Nick opened his door and climbed out of the car. ‘This is the guy I was telling you about, Mrs. Silver,’ Brenda said. ‘Without him Teresa might still be lying on the beach.’
Mrs. Silver extended her hand. Nick took it, feeling a little awkward. He didn’t know how to shake hands with a woman. ‘I understand that I’m in your debt, young man,’ Mrs. Silver said graciously. ‘Brenda tells me that you rescued Teresa from all sorts of horrors.’ The light from the street lamps played about her sculptured face. Her hand was soft, sensual. Nick smelled just a trace of perfume, something exotic. Her eyes were fixed on his, unwavering, inquisitive.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Nick said clumsily. ‘I mean, well, she had had too much to drink and I thought the crowd of teenagers she was with were a little bit out of control.’ He stopped. She was still watching him, measuring him. He was becoming agitated and didn’t understand why. ‘Somebody had to help her and I just happened to be there….’ He trailed off weakly.
Mrs. Silver thanked him again and turned to Brenda. ‘Your mother’s expecting you, dear. We’ll stay out front until you get home. Flash your lights to let us know you’re there.’ Brenda looked happy to be dismissed. She scampered off into the night in the direction of the nearest house, about a hundred yards away.
There was a momentary pause as they watched the sixteen-year-old disappear. Nick found himself stealing furtive looks at Mrs. Silver’s profile. An inchoate awareness of what he was feeling made him more nervous. Jesus, she’s beautiful. And young. How could she be the girl’s mother? He was wrestling with a jumble of thoughts as he saw the lights flicker in the distance.
‘Good,’ she said, turning to Nick with a smile, ‘Brenda’s home. Now we can worry about Teresa.’ She stopped for a moment and laughed. ‘Oh, I almost forgot. We haven’t been formally introduced. I’m Teresa’s mother, Monica Silver.’
‘I’m Nick Williams,’ he said in response. Her dark eyes were fixed on him again. In the reflected light the expression in her eyes seemed to vary. One moment she was a pixie, then a seductress, then a very proper Palm Beach society woman. Or was Nick imagining it? He couldn’t return her gaze any more. He felt his cheeks flush as he averted his eyes.
‘I had to carry her from the beach to the parking lot,’ Nick said abruptly, as he went around to the back door of his car and opened it. The teenager had been leaning against the door and nearly fell out. She didn’t stir. He picked Teresa up and threw her over his shoulder. ‘So it’s no problem for me to carry her for you now. I’m used to it.’
They walked quietly down the path toward the house, Monica Silver leading by a few steps. Nick watched her walk in front of him. She moved effortlessly, like a dancer, with almost perfect posture. Her dark hair was wrapped up at the back in a chignon. It must be very long, he thought to himself with delight, imagining her hair flowing down her beautiful back.
It was a warm and humid Palm Beach evening. Nick was sweating by the time they reached the entrance. ‘Could you do me one more favour, Nick?’ Mrs Silver asked. ‘Could you carry her up to her room? My husband’s not here and the help has all gone to bed. And I seriously doubt if she’s going to get herself together well enough to climb the stairs, even with my help, in the near future.’
Nick followed Mrs. Silver’s instructions and carried Teresa through the atrium, into the living room, up the entry steps on to the platform, up the left flight to the first floor, and then into her bedroom. It was huge. In her room Teresa had a king-size four-poster bed, a giant television, an entire cabinet of movies for the VCR, and a sound system that would have been a credit to any rock-and-roll band. Bruce Springsteen posters and photos were all over the room. Nick laid Teresa gently on her bed. She murmured ‘Thank you,’ indicating to him that at least she was semiconscious. Her mother bent over her and gave her a kiss.
