Wicked Pleasures (20 page)

Waiting to cross the street, gazing idly into the hooting, restless cars, she suddenly realized she was gazing into a yellow cab, at an oddly familiar head. A golden head, a large broad back, that was all she could see, for its owner was totally engaged in kissing the other occupant of the cab. But as it suddenly lurched forward, he pulled away laughing and lay back against the seat, and she could see him properly, and of course it was Baby. And the other person, blonde chaos of curls fanned across his outspread arm, green eyes laughing into his, was Angie.

‘Baby, I really have to see you urgently.’

‘Virgy darling, not today.’

‘Yes today. This evening. At the house.’

‘Virginia, I can’t. I’m terribly busy. I have a huge deal going through, and I’m a little behind on the paperwork.’

‘I’m not surprised. You should stay in the office over lunch, rather than taking taxi rides. Or have those business lunches that Mary Rose so approves of.’

Baby’s prime emotion was one of relief. At last he could talk, without having to actually break his pact with himself.

‘Ah,’ he said.

‘Yes. Baby, are you out of your head?’

‘Virginia, you don’t understand. You simply don’t understand.’

‘Well, you could try helping me along. I don’t mind how late it is.’

‘OK. But I’ll have to make an excuse to Mary Rose.’

‘Well,’ she said briskly, ‘I expect you’ve been getting fairly adept at that.’

He arrived at East 80th at seven, and poured himself a large bourbon. ‘I thought you’d given that up.’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘only on the good days.’ He realized there had been a lot of those lately, and smiled at her, half sheepish, half happy. ‘Virginia, you have to let me explain. It isn’t – well, it isn’t like you think.’

‘Baby, I know how it is. It always is. Oh, Baby, you’re such a fool. Angie of all people.’

‘Well,’ he said, trying to sound lighthearted, ‘of all people she seemed like the best to me.’

‘I’m appalled at her, Baby, frankly. After all my – our kindness to her.’

‘Maybe,’ he said looking at her oddly, ‘it was all the kindness, as you put it, that made her more likely to do it.’

‘I don’t know what you mean, Baby.’

‘I mean that she gets a little tired of feeling grateful. Of having to be shown kindness. Here was a chance to make a move on her own account. Because – well, because –’

‘You wanted her?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, slightly defensive. ‘Yeah, because I wanted her. I have to tell you, Virginia, I do adore her.’

‘Well of course you do. She young, and she’s sassy, and she’s –’

‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘You never told me how beautiful she was.’

‘I didn’t think it was necessary. Yes, she’s beautiful. And totally immoral. Or amoral. Well, that’s hardly the point. Baby, it’s so dangerous. If you had to have an affair, why not someone completely separate from us all? In a different city? You’re mad. What would Mary Rose make of it? And Dad?’

‘Mary Rose is benefiting from it,’ he said sadly. ‘For the first time in years I’m able to be nice to her. I’m so happy.’

‘I believe that’s what they all say.’

He looked at her and finally found the courage to ask her something he had always longed to know.

‘Virginia, have you ever – well –’

‘Oh Baby, don’t be ridiculous.’ She was flushed, plainly angry; she lit a cigarette. ‘How could I risk such a thing? I’m a high-profile lady, with a dynasty to found.’

‘Yes, but – haven’t you ever thought about it?’

‘Oh, often,’ said Virginia lightly.

He poured himself another drink, and sighed. ‘Oh, Virginia, if only you knew how utterly different I feel. I’m so happy. I can work properly. I really really love her, you know. That’s why it’s so important. It isn’t just an affair, just a few times in the sack, I love her.’

‘Do you think she loves you?’

‘I don’t know. She says she does.’

‘Baby, she’s a tough little nut, you know. And fearsomely ambitious. Has it not occurred to you that she might be using you?’

Baby had a sudden vision of Angie, sitting stark naked in the big bed in the small apartment he had rented for her in the Village, her eyes soft with tenderness, and he felt a sharp hostility towards Virginia that he could never have imagined possible.

‘You simply don’t understand,’ he said shortly.

‘Perhaps you’d better try and make me. Tell me about it,’ she said.

He had thought she was gorgeous, straight away. It wasn’t just the exquisite face, the green eyes, the cascade of blonde hair, the oddly reckless, slightly rakish smile, nor the small neat body, nor even the way she exuded sex, or that she so clearly found him irresistible as well; nor was it her toughness, her courage, her way of taking life on the chin and hitting back at it. She was working for a fashionable young interior designer, having left her original mentor, a Mr Stern. She and Mr Stern had parted company, at her own instigation, she told him, when Mrs Stern, with whom he had recently been reconciled, became increasingly jealous and difficult about Angie’s position in his firm and his life. ‘And he was never going to see me as anything more than a secretary anyway. You have to keep moving on, I think, Baby. Certainly at my stage in life.’ But what was primarily irresistible about her to Baby was her sense of fun. When he suggested, after their very first lunch, that they took a walk in the park, she said she’d rather ride round Central Park in one of the carriages; only she didn’t sit in the passenger seat with him, she persuaded the driver (who told her she’d lose him his licence if he got caught) to let her sit alongside him. When they first went to bed together, she refused to be smuggled into a downtown brownstone; she dared him to take her to the Plaza, and book in as Mr and Mrs Smith. She said if he did, she’d do anything –‘and I mean anything’
– he liked.

Then there was the time when she insisted he waited outside Macys, while she brought him three things he would like from the store without paying for them; and the time when she wore a black wig and dark glasses and walked into a restaurant and pretended not to know him when he sat down beside her, and everyone was staring and finally she called the manager and poor Baby had ended up not feeling really quite sure himself who she was. And the night she had given him a list of things to collect before she would agree to have dinner with him, ‘A kind of treasure hunt, Baby, I’m sure you played it lots of times in your over-privileged childhood’; the list had included a packet of Tampax, a blow-up lady and two tickets for
Hair
; and the occasion when she said they would have a competition ‘To see which of us could think of more positions to fuck in, and the loser has to do the one the winner likes best.’

And practically every time he met her, she had some new idea, a game to play; and every time he found her more irresistible, and he loved her more.

The other thing he found irresistible was the way she thought he was wonderful. Nine years of marriage to Mary Rose had been demoralizing to Baby; nine hours into the affair with Angie had restored his self-esteem, made him feel clever, powerful, sexy, funny again. And that was heady stuff.

The affair had begun slowly; he had seen her to the small hotel Virginia had
recommended, near Gramercy Park, taken her for a drink the next evening, made sure she had made contact with M. Wetherly, driven her out to Long Island to spend a spring Sunday with Fred and Betsey. He had been slightly uncomfortably aware of her sexuality, and, more beguilingly still, of her awareness of his, and they had flirted easily and almost thoughtlessly through the day (to Mary Rose’s irritation but no more – although from then on she always referred to Angie as ‘that little English girl’, her frosty tone inserting a silent but clearly heard ‘common’ between ‘that’ and ‘little’). Angie went her way, found her niche in New York, and it was autumn before he bumped into her again, quite literally, at the Thanksgiving Day Parade. He had taken Freddy, greatly against Mary Rose’s wishes, who said Freddy would be able to see everything much better from the Morgans’ balcony at the top of Park Avenue, but Baby said there was nothing like being on the street and he took Freddy down Broadway, and stood with him on his shoulders in Times Square, and they were craning their necks, looking up at Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, when a voice said, ‘One more step and I’ll be dead’; and he had looked behind him and seen Angie, wearing jeans and a check jacket, a red scarf round her neck, her hair tied in a pony tail, laughing but half afraid of being trampled by him, and he had said, ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ and then recognizing her, ‘It’s Angie, isn’t it, how are you?’

Angie said she was fine, and wasn’t the parade wonderful, the best fun she’d had in New York yet, which was saying something, and Baby asked her what she was doing for the rest of the day and she said spending it with herself, and he said that was terrible, why didn’t she join him and his family at the Praegers’ house on East 80th Street. Angie said that would be wonderful, and she’d love to, but she should go home and change; Baby said fine and to arrive at the house any time after two. Angie turned up looking devastating in a red jersey mini dress and white boots; Mary Rose was very cool to her, but Betsey was delighted to have her at Thanksgiving dinner, and Fred III flirted with her so outrageously that Baby couldn’t get so much as a wink in edgeways. Which was possibly why, as he drove her home that night, he felt compelled to make it plain that he would have been flirting too, had his father allowed it, and one thing led to another and he found himself kissing her rather hard and the next day they had lunch together and that was that.

