Spring Collection (36 page)

When she saw Maude’s breasts dangling over her face April felt herself grow wild and strong with a desire she’d never known, she pressed the breasts together so that she could suckle one nipple after another with lightning rapidity, abandoning herself utterly to the realization of a fantasy that had always, she now admitted to herself, lurked at the back of her mind. The abundance of Maude’s breasts intoxicated her, she looked with wonder at their hanging ripeness, the full rosy firmness of their skin, the darkness and largeness of their mature nipples. She fed on them, shuddering with luxurious invention, pulling on the nipples, teasingly, imperatively, with a swollen mouth and careful teeth and a plundering tongue, imagining hazily that she was a baby, imagining that she was a man, until suddenly, she realized that she was a woman and she wanted to be fucked.

“Maude, Maude, what do we do now?” April cried.

“Do you want more? Say the words, just say the words.”

“Please, Maude, I don’t know the words.”

“Yes you do.”

“I beg you. I can’t stand it anymore.”

“What do you want me to do?” Maude was implacable. It was the only way to make April know herself.

“Between my legs … your hand, your mouth, everything! Quickly!”

“No, not quickly, never quickly, not the first time,” Maude murmured. “Take off your nightgown, get under the covers.” While April hastened to do her bidding, Maude slid out of the bottoms of her pajamas. “You’ve had my breasts, but I haven’t had yours,” she told April with mock sternness. “That’s not right, not when I’ve been dying for them for so long, dreaming of them, watching you flaunt them without a bra under those tight sweaters, driving me mad … lie still, let me look … oh, your nipples are as hard as mine, and I’ve barely played with one of them … you were born for this, darling, born for it.”

By the time Maude attacked April’s lovely small breasts with her kisses, she had positioned herself in the bed so that April’s nipples were on a level with her mouth and her hands were free to descend the length of the girl’s body. Between kisses, with a reverent, hesitant caress she laid one hand on the girl’s flat belly, waiting for the slightest hint of rejection. Instead, April arched her pelvis and threw the covers off the bed, so that the entire length of her naked, magnificent body was revealed. Her mound was covered with straight, silky hair, the same golden as the hair on her head.

“Yes, yes, there,
lower
, now, I can’t wait!” April moaned. She heaved herself upwards in the bed, pushing Maude downward, away from her breasts, crying out, “your mouth, Maude, I have to have your mouth!” April opened her legs wide and spread her wet, congested lower lips apart with her hands. “There, put your mouth on me there,” she demanded in a tone of domination that Maude had rarely heard, a tone for which she abandoned her own, unselfish plans to obey.

She swiveled on the mattress and crouched above April, enveloping the pink, enlarged bulb of the girl’s clitoris with the pulsating, firm suction of her hot mouth. At the same time, she inserted two fingers gently into the entrance to April’s vagina, remembering that she was a virgin. April cried out in ecstasy and pushed down on Maude’s fingers as hard as she could. Then she pulled back until the fingers almost lost contact with her and immediately pushed down again, contracting her vagina and panting, “Push, push harder! Give me another finger! Don’t stop sucking!”

Maude gave herself to her task with an intensity that blocked out anything but an awareness of April’s sensations. It was as if she were being fucked for the first time herself, as she gave the girl what she’d wanted so desperately, for so long, without knowing it. April’s vulva was open and distended, madly greedy, demanding, more engorged every second. Whenever she tried to slow the rhythm of her fingers and her mouth, to make the first time last longer, April spurred her on, as if she were riding a horse, and soon, from the tenseness in her thighs and the way she raised her pelvis, Maude knew that April’s orgasm was approaching. She heightened the sucking rhythm she had established, making her lips and tongue as hard and tight as possible, letting April go faster and faster as she rode her three hard fingers until she felt the girl pause for a long, silent second and then come, shrieking and bucking, into her waiting mouth. Her fingers, deep inside April, were clutched and unclutched by the powerful spasms that lasted a long time until they eventually came farther apart and finally stopped entirely.

