“I’ve never raped anyone in my life,” he said humorously, “and I promise not to start with you.”
Suddenly, humiliatingly, Isabel felt tears stinging her eyes. “Hell,” she said violently, and she turned to run up the stairs.
A strong arm reached out and circled her shoulders and she found herself being walked steadily down the hallway and into the sitting room.
“You’re not going to run away,” Leo’s voice said above her head. “You’ve been running away for long enough, I think.” He put his hands on her shoulders and made her sit down on the sofa.
“What do you know about it?” she said shakily. A drop fell from her eyes onto her clenched hands. “I’m not a candidate for a Big Brother,” she added, and disregarding the tears she could no longer hide, she stared up at him defiantly.
He sat down beside her. “I know. You already have a big brother, I think. Isn’t that what Bob is?” He put his hand into his pocket and handed her his handkerchief.
Isabel took it, dried her cheeks, and blew her nose. “You don’t do much crying, do you?” he asked noncommittally.
She laughed a little unsteadily. “The last time I cried was the day I graduated from Cooper Union. I came home to find we had been evicted from our apartment—Daddy had neglected to pay the rent.”
Thank God he didn’t offer her pity. The one thing she did not want was pity. “Surely you had learned by then not to trust him with paying the bills,” Leo said.
“Of course I had.” A strand of black hair had come down from her chignon and lay coiled like silk on her shoulder. “The end of the term was frantically busy, though. I put the exact amount of money into an addressed envelope and told him to get a money order on his lunch hour and mail it. He didn’t drink in the morning. And he told me he had bought the money orders. I did that for four months and then came home and found all our belongings out on the street.”
Leo sighed. “That’s an alcoholic for you.”
For some strange reason, she began to feel better. “I suppose so.”
“Drugs are the same. I knew a few fellows who were on cocaine.” He shrugged. “You lose them. There’s nothing left: no dignity, no honesty, no love. Nothing. Just the drug.”
“But why, Leo? Why would someone do that to himself?”
He grinned crookedly. “Honey, if I could answer that question, I’d be more famous than Freud.”
She gave him a shadowy smile. “I guess you would be.” She turned her head then and stared straight ahead, at the blank television set.
“You were right about Bob,” she said quietly. “He has been a big brother to me. I would never have been able to get as far as I have as a painter if it wasn’t for him.” She seemed to realize for the first time that her hair had loosened, and she raised her hands to try to push it up again. He watched the deft movements of her fingers, her sternly beautiful profile. She bent her head a little forward and then raised it again. Her neck was long, slender, and delicate, and the line of her breasts under the fine wool dress was emphasized by the movement of her arms. Some of the peacefulness left Leo’s face as he studied her.
“I could never have afforded to live on just my salary,” she continued. “When Daddy died, I would have had to get a second job, but Bob let me move in with him. He pays the rent and the utilities. I just buy the food.” She raised her hand once more to smooth back her hair. “There are two bedrooms,” she added a little awkwardly.
“I see. So you have financial security and time to paint. What does Bob get out of this arrangement?”
“He gets his meals cooked, his house cleaned, and his laundry done,” Isabel said tartly.
“I see.” Leo stretched his legs out in front of him. “Does he also get a little professional camouflage?”
Isabel’s mouth dropped open. She stared at him. “How did you know?”
“Isabel, honey, there is no way in this world that a heterosexual man could live with you for three years on the terms you have just described to me.”
Isabel closed her mouth. “Oh.”
“I believe you said he works for a very stuffy architectural firm?”
“Yes. They think our living together is racy and modern and slightly scandalous. I get speeches at every dinner about how I should let him marry me. But they would not accept the truth at all—or at least Bob doesn’t think they would.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t think they’d want to lose Bob, whatever his sexual preference may be. He’s tremendously talented. And he’s a super guy. Everyone likes him because it’s impossible not to like him.” She turned her face back to the empty television. “He’s been an absolute Rock of Gibraltar for me,” she said flatly.
“Yes,” said Leo very quietly, “it rather sounds as if he has been.”
