The Baron (29 page)

Chaucer walked down his arm, the razor-sharp talons daintily applied, and stepped off to stand on the table, blinking first one intense saucerlike eye, then the other.

The man stretched one graceful, supple-fingered hand and scratched the owl behind the ears, chuckling softly, and then yawned and closed his eyes for a moment … man and wild creature in a still tableau.…

The silence was broken when he opened his eyes again and looked at his watch, giving a soft curse. He was due soon at work.

The nestlings didn’t like much being taken from next to his skin and put back into the box, even though he made them as comfortable as he could. He carried the box up the great staircase to his bedroom and left it there with the door closed. There was no point in testing Chaucer’s patience. Then he collected fresh clothes from the drying room near the kitchen, stripping off his hiking clothes and pulled on clean wheat-colored jeans, leather boots, and a V-necked white sweatshirt.

To Chaucer, sitting on the edge of the laundry basket examining a clothespin in one claw, the man remarked, “You probably wonder, don’t you, old son, why I never talk about what I do to support us all?” The owl began chewing thoughtfully on the clothespin, giving him a wise look. “The truth is, there’s no intelligible way to explain it. Humans have particularly odd forms of entertainment. But it pays what we need to support this
rockpile, and now we have two new mouths to feed.”

The man pulled on his jacket again and strode out through the new snow to an old station wagon, whistling resignedly.

Jennifer Hamilton, the woman who had faked flu in high school for the entire two weeks her class had studied reproductive biology, the woman who had almost expired with embarrassment in a college art history class when asked to speak on the merits of Michelangelo’s David—Jennifer Hamilton, who’d spent a lifetime of twenty-three years misplaced in an era of sexual liberation, was about to attend a club where men took off their clothes to music.

From the outside, the Cougar Club had a deceptive coziness, like a family restaurant that serves fish fries on Friday nights. Inside was another story. Inside it wasn’t frying fish that sizzled. It was the stage act.

In fact, Jennifer hadn’t realized until she was actually within the friendly white clapboard walls that the place was anything more than the popular nightclub which her four companions, in a spirit of gleeful mischief, had represented it to be. Light had begun to dawn for her when she saw the gift shop just within the front door which merchandised Cougar Club nightshirts and bumper stickers decorated with a provocative male silhouette. There were even more provocative items such as calendars featuring Cougar Club dancers in throat-tightening stages of undress, and a mysterious piece of equipment called a “go-naked pen.”

Turning to her companions, trying to look like a woman who thought this was all a good joke instead of one who was likely to require being removed from the place on a stretcher, Jennifer had said, “I can see that I’ve been grossly misled!”

Her words brought laughter because none of the four women with her had known her long enough to realize that after one glance at the club’s logo, an undraped male silhouette, Jennifer’s stomach felt as though it had begun to solidify. And because she didn’t want to look like a poor sport, it was the last thing she wanted them to discover. She had been in Emerald Lake only two weeks working at her new job as children’s librarian at the public library. New job, new town, new people.

She knew it was partly her own fault, but in her home town where she’d lived from birth through college, her acquaintances and neighbors had recognized only her stiff, rather formal exterior. But another wider and more playful soul had grown beneath that exterior … and it had such a difficult time showing itself.

Jennifer had come at Annette’s invitation tonight. Annette, a tall friendly woman, was adult services librarian. Somehow she accomplished a remarkable amount in spite of the impression she gave of always being on the way to the back room to have a cigarette. Annette’s younger sister Diane had come also, and her friend Susan. They were leaning over the merchandise counter, wearing straight-leg jeans, blouson jackets and boots with heels, looking like a page from the Spiegel catalogue. Lydia beside them was the library aide.
She had just picked up a logoed G-string and was giving it the twice over.

Taking it from her with a twinkle in her eyes, Annette said, “What do you think? Should I buy one of these for the hubby?”

Susan laughed. “C’mon. Bill would never put on one of those things.”

“Little do you know Bill’s private side,” Annette said. “He’d have it on in two minutes.”

With a grin and a teasing push on the arm, Diane said, “And you’d have it off again in one!”

