The Fire Night Ball (6 page)

Strike one for Marlena.

Though Harry had intended to imply to Marlena by his encouraging her to confide in Dimmer that he was looking for less, not more, communication in their connection, she, to his mind perversely, took it the other way.

As if to convince her lover she needed no one but him, she began to reveal more and more personal things from her past, even far back into her childhood in Alta. Suddenly, by Mungo, Harry knew more than he had ever wanted to about Marlena or any other broad!

One night, while they were watching the news on television, a story was aired of a celebrity who claimed she'd been molested by her father when she was a child, leading to various dysfunctions in her emotions and behaviors as an adult. A long time had elapsed between the occurrence of the events and the histrionic star's memories.

“I have a hard time getting worked up over that kind of garbage,” Harry commented. “The bitch is just trying to get attention.”

“Actually, it happened to me,” Marlena blurted out, then blushed furiously.

He stared at her, at a total loss as to what to say. Finally he stammered, "Are you sure? Maybe it was a dream.”

From her glimmering face, he could see he was expected to go on pretending he cared about her childhood
. The past was the past; let it lie.

"So, what happened?"

"When I was almost seven, I was confined for nearly two months with scarlet fever. As it happened, my father had been laid off from the electric plant while they did work on the boilers. My mother's father had suffered a stroke, and she was in New York. For a time, I was home schooled by Dad, in our cabin in New Gillette. That’s when the stroking of my private parts began, sometimes when he was singing songs to me or I was reading books on his lap. Sometimes it happened when I was in bed. I would lie very still, pretending to be asleep. The only time I felt safe was when I was in my grandparents' pink house, here in Alta."

What was a man supposed to say? Only degenerates, Southerners, and Mormons went in for getting their jollies off children. As repulsed as he was by her story, he felt obligated to continue showing some interest. “Did you tell anyone?”

“Well, no. Whom would I tell?”

“A priest or your mother. A psychiatrist, maybe, like Chloe.”

She shook her head. “I was too afraid of getting my father into trouble. It’s not like he raped me or anything. I believe he did it out of excess love and frustration. I used to think I'd dreamed it, but now I know better.”

The low class nature of Marlena's disclosure left a bad taste in Harry’s mouth.

Strike two.

Harry sometimes wondered what the big attraction in their affair was for Marlena. Social climbing, he supposed, but that wouldn't account for her obsession.

Women were susceptible to addiction when they were brought to climax for the first time, or so he'd heard. He had no doubt he was her sexual emancipator.

It was a fact, though, that she didn’t need him as much as she thought, though he wouldn't tell her so until he was ready to call it off.

If it was intimacy she craved, then she would have to get it from someone else, not him. He'd made it clear where they stood, but on this one subject, she deliberately turned a deaf ear and a blind eye, though her memory was flawless, like a steel trap.

When he was able to be with her, about once a month now, he'd always make it a point after sex to ask if she was happy. She would always say she was. Case closed. To his mind, there was nothing to fix in the relationship, even if some of the fire had gone out of it.

He couldn’t help it if he wasn’t one of those guys whose passion burned on unaltered. He wasn’t sure if guys like that even existed outside of romance novels.

Naturally, he wouldn’t ever let on to Marlena she didn’t exactly do for him what she used to do. That wouldn't be civilized. He tolerated the reduced temperature in their love life, like he tolerated everything else.

So he'd been genuinely surprised when a sudden climb in temperature occurred in a quarter where the fire had long been out. The fire starter was none other than his wife. Now she'd stopped gallivanting around the globe, he was treated to an occasional grapple in bed with the sexy, black-haired temptress, often after a heated argument. Violence seemed to get them both in the mood.

One tiny concern had sliced across his linear line of thought. After all her exploits, might Lila find him a tad tame? Perhaps his wife would enjoy a threesome; he certainly would! Some charming voluptuary might be enticed into the marital bed.

The ideal candidate? Marlena.

