed by life? She didn’t understand it. In the distance somewhere, she could hear her boss’s loud voice. And then the voice stopped.
She waited in the silence, and then she heard footsteps. Hull strode into the room and, without speaking to her, went to the large wet bar in the corner, grabbed a glass and poured himself another big glass of Scotch. He looked down into it before he turned and acknowledged her presence. “There you are again.” He glowered at her like a talking redwood.
“I could start to work now. It’s a privilege to be in the same room with this Motherwell.”
“Oh crap, lately I’ve decided it’s a fake.”
“What? No, it couldn’t be.” But of course it could.
“There are a lot of fakes out there, paintings and people.” He poured another glass of Scotch and handed it to her. “It’s a Friday night in Water Mill. No one should be working. Go ahead, it’s a grown-up drink, you’ll like it.”
Jenna took a sip of the deep amber liquid, which tasted to her like medicine, and gave a small hiccup. She tried for a smile but wondered how long or how much he’d been drinking, and whom he had been yelling at? The big man stood now and reached out for her. “Come on. Let’s go outside.”
He took her by the arm. She twisted away as soon as she could and waited for him to sit, and he did, on the patio steps. She moved toward a rocking chair, but he motioned her to come next to him. He had brought the Macallan bottle with him and poured himself another half glass. As Jenna nursed her own drink slowly, warming to its smooth, sharp flavor, she began to feel more mellow in the soft night, to relax, and finally almost to sing inside. This place, this world, she had never experienced such before, and it caused her a sharp, unaccustomed pleasure. “Why do you have so many paintings?”
Hull observed her with a certain amount of charity. “That’s complicated. It must be about beauty—that stays.”
“Forever,” she said, with something very near to a burp. Hull laughed, and as she scrutinized him he seemed softer, less imposing, much more handsome than she had perceived him at first acquaintance. It’s the drink, she thought, as she tried not to take it in too fast. “My granny liked Irish whiskey.”
“The ‘shiny dogs’ balls’ woman?”
“The very same. One time I was dating this guy—well, I had been, but we broke up. Then I started to worry. Why hadn’t I heard from him, was there something wrong? I told my grandmother the whole story, sort of whining I guess, and saying something about calling him or trying to get in touch. ‘I’ve got an idea,’ she said, ‘send him a letter and say, Call me when you’re dead!’” Jenna erupted into giggles.
“Did he call you?”
“No way, apparently he’s not dead yet.” Jenna put a hand on her stomach and paused to take a breath, since she felt an attack of hiccups in the offing. “This Scotch stuff is great. My roommates drink a lot, and they always want me to go out with them. They must really love me, ha, not!”
“You do seem like a girl waiting to be loved.”
Had she heard this right? She didn’t have time to react, instead he pulled her up beside him and led her down the steps, across the lawn toward Mecox Bay. His hand felt warm and strong, familiar to her now from their plane flight of doom, and she was embarrassed, couldn’t even look at him, but she tightened her grip. Lights from the houses flickered across the water, and she heard the sweet whistle of a blue-winged warbler when it veered off in front of them. As they approached a wooden dock where a skiff bobbled in the night wind, Jenna muttered, “You’re not a fisherman, are you? I could never kill a fish. . . .”
Before she could say more, Vince closed her in his arms and kissed her. She trembled but opened herself to him, and she felt herself warm and clinging, felt his arms and held on. When he finally let go, he pulled her again toward the pool. “Why don’t you take those clothes off one more time?”
“Are you sure?”
But he didn’t reply, instead he pulled two chaise lounge cushions out of the storage bench and laid them on the tile surrounding the pool’s rim.
She watched him carefully, and then, with no hesitation, unbuttoned her dress and let it drop. Her bra and panties came off next. Vincent Hull drew her down onto the chaise and touched her slowly, cradling her breasts in his hands and then kissing them, moving over her body with a light touch, until he stroked her thighs and opened them. Jenna thought she would faint, not doing much herself except clinging to him. After teasing her with light flicks of his hands, he touched her soft places and played with her until she moaned loudly. “You’re fast, girl,” he said. “It must be because you’re young.”
Jenna didn’t know what this meant and would have been embarrassed, except that she had lost everything except the wish that he would touch her again and again. Still in his own clothes, she could feel his hard, thick body against her, but at first she feared to excite him more. She didn’t have to though, as now he moved his lips across her nipples, down her belly, to the curly red hair between her legs, and there he licked her until she gasped with an ecstatic cry. He stood up and slid out of his pants. Jenna was almost afraid to look, but when she did, saw a man in full with muscular thighs and a muscled torso. As he crouched down above her, she touched him, slowly too, gently, and he came into her body and moved with her until she cried out once more, at which he bent his head and groaned into her breasts. After a moment, he pulled her up and wrapped her in another towel, while he wrapped him
self in one too, picking up her clothes and then his own. “Now you are so quiet, Miss Jenna.”
