(1969) The Seven Minutes (36 page)

Faye’s indignation had not abated. ‘Mike, I’m not a child. Don’t lecture me, or try to put me off with pedagoguery. I’m simply telling you I’m a woman, and I’m like most women, and I know what offends me. I don’t care who’s used the word - Chaucer, Lawrence, any of them - it’s still a vomitous word. It’s dishonest, and any writer who uses it knows nothing about women, is hostile toward women, wants to degrade them, and is preaching disrespect of women to every male reader, young or old. Don’t look down your nose at me, Mike. I know when I’m right and you’re wrong. I abhor language like that, and I don’t want you having any part of that filth. More and more I see how right Dad was in wanting to keep you away from this kind of case. He knew it could corrupt and warp anyone involved in it. And it’s already making you say things and do things that I know are contrary to your real nature.’

Her mention of her father had unnerved him again. The last remnants of his wrath were in retreat, and only a small part of resentment remained. ‘Well, I’m in the case, and I’m staying in,’ he said, his voice strained. ‘As for Jadway’s judgment, or my own, of what takes place secretly in women’s minds, perhaps we are both mistaken. Maybe we can never know. And maybe women themselves don’t know. But at the very least, whether we’re accurate or inaccurate, the use of certain language as a literary device to point up the mysteries of stream of consciousness may be sufficient defense of such vulgarisms.’

All through the last, her head had been cocked sideways as she listened and observed him - trying to assess his annoyance, he guessed - and now she was smiling, softening, ready to reach out for a compromise. Her hand had touched and then covered his hand. ‘I’m glad you see my side of it a little, and I’ll try to understand yours. I only know I’m a woman, and I’m against anything that degrades me. I’m a woman and I want respect and love. You know that, Mike.’

‘Certainly.’

Her hand had gone up his arm, and as she slowly sank back against the pillow she gently pulled him down until he lay beside her. She ran her fingers through his hair. ‘I’m sorry, Mike,’ she said softly. ‘I don’ t want to fight about all that silliness. I want tolo vey ou.’

She went closer to him, her head against his chest. ‘And I know what’s been inside my head these last minutes, and there wasn’t one dirty word, there was only one word, and that’s “love.” I kept thinking how I want you and need you, and how I want only what’s best for you and for us.’

‘Yes,’ he said. Corneille was offering him his next line: ‘O heaven, what a lot of virtues you make me hate.’ He kept it to himself.

‘Don’t be cold, Mike, don’t punish me,’ she said in a muffled voice, ‘not when I want you so much.’

His arm tightened around her body and his hand reached toward

her breast and caressed it beneath the gown. ‘I want you, too.’

‘Then forget books and make-believe,’ she whispered, ‘and let’s love each other.’

But while he continued to caress her, he made no other move. Lingering resentment of her attitude, her righteousness, hung between them like a thin curtain, separating her from him, and he could not bring himself to push aside the curtain and find desire.

He felt her cool long fingers trace their way across his ribs and move down his hip and he felt them move between his legs and touch what still lay flaccid, and her fingers curled around it and massaged it and her breath and throaty words penetrated the thin curtain. ‘1 love you down there, Mike, I love him - make him love me - don’t hold him back - let him get big, I like to feel him get big.’

He meant to resist, but resistance weakened and faded as he grew large in her hand. ‘All right,’ he groaned, ‘all right.’

And the curtain was gone.

She had pulled loose the ribbon that held her negligee together, and now the garment fell away, and her breasts trembled and her torso wriggled as he came over her and he kissed her breasts and his lips circled her hardening nipples and then his mouth kissed one nipple and then the other.

He could feel her left leg slipping under him, and one cool hand pushing his head away from the breasts, and he could hear her saying, ‘Come on, darling, now, right now.’

For the brief moment that they were apart, he rising to his knees, she bending her long legs and holding them wide apart, he remembered how she always resisted the heat of prolonged foreplay and always led him to enter her the moment that she saw he was ready. For an instant, he determined to change that, to extend the prelude to love, to bring her to a passion matching his own, to make her commitment and animal-want rise to his own, but the instant eluded him and once more he was subject to her will.