Nick left the two of them alone and went back down the stairs into the living room. He could not believe that somebody really could live in a house like this. Why, the living room alone was bigger than the house in Falls Church where he grew up. He wandered around the room after he came down the stairs. There were original paintings on the walls, crystal glass chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, and art objects and bric-a-brac both on the tables and in every nook and cranny. It was all too much for him. He was overwhelmed.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and involuntarily recoiled. Monica Silver chided him, ‘Goodness, you’re jumpy. It’s only me.’ He turned around to look at her. Was he imagining it or had she somehow combed her hair and put on fresh makeup in the few seconds they had been separated? For the first time he saw her in the full light. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. His breath was taken away and he felt giddy. Outside he had not been able to see her skin clearly. Now he found himself staring at her bare arms, following the elegant contours of her neck. Her skin had the smoothness of ivory. It called to him to touch it. Watch yourself, Williams, he heard a voice inside him say, or you are going to be outrageous. He tried to calm himself.
But it was useless. He could not take his eyes off her. She was saying something. She had asked him a question. He had not even heard it, so dumbfounded was he by what was happening, by where he was. She was leading him somewhere in the house. His imagination was running wild. She took him into a small room with a table and told him to sit down.
‘It’s the least I can do,’ she was saying, ‘to repay you for what you did for Teresa. I know you must be hungry. And we still have some great food left over from the party tonight.’
Nick was in a breakfast nook just off the kitchen. To his left a door led to the patio and then outside, into the back yard. The lights around the huge swimming pool were still on. He could see manicured gardens with roses in bloom, chaise longues, colourful umbrellas, white iron tables with twisted, lacy legs—he could not believe that it was all real. He felt transported to another world, a world that existed only in books and movies.
Monica Silver laid out some food on the table. Smoked salmon, onions, capers, cream cheese, two different kinds of bread, plus a dish of some other kind of fish that Nick did not recognize. ‘That’s marinated herring,’ she said with a smile, noticing Nick’s quizzical expression. She handed him a wine glass. He took it and unconsciously looked her straight in the eyes. He was transfixed. He felt weak and powerless, as if he were being drawn into her deep brown, bewitching eyes, into her world of richness and luxury and beauty. His knees were weak, his heart was racing, he could feel his fingers tingling.
She poured some white wine in his glass and then in her own. ‘This is a brilliant Burgundy, Clos des Mouches,’ she said, touching her glass to his with a light tinkle. ‘Let’s make a toast.’
She was radiant. He was enthralled. ‘To happiness,’ she said.
They talked for over three hours. Nick learned that Monica Silver had grown up in France, that her father had been a small, struggling fur merchant in Paris, and that she had met her husband, Aaron (the biggest of the big Montreal furriers), while helping her father at the shop. She had been seventeen at the time of the whirlwind courtship. Mr. Silver had proposed just seven days after they had met and she had accepted immediately even though her husband-to-be was twenty years older. She moved to Montreal and married him before she was eighteen. Teresa was born nine months later.
Nick told her that he was in his junior year at Harvard, majoring in English and French to get a good liberal arts education and prepare himself for either law school or graduate school. As soon as she found out that he was in his third year of French, she switched and spoke to him in her native language. Her name became Monique. He missed some of what she said, but it didn’t matter. He understood the gist of it. And her dramatic voice plus the sound of the foreign language only increased the power of the spell already cast by the wine and her beauty.
Nick also tried to speak French from time to time. Whatever self-consciousness he might ordinarily have felt was swept away by the magic of the setting and their g
rowing rapport. They laughed together easily at his mistakes. She was gracious and charming when she corrected him, always adding ‘mais vous parlez français très bien’ in the early part of the evening. Later, as their conversation became more personal (Nick talked about his problems with his father; Monique wondered if there was anything a mother could do with a teenage daughter except hope that some basic values had been learned), Monique changed to the more personal ‘tu’ form in talking to him. This established an additional intimacy between them that deepened in the small hours of the morning.
Monique talked about Paris, about the romance of the streets, the bistros, the museums, the history. Nick visualized it all and felt transported with her to the city of lights. She told about her dreams when she was growing up, about walking in the sixteenth arrondissement among the wealthy and promising herself that someday… He listened closely, enraptured, an almost beatific smile upon his face. In the end, Monique had to tell him that it was time to go because she had an early tennis lesson in the morning. It was after three o’clock. He apologized as they walked together to the door. She laughed and said that it had been fun. At the door she reached up and kissed him on the cheek. His heart soared out of his body at the touch of her lips. ‘Call me sometime,’ she said with a playful smile, as she closed the door behind him.
