Scruples (31 page)

Billy abandoned almost all her excursions into Beverly Hills except for the hairdresser and refused all lunch dates. She was afraid to rearrange the nurses’ schedule so that Jake would have every afternoon off, for fear of alerting the others. But two days out of three she went to the pool house after lunch and waited, lying naked, thighs opened shamelessly wide, until he came.

After that first afternoon he had treated her in public exactly as he always had. There was not a flicker of an eye or a secret glance to indicate that he even remembered what had happened between them. He was as respectful and punctilious as ever. All her sharp perceptions told her that no one suspected anything. Nor would they, as long as she didn’t betray herself. And even in the pool house, vibrating like a steel rod inside of her, working his cock in and out of her cunt, he called her by no name and discreetly left her afterward so that there was no need to speak, to use words to talk about what they had been doing, even to get to know each other in this new relationship. How strange, she thought, that she could taste her own juices in his mouth and yet this most intimate communication was nonverbal. It was as if they shared a place that existed only under certain circumstances, at a certain time, a space in which their own everyday personalities dropped away entirely.

Billy’s eroticism became more and more focused on the secrecy and the illicitness of the pool house. Nothing that happened there
counted
in the real world, yet nothing in the real world mattered compared to the pool house. In the pool house, where she had absolute disposal of the powerful and marvelously willing body of Jake Cassidy, their fucking became more and more experimental and animal. She was not Billy Ikehorn, the sad, rich wife of a dying man; she was somebody—somebody she didn’t give a name to—but somebody who hadn’t existed before. She almost felt as if she could sense this new person being born, separating itself from her, a new person without guilt or standards of behavior, to whom everything was permitted—as long as it was secret. Utterly secret.

In the beginning of her afternoons with Jake Cassidy Billy wondered at what seemed the abnormal way he had of keeping the time they spent together in a separate compartment from all the other times they were in contact during the day. Then she realized that she too wanted it that way, not just because it was safer but because she
did not want to know
Jake any better than she did. He was likable and efficient in his professional capacity; at the pool house he was a man with an ardent mouth and a stiff prick, but beyond this, she did not care to probe. She didn’t want to know about his family, about his childhood, about his feelings, about his likes or dislikes or any of the other idiosyncrasies that make a person individual and meaningful. It was not that she was deliberately shutting him out of her heart; it was rather that he failed, in some fundamental way, to appeal to that heart, an intransigent heart that steadily refused to confuse lust with sentiment Billy remembered too well what love had been like. Jake Cassidy had nothing to do with love. But she could live without love, if she had to. She had no choice.

Dan Dorman looked at Billy shrewdly. Since his last visit she was getting some, somewhere, he’d bet his life on it. She had that luminous look he hadn’t seen since before Ellis got sick. Good for her. It was about time.

“You’re looking well, Billy. I’d take up tennis myself if I didn’t think I’d drop dead first time on the court at my age.”

“Swimming, Dan, not tennis. I swim about a mile a day now—wonderful exercise. But why don’t you? You could start just doing a few laps a day.”

“In New York? Maybe deep knee bends. Now, about your plan to take Ellis to Palm Springs again, this winter—well, I’m not sure it’s really necessary. It just isn’t going to make that much difference to him this year, unless you enjoy it there, yourself, of course.”

“Good God no. It’s geriatric paradise, Dan. Even the young people look old and dried out. And our house there isn’t nearly as comfortable for us as this one—I’d like to sell it.”

“What about the jet—going to keep it?”

“Definitely. I’m sure that Ellis still enjoys going to Silverado and it’s worth keeping the plane even if we only use it twice a year—with the nurses and everything, we’re like a safari when we set off. Anyway, the cellar master at Silverado would kill me if we didn’t show up for the vintage this year. Do you have any idea of how many vines we had to uproot to build the landing strip? But Dan, why did you say it wouldn’t make any difference to Ellis about Palm Springs this winter?”

