Envy. She’d known about envy since she started dancing, Lily raged as she walked home as quickly as possible. She knew well the envy of her classmates each time she was singled out, praised, given a principal role. Envy meant that she was the best, the infallible sign, the one emotion no one could conceal, the one tribute that reassured her absolutely. Envy was her ally. But it made her sick to find out that even Sir Charles and Alma Grey weren’t immune … they were supposed to be teachers, guiding and caring, not competitive; beyond envy, but obviously that was too much to expect from human nature. They would go to their graves envying her, shriveled, wasted, wizened with envy, for what else could it be? They nauseated her, she could almost feel sorry for them if they weren’t so completely revolting. She walked faster, almost running, trying to put the words she had overheard out of her mind. Why should she waste another minute thinking about something that couldn’t possibly be true? She walked with her head high, her shoulders back, with the portée of a prima ballerina, the finest way a human body can move.
“Lily, you’re so late. Is everything all right?” Lady Maxime called from the drawing room.
“Of course it is, Mother. I’m sorry if I’ve kept you waiting … I won’t be a minute.”
Damn Miss Briny, Zachary Amberville thought, he should either have brought her along or not listened to her sartorial jitters. He stood, jacketless, in front of a heavy wooden table on which were piled, in constantly sliding heaps, bolt after bolt of the finest silks and cottons in the world, solids, checks, stripes, plaids, a bewilderment of shirtings. The Bespoke Department of Turnbull and Asser was no place for a man who hated to shop and didn’t have a clear idea of what he was looking for in the first place. The polite young salesman had finally left him alone, to meditate on a choice, after an hour of making fruitless suggestions and draping various lengths of fabric over Zachary’s shoulder. He had brought over smaller swatches in little booklets, dozens of them, but the more choice there was, the more difficult it was to decide on anything.
Pale blue? That seemed to be the only sensible and safe idea but Zachary refused to be reduced to ordering custom-made shirts in the same solid color he’d been buying for years. Nor could he just leave quietly, not after having taken up so much of the salesman’s time. Resolutely he started to eliminate the materials he couldn’t imagine himself wearing, putting those bolts to one side. One thing he had learned about the British this Saturday morning, he reflected, was that loud shirtings were highly considered. Never had he seen so many perfectly outrageous candy-ass contrasts in stripes, bold checks and plaids so aggressive that only a gangster could even consider them.
Engrossed, determined, he finally picked out four possible fabrics and, as the salesman had shown him, released them from the bolts, in long lengths, and swathed himself in them. He studied himself in the mirror and shook his head in dismay. There was almost no light, either electric or natural, in the small room, and all the quiet stripes he had picked out seemed almost identical. He looked as if he were wearing a Bedouin tent.
“Excuse me, but would you mind giving me some advice?” he said, in the direction of a female figure he had vaguely noticed sitting for some time on a little couch, while an older man with whom she had entered the shop was deep in conference with his salesman.
“Forgive me?” she said, startled, as if aroused from a dream.
“Advice. I’ve got to have a woman’s advice. Would you mind getting up and taking a look? Tell me what you think about these stripes. Don’t be polite … if you don’t like them, say so. I’d come over, but if I do these bolts will unwind all over the floor. I’m anchored to this table and I’ve lost my salesman’s attention.”
“I’ll fetch him for you.”
“Don’t bother, he’s given up on me. I need a fresh eye.”
Reluctantly, Lily Adamsfield rose and approached him. Odd manners, but what could you expect of an American?
Hell, she’s awfully young. Well, that just isn’t going to matter, Zachary thought in a flash of absolute certainty that left no room for doubt. In one glance at Lily he fell in love, in love with her oval face framed with thick, straight sheaths of fair hair, in love with her eyes, their gray depths holding glints of the misty sea, with her mouth, vividly sweet in form, with a trace of delicious sadness, meant to be kissed away. He fell in love forever. She was his girl. And so vulnerable. If he’d known that the girl of his dreams really existed he would have come for her long ago. Zachary let the shirtings fall from his shoulders and took Lily’s hand in his.
“We’ll go now and have lunch,” he told her.
