The Fire Night Ball (2 page)

Once that buzz had turned into a full-blown affair, Marlena's journey into sexual submission to Drake was as prominent in her life as a flying buttress on a Gothic cathedral. Every time they made love, her mind and body revisited her entire sexual history.

As a child, she was a gawky, long-legged, big-eyed freak, painfully shy, who suffered persecution by the normal children and endured constant loneliness in silence. For solace, she retreated into the world of adult fiction she found in the local library.

She would read over and over torrid scenes where a gorgeous woman drowsily lounged, awaiting her manly lover in a silken bed draped in gauze. At the time, she was living in her grandparents' pink house, her parents largely absent, Austin working in New Gillette and in Faith's case, far off East in Saratoga, tending to her sick father.

Marlena's childhood fantasies centered on finding someone who would kindly tolerate her presence and show her the ropes, socially speaking. She invented an imaginary brother with auburn hair and grey eyes who held her hand and guided her through kindergarten.

Later, in second grade, she found a girlfriend who was unusually intelligent and saw sexual images in everything. With June, for a season, she explored a warm, tender place between her legs which her mother didn't want her to touch.

June was almost as odd as herself. Her hair was glossy black; she had freckles and startling green eyes. She wasn't pretty like the little blonde girls who were popular in class, but she had other attributes. She could multiply large numbers in her head. Her father was a medical doctor, so they had access to his books on sexual reproduction, which they pored over together, their ankles touching in the air.

Marlena's only male admirers were Typhoid Ronnie, the boy who sat behind her and gave her all the childhood illnesses, and Gareth Blood, a goony kid from down the street who ran away from home at sixteen and joined the San Francisco Opera. If they liked her, Marlena reasoned, there must be something terribly wrong with those two.

At twenty, while a graduate fellow at the University of Arizona’s Drachmann School of Architecture, Marlena interned in the San Francisco office of PAD. There she met Codwell Dimmer, a sweet, balding man of twenty-five with a weak chin. He was the Chief Financial Officer, a CPA by profession but well-versed in commercial real estate.

They became best friends, then a couple to watch.

Their civil wedding ceremony was performed on June 21, 1970, on a wet afternoon in San Francisco’s gold-domed City Hall. A religious ceremony for the benefit of her parents was held later at St. Boniface Church.

The first wedding night broke her hymen.
I waited for that?

Though passion was absent, the couple lived amicably at Dimmer’s house in the Marina district, on a cul-de-sac named Solid Hollow Lane. The following year, Marlena got the nod to assist the firm’s senior architect with hotel construction in her home town of Alta, Wyoming.

The Dimmers celebrated with prosecco in the park, followed by a tape of "Casablanca" from Blockbusters. Marlena owned a framed photograph of Joe Cocker playing an invisible guitar at Woodstock "....for my friends," but she was all about the classics when it came to movies and books.

Two months after the ground-breaking, Bob Drummond, the senior architect, became madly infatuated with the client's wife. Lovely and dashing Lila Coffin Drake had a reputation preceding her as a devotee of free love. Soon Drummond was chasing her from one international watering hole to the next.

Realizing Drummond's dereliction of duty was an opportunity for herself, Marlena stepped up to the plate, throttled into high gear, and quietly drove the project forward to completion. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do to ensure its success, including a trek to England on a treasure hunt, though she hated long flights over water.

When she found B. L. Zebub, she wired Drake to fly in on the Concorde for a look.

Two weeks later, returning to America aboard the Queen Mary--B. L. Zebub, like King Kong, was locked up somewhere in the hold--she was surrounded by the endless immensity of ocean and overcome by a sense of déjà vu.

When she was jeered by childhood classmates for her freakish memory and Clarabelle hair color, Marlena had found peace and a universal connection in walking out on Hatter's Field to look upon vistas of empty, unusable space. Now, gazing upon the limitless expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, she felt a fateful, romantic connection as she stood together with Harry, their elbows slightly touching and the stars as their backdrop.

While remaining technically chaste, the pair seemed to be having sex as they talked business. One evening, after trading sly innuendos, Harry observed: "I've never known a Wyoming woman to have a man's dirty mind like you do. Keep it up."

"You, too," she purred throatily.

"Madam, you've just proved my point."

