by A. R. Taylor
Vincent threw up his hands in mock horror. “They love to quit. It’s their only option.”
Tasha interrupted, “But we’re starving to death. We’ve been sitting here for three hours.”
“Waiting for you, Vincenzo.” Sabine Hull rubbed her hand with her napkin, as if polishing something. “Always late. It’s a disease, but I can’t think of what it might be called.”
“Your English isn’t good enough.” Hull sipped his wine. “This isn’t any good either.”
The maître d’ still stood nearby, embarrassed for every reason in the world. “Some of the waiters have stepped in and are cooking the food, so please just wait for a few more minutes.”
“Are you serious?” Hull said loudly. “I doubt they can cook anything edible.”
“Vincent!” Sabine socked his arm, and Jenna giggled, then hid her face in her napkin, while images of his body parts rolled through her head. Oh god, she had to get out of there.
At this moment, Vincent pulled out his chair, every eye in the place upon him, and marched toward the kitchen. “What’s he doing?” Jenna by now felt stuck in a bad dream.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if he tried to cook the dinner himself.” Under the gaze of the multitudes, Sabine pulled out a cigarette and lit up. At this the maître d’ ran over.
“No, no, miss. Sorry Madame Hull, no smoking at the Plaza.”
The Madame looked about to slap the man, and now Jenna knew she had to take action. Where was her purse and where the inventory binder? She stuck her hand beneath her chair, flapping it about trying to hit something. Staring down again, bending down, she wanted to crawl onto the floor, but finally these fat objects let themselves be felt right next to her left leg. “I must go,” she said stiffly.
“No, no, you can’t,” a chorus of drunken cries came up from Tasha and Sabine. “We need you.”
Even in her stupor, Jenna recognized a seriously bad idea when she saw one, and just as Vince marched their way, followed by a waiter pushing the roast beef cart, she managed to stand, her purse and the binder giving her welcome ballast. “Thank you, thank you all so much,” she intoned like the hostess at a charity ball. How she got out of there, in later years she couldn’t ever remember. The lighting so dim, herself completely hammered, she prayed that almost everybody at that table forgave her or didn’t notice, and Vincent of course, would understand what she had done. She had, in fact, taken one for the team, that’s how she wanted to think of it in the end, despite the fact that very stupidly, she’d forgotten to hand him the blasted art inventory.
Outside she spotted Angelo and the car, but leaned in through the window to wave him off. “I have to walk. Just forget about me.”
“How could I do that?” He threw out his hands dolefully.
But Jenna refused the temptation to enjoy yet more luxury and congratulated herself that at least she had gotten out before the bill came. From Central Park South all the way down to 20th, she actually made it on her own steam, and it helped that she still wore her work shoes, nothing pointy or high, just patent leather flats. Her head began to clear. When she saw the familiar Gramercy Park Hotel on the corner, for the first time since she had moved here to New York, she felt herself at home. It was late now, almost midnight, and Jenna wondered if she would find her roommates anywhere about.
Tiptoeing into the apartment, in the darkness she could see that their two doors were open, so Allyson and Vera were off doing a Friday night thing themselves. She flopped down on her futon. This night, how awful, how drunken and right in front of Sabine Hull and Tasha. Had she said anything terrible or outrageous? Would the two other women have been able to read the signs, the shifting body moves that meant yes, she and her boss had made love recently and a lot. Jenna couldn’t even look at herself in the mirror as she brushed her hair. Unfolding what passed for her bed and climbing into it, she snuggled herself into the blankets, the newly purchased air-conditioner blasting out at her as if she crouched in a high wind. God, she hated this stuff, this artificial air.
The little cell phone Vincent had given her chirped, and for about ten seconds she thought of not answering it. Maybe he would believe her fast asleep. Unnerved, as it was after one in the morning, at first she couldn’t find it, finally knocking it off the table. By the time she’d fingered her way toward it, then figured out the buttons, only silence came through from the other end. She put it back on the table beside the bed and got up to grab a ginger ale out of the fridge, trying to stare down the phone. Maybe it had been a wrong number? It pinged again, and this time she pressed the tiny button, pulling it up to her ear. “Hello?”
