Making Love (35 page)

Troubled deep-set cocoa eyes peered remotely at her kneecaps as Lee tiptoed through to remove the plates. A splendid baritone on WQXR announced that Sir Thomas Beecham would lead the London Philharmonic in the
Jupiter
. Now that Mr. Sulzberger, Sr., the station's most important listener, was no longer around, Mozart could be played with impunity. Jane saw electronic buttons on an innocent-looking side table, accounting for the magic of sound.
 

“Frankly, Jane, my behavior's inexplicable.”
 

“This whole thing isn't simply to lay me?”
 

The word offended him.
 

“No, it isn't.”
 

“You could have had any of the Brownies at the hotel.”
 

“I'm aware of that. I explained that sometimes I arrange these things to entertain people who've been helpful to me. But personally, it's not my style.”
 

Speechless, he rose, waved a hand, and told her a tour of the environs was now on the itinerary. The guest bedroom, guest bathroom; closet space enough for Korvette's men's boutique; a sauna with two entrances (a first in Jane's life); a study with real books, dustless, seldom perused, Lee and his Electrolux everywhere (the tip-off that the room was merely for show); the master's suite done in bamboo wall covering; the other sauna entrance; his suits, sixty-five of them on unstealable headless hangers; Meladandri labels; forty-one pairs of shoes polished so highly that a lady didn't need a mirror for her lipstick. Everywhere she turned she saw the initials C.B.L., even inside the shoes, a reproduction process speedier than binary fission. Did he frequent public skating rinks or bowling alleys where shoe checking was a risky business? Would he forget who he was, how his name was spelled?
 

“Very impressive,” she said.
 

Her tone worried him. Had he gone too far?
 

“I keep another wardrobe in the country,” he continued blandly, but without making an impression. She had that magic quality his mother always raved about:
background
. Nothing daunted her. Self-taught, he had nervous suspicions that he occasionally acted in a gauche manner, but instantly forgave himself; an unfortunate, a first-generation American, the last son of elderly parents with a long history of sexual activity. His father into his seventies, his mother still a vessel in her sixtieth year. She'd given birth to her last after turning forty-three. Who could he learn from? He wandered into the bathroom and Jane heard a whirring sound as he made the Jacuzzi whirlpool operational. The lecture tour had culminated at his bed, which was electronically equipped by a German firm at a cost of thousands. Everything present except radar. Lee appeared on a closed-circuit television scouring a pot with a Brillo soap pad, always an interesting program before bedtime. For the masses, Merv and “Here's Johnny,” but Luckmunn preferred Lee in charade. A new age dawning, the era of silent TV. Luckmunn had it. On the bedside table was a book with a place mark. So he did read! She picked it up:
Human Sexual Response,
a little hot mustard before retiring. A number of passages, she saw, were underlined, all relating to size. If a girl tried to give him an inferiority complex and pulled a ruler out of her bag, Luckmunn was prepared with his Standard and Poore reports on penises. Quality, not quantity. Longevity, not load—the true facts about fucking. Read them and weep. He'd open the book, recite a passage from his personal
Screwtape Letters,
then go into action while quoting insurance rates and the Dow Jones closing averages. Lee finished washing and mixed himself a malted in the blender. East met West at a meridian called Sunbeam. He tossed in an egg yolk, greedy little gook. No wonder Luckmunn watched. The bills for milk, Bosco, and eggs must have been astronomical. Luckmunn called to her. The Jacuzzi was on full blast, creating dizzying eddies of water in his private Gulf Stream. What an existence; a man who didn't have to worry about trade winds had everything.
 

“Where do you go when you want to fish for salmon?” The blades churned like the Q. 2 rudder. No Chinook would ever make that leap.
 

“I don't fish, as it happens.”
 

He removed his shoes and socks and stuck his feet in.
 

