He said it again simply, with even a hint of a smile. Almost, in fact, if it was possible, eloquently. “To jail,” he repeated, and then neither said another word.
S
he picked him up in front of the West Palm Beach jailhouse at seven
P.M.
on Sunday night. He was smiling, looking none the worse for wear for his two-day incarceration—if anything, he looked even better than she remembered, dressed casually in blue jeans and an open-neck shirt. He was already waiting for her—they had released him some ten minutes ahead of schedule.
“Time off for good behavior,” he joked, getting into the passenger seat beside her and immediately cradling her in his arms, his lips tasting better than a good brandy as they touched lightly down on hers.
“Honest to God,” she began, starting the ignition, “I don’t believe this whole thing.” Especially the way my heart is thumping, she thought. She pulled away from the curb into the middle of the street. For some reason, the West Palm Beach jail was situated on one of West Palm’s main streets just next to a used car lot. From the outside, it looked like just another reasonably run-down store front.
West Palm Beach was separated from its easterly counterpart, Palm Beach, more by a gulf of dollars than by the inland waterway that physically divided the two territories. West Palm had a decidedly lived-in aura; nothing in Palm Beach proper betrayed any signs of use or age—except possibly its population.
“Do you always pull away from the curb like that?” Victor asked casually. “You’ll ruin the tread in your tires.” Donna smiled, finding it very difficult to concentrate on anything other than the few black hairs she had seen escaping the top of his pale blue shirt.
“Well, I’ve certainly learned my lesson,” he said solemnly, pausing dramatically. “I’ll never run a stop sign again.”
“I thought you said you didn’t run that stop sign.”
“They said I did.”
“But you said you didn’t and that’s why you chose two days in jail rather than pay the stupid ticket. A questionable move, even if you were innocent! Now you say you were guilty?”
“As charged, yes,” he agreed, nodding his head. “But I couldn’t let them know that, not after I made such a fuss. The principle of it all, you know.” He laughed.
She laughed as well, although she wasn’t sure why. In her mind, she was trying to come to quick terms with a man who would choose two days in jail rather than pay a traffic ticket he could well afford for an offense he now admitted he was guilty of committing—and still refer to it as a matter of principle.
They crossed over a bridge and headed onto South Ocean Boulevard. “So, how was it?” she asked. “Rough?”
“You better believe it. Two days in solitary confinement!”
“Solitary confinement?”
“There was no one else there.”
“You were the only prisoner?” He nodded. “Then you weren’t raped,” she stated more than asked. Why was she always talking about sex?
“I was hoping we’d save that for tonight,” he said, their eyes freezing on each other’s. “Watch the red light!”
Her foot moved immediately to the brake, slamming down hard, jerking them both forward. They were a good fifty feet from the stoplight and there were no other cars in the vicinity.
“Sorry,” he said immediately. “I just saw it out of the corner of my eye and I thought it was closer.” Donna’s heart was racing. “That’s okay. I shouldn’t have taken my eyes off the road.”
“Would you be insulted if I asked you to let me drive?” he asked, suddenly.
“You want to drive?” she repeated.
“If you wouldn’t mind.” He paused, smiling. “For some reason I feel a little nervous tonight, and I usually find that I can relax behind the wheel of a car.”
“I wouldn’t mind a bit,” Donna said earnestly.
Victor opened his door and Donna slid over into the place he left vacant while Victor walked around the front of the red Mustang and proceeded to occupy the driver’s seat Donna had given up.
“That’s better,” he said, and she immediately agreed. He advanced the fifty feet to the stoplight, which turned green precisely upon his arrival. A good sign, she thought.
He looked over at her briefly, the thin lines around his eyes relaxing into creases which, she thought, actually
seemed to be smiling. His voice was very soft. “Home?” he asked, and then turned his attention back to the road without waiting for an answer.
Donna couldn’t believe what was happening to her.