Midnight, on the last day of October, his mind was dwelling on these erotic thoughts while in the midst of watching soft porn on one of the televisions in his 4000-square-foot, seven-room penthouse suite.

The bonfires had been lit in sequence, just as in the olden days, beginning with the big one up at the Hat. One could watch the festivities from the best rooms in the hotel.

For each of the three celebrations, in October, November, and December, Marlena would trump up a special event and build goodwill among the customers, at a minimal cost to him.

That night, the first of the Fire Night bonfires were flaming out, but his fires were raging. Marlena was giving him head in one of her sexiest get-ups. On the television set, a buxom wench in a tiny Scotsman’s kilt and nothing else was going down on Johnny Cum-Lately. A second lovely, naked young thing watched and made herself useful.

Aroused on several levels, he began to concoct his own fantasy.

How would it feel, he wondered, to be in bed with his lovely black-haired wife sucking his dick and his gorgeous redheaded lover playing with Lila’s breasts? His cock made an immediate standing ovation. That would be one affirmative vote, he thought.

Let's try it on the redhead.

And so, Harry wondered aloud if one day Marlena might find it interesting to be involved in a sexual adventure. Say, a three way, my love?

She drew back from him, and his cock fell.

"I find all that kinky sex stuff to be somewhat mechanical and off-putting," she said.

"Oh? I didn't know."

"Last spring I attended a Lifestyle Convention in San Diego, to check them out for our banquet business. They’re all swingers. The men are a bunch of weirdoes, and the way the women look at each other in the ladies’ room–or rather, the way they won’t look at each other–well, it creeped me out. It’s pathetic.”

“I was kidding,” he said. “Don’t give it another thought.”

But he had given the idea of a three-way considerably more thought. Now that would be a Christmas present he could get into!

Lila was staying home for the holidays to please him. A plan was forming in his head to entice Marlena to Drake's Roost on a business pretext, then to seduce them both in a feat of sexual prowess. He jerked off to this fantasy every night.

In past holidays, he'd leave a note for Marlena demanding she drop everything and meet him somewhere exotic, anywhere from Tahoe to the Italian Alps. Breathlessly, as in the old romantic movies she loved, she would fly to his side in a provocative outfit, with a bagful of lingerie and joints disguised as Salem cigarettes, and they would enjoy days of uninterrupted lovemaking.

She kept little souvenirs from these trips locked up in her private closet, a cocktail napkin, matches, or a map of the city. Pathetic, how she couldn’t distinguish a roll in the sack from a dime-store novel.

He always liked their holiday escapades well enough, but he'd made a promise to his wife to stay home. No last-minute fantasy and escape--unless Marlena could see her way clear to yodeling naked in Switzerland in a pairs act with Lila!

His resolve to stick by his wife this Christmas had been rewarded with unexpected dividends. Lila had emerged from her usual self-absorbed torpor and was responding to the holiday spirit with frenzied activity, turning their stone mansion into an elaborate Santa’s castle brimming with berried garlands, scented candles, and a snow-flocked, forty-foot Christmas tree sparkling with silver and crystal ornaments.

Lila had even voiced an interest in Chloe’s Christmas Ball, coinciding with the final bonfire celebration. Her sources had told her there would be a Cajun band and the best bonfire in town. Dr. Vye’s books had made her an international celebrity, and so the guest list might not be too boring. Indeed, Lila had read the last one,
Evolving Definitions of Femininity: Natural Selection and the Whore/Madonna Archetype.
Impressive, she said, though not her cup of tea.

Harry had agreed they would attend the ball together. But now he was wondering: was this such a good idea? Marlena would be lurking, baiting him to meet in a dark, attic bedroom. That would be irresistible, but bad for the improved climate at Drake's Roost.

This morning, when he’d called home on leaving Laramie, Lila had been hard at work on her lists. Guests would be arriving for the weekend, people whom Harry actually liked for a change: a couple of the old guard from back East, a Montana rancher and his wife, single male members of the Union Club. This wasn’t the gay crowd Lila usually invited. He’d been touched by her deference to his tastes.