Her gravely thin face suddenly broke into its wonderful smile. “I’m glad you said that. Not everyone would understand.”
“I reckon not.”
She tilted her head a little to one side and regarded him curiously. “Frankly, I’m rather surprised to find you so tolerant.”
“Because I’m a big macho football player?”
His face was expressionless, but Isabel understood, with great surprise, that she had hurt his feelings. Impulsively she put out her hand and covered his. “Leo, I’m sorry. I’m as bad as the people who would condemn Bob.”
He looked for a minute at their two hands lying on his thigh. Isabel’s narrow palm was about half the size of his. Her gaze followed his and she laughed a little nervously. “My skin is about three shades darker than yours,” she said as she removed her hand.
“You have beautiful coloring.” His gentle, slow, Southern voice sounded like a caress.
“You’re the one with the spectacular coloring,” she retorted quickly. “And it’s my job to catch it on canvas. And, if we’re going to start at seven-thirty tomorrow morning, I had better turn in.”
He smiled at her, slow and charming and utterly seductive. His eyes were even bluer than usual. “All right,” he drawled. “You go on up to bed. I’m going to stay here and watch the news.”
Isabel realized, with terrified astonishment, that she didn’t want to leave him.
“Good night,” she said firmly, and walked out of the room, feeling suddenly empty.
She did not go to sleep right away, but lay awake, consciously thinking about the portrait, about what she was going to work on tomorrow, about anything that might distract her from the upheaval of her emotions.
After a while she heard Leo come upstairs. His footsteps came along the hall and moved unhesitatingly past her door. He walked lightly for so big a man. He was like a giant cat, she thought, a giant golden cat. She opened her eyes and stared into the dimness of her room. Damn, she thought. Damn, damn, damn. He got to her as no one had in a long time. Not since Philip.
Philip. She closed her eyes and for the first time in years she tried to visualize his face. It wouldn’t come clear for her. She remembered his curly black hair and blue-gray eyes, but she couldn’t remember his mouth. She couldn’t really remember his face.
Now, wasn’t that funny? she thought. She couldn’t remember what Philip looked like. She had been so sure his face would be engraved on her soul for the rest of her life.
He had been teaching an evening art class on the Italian Renaissance at the Metropolitan Museum when Isabel met him. He was thirty years old, very handsome, a painter whose work was exhibited in the best New York galleries. Isabel had listened to him in wide-eyed wonder, thirsty for the knowledge he was imparting, awed by the looks, the intelligence, the talent of the man in front of her. When he had spoken casually to her after the third class, she had been thrilled. After the next class he had invited her out for coffee. It had not taken him very long to get her into bed.
Isabel thought that he was wonderful and that she was in love with him. She was very young and very alone and very vulnerable. She was overwhelmed by the thought that such a brilliant, handsome, successful, talented man could possibly be interested in her. She did not know that he was married.
She found it out, brutally, when she went to one of Philip’s exhibitions. She had come into the Fifty-seventh Street gallery dressed in her jeans and sweater, but she hadn’t minded the fact that she had no other clothes to wear. In fact, she was scarcely aware of all the well-dressed people around her. She was even less aware that the attention she attracted was not due to her casual clothes. Isabel was aware only of the paintings and of the man who was standing among a small group of people in the corner of the gallery. She didn’t go over to him but began instead to look at his work.
Philip was an Abstract Expressionist. Isabel’s classes in high school were mainly drawing classes; everything she knew about nonrepresentational art she had learned from Philip. So, as she looked attentively at the paintings in front of her, the expression on her young face was gravely intent.
“Isabel.” It was Philip’s voice, and she turned to him, a smile illuminating her darkly serious face.
“Hello, Philip,” she said simply. It was a minute before she noticed the mink-coated woman standing next to him. Then he introduced her to his wife.
Even at seventeen, Isabel had learned to guard her expression. She had managed to get through the next half-hour with at least a semblance of poise. When she had finally reached home, she had been too shocked to even cry.
