An Inconvenient Woman (39 page)

“Are you there, Jules?”

“Yes, I’m here, Myles. Look, tell the Secretary he doesn’t have to bother calling.”

When he hung up the telephone, Jules Mendelson put his head down on the blotter of his desk and wept.

Flo’s Tape #17

“My mother used to say to me, ‘Your father walked out on us when you were two.’ I had romantic notions of what my father was like. I used to always think someday he’d come back and want to make life easier for us. I thought maybe he’d have curiosity about what I looked like.

“But when I grew older, I began to realize that my father hadn’t ever married my mother. It sometimes even occurred to me that my mother wasn’t even sure who my father was.

“Jules once said to me, ‘Did you ever say that to your mother?’ Of course not. Her life was hard enough as it was.”

“Y
ou’re late, Jules,” said Flo. “I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.”

“Why are all those cars parked on Azelia Way?” Jules asked. “I could hardly get my car in the driveway. Somebody’s Jaguar is blocking about half of it.”

“I told those parking boys not to block my entrance,” said Flo.

“What’s going on?” The small street was usually silent, except for the several times a day the tour buses went by, and the voice of the tour guides could be heard announcing Faye Converse’s house.

“Faye Converse is having a barbecue luncheon,” Flo answered, breathlessly. She was beside herself with excitement at the activity in the next house. She had been watching the festivities through her binoculars, from her position of vantage in her bedroom window. “Look, Jules. Faye’s parasol matches her caftan. She’s got half the stars in Hollywood over there. Practically everyone you ever heard of. Oh, oh, my God. There’s Dom Belcanto. Be still, my heart. And Pepper, the new wife. Glyceria said Dom sometimes sings at Faye’s parties. Oh, look, Amos Swank, the talk show host. I just watched him last night, and there he is. And there’s your favorite, Cryil Rathbone.”

She handed Jules the binoculars, but he had no interest in looking at film stars cavorting at a lunch party that showed no signs of dwindling down at five o’clock. Screams of laughter could be heard.

“Don’t you love the sounds of a party, Jules?” asked Flo, looking through the binoculars again. She reminded Jules of a courtesan in an opera box, enrapt with her first opera experience. “That hum of voices, and all that laughter? Wouldn’t
you love to know what they’re all talking about down there? I may not fit in your world, but I could fit in with the movie crowd. I just know it.”

Jules shook his head and walked out of Flo’s bedroom into her living room. At the bar he took out a bottle of white wine from the refrigerator and poured himself a glass. He removed the jacket of his suit and threw it on the gray satin sofa. Then he sat down heavily and looked off into space. His mind was on the telephone call he had received from Myles Crocker. He imagined Myles reporting his reaction to the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of State reporting to the President, and he experienced the feeling of despair, a feeling unknown to him in his spectacularly successful life until that moment.

“Are you all right, Jules?” asked Flo, when she came in from her bedroom. She placed the binoculars on the bar.

“Fine, why?” he asked.

“You seem, I don’t know, quiet, distant, something. Did I do something wrong? Are you mad at me? Because I was watching Faye’s party through the binoculars? Is that it?”

Jules smiled at her. “No,” he said.

“I suppose it is kind of cheap. I can’t imagine Pauline doing anything like that,” said Flo.

For once he did not turn away or turn red when she mentioned his wife’s name. His eyes fixed on her, as if memorizing her face.

“Sometimes you look at me as if it’s going to be for the last time,” she said. “Are you sure you’re all right, Jules?”

“I told you, I’m fine.”

“I know how to cheer you up, baby.” She began to sing. “
Gimme, gimme, gimme, what I cry for. You know you got the kind of kisses that I die for.
”

Jules smiled.

“I knew I could cheer you up.”

She kissed him and touched his face in a gentle fashion until he began to respond to her. When he made love to her, he had never been more passionate. He could not get enough of her. His tongue probed her mouth. He sucked in her saliva. He inhaled her breath. Over and over again he told her he loved her.

Afterward, when he phoned Miss Maple to check on his calls, he signaled to Flo that he needed the little agenda book that he always carried in the left-hand pocket of his suit
jacket. He covered the mouthpiece and said to her, “It’s on the sofa in the living room.”

Because of the party going on next door, Flo slipped on a dressing gown and high-heeled satin slippers. As she went into the living room, she heard Jules say on the telephone, “Call the house. Tell Dudley to have Jim meet her plane. Tell him to be there half an hour ahead of time, so there’s no possibility of a mix-up. And hold on, I’ll have Friedrich Hesse-Darmstadt’s telephone number for you in just a moment.”

Flo realized from Jules’s conversation with Miss Maple that Pauline was coming home from Northeast Harbor, and that as of tomorrow Jules would be resuming the heavy social schedule that he and Pauline customarily followed. As she sometimes did, she felt jealous that Pauline claimed more of Jules’s life than she did. Outside, she could hear the guests from next door starting to leave the party, some in an inebriated state. “Bye, Faye,” guest after guest could be heard saying.

Flo reached into the left-hand pocket of Jules’s suit jacket and found his agenda book. Once he had said to her, “My whole life is in this little book. All the numbers I need. All the engagements I keep.” As she took it out, her hand felt a small velvet box next to it. She took that out also. She went back into the bedroom and handed Jules his book. Then she opened the velvet box. Inside was the pair of yellow diamond earrings that Jules had given to Pauline and that Pauline had returned to him the next morning. He had meant to have Miss Maple send them back to Boothby’s, the auction house, to be reauctioned, but he had forgotten to give them to her when he returned from the Viceroy Coffee Shop that morning.

Flo thought that Jules had bought them for her. Ecstatic, she let out a squeal of excitement and then covered her mouth with her hand to shut herself up, as he was still on the telephone and hated for her to talk when he was conducting his business. As soon as he hung up, she ran to him and threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.