The Honorable Lily Davina Adamsfield, just eighteen, a queen of the nymphs in her Norman Hartnell dress of priceless lace, and Zachary Anderson Amberville were married a month later, in January of 1952, with the bewildered blessings of Viscount and Viscountess Adamsfield, at St. Margaret’s Westminster, in front of four hundred and fifty people, including the recently crowned Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, Miss Briny, Pavka Mayer, the entire Landauer family and Sarah Amberville. Only Cutter, who was in the middle of exams, was missing. Lily had seated Sir Charles, Alma Grey and all her fellow ballet students in the second row, directly behind the Queen and her parents.
Let them have a good look, a really good, long look, she mused as she carefully arranged their placement, at how happy she was, even as she sacrificed her career, her never-to-be-questioned future as a prima ballerina. She would always dance. Dance was essential but she wouldn’t perform. The difficult, dedicated, single-minded existence demanded of a prima ballerina couldn’t be included in the triumphant life that lay so radiantly, so securely before her as the wife of this amazingly forceful American, a man who worshipped her, who believed in her absolutely.
As she had told her astonished mother, if she had to give nightly performances it wouldn’t be fair to Zachary. Joining the New York City Center Ballet was out of the question now. “I’ll have the best of both worlds … all I’m giving up is a title, two words, ‘prima ballerina.’ What if I’d wasted my life on being those two little words, Mother? I can’t marry Zachary and lead the life I thought I wanted. I have to grow up, and choice is part of growing. Yes, it is a sacrifice, you’re not wrong, but it’s a sacrifice I want to make. A sacrifice I must make. It’s not a waste, I promise you. All those years haven’t gone for nothing—I’ve just outgrown that life. Believe me, Mother, I know what I’m doing.”
He’d taught her to kiss, Zachery thought in the state of light-headed euphoria that he seemed to have entered into permanently from the day he first saw Lily. She hadn’t known how to kiss, she had never been kissed, he’d let everything he possessed that if he hadn’t come to England he could have spent the rest of his life in the United States without finding a girl who looked like Lily and had never been kissed.
And now he had to teach her to make love. Oh Jesus, if only it were a year from now and they were all settled into the big house she would pick out for them on any New York street that pleased her, if only they were going up to bed in a familiar room filled with all the beautiful things she was going to buy, to a bed with sheets that didn’t have the cold, immaculate, polished finish possessed by these sheets in the Bridal Suite at Claridge’s. Friendly sheets, damn it, might help. Or even a French hotel. Claridge’s was too majestically British. Tomorrow they’d be in Paris, but tomorrow wasn’t tonight.
If only he were one of the Ambervilles from centuries past facing a traditional New England wedding night with a virgin bride, something that would have been the only possible and natural state of affairs, just what he had been brought up to expect. Tradition was what he needed. Some ordinary old-fashioned traditional values. Maybe next year he’d vote Republican.
He suddenly remembered his own first experience, with one of the student nurses from St. Luke’s Hospital, whose residence window was opposite his dormitory windows in Columbia’s Hamilton Hall. He’d been a fifteen-year-old freshman and she’d been young too, but not as you
ng as he. Whatever her age, she’d known exactly where and when and particularly how. Know-how … that was all it took. Every girl he’d made love to since that memorable night had had some degree of know-how, and not a virgin among them.
But he hadn’t fallen in love before. So, he was a sort of virgin too, a twenty-nine-year-old emotional virgin, a virgin Marine fighter pilot, a virgin owner of three magazines, a many-times-over-millionaire virgin, a virgin who had had dozens of women, more than he could count. “Stop thinking,” Zachary said out loud to himself in his dressing room. “It ain’t helping.”
He was momentarily reassured by the first sight of Lily in front of the wood fire that was burning in their immense paneled bedroom. He never realized, when he took her in his arms and felt the chill of her skin, that she owed the supreme composure with which she stood so quietly in her white satin and lace peignoir to hundreds of rehearsals of Giselle, to muscle memory of Coppelia, to the nights on which she had danced Odette in Swan Lake. The posture developed for dancers during a hundred and fifty years of classical ballet will sustain any one of them in any situation for the raising of any curtain. But once Zachary and Lily lay together in the wide bed, once she had laid her peignoir on a chair and wore only a satin nightgown with thin shoulder straps, he became aware that in spite of the warmth of the room she was shivering.
