Victoria didn’t allow herself to reveal the slightest hint of emotion other than impersonal friendship during these evenings. She made half a glass of wine last her all night, so that she was in total command of herself at all times. She was never caught watching him with too long a look, or using any of the recognized feminine flirtation techniques, not even subliminally. She couldn’t make herself into anything other than a female, but it was not as a female that she presented herself to Angus, or as connected in any way at all to his wife. Millicent Frost Caldwell ceased to exist as her daughter spun a complicated, age-old spell in which she became almost completely an interested listener and an interesting talker, someone to whom the life of the mind was deeply important.
During these long evenings, Victoria always sat at a distance from Angus that encouraged conversation yet was just too far away to permit any deeper proximity to be established. When it became time for him to leave, she managed to be busy with something in the living room that had just caught her eye, so that she could wave him impersonally out of her front door. Even when he was sitting at the kitchen table and they were ready to eat, she kept an impassable space between them, scrupulously handing him a bowl or platter or jug across the large table, never bending over to serve him or fill his glass. He had never been invited to take a look at her bedroom in the usual way people show off their apartments in New York, and gradually he realized that he never would be.
Victoria always changed before she expected Angus for dinner. She took off the dark, austere, almost too-old-for-her clothes she had adopted for the office right from the beginning of her job and put on casual garb—old, well-washed, rather oversized jeans, and equally well-worn T-shirts or sweaters. She chose these in colors like apricot or old rose, pastels that weren’t fussy but that reflected their warmth on her skin. She always wore a bra under these tops so that her full, thrusting breasts were held firmly in place, but she never wore panties, since it made an important difference to her to be able to feel the rough denim rubbing so intimately on her body, warning her constantly of the role she had to play. She let her hair fall down to the middle of her back, well brushed and loose, she put no makeup on her perfect skin and no makeup on her clear eyes. She looked incredibly young and careless and innocent.
Young, indeed, she was, and infinitely careful and utterly without innocence except for the merely physical. Victoria Frost knew very well that, over the course of time, she was driving Angus Caldwell slowly insane with desire, but she made no move, no sign, gave no word. Everything, she vowed to herself repeatedly, must come from him. She would do nothing to encourage him, nothing to allow him to think that she craved him with every inch of her skin, every cell of her brain. Her victory must be total.
Gradually, even when there was an opportunity for him to possess a woman in a way that would leave no trace, no attachment, Angus Caldwell found himself unwilling to plunge into an unknown body attached to an unknown mind. What he had thought of as a necessary release, a short adventure, began to seem merely shabby when the thought of Victoria came into his mind. He could see her so vividly in the enchanted quiet of her apartment, like a clearing in the woods in its restful colors, with her particular glowing calm, her lovely but impersonal smile, her ready understanding of his ideas, her attentive ear, her interesting opinions.
There was, Angus thought, as he began to look forward more and more eagerly to his dinners with Victoria, only one odd note. Neither he nor she had ever mentioned to Millicent that they met when she was away. They had never discussed this omission. It had been mutually and wordlessly understood from the very first time he had visited her apartment that Millicent would not find acceptable these few hours they spent so harmlessly together. Was this another example of Victoria’s tact, that tact she employed so successfully in dealing with clients, or was it because he was, after all, her boss, or was it some sort of reaction to the undercurrent of edgy discomfort he always felt running so strongly between mother and daughter when they were, so infrequently, together? It was far too late to ask Victoria a question about this matter, and in any case he blessed the silence, for Millicent’s watchful, growing jealousy included all of the many dozens of women he worked with, and wouldn’t have stopped at her daughter, in spite of the fact that Victoria gave her no cause.
No cause. Victoria gave him no cause to think of her with an almost uncontainable, growing lust, yet lust was precisely what was consuming him. He burned, day and night, with lust for a girl who had just turned twenty-seven, a girl who wanted nothing from him but a quiet evening from time to time, a girl who didn’t even bother to put on makeup for him, who never came close to him, who never offered any personal information about her life that might have fed his imagination, a girl who had taken him into her life as a friend, nothing more.
In the office, when Angus saw Victoria in a meeting, dressed in the almost monastic black she favored, her hair so severely tamed, her attitude so cool, so competent, so in control that she could pass for a woman in her mid-thirties, all he could think of was how she looked when he had dinner with her alone. Then, when finally a chance of timing made it possible for him to be with her in her apartment, he could only think of how she would look spread out naked on a bed, stripped of those damn jeans and baggy sweaters, naked, her legs open, her eyes closed, naked, waiting for him, ready for him, crying out for him … Christ! He had to stop this, Angus Caldwell thought as he dressed for another black-tie benefit at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
And what did Victoria think of when she thought of him, Angus wondered as he leaned forward and examined himself in the mirror of his dressing room. Or did she think of him at all? Did she perhaps dream of one or another of the two young men she had recently lured away from the Grey Agency and with whom she now spent so much time in the office? Archie Rourke and Byron Bernheim, a highly coveted creative team, had been hired to work on the three low-calorie products Oak Hill was planning on introducing. Both of them were Victoria’s age, and before Grey they had spent three years at BBD&O, establishing a resonating reputation.
