Lovers

by Judith Krantz

  “What’s going to happen now?” Victoria made herself ask, the night before her mother’s return.

  “The only thing I can think about is how we can be together. We can’t … sit around and wait till she goes out of town—that’s out of the question.”

  “But the two of you have social obligations almost every night, there are no excuses you can make.”

  “I just don’t know what to do.” He sat up in bed and buried his face in his hands.

  As she had expected and feared, Angus wasn’t ready yet to tear his life apart, Victoria reflected. He hadn’t allowed himself to realize that of course it all must come tumbling down before it could be built up again with her. It was too soon for him to face the reality that he had to turn his back on everything he’d taken for granted, too soon for him to acknowledge that she must replace her mother, her unloving, ungiving, unnatural mother, whose punishment had been too long in coming. But Angus was still only thirty-nine, he had as much time ahead of him as they needed, and she would wait. Wait and wait. Now that she was sure of him, how much easier it would be. Hadn’t she waited since she was sixteen for him, held herself out for endless, arid years with nothing but her will and her love to keep her going? She couldn’t risk a wrong move now that she had achieved the victory that had never seemed impossible. She had always known that she must eventually win Angus away from her mother. He had belonged to her from the minute she had first seen him.

  “We could get a place near the office,” Victoria said hesitantly, as if she hadn’t meditated long on the question. “We could meet there now and then … at lunch or right at the end of the afternoon, before you have to be home—you could be out having an early drink with a client or playing bridge—we could manage an hour here and there.”

  “Oh God, darling!” He buried his face in her shoulder. “An hour! An hour’s nothing!”

  “But what’s the alternative?” she asked.

  “None,” he groaned, “none.”

  Within a few days, Angus had rented a well-furnished studio apartment that was only a five-minute taxi ride from the offices of Caldwell & Caldwell, and had arranged for regular maid service. They met there whenever they could, sometimes by rigorous planning, jointly managing to avoid their business lunches, and sometimes at five in the afternoon. However, their busy schedules, which depended on fulfilling the demands of so many other people, made their times together few, short, and maddeningly unpredictable. The weekends, which the Caldwells usually spent in Southampton from the spring through the fall, were especially difficult to endure, and Millicent Frost Caldwell’s brief trips out of town still remained their only periods of genuine freedom.

  Almost a year passed, and their ravening desire for each other became stronger with every unexpected postponement of a meeting, every time they had to tear themselves from an hour in their warm bed and put on their public faces. Unslaked desire, desire that grew stronger with its infrequent release, possessed them whenever they were not together, a gnawing undercurrent of permanent hunger, a confirmed addiction, an addiction they welcomed in all its manifestations.

  “I can’t touch Millicent,” Angus confessed late in that year. “I haven’t touched her since our first time.”

  “Has she said anything?” Victoria asked, screaming in her head for him to tell her, for God’s sake, tell her mother the truth.

  “No, she’s let it go. Clearly she’s decided to blind herself, she obviously doesn’t want to know,” Angus said, and Victoria heard the clear relief in his voice with cold dread.

  Not long afterwards, in early winter of 1981, soon after she had been promoted to senior account supervisor on all the Oak Hill accounts, Victoria faced the fact that it was too comfortable for Angus to have a lover who worked so closely with him, a lover who would do anything to be with him whenever he had a scrap of time for her, and a wife who was determined to ask no questions. Perhaps she could provoke some sort of showdown.

  “Mother, I was thinking of coming to Jamaica for a week at Christmas this year … that is if you have room for me?”

  “We’d love it,” Millicent said, hiding her surprise. “But I assume you’d like to bring a beau?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that, but yes, as a matter of fact, I would. He’s no one special, at least not yet, don’t get your hopes up, but he’ll be an addition to the party. Thank you, Mother.”

  She couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of playing that hand herself, Victoria thought, as she made a telephone call. Count on Millicent Frost to know how to sell a product, dead or alive.

  In order to keep busy during her many empty evenings, she had never stopped seeing several of the increasingly eligible men who continued to present themselves to her, only to go away eventually, disappointed in their failure to interest this somehow mysterious young woman who seemed to have escaped even a touch of the neediness they sensed in most of the other unmarried career women they knew. Victoria Frost had a monster job, she got more uncannily attractive every year, she’d never been serious about anyone … how could she not be anxious, at almost twenty-nine, to find the right man and take her rightful position in the world? Why did she seem so snugly settled in that mysteriously comfortable little place of hers that wasn’t even on a good street? There was no way she could be destined for the permanently unmarried life, happy as she seemed with the arrangement; such a life simply didn’t happen to girls like her, smart as hell, rich as hell, and yes, beautiful, for Victoria Frost had become a beauty in the last year or so. People agreed that she’d finally grown into her looks.

  Victoria chose the most attractive of her many aspirants, Amory Hopkins, a thirty-five-year-old divorced stockbroker, decisively rich, unencumbered by children, tall, good-looking, well mannered, and possessed of a pleasant, quiet sense of humor. He had the necessary skills at sports, he danced acceptably well, he dressed most acceptably well, and he certainly looked as if he could fuck more than acceptably well, Victoria thought, as he accepted her invitation with deep pleasure. Her mother would be secretly salivating over him. Angus … the more agony Angus felt the better.

