Her Hungry Heart (22 page)

‘You’ve done her proud with this party, Mimi.’

‘I love her. Whatever I do for her will never be enough.’ She smiled and kissed her father on the forehead. It flashed through her mind as she left him how incredible it was that, in all the years since he had found her, he had hardly changed or aged at all. He was still as handsome, flirtatious, charismatic as ever. There was still hardly a woman in New York who would not have been pleased to be chosen by him. It was strange, she knew, for a daughter to feel pride that her father was still such an attractive man, a lover of women, and very discreet about it. But she had never blinded herself to Karel’s womanizing, no matter how discreet he had been. Just one person, Barbara, had escaped her scrutiny. Mimi still had no idea about the intimate relationship between Barbara and her father.

‘You’ve done it again.’ Jay interrupted her thoughts.

He took her hand and she stood up. He placed an arm around her and told her, ‘A wonderful party, and you’re wonderful too. Among all the beauties in this room, you are still the one I choose. Nobody does it better, Mimi, getting an intimate mix of cultured people in this city together without affectation and superficial chitchat. No one does it better.’

There he was, Jay, making a woman feel good again. Nobody does it better than Jay, she thought.

‘I like your friend Rick. He looks more like a lifeguard than a surgeon. Young enough to be one. Wrong age, maybe, for the other. And his girlfriend, Zoe …’ He was interrupted when several of the guests approached.

Mimi managed to get away from her husband a few minutes later. Together she and Barbara went out into the now chilly night. On the terrace they could hear muffled sounds of the city far below, the mournful sound of a ship’s horn from somewhere on the East River. They watched the lights of several barges, one trailing after the other, chugging their way to Staten Island.

‘Mimi, you’ve gone to an awful lot of trouble for me.’

‘Nothing I do for you is trouble, Barbara. Are you having a good time? That’s all that matters.’

‘The best time. It’s a lovely party. I like Rick.’

‘I somehow thought you might.’

‘Oh, to be young like that again! I admire what he’s doing, dropping out for a while to see what life is really all about. I somehow suspect he already knows. He’s a very interesting young man.’

From the terrace, the two women watched him and the people clustered around him. There was little warmth left in the night air. Barbara and Mimi walked back into the living room. Rick was standing some distance from them, but not so far that they couldn’t hear bits of his conversation with one of the guests, the middle-aged Cary Klaus, a nervous, introverted, bird-like woman, a sculptress in stone. She always wore glasses with very dark lenses, and chain smoked. Someone in the circle of people asked, ‘Feeling better, Cary?’

‘Marginally,’ she answered. ‘It’s always a matter of degree, the pain is always there. For months now I just haven’t been able to get rid of it.’

‘The pain?’ Mimi heard Rick ask.

‘Yes, honestly, nothing to fuss about. I just have this headache that never goes away, hence the glasses.’

‘May I?’ he asked. Without waiting for an answer he gently removed the glasses.

She objected. ‘No! Please don’t. I can’t do without my glasses.’ An unmistakable note of anxiety crept into her voice.

‘Yes, you can,’ he told her in a gentle, caring, but firm voice. She squinted, but stood quite still in front of him. He tilted up her chin and turned her head at a slight angle, so he could better see her eyes in the light of a nearby lamp.

‘Are you a doctor?’ she asked, a note of sarcasm in her voice.

‘I could claim to be one.’ He turned her head back from the light and told her, ‘I’m going to take your headache away.’ The group around them stopped talking and watched with party-goers’ curiosity. Rick removed the cigarette from Cary’s fingers and stubbed it in an ashtray close at hand.

He saw her clench her fingers. Her hands became fists. ‘Relax,’ he told her. ‘Trust me. I’m going to take the pain away.’

The people around them remained quiet, all eyes on Rick and the sculptress. He took Cary’s clenched fists in his hands for a few moments. They gazed steadily into each other’s eyes, Cary still squinting and evidently uncomfortable. Then he released the still tightly clenched fists. Quite slowly her fingers relaxed.

Rick smiled at her, ‘Good. Trust me, I am going to take the pain away. It’s never going to come back,’ he told her. His voice was clear and steady, calm and caressing.

Tears filled her eyes, but she remained where she was. Now he placed his hands on her shoulders and began to chant a mantra. ‘Omm, Omm.’ No one in their immediate circle moved. Something strange was happening, sensed by everyone in the room. Conversation stopped. Nothing but
the sound of Rick’s voice could be heard. The chant of the mantra seemed to fill the room, to bounce off the walls, the ceiling. Rick removed his hands from Cary’s shoulders. Tears were trickling down her cheeks now. The steady chant continued. All eyes were on Cary. They saw her shoulders drop, the tension in her face slowly disappear, as he continued to chant. He placed the open palm of one hand lightly on top of her head, the other under her short, cropped hair at the base of her skull. She was crying openly. It was painful to watch.