Annette picked out a calendar and paid a woman who happened to be pregnant and was wearing a Cougar Club T-shirt; as was the girl behind the counter at the coat-check stand; as was the female maître d’. Jennifer found herself wondering in an unnerved way if any of this was in some way connected with the nature of the entertainment provided inside. She was further unnerved by the press of women who were departing, flushed and ecstatic, from the previous show. One clapped her on the back and said.

“Whew! En-
joy!
”

As they walked into the packed cavern of the nightclub, Jennifer looked through the candles flickering on many tables to the ominous, empty stage dominating the room. She turned to Annette.

“I see a free table in the back corner—”

“Oh, no,” Annette said with a wolfish smile. “I should think we’d want to sit fairly close.”

“
Very
close,” put in Diane.

They ended up directly in front of the stage, which was raised just enough to put anyone on it at thigh level with Jennifer’s nose. Generously, her friends insisted she take the closest seat. When
she protested in a suffocated voice that it might kill her, they thought she was being witty.

Admission was for women only. It was an attractive crowd that ran the gamut of ages, though the concentration seemed to be of women in their twenties and thirties. And not one of them would have looked out of place in a meeting of the local PTA or at church choir practice. They were letting down their hair with the weekend-away-from-home exuberance of farm implement salesmen at a convention. The young male waiters—who seemed to hail from that class of folks know as “hunks”—were receiving some pretty risque answers when they came to the tables collecting orders for drinks, asking, “What would you like?”

The waiters responded to the ribald answers with quick, accustomed smiles, and brought them drinks instead. Their waiter, who introduced himself as Rick, couldn’t quite repress a gleam of interest, though, when Diane leaned her elbows on the table. Her long blond hair trailing forward over her red ribbed sweater, she asked, “For the fifteen dollar cover charge, do I get to take you home too?”

Mounting the stage wearing a clinging knit dress, the Mistress of Ceremonies had geranium-red lips and looked like she’d have become someone’s mistress without too much ceremony. There was a slight, intriguing hard edge to the lean, beautiful woman. Her hair, long and black, caught the smoky light from the spots like vintage Cher Bono as she welcomed the audience.

“Ladies who come here are usually celebrating something,” she observed, and looked around the room, randomly choosing tables, asking for the
occasion. There was a doe party for a young girl who was getting married in a week; a group of student nurses who’d gotten their caps; a woman leaving for the Air Force. One divorce. (A burst of sympathetic cheers. The M.C. sent over a certificate for free drinks on the house.) There was also a busload of bank employees from Chicago. They were toasting the night with margaritas, in a way that would probably have started a stampede of investors withdrawing their money if any of them had been there to see it.

“Illinois girls know how to party hard!” The M.C. grinned. “And that’s good. Let’s take a poll, ladies. How many of you have never seen any man besides your husband or your boyfriend in the altogether? Let’s see your hands!”

Many hands rose. But not Jennifer’s. Jennifer’s hands had welded themselves to the sides of her chair.

“Enlightenment awaits!” promised the M.C. in high good humor. “Tonight you’re going to see
everything
of three gorgeous guys and find out how the men in your lives”—she winked—“measure up!”

Amid the howling approval around her, Jennifer tried to sink as low as possible in her chair without disappearing under the table; she spared a thought for her poor mother, receiving the news that her only child had suffered a fatal heart attack in a nightclub featuring male strippers.

She made it halfway through the first act. But when the macho hunk onstage five feet from her dropped his hands to the waistband of his skintight glitzy slacks, and made teasing motions that
indicated he was going to divest himself of them, she vanished into the restroom.

Feeling like an idiot, and a coward, and a mouse creeping out of a knothole, she emerged when the music and explosion of whistling and foot-stomping applause had faded into the lower roar of excited conversation that signalled the end of the first act.

A waiter taking drink reorders from the table of graduate nurses blocked the narrow path to her table. Standing patiently, listening with a reddening ear to the M.C.’s bawdy routine, she heard a woman seated nearby say, “Deb, look at that—the guy who just came out to change the tape. Is he
cute
!”

