Sex Between, The (6 page)

Lee sat down at the table and smiled Maggie her thanks. For months Maggie had been helping her nurse along her affair with Helga. Remembering—when Lee forgot—the cafe-au-lait orchids and the exquisite little French chocolates that kept Helga's temper on an even keel. Maggie, who believed in thrift, had a special thing against Helga, who would not settle for the free samples of Dutch miniatures that found their way into Lee's house. She had always called Helga "that thing" but this morning, there was something extra in her tone. Something...

"Pieter called this morning," Maggie said drearily. "He and Trudel will be here at eight."

Lee sighed and leaned back against the chair. "Trudel," she said in Maggie's tone. "Now how the hell could I have forgotten about Trudel?"

It made sense to forget somebody like Helga, who had the usual pretty face, the usual nice body, and the usual compliment of details that she sought in a woman. But to forget Trudel Ten Broeck was like forgetting her own name.

"I didn't forget," Maggie said. She laughed then—a sick little sound that stuck in her throat. "I wonder if we'll all sleep in the same bed."

Lee laughed too, not because it was funny, but because she couldn't think of anything else to do with it. She remembered too well, now that she thought about it, the stories she had heard about the Ten Broeck twins.

For many years Lee had taken for granted that it was the Ten Broecks people meant when they talked about dumb Dutchmen. They were tall—like Kate—but in structure, not like Kate at all. Pieter at least had a shape to him, but Trudel managed somehow to look more like a cube than anything human. Both had flaming red hair, and standing side by side—as they always were—they looked like a team of oxen waiting for the yoke. Kate usually refused to discuss the fact of the red hair all too obvious in a family that had never produced anything but blonde. But Miss Ida Winkle had once confided to Lee that Kate had her suspicions. There had been a hired hand used to work at the Ten Broeck farm...

But whatever private thoughts Kate might have had, she had kept them to herself and treated the Ten Broecks like anyone else in the family. She had given Pieter a good job in the firm and, as a special grace, had allowed him to incorporate Trudel as his private assistant. Separating the two was a feat no one had ever undertaken. They moved in lock step, spoke as though from the same mouth and, except that occasionally one or the other of them had been seen to move independently, they stuck together like Siamese twins.

Yet, when one looked at it carefully, one could discern a truth that Pieter would have denied. It was simply that Trudel, on her own, hadn't sense enough to survive. The family, being the family, said that Trudel wasn't quite bright. Lee had stronger feelings on the subject. But whatever the case, wherever he went, Pieter dragged Trudel with him like some swollen, obscene appendage.

Remembering this, Lee felt a twinge of pity curl through her. Not, God knows, for Pieter, though he may have deserved it, but for Maggie, who certainly didn't deserve Trudel.

"Look," Lee said, "it still isn't too late, you know. If you want, I can talk to Kate and try to pound some reason into that unreasonable skull of hers. I mean, after all, she can't expect you to marry Trudel."

"No," Maggie said flatly.

"But..." Lee sputtered.

"No," Maggie said again. She took Lee's empty cup and carried it over to the sink.

Lee got up and went to stand behind her. She could feel the waves of unhappiness that emanated from the girl. Knew from her voice that she was close to tears. She put out a finger and, very gently, pushed a blonde lock back into place.

"Why don't you let me help you?" she said quietly. Maggie was so close. So very close that she could smell the warmth and the sweetness of her. Could reach out and touch her...

Maggie turned on the water and carefully rinsed the cup. Then she took a clean towel, dried the cup and stepped away from Lee to set it into the cupboard.

Lee felt a prickle of irritation teasing along her spine. For a girl who usually had such good sense, Maggie was acting like a jerk.

Maggie turned to face her, and as she did she smiled. Lee knew instinctively that Maggie had pulled all her loose ends together and was ready for anything. She was thankful, glad for Maggie and glad for herself, for she had come so close, so very close...

"Don't you think we'd better get down to some work?" Maggie said, changing the topic as though something had been settled. "We still haven't finished that letter and Daddy says—"

"You want to know something?" Lee said. "I'm a little sick of hearing what Daddy says. Lee says she didn't get any sleep last night and she didn't get any sleep the night before and if she doesn't get some damned soon, she's going to fall flat on her face. And from the looks of you, Miss Maggie, you could use a little yourself."

