The Renewable Virgin (13 page)

I'd just hung up when Ivan Malecki came over and perched his butt on the corner of my desk. ‘Did you hear about your Ohio hostess—our murder victim's mother?'

‘Fiona Benedict? What about her?'

‘She's here in New York, and—are you ready? She's just been arrested for attempted murder.'

‘What?'

‘She tried to shoot a guy. Some Englishman who's in town to publicize a new book or something.'

‘Richard Ormsby? She tried to shoot Richard Ormsby?'

‘Yeah, that's the name—hey, how'd you know that?'

But I didn't answer, because I was already out the door.

CHAPTER 6

KELLY INGRAM

I came out of the shower wearing a towel and my dewy-fresh look.

Nick Quinlan looked me up and down with his x-ray eyes and then with a masterful gesture of his head commanded me to come closer. Eagerly I obeyed.

He placed one hand on my hip, leaned down so our faces were almost touching, and whispered softly, ‘Doncha got summon more uh uh cum, cumfable more'n 'at?'

‘That was fine, Nick,' the director said through clenched teeth. ‘But we're running long and we're going to have to cut the line. Just say, “Comfortable?”'

‘Cumfable.'

‘That's it. Kelly? From the shower, please.'

The next time Nick was concentrating on his change of line and didn't pay enough attention to what his hands were doing and I lost my towel—nevertheless disappointing all the drooling letches on the set who were hoping for a juicy outtake, because I'd had the foresight to wear a bikini underneath. I'd been working with Nick Quinlan long enough to know better than go on to an open set with nothing on under my towel.

I ruined the next take myself. By laughing at the wrong time. Most of the two-shot close-ups you see on television have the two actors impossibly close to each other, their noses sometimes only a couple of inches apart. It's awfully hard not to get tickled when you are supposed to be saying serious lines with your face shoved up into somebody else's face like that. Besides, when Nick is really concentrating, his eyes tend to cross.

The next time we got it. Four takes. We were getting better.

I just realized I've never said one nice thing about Nick Quinlan. I've given the impression that he was beautiful but dumb—a clumsy, slow-witted peacock who liked admiration so long as he didn't have to do anything strenuous to get it. I probably gave that impression because it's true. Oh sure, I know, there are always two sides to everybody, two or more they say, and I'm not going to argue about that, that's okay. But if you want to see something other than Nick's dumb side, you really have to go looking for it. I mean, that's a wild goose chase, why kid ourselves? But still, it doesn't make me look very good when I go around badmouthing the star of the series, the creep.

Therefore I am going to say something nice about Nick Quinlan. Right now.

I'm thinking, I'm thinking.

Ha—got it. He did not smell bad.

I've been rattling on about Nick Quinlan like this because he's the kind of man most people admire and I don't really understand why. A good ole boy with the rest of the boys (accent on
boy)
whose proof of maleness lay (laid?—grammar, not sex)—whose maleness
depended on
the number of women he had at his feet, urf, what a sentence. And he looked and talked and acted just like everybody else, but maybe a little prettier. Yet when somebody really special like Ted Cameron comes along—nobody notices!

The first time I saw Ted I was talking to Marian Larch on the
LeFever
set and honest to God I had to look away. I could not
look
at him, he took my breath away so; excuse the cliché but that's what happened. He was just too good to be true and I was afraid if I looked too closely too soon, he'd melt or turn into the Hulk or something. But when I could look again he was better instead of worse, better even than I'd hoped.

When I'd gotten over my astonishment at those eyes of his, I shot a quick look around the set. There were some visitors, girls mostly, and they were standing and gawking at Nick Quinlan. Ted was only a couple of feet away but they didn't even
see
him, the idiots. I'd had trouble looking at him at first but then I couldn't take my eyes off him. He was slim and together-looking and leaned slightly forward as if ready to take on whatever came next. He wasn't a big man, just medium, and you could tell at one look he wasn't the kind who went around pumping up his chest all the time. His clothes were part of him, not just something hanging on his body. My hands began to itch, I wanted to touch him so much. Then he turned those way-out eyes on me and looked at me. I mean really looked at me. Windows to the soul? Ha. Signals from outer space.