For over thirty hours Nick thought of nothing but Monique. He talked to her in his mind during the day; she was his lover in dreams at night. He called her once, twice, three times, each time talking to her answering machine. The third time he left her his phone number and address and suggested that she try to get in touch with him when her schedule would permit.
By noon on the second day after his evening at the Silvers’ Palm Beach mansion, he started to calm down, to realize that there was no sense in his continuing to worship the image of a woman he had met for a single evening. Especially a woman who was married to someone else. In the late afternoon he went out on the beach to play volleyball with some of the other college students he had met during his first days in Florida. He had just served an ace when he thought he heard his name being called by a husky, accented voice that was absolutely unmistakable.
Standing in the sand not ten yards away was Monique. She was wearing a bright red and white striped bikini and her long black hair hung down her back to just above her waist. The volleyball game stopped. His friends whistled. He walked over to her, his heart pounding in his temples and his breath struggling to find its way out of his constricted chest. Monique smiled and slid her arm through his. She explained that she had brought Teresa into Lauderdale for a small high school party and since it was so hot….
They walked along the beach and talked as the sun set behind the flats. They were oblivious of the young people all around them. The gentle waves washed their feet with warm water as they walked. Monique insisted that they eat in Nick’s condo, so they stopped for tuna fish, tomatoes, onions, and mayonnaise to put on their sandwiches. Cold beer, crisps, and sandwiches on a bare formica table was the dinner. Lovemaking was the dessert. Nick almost had an orgasm on their first kiss and his passion made him clumsy in trying to remove her bikini. Monique slowed him down, smiled softly, neatly folded her bikini and his bathing suit (while he of course was going wild), and then came to join him on the bed. After two kisses naked on the bed, Nick was seized by a paroxysm of lust. He rolled roughly on top of Monique and began gyrating with his hips. At first a little alarmed, Monique slowed him just a bit and guided him gently into her.
Monique’s body was nearly perfect. Nice, full, upright breasts (they had been reconstructed of course after she had nursed Teresa, but how could Nick have known or cared?); slim waist; rounded, feminine buttocks; taut muscled legs kept in shape with lots of exercise. But it was her skin, that magnificent ivory skin, that sent Nick into ecstasy. It was so soft and easy to the touch.
Her mouth seemed to fit his perfectly. Nick had been with two women before: a high-priced girl given to him as a Christmas present after the Harvard swimming team had discovered he was still a virgin at the end of his freshman year, and Jennifer Barnes from Radcliffe, his sometimes steady date during most of his sophomore year. Jennifer’s teeth always clanged against his when they kissed. But that had not been the only difficulty in their relationship. She was a physicist and her approach to sex had been almost clinical. She measured sizes and durations and frequencies and even quantities of ejaculant. After three ‘scheduled performances’ with Jenny, Nick had decided it wasn’t worth it.
Nick gasped as he slid into Monique. Both of them knew it would be over soon. Ten seconds later Nick finished his climax and started to withdraw. But Monique held his rear firmly in her hands, keeping him in place, and deftly (how did she do it?) rolled over so that she was on top. Nick was now out of his element. In his limited experience, withdrawal was the next step after orgasm. He didn’t know what Monique was doing. Ever so slowly, her eyes half closed as she hummed a piece of classical music to herself, Monique rocked back and forth on top of him, her vaginal walls holding tightly to his now flaccid penis. After a couple of minutes she began to grind her pelvis forward as she rocked and, much to Nick’s amazement, as her breath shortened he found himself becoming aroused again. Now her eyes closed altogether and her rhythm became stronger, the thrusts of her forward motion grinding with a little pain into his bones. Nick was now definitely erect and he started following her motion, lightly gyrating in pattern with her.