"I could," Maggie agreed without hesitation. "I feel like something ready for the garbage pail."

"So the hell with it," Lee said. She grinned. "Besides, you have to look gorgeous tonight. We don't want Pieter to feel he's getting gypped."

She shooed Maggie off upstairs and poured herself another cup of the strong, black coffee. It was true that she was tired, worn thin like she had never been in her life. Her stomach felt like somebody had been working it over with a mallet, but she knew that she would not sleep. That she would lie there in the big empty room and stare at the ceiling and think about Maggie and wonder...

About many things. And dream a little, too. Like about how simple it would all have been, if she had been the son she was supposed to have been. Maggie would have belonged to that son. Maggie would have been Kate's gift to her only heir and the family, the lousy family, would have sanctioned and approved.

But it wasn't safe to have dreams like that. They hurt too much, cut to the quick in all the wrong places. She had heard from the day she was born that she was supposed to have been a boy. In every generation there had been a boy. Only one—but that had been enough to keep the family line going. Each son had produced another. She remembered the portraits in Kate's library and silently, she cursed them, as she had often done-cursed the waning maleness in each generation that had finally produced her. She felt like a eunuch, like something that wasn't quite a woman and certainly was not a man. She loved Maggie as much, as well, as deeply as any man could. Yet she could not marry her, she could not give her sons. She could not go to Kate and say, Maggie is rightly mine.

She couldn't really, she knew, go to Kate and say anything. Kate had an empire to worry about, a family to propagate. Kate, if she had ever loved anything, had not let love get in her way. Lee could not persuade herself that Kate would listen to her, for Kate had not softened with age. She had grown hard, believing that only she had the strength, the fiber to keep the family going.

After a while, she gave up on the subject of Kate and climbed up the spiral stairway to the living room. There was little point in beating herself over the head about Kate. She'd been doing it all her life and gotten nowhere.

She poured scotch into a glass and carried it to the couch and stretched out with the glass propped on her stomach. The sun beat warmly through the front windows, burning a path across the rug toward her. She was too warm in the suit jacket and too tired to get up and take it off. Every now and then, she sat up enough to slug down a swallow of the scotch. But it didn't reach her. The pounding inside her head went on inexorably.

Only for a moment did she concern herself with regrets over Cleo. Cleo, like any woman but Maggie, was just one of those things. She would probably move Cleo and her tons of clothing into the house for a while—just long enough to take the edge off Maggie's departure. Cleo would at least keep her mildly entertained, and it was a hell of a lot easier than digging up a new body every night.

Helga, she could hardly spare a thought for. The fire had gone out of that flame a couple of months ago. Still, Helga had her good points as well as her dull ones. And she would need someone on the string, someone to hold her head when Cleo started kicking it in. Helga would do nicely for that. Helga loved to hold heads. It made her feel secure.

By the time she had worked up a good fat hate for the whole world, the glass was empty and the sun gone below the windowsill. She heard Maggie coming down from the top floor and glanced up to watch her descend the staircase.

She had always thought the spiral stairs a little silly until she watched Maggie coming down them. It was like a game of hide and seek, the way her knees peeped out from the edge of her skirt, then disappeared when she rounded a spiral, then were there again. Maggie had nice knees and good legs, legs that had walked a lot and been out in the sun.

The rest of her looked damned good too. Lee sat up slowly, taking in the whole picture a little at a time, so it wouldn't touch off the scotch. She had on a green dress Lee had not seen before that fit in a way that was at once both demure and exciting. Her hair looked softer, shinier, and it waved neatly, but not tightly against her head. She had taken a long time with the make-up and done a good job. Lee felt all of her reaching toward the girl, wanting to go to her, to hold her...

"Do you like it?"

"If I answered that honestly," Lee said, "you'd slap my face."

