Paradise - Part One (The Erotic Adventures of Sophia Durant) (9 page)

The windows are down so we can feel and smell the sea breeze as it pelts us.
Also, as an excuse not to have to converse. It’s just as well, the feelings in me are too big for words. Apart from these feelings and very distinct is the feeling that this is the birth of evil in me. I cannot say where this thought comes from. It isn’t religious by any means. I am not religious. All I can say definitely is that it’s there, it’s terrifying and all-consuming like my burning affection for this almost entirely unknown man.

His hand touches the edge of my hand.

I look at him, holding my gaze.

He looks at me, then away. He moves his hand away. The impression is ambiguous. He could have touched my hand on purpose, or perhaps it was an accident.
Though he gives the impression that nothing in his life is accidental. It’s the aura he projects. But of course everything is. He didn’t choose to be born as who he is any more than I chose to be me. It’s all incidental, but never mind. I begin to fantasize about pulling off the road, driving out to a perfect beach on the East Coast. Parking in front of the pink sand in the magic hour right after sunset. I cut the engine, take off my pants and climb over Stafford in the passenger seat, mounting him. But I stop myself there. When a thing is imagined it is as good as real, and I want to save the potentiality and let it explode when it does, if it does, in actuality. I don’t want to spoil it by some weak pre-imagining. I think to myself, I can’t let myself do that with him. But the thought is light and arid, and once thought I know there was no point—the opposite is my true feeling, my desire.

If you do read this one day, Julie, I want you to know I am a little embarrassed at some of these admissions, but I am just writing stream of consciousness, getting the burden off my chest like a sort of purging of the heart. I also want to tell you that, in all honesty, I felt a little too weak to commit the atrocious acts I was about to, but I forced myself out of some not-too-well-understood, compulsive need to go through with it.

I strengthen my heart in imagined strands of steel to fortify it against the onslaught of horrific feelings. Stafford does not glance at me again till we return to the villa. The gate is open when we arrive and we pull around a water fountain before the steps to the arched doors.

Stafford says coolly, “Thanks for the ride,” and we separate.

Back in my room I set down my wallet and phone and enthusiastically popped the
MacBook. Waiting for it to boot, I glanced out the window to see a sky on the verge of rain. I felt drained, thrilled and like I needed to rest my Serotonin-saturated brain and think it all over. For now, I would just check my email, the news and make sure something was recorded in Minerva. But I would not listen to it till later in the night since all I wanted now was to return to some semblance of a normal life, whatever that was. What were my thoughts prior to the unfolding adventure that began that afternoon? I was a nanny for a millionaire or billionaire who is mysterious and aloof. I was enjoying this private paradise with the unbelievably attractive Anna. I had smoked a few joints and a torpedo with her. Then the millionaire/billionaire put a wrench in it with some highly questionable business on a small cove a few miles to the north. But it was an intriguing wrench and not altogether undesirable. I didn’t like the idea of the crisp, clean Stafford up to his eyeballs in international intrigue. But I wasn’t going to marry the man, I only wanted to fuck him. An act which I was already trying very hard
not
to imagine. I wondered if he thought about it. Of course he did. He was a man. Clearly he had taken an interest in me. It was written all over him whenever we were together. I hoped no one else noticed it. I didn’t want it to get back to Isabella. But the more I thought about her and her drone-like behavior, the less I cared.

There was a note from Julie in Gmail.

I hope you’re having fun. You must be since you haven’t written me back. Don’t forget about your old friend in her humdrum, middle-class existence. Part the clouds and peak down at
me once in a while. I’ll greet you from the marshes with a smile.
(She was waxing eloquent.)
If you do get in on your new employers’ multi-million-dollar operations, don’t forget that mansion on the beach in the Cayman Islands you promised me. Imagine the movie nights there.

With that she signed off.

I felt a longing for her. She was like a ghost that haunted my dreams. She represented a safe haven in a real world that I once hated but now looked back on with fondness. I wished she was here and could see all of this. She was fairly well-to-do, but her family’s wealth was nothing like this. The rarified air of wealth of astronomic proportions feels strangely out of place in a world mired so deeply in a great economic depression, it gives the world a distinct dreamlike quality.

I clicked on the Minerva icon somewhat hesitantly. Before it could load there was a knock at my door. Thinking it was Anna I set the MacBook on a bedside table and walked over to the door. As I opened it, Mark Stafford leaned in. I felt my heartbeat in my throat and swallowed hard. I immediately regretted leaving the MacBook open. To my horror, the audio file began to play automatically.

“What’s that?” he asked.

I went over to the bedside table and paused the recording. There were no indicators on the screen of what it was. All that had played so far was just a muffled, ruffling noise.

“Weather,” I said without really knowing what I was going to say next. The following came automatically: “It’s a recording a friend sent of a storm outside her house. Only sound, no picture.”

“Interesting.”

“What brings you, Mark?”

“Isabella’s leaving for England in the morning.”

I wondered if it was anything to do with the “Brit” Stafford had sorted out in the morning.

“She’s in a bit of a state now. She didn’t want to come see you. It’s not you. She doesn’t want to see anyone. She doesn’t even want to see me.”

What he was telling me seemed like something private he should have kept to himself.

“I hope she’s alright.”

“She is. She just gets like this before she travels. She’s going to see her family.”

“Why didn’t Anna come tell me?”

This was my way of saying I thought what he was saying was a bit too private for my liking. I needed to put some distance between us, take control.

“I thought we were friends.” That magnetic smile appeared again.

I couldn’t help smiling, and I was mad at myself for doing so.