‘And don’t even ask me where it’s going to end, because I don’t have the faintest idea,’ he finished, looking at Virginia with an oddly vulnerable expression. ‘And you have to promise me not to tell anyone, Virgy. Scout’s honour?’

‘Oh for God’s sake,’ said Virginia, ‘what do you think I’m going to do, call Cholly Knickerbocker? Of course I won’t tell anyone. I just fear for you, Baby, that’s all.’

‘Don’t,’ said Baby, ‘I can look after myself.’

Angie came to see him straight from a meeting called by Virginia three days later. She was in a very odd mood.

‘She acts like she was still my boss, Baby. I don’t like it.’

‘You’re being over-sensitive,’ said Baby soothingly.

‘I’m not. She said straight away how she’d seen me in the taxi with you, and she wished she hadn’t; and then went into a lecture about you being married and everything. As if I didn’t know. And then she went into this great spiel about how kind your family had all been to me. So I told her a few things.’

‘What kind of things?’ said Baby nervously.

‘Oh – true kind of things. Like yes, you’d all been kind to me, helping a poor little girl from nowhere, showing how good you were. And like it wasn’t entirely one-sided, that I’d worked my butt off for her, and covered up when she was drinking and been pretty bloody loyal. Oh and I pointed out that I was quite easy to be kind to. I said I might be a bit common, but that I didn’t have cross eyes or anything, and I said please and thank you, and I wasn’t exactly stupid. And then she said she hadn’t meant it like that, but she was upset, that you had a difficult marriage, and I wasn’t helping it. So I said I thought I was helping, that you’d said even fucking Mary Rose was easier these days.’

Baby felt slightly sick suddenly. ‘Angie, I think that was going a little far. Discussing things in quite such detail.’

‘I think
she
was going a little far. Anyway, she went a bit quiet, and then she just said she would like to appeal to me to give you up, that if your father knew he’d break you. And she said she hoped I didn’t think you were about to leave Mary Rose for me, that Praegers didn’t leave their wives. What she meant was they didn’t leave them for the likes of me.’

‘So what did you say?’

‘I said I couldn’t give you up,’ she said, kissing him. ‘I said all I knew was that right now we were having a great time, and I really cared about you, and you really cared about me. And then she said you’d get over it, if I moved out, and I said I didn’t want you to get over it. And then I left. I quite enjoyed it all really,’ she added. ‘Much more than she did.’

Baby looked at her; she was wearing a black silk shirt and a gold bracelet he had given her, and some Chanel earrings, and she looked very expensive and sophisticated.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I expect Virginia saw some changes in you.’

‘Yes, I expect she did,’ said Angie happily.

That was a heady summer for Baby. It wasn’t just that he was happy with Angie, or even that his marriage ironically was improved; he appeared to have recovered his place in the sun on Pine Street. This was not entirely due to a greater diligence, or even an improved skill on his part. There was a booming economy in the late sixties, albeit against an appalling background of war, violence and political unrest; the year before, as the cost of the war in Vietnam rose towards $21 billion, the stock market had touched 1,000 for the first time, and there was so much trading on the Exchange that an almost insupportable burden was placed within its unmechanized confines. People working in the back office – the department where the paperwork and follow-through of all the business was dealt with, known in the trade as grunt work – were frequently at their desks round the clock. At one time the Exchange was closed on Wednesdays, simply to enable people to catch up; two o’clock closing became the norm for a while.

There were two reasons for this: one was that a lot of small companies were expanding, and the other was that there was a huge public interest in securities; the joe in the street was buying stock at undreamed-of levels. The smell of money was mouthwateringly in the air; it was up for grabs, and everyone was grabbing. Even some of the bulge-bracket firms, people like Merrill Lynch and D. H. Blair, had retail clients. Praegers had a great many. One leading broker, Charles Plohn, came out with so many issues he was known on the street as One a Day Charlie. As a cause – or as many argued a result – P.E. Multiples were at an all-time high. What that meant to the joe on the street was that the return on the stock he bought went roaring up as the firms prospered, and it was rated and re-rated in the extremely bullish markets. The fact that much of it was high-risk stock and its price was related to perceived value and sheer numbers rather than actual performance, and that in a more bearish market it might become less attractive and be re-rated downwardly, was not given a great deal of attention. Despite – maybe even because of – the stormy background to life, people seemed to be living totally for today; tomorrow was left to worry about itself.