Cheyney Fox (20 page)

He hadn’t planned any of it. Not meeting her at Zonar’s, not sending the note, not having sex or making love to her, none of it.

He had been in Athens only for the day. There to assess the authenticity of a rare Byzantine icon secretly on the market for a discreet buyer, who would deposit the money in Switzerland. Under the present regime, increasingly, works of art in Greece were finding themselves released from private collections. In normal circumstances that would not have happened. But to secrete money abroad had become one of the major concerns for many Greeks now.

Of course he knew that Cheyney lived there. But he had had no intention of looking her up. First he had heard her laughter, then he had seen her. After that, there had been no choice. He sent the note.

Now waiting for her to finish dressing, he sat in a canvas chair on the terrace. An orchard of potted olive trees rustled in a still-warm autumn breeze blowing in from Africa. Zazou, still deep in her siesta, lay in his lap.

He was thinking about the icon. He would not buy it. Perfect as it was, it lacked that special something he expected from everything he collected.

Cheyney appeared in a terra-cotta, buffalo-suede suit. The fitted jacket was perfectly cut, with its row of six decorative gold buttons on each sleeve and on each of the small breast pockets, over the pencil-thin skirt. She had drawn her long black hair into a voluptuous twist at the nape of her neck. On her ears, huge gold earrings from Senegal. She was barefoot and held a pair of shoes in each hand.

More, much more, of the old Cheyney he had seen that night
he had fallen in love was now coming through, as she stood dressed in her best before him.

“High heel or low heel? It all depends where we’re going. I wouldn’t want to break a leg. And, keep in mind, I do have a tendency to fall down. I’m not a woman who always looks where she’s going.”

“High heels for your legs and for me. But the flat ones for the Agora. I think I would like to walk through the Agora with you.”

He watched her slip into them. She pleased him so much. There was no question about it, she had an impressive personality. She did not have to say much because every action she took, no matter how large or small, was clean, clear, and sure. She was like someone who lived in a small world of her own. Only her world seemed to be the whole world.

During sex, she had listened with her body and taken all that he had to give, and given back again and again at just the sensuous moment. He divined that was the way she must be all the time. She was a glorious woman.

“A lovely idea, but the Agora will be closed at this hour.”

“Not for us.” He rose from his chair and, handing a sleepy Zazou over to Cheyney, he said, “I think you look lovely. You are one of the prettiest women in the world. Let’s go.” In the few hours that she had known this man, he had several times elevated her with compliments, flattery even, and then not taken advantage of it. It did something to her, something good. It made Cheyney want to raise herself just that little bit higher than where she was.

The driver rushed around to open the rear door the moment they appeared. Cheyney recognized the Mercedes as belonging to the German embassy.

“I hope you don’t mind. I used your telephone while you were asleep.” That was his only explanation. Settled into the soft white leather of the backseat, she realized that they had not asked each other one personal question. It was strange, they didn’t even know each other’s name — or so she thought. Something Lala had said came to mind: “You don’t have to love them to fuck them.” Right on, Lala. “Maybe you don’t have to know them to like them, and want to fuck them.” How glorious it could seem, this permissive society that loosened
the shackles and set you free. Even if it lasted no longer than an interlude with an exciting stranger. She almost had to pinch herself to make sure this was real. She had come so far from West Hartford, Connecticut, survived New York, and still had the spirit for an adventure.

She was amazed that the guard let them into the Agora — even Zazou was allowed in. They had the famed archaeological site to themselves. Not another person did they have to share it with. The afternoon light animated the ruins.

“I find the Agora so romantic. The ruins speak to me, and I hear them, and I learn from them. Once, when I was very young, I sneaked in here with a woman on a blistering hot night. Under a perfect full moon we made wild, passionate love among these broken marbles. In those days there was hardly a guard about. My lady and I had no need to stifle our cries of ecstasy. They echoed among the spirits that dwell here amid the marbles. Oh, the golden vanities of youth. I thought to spill my seed amongst these old stones and magnificent maimed statues. It would, after my death, allow me to join those august ghosts who through the centuries have made this place their home.” He laughed at himself and slipped his arm through Cheyney’s.