“Come on, kid, this is all too damned silly,” he announced, bundling her up, blankets and all, and carrying her over to sit in his lap in a deep chair in front of the fire. “I feel as if we should invite the room-service waiters and chambermaids in to watch … it’s like those royal wedding nights I’ve read about in the old days where everyone stood around putting the poor bride and groom to bed, gaping and, no doubt, making bawdy jokes.”
“Tell me a bawdy joke,” Lily said, trying to smile.
“You probably wouldn’t understand the ones I know. And I can never remember punch lines anyway. It’s one of my failures in life, but it makes me a hell of a good audience because every joke’s new to me.”
“What are your other failures?” she asked seriously.
“I can’t play golf, always lose money at the track, but I still love to bet, I can’t remember vintage years of wine or even the difference between a Bordeaux and a Burgundy, I never got that job as a copyboy at the New York Times.…”
“I mean real failures, major ones, the kind you never recover from,” she said, unsmiling.
“I don’t think I’ve made any. And I don’t intend to. Not ever.”
“That’s what I thought about you the day we met … you’re not a man who fails at anything in life.”
“Darling, you sound so fierce.” He looked in astonishment at Lily, his mysterious, timorous, inexperienced bride, whose every gesture seemed at once a caress and a quest for nourishment, yet whose expression was suddenly intent in a way he’d never seen before.
“You don’t really know me, Zachary. I am fierce,” she said in a voice that was so naturally angelic that he simply laughed and kissed her lips. She responded with the still awkward willingness that he found so touching in her. He put his arms around Lily under the layers of blankets. She was warmer now, more relaxed, the shivering had stopped. He ran his blunt fingers over the column of her neck, touching with wonder the astonishing curve where her neck met her shoulder. His hand ventured to her collarbone, felt the strength, the power under the muscles of her slim shoulders. He could ring her upper arm with one of his large hands. There was a delicate tautness there that made him alarmingly aware of the difference in the stuff of which they were made. She was like steel covered with silk and he was just flesh, ordinary flesh.
Excitement flowed through his veins, moving like a forest fire that has been started by lightning in a dozen different places at once, but he kept himself under absolute control. There was only one single thing he knew about teaching Lily how to make love and that was to take it easy, to go as slowly and as tenderly as was humanly possible, or, if it weren’t possible for a human, to become inhumanly controlled. Minutes passed, while Lily, her eyes tightly shut, became aware of Zachary’s fingertips gliding with the faintest of pressure from her shoulder to her elbow. The strap of her nightgown was a thin roll of satin, and it slipped off a shoulder, exposing one of her small, saucer-shaped breasts with a tiny, flat nipple, of a pink so pale that it made almost no contrast to the whiteness of her skin. Zachary saw her breast by the light of the fire, caught his breath, squeezed his thighs together mercilessly, and kept his hand away from the ravishing little mound. She wasn’t ready to be touched yet, he told himself, as he lightly brushed his lips along her neck, under her hair. Lily made no sound at all and sat motionless, almost weightless in his lap, but he could feel that she was holding herself together tightly, scarcely breathing.
“Relax my darling, my baby, I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do, there’s no rush, we have all the time in the world,” he whispered to her, but she gave no sign of hearing him. His fingers left her elbow and descended caressingly along her forearm, reached her wrist and then spread out to cover her hand with his. In a quick movement that surprised him she turned her palm toward his palm, grasped his hand and lifted it up so that it abruptly covered her breast. “No darling, no, you don’t have to, it’s all right,” he said in a low voice and took his hand away. She was only doing what she imagined was expected of her, he thought. Mutely she kissed his mouth, pressing her cool lips on his, seeming more like a child in search of security than a woman. He ground his teeth together to keep himself from thrusting his tongue between her lips. In the last month he had taught her to kiss without keeping her lips tightly together but she had retreated from his tongue as often as she had accepted it, and he was unwilling to initiate anything she might not want, tonight of all nights.
Lily, with a quick shrug of her other shoulder, caused the second strap of her nightgown to fall away from her body. With the blankets still covering her legs she sat defiantly upright on Zachary’s knees, naked from the waist, her eyes still closed but her torso entirely revealed, a torso in which the combination of the girlishness of her immature breasts and the almost boylike width of her shoulders created a furiously erotic counterpoint. From her breasts to her waist she could have been molded out of ivory, Zachary thought. He could count her ribs, he could see her heart beating, the veins of her chest made an eternally memorable design under her pale skin. Using the utmost deliberation he traveled the largest of the veins above her breasts with his index finger, careful not to wander between her breasts, not to risk boldness too soon. He had to cross one of his legs over the other to restrain his rearing penis from forcing itself out between his thighs, for no matter how he fought to keep them together, the thick tip had a life of its own and nothing could keep it from swelling upward.