“He’s much more withdrawn, Billy. You probably don’t notice it as much as I do because you’re with him every day, but he’s losing interest in life month by month, going away more and more each time I see him. When it rains here this winter he’ll be just as happy indoors, watching the fire or television, if it still interests him. He won’t miss a few days of sunshine.”

“I have noticed it, Dan—his—enormous—remoteness. I was afraid it might be something I wasn’t doing right.”

“Don’t ever, ever think that Billy. He’s getting the best possible care. You can’t compensate for what happens inside a person’s brain when a tiny blood vessel pops. You can only do so much. What are you now, Billy, almost thirty? It’s not much of a life for you.”

“Oh, I manage, Dan, I manage.”

As Billy’s afternoons in the pool house continued, she felt herself changing even further. She had never guessed how aggressive she could become with a man. Except for the two times in her life when she had taken the initiative—once when she crossed the hotel corridor in Barbados to go to Ellis and the first time with Jake—she had always assumed that it was the man who reached out for the woman, who indicated his desire, who aroused the passive yet alluring female. Now she was tasting the thrill of a fresh and almost excruciating pleasure in becoming the one who sought, who demanded, who explored, who drained. When Jake arrived at the pool house she was always there, hungry for him. In early autumn when he started to arrive first a half hour and then an hour late, she found the waiting, the uncertainty, more viciously painful than if she had known he couldn’t come at all. He always had a plausible excuse, but she didn’t believe them. She began to suspect that he enjoyed the power of knowing that she was already there, aroused almost to the point of violence, a voluntary prisoner focused totally on the animal release only he could give her. She had taken him. Now he was trying to turn the tables. She became sure of it the afternoon he didn’t come at all, explaining later that he’d just fallen asleep in the sun. Raging with hidden anger, horrified and humiliated but in the grip of her need, her obsession, unable to do anything else, Billy raised his salary by a thousand dollars a month.

Her lust for Jake’s body chewed at her constantly. In the mornings as she saw him passing in the hallways, she followed him with lidded eyes, visualizing the details of their next meeting. When she dined with the nurses, if he was among them, she could barely swallow as she looked at his hands and thought of what they could do to her. One Monday morning after he had had the weekend off, she came upon him passing the door of her room and gripped his wrist. She pulled him into the room, locked the door behind them, unzipped his pants, searched frantically for his cock, and made him hard with her hand. Then she rubbed herself against him until she came, still wearing her nightgown, the two of them leaning and panting against the wall like a pair of teenagers. Another day, when he had been on duty during the afternoon, she waylaid him after dinner and led him to a guest bathroom on the first floor of the mansion. She ripped off her panty hose and panties, sat on the lid of the toilet, forced him down on his knees, and pushed his head between her spread legs, thrusting her aching, wet cunt at his lips. He brought her to a quick, sharp orgasm with his tongue, but somehow it wasn’t enough of what she wanted. She made him stand up in front of her, and still sitting, she took his penis in her mouth and sucked him off, the world reduced to that jut of flesh that she attacked so thirstily, with such craving. When he had slipped out of the door she sat in the locked bathroom for almost an hour, disconcerted and still unfulfilled. Billy knew that she was getting out of control. Either the incident in her bedroom or their joint disappearance of tonight could have been observed by any one of the servants who came and went about the house.

Within a day in early November the weather changed. The long, hot spring, summer, and fall were unmistakably over. An unusually rainy winter had come to southern California, a winter that might seem merely like a disappointingly wet fall anywhere else, but here, with the temperature in the fifties, long afternoons in the unheated pool house, far down an avenue of dripping trees, were self-evidently impossible. Billy became aware that until true spring came, perhaps until April, almost six months away, she would have to find an alternative location for her secret life.