Mimi saw Jay across the room. He was upset. He took a step forward and Mimi sensed he was going to stop Rick and release Cary. Something told her that was a dangerous thing to do. She raised her hand and caught his attention. A shake of her head indicated that he was to do nothing. He stopped. Mimi could see it was against his better judgement, but he did stop. His attention reverted to Rick and the woman. The mantra continued. Still everyone in the room was riveted, unable to detach themselves from the scene being played out in front of them.

The crying petered out, the tears dried on Cary’s cheeks. The squint was gone. Her eyes opened wide and became clear. She took a deep breath, and let out a great sigh. A sigh that sounded as if her very soul was expelling all the pain she had ever experienced in her life. Colour, a lovely glow, came into her usually pasty face, and then, miraculously, a smile appeared at the corners of her mouth. She began to laugh. Deep rich laughter welled up from her. She seemed to be shedding the years like an old skin. Before their eyes she changed, to look like a young woman, a girl even. Now she laughed louder, more uproariously. It wasn’t a laugh of hysteria but of pure joy, bliss. She couldn’t stop laughing.

Rick removed his hands, first from the base of her skull and then, a few minutes later, from her head. Gently he replaced his hands on her shoulders. Her laughter tapered off, but then rose again. Uncontrollable, sweet happiness,
the laughter of a child. He removed his hands from her shoulders. He smiled at her, and then stepped slowly a few paces back from her. Her laughter subsided, and she stood there, relaxed and smiling. She blinked her eyes several times and remained standing in front of Rick, very calm and quiet.

‘How do you feel?’ he asked.

‘Wonderful. It’s gone. The pain in my head has gone.’

‘It won’t come back.’

‘I don’t understand. It’s wonderful, amazing, extraordinary! I haven’t laughed like that since I was a child. I was five years old again. I was a child in Iowa watching a clown who was laughing. I haven’t laughed like that in forty-five years.’

She touched the palm of her hand against her forehead and moved it back and forth several times. She told Rick, ‘It’s gone.’ She placed her fingers gently over closed eyelids. When she removed them and re-opened her eyes she seemed astonished. ‘It’s gone …’

Rick interrupted her. ‘That dull pain at the back of your eyeballs?’

‘Yes, it’s just not there, it’s gone. I can see everything clearly. It seems as if everything is sharper with more of an edge to it.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘That’s amazing. How do you do that?’ asked someone standing close to them.

No one was more impressed than Jay. Mimi had never seen her husband genuinely astonished.

‘Where did you learn that?’ he asked Rick. ‘I doubt it was at Harvard Medical School.’

Rick laughed good-naturedly. ‘You would be quite right. No, in India.’

‘Can you explain it?’

‘You saw what happened. Think about what you saw and heard, it’s self-explanatory. The brain is a complex and
extraordinary organ, it can react to all sorts of treatment. You just saw an alternative one to the scalpel. We know so little about the true workings of the brain.’

‘You said you were a surgeon.’

‘That’s true, a brain surgeon.’

‘So young? Practising?’

‘Yes, so young. But not practising. I completed my residency at Johns Hopkins. But for the last two years I’ve been Dr Michael Quinn’s assistant.’

There were several raised eyebrows at that information. Michael Quinn was supposedly one of the finest, if not the top man in the world, in his field of surgery.

‘And now?’

‘Now I’ve dropped out for a while.’

‘But you will practise, not give up those years of work?’

‘I’m a surgeon. Of course I’ll practise. At least that’s what I think now. But we’ll see how I feel about it when I drop back into the world again.’ A smile on his lips, a twinkle in his eye. No one was quite sure whether to believe him or not. Most did.

‘Good men like you are needed. What about your career?’

‘That’s what I’m doing it for – to further my career, further my life. To enhance the lives of the people I hope to treat. There are all sorts of things to be learned that are not in school. I’ve gone as far as I can there, and with Doctor Quinn. I want to learn more. This is an age of mind-expanding drugs and experiences, broader views, eastern philosophies come west to add to our lives. I’m interested in those things, and in peace, and the love of my fellow man. I’m a man of our times. My surfboard is as important to me as my scalpel.’

Mimi sensed he was setting them up, teasing them because he recognized how trapped they all were in their own lives. She was amused. She could afford to be; she felt neither trapped in her life nor dissatisfied with it, any more than she felt dissatisfied with her marriage or her husband.
She felt neither confusion nor anxiety about having an affair with Rick. It seemed not at all relevant to her marriage or Jay.

Having a lover had to do with a need to expand herself which she neither questioned nor analysed. Had it been a different kind of man than Rick, one not steeped in freedom of the mind, body and soul, not interested in humanity, peace and love, it might have been different. Love did not come into it, not the sort of love that concerns a man and woman in possession of each other, marriage. What she had with Jay. No, she felt no guilt at having Rick for a lover.

Through him she was learning about a greater kind of love. Something that circumvented those things. Before the age of new music and dance, Flower Power and the new consciousness that was sweeping the country, the world in fact, what had people to look forward to? War and violence? Well, Mimi knew at first hand what that did to people. This outrageous quest for happiness and fun in all things – food, clothing, sex, freedