Authors: Jacqueline Briskin
She wrenched away from him. “Curt, I am not an idiot, not anymore.”
“Are you trying to tell me he said he was
mine?
”
“He is.”
“Gott!” Shocked into the Teutonic intonation of his early childhood, he crossed the room, his heels making hard, angry clicks. At the window, he turned to face her. “Honora, I should’ve told you this up front, but you and Lissie were so high on him and he’s your nephew. Who was I to rain on your parade? Men in the business who know him say the younger Talbott kid is an amoral prick. The older one’s strictly okay. This Alexander is a total shit.”
“Curt, no more lies.”
“He’s spooking you, don’t you see?”
“Stop it!” she cried.
Curt came to stand in front of her again. Below his narrowed eyes, the cheekbones stood out like sweat-glossed pillows. “You believe
him
, not me?”
“He has your eyes.” This hard, accusatory voice, where had it come from.
“My eyes!”
“Exactly like yours, the color, the shape, everything.”
“What a crockful—” All at once Curt’s tensed, irate expression went lax. He moved to the nearest chair, slumping into it heavily. He was breathing in ragged gasps.
Fear for him—she knew active, driving men far younger than he who had suffered strokes or coronaries—cut through Honora’s tangled fury and despair. “Curt,” she asked anxiously. “Are you all right?”
After a moment he looked up. “The time’s right,” he muttered. “It
is
possible.”
The elusive tints of color drained from her face, and her dark, expressive eyes were unbearably mournful.
He turned away. “Possible, is all,” he mumbled. “Not probable.”
“Is it still going on?”
“Christ, Honora.”
“Pretending to be rivals, getting into her—”
“One damn time. One stupid, asshole slip . . . . I don’t suppose you’ll believe me when I tell you that was my only time with another woman since I met you.”
“You’re right. I don’t believe you.”
He curved a hand over his eyes. “Remember that summer I went up to San Francisco to try for the Taiwan seawall contract? There was a
big party at Thomas Wei’s house and she was there without Gideon. Don’t ask me why she was alone. I got drunk. So did your sister. We went into the garden, it was freezing. God knows not the night for a quick roll in the bushes, especially in formal clothes. Looking back, I don’t know how it could have happened. She might be a knockout, but she’s a hard alligator. I’ve never felt anything for her. She grabbed me.” He shook his head. “I was drunk, angry, furious at her, furious at Gideon, and guilty about going against him when he had saved my life. Who the hell knows what the hell went on in my mind? I was too loaded to think.”
She pulled at the constricting neckline. “Try another excuse,” she said bitterly. “My earliest memories are variations on that one.”
“I’m only trying to explain what happened,” Curt said. “Anyway, why did that miserable shit tell
you?
Why didn’t he come to me?”
“He wanted me to know,” she said.
“To hurt you? Or because he knows he’d have a tougher sell with
me?
Okay, he found out somehow about that one goddamn drunken bang at the Weis’—what does it prove?”
“He has your eyes!”
she screamed, then clamped her hand over her mouth.
Curt had risen from the chair and was pacing up and down the bedroom. His swift strides roused shivers in her; it was as though he were jerking about like an epileptic. She had never before felt any kind of aversion for him. She opened the doors of the balcony, stepping out
in the hot desert night. “I can’t stay here,” she whispered.
Curt followed her. “Sweet, we’ll leave tomorrow,” he said eagerly. “Tonight if you want. I’ll charter a—”
“I’m going alone. Me and Lissie.”
“You are not going alone.”
“I think I could have borne you having an affair—affairs.” Her soft voice faltered. “But with Crystal . . . and to have a son . . . .”
“Will you stop saying that?” he asked heavily.
“Can’t you understand?” Her throat had clogged and she had difficulty getting the words out. “This is too much for me to cope with.”
“Honora, love, let’s just say for the sake of argument that the biological facts are there. So what? As far as I’m concerned that long-haired young prick is somebody I just met. Somebody I don’t ever want to see again.
I have no son.
”
All at once she was transported back to that room in the Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. She could feel the tautness and coarse weave of the linen, see the way that the shadows of leaves bubbled on the wall, smell the perfumed dissolution of Vi’s roses, feel the aching of her bereaved, battered, empty body as she mourned for the infant Ivory, male, dead because of her careless, criminally childish pride.
