A ruling passion : a novel (5 page)

"I don't do it very often," Valerie told Nick as they arrived at the Palo Alto television station a week after their lunch in his apartment. They had not gone riding after all; at the last minute he had been called in to his part-time job in the engineering department, to fill in for someone else. "I'd love to do more because ifs such a blast, but there's not a lot of free time for good causes on television. Anyway, I don't have time; I'm too busy with school."

"You might manage to find time if they asked you more often," he said.

She laughed. "You're right; I really love doing it, but I'm not going to camp on their doorstep and beg for more. I'm hardly a professional and I'm certainly not going to make it my life's work."

"Why not?" Nick asked.

She looked at him. "I don't know. I haven't thought about it. I haven't thought about any kind of life's work; I told you that. Anyway, nobody's telling me I'm the ideal television personality—good Lord, do you think that would be a compliment or a put-down? I just do favors for fi-iends, or friends of my parents, and what happens, happens. It's all fun and it can't do any harm."

They walked into the studio and she led him to a folding chair at the side of the large, bare room. "You can sit here and watch. We're just taping a short pitch; it won't take long."

He watched her greet the cameraman and a young woman who stood nearby, wearing headphones and carrying a clipboard. Valerie stepped up to a shabbily carpeted platform, where she sat in an armchair turned at an angle to hide a long tear in the fabric. Beside her was a table with a vase of drooping flowers.

"Are there any fresh flowers?" she asked. She ran the cord from a

tiny black microphone under her sweater, then clipped the microphone to her collar. "These ought to be tossed."

"We'll get something else," said the woman with the headphones, and a moment later replaced the flowers with a contorted, vaguely modem bronze sculpture with one long protuberance.

"Two dogs in a moment of passion?" Valerie guessed. "Or a couple of horses fighting over a feedbag. Or one horse and a dog, mismated."

The cameraman was laughing. "A student made it. Dropped it off this morning so you could show it when you talk about the exhibit at the art center. I like it; ifs got a certain something."

"It's got a lot of bronze," Valerie said. "But ifs better than dying flowers. Fm ready if everyone else is."

The spotlights came on, flooding the set in a white wash that bleached and flattened everything beneath it. Nick understood why Valerie had worn makeup, especially on her eyes and cheeks, with bright-red lipstick, and a vivid dress of coral silk: under those lights, what was exaggerated seemed natural. As a cameraman focused the single camera on her, she read through the script twice from the Tele-PrompTer, once for practice, another time for an engineer in the control room to check the voice level of her microphone. Then the woman with the headphones gave a signal and the taping began.

This time, as Valerie read the script, Nick alternately watched her in front of him, and on a television set to his right, fascinated by the effect of the lights and the camera: on the screen, she looked heavier; a slight difference between her right and left eyelids became apparent; shadows from the downlighting made her shoulders seem rounded. It was all new to Nick, and he reached for the pad of paper in his jacket pocket and scribbled some notes to be stored with dozens of others he had written at various times about things that interested him. Someday he'd have time to go through them and think about all the intriguing tidbits of information he'd collected.

The lights went down, Valerie undipped the microphone and pulled the cord down beneath her sweater. She came to Nick. "What did you think?"

"It was unreal." He looked from her to the camera. "You sat there and talked to a lens that's like a black hole swallowing everything up, but on the screen you looked like you were talking to me and I was your best friend. How the hell do you do that?"

"I don't know. Some people are better at it than others. I'm one of the good ones."

"You must have done something," he insisted, "Imagined a face in

front of you, a real person inside the lens... How else could you be so damned sincere?"

She laughed. "You can fake sincerity, Nick. It's called making love to the camera and it isn't all that hard, at least not for me. If you're on top of what you're saying, and if you know what people want from you, you can make them believe almost anything. Oh, here's Sybille. Have you two met?"

"No." He held out his hand.

"Sybille Morgen, Nicholas Fielding," said Valerie. "Sybille's at Stanford, too; she works here part time."