“I am so glad we never met then. Well, we probably couldn’t have. Perhaps you hadn’t even been bom then. But had we met, it was then you might have been able to call me presumptuous, and with reason. When I look back, which I don’t very often, I must have been insufferably arrogant. Come this way.” He swept Zazou up into his arms so as to move faster.

They were walking toward the west entrance to the Agora. Of the three, it was the best. It afforded them a sublime view of the romantic ruins, with Mount Hymettos in the background. A little further on, set on a rocky plateau, was the well-preserved Temple of Hephaestus. A perfect jewel of architecture. They sat down to rest there, and for a few precious minutes became a part of the Agora. After a while they reverted to the present and, remaining where they were, simply enjoyed the view.

He turned to her and asked, “Would you have bought one of the ‘candy bars’ you were laughing at this afternoon?”

“Only if it had been edible,” she joked and they both laughed.

“But you like the things?”

“Oh, yes, but the concept more. It still makes me want to laugh. Do you know about the scandal of the chocolate bars?”

“Yes, some of it. Only what I read in the papers and have overheard people saying about it.”

“What do they say about it?”

“Everything and nothing. It’s perfect cocktail-hour chat. Actually that — as you have discovered yourself — it’s more comic than significant.”

“They aren’t seriously hoping to win this case against Barry Sole?”

“Is a serious case possible against anything so intrinsically unserious as that creature …?”

She began to laugh again. He couldn’t help a smile. She said, “I find it
so
funny. It’s difficult to believe they have been able to make a case out of this story and have got it before a jury. The mind boggles as to what the lawyers will do with it.”

“Oh, they’ll go down many different paths to keep the case from being thrown out of court. It’s in too many peoples’ interest now for that to happen. They will try to prove that this choc-bar scam is nothing more than an art swindle, a fraud. It also happens to devalue his own paintings. They’ll argue that what he is up to is as fraudulent as a stocks-and-shares swindle for those who have invested in his paintings. And for himself, as a well-known and respected Pop painter.

“They will try to prove that Barry Sole, willfully and with intent, created a fraud. Obviously Mr. Rosewarne is going to try to prove otherwise.”

Kurt watched her face for a reaction to her former lover’s name. He was not disappointed. She stiffened, the smile in her eyes dimmed. He was sorry for her, that the pain connected with this man had still not all gone. He would tough it out, bring it out in the open, in the hope that it would help her get rid of it.

“Is something wrong? You look upset?”

“No, not upset. Surprised that David Rosewarne would take on a case like that. I knew him, he helped me once.” The light
came back into her eyes and she sighed, “That all seems like a lifetime ago. I am sure I was another person then. His name evoked the past for me for a moment. It made me feel strange, almost as if the me who knew him was now dead.”

She gave a visible shiver. Wanting to distract him from herself, David Rosewarne, and her past, she asked the first thing that came into her mind, “What do you think will be the upshot of the ‘candy bar scam’? Might it just melt away?”

“Only if someone stops the lawyers getting their teeth into it.” They both liked her pun.

He took her hand in his, lowered his head, and kissed it. Then her cheek. She was moved by something in the way he kissed her. She knew he understood exactly what she had said, that he understood her pain. Amazingly she felt as if he had kissed that particular pain away forever. Who was this man? A Svengali, a magician?

“Yes, I think that’s just about what will happen. It will melt away and leave a smudge. Guilty or not, Sole has raked up the Pop Art muck, and that whole world is slithering about in it. Only a few, if any, will emerge with the smell of roses still on them. This man Sole will blossom, and, no doubt, enhance his creative esprit. The American Abstract Expressionist painters will feel as if they have been freed at last from a terrible dictatorship, Pop Art. Perhaps they’ll abandon the resistance movement they have worked behind these past few years, to take their places again in the open and ignore the dictator.”

Cheyney was stunned. She had asked him, and he had given her a sensitive and intelligent interpretation of what he thought might happen. Fair enough. But one that displayed a certain knowledge of art. Normally she did almost anything to avoid becoming involved in a contemporary art conversation such as they were having. Now, somehow or other, she was right in the middle of one, yet not panicking about it. The wariness, doubts, and second thoughts that normally taunted her at every word uttered about the art world, though not gone, seemed foolish, unnecessary. Another thing to be relegated to the past and buried.