He would stop briefly at the hotel, present Marlena with her gift (an Elsa Peretti gold heart necklace from Tiffany’s), have one last romp in the sack with her, and that would be that. Yes, that would be best way to proceed. She wasn’t expecting him today. She loved surprises. A quick fuck, and then the brush-off.

A red tow truck was approaching and passing by the other cars in the ditch. Right behind it was a black tow truck, with a row of flashing orange lights and "Cowgirl Towing" emblazoned in pink lettering on the driver's door.

The ashen-haired female driver, a cigarette dangling from her lips (or was that a roach?), waved as she drove past. In the back of her vehicle was a pink fire extinguisher, and on the back window a pink decal of a girl in a cowboy hat.

Now there was a cracker-jack native girl for you, he thought. Lorna Anderson, who worked part time at the Sheriff’s office, dealt in marijuana and would even deliver a bag of pure Columbian to the hotel and go down on him while he tested the product.

Her vanity license plate read: “Pog Mo Thoin.” Lorna had told him this was Celtic for Kiss My Ass. But he didn’t have time for messing with Lorna today.

Thank God for his Carlotta, who’d rounded up the tow. His Mexican secretary never missed a trick. It would be nice if he could turn over the Marlena-Lila situation to Carlotta, wouldn’t it? Everyone said Carlotta was a lesbian, though he himself had detected no obvious sign of her perversion.

There was distraction written on his handsome features as Harry Drake reached a gloved hand out the window and languidly waved his embossed, white linen handkerchief, signaling for the red tow truck to stop.

Inside the truck, the red-bearded man turned to the other. “Sam, what’s the difference between a Mercedes and a porcupine?”

“I dunno. What?”

“The prick’s inside the Mercedes.”

As Harry jounced along in the passenger seat of the tow truck, he found he was thinking about Marlena’s voluptuous body, her hair and eyes, the package that was so devastating in bed, a spirited woman whom only his kind of man could possibly dominate.

He checked his Philippe Patek watch. It was eleven a.m.

Marlena was a late sleeper, and he didn’t doubt for a moment she would be there when he entered her suite, that she would welcome him with open arms and a wet pussy.

But he found she wasn’t there. Further, she seemed to have been in the midst of packing, as her tiny suitcase was half full.

Surely she wasn’t planning to stay with her mother at Ho Jo’s, with the odor of fried clams!

He sniffed, as if smelling the odious grease, and then his eyes fell on some papers strewn on her desk.

He ambled over, picked one up, scanning it quickly. It was an official document, requesting the final dissolution of the marriage between Marlena Bellum and Codwell Dimmer in the county of San Francisco.

His eyebrows knitted together; his eyes grew stormy. Obviously, the papers had been left out where he would see them. It was her devious way of putting pressure on him to get a divorce.

He didn’t vary his pace, but he slammed the door on his way out. He went up to his hotel suite, where there was no sign of Marlena and no message from her either, only warm ashes in the fireplace where the maid had burned the trash.

Strike three---the bitch is out!

While her husband's car was being towed to the Alta Hotel through blizzard conditions, Lila Coffin Drake was sitting before a fire at her ornate French provincial desk, one of the few places in Drake’s Roost where she felt comfortable. She was putting the finishing touches to her holiday correspondence.

Lila had a light, musical laugh that was almost girlish and quite out of character with her elegant appearance. Laughter would be her first response if she knew her husband thought of her as an "unreliable supplier."

Her second would be a bored yawn.

At 39 still slim, restless, and very glamorous, Lila saw herself as a valuable commodity indifferently used. She was certainly no fool. She knew what slut Harry was sleeping with and where they did it.

Though she despised her unfaithful husband, she had no intention of giving up her claim to the vast real estate empire of Harold Augustus Drake--HAD, as she and Bob sometimes referred to him.