The first thing he said to me was, ‘Are you real?'

It didn't take us long to figure out neither one of us was the victim of a one-sided attraction; that's what I was most afraid of. I touched his face, once, for reassurance, then put my hands behind my back. Saving it. He lived in Tuxedo Park and neither one of us wanted to make the drive so we stayed at my place that first night.

In retrospect, I guess it was just glands calling to glands, but never in my life had I wanted a man the way I wanted Ted Cameron. The pressure was unbearable; I ached from wanting him even in the very act of making love. It was not altogether a pleasurable experience. You want contact with the other person so much, you try to get through each other's skin. I wanted Ted with me every minute of the day, I wanted constant physical contact, his body right there next to mine
all
the time. Which of course was impossible. It was very frustrating.

Those first few days were especially troublesome.
LeFever
still had a couple of more days to go, and Ted and I didn't really have time to get to know each other. What I knew at that point was a lover who seemed to have been made just for me. I spent my time on the set thinking of Ted and bed; I just sleepwalked through my role. And there were complications. Ted had a business to run, and I had some ugly news to deal with.

The very day after Ted and I had met, I went on to the
LeFever
set and learned Rudy's mother had been arrested for attempted murder. I called Howard Chesney and asked him to make sure she had legal representation, send the bill to me.

Ted was with me, concerned and wanting to help. ‘Do you want to go see her?'

I shook my head. ‘She wouldn't want to see
me
. She doesn't really approve of me, Ted.'

‘I thought you said a friend …'

‘She's the mother of a friend. Rudy Benedict's mother. Rudy was a writer who, oh damn, he was murdered.'

Ted knew about Rudy, but he hadn't known he'd been a friend of mine. Ted slipped an arm around me and said, ‘I'm sorry. This can't be easy for you. Who was it she tried to kill? Somebody she thought murdered her son?'

‘No, it was Richard Ormsby—you've seen him on Channel 13, haven't you?'

He looked puzzled. ‘Why would she want to kill Richard Ormsby?'

‘Well, they're both historians—that's the only connection I can see. But historians don't go around shooting guns at each other, do they?'

In the end all I could do was leave it to Howard Chesney. I didn't really want to see her, either. Part of it was I was so absorbed in Ted I didn't have room in my life for anybody else, even people in trouble—yes, I was that selfish about it. But part of it was I just didn't
want
to see her.

Then we finished
LeFever
, and I had some time before I had to start work on a project Nathan Pinking and Leonard Zoff had lined up for me. Time for nothing but Ted Cameron, and he finally began to emerge as a personality instead of this irresistible force looming over my life.

What I saw was a man in thorough, easy-riding control of his life. He was in the driver's seat and he was comfortable there. A man of authority ruling over a kind of kingdom, making decisions, giving orders. And doing it all with such ease and grace that you'd think he was to the manor or manner born. As I guess he was, come to think of it. His personal life was under that same kind of unfussy control; he'd had two not-very-successful marriages that he'd ended, neatly and amicably. Ted's entire life was
neat
.

Little by little I learned more of him. Ted Cameron turned out to be kind, courteous, decisive, intelligent, sexy, generous, knowledgeable, gentle, self-aware, courageous, worldly, reliable, determined, considerate, amusing, resilient, adventurous, playful, straightforward, upright, and steadfast. I liked him a lot.

In spite of what you're thinking, Ted was very human; he did have one serious flaw. He didn't like to dance. (Imagine!) He was so out of it I even had to explain that disco had been passé for some time now. A man whose whole life was a stately dance, a minuet maybe—and he didn't like to dance. Incredible.

But when that first bone-aching obsession with each other began to ease up, we found we had something better, at least I thought I had. I had a partner, a companion. I had somebody to share with.

CHAPTER 7

FIONA BENEDICT

The lump in my stomach did not start small and gradually grow larger. It was just suddenly
there
. Solid stone.