She listened to him say, “Pop Art and Andy Warhol, and the sixties in politics and music and society, morals, and myths, has, for good or for bad, had a tremendous impact on the world.
The time has touched us all in some way, no matter whether we reject it or open our arms to it. Now it’s nothing more than a question of how much it has affected us all, and where do we go from here. It’s not life, you know, only a small moment in a life. Enough of ‘candy bars,’ never enough of the Agora. Alas, one last look. We have somewhere else to go.”

Cheyney had listened, no longer torn by bitterness about the art world. She felt sober, cool, and calm; in fact, downright unemotional about it. She was free. After so many hard and unhappy years she was free. The last of her guilt over her past role in the New York art world died that afternoon, with a stranger, in the Agora.

Chapter 20

T
he car climbed toward Sunion. He told her, “I have known Greece for most of my life. I’m always amazed at the lasting effect it has on people. The changes it makes in people’s lives. You go away, and yet it always stays with you. Whenever I come to Athens, I touch base again with the Acropolis, the Agora, and Sunion. How nice for me, this bonus of having you here with me.”

“Is that often?”

“No. You see, I touch base in many places. Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat, Luxor, the Valley of the Kings, Ephesus. Even Eleni-Kamini. I wish there had been more hours in this day, I would like to have taken you there for dinner. It’s a small cove on a Cycladic island I know, with nothing more than a taverna on the beach. You get there by caïque from the old port. We would have sat near the water’s edge on weatherworn wooden
chairs placed on a beach of stones that the sea has washed smooth. There is a breathtaking view, all sea and sky, and some deserted islands off in the distance that seem less to rise from the sea than to have been plucked from the underworld by some god, and carefully laid on the surface of the water to float in place for eternity. At dusk and at dawn, a mysterious, milk-thin mist appears and veils them, then moves sensuously around and between them and vanishes. The evening visitation of some unhappy god. Or so the locals have claimed for as long as the island has been inhabited. We could have had ouzo and octopod cooked over a charcoal grill, and watched the sun set over the sea.

“One day I’ll take you there. Yes. We’ll go in late spring when it’s hot, and the air is still fresh and full of the scent of night and flowers. Out there the sky is simply a blanket of stars broken by millions of pieces of dark blue night. Would you like that?”

“Of course,” she answered, hoping that it might one day happen.

They laughed a great deal when he asked, “Tell me about
your
Greece?” She supplied him with her interpretation of a certain type of foreigner who falls in love with Greece and the Greek islands.

“To sit on a Greek island, let’s say Hydra or Mykonos, in the blistering heat under an awning in the old port. You drink Demestica or a cold Fix, cheap Greek beer. You watch the caïques bobbing up and down in the water, hearing their lap and slap against the boats and the quay. I love it. The curtain has gone up, the scene is set, and here’s a play that runs twenty-four hours a day. Surely, if you have been to those islands, you will know such scenes.

“The boats when they disgorge their passengers and freight — dogs and chickens and goats and tourists. The whole island down at the port, waiting to see who bought what in Athens, who has arrived, who’s leaving. The beginnings of new sagas and the endings of old. The pinched and exhausted look of the returning locals. The Greeks never travel well, they just pretend they do. The cautious, hungry but happy eyes of the foreigners. They have already fallen in love with the picture-postcard
port and the island of their dreams. They step on the quay and, snap, something happens to them.

“No one knows how, but suddenly under the burning sun, the magic light, in Greece, and especially on the islands, new life surprises them.

“The fairies sprout wings, the closet-queens quit the closet, the spinsters turn instant nymphomaniacs. Happy suburban husbands let their sexual fantasies fly in every direction, male, female, or whatever. The butch girls and gay boys unzip their dreams and tuck their instant loves under their arms. They flower proudly in the sunlight. And the islanders just help them along, feeding them with their own needs.

“Then one day, as suddenly as it began for them, it’s over. The holiday has run its course. They fold up the subconscious like some old soft hat and pack it away for another year. They leave with memories of their dream island stashed away in the core of their being. Some return as soon as they can. Some just can’t leave.”

“That’s very funny,” he said, truly amused.

“Yes, it is,” she answered, “but it always worries me that, in this particular theater, the viewer is just as much one of the actors. There are moments when I ask myself, ‘What are you doing here?’ ”

“Do you get an answer?”