“Anyway, she’s leaving in the morning, but the baby’s staying. So the chore of looking after Savannah will be divided between you and Anna. You two will have to work out how you do this among yourselves. Understood?”

“
Claro
,” I said with a smirk.

“You speak Spanish?”

“Not really. Only enough to get by if I have to.”

“So beautiful.
So intelligent. Why haven’t you married yet, Sophia?”

“I suppose I’m too introverted. I don’t get out enough.”

“I find that hard to believe considering, for one, you’re so outspoken.”

“What’s number two?”

“Oh, you’re attractive.”

“You already said that.”

“Hold your horses.”

“You hold
them, you seem to do better at it than I do.”

“I’m not quite sure in what sense you mean that.”

“Take it in what sense you will.”

I didn’t let up in what had become something of a rapid-fire exchange. I came back quickly on the heels of whatever he said, not caring how outlandish I sounded.

“Number two: you have an easy grace about you not many women have. Especially women as young as you.”

I looked at him searchingly, trying to discover his motivation. But this was as elusive as most things about him.

“You should take that as a compliment,” he said.

“How else?”

I mirrored his magnetic smile.

You could cut the tension in the room with knife. I felt the tiniest dots of sweat form on my palms, and I could see tiny dots like salt crystals appear on his forehead.

He smiled now too.

“With that, Ms. Durant, I bid you adieu.”

Stafford made a small bow and walked off.

I shut the door behind him. Here I was thinking this might be our first sex scene. He was teasing me. Stafford had gained the upper hand. Damn. I played the audio from Stafford’s phone. I listened to the muffled Bob Dylan track, occasionally interrupted by a full-on rustling sound.
Stafford shifting around in his seat. Eventually the music stopped. I heard a muffled: “Here.” Stafford’s voice. There were moments of silence before some doors have opened, and there was the onslaught of violent wind and more rustling sound. I could make out the soft crunch of footsteps in the sand and wind blowing through dry grass. Next the phone must have come out of the wind and back into the Escalade because there was a tremendous amount of noise followed by the sound of a car door slamming shut, followed by utter silence. That motherfucker put his phone in the car for the meeting. I looked at the soundwave on the bar of the timeline in the bottom half of the screen. It was flat for about forty-five minutes. I skipped through to make sure there was no sound contained therein that didn’t show up on the bar. There was not. I played from the point where the soundwave started fluctuating again: car doors opened, Stafford put the phone back in his pocket, more Bob Dylan, more rustling. I learned nothing at all from what I heard. But I did learn one crucial thing from what I didn’t hear. Stafford was aware of the possibility of outside observers listening through the mic on his phone and therefore he left it in his car the duration of the meeting. I knew then that whatever it was he was up to was definitely not above board. It was illicit without a doubt.

I closed the program, shutdown the computer and lay down to sleep. But I couldn’t sleep. My mind began whirling through all the strange events of the day, trying to make sense of them. The only thing I could come up with was that I had never really
lived
before that day. So, in that sense the day was a tremendous success. My mind also automatically drifted into sexual thoughts of Mark Stafford, but I ignored them and pushed them away. Pretty soon I saw myself as a lioness deep in the African jungle, hunting her pray, and I was out.

I awoke before dawn when the light of a bright yellow moon shone across my bed, bouncing off, and seeming to project strange images on the wall opposite my feet. My first thought was to wonder if today could be any stranger than the last and with that I drifted off again, this time into vivid dreaming, and Mark was there. He had crept into my subconscious in his subtle way and I couldn’t shake him no matter how I tried. In those early morning hours I didn’t have the will. I let myself be consumed by thoughts of him, which in these half-dreams morphed into other people: lovers from the past (the very few), men I’d fantasized about heavily, men I’d obsessed over, and some women too, including Julie and then Anna.

From an upstairs window I watched Anna and two porters pack Isabella Gardner’s travel bags into a Mercedes Benz limousine. I cradled Savannah gently and watched as her beautiful eyes turned toward oblivion. Her heavy lids sank and she urged them up with all her remaining will, but it was to no avail. They sank in one final rush to the bottom, and the ship of her soul sailed for dreamland. I swayed her happily, holding her close to my chest while enjoying the warmth of her small body. I had not seen a more beautiful baby and wished she was my own. After watching the departure of the Mercedes that carried Isabella I walked the baby to her room and set her ever so gently down in her crib. My heart overflowed with sentiment watching the glow of her little body lying face up in a deep sleep. I listened intently to the sound of her baby snoring and thought it the most heavenly sound I’d known.

I met Anna in the corridor outside the nursery. I told her the baby was fine and asked about Isabella’s departure.

“Everything is fine. She left without a hitch.”

“That’s good. I heard she was upset last night.”

“Yes. She is always upset before she travels…who did you hear that from?”

“Oh, Mark told me.”

When it slipped out I wondered whether I should have said it.

“So, you are developing a personal relationship with Mr. Stafford.”

“No, he—we have a professional relationship. He is just friendly.”

“He is a strange man. I warn you that whatever happens between you…keep the distance between your…
corazon
.
Corazon
?”

“Yes, heart.”

“Ah, you speak Spanish.”

“Not really.
Only a little. A few words.”

“You are a very nice, modest woman. Some might say too modest.”

A mischievous smile curled around the edges of her lips. My memory flashed back to the scene on the beach. I felt the sensation of the touch of her lips to mine. Her hot breath on my neck. Running my hands along her body. I felt an overpowering urge to drag her off into one of those great empty rooms and have my way with her.