Monique leaned forward, concentrating but smiling with her eyes closed, preparing for her own orgasm. Timing her own progress perfectly (and in complete control of the situation), she adroitly and softly reached down and began titillating Nick’s nipples in rhythm with her forward thrusts. Nick had never had his breasts touched in lovemaking before and was shocked. But the raw excitement was overwhelming. She increased her play, even pinching him when she saw (and felt) his response. As wave after wave of delightful release coursed through her body, Nick uttered a loud, wailing cry and had his second orgasm in fifteen minutes. At the end of the climax he was completely given over to pleasure and made animal sounds and shook involuntarily from exhausted satiety.
Nick was a little embarrassed by his noisy and uncontrolled response, but Monique’s playful and friendly afterplay assured him that everything was all right. She went to his closet, pulled out one of his three dress shirts, and put it on. The tails came almost down to her knees (Monique was only five feet five, and Nick was a shade less than six feet two) and she looked positively gamine with her pixie smile, long hair, and man’s shirt. Nick began to declare his love but Monique came forward and put her finger to his lips. Then she kissed him lovingly, told him that she needed to pick up Teresa, jumped in the shower for what could not have been more than a minute, dressed, kissed him again, and walked out the door. Nick did not move during this entire time. After she left he fell asleep contentedly. He did not dream.
For the next eight days Nick was on top of the world. He saw Monique every day, most of the time at her Palm Beach mansion, but sometimes at his uncle’s flat. They made love at every opportunity and it was always different. Monique was full of surprises. The second time Nick went to her house, for example, he found her in the back, swimming naked in the pool. She told him that she had given all the servants the day off. Within minutes they were frolicking and laughing on the grass between the garden and the pool.
Their affair was conducted in French. Monique taught him about food and wine; they shared their knowledge of French literature. One passionate night they argued about Andre Gide’s La Symphonie Pastorale both before and after lovemaking. Monique defended the pastor and laughed at Nick’s insistence that the blind Gertrude was ‘an innocent’. Another evening, when Monique demanded that Nick wear a black Halloween mask and a pair of white leotards throughout their long French dinner, they read Jean Genet’s Le Balcon together as a prelude to sex.
The days raced by relentlessly, clothed in the magic of love and intimacy. Once Nick s
howed up at the mansion and Monique greeted him dressed in an incredible coat, a full-length Alaskan seal fur with indigo fox trim around the collars as well as down the lapels and framing the sleeves from the shoulders to the wrists. The coat was the softest thing Nick had ever touched, even softer than her tantalizing skin. His playful paramour had turned the air conditioning up as high as it would go so that she could wear her favourite coat. She was wearing nothing underneath it. After love that evening she dressed Nick’s naked body in one of her husband’s beaver coats, explaining the presence of half a dozen fur coats in Palm Beach with a simple, ‘It’s our business and we like to have some things to show our friends and acquaintances in case they are interested.’
Nick professed his love with increasing zeal each time they met anew. Monique responded with her usual ‘je t’aime’, but would not reply to Nick’s insistent questions about the future. She avoided all questions about her relationship with Mr. Silver, except to say that he was a workaholic and that he stayed in Montreal most of the year. He had bought the place in Palm Beach primarily because Monique did not like the cold and wanted a more active social life than the one they had in Montreal. Monique usually spent the period from Christmas to Easter in Palm Beach; Teresa, who had just finished her spring break from her exclusive private school and had returned to Canada, came down as often as possible so that she could be with her mother.
Monique gave terse answers about her present life. But she waxed rhapsodic about her childhood in Paris. She never criticized her husband or complained about her married life. Yet she did tell Nick that her days with him had been the happiest time of her life. She also talked about some of her friends, but Nick never met any of them. They were always alone.
One day she picked him up in her Cadillac and they headed toward Key Largo so that he could do some diving at the Pennekamp Recreation Area. As always, she was wearing her wedding ring. On this particular day Nick had vowed to himself that he would get some answers about the future, and the constant presence of her wedding ring pissed him off. He asked her to remove it. She politely refused, then grew angry when he pressed her. She pulled the car off the highway in the marshland north of the Keys and stopped the engine.
Cradle Page 14