"A good place to work," Nick said, feeling the strong grip of Sybille's hand.

"The best, at least while I'm in college." She looked up at him with the most astonishing pale-blue eyes he had ever seen; it was as if she were memorizing everything about him. "It's a good place to learn. It won't make my reputation, but it can't break it, either."

"I hope you find a place to make it," he said.

"I intend to." She turned to Valerie. "I checked the tape; ifs fine."

"Good, we can go to dinner." Valerie took Nick's arm. "I'll see you next month; isn't that when you're doing the antique-car show?"

"Two months. I'll send you a note." She looked at Nick. "Come again, whenever you like. We love to show off."

"I'd like that." He watched the cameraman roll the camera to another platform where a long curved desk stood before a world map and a smaller map of Palo Alto with weather arrows on it. "I don't know anything about television and I'd like to."

"Call me; we'll do a tour. Both of you, if you like," she added to Valerie. "Though you'd probably be bored."

"I'm never bored in a television station," Valerie said lightly. "At least not so far. And I like to watch you work, Sybille; you're so good."

"I'll expect you, then," Sybille said to Nick, and he was aware that it was the second time she had talked past Valerie, just to him. "If you want to see anything special, let me know in advance." She walked away and Nick watched her, admiring the decisiveness of her stride; she walked as if she were determined to make up in assertiveness what she lacked in stature. She was striking, with a face one would not forget; about Valerie's age, he thought, with heavy black hair held with an elastic band, a firm mouth, and rounded cheeks. But it was her eyes that Nick remembered: startlingly pale blue against her olive complexion, close together, heavy-lidded, guileless-looking, but alert, a combi-

nation that made it impossible to guess what she was thinking.

"Have you known her long?" he asked Valerie as they drove in her car toward the campus.

"Most of my life. She's from Baltimore, and when we're at the farm her mother is my mother's dressmaker. She comes down from Baltimore one day a week, early morning to midnight, or later, doing fittings, because that's where the wealthy clients live, and Sybille's always tagged along, ever since she was a baby. Am I buying dinner or are we splitting it?"

"It's already made at home. If you don't mind. How come she came all this way to school?"

"She told my mother she wanted Stanford and nothing else, because if I chose it it must be the best. Can you imagine me as a role model? Anyway, she was so wild to come here my parents loaned her money for four years' tuition; I think she barely makes it by working at the station."

"Where's her father?"

"Dead, I think." She swerved to the curb. "I want to stop here for a minute, and buy some wine."

"I have wine."

"I know, but I want to contribute something and wine seems to be your weak point. The only one I've found. So far."

He laughed. "Make it white, then; we're having veal."

She bought four bottles of Chablis and he was silent until they left the store. "How are we dividing up four bottles of wine?"

"We're having some left for next time."

He smiled as he put the wine in the car. "Can you make a salad?"

"I never have. \Vhy?"

"I like the idea of our making dinner together."

"I don't think you really want me in your kitchen, but I'll try."

"Good enough."

In the kitchen, he poured two glasses of wine, put the rest in the refrigerator and took out salad ingredients. Valerie stood beside him and began tearing the greens into pieces. "Did your mother teach you to cook?"

"No, my father." He was measuring wild rice but glanced at her in time to see her quick look of surprise. "My mother is a secretary in a real estate office; she used to cook when she got home from work, but after awhile my father took over. She still cooks on weekends."

"So your father cooks after work?"

"During it, is more like it. He has a workshop in the garage and he's

in and out of the house all day long." He put a pot of water on the stove and turned on the gas. "He's an inventor."

"An inventor! Of what? Something I've heard of)"

"Probably not. He's patented some tools that are used in automobile manufacture, and a new method for emulsifying paint—" He met her eyes. "Nothing you'd be likely to hear about."

"Nope," she said cheerfully. "But I'm impressed."