At once she heard Vincent Hull’s deep voice. “Where are you, Jenna?”
“At home in bed.”
“I want to see you.”
“You did see me.”
“I want to see more of you than that. Besides, we couldn’t talk.”
Since when did they ever talk much, but she didn’t want a fight, and after all, how could she refuse, even though it was late and she was in recovery mode? “I’ve finished the inventory, in fact it’s in a binder right here.” She sought some semblance of normalcy amid the weirdness.
“Maybe you could bring it to me?”
“Now?”
“Why not now?” Jenna looked down at the shiny hands of the clock on the floor next to her bed: 1:20. Okay, so how was this going to happen? “I’ll send Angelo.”
“No,” she said sharply, startling herself.
“He’ll be there in ten minutes, and he’ll bring you back to the townhouse on 57th Street.” What was this, another residence? She hadn’t even known about this one. A secret office, perhaps one he used for his charitable foundation? Worse yet, two blocks from the Plaza.
By now halfway toward sober, Jenna jumped out of bed and pulled on some black slacks, a red T-shirt, dressy though, with a slash of lace at the collar, and piled her binder into her black leather tote bag. The binder looked sleek and professional. Angelo, Angelo, a fellow sufferer in the land of filthy lucre, what would she say to him? In a few moments she heard the discreet toot of a horn, and outside in the shadows the Lincoln hummed. She jumped in as if escaping someone or something. Angelo gazed at her in the rear view mirror, at first silent. Since she didn’t know what to say, she stared down at her purse, fumbling with the clasp compulsively. He wheeled the big car around the block and headed uptown, still without a word.
“Angelo, I’m sorry, I mean, I don’t know what to say—”
“Not necessary.”
“It is necessary. This, I don’t know how it happened.”
“No one ever does.” Angelo adjusted the mirror, tilting it slightly to get a better view of her. “You know, I worry, I really do. If you don’t mind me saying so, you’re not like the other people—girls or women or—”
“Don’t tell me, I can just imagine.”
“Not sure that you can, actually.”
“I can’t explain it to myself, but I’m alone in the world, no one to live for or look up to or really even get close to. These New York people are not so friendly, and here I am in that incredible office. Everyone’s afraid to say hello to me.”
“True, but I thought you had that writer who went up to Rye, you know, more your age. I drove him a couple of times when he first started at the magazine. He seemed like a nice guy.”
“We’re friends.” They left it at that, in part because there was no more to say, but also now Hull had positioned her somewhere ambiguously above Angelo, no longer strictly an employee, but a lover and therefore in a position of power herself, not that she had any sense it could be used, but still, it was too much. She had left the ground and floated upwards into a social stratum she neither deserved nor knew anything about.
At East 57th Street, Angelo stopped the car in front of a stately townhouse that looked to be from the Art Deco period, iron scrollwork curving over the stained-glass doorway. Jenna stepped out of the car, glad that Angelo stood beside her, as
it was now close to two in the morning, no one about. She ascended the front steps, pressed the bell, which sounded like a gong in the silent night, and right away a soft buzzer hummed as she pushed the door forward. Into the extraordinary hallway she walked, its walls covered in green damask, geometrically carved wooden ceilings above. Before her hung a chandelier of iron and glass curlicues, and at the far end of the hallway, there loomed an elaborate gated elevator.