Despite her firm resolution this season to behave herself, fervently and deep inside her wild nature, she longed for escape from Drake’s Roost. The piteous pleas she received from poor Bob Drummond tore at her heart and made her itch to run away again. Yet she’d vowed to make herself listen to her head and not her heart.

Anyway, the sex hadn't been that good on their final escapade. She'd had better on the way home with a pretty, dimpled female masseuse at an exclusive spa in Boston.

She put her pen aside and allowed her mind to wander.

Drake was fast approaching fifty, she thought. Perhaps he'd die and she'd be off the hook. His grandfather and father had died in their mid-twenties, his mother and sister were deceased, and he had a weak heart and high blood pressure.

What if the end came soon, making her both wealthy and independent? Wouldn't she just love to scram from this outpost and travel the world for a long spell with her redheaded, green-eyed sister Marty, a real hoot who’d just married (for a third time) a handsome Lebanese doctor in Pasadena. Marty knew how to party.

Lila sometimes thought she would scream if she had to stay in Alta one day longer. The natives, with their big families and stay-put wives, were about as hip as Attila the Hun.

Except for B. L. Zebub's, the place was empty of life. The sexual revolution had not made it to Wyoming and never would. Her particular life in this rock-pile was like inhabiting a mausoleum.

Like most men of his type, Harry was an egomaniac and completely blind to his faults and her needs. Under the male bravado, he suffered from an inferiority complex about his stature among their powerful friends in the East. He rightfully suspected they made fun of him behind his back as the proverbial BFSP--Big Frog, Small Puddle.

At least, however, he wasn't a man with a penis complex, like many of those over-sauced, febrile, Eastern pencil dicks. Harry Drake liked it on the rough side, as did she, and he had the right equipment. And it had been fun landing the big hunk; she'd give him that as well.

The critical juncture had been the party in Georgetown during the Cuban missile crisis. It was attended by none other than the distinguished, liver-spotted hedonist Senator Cockburn, whose family had held a tenacious grip on a Senate seat since the founding of the nation.

Before dinner, she'd played a parlor trick with the gentlemen's toes. It always got the party moving and the male libido charging. Harry's friend Chloe Vye, an intellectual type, was giving her the evil eye, but she knew exactly what she was doing. A longer second toe, she claimed, was a sign of virility; to a man, they'd taken their socks off.

Literally leaving her two companions in the dust, after dinner she had allowed herself to be whisked away in the great man's stretch limo. They'd proceeded as slowly as if they were in a parade toward Senator Cockburn’s lovely brownstone in Georgetown.

In the foyer, Lila coolly took in the family portraits from five generations of Cockburns, also the Senator's fragile wife of sixty years, conveniently at home in the ancestral residence, several states distant.

On the Senator’s bedside table lay a short leather riding stick, which he loved liberally applying to the buttocks of young women during intercourse.

Lila did not allow him to use the stick "to stretch her pleasure," as the Senator put it, but she did allow other sexual liberties, closing her eyes so as not to be overly bothered by his liver spots.

With the hook planted firmly in the great man’s mouth, she used his frequent phone calls to reel in her target: 40-year-old Harry Drake, on
Esquire
’s list as one of the nation's most elusive bachelors.

At the time, she was working in a publishing house on Beacon Street in Boston.

The enamored Cockburn would call her at work from the Senate offices. When would she return to the capital? Would she be “properly escorted”? There was nothing proper in the motives behind the Senator's questions.

She made it a point to answer the calls only when Harry was languishing in her office, pretending not to listen in.

On each occasion, she made Harry cool his heels for at least an hour while she teased Senator Cockburn into a frenzy. Then she would allow Harry to take her to lunch down the street at the Ritz and hold her hand. After six months of this callous treatment, which made Harry hard as a rock every time she subjected him to it, he capitulated and asked Lila to marry him.

Their glamorous wedding, which was covered by
Town & Country
, was the event of the year in Boston.