Watching her, Curt took a heaving breath and yanked at his tie. “Honora, we got some bad news, but we can work it out.”
She shook her head. “Maybe you can. For me it’s an impossible situation.”
“I—am—not—letting—you—go—
someplace—by—yourself—to—brood.” As emphasis for his separated words, he gripped her upper arms, his fingers burying deep in the flesh.
At the pain she whimpered.
He did not release her. Instead, he pulled her closer, kissing her, an inflexible assault that cut her teeth into her tight closed lips. How strange, being kissed by Curt and feeling not the least fringe of desire, only the pain of his fingers in her biceps and a sickened revulsion. She tried to pull away, but he stayed with her, his tongue thrusting, his hands shifting downward, the widespread fingers splaying around her buttocks as he pressed her against his tumescence. She squirmed, but her attempts to escape increased his obduracy. Curt worked off his tensions athletically, and though her height nearly matched his she was slender, delicately built. Her rejecting struggles were ludicrously inadequate.
Lifting her, he pushed her backward catercorner across the joined mattresses, dropping heavily on top of her. The caftan was caught underneath her so that the reverse neckline cut like a hangman’s noose into her windpipe.
Panicked, she kicked and hit frantically.
He was pulling at her panties. She grappled with his hands. He slammed his fist at the base of her hip. The pain brought tears to her eyes, halting her flimsy struggles.
Is this what Joss put up with?
He succeeded in yanking down her panties, the gold of his wedding band cutting into her clenched thighs.
Using his knee to wedge her legs apart, he fumbled with his fly.
As he forced entry, she shrieked.
Sometimes he had taken her caveman style, swiftly and artlessly, and she had responded with wild excitement, dissolving into orgasm as soon as he went into her. Now there was arid pain.
He caressed her flanks, whispering, “Darling . . . love . . . sweet cunt . . . .” His rhythmic pounding swiftened, forcing the breath as if by artificial respiration through the stranglehold of the cotton caftan.
It was over in less than two minutes.
He fell gasping atop her. She squirmed to the far side of the bed, curling around her violated, aching self. His breathing quieted and the springs shifted as he got to his feet.
He turned away from her as he slid down his trousers to straighten his shirt. “That wasn’t such a terrific idea, was it?” he asked, half humorously, but his voice broke as he continued. “Okay, Honora, you win. I’ll have them make the arrangements for your flight.”
“Thank you,” she replied leadenly.
“Where are you off to?”
“London,” she said, then wondered if the instincts of a mortally wounded animal were directing her to her birthplace.
“London?”
“Please.”
“Three seats on the first available flight, then,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“I don’t suppose you want me sleeping in here tonight?” Again that jaunty, sardonic voice.
She said nothing.
“I’ll see about another room.” Doubtless he could procure one even during the overbooked Pan-Arabic Conference.
“Thank you,” she repeated in the same dulled monotone.
He opened the door and went out into the hall. But not before she saw he was weeping.
* * *
At a little after one the following day Honora climbed the metal stairs onto the Air France flight from Casablanca to London and Paris. She was carrying a balky, bewildered Lissie while Miss McEwen followed with the hand baggage. Across the landing field, men wearing black robes stood in formation in the broiling sun awaiting the plane of some important sheikh.
As the aircraft took off, Honora was too benumbed to cry. Instead she closed her eyes, feeling as though the distance she was putting between her and Curt had made a concrete fact of her despairing rejection.
Curt had arranged for them to be met at Heathrow, but seeing the familiar, hunched figure of the elderly driver, an Ivory employee,
caused a return of Honora’s pulsing nausea. She sent him away. Lissie and Miss McEwen, perhaps frightened by her stern pallor, didn’t question the decision, and neither did the governess comment when, instead of giving the taxi driver the Upper Brook Street address, she said, “The Cumberland.”