She couldn’t look at him. “I don’t know how to talk to you. I don’t have the right words.”
“You’ll find them, I’m guessing.” He kissed her lightly on the forehead, leading her straight up back to the house.
“I don’t know what to call you.”
“‘Vince,’ but only when we’re alone together.” Right away this new man, this Vince said goodnight, though tenderly, at her bedroom door. She sank down into the pillows and fell asleep without showering or doing anything else to cleanse herself of his body. When she awoke the next morning she found a note on her bed. In black pen with a more florid hand than usual, he had written, “What a beautiful evening.” That was all, and she learned later from the housekeeper that he’d gone back to the city. She didn’t know what to make of their lovemaking but felt curiously complete and relaxed. She didn’t worry for her job, nor for any gossip or problems or further romance. She had provided him some solace, for what she didn’t know, but she had felt it in his mouth and his hands and his sex. She would just stay here and do the inventory, but still she didn’t want to wash his smell off her. Why did everyone hate this man?
THREE
For most of that Sunday morning Jenna worked on the art project, energized and full of hope, for no good reason except a rested soul. The very discreet housekeeper, known to her now as Carmen, seemed to come and go, to vanish behind swinging doors, to tiptoe through halls like a kindly sprite, smiling all the while but acknowledging nothing that she might have seen or heard, not even the trace of a leer in her face. By now, Jenna had thoroughly mastered the Leica, which she had quietly taken possession of, and got so much work done that later in the day she called a taxi and went into town to shop. Her two little dresses had been through a lot, and she still had not washed herself or even taken a shower.
After a short taxi ride from Water Mill, she wandered dreamily along the quaint main street of Sag Harbor, randomly picking out items in the pricey boutiques that looked good but that she didn’t even bother to try on. After two hours spending way more money than she should, Jenna took a second cab ride back to the palazzo she currently occupied and fell hot and exhausted onto her strange, Chinese-looking bed. She floated off into dreamless sleep, and when she finally awoke, the clock read six. She jumped up, pulled the two skirts and three T-shirts out of her shopping bag and decided to shower before traipsing down to what she knew would be a solitary dinner. She did not want any sadness or loneliness now, just the remembered pleasures that suffused her body and her mind. She stripped off her clothes and looked at herself from head-to-toe in the mirror. Everything the same but rosier, breasts slightly bigger. Really? The tummy flatter, the thighs taut. “Oh, you idiot,” she said aloud as she contemplated the effects of love on her young and blooming flesh.
Inside the ridiculously big shower—the Hull bathroom was larger than her living room in Gramercy Park—she soaped herself all over with a sumptuous washcloth and luxuriated in the cleverly modulated streams of hot water cascading over her. Such bounty had never come to Jenna before, and while she knew it couldn’t last long, she intended to enjoy every single minute of it. Out of a window large enough to show off the capacious lawn and the pool, she watched as once again the lone nighttime kayaker reappeared. She wondered who he was. Turning away to raise her face to the water, she didn’t hear Vincent Hull come into the bathroom and sit on a stool near one of the sinks. When she turned, she saw him and gave a screech.
“Don’t panic,” he mouthed, and added louder, “I didn’t see anything that I haven’t already seen.”
Jenna put her face up to the shower glass. “You again,” she said boldly and then put her hands demurely over her lower body. Even through the foggy glass of the shower, she could read his intense expression, and as he fixed her eyes with his, he began to undress, pulling off his T-shirt, then letting his khakis drop, next his boxers. His thick, muscular body was not old looking, not wrinkled, but taut, as if he worked out, though she’d never heard of such activity. She dropped her eyes the minute she saw how vivid his excitement was. He opened the shower door and stepped in. As she turned toward the shower head, he caressed her from her shoulders, down to her back, to her buttocks, and then her thighs, curling his hands around front to excite her even more, while he moved into her from behind. After she could stand it no longer, she curved herself around and clasped him to her, while they shuddered together with pleasure.
Outside the shower, right away they started laughing at their bedraggled, possibly drowning state. Drying himself quickly, Vincent took the enormous towel in hand and with it covered every inch of Jenna’s body, rubbing each soft secret place very carefully, until once again she moaned into his arms. Then he sat back with only the towel draped over his thighs and watched as she pulled her hair out of its scrunchie and combed it over her shoulders.
“You are really beautiful.”