It was very old, and it creaked upwards slowly, its menacing metal bars giving her a glimpse of the ancient mottled wood that made up the interior of the building. At the second floor, where it jolted to a stop, Jenna just stood there, not really knowing how to get out. Finally she wrestled the grillwork door aside and entered a room unlike any other she had seen. She glimpsed mahogany-lined bookshelves, probably a Chardin still life, what appeared to be a Van Gogh, and finally, on a green couch, Vincent Hull himself, dressed casually now in blue jeans and one of his black T-shirts. Drink in hand, he leapt up, trying to sweep her into his arms, as he planted his drink on the table. “I waited so long for you.” His voice sounded hoarse and unnatural.
“No. I won’t do it.” She hugged the thick binder to her breasts. He took it gently from her hand and set it on a nearby table.
“Do what?”
“I don’t know.” She really had no words for whatever conversation she thought she had planned. Looking up into those deep-set eyes that spoke to her always, she felt drugged. He covered her mouth with his own, harshly, not waiting at all for her to respond, but of course she did, and what happened next she could never forget. He moved her forward as if to go to another room, but she grabbed his arm and pulled him down toward her. “Here.”
“Here?”
“Yes, on the floor.”
“What?” He let her pull off his shirt, then slide her hands over his hips and unbutton his jeans, but he swept off the rest while she waited. She did not let her gaze waver. She took off her own clothes slowly, as he sank down and watched without a word. Once completely naked, she stood over him as he grabbed a pillow for his head and looked up at her. Except for that one really hostile moment she had ravaged him in his bed, normally he had dominated her so absolutely that she might have been a captive lady in the castle keep. Now he took the place of captive.
She sank down onto his chest and began to kiss him gently from the forehead down to his throat, his chest, to his belly, and finally to his sex. He groaned and closed his eyes, while she whispered into his ear, “I want you to beg.”
Even in the midst of this, he laughed. “Never. I don’t beg.”
Once again, she moved slowly over his body, her lips resting for a moment in his secret places, in places she had never touched before, and then she caressed with her mouth the very center of the man until he started moving hotly to touch her. “No touch,” she whispered again. “Just beg me.”
“For what?”
“To fuck you.”
“No, no, you’ve lost your mind, I don’t—” But her fluttering tongue had him gasping now, and though he tried to touch her, too, she flicked away his hand.
“Just say please. Do you know how to say please?”
“Okay, fuck me.” He breathed heavily against her breasts and seemed about to explode.
“Say please.” Jenna herself was about to scream with pleasure, but she held herself in so tightly, bottled up with her rage against this man she wanted but didn’t even know.
“Please.” As he got this out, she sank down upon him and the sound that came out of his mouth she had never heard before, but at the same moment, she herself let out a cry. Hot, sweating, still inside her, Vince curled his arms around her and rolled her onto the floor next to him, wanting to hold her there against him, but she struggled and slid away. He pulled a throw rug around them, drawing them together. Almost but not quite, Jenna drifted into sleep. After some moments, she pulled herself up, aware somehow that these postures, this attitude, could not exist where she currently lay. While the man watched, silent, she pulled on her clothes and then, before she could leave, drew the inventory binder off the couch and flipped through it quickly. Fat as a Russian novel, it looked professional, consequential, a careful record of size, date, and provenance of artworks that, taken together, she had valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. This was her work, the only solid piece of anything meaningful she had done for him. She laid the book carefully down next to him. Vincent still said nothing, though at last, “You’re going?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t”
But Jenna fled into the hall of this singular abode, more appropriate for an eighteenth-century magnate or country gentleman, yet stuck right here in New York City. She wasn’t sure Angelo had waited, but as she peered around her, there the car purred like a panther after a feed. She climbed aboard and lost herself in its leathery darkness. She did not speak at all.
SEVEN
For the whole of the next week, Vincent Hull did not come into the office and, according to Jorge, the man had once more decamped to Paris. “What does he do there?” Jenna was unsure how much to ask, but she fully expected to get fired and wanted to be prepared.
“Drinks coffee, scouts paintings, eats croissants, I don’t know. Lives the charmed life.”
“What about his family?”
“The wife goes with him sometimes, and the girls stay with Mrs. Hull’s parents.”