She watched the color deepen in Maggie's cheeks and she knew, for one moment, that if she reached out to Maggie, Maggie would run to her arms. She knew it and it was all she had ever wanted to know. But she could not tell this to Maggie. Not now and not ever.

She sat very still as the girl went on down the stairs to the first floor. In only a few moments, she would have to sit there and watch Pieter eyeing Maggie, feeling her up with that stupid, stolid expression of his, taking her measurements with his little pig eyes. She had seen Pieter look at women before. Pieter, who liked women the way some men did, as though they were nothing but flesh to be pawed over and mauled. Pieter, who had probably never done anything to a woman but look and drool.

She heard the bell and the click of Maggie's spike heels. And then the three of them coming up the stairs.

Maggie, quick and alive. Pieter, plodding and slow. Trudel, moving over the earth like a mongoloid Neanderthal. Lee got up as they came in and crossed to the liquor cabinet.

"May I fix anyone a drink?" she said automatically, looking straight at the cocoa-filled pot in Maggie's hand.

"We're having cocoa," Maggie said.

Pieter said, "Yah."

"Yah," Trudel echoed.

The Ten Broecks had not changed, as she had known they would not have. They never seemed to age, to lose or gain weight, to grow or shrink an inch. And still they said, yah—as if they had just climbed off the boat. Lee poured herself more scotch and knew that it wouldn't help a bit.

Maggie set the ceramic pot on the coffee table and stepped to the walnut cabinet for cups. Lee heard the girl fiddling around behind her, getting things out, but she was not looking at Maggie. She had fastened her eyes on Pieter—on his bloated, red face—and she had decided that it might be fun to kill him.

The Ten Broecks sat down together on the couch, dropping like two hinged halves. Carefully, Lee forced herself to look away from Pieter's face and went to sit down behind her desk, needing the advantage of distance.

"It is warm today," Pieter said in his foghorn voice. "We have hyacinths in the yard."

Lee had never quite known how to respond to Pieter's brilliant dialogue. He sounded, somehow, like a children's reader that was badly out of date. Neither he nor Trudel had ever set foot in the Netherlands. But they spoke and moved and behaved like classic examples from the old sod.

"We have a few things growing," Maggie said brightly. "I was out just this morning digging around the tulips." She retired with her cocoa to a sling chair across from the couch, and Lee watched the three of them sitting there, drawn into themselves now that there was nothing more to say.

Finally she pulled open the top drawer of her desk and searched around till she found a fresh pack of cigarettes, then offered them to the other three.

"We do not smoke," Pieter said, speaking at once for the three of them. He did not even glance at Maggie for her reaction.

"Maggie doesn't either," Lee said pointedly, knowing that no point she could throw would dent that thick skull. Still she had to try, for Maggie's sake. At the rate Pieter was going, Maggie would be dead of suffocation... or boredom... in a week.

She lit a cigarette and sat back to watch them through her smoke screen. It was like being at a play for which she had memorized the dialogue, the movements of all the characters. Yet it might be interesting, just for the hell of it and for the scotch in her veins, to try to shake it up a bit—see how the characters behaved when someone threw a rotten tomato onto the stage.

"I suppose Kate has made arrangements for the marriage," Lee said off-handedly, directing herself not to Pieter, but to a spot on the white wall behind his head.

"Yah," Pieter said. "For Sunday. In the morning."

Trudel said, "Yah.”

She felt Maggie watching her, but she would not look at the girl as she spoke. "In that case," she went on, "I'll be needing a secretary the first of next week. You know, Kate's made me head of the firm."

"Yah," the Ten Broecks said together.

It had a slightly different ring. Just enough to tell Lee what she wanted to know. Kate had set things up very comfortably for her. She would get from the Ten Broecks and from the rest of the family—the same deference, the same obedience that Kate got. Not because she had earned it, but because Kate demanded it.

"Well, I've been thinking it over," Lee said slowly, feeling a little sick at what she was about to say, "and I've decided on someone to succeed Maggie."

"Yah?" they said, sounding like a caricature of themselves.

"Yes," Lee said. It almost came out yah, but she caught herself just in time. "I would like you, Trudel, to take over Maggie's job. It's not exactly an easy one, you know."