“It's very relaxing,” he advised her, inviting her in. She returned to the bedroom, lowered her stockings and stuffed them into her handbag, watching Lee furtively gulping his malted. She wondered if she could ask him if he wanted to do a little washing. She adjusted her bikini panties to belly-button level, sought help from Luckmunn's sexual New Testament by the tried-and-true formula of closing her eyes, flipping the pages, and pointing her finger at a passage for guidance. No luck, the subject was orgasms. She returned to the bathroom, where Luckmunn commented on her absence of bunions and corns. He himself was a sufferer, having done many stints during his youth as a waiter in Catskill resorts when money was tight. He opened a cabinet above the bath, revealing a complete line of Dr. Scholl's products. She lowered her feet in the water.
 

“Do you show everybody your toilet or only people you really care about?”
 

“Jane, you know nobody puts me on. Why is it that I really enjoy it when you do?”
 

As their toes touched she had a wounded chest-clutching pain for Sonny. What a place for the reunification of intimacy! It would have been different with Sonny, no question of that. Her ailing athlete would have put epsom salts into the whirlpool rather than the Vita-D body food favored by the realtor. It smelt good though, despite the water's change from see-through to the murky green of an Amsterdam canal. Luckmunn oohed and aahed in the soft water, but made no reprehensible suggestions to Jane.
 

“I do this whenever I have an opportunity. It's a good place to think.”
 

She couldn't quibble with him, as she had an image of her mother, cocktail glass in hand, toe soaking with Luckmunn before a bang. Actually his ferocious performance on the tennis court, loping and leaping awkwardly, had little relationship to the soft-soaping she was now receiving. His manhood threatened, he became a savage. If he couldn't beat a drunken woman at a game (with rules), then he might just as well resign from life.
 

Two switches on the wall with clock attachments and time settings up to fifteen minutes were pointed out by her host.
 

“I wonder if heat or sunray would help your eye.”
 

“Ice, just ice.”
 

The crenelated pocket of skin under the eye drifting under the lens of her glasses had the implications of a birthmark for Luckmunn and made him unhappy. He'd never made it with anyone wearing dark glasses and wondered if the experience might be subtly different, more sensual, than the usual dazed eyes he encountered most frequently. A former shade-wearer he once dated under the assumption that he would be boffing a career girl had been a drug addict, and when Luckmunn disrobed her and removed the glasses, he had been confronted by pupils the size of microdots and track marks running crazily along her arms—which could lead only to derailment. The girl had offered Luckmunn her works and invited him to skin-pop if he couldn't find a vein, even offering to locate one for him. In the lost-erection event he had established a speed record, crushing the backs of his shoes getting into them, and moving like a man in a fire drill determined to save himself and not his credit cards.
 

Jane, however, didn't appear to be drugged, just peculiarly individual. She got to him through his fishnet defenses, a supersub which crawled on the bottom of the sea and shot torpedoes before he could get a sonar beep.
 

She had reversed their roles. By what sleight of hand, he could not imagine—and now he was fighting a defensive battle, retreating under her glare. A fleeting reference to Nancy's health earlier in the evening had elicited a vague response from Jane before disappearing back into the genie bottle of bad memories. Obviously Jane knew nothing of what had happened between them. Nancy, now confined, was neutralized. No one stood in the way of the future that had dropped into his lap. No one except Jane, an unfair obstacle. A strange first date, toe soaking, he had to admit to himself. His friendly business pimping hadn't upset her. She took that in her stride. Nothing could really shock Nancy's daughter. What those innocent eyes must have seen, before his arrival, in the way of gigolos and drunks had no doubt prepared her for all modes of perversions. Nothing left unsaid. His heart went out to her, prematurely toughened against her will. He'd sold himself on her. The easiest sale he'd ever made in a long career of high pressure.
 