  During the week at the estate near Montego Bay, Victoria deployed every weapon she possessed. Garden-variety flirtation was not among them—it was an art she had never practiced—but as she sat listening intently to Amory Hopkins, during the long conversations she instigated as they sat somewhat apart from the rest of the house party, she cut raw wounds into Angus that no amount of coquettishness could have made. Whenever her low assenting laugh was heard, whenever she grew animated and leaned toward Amory to emphasize a point, running her fingers through her hanging tangled hair, Angus quivered with jealousy. Victoria cast aside her usual style and wore thin cotton sun dresses with nothing under them to restrain her full, swinging breasts, bikinis that revealed the disciplined richness of her thighs and the firm, tight line of her waist, short summer evening dresses that turned her flashing long legs into a scissors thrust to his heart.

  Victoria was nicely charming to her mother. She was nicely charming to all the other houseguests. She was particularly nicely charming to Angus, as charming as if he were the elderly stepfather with whom she had a history of years of grateful affection. Whenever she found herself alone in her room, she congratulated herself on that training as an account executive which had made nice charm an automatic part of her repertoire, like a second skin. No un-nice, un-charming account executive survived, either at the top or the bottom of the agency business.

  Amory Hopkins would have thought Victoria even more charming than he did if she’d let him make love to her, but she wouldn’t, implore though he would. She let him kiss her, she let him touch her neck and her arms, and once, when they were out by the swimming pool with everyone else, she let him rub her with suntan oil wherever he could reach, but she insisted that in her mother’s house, it was only decent that she sleep alone.

  Once, just once, she contrived to meet Angus alone in the pool house late in the afternoon. He w
as waiting for her as she entered, grown painfully erect in the few minutes he’d been standing there planning how he would kiss her until she trembled, how he would lead her into one of the changing rooms, lock the door, lift up the skirt of her sun dress, and take her without the slightest regard for her own satisfaction. He owed her that for the way she’d been tormenting him. He knew she’d be so lubricated from the thought of this meeting that he could stick his cock into her without the slightest preliminary. He promised himself to use her so quickly, selfishly, and remorselessly that she wouldn’t have time to achieve an orgasm, and then pull out and go away, leaving her lying there mad from humiliating desire. Let her suffer, Angus told himself, let her feel the same tormented arousal he’d felt all week and been unable to satisfy. Let her touch herself and think of him, as she used to, he thought, grinding his teeth in a rapture of anticipation.

  Victoria entered the pool house and flew into his arms. He had only kissed her once before she thrust both of her hands into the fly of his swimming trunks, grasped his hard penis, and started to use her fingers in the way he adored the most, cupping and squeezing his balls with one hand while the other manipulated the shaft with a sure up-and-down motion of firmly increasing pressure and swiftness. Angus stood frozen, panting, with the beginning of the certainty that he was about to come, unable to carry out his plan. Suddenly Victoria jumped, startled, as if she’d heard someone at the door of the pool house. She snatched her hands out of his trunks, turned on her heel, and ran out of the pool house as quickly as she had entered.

  Oh, she knew how much he was suffering, Victoria thought, as she walked lightly up to the house, for she was suffering just as much. She would give almost anything to have him inside her, anything but the victory she had just achieved.

  “Do you think I don’t know that you did that on purpose?” Angus raged at her the first time they met again at the New York apartment near the office, shortly after the New Year’s Eve that ushered in 1982. “You were obscene!”

  “You have a life. I don’t,” Victoria said quietly, unaffected by his anger.

  “We have a life!”

  “It’s not enough. I refuse to accept this little.” She spoke in a conversational tone.

  “Good Christ, we have as much as we can, you must understand that.”

  “No.” She shook her head with an air of finality, sitting on the edge of a chair, her gloves in her hand, like a lady waiting for a cup of tea. He had expected her to be as avid as he was, but she had never looked so removed from thoughts of sex. She was still playing with him, he thought as he walked over to her, bent down, and pulled her up to him, kissing her lips, pulling out the pins that held up her hair, undoing the buttons of her suit and blouse, and then bending to suck hard, hard on her nipples in the way that excited her the most. She allowed everything, she allowed him to push her back on the couch, to undress her, to make her as wet as he wanted to with his tongue, to part her legs, to push into her, but she responded not at all. He took her with a more intense excitement than he had ever known. The more she held herself in check, the more frenzied he became.

  When it was over, she asked only, “Was that enough for you?”

  “Shit, no! Was it enough for you?”

  “It’s as much as I can give you,” she said implacably. “I have to leave. There’s the Lighthouse Ball tonight, and I have to go home and get ready.”

  Unable to move, unable even to think with any coherence, Angus watched Victoria gather her clothes together and dress rapidly. It was only five-thirty in the evening, there was no need for her to be in a hurry, they still had an hour, even an hour and a half. How could she leave him, aroused and unfulfilled as she was, this girl who lived for his fucking, when it had been weeks and weeks since she’d had an orgasm? At least so far as he knew. He despised himself as he asked, shaking with jealousy, “Who’s taking you to the ball?”