Lily seemed to shudder. Was she still cold or was she finally impatient? he wondered, and he let himself touch the tip of a nipple with one finger, touch it lightly, just brushing it, watching to see if she had any reaction. She neither shrank back nor pressed forward, but it seemed to Zachary that the nipple had risen, that it was distinctly standing up from her breast, and when he touched her other nipple he saw, with joy, that it too responded to his caress. “Yes, yes, that’s right, that’s good, that feels good,” he muttered between his teeth, willing himself not to frighten her now that she was just beginning to enjoy it. He teased her nipples for minutes more, tracing their small circles around and around, returning again and again to the points that were now distinctly firm, and finally he bent his head and took one of the hard buds into his mouth, circling it with his tongue for a long moment before he actually dared to suck on it. Lily seemed to tense herself when he started to suck and he stopped, thinking, with an emotion that was almost reverence, that it was the first time a man’s mouth had ever been on her body, on her private places, but finally with another sudden and resolute movement she pulled his head back toward her breast with one hand and with the other she cupped her breast and
offered it to him, put it in his mouth and mumbled, “Don’t stop.”
Soon both nipples were wet, lapped and tugged into small islands of engorged tissue, and when Zachary saw how big they had grown he picked Lily up, her nightgown slithering down the length of her body as he crossed the room. He put her down on the bed carefully and lay down next to her, preserving a distance between them so that she would not feel his rigid penis that lay straight up over his stomach, jerking in violent impatience. He rose on one elbow and with his other hand he tentatively smoothed her tiny waist, her elegantly narrow hips, her supple, firm, supremely developed thighs, learning the shape of the kind of body he had never seen on any other woman. Naked, Lily was a divinity, he knew, like the statue of a goddess from some other civilization, some finer civilization. His reverence grew, painfully mixed with the most maddened desire he’d ever felt when he saw Lily’s pubic hair, blond and slightly curly and so much thicker than he had ever expected, over the rise of her mound of Venus, the pubic hair of a woman, not a girl. She quivered slightly under his hand, turning her head from side to side, her eyes still closed, but just as she didn’t push him away she didn’t put out her hands to touch him. It was almost as if she were asleep, he thought, almost as if she wanted him to take her in a dream.
After Zachary had touched as much of Lily’s proffered body as he could, for as long as he could endure the giving of caress after caress, without moving closer, he pulled her to him and put one arm under her head. He took his free hand and put one of his fingers into his own mouth and wet it thoroughly. With that gentle finger he carefully parted her pubic hair and found the concealed entrance to her vagina. Slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, he worked his finger into the passageway, anxiously searching her face for signs of pain or fear. Her expression didn’t change although her lips were again firmly pressed together, her jaw set.
Zachary wet his finger again and again, each time returning cautiously to the warm tunnel, finding no resistance even when his finger was up inside as far as it could go. He couldn’t tell if she had become wet by herself or because of all the wetness he had brought to her, but he knew that the moment had come to enter her. He straddled Lily on his knees and elbows and carefully lowered himself so that just the rounded, engorged tip of his penis nuzzled at the mouth of her delicate opening. Then he pushed into her, at first less than an inch and then a half-inch more. Slowly, oh so slowly, he moved, the sweat standing out on his forehead, always scanning her face for the moment when he would have to withdraw, when it would hurt her too much, but she was expressionless, although her breath came more quickly. She didn’t move, she lay under him unflinchingly and let him fill her. Finally, after long minutes, she had accepted his entire penis, it throbbed within her at its full length, and Zachary lowered himself so that his legs were outstretched on the mattress, while his elbows kept him from crushing her. He could feel his penis swelling, growing larger and larger, although he didn’t move a muscle. The soft, hot, tight inside of her was too much for him. Without a single thrust he came, his spasms so wrenching, so strong, so impossible to control after the frustration of the last hour that he poured his sperm into her with a rush, a flood, that was so quick that it was pure animal release.
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