Her firm hands were behind his back, her fingers pressing into his flesh, forcing him down toward her, bringing him down between her legs. He came down to his elbows, until his chest felt her nipples, and his hips were enclosed by the inner part of her thighs, and his rigid hardness, guided by her hand again, slowly sank into the folds of the soft, warm, moist wedge - the warmest part of her, the thought came and went, the warmest, warmest. And he was deeper in her now, and almost out, and deeper again, and back and forth and around and around. And he felt her lips on his ear, and her quickening breath, and he wanted her to moan and give, and open wider and shake, but she remained still and unmoving except below, where her buttocks responded to the rhythm of his motions, not wildly, not totally, but nicely and properly as in a dance on a dance floor, that much, that answering motion that was part of a form and no more.

If she couldn’t, then maybe he could, maybe he finally could

bring her passion to his pitch. He thrust harder and faster into her, as if trying to weld them into one, and her pelvis lifted and fell with him, and rotated with him, and no more.

Gradually he began to moderate his movement, and he heard her whispering, ‘Darling, what is it?’

‘I want it to go longer. I want to give you a chance to -‘

She clutched him. ‘No… no… don’t hold back. Come now, come right now.’

And she dug her fingers into his shoulders and closed her thighs more tightly around him and pressed herself against him, and instantly he was restimulated and no longer in control.

He heard her faintly once more. ‘That’s better, darling, better.’ And then, ‘Does it make you happy, darling, are you happy, do you like it?’

And then he heard no more, because he was telling her inside how it was, he was bursting inside her, shuddering, bursting, letting go and suffocating her in his nakedness.

It was over, and he was still inside her, but sanity was returning and soon he would be ready for reality.

He opened his eyes and looked at her. She was unmussed and poised and smiling coolly at him, as if pleased at his pleasure and pleased with herself for what she had done for him. The curl of her mouth told him that she was proud to have been able to serve and yet humble him by still maintaining an attitude above and beyond all this mean coupling, above this necessary act that could be described in books only by using dirty words.

And suddenly the curtain he had put down, tried to put aside earlier, was there once more. Through it he saw her more clearly, more honestly. And what he saw was what she held on to with unwavering self-pride, in a secret recess of her mind: that for her, lovemaking was a thing you did because it was a biological measuring stick of your health and normality, and lovemaking was a thing you offered because in the end it gave you an advantage. They had made love, and behind the invisible curtain she had emerged from the fornication as untouched and unsullied as if she had been a spectator at a sex circus, the bystander, the observer, someone superior to the ridiculous, helpless, uncontrolled, panting male member who required indulgence in this function. As ever, she had survived the filth and the beast to retain on her brow the tiara of civilized decency and ladyship.

And that was not all that Barrett perceived of her secret mind in these fleeting moments. There was not only the moral side of her triumph, but the business side as well. She had invested little in their performance, and yet she had profited so much. There had been no thought of fair trading. It was the way her father did business. You learned where others were weak or susceptible, and you took them over, absorbed them, offering little, only enough to hold them through their need, and then you came out of the partnership as the

one in control and in power. You were, in short, Father’s daughter-And he, he would become Father’s daughter’s necessary mate.

He had never read her secret mind so clearly. But he read it now, with a new insight, because he had read The Seven Minutes, and she had read it, and that had become the litmus paper that showed truth in its real color. Yet, despite this discovery of her, he felt helpless. He became conscious of his exposed flesh and her own, and it was unbeautiful and unromantic this night. He had played stud for royalty. His reward would be a tiny slice of empire. And this reward was the most intriguing and satisfying seduction of all.

‘How was it, Mike?’ she was saying. ‘Did you really enjoy it?

‘You know I did.’

‘I always like it when you love me. Do you love me?’

‘I showed you what I felt, didn’t I? That wasn’t push-ups I was doing.’

‘Really, Mike…. Are you through? My legs are beginning to ache. Do you mind?’

He withdrew from her, and in the moment of disengagement her legs were wide apart and what could be seen was all of her that was soft and warm and honest and natural. Quickly her lowered legs closed the best of her from view, and quickly the blanket was drawn over it and up to her breasts. The best was hidden, stored from sight for another-week, and what was left was the detached genteel head and the smiling glacial outsider’s face.