Rourke was a type any young female would find unsettlingly attractive, Angus realized grimly, Black-Irish handsome, so predictably rakehell, whiz-bang handsome it was almost laughable, with that Irish white skin and Irish blue eyes and thick black hair growing in curls too far down his neck, and that Irish way with women. If the talented bastard weren’t in advertising, he could run for any public office he coveted, and probably win on the women’s vote alone, Angus thought wrathfully. Yes, tough Archie Rourke, whose mother taught English in a public high school outside of Chicago, whose father coached the football team; cocky, blunt Archie Rourke, whose way with words was as lively as his ambition, might make any girl think about him twice.
As for Byron Berenson Bernheim the Third, the art director of the two, he was more likely to be Victoria’s type, Angus reflected, his speculations making him more frantic by the minute. Bernheim was the product of a San Francisco family, a highly cultivated clan, with an intellectual mother who supported every cultural institution of the city and a banker father whose art collection was well known even in New York. He was taller than Archie, and leaner, with reddish hair, elegantly put together with none of the bulk that was visible under Archie’s jackets; he had a lively, interesting face and he looked as if he could handle himself well in any fight.
Damn them both to hell! And damn all the other men Victoria worked with and the unknown men she must go out with, although she never mentioned anyone’s name, and damn the museum only three blocks away from his home to which he and Millicent could easily have walked tonight if she weren’t wearing a dark blue Scassi gown that covered her bare arms with a cunning double layer of chiffon that hid the sagging flesh on her skinny frame, for no amount of exercise could overcome the effects of gravity. The dress had also been designed to display her three million dollars’ worth of diamonds. Millicent, so charmingly coiffed and made up by an expert who had ar
rived two hours ago, literally didn’t dare to walk any farther than from the lobby of their apartment house to the waiting door of their limousine, for fear of being mugged, even on Fifth Avenue.
6
A few weeks later, Millicent Frost Caldwell suddenly took herself, her jewel case, three suitcases, and her personal maid off to London on the Concorde for several days of countering the raid she had just discovered Saatchi and Saatchi was going to make on their British Airlines account. Angus proposed himself to Victoria for dinner.
“Tonight or tomorrow?” she wondered.
“Tonight would be better,” he answered casually, “if it isn’t too much trouble?”
“How much trouble can it be to warm up leftover stew?” Victoria smiled, and walked quickly down the corridor to her own office to tell her secretary to cancel her date for that night.
“I brought you a Vivaldi tape you don’t have,” he said as she opened the door.
“Vivaldi and beef stew … are they compatible companions?” she asked on a laugh.
“Better save the music for after dinner,” Angus suggested. He often brought her new tapes simply because she listened to music attentively, with her eyes closed, and that gave him a chance to look at her for a mercifully long, unmercifully torturing time, without her being aware of his gaze.
Tonight, as they finished dinner and put on the tape, Angus sat back with his legs relaxed, in one of the leather armchairs, his eyelids hooding his eyes as Victoria leaned back on a russet linen couch. Her white jeans were so old that they hung comfortably at her waist without needing a belt, and her long hair drifted in soft strands over the dark peach of a sweater that had rubbed thin at the elbows. She looked as tousled and languid as a girl on a sailboat; she was so full of heedless, bursting youth that his heart reeled. He imagined painfully what it would be like to stroke her creamy cheek with his fingers, to kiss her at the base of her smooth, long throat. It seemed to him that the air in the room must be dense and smoky with his feverish longing to touch her, but no such awareness appeared to disturb her concentration on the music.
As the Vivaldi filled the room, Victoria peered through her amazing eyelashes at Angus, knowing from practice in the mirror that she could do so and still seem to have her eyes closed. His face revealed nothing, she thought in a sharp ache of need to touch his rough countryman’s skin, to touch his sandy, silky hair with her lips. She stirred restlessly on the couch. A few seconds after she changed her position, she saw him suddenly, with an almost angry expression, cross one leg over the other in a way that wasn’t characteristic of him. She took a deep breath, waited a minute, and then moved again, stretching her arms over her head as if she had a kink in her back. Still watching him through her lashes, she saw him bite down on his bottom lip and press his legs together more tightly than they had been before. Oh yes, she thought, yes, it has to come now, this moment she had been dreaming of and plotting toward for years, it was time, more than time, high time, and if something didn’t happen now, tonight, when she had finally seen his excitement and measured the extent of his control, it might never happen, he might never come to dinner again. But still the Vivaldi continued and Angus remained seated.
The volume of space she had established between them, never violated, seemed solid and impenetrable to her. The two of them were frozen by the habits she had so carefully, stealthily nurtured, year after year, Victoria realized. He would never make the first move. Suddenly she couldn’t endure the measured formality of the music for another instant.