Harry would always make the point, while courting Lila, that she would be walking into a "castle fit for a queen." But Drake’s Roost was no place for a woman at all, much less a queen.

Harry had built it a decade before she arrived. It was a man's cave, inside and out. Try as she might to alter the gloom, she could find no pleasure in the stone mansion or its corporate twin down the road, the Alta Hotel. To her sensibilities, they were stone cold, as was Harry.

For lovemaking, she preferred the look of one of those old hovels that had once been sheep drover's huts. Now there was a warm, earthy place where a woman might have multiple orgasms with a rough-and-tumble cowboy.

Much like other rock piles that had been built by wealthy men as a lasting memorial to themselves--Hearst's Castle in California, the Vanderbilts' Biltmore mansion in North Carolina, the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado--Drake's twin towers stood as monuments to the owner's colossal self-regard.

In her salad days, she had been courted by descendants of the great Robber Barons and shipping magnates, and she had their number. When one's ancestor had accumulated wealth past all spending it, what was left for a descendant to do? Erection and self-glorification, in one fell swoop: a stone mansion with flags flying from the parapets, a phallic symbol bigger than the next guy's!

In a way these castles all looked alike, dreary and lightless inside, with Flemish tapestries, twisted dark wood furniture, and names from Olde England. Adapting the word "moor" was a favorite notion, to make the context as bucolic as possible, even when the landscape was about as much fun as a graveyard.

Enter, the sexual fantasy: lord and master in the guise of a shepherd cavorting amid his flock, frolicking on the green, or an angler with a tight line. At Drake's Roost, the greens were tall stands of grass, tall enough for cattle to get lost in, and there was a stocked bass pond.

Since they didn't need the money, the robber barons of the 1920's would usually call the rock-pile their "home," at least until their wives were driven stark, raving mad by the dark, cloistered interiors. Their descendants always needed the money, however, so the second or third generation would turn the “family home” into a huge tourist attraction and collect the dough in drips and drabs for perpetuity.

Drake had built Drake's Roost and then the Alta Hotel, with the help of that SWAT design team from San Francisco, within a mile of each other and on the same rugged, windswept mountainside. Taken together, hardly anyone could claim bragging rights beyond his, not even the Biltmore family. Harry had managed to have his cake and eat it too -- how like Harry!

However, she had to give the devil and his consort their due. B.L. Zebub's was priceless. If it belonged to anyone but Harry and Marlena, Lila herself would be hanging out there all the time.

Marlena Bellum (formerly known as "the Dimmer dame" before her separation) had singlehandedly conceived of and created an astonishing over-the-top watering hole. Nothing, not in Wyoming and perhaps not in all the West, could rival B. L. Zebub’s as a hip oasis. Lila freely admitted it to herself: she was green-eyed with jealousy.

Outside the hotel's walls, the howling wind raged. Inside B. L. Zebub's, all was cozily aristocratic and blatantly sexy. While Lila was tooling around Europe with Marlena's boss--so Lila's inside sources relayed--the redhead had been bribing descendants of an English lord to let her take a peek at the design of a leather-dominated billiard room.

As a result, the interior walls of B. L. Zebub's were covered in squares of hand-tooled Spanish leather, the design copied from the secret sixteenth-century gentleman's enclave Marlena had visited.

Also thanks to PAD's young architect, the gleaming hardwood floors of the saloon were cushioned with rare Turkish rugs. The pool-table, hand-built in Philadelphia, featured a scarlet cloth. A music box from 1900 along with the antique humidor graced a corner. Elk and antelope balls festooned the antlers of a collection of stuffed mule deer.

Overall, the décor came off as a perfect blend of upper-crust hunting lodge and ribald drawing room. To keep the right people coming, B. L. Zebub's was guarded and open to privileged adults only. The drinks were over-sized and over-priced to keep the riff raff out.