The lips set in the face of the detached head were moving. “There, you see, Mike, love can be decent and clean. You see that, don’t you?’

He saw that, yes, he did. He saw her in sharpest focus. His memory evoked pictures projected by J J Jadway and Geoffrey Chaucer, and the pictures revealed Faye Osborn, the simple essence of her, plain and unretouched.

Cunt, they showed.

Inside and all over, cunt, no more, no less.

The clarity of the pictures, their precise exposure, frightened him. This was royalty, and his thoughts were seditious. He fell back on his pillow. Banish sedition. Yet Faye’s whore, Cathleen, Jadway’s Cathleen, was there also, appreciating him, and her face was strangely the face of a girl named Maggie. Banish sedi tion, banish it.

And he did. He managed by force to conjure up different pictures, pictures of the safe good years ahead, glimpses of the imposing house in Bel-Air, the staff of servants, the chauffeured Bentley, the private Lear jet, the villa on Cap Ferrat, the celebrities, the social seasons, Faye so stately, so beautiful, so complementary beside him. The lift cauterized of meanness and devoid of commonness. The good life. The best.

What more could a man want ?

He turned his head on the pillow and smiled back at Faye. ‘I love you, darling,’ he said.

The following morning, promptly at ten o’clock, the doorbell rang, and Mike Barrett answered it and ushered Mrs Isabel Vogler into his apartment.

She proved to be a corpulent woman, probably in her middle forties, and on her graying head she wore a Sunday hat braided with limp artificial flowers. Her eyes were creased above two puffs of cheeks, and there was down on her upper lip, and a massive double chin or goiter, but her dark dress was fresh and neat and she moved with remarkable agility for one so obese.

She planted herself in the center of Barrett’s living room, surveyed it briefly, and said, ‘Well, this isn’t much of a job to take care of. Looks no problem to me. Like I said in the ad I put in the paper, I’m a real experienced housekeeper. How many rooms have you got?’

‘Besides this, there’s the bedroom, a bathroom, the kitchenette,’ said Barrett.

‘Can you show me ?’

‘Later,’ said Barrett, gesturing her to a chair.

Mrs Vogler settled down with a grunt. ‘Don’t mind sitting whenever I can,’ she said. ‘When you’re in my line of work, and on your feet all day, sitting is a real vacation.’

Barrett found a place on the sofa across from her, took his pipe from the ashtray, and held it up. ‘Do you mind?’

‘Not at all. Mr Vogler, rest his soul, was a pipe smoker, but even his awful-smelling corncob was better than those men smoking cigars. You go ahead and smoke your pipe, Mr Barrett, and take no mind of me. It becomes a man, a pipe, even though it’s sure to mean plenty of holes in the furniture.’

Barrett lit his pipe. Through the partially open bedroom door he could see the still unmade bed that Faye had left at two in the morning, after extracting the promise from him that they would dine together tonight. He returned his attention to Isabel Vogler. He was not sure how it was best to proceed with this possible witness whom Maggie Russell had suggested, since he had lured Mrs Vogler to this meeting under false pretenses.

‘Was it difficult to make connections from Van Nuys to West Los Angeles?’ he inquired.

‘No problem at all. I have my own jalopy - didn’t my boy tell you ? Kids, once they got their heads in the television set, they don’t remember anything.’

‘Well, your youngster did very well with my call. Now, about the ad you placed, Mrs Vogler. Can you elaborate upon it a little more?’

‘You mean - ?’

‘I mean can you let me know a little more about what you’re after and about your background ?’

‘Like I told you, I have plenty of experience and I’m dependable, if that’s what you mean,’ said Isabel Vogler. ‘Since Mr Vogler left me widowed and penniless eight years ago, and with a child to rear, I’ve been working more or less steady. As a housekeeper, but I can cook too, if nothing fancy is required. When the child was younger, I took live-in positions and boarded him out, but since my last live-in employment, what with the child growing up, I figured he should at least know he’s got his own home, so I’ve been doing only day work. But that’s not so good, because it’s not regular enough. I want a position where I know I can come in three, four days a week, or, even better, all week, nine to five, and have some income I can depend upon. I’m doing everything I can to save up some money.’