  “Not Amory. No one you know.” And she was gone, leaving him in incredulous despair.

  He sat for a long time on the couch, unable to dress, wrapped only in his overcoat, shivering in the warm room, trying to make sense out of what had happened, torn between jealousy of some man who would dance with her tonight and look into her eyes and receive her smile, and the fact that he was again violently thirsty for her body, so ready that it hurt, so ready that now, this minute he would give anything to take her again.

  “You have a life,” she’d said to him. Indeed he did. He had a life that was filled from waking to sleeping; a life in which he was responsible for the fortunes of a huge company; a life in which he had to portion out every minute to meet the demands of his clients, each one of whom expected individual hand-holding, no matter how good the account supervisors were who worked with them; a life in which these same supervisors and their account executives and their creative teams looked to him and Millicent for final approval of the campaigns they planned to present to the clients; a life that included playing hard at the sports through which men like him consolidated their business relationships; a life that demanded that he entertain and be entertained on an increasingly grand scale, that he travel to touch base with his international branches and clients in other cities … a life that was crammed full to bursting with obligations that went with his position and achievements as one of the most important men in advertising.

  The small spaces of time he’d been able to steal for Victoria could not, reasonably, be added to by more than a few hours at wide intervals, Angus Caldwell realized. What more could he give her?

  Imagine, he said to himself, imagine that you got a divorce from Millicent. Imagine that the agency was thrown into confusion and its smooth functioning went to hell for a while, imagine a full-scale uproar, as bad as it could get. Nevertheless, a cadre of clients and creative people would most certainly stick it out with you, and you could start up all over again, on a smaller scale, with your own new agency, and be content with that and whatever growth came in time. Yes, that scenario was entirely possible. A number of agencies, headed by two or more partners, endured when those people agreed to go their own ways, creating other agencies as they split.

  He certainly had the right to divorce his wife, brilliant, popular Millicent, and marry any other woman, even a twenty-year-old, and risk no more than the loss of some of his business and many of his friends. He would probably seem heartless, considering Millicent’s age and her role in his success, but people always assumed that they never knew the truth of the inside of a marriage and made allowances. They hated to take sides.

  But imagine instead that after you divorce Millicent, you marry Victoria. Angus now realized, finally, in hideous clarity, that Victoria’s agenda was marriage. How could he ever have been stupid enough to hope that she would be content with the arrangement they had?

  Yes, just imagine that you marry your former wife’s one and only daughter, a young woman the people you know best have considered to be your stepdaughter for thirteen years, ever since so many of them had seen her as a flushed, tall, beautiful teenager in an emerald green minidress, walking in nervous dignity down the aisle of a church at your wedding, your wife’s only attendant.

  No! Never! He, Angus Caldwell, knew it wasn’t incest. Victoria and he shared no ties of blood. He had never adopted her, never even considered it. He knew she’d been a grown-up sixteen when he’d first laid eyes on her. He knew they hadn’t spent a night in the same house in her formative years, except for a few occasions when she was between trains or planes. He knew how distant she had always been from her mother, how rarely he’d even seen her in those six years before her graduation from college. He knew he hadn’t touched her until she was twenty-seven. He knew he had never, in those eleven years, considered her in the position of a stepdaughter. Not once, during those innocent dinners at her apartment, those dinners during which they had never touched each other, had he spared the time to remind himself who her mother was. And afterwards … no, never. Particularly not afterwards.

  Oh, he k
new all this, and none of it mattered. Not one single fact. None of it could be explained away as he had just so convincingly explained it to himself. The facts were irrelevant. None of it—none—would be weighed in evidence when the scandal came to light, when people heard about it and started the storm of speculation that would never stop, even after his death. Everyone he knew in the world, every man in every club, every client who had confidence in him, every one of the hundreds of people who worked for him, would think of him as a man who had committed a crime against nature. A man who had fucked his stepdaughter. A man who had fucked her for God knows how long. A man who had betrayed his wife in the vilest way, A man who should be thrust outside of society. A man to be shunned by any decent person.

  He had to give Victoria up, Angus saw in a jolt of clear reason. He had to get out of the fearful danger he had been too muddleheaded and blinded by sex to think through until today. He had trapped himself into the biggest mistake of his life. But he had to ease out of it cautiously, with infinite care, so that no one, no one, would ever know. Victoria had it in her power to destroy his life, to lay waste to everything that was important to him. She could be his ruin.

  During the next months, whenever they met, Angus Caldwell forced himself to raise the question of their future together. He realized she couldn’t go on like this, he told Victoria, he realized how selfish he’d been, he couldn’t live this way either, it was against all natural human feeling for them not to be together openly, for them not to marry when they loved each other so. But, my God, they had to be patient a while longer, she must understand that, they had to find a way to have their lives together and still make as little mess as possible, she saw that, didn’t she, his intelligent darling? No, he understood that she had to go out with other men, it would look peculiar if she didn’t, but he couldn’t help being jealous even though he knew she didn’t sleep with them, she had to forgive him his jealousy, she had to promise him, promise him that they never touched her, never touched his darling.