The games played weren’t entirely of a sexual variety. Local politicians had been handsomely paid off to look the other way when a high-stakes gambling game came off in a smoky back room, serviced by carefully selected staff: cup-size D waitresses and obsequious, clean-cut waiters in starched, long-sleeved black shirts and long white aprons tied neatly over smart black pants.

No tired Christmas carols in the musical mix this week, which according to her inside source featured the Staples Sisters, Peter Frampton, Phoebe Stone, Maria Muldaur, Wayne Shorter, Steely Dan, and Silver Convention. And to top it off, his red-headed love slave had seen to it that the lord and master's entrance was heralded by a round of “Hail Britannia” and a skirl of bagpipes. Harry would flash his vintage, shit-eating grin, shake hands with any notables, and boogey.

It was enough to make Lila throw up that by staying away, she missed out on all the fun to be had in these glum parts. In November, Mick Jagger and Bette Midler had been seen in B. L. Zebub's. Meanwhile Lila was at Drake's Roost, drinking alone and managing the upkeep of her husband's creepy mausoleum. Boring!

She particularly hated the guest quarters, dismal corridors of old-fashioned bedrooms bearing the names of Harry's many ancestors.

However, there was no room named after his paternal grandmother, Clare Brighton Drake. Lila supposed that was because the young woman had done the ultimate disrespect to the line after Augustus "Curly" Drake died; she had married a commoner.

Harry was an intensely competitive and unforgiving man. In this regard, he was exactly like the two Drakes that had gone before him. The most successful of the three was the mildest in personality, Harry's father Nicholas. Life-size portraits of three Drakes, Augustus "Curly" Drake, Nicholas Samuel Drake, and Harold Augustus Drake--painted by a Sargent wannabe (two posthumously)--were prominently featured in the library, along with Harry's wall-to-wall collection of fake, leather-bound books.

Harry didn't read much, and he wanted the collection to look identical.

However, there wasn't much else about Drake’s Roost that was faked. The large grey stones had been quarried locally and were hand-hewn; everything dripped with imported English Ivy.

There was a heated solarium with an indoor swimming pool, stables to rival those in Kentucky, and a separate garage for Harry's eight vintage cars. An entire wing, three stories high, was dedicated to the marble clock tower. Atop it was a plumed rooster made of gold.

The house carried 41,607 square feet of stone-encased living space under the towering mansard roof. There was a formal ballroom on the fourth floor and a bowling alley in the basement. Between the formal dining room and the gigantic cook’s kitchen was a pantry the size of most houses, which housed a walk-in dumb waiter.

Under the carpet in the dining room were bells Lila pressed with a tap of her toe to summon the servants. The mahogany dining table could seat thirty comfortably. Six chandeliers, each a yard wide and six feet tall, glittered along the domed ceiling's length.

Here, Lila had installed the Christmas tree, thirty-six feet tall, four less than the one at the Biltmore. She'd told Harry his was taller (he wouldn't bother to check).

After their guests oohed and ahhhed over the tree, Harry would drag them off to see his curiosities. These were scattered around the mansion, in collections and single presentations. Harry had a weakness for odds and ends--he collected colonial spinning wheels, medieval suits of armor, antique swords, and red-headed women. She wouldn't put it past him if he'd tried to score with her sister Marty at their wedding in Boston.

Once Harry saw the Napoleonic chess men at the Biltmore, he didn't rest until the obliging Marlena scoured the universe and discovered something uniquely historic. She'd found a humidor once in use by the Archbishop of Canterbury; it was displayed in B. L. Zebub's.

The front of Drake's Roost was where Lila had made her mark and counteracted the gloom. She did so in the early days of their marriage, before Harry began to show his true colors with his childishly vindictive cheating.

Where once there had been a formal entranceway, flanked with a pair of stone British lions on the outside and on the inside, a faded wall tapestry depicting a hunting scene from Merry Old England woven at a Benedictine monastery in the 17
^th
century, there were now three arched windows soaring from the tiled floor to the vaulted ceiling.