What the romantics call fate and the frightened call God's will, historians call pattern—mundane, earth-generated pattern, responding to the human need for connections. My pattern: the result of wanting to fill in a gap in our knowledge. The fourteen years of studying the life of George Charles Bingham, third Earl of Lucan.
He
called
his
book
Lord Look-on
. Cute. Dismissive. Cashing in.

The stone grew heavier.

Personal artifacts tell a history. In a box in a drawer in a bureau in my bedroom: one loaded gun. A gift from Rudy;
for protection
, he'd said. Prompted by some feeling of guilt, belatedly being The Good Son. A California gun, he'd said, laughing to make a joke of it. I'd never needed to fire it. Before now.

They must be stopped, the invaders. My life had been violated by a profane Englishman who in all likelihood would go on to rape again. No one would stop him. No one would object. What did it matter, what he'd done to me?

It isn't a matter of loneliness; if the work is good, the cocoon is warm. But when the cocoon is ripped away, the only consolation is the perfunctory sympathy of one's peers. Of
some
of one's peers. Others betray. Garfield of Columbia, in
The New York Times Review of Books
, cashing in on the casher-in. Jumping on the pop history bandwagon, survival of the flightiest. Elsewhere in the out-of-town edition, an announcement of his arrival in New York, spreading the good news about the wonderful thing he's done, how he's saved everyone the trouble of having to read Fiona Benedict's
Life of Lucan
. We are being invaded and we must defend ourselves.

The young woman at the airline counter seemed most concerned over my lack of luggage. Why would I need luggage? But I didn't even get near the aeroplane; I had to turn back. I'd forgotten about those detection devices they use to keep people from carrying guns on to airplanes. The stone in my stomach and I rode the bus all the way into New York City.

No sleep, no food—how long? Doesn't matter; time seems to have lost its divisions. Uptown is which way? We
are
being invaded, you know.

A talk show at CBS: how to breach the Black Rock? As a member of the audience. Polite words but still pushing and shoving, a man's elbow just missing my eye,
I'll shoot you if you do that again
, I have the means. A woman's high heel on the arch of my foot, not even noticing, too busy showing off for the accompanying man. Pain and dizziness and finally a place to sit down. A seat in the last row.

Then they were all screaming and a light popped out and the pain and dizziness were too much for me and I went down, down. A hand pressing the back of my neck, forcing my head between my knees and consciousness returning. A voice saying
There's the gun
, another voice saying
Don't touch it
. A woman's face peering anxiously into mine, asking if I was all right.

‘Is he dead?' I whispered.

‘No, that maniac missed him. I
think
he's all right.'

That maniac?

A man's horrified face. ‘Hey, lady, you better watch out! She's the one who tried to kill him!'

‘Are you crazy?' the woman said. ‘It was a man.'

‘It was her!'

‘It was a man—I'm pretty sure.'

A third voice: ‘I thought it was a boy.'

More noise, arguing. My stone and I wanted to lie down, but there was no place. Then a policeman was asking me, all of us, for identification. As a result, one question was answered, at least: he did know who I was, he did know about my
Life of Lucan
.

He stared wide-eyed at me and said in that theatrical English voice,
‘You
are Fiona Benedict?' Then he took one of the policemen aside and explained something, earnestly and at great length. I wanted to, I
had
to lie down.

‘She's the one, I tell you!' the man with the horrified face kept insisting. ‘I saw her!'

A hundred years later I was arrested and charged with attempted murder.

But still they wouldn't let me lie down. They took me to the nearest precinct station, and asked questions, questions, questions. I couldn't think, I couldn't see straight. I said nothing, nothing at all. Fingerprints, photographs with a number, other indignities. No, I did not want to call anyone.

At last they let me lie down.

CHAPTER 8

MARIAN LARCH

Captain Michaels had said, ‘Bullshit. Nobody tries to kill another person over a
book.'
He'd been in the business long enough to know that people do dreadful things to each other for far flimsier reasons than that, but he just couldn't bring himself to believe Fiona Benedict had tried to shoot Richard Ormsby. ‘Not her. You, me, anybody else—but not her.'