When the girl lay quiet at last, Maude lifted her head and looked at her face, not knowing what to expect; shame, a return of shyness, bewilderment, anything was possible. April’s eyes were shining through her half-parted lids and she licked her dry, smiling lips.

“Just give me a minute to bask, Maude, my beloved, just give me a minute and then … then I’m going to fuck you, fuck you good. I’ll be grateful to you
every day for the rest of my life. I’ll never be able to thank you enough.”

“Listen, darling, you don’t have to, honestly … I have ways.”

“You don’t understand. I want to, I’m dying to taste you, I can’t wait for it … I’m just getting my strength back, is all. I’m going to fuck you and then you’re going to fuck me again or we’ll do it to each other at the same time. I’m just getting started, Maude. Think of how much I have to make up for. Oh, come on up here right away and kiss me, I’m going crazy just thinking about how good it’s going to be.”

Not only can she keep up with me, Maude thought, she’s going to go far beyond what I can give her, and not that far from now. She’s unstoppable. I’d better take what I can get before the word gets out, before she gets curious about other women. Or is she already? She’s going to be the most wanted girl in town when we get back to New York. She doesn’t need me, but she doesn’t know that yet.

Maude moved up on the bed so that she could meet April’s lips, her body so aroused that a touch would bring her to orgasm, her heart breaking.

J
acques Necker woke up each morning to the conviction that he would feel more rested if he could somehow make himself stay up all night and go without sleep entirely. He was plagued by brutally punishing nightmares that vanished before he opened his eyes, leaving him with a sensation of having been physically pounded into the ground. He was depressed to his very core, but without a memory to pin to the nightmares. Nevertheless, in the last week, they seemed to have become a part of the historic reality of his own life, as real as any of his achievements and as solid as any of his possessions.

The hideous miasma of the night was only slightly dispelled as he forced himself through his brisk morning routine and his rapid walk to his office. As spring collection week rapidly approached, he found some relief in thrusting himself into overdrive, not only making the usual important decisions that determined the overall course of his business empire, but also overseeing feverishly the small details that he normally left to the people who were well paid to do these jobs. He deviled the party arrangers about the work in progress for the showing at the Ritz, demanding to know if they had enough tens of dozens of flowering trees, wanting an explanation about the progress of their painted decors, insisting on changing the menu, even tasting the wines, as if the success of the Lombardi collection were the only thing on his mind. He worked later and later,
driving his associates mad with his second-guessing of already-made plans, postponing the moment when he would have to leave the place where his word was law, and return home.

If his wife, poor Nicole, were still alive, he would have had an obligatory distraction every evening, Necker thought, with a grimace, since Nicole had expended most of her energies on entertaining with enormous style at least once a week and on being entertained in return. He remembered the shadow of distress that would cross her face if they dined alone together more than once in any given week. Unless her appointment diary was filled six weeks in advance, she quickly felt friendless, abandoned and, worst of all, unimportant. Knowing this, in spite of the pressure of his work, Necker had never protested at having to leave home, showered and freshly dressed, in time to be driven to yet another dinner party or gala. It was the least he could do for her, he had long ago decided, since he no longer loved her with anything but a reflex of mild affection, and hadn’t given her children to occupy her life.

Even if Nicole were still alive he wouldn’t have mentioned his nightmares to her, Necker realized. They had fallen out of the habit of personal revelations a very long time ago, less than two years after their marriage, when it became clear that her world consisted of fittings and lunches and consultations with florists and caterers, and his world consisted of business.

Not many weeks passed, after Nicole’s death, before Necker began to receive twice as many invitations to dinner than he and Nicole had ever received as a couple. He refused them all, occasionally asking several old friends to dine at his house, merely to let people know that he hadn’t become a morbid hermit. He had no interest in remarriage, but he realized that he had been targeted by every important hostess in Paris, each of whom had her own candidate, one of the many, still lovely divorcees or widows of suitable background and interests, to become the second Madame Necker.

It was unthinkable, Parisian hostesses agreed among themselves, that a fabulously rich man, a particularly handsome, alluring, vigorous man who was younger in so many ways than his actual age, should be allowed to draw another breath without a new attachment.