She had been prepared for him to be a good, even an excellent lover (although she had also spent the previous two days convincing herself that he would probably not be—something was bound to go wrong somewhere—not even fantasies were as good as this reality). She had not been prepared, however, for just how good, how truly excellent he was. Beyond excellence. Into the realm of the fantastic.
She had never had a lover who was so willing to do anything—everything—to make her feel good. His dedication—a strange word to use, she realized, but she could think of none better—was all-encompassing. He wanted only to make her happy. He wanted nothing from her except for her to lie there smiling. She was simultaneously passive and delirious.
They had walked quickly and silently from the car into his moderately large bungalow and once inside, he had taken her hand and led her through the hallway, past the living and dining rooms and the kitchen, all of which Donna noted in passing were neat and tasteful, and back to the rear of the house where the bedrooms were situated.
Donna guessed there must be three, possibly four bedrooms, by the length of the hallway. He led her into the first room, a room of soft blues and beiges (“surf and sand,” he joked quietly, leading her to the double bed and starting to kiss around her mouth).
He undressed her without saying a word, letting his hands, his fingers, do all the talking. When she reached over to unbutton his shirt, he moved just out of her reach, pulling back the bed covers and guiding her inside them. “Let me,” he said, his voice very low, his fingers moving to unbutton his shirt. “Let me do everything.” Donna had never heard anything as sexy as those four words sounded.
She watched as he took off his shirt and slipped out of his shoes and socks. Donna felt she should perhaps avert her eyes as he lowered his jeans and shorts but she didn’t, couldn’t. He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen.
He crawled into bed beside her and immediately took her in his arms, his lips moving softly over hers. They kissed for what seemed like an incredibly prolonged period and yet simultaneously felt like no time at all.
Everything he did was more than she had hoped. The way he touched her, moved her, stimulated her, while demanding nothing in return. At one point, she had moved to take him in her mouth, but he had caught her hair with his hand and brought her body over his, positioning her open legs directly above his waiting mouth and lowering her slowly down.
“Let me—” she whispered later, using his words.
“No,” he said, again moving just out of her reach and sliding his head down her body, his hands remaining on her breasts. “I want it all,” he said as his tongue moved slowly down her skin. “I can’t get enough of you.”
When he finally entered her, she felt she was beyond further orgasms, her entire body soaked with perspiration; her hair clinging wetly to her head, sticking against her cheek.
“I can’t come any more,” she breathed, feeling his hands rotating her hips against the rhythm of his own.
“You’ll come,” he said, shifting their positions, lifting both her legs over his shoulders, high into the air, raising himself onto his knees.
“Oh my God,” she shouted, feeling him penetrate deep inside her. “Jesus Christ!” She could barely catch her breath.
Minutes later, he brought her legs down and turned her so that they lay moving together on their sides. Slowly, very slowly. His lips tentatively moved away from hers. She opened her eyes to find him staring at her.
“Would it upset you very much,” he asked, “if I told you I think I’m falling in love with you?”
She began to cry, realized she was indeed coming again, and hugged him so tightly against her that she found it hard to distinguish where he left off and she began.
They decided to get married two months later over mushroom burgers at Hamburger Heaven.
“When?” she asked, as she drove him back to his office after lunch was finished.
“As soon as I can make all the arrangements,” he said, his body suddenly tensing.
“What’s the matter?”
“Sorry, honey,” he said, sounding genuinely contrite. “It’s just that I get very nervous when you hold your hands on the wheel like that.” She looked at her hands; they were resting with a moderate degree of casual abandon at the bottom of the steering wheel, a position they often maintained when she was driving. “If something were to happen,” he continued, “you know, if some idiot did something stupid
and you had to move fast, you’d never get your hands back on the wheel in time to get out of his way. You’d be a goner.” Her hands moved to the proper position on either side of the steering wheel.
“You’re right,” she said, “I better start being more careful with myself.”
She pulled the car to a halt in front of his office, a large stucco building of appropriate canary yellow. A stocky man of medium height walked past their parked car and into the building’s imposing front door.