Harry had spent his life among rich, staid, boring Republicans; he enjoyed her hungry, consuming interest in their work and her smart, saucy banter. He also enjoyed spinning yarns for his protégé, as Marlena was socially inept and thoroughly gullible.

With impunity, he dropped names of Hollywood royalty and contemporary robber barons, omitting the fact that his wife was responsible for these connections. He'd played golf with Bing Crosby, lunched with William Vanderbilt Cecil, been recognized by a former British prime minister for his generosity in the worthy cause of refurbishing the Salisbury Cathedral.

"If I'd known he and the Archbishop were sucking each other's dicks, I wouldn't have given them quite so much!"

She laughed at his jokes and hung on his every word.

As he watched Marlena blossom, Harry felt more interest in her. The waifish young woman with the fast learning curve used her gifted memory to good effect, touching back on all he said with a thoughtful comment or insightful questions. Harry genuinely admired her acumen and was gratified by her intense focus on the project and on himself.

Fascinated by her transformation, he felt as if he were Pygmalion and she his Galatea. His wife Lila, far more sophisticated and worldly than he, wasn't nearly so much fun to talk to. Seeing himself in Marlena's eyes, Harry's image of himself as an international bon vivant was restored.

Nor was it all about his self-esteem. Under the stars on the upper-deck lounge, Marlena sketched out impressive blueprints of what her mind had absorbed as snapshots. She was an invaluable asset.

"We steal only from the best," he said, toasting her drafting prowess. As the ship plowed its slow way across the Atlantic, the two debated the design of leather walls into the wee hours of the morning.

They disembarked in New York on a cold, rainy day in February. That afternoon, at four o’clock sharp, they convened in the lobby bar at the Algonquin Hotel, where Harry had checked them into adjoining rooms. They sat down at a small table in two red leather chairs to discuss plans for Marlena’s activities in New York. From time to time, he would ring the bell for more drinks and peanuts. Five hours later, they were still there.

A week later, they remained in New York, still meeting every afternoon in the lobby bar. Marlena had learned to order gin and dubonnet cocktails.

Before these pleasant meetings were many long and grueling hours of work, requiring her to be up early and at the top of her game. In hip boots and a long camel coat, she rounded up treasures for jaded hotel guests to ogle. By day, she hunted through Soho’s dustiest corners for antique clocks, scoured warehouses for Empire furniture, and selected richly patterned Moorish carpets; by night, she stayed up late sketching prototypes for the individualized décor of luxury guest suites. Meanwhile, Drake dined with former fraternity brothers at the Harvard Club.

Though she and her client often agreed, there were instances where they didn’t see eye-to-eye. She soon learned to change her mind or the subject, as the case might be. Though Drake might assume humility for his public front, he was stubborn and conceited, a classic Taurus. Marlena, though willful, presented the dreamy-eyed aspect of an Aquarian. She began to ebb and flow with his preferences, submitting herself to his every whim.

Of course, as they say, opposites attract.

One night, squeezed together as they ascended at a snail's pace in the creaky cage elevator that was run manually by an elderly, uniformed employee, midway the cage jolted violently to a halt and, as if by fate, they were literally thrown into each other’s arms.

It was not by chance, however, but by willful choice that they continued clutching each other as they reached the top floor.

Cheekbones burning, heart pounding, eyelids trembling, Marlena gazed bravely ahead and allowed her hand to remain in Harry’s as he steered her past the operator, out the elevator, and down the narrow corridor into his room.

The door closed, and overnight, her life changed.

Oh, the incredible passion of their union! An entire world, previously unknown, suddenly hove into her view, a volcanic planet characterized by smoldering desire, the crescendo of shuddering delights, and the final, mind-blowing explosion of orgasm! Why had she not known before about this dark star, the power of illicit sex?

It's our discovery, ours alone; no one else feels this special intensity.

After that night, only one of the two bedrooms was used. The maid, experienced in such matters and confident of being rewarded, discreetly made up both rooms each day with fresh linens and sprigs of lavender.

Thus began the glory days of their affair, when every thrilling moment seemed a golden-throated harbinger for a blissful future. Lila Drake was a mere phantom on the loose as she cavorted through Europe’s priciest watering holes, leaning on Bob Drummond’s tanned arm. On the rare occasion when Lila flew into town, she and Harry barely spoke.

They took obvious precautions to keep the affair hidden from prying eyes. However, there is an old Arabian proverb to the effect that there are three things you cannot hide--love, smoke, and a man riding a camel.