Philip waited after school for her the next day, and over coffee he was charming, apologetic, regretful, but firm. Maureen was from one of the best New York families, and it was her money that allowed him to paint, her connections that had gotten him his first exhibition. He had no intention of breaking up such a lucrative union, though none of this, of course, interfered at all with his feelings for Isabel.
Isabel had left the coffee shop, gone home, and refused to see him again. He had telephoned her and waited after school for her, but in the end he had given up and left her alone.
Isabel had never even kissed a man since.
Until tonight.
“Some man sure did a job on you,” Leo had said to her, and Isabel still didn’t understand how he had known that. She did understand that he was the first man since Philip and her father who had been able to make her cry. She also understood that if she wanted to maintain her peace of mind, she had better keep away from him. How the hell was she going to be able to keep away from him when she was living in the same house with him? When she was painting his bloody portrait, for God’s sake?
It was a question she still had not resolved when she finally fell asleep.
The following day, Friday, Isabel painted during the morning and had lunch with Leo in the Senate dining room. She spent all of the afternoon at the National Gallery of Art and came home to find her dresses from New York along with a cherry-colored wool suit Bob had “picked up,” he wrote, “in Lord and Taylor’s on sale.” It was size eight and fit her perfectly. Bless Bob, thought Isabel, who had worn her burgundy paisley for lunch with Leo and had thus, in two days, exhausted her repertoire of daytime dresses. The suit would be a welcome addition to her limited wardrobe.
Leo was home in time to have a drink and watch the six-o’clock news. Isabel curled up comfortably in her corner of the sofa with a ginger ale and thought that this was quite a pleasant ritual they shared. They talked very little and Leo sipped his Scotch slowly. It was his time to relax and unwind, Isabel realized, and she was content to sit quietly beside him on the comfortable sofa.
When the news was over, he switched the television off and turned to Isabel with a smile. “Well, are you ready to make your first foray into the wilds of social Washington?”
Isabel wrinkled her nose. “I’m petrified,” she confessed.
“You needn’t be.” He was quite serious now. “A lot of people think the Stacks are a bunch of stuffed shirts, but it isn’t true. They’re very formal, but also very kind. I think you’ll like them.”
Isabel got lithely to her feet. “The question,” she said austerely, “is will they like me?”
“They love beautiful, stuck-up young painters,” he said.
Isabel stared. “Stuck-up?” she said finally, when she had gotten her breath back.
“The question,” he said with a fair imitation of the reserved manner she had meticulously maintained with him all day long, “the question is, Are you stuck-up or are you scared?”
Isabel’s stare turned to a glare. “Leo Sinclair, will you please stop psychoanalyzing me?”
“Scared, I reckon,” he said.
“I am trying to maintain a professional relationship with you,” Isabel began calmly and carefully, “but you are going out of your way to make it difficult for me.”
He smiled at her, very blond and blue in the light of the table lamp. “I am,” he admitted.
“Well, stop it.” She tried to look and sound severe, but the sight of him in the lamplight was doing strange things to her insides.
“You have one hour to get dressed,” he said softly.
“Oh.” Isabel hesitated, looked at him once more, and then turned and went up the stairs to her room.
She put on one of the dresses she and Mrs. Sinclair had bought: a designer dinner dress with an ivory satin, side-draped top and a slim ivory velvet skirt. It had been out of season in Charleston and so she had gotten a good price on it. The neck was high, so she did not need a necklace. She wore long drop earrings and did her hair in a simple, elegant chignon.
Leo was waiting for her as she came down the stairs, and she caught a glimpse of their reflection in the tall narrow hall mirror. With an artist’s detachment she realized that they made a striking couple, he so tall and strong and blond, she tall but slim and dark. They were opposites, she thought as she drew a shawl around her shoulders and preceded him out the door. There could be no middle ground between the rich aristocratic Southern senator Leo Sinclair and the lower-middle-class young painter from New York that was herself.
* * * *
The Stacks house was in a section of Washington that Leo called Kalorama. The homes were much larger than those Isabel had seen in Georgetown.
“That’s the French embassy there,” Leo said casually as they passed the imposing edifice.