“Wasn’t that Danny Vogel?” she asked. He nodded. “Haven’t you patched up that silly squabble yet?” He shook his head. “I thought he apologized.”
“He did.” Victor got out of the car and leaned back inside. “You decide who you’d like to invite. Make a list. As far as I’m concerned, the fewer people the better.”
He started to close the door. “Victor?” He pulled it back open and stuck his head inside. “I love you,” she said.
“I love you, honey,” he answered, closing the door gently.
Donna watched him walk inside the large white door. He didn’t look back. It seemed he never looked back. About anything. He was so sure of everything he did. “Oh, God, Mother,” she heard herself suddenly exclaim, realizing how little she really knew this man, feeling an advance onslaught of pre-nuptial jitters, “please tell me I’m doing the right thing.” But the only voice she heard was the DJ on the car radio telling her it was two o’clock and time for a look at the news.
She had been sitting for well over an hour just staring at the name. Lenore Cressy. Beside it, printed neatly in the
same even black-inked hand that had penned the multitude of other names, addresses and phone numbers in the small black leatherbound book, was a Connecticut address and phone number. Lenore Cressy. Donna continued to stare.
He had told her there was no wife; his mother was dead; he’d been an only child. Who then? Perhaps an aunt or a cousin. Obviously a relation. She looked away from the address book, debating with herself what to do. Their wedding was less than two weeks away and so far he’d only asked her to do two things for him—arrange for the flowers and the photographers. It meant two phone calls, and yet here she was, already sidelined by an irrelevancy. She tried to assign herself to the task at hand. They had decided on white and yellow roses, and since he mentioned that he also loved daisies, they had been added to the decor. She looked around the room, suddenly very glad he had thought of having the wedding here, at his home, the home that would soon also be hers.
His list of the people he wanted to invite consisted only of five names, which brought the total number of guests to twenty people. She’d sought out his address book, not deliberately to spy on him, but to find the phone number of the florist he had suggested she call after telling her he knew it to be superior to the one a friend of hers had recommended. Carnation Florists, right there under the letter C. Seven listings above Cressy, Lenore.
She picked up the phone and dialed.
The woman’s voice was nasal and Floridian. “Carnation Florists,” she said with a marked degree of boredom.
“I’d like to order some flowers,” Donna told her, her mind not on flowers at all.
“Yes. What would you like?”
Donna quickly explained, and then had to repeat, that the flowers were for her wedding, yes, her own wedding, and that she wanted enough white and yellow roses to fill a fourteen-by-sixteen-foot living room, the roses to be interspersed with daisies, as would be her bouquet. She had decided to wear the simple white silk dress Victor had seen in the window of Bonwit Teller on Worth Avenue rather than the pale blue one she herself had spotted across the road at Saks, so that detail was all taken care of. It took another twenty-five minutes to work out the details with the nasal voice from Carnation Flowers, but once done, it left only one item not already arranged: the photographers Victor had mentioned as being the best in Palm Beach. Messinger-Edwards, he had said, and he had their number listed in his address book as well. Donna went to turn the page but couldn’t. She was stopped by Lenore Cressy. Her fingers played with the dial. Who was Lenore Cressy? One phone call and she would certainly find out. And then what? She would discover a faceless, long-lost, long-ignored cousin of sorts whom Victor never talked about and obviously did not want at the wedding or he would have included her name on his list. To pick up the phone and dial this woman would be tantamount to the same kind of invasion of privacy she herself detested. She quickly flipped to the
Ms.
There was still time to find out who Lenore Cressy was, and in a far more honest direct way. She would simply ask Victor about her later on.
T
he fight began almost imperceptibly, neither party able to recall at exactly what moment their discussion became something more, moving from something vaguely unpleasant to something distinctly unpleasant, progressing—or deteriorating—from a discourse to a disagreement to an argument, growing into a debate soon out of control, mushrooming into a full-fledged, all-out, honest-to-God fight. Their first.
“I called the florist,” Donna said.
“And?”
“Everything’s arranged. White and yellow roses. And daisies. Like you said.”