On the television set mounted on the far wall of the doctor’s waiting room, Marlena watched national coverage of the Russian space walk. Astronaut Georgi Grechko from Salyut 6 EO-1 looked hot in his dazzling white Orlan spacesuit.

"In Russia," the newscaster said, "Santa Claus is known as Grandfather Frost."

"Marlena Bellum,” called out the gray-haired nurse. As she got up from her seat, a commercial announcement came on the television, and in a deep voice the announcer boomed, "Choosey moms choose Jif."

Avoiding direct eye contact with the others, a young businessman and a married couple, she walked to the glass door. The businessman had constantly checked his watch and fidgeted, while the couple seemed placidly inured to waiting, the husband reading his newspaper and the wife idly leafing through a dog-eared copy of
Life
.

Married squares and her creepy little home town at the holidays, she thought; what a drag.

Marlena wished she were anywhere else, hanging out with her lesbian roommate in their loft in San Francisco's Castro district, getting it on with Harry in his penthouse suite at the hotel, or, the best idea yet, walking in outer space with Grechko.

Could the Russian astronaut possibly feel any weirder than she did, entering Typhoid Ronnie's examination offices?

"Date of birth?"

"February 1, 1947."

The nurse took her blood pressure and temperature, then measured her height and weighed her.

“Five feet, seven and one half inches; one hundred and fifteen pounds. Step down and follow me, please.”

Following the nurse, she thought: funny, how for seven whole years she'd been shuttling between San Francisco and Wyoming with nothing odd, weird, or even mildly disturbing ever occurring.

Then she'd set up the holiday family reunion with Mama and Chloe and packed her bag for a guilt trip. Sure enough, ever since Saturday, life had taken on new dimensions.

Now here she was on a Tuesday morning, signing on as her personal physician a classmate from Teddy Roosevelt Elementary. In her life in the City, what would be the chances of such a thing happening? As likely as getting struck by lightning!

She felt loopy as a drunken sailor.

Saturday morning, on an impulsive, nostalgic visit to her grandparents' empty Victorian (she’d always fondly called it “the pink house”) a chance discovery had packed the first disconcerting punch.

Along with two brown spiral notebooks lying in a wooden sea chest in a corner of the dank basement (these turned out to be her childhood journals), she’d pulled from its dusty hiding place a tiny, hardbound book by Thurston Scott Welton, M.D., F.A.C.S. It contained comprehensive instructions on the "Rhythmic Method of Birth Control.” Enclosed were menstrual calendars from 1947 to 1955 and a handy plasticized device to detect safe and unsafe dates for sexual intercourse.

With the exception of two years, the calendars were marked in Faith Bellum’s distinctive, round handwriting.

But, she couldn't help recalling, ever so clearly, how Mama, with her rosary beads dangling and convincing tears in her eyes, had once remarked: "It is God’s will and my greatest sorrow, Lena, you didn't have a little brother or little sister."

Marlena was still digesting this information when she was caught off guard and completely blindsided Saturday afternoon in the hotel ladies' lounge. She was assailed by a barrage of foul words hurled by Letty Brown-Hawker, Alta's self-appointed witch-hunter.

"Be gone, witch! Thou art accursed! If you fail to heed my warning, there will be two deaths on your head before the bonfires are extinguished."

Surreal.

Now, a decision was needed.

Should she move from her posh hotel suite to Mill's Creek for the rest of her stay, as Chloe has urged her to do?

If she did, she would have a chance to discuss these disturbances in the field with her cousin, the world-renowned evolutionary psychiatrist. Though Chloe was older than Faith, she couldn't be more radically different, and Chloe was willing to talk about their special powers.

On the other hand, wasn't it best not to get hung up on puzzling events? Simply ignore them and forge ahead?

"Forge ahead" was Marlena's mantra. She fancied herself a futurist, even imagined she carried a crystal ball around inside her head.

But if I leave the hotel for a few days, I might feel safer
.

It was even possible Letty's harangue had triggered a reoccurrence of the persecution complex she'd suffered from as a child, causing her to vomit from anxiety. For sure, the weird scene was proving hard to expunge, though she was focusing her will on dismissing it.

Alas, a talent Marlena shared with her mother and cousin--their gift of perfect recall--made forgetting even a fraction of a second of that freakish hullabaloo well nigh impossible.