“Liar.” She giggled. Actually she felt like singing, but then a strange silence fell.
“Who taught you to fuck like that?”
“What?” He had ambushed her, and for a moment she couldn’t think what to say. Then, “It’s an Irish thing.”
Perplexed as well, apparently, he stared at her, until finally he lashed out. “There you stand in all your glory, while you betray a wife, a woman who right now sits probably waiting for a call from me, who met you and is secure in the knowledge that you are possibly too sweet and too kind to do what you did here today. Not that you did it to her, but you might as well have. And what of the children? You’ve seen them, or at least their pictures, innocent, loving, trusting. Do you think of them at all? Waiting at home for Daddy?”
As she listened, Jenna stopped breathing. He was right. She thought of no one but herself, nothing but her own pleasure. She was young, a kid, just turned twenty-four. She knew nothing, she thought nothing, she just longed and wanted and got and didn’t care. Her eyes filled with tears, and she shouted, “Get out, get out of this bathroom. You bastard. They told me you were the devil. After all that we’ve done together, all we’ve—” here she stopped because she didn’t know exactly what it was they had done. Earth-shattering to her, but perhaps to him, to anyone schooled in these arts, just ordinary. And yet, standing there half naked, full of sex and heat, she thought, no, it was important. She shrieked again, “My roommate Allyson always says, ‘To me love is fucking.’ I never knew what she meant, but now I do. I guess you don’t.” She whipped a towel around her and tried to run past him out the door, but he grabbed her.
“Stop, don’t do that, I’m sorry. Oh Jenna, Jenna, you’re the most loving person in my world now. I don’t know why I said such ugly things.”
“You don’t know why you do anything. Why do you collect guns, houses, women, paintings? What are you doing with all this stuff? Maybe you’re just a high-class hoarder.” She ran out into the bedroom and flung herself face down onto the bed, leaving her damp imprint all over the yellow silk duvet cover, screaming her rage into the pillows. Vincent stood for a moment and then sat down next to her and began rubbing her back, but she rose up and shouted, “Stop doing that!” And yet she could see that he looked shocked, actually hurt. His eyes seemed to tear up, but she felt no pity and jumped away, pulling on whatever of her clothing lay about.
“Sit,” he shouted and shoved her into a chair. She could not resist but refused to look at him, because in truth he was right about everything. She was a selfish, ignorant bitch who didn’t care for families or children at all; she knew nothing about them, really. He sank down in front of her and tried to pull her toward him, but she pulled back. “Please forgive me, please. I say things, I shoot my mouth off. No one ever opposes me in anything. I’ve forgotten how to act like a civilized man.”
Jenna stared into his eyes now, recovered somewhat. She pulled her T-shirt over her chest, though she was still naked from the waist down. Quietly, in a hus
hed voice, she murmured, “I was just part of your empire, the bed part of your empire. Who are you exactly? I mean, do you exist at all in the real world?”
Vincent dropped his head and wiped his hand over his forehead. “Forgive me.”
“Just tell me one thing that’s true about yourself. Can you do that? Do you know how to do that?”
Vincent Hull controlled thousands of people, owned treasure equal to that of kings, a world of possibility and freedom, and yet he felt so ashamed that he couldn’t speak. Finally he clasped Jenna’s shoulders in his strong hands, leaning in close to her mouth. “I am the faithless one. I am the confirmed, practiced betrayer, a traitor to those who love me.”
Jenna stared at the man, and at last put out her own arms to him, and they held each other. “No, you must be good, you are, truly. Kiss me,” she commanded.
He opened his mouth to her, but as soon as he did, she pushed him down on the bed. Pulling off her T-shirt, she tugged at the thick towel around his waist. When he was naked, excited already, she straddled him and pushed her weight against him. “Watch that, girl,” he tried to joke. “My chiropractor won’t like this.”
Her breasts touching his chest, she began to slide very slowly from his mouth, to his Adam’s apple, to his belly, and thence downwards, using them as soft arousing pillows that rubbed every part of the front of him. He moved as if to kiss her, but she shoved him down sharply. “You do what I want now.” With her lips and her hands, even her legs, she made love to him, flicking his penis with her tongue as he lay passive, not allowed to move because she lay on top of him, until at last he cried out so loudly that she had to put her hand over his mouth. Moments later, she slid down upon him so that he could enter her. As he rose inside her, she gripped with her strong pelvic muscles until he shouted in a frenzy. Only then did she allow herself her own pleasure. Exhausted, silent, at last he sat up, and Jenna let him go. He embraced her, murmuring, “Never in my life have I had a lover like you.” She smiled, not saying a word, and curled herself into his arms, ready to sleep.