“Well, I haven’t yet.”

It was dusk when they arrived at the temple in Sunion. Perched on the top of a precipice rising two hundred feet out of the sea, the very tip of Attica, it had always been a beacon of home for ships returning to the Saronic Gulf.

Again they were fortunate in their timing; they were the only people there. A magic few minutes, walking among the Temple of Poseidon’s slender, luminously white marble columns. “More Ionic than Doric. Perhaps the same architect who designed our little temple in the Agora. At least that’s what the archaeologists have suggested.” He took her hand and led her across the worn marble floor. Together they went as far as they could to the edge and looked across the water. “The sea, this marvelous Greek sea,” he said.

It was vanishing right before their eyes, swallowed in the impending darkness of night. “I suppose I ought to quote you
something of Seferis, or better still Cavafy. But this place seems for the moment to have silenced even their voices in me.” She would have liked to have offered him poetry as a gesture of thanks.

“That would have been perfect.” She thought she saw a far-off look come into his eyes. And he walked her to the car.

Riding away from the temple back toward Athens, Zazou kept leaping from the rear-window ledge to his lap and up to the ledge again, then down into Cheyney’s lap, a game accompanied by barks and doggy cries. He was pleased, Cheyney relieved to have the distraction. It filled a sudden distance she had felt growing between this man and herself as they had walked in the dark from the temple to the car.

At last Zazou settled down. In silence, they sped through the darkness, traveling the winding Cape Sunion road for some miles before he reached out to take her hand in his. Cheyney could not have been more wrong about a distance growing between them. Quite the opposite. Kurt was thinking how much he liked her, how near to perfect he found her. In the few hours he had been with her, how good they were together.

He was more than smitten with Cheyney Fox. To have known her, learned to admire her, as he had had to from a distance for all these years, had been a challenge he quite enjoyed. A taste of her now had proved to him the search to uncover her real qualities, her weaknesses, her strengths was well worth his efforts. If the game had to be the courtship process to get her, then so be it. All the more fun for him. One day he would explain to her that he had only to look at her once to know that in many things they were the same: like him, she too was seeking someone of substance, someone of quality. That he knew a time would come when the nest-building instinct would get the better of her. A time when the life-creating instinct would get the better of both of them. And for them, it would have to be with the right person or not at all.

He switched the car’s interior lamps on. They cast a soft, warm light across the backseat. Zazou perked up and licked the hair on the back of his head. “We only have a few hours left before I have to catch a plane, and I don’t intend to waste them struggling to see you in the dark.”

Cheyney was not surprised by his announcement of an imminent
departure. Something like that was bound to happen. She was, however, disappointed. He had been an exciting adventure, a more than interesting man, one who had quietly brightened her life, and all in a few hours. Too few. She would have liked him to have stayed at least the night.

There was something else. She did believe he intended to marry her. Otherwise there would not have been the visit to the Agora, the pilgrimage to Sunion. They would have remained in her bed, and they would have had sex together all afternoon and evening. She knew almost nothing about this man, except that she found him to be cultured, and highly sexed, a seducer of women.

“Two strangers meet …” she began.

He interrupted her. “Ah, but that is not strictly true. If you are talking about us. You must begin, ‘Two people meet again.’ ”

“All right. Two people meet again, if you prefer. They like each other, they want each other.”

Again he interrupted her, a smile of approval on his face. “Ah, that’s good, that you want me. Now we have a real beginning.”

He turned off the light and slid over the seat to be those few inches closer to her. Taking her face in his hands, he drew her head forward and kissed her. A long, slow, passionate kiss that kindled an uneasy flame within her. Then he placed his arm around her shoulder and drew her close against him. In that one kiss he managed to upset her poise. She struggled to regain her equilibrium, and continued, an edge of huskiness in her voice, “They came together.”

Yet again he interrupted her by taking her in his arms and whispering in her ear, “You see there was no need to ask me if you had been dreaming. We were wonderful, we were sublime, whether in your dream or in the real world.” Before she could ask anything, he kissed her with even more passion, his hand caressing her naked breast, her nipples reacting to his measured touch. She felt dizzy and was relieved when he gently released her, took a long, lascivious look at her still-naked breasts and closed her jacket, buttoning it up. She had scarcely been conscious that he had opened it.