The name popped out of Honora’s childhood memories. She had never stayed at the Cumberland, a large, bustling commercial hotel at Marble Arch—and neither had anyone else she knew. It wasn’t until the taxi inched amid the heavy, early evening traffic around Hyde Park Corner that she admitted to herself that her choice had been made because she didn’t want any chance of Curt finding them. In her frantic state she was positive that he was in hot pursuit.
The following morning a cold summer rain fell. Cashing travelers checks, Honora gave the governess a small stack of bills to buy herself an all-weather coat and to outfit Lissie in warm clothes and sturdy shoes. As she handed over the money she wondered briefly how she would be able to afford Miss McEwen’s considerable wages, but her mind wasn’t able to concentrate on more than one problem, and at the moment her concern was to find housing for them. Buying a clear plastic umbrella, the cheapest available in the lobby boutique, she hurried in her lightweight, pale midi to the estate agent around the corner on the Edgware Road. At each splashing step her thigh muscles twinged and the bruise on her hip ached—this morning
as she bathed she had gingerly soaped the plum-colored mound.
The agent, a Mr. St. Clair, had a glass eye: its fixed gaze distracted her as she inquired about weekly furnished rentals willing to take children, something nice but inexpensive.
He flipped through a file box, extracting a card. “Just the flat for you. Fifty pounds a week. Brand new. On Great Carrington Place—that’s West Kensington.” Feeling himself safe with an American who wouldn’t be able to differentiate between Kensington and its lesser neighbor, he added, “I’m sure you’ve heard of West Kensington, it’s a tiptop address.”
Langley wouldn’t be caught dead in West Kensington’s unfashionable precincts, and neither would any of the charged, important executives from Ivory’s London office.
“Sounds perfect,” she said.
He took her in a taxi to see the flat. Great Carrington Place despite its grandoise name proved to be a meager cut above a slum, a cramped brick row that had been flung up at the turn of the century. Three of the depressingly narrow joined houses had been thrown together. As Mr. St. Clair showed Honora through the second-floor flat, her mind kept wandering to Curt and Alexander and she didn’t notice the dank odor, the ugly, comfortless furnishings or that the three bedrooms were airless cubicles.
Agreeing to take the place, she further fixed her anonymity by saying, “Oh, and when you speak to the manager, would you tell her I
prefer going by my maiden name, Weldon.” A dashing monitor in the form above her at Edinthorpe had been called Buzzie Weldon.
“Of course, Mrs. Weldon.” The real eye shifted while the artificial fixed its gaze on her. “One week’s rent is due in advance.”
They moved in that afternoon.
Miss McEwen went through the flat, the freckles showing darkly in her face as if her blood were rising up to bid adieu to deluxe quarters and Arabian princesses. Lissie darted through rooms scarcely larger than those in her playhouse, making her high noises of pleasure.
The rain had stopped but the clouds hung gray and threatening: the governess and Lissie put on their new warm clothes, taking Honora’s umbrella when they left on their shopping foray to the nearby shabby high street.
Waving goodbye from the living room’s bulbous window, Honora shivered and twisted the radiator knob. There was no answering hiss. Recollecting that Mr. St. Clair had explained that this being summer the central heat was off, she went to her room, the smallest and darkest of the three cubbyholes, opening her suitcase for her beaded stole, the only wrap she had packed for Morocco. Clasping the thin cashmere around her, she returned to sit in the living room. She could feel the prickling of the gray frieze upholstery through her light summer clothing but was too chilled and enervated to move.
Her pity for Curt was profound—those tears on his cheeks—yet her impulsive flight
had been totally honest. She could not go back to him.
So how would she manage?
The purse on the plywood bookcase held less than two thousand dollars in uncashed travelers checks. She had never been good with numbers, and now her thoughts rose and fell as if on a roller coaster. The weekly rent of fifty pounds translated into around a hundred and twenty-five dollars. What did it cost nowadays to buy food in London? Certainly she couldn’t afford Miss McEwen’s salary. Lissie would need private schools and special teachers.
It finally occurred to her that since her marriage Curt had accumulated an immense fortune, and California being a community property state, half was hers.
I’m leaving him
, she thought.
I can’t take his money.
Even in her dubious mental state she knew that her ethical code bordered on moronic masochism.
But what did pity and finances have to do with emotions?
So she had a living to earn.