One of her phone lights turned red. It was Inti, busy, stressed, anxious to get the photos. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you.”
She fished the photos guiltily out of her desk. “Actually, I have them right here.”
“Messenger them, I’m not kidding. This could be a big story, at least for Rye and could be for a lot of other towns. Time passes. What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m sorry, I just got busy. It’s not that easy with the Leica. I couldn’t go to a regular photo processing place.” Jorge listened to all this, trying not to stare. “The pictures are really good. I think you’ll like them.” In one, she had caught the glazed, fiery eyes of the coyote looking at them helplessly. In another the retreating rear ends of the pack lined up almost symmetrically, and in one of the saddest, a coyote lay dead, fallen down before them in exhaustion.
“This could be serious. Get them to me right away.” He sounded truly angry, and she could see why. Inti hung up without making any sort of plan to see her again. Within minutes, Jenna enlisted Jorge to package up the photos, and out the door they went with the messenger.
Her roommates, who up until this point had alternately ignored her or laughed at her, for the first time in a long time invited her out for a drink and a hamburger at their favorite pub in Gramercy Park. Ten days after Jenna had ravished Vincent Hull on the floor, there they all sat. The irony of it made Jenna stare solemnly into her second martini. What do you know, and when did you know it, she almost wanted to shout above the din, like some demented television reporter. Of course they must know nothing, but maybe they just felt her changed for the better. Sounds of Ricky Martin’s “La Vida Loca” streamed loudly through the room and Jenna couldn’t stop herself from swaying her shoulders as if dancing, whether fearful or nuts she wasn’t sure. Allyson looked at her strangely, while Vera swiveled her head right and left to see who was around, especially her errant boyfriend, Ed Delong. They didn’t talk much to her, and so she was left to watch the TV up behind the bar. Without warning, the imposing figure of Vincent Hull appeared, being interviewed, it seemed, in a building distinctly Parisian. “Quiet,” she said to Allyson and Vera, and then shoved her way closer to the bar to hear what the man said. Vera snickered, and Allyson tossed back a tequila shooter, making strange faces all the while.
By the time she had pushed through the people, Hull was off the screen, but there before her stood the Rothko that had so transfixed her in his New York townhouse. Had he taken it to Paris? She couldn’t imagine such a thing, but then she really couldn’t fathom his life at all.
Maybe he had put it in his plane? When she got back to the table, her roommates both started to interrogate her. “All right, come clean, Jenna. We know what’s going on, I do anyway.” Allyson flicked a cigarette ash into a glass dish before her.
Vera leaned far forward, poking at her with a French fry. “You’d better be careful, missy. Whatever you’re doing, you don’t know what you’re doing, that’s for sure.”
“How do you know that? How do the two of you know anything?”
“Come on,” Allyson crooned. “We’ve tried to make friends, but you’re never around or you’re out, god knows where.”
“You’re out all the time too. Besides, I thought you didn’t like me.”
Vera shook her head. “You’re the one who never talks to either of us. We thought you hated us, maybe for sticking you with the futon?”
“No, no, not at all. I’m just too flustered to know what I’m doing.” Jenna had decided to play dumb. Her roommates didn’t buy any of this, and had taken to speculating daily about whatever salacious business Jenna was up to, but she was younger than they by at least five years, so they were unsure how deeply she might have gotten herself into trouble.
Late on a blustery hot August night in the city, many days after her curiously satisfying erotic frenzy with her boss, Jenna awoke from a sound sleep startled by the phone. She grabbed it right away so as not to awaken Allyson and Vera. It was, of all people, Tasha, screaming, “You’ve got to come to the office, oh please right away!” She gasped and sobbed as she spoke.
“What’s wrong . . . what’s happened?”
“Just come, please. If you really care about Vincent.”
How did Tasha know what she felt for her boss? But the latter was too hysterical for her to ask. “Has something happened to him?”