As she turned her head to the array of sound equipment edging the stage, Jennifer was wondering mildly how women could bring themselves to go into ecstasies over another of these vacuous, beef-on-the-hoof jocks. Then her gaze lit upon the tall blond man in wheat jeans and a white sweatshirt, who stood by the sound table with a tape in his hand.

Never had she seen a face like this one. Carved in simple planes, it contained a strict beauty that carried no trace of prettiness. His hair had the diffuse brightness of sunlight pouring through spring water. Under sable eyebrows, a dark fringe of straight lashes defined eyes of haunting crystalline blue. Small smile lines framed a wide mouth. The pure facial structure gave the indelible impression of strength, intelligence and a certain refined tenderness—it was a face built for sweetness. But the brooding eyes were a cynic’s. He was here, yet remote from all this; detached. That,
and the straight classical proportions below made him look like a statue of the young Alexander.

Jennifer heard the woman seated in front of her who’d been addressed as Deb breathe, “What a babe!” While Jennifer disapproved of the extravagant phrasing, she had to admit to some echo of the sentiment inside herself. Here was the expected coronary, but caused by a man who was fully clothed. With a flash of humor, she thumped a fist lightly against her chest and said, “Pump, heart, pump.”

Her own record with men was not what anyone would call impressive. In her dreams she was brave, polished, even a little wild. In reality, she was a worrier. No one ever worried the way she could. It was the one thing she did really well. And because one of the things she worried the most about was men, there she had erected her strongest defenses. Not a prickly person, she was prickly with men. She wasn’t good with them. She just wasn’t. Attractive males, with their lavish egos, ruffled her the most. Perhaps it was because she was such a plain daisy herself. With her brown hair and brown eyes, she was the very fabric of average. She had a face right off a Norman Rockwell Post cover, the picture of wide-eyed Americana. It was a sincere face, at times even a merry one, but in a crowd heads had never turned to look at it.

She was threading through the cleared path to her table when one of the nurses interrupted the M.C. by calling out playfully, “Hey! Is the blond guy going to take off his clothes?”

Jennifer watched him pretend to ignore the remark as he wound the tape, his broad mouth
stretched in a smile that suggested he might be laughing inside.

Mock-indignant, the M.C. made a “naughty-naughty” sign with her index finger. “Have you no shame? The poor kid is barely seventeen years old—” Laughing protests and a suggestive comment or two around the room greeted the obvious fiction. Jennifer would have put his age at perhaps a year or two older than her own. Grinning, the M.C. continued, “I’m ashamed of you ladies and your carnal intentions. And in front of a minor! Anyway, he’s only the sound man, so—behave! Because I’ve got something here for all of you who luh-hu-uvv”—she gave the word three syllables—“law and order: a tribute to our gentlemen in blue! Here’s a man you’d love to go undercover with. For your entertainment pleasure, allow me to present Peter the Policeman!”

Jennifer landed in her seat just as a magnificent body in a motorcycle cop’s outfit—with silver helmet, shiny black knee-length leather boots, reflecting aviator sunglasses—landed onstage inside a swell of acclaim. Moving at full throttle and with dynamic professionalism to the theme from Peter Gunn, he was a riveting figure. If she hadn’t known he was about to take his clothes off, Jennifer almost might have enjoyed it.

The aviator shades came off to reveal lustrous black eyes. Beneath the discarded silver helmet was a shining mass of stunning ebony hair and Jennifer swallowed nervously. He slid out of his black leather jacket and began opening his blue shirt. Beneath was a finely muscled chest and taut stomach—Jennifer’s palms started sweating. The half-naked policeman began stroking his palms
down his midriff in time to the music, his hips moving. To a riot of encouragement, his deft fingers played with the buckle of his wide black belt. Jennifer had slid so low in her chair that her chin was nearly level with the table. But she was not too low to miss the policeman’s gesture toward her when it came. Fingering the buckle, crooking the index finger of his other hand invitingly, and looking right at her with a come-to-me smile, he showed her by look, by gesture that he wanted her to join him onstage and unzip his … Jennifer choked. The tables around her exploded with excitement and rippling laughter. Embarrassment hit her, so strong that it nauseated her and burned from the top of her head to her shoulders. Her face buried itself in the shelter of her table napkin.