"He is impressive." Nick stared unseeing at the pot, waiting for it to boil. "He never gives up, he swallows a thousand discouragements and keeps going, he loves to share his successes but he keeps his failures to himself He's very smart and endlessly optimistic and he's a realist with a sense of humor. I've always wondered how he manages to be all those things at once."

"You love him very much," Valerie said.

Nick turned at the wistful note in her voice, but she was looking down, at the red pepper she was slowly cutting into tiny dice. He started to tell her to stop, that the pieces were too small already, but he caught himself and watched her for a moment, feeling a rush of pro-tectiveness that took him by surprise. Crazy, he thought. She was enormously wealthy, with beauty and charm, energy, a quick wit, friends in every part of the world, as many men, probably, as she wanted—how could anyone resist her?—and a taste for high living that she had the means to satisfy. And he was feeling protective. But there had been that note in her voice...

She glanced up. "Don't you?" she asked.

"Yes," he said, realizing how long he had been silent. "I love him very much. He's been my lodestar all my life. Even when I hated it that he failed so often, or when he embarrassed me, I couldn't imagine having another father or wanting to follow anyone else."

Valerie was watching him; her hands were still. "Embarrassed?"

"Sure, didn't your parents ever embarrass you? My mother and father would come to school for parents' night or something like it, and all the parents, including my mother, would listen to the teachers talking about our classes, but my father would go around telling anyone who'd listen about his inventions—the ones that failed and the ones that were going to revolutionize modern life and make his fortune, though he said his real goal wasn't money but to make life better for everyone. I wanted him to shut up, but of course I couldn't tell him that; I just went off to a corner and quiedy died, as teenagers often do when they're with their parents."

Valerie laughed. "But why did he keep on, if he failed so often?"

Nick looked at her oddly. "Because inventing was what he did; it was his life. It still is. And because he's always sure he'll be successful the next time. Would you give up if you failed at something?"

"It depends on how hard I'd have to work at it. I might not quit right away, but after awhile I'd do some serious rethinking. Is your father happy?"

"Yes," he said without hesitation. "He still dreams of doing something that would have a real impact on history, but he's just about decided I'll be the one to do that while he keeps on doing what he does, the best way he can."

"It sounds so organized," Valerie said. "Like a relay race."

"We're doing what we both want," Nick said shortly. She gave him a swift look, then turned back to her salad, and in a few minutes held out the wooden bowl for his inspection. 'Tou're very neat," he said, gazing at the red and yellow peppers and hearts of palm all cut the same, minuscule size.

''Not really; I'm really very messy. I always need someone to follow me around and clean up after me. But I didn't want you to be ashamed of having me in your kitchen." She looked at the salad bowl. "I must say it looks odd, not like any salad I've ever had; maybe I was concentrating too much. I was hoping it would earn me at least a couple of points."

Nick took the bowl from her and placed it on the counter. He put his arms around her. "I'd never be ashamed of having you here, or anywhere close to me." As Valerie's arms came around him, his lips brushed hers. "And I'm not keeping score. Are you?"

She shook her head. Her mouth opened beneath his and she forgot the salad, forgot that brief shortness in his voice, forgot his seriousness that sent litde shivers of doubt through her whenever they were together. His mouth covered hers, she tasted the smooth wine on his tongue, and she gave herself up to the feel of him, the strength that had attracted her when they met, and his openness, so intriguingly different from the people in her life.

He pulled back to look at her, but she kept her arms around him. "Are you worried about burning our dinner?" she asked.

A slow smile lit his face. "It could wait for hours."

"Then let it."

He bent to her again, his mouth finding hers as his hands curved over her body. The silk of her dress felt electric beneath his palms and fingertips; he was alive with the feel of her, the small quiver that went

through her when he unbuttoned the front of her dress, the scent and sounds and touch of her.

They turned to the sofa, but Valerie stopped as she took in its narrow Scandinavian lines: a thin piece of foam on a wooden slab, with a wooden back and arms. "Maybe your bedroom?" she asked.

Nick chuckled. " A little better, but not a lot."

"It has a bed. That's better."