Her feet didn't excite him terrifically, since toes or ankles were for fetishists and Luckmunn knew with certainty that he belonged to the meat-and-potatoes class. Moving upward along the hypotenuse from knee to neck was more his territory, an area worth contesting, the hills, vales, and slopes of female topography. Definitely a land parcel to be surveyed and, if the report proved good, invested in. Her breasts, he could not get over. Short of girly magazines—in which they appeared hygienically cordoned off, and of such mammoth size as to reduce their functionality to such discredited practices as the Schaeffer method of artificial respiration—he'd never encountered a pair like Jane's, a marine color guard unflinchingly at attention under all weather conditions.
 

He gave himself over to a few moments of erotic war games. Since they interested him more than he could say, he kept his eyes off them, fearing she would notice.
 

Her presence removed his self-confidence. Where others quaked under his gaze, she had reduced him to the level of a sniveling dentist who spent his nights sleepless, horrified by visions of incorruptible Internal Revenue agents, his fear cross-pollinated by the possibility of Luckmunn screwing him on the cash he'd stashed, then threatening to squeal if he so much as asked a question. She moved him,
and
with impunity, giving him a case of golfer's yips which rendered the greatest of them nervous wrecks on two-foot sink-or-perish putts.
 

“How's the water?” he asked gaily.
 

“What do you want, Charles?” She'd give him the “Luckmunns” later, she thought angrily. (Nancy's form, drunkenly plummeting on the court, tripped over her own closed circuit.) This was her first time with a
bona fide
mother-fucker. Luckmunn with perfect accuracy might put that down on a job application form under the heading of previous experience.
 

She was disappointed in him, expecting him to be unlike other men, a tragic hero, blinded, in Thebes.
 

“I'm not sure,” he rejoined weakly, a denouement winging through his mind at the wrong time, which he'd be powerless to prevent.
 

“Is there anything ...?”
 

“Not a thing! Not even an egg roll.”
 

What had he done to foster such hostility? Pleased with the success of her attack—she'd read him beautifully—Jane offered him her hand, fresh from an immersion in Vita-D. It dripped on his trouser knee—the action, not the dampness, unsettling him even more. He took it and asked no questions.
 

“It's getting kind of hot in here,” she said. She turned her back to him. “Unzip me, will you. And don't touch.”
 

With zombielike precision he unzipped, clearing her skin by a centimeter. The scenery was splendid even from the rear, a white elastic band hooked together evenly on an eyelet. He'd never before known such excitement from the back of a brassiere, it being his practice to let the girl unsnap, or twist his own wrist underneath to get the job done. Whoever thought a zipper could make such an impression? She kept her back to him and stretch marks and spine became a blur of instant replay, mesmerizing him. This wasn't simple cockteasing, a game of three responses: You paid, or humped for nothing after a while, or told the girl to get the hell out. This was heart-attack hotel, the coronary cruise. Seized by palpitations, he whined silently and stared, his ankles dipping deeper into the water, meeting unexpectedly at his hiked trousers. He'd given her the Mandarin prelude (no skimping there, either), the grand tour, and now helplessly wondered why she was torturing him.
 

“Are you still going to college?” he asked.
 

“I left a while ago.”
 

“Everyone seems to be doing it. Marching and rioting.”
 

“I'll bet you wouldn't if you were still there.”
 

“Well, I was brought up kind of traditionally. You go to college to learn. Education is next to godliness.”
 

“What did you study?”
 

He caught his reflection in the mirror over her shoulder, smiled at it. The Hansa trader looked like a goy. He needed a trim, his earlobes were concealed. Might create doubts about his reliability at the bank. He'd get his ears back in view just to be on the safe side. His leverage might be threatened, more collateral demanded by the manager.
 

“I studied accountancy and business management.”
 

“And that's godly?”
 

“I give money to charities every year. My education enabled me to make the money to give.” He closed with impeccable logic. “So what's wrong with that, Jane?”
 

Her mother and Luckmunn, surely an impossible combination, she reflected.
 

“I'm awfully tired.”
 

“And a little depressed, too, if I'm not mistaken.”
 

“If I keep my toes in here any longer, you'll be able to stick them on a hot-dog roll,” she said.