She spent a long, thoughtful afternoon prowling about the great citadel on the hill, wandering speculatively through the many empty rooms Lindy hadn’t bothered to have redecorated because they served no function. Some of the rooms could be observed from other parts of the house, some were located too close to corridors often used by the servants, still others displeased her because from their windows she could see the wing that contained her own suite of rooms and Ellis’s rooms, a part of the house that instantly made her aware of its true function as a private hospital. But finally, at the top of a long unused turret staircase, she came upon an octagonal room that might have been built simply for the quaint aspect it had from outside the castle, since it seemed to have never been used. She leaned out of one of the narrow windows and felt her hair caught by the newly brisk wind. The rain clouds that pressed down on Bel Air looked as if they could almost touch this high room and she remembered Rapunzel, the princess held prisoner in a tower. This particular Rapunzel, she mused, was about to acquire a hobby. Should it be sketching, watercolors, or oils? Or perhaps pastels? It scarcely mattered. The important thing about her art was that it required long hours alone in her studio, hours during which no one would question the fact that she was incommunicado. Everyone respected an artist’s need for privacy and who, she wondered, was there left in the world to ask to see her work?

Within several days Billy’s new studio was furnished. First she made a whirlwind stop at Gucci’s, where she had recently spotted a thick silver-fox throw lined in silk and at least twelve feet square. Then she descended on the May Company, where a bewildered salesman, used to customers who measured, hesitated, compared, and consulted, barely managed to keep his sales slips filled in, as, in half an hour, Billy bought a floor sample couch from Milan’s most experimental designer, which the buyer had been worried about because it was too dominating and too expensive to fit into any normal room; an ancient, fine Oriental rug, which was, in the salesman’s opinion, too rare to be used as anything but a wall hanging; and several wildly extravagant lamps, which he knew, but didn’t tell her, could give only dim light.

Billy’s next stop was at Sam Flax, an art supply store, where her salesman enjoyed the odd experience of selling almost two thousand dollars’ worth of painting necessities to a lady who seemed more interested in the sable brushes than in anything else she bought. He would have been even more intrigued if he had seen Billy struggle the next day to set up her new, unfamiliar easel. That finally accomplished, she fished out one of the dozens of canvases, positioned it carefully, and drew a jagged streak of red across it with a stick of pastel. Then she carefully lettered, on a page from one of the sketchbooks, “Studio. Work going on. Do not disturb under any circumstances.” She tacked the page to the outside of the door, which could be locked from the inside, and, satisfied, she then removed all the sable brushes to her dressing room where they would come in handy for her eyebrows.

During the time it took to set up her studio Billy noticed that, in spite of the change in the weather, Jake maintained his attitude of imperturbability and public reserve. His black-fringed choirboy eyes met hers as frankly as ever, without a flicker of question, although he must have realized that it had been more than a week since they had touched each other. He did not even pay her the homage of a glimpse of impatience. Billy had first planned to surprise him with her studio, but now some instinct prompted her to keep it secret from him.

When it was all finished, she joined Jake and Ash for dinner one night dressed in a long, silver-lamé robe bordered in black mink, her hair combed loosely back, and heavy ropes of cabochon emeralds, baroque pearls, and rubies twisted around her strong throat. She studied Jake dispassionately across the table as he favored her with one of his cocky, impersonal smiles. Suddenly she saw him as not only unnecessary but dangerous. She had never forgiven him for the times he had kept her waiting, nor would she, as long as she lived.

Her lawyer, Josh Hillman, could handle the matter of Jake tomorrow, she decided. No, she’d have to attend to it herself. Josh would never understand the large bonus, the most inappropriately large bonus, that Jake would receive on his rapid departure. That and a few carefully chosen words should settle it. Perhaps Jake wouldn’t fully understand, but somehow Billy knew that he wouldn’t be too surprised. He must at least have wondered if he had gone too far. He’d been playing a game that was over his head.

Billy looked down the table at Ash, Ash with his gentle southern voice and his fine, long fingers, Ash who trembled when, without thinking, she stood too close to him, Ash who followed her with longing eyes when he believed she wasn’t paying attention—slim, gallant Ashby. What would he look like naked?