However, Jacques Necker managed to show himself so unresponsive, even rudely uninterested, when it came to that, that all but a very few of his oldest and most optimistic friends had given up arranging his future. Sometimes, in a rare moment in which he admitted his loneliness to himself, he asked himself why he didn’t give in to the matchmakers and pick some perfectly agreeable woman to busy the corners of his life with the bustle of redecoration and the myriad irritations of domesticity known only to the enormously wealthy—someone energetic, he thought, who would consider it minimal to own the banalities of a yacht, a château and a villa at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, someone who planned safaris and skied and would bully him into taking time off and “enjoying life.”

But he didn’t intend to be condemned to repeat the pattern of his life with Nicole, and dining out and entertaining, chatting about nothing with the same three hundred people year after year. Until he learned about Justine, he had been, if not content, at least resigned to spending his small amount of leisure in collecting, reading art history and flying off frequently to Zurich, Amsterdam, Milan or London to see the newest museum and gallery exhibitions or to attend the latest of the annual antiques fairs to which dealers from all over brought their finest wares.

The only way he knew he hadn’t turned into an antique himself, Necker thought, was that his sexual appetite was far from dead. He couldn’t bring himself to keep a mistress, preferring the efficient, if joyless, relief afforded by the most exclusive call girls in Paris. He expended his supercharge of energy almost every evening in violent squash games at his club, often dining there as well, with one of his many squash partners.

The blow Justine had dealt him in not coming to Paris immobilized him for several days. One morning, while walking to the office, he suddenly asked himself why, now that a suitable amount of time had passed, he had not done the natural thing and inquired after her health. As soon as he arrived in his office he called Frankie and asked if Miss Loring’s ear infection had responded to treatment.

“I’m not certain,” Frankie answered, too surprised by the suddenness of his question to make up a lie.

“How is that possible? Don’t you keep in touch on a daily basis?”

“No, actually we don’t,” Frankie said, recovering. “Justine has almost seventy other models to worry about. She knows where we are and that the girls are keeping busy—she counts on me to alert her to any problems, so I don’t need to check in with her every day.”

“Miss Severino, I consider you entirely capable, but it seems to me that with the Lombardi spring collection less than a week away, Miss Loring would find it more important to be here than in New York, where nothing this important can possibly be going on.”

“I don’t know what she could do here that I can’t,” Frankie said hardily. “Tinker doesn’t have a minute to herself all day long, as you know, and Lombardi said he doesn’t want to even lay eyes on April or Jordan until he’s ready to fit them along with all the other models. He’s expressly asked me not to disturb him for any reason. From what Tinker tells me, he’s making new designs like mad and all his associates are working to keep up with him. Marco has his ateliers open and filled with workers night and day. I don’t see what possible good Justine could do over here, except add to the confusion.”

“It’s a question of dignity,” Necker heard himself say pompously. “Miss Loring’s absence fails to reflect her consideration of the importance of the Lombardi contract. I assume she’d manage to come for the collection itself.”

“Oh, certainly! Of course she will, if not before,” Frankie said calmly.

“Are you all keeping busy?” Necker asked, forcing a friendlier tone.

“Now that the girls have finished working with the photographer from
Zing
, they’re basically killing time … the club scene palled quickly for all of us. Maude Callender, the writer from
Zing
, and April have been sightseeing all over Paris and Jordan’s usually off doing her thing at museums. Yesterday she spent almost all day again at that museum of decorative arts. That’s become her favorite Parisian spot.”

“Your little group seems amazingly dedicated to culture.”

“Well, what’s left, Monsieur Necker? The girls don’t dare indulge in French lunches or dinners, the cooking’s too fattening, there’s nothing much to buy in the stores except leftover winter stuff on sale. They can’t even shop! All the new movies are in French, even the TV’s in French. It’s too cold to stroll around for long or sit in the parks, Paris doesn’t even have any decent workout clubs … how do women stay in shape here? If it weren’t for the arts, what would we do with ourselves? Everyone in the couture is working in a frenzy of last-minute arrangements this last week but, except for Tinker, my girls aren’t needed yet.”