“They’re gorgeous, Jules,” she said. “I never say anything so beautiful in my whole life.”

“What?” asked Jules, confused by her outpouring.

“ ‘What,’ he says.” She fastened the earrings onto her ear lobes and pulled her hair back. “
This
is what.”

Jules looked at her in a quizzical fashion. He was startled to see the earrings that he had bought for his wife, that his
wife would not accept, on his mistress’s ears. Flo’s madly excited reaction to the beautiful jewels was what he had hoped Pauline’s reaction would be when he gave them to her the week before. He did not have the heart to tell Flo that the earrings were not for her, or that he had just told Miss Maple to contact Prince Friedrich of Hesse-Darmstadt, the head of the jewelry department at Boothby’s auction house in London, to inform him that he wanted to sell the earrings.

“Why are you looking at me in such a funny way?” she asked.

“I’m not looking at you in a funny way,” said Jules. His voice sounded tired and weary. “I’m just feasting my eyes, that’s all. They look beautiful on you.”

“Do you think it’s okay to wear the blue sapphire ring and the yellow diamond earrings at the same time?” she asked.

“I would think it’s proper,” said Jules.

Nothing put Flo in such a good mood as a beautiful gift. She turned the music up on the radio and slowly slipped out of her dressing gown. She began to dance around the room, wearing nothing but her high-heeled satin slippers. It was a look she knew Jules liked. He lay back on the bed watching her, as her erotic and exotic dance steps slowly began to arouse him again. He was mesmerized by her lovely young body, her beautiful creamy skin, her superb buttocks, her perfect breasts, and her ample red bush, which he could never become sated with, no matter how often he entered it, or kissed it, or breathed it, or rubbed his face in it. As she danced her way from the bedroom to the living room, he followed her. She reached behind her and took hold of his erection and led him to her newly upholstered gray satin sofa. Never losing the beat of the music she was dancing to, she perched on the back of the sofa and then allowed herself to fall backward, spreading her legs at the same time so that only her bush, open and ready to receive him, was visible to him. With one thrust he entered her and began to pump back and forth, without subtlety, a race to a mutual explosion that momentarily obliterated the great disappointment of his day.

The massive heart attack that followed was concurrent with his ejaculation, and Flo mistook the shudders of his body and the groans of pain from his lips for signs of passion. It was only when his spent penis slid out of her and he fell over backward onto her carpet that she realized what had happened.

She pulled herself up off the sofa and ran to him. His face had turned gray. Drool was dripping from his mouth. She thought that he was dead.

The scream that came from Flo’s lips was unlike any scream that she had ever screamed before. The sound traveled upward in the canyon, and people in houses higher up heard it, although they could not tell for sure from which house it was coming. The scream was also heard in the patio of Faye Converse’s house next door.

All the guests from her barbecue lunch party had finally left, save one. Cyril Rathbone, the gossip columnist for
Mulholland
, who could not drag himself away from the great star, continued to engage her in poolside conversation, although Faye Converse was sick to death of him and his adoring chatter. He knew the plots of all fifty-seven of her films.

“How amazing you should remember
The Tower
, Cyril,” said Faye politely, stifling a yawn at the same time. She could not think of anything she would like to discuss less than the plot of
The Tower
, one of her great flops, in which she had played Mary, Queen of Scots, against the advice of everyone. She wished she hadn’t sent Glyceria out on an errand, for Glyceria always knew how to get rid of adoring guests who didn’t know when the party was over.

It was then that Flo March’s scream from the house beyond the tall hedge pierced the canyon air.

“What in the world is that?” asked Cyril. He jumped up from the lounge chair.

“Why don’t you go check?” replied Faye, who intended to disappear as soon as Cyril had gone to investigate.

“Do you think it’s a murder?” asked Cyril. He was wide-eyed with excitement.

“Oh, no, it didn’t sound to me like a murder kind of scream at all,” said Faye Converse.

“Who lives next door?” asked Cyril.

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said Faye. “It belongs to Trent Muldoon, but he’s rented it to someone.”

“Perhaps I should call the police,” said Cyril.

“You should go over and check first. It could be the television. I’d send Glyceria over—my maid, Glyceria—but she’s out getting some disinfectant for the powder room for me.”

“Is there an opening through the hedge?” asked Cyril.

“No, I don’t think so. You have to go ’round, down my driveway, and then up that driveway,” said Faye. Then she
stood, expecting him to go. “It’s been lovely having you here, Cyril. When you write up my party, don’t mention that Pepper Belcanto drank too many tequila sours and got sick all over the walls of the powder room. All right? You know how Dom gets. Broken-kneecap time. Good-bye, Cyril.”

“I’ll come right back and tell you what happened next door,” he said.

“Oh, no. That’s not necessary.”

Faye turned and walked into her house. Cyril had not expected to be dismissed in such a fashion, but his curiosity was such that he could not resist going to check on the source of the scream. He went down Faye Converse’s driveway to Azelia Way. From the street the house next door was totally hidden from view by the overgrown shrubbery and trees in front of it. Cyril slowly went up the driveway of that house. Directly in front of the house was a dark blue Bentley, which blocked the garage in which was parked a red Mercedes convertible. From inside the house he could hear the hysterical crying of a woman. The front door was locked. He walked around the side of the house to the swimming pool area. There was no one in sight. Then he went up to the sliding glass doors and put his hands up to cover the sides of his eyes and peered in. There on the floor was an enormous man, totally naked. A beautiful young red-haired woman, also naked, was administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Cyril slid open the door. “May I help?” he asked.

“Call an ambulance,” screamed Flo, between breaths. Without lifting her face, she pointed to a telephone on the bar.