An agony of impatience, a snapping of her inhuman determination, a shrugging-off of years of self-government possessed her as she rose from the couch, murmuring something about another tape, and mounted to the third step of the library ladder that stood next to the nearest bookcase. She rummaged there with her back to Angus, tears of anger and frustration filling her eyes. She heard his footsteps, and suddenly his arms clasped her waist. She went utterly immobile as she felt him fumbling at the zipper on her jeans. She didn’t move or speak when she felt his warm, shaking fingers moving down her bare stomach to the very edge of the springy hair between her legs, but only braced herself against the railing of the ladder so that she wouldn’t fall. Let him do what he would, she thought, oh, please, let him do what he would, and when he turned her around and buried his thirsty mouth in the dark bounty that was so marvelously bared to his warm, warm lips, her silence spoke for her.
They stood there for long minutes, too overcome even to groan, as he pressed his head into her belly and explored her with his avid, parched lips and his piercing tongue, her voiceless assent more powerful than any words could have been. He kept at her relentlessly, even when her hands tore at his hair and she ground herself against him, until he became afraid that she would escape him into a bliss he couldn’t share. He picked her up and carried her into the bedroom he’d never seen and laid her down on the bed he’d imagined so often and covered her face and mouth with mad, wild, hasty kisses as he tore off his clothes and pulled off her sweater and released her breasts from their bra, as swiftly and hungrily as a criminal. He handled her roughly and ruthlessly, lost to all tenderness, arid she responded with a raw willingness that made her as brutal as he was. His last thought was that later there would be time to caress, to speak, to kiss, as he grabbed the club of his penis in his hand and jammed it into her with a violence he had not known he was capable of. Again and again he shoved, his teeth grinding, clumsy, urgent, savage, falling on her like a starving animal on a piece of meat until he was entirely enclosed by her tightness and warmth.
“Yes!” It was the first word she had spoken, and it was all it took to make him buck into the most severely exquisite orgasm of his life. When it was finally finished, he flung himself back, his heart pounding, almost unconscious with relief, until, after a long while, he returned to his senses and realized that Victoria was lying motionless beside him, still panting with a fierce, unrelieved tension.
“You didn’t …”
“No,” she whispered, and Angus bent over her with his lips open to suck her quickly into the climax she had almost achieved in the living room. As he parted her legs, more gently now, he saw the bloodstains on the sheet below her. “I’ve hurt you!” he exclaimed, suddenly aware of his savagery, his selfish relentlessness.
“I wanted it.” She sounded vulnerable, wounded and deliriously alive, utterly made flesh.
“You’re bleeding.”
“Yes.”
“You … it was the first time.” He was blankly incredulous.
“Of course.”
“Victoria, you couldn’t have, you couldn’t have waited!”
“I touched myself … and thought of you.”
She laughed low in her throat, a purely female laugh, and he was gripped by a wave of emotions—unutterable gratification, violent flattery, amazed love, and unbearable curiosity—emotions primitive and deep and almost too much to endure, so that he wanted to bite her until she bled, to hit her until she cried out, to kiss her until her lips were raw, to bind her to the bed, to mate with her, blindly, until they were both reduced to husks. I touched myself and thought of you. He was hard again, he realized, and now he guided his penis with delicious, careful slowness into her wanting, waiting, welcoming body, feeling with his fingers, which were suddenly delicately sensitive, the folds and concavities of her lower lips, which had been swollen by an onrush of readiness for the past hour. He filled her with a steady, stern penis, hard in that second hardness which lasts so much longer than the first, and he kept it there, motionless, plugging her full of him, while he played with the plump, burning, hesitating rosette of flesh that was the key to her satisfaction. Whenever he sensed that she was about to come, he took his fingers away, only putting them back when she had forced herself to lie quiet again, impaled on his penis, her mouth open in an unuttered plea. She had waited for him. Now she must wait until he chose to release her. Never had he known a woman who understood his demands without words, never h
ad he had anyone so at his mercy, never had he wanted to kill as he came, kill in a carnal ecstasy of total possession, and when he finally burst into her again it was only after finally, almost unwillingly, permitting her the splendid fruit of satisfaction, the terrible, triumphant satisfaction she had waited for so long.
During the four business days that Millicent was in London, they met in Victoria’s apartment as early as possible every night, leaving their offices separately, taking separate taxis, using separate keys, and, once they arrived, going directly to Victoria’s bedroom and falling upon each other in a thunderclap of such intense passion that it never lessened, never allowed them time to pull apart, stop, and take account of the situation. They were too euphoric to think or plan, too anesthetized by the growing discoveries of each other’s bodies, to spare time in talk.
Eventually, Angus had to drag himself off to his home to sleep a few hours, shave, shower, dress, and eat breakfast as if nothing were out of order in his routine. Their days passed in a feverish dream as they attended the usual round of meetings and presentations, surrounded by their unseeing co-workers. Victoria’s body was camouflaged in the reliably hard chic of her clothes, and if anyone had inspected her flushed face closely, the only conclusion they might have drawn was that she’d had a good night’s sleep or had somehow managed to get some sun. Angus found he could run the company on autopilot for a few days. When they both happened to be in the same meeting, they never dared to look directly at each other; when they had to lunch with a group of Oak Hill executives, they barely managed to swallow, although not one of the men around the table noticed that Angus Caldwell and Victoria Frost were any different from their usual efficient, businesslike, good-humored selves.
Lovers Page 14