She sighed, and leaning back against him, was silent while
she composed herself. Finally, when she had recovered enough to speak, she murmured, “Maybe I should have worded that a little differently.”

He laughed. Then added to his laughter, “Yes, maybe you should have.” It happened so quickly. He did it with such finesse. He released his massive erection from the confines of his trousers, raised her skirt to her hips, and whispered huskily, “Guide yourself onto me, Cheyney.” Then he pulled her hard down onto him, impaling her on his outrageous lust.

She gasped as the head of his full throbbing penis rent open her lips while he caressed her naked bottom. She did as she was bid and guided him up into her but still could not wholly take all of him inside her. A moment of exquisite pain for her as he pulled her yet further onto him until she could feel him pressing tight and desperate to the very opening of her womb. She could barely catch her breath for the excitement she felt, sitting upon his lap that way.

She whispered, “We are mad, what will the driver think?”

“Nothing. Just my lady being cuddled lovingly in my arms.” And he whispered in her ear, “You feel wonderful to me.”

“And you to me,” she whispered back, as she raised herself a few inches off him and then slowly slid down, able now to take every bit of him into herself, aided by the silky smoothness of her orgasm. She repeated the exercise yet again, then relinquished him in a slow, luxurious withdrawal that was as sensuous and raunchy as his own behavior.

Now it was he who seemed at a loss for words, he who had to compose himself by asking in the darkness of the speeding car, “You were saying, before I so rudely interrupted.” The tremor of passion he felt for her was impossible to disguise.

She switched on the light. “I was trying to say — and no more interruptions, please — I find it strange that in the times we have been together (a few minutes in New York, a few hours here), neither of us has posed a personal question to the other. No, are you married? what do you do? where do you live? All those banal questions that are supposed to be important when two people meet. I know nothing about you, and I don’t care.”

“I know everything about you, and I do care.”

She pulled away from him, just enough to take a good, long
look into his eyes. She was trying to see if he was teasing her or not. It was difficult to trace a smile on his lips.

“What
do
you know about me?”

He was on the verge of telling her all he knew, but changed his mind. Not yet, not quite yet. This wasn’t the moment.

When she had turned to face him, she had brushed his cheek with hers. He touched it now, and said, “I know you make up your face beautifully, so skillfully, and I like your scent, lilies and jasmine, and your chic suit. I know that you are a glamorous woman, full of life, yet living in some kind of a retreat, or you would not be in Greece. You would be in Paris, New York, or London. You discriminate finely when it comes to men. You are not a woman to snap up the first thing that comes along, or you would have been married long ago and many times. And there are no signs in your personality or the way you live of your having done that. Oh yes, you live simply, but have not always had to do so. Shall I go on?”

He was teasing her. Well, she could play his game. “Oh yes, why stop there.”

“I know that you have an interesting mind. The kind of mind that likes Tinguely, the concept of ‘chocolate-bar’ art, Pop Art. You can see and understand them for what they are, and laugh at them.”

To himself he added, And you persuaded a strange man into the strangeness of painting Campbell’s soup cans. And that caught the imagination of some very artistic people.

“A clever mind? An intelligent mind?”

“I know that art must have its special place in your life,” he told her with sympathy in his voice.

Cheyney was genuinely surprised. “You are perfectly right. You do know a great deal about me, and, I now suspect, more than you’re telling me. You speak about art, not for the first time today, as if it were important to you. Is it?”

“It’s my life. My magnificent obsession. Art is everything, well, almost everything. Perhaps I think of it as being an expression of the god Eros. A great force, which is sex and love and desire. Art is the human soul at its most cunning. For people like you and me, art is the fundamental method of explanation. That is putting it rather pompously. What I should have said was, for you and me and all the rest of mankind. Art is a means
of truth, even with all its conniving and tricky ways. That’s why you should not be so hard on yourself for loving it. I’m not. I’m proud that it’s my great passion, my soul.”

Cheyney felt her own attitudes to art and its ambiguities take shape within this man’s phrases. At a loss for words, she slipped her arms around his neck, placed her lips upon his, leaned her body into him and kissed him. A kiss where she took command and they dissolved into each other. On this occasion it was she who released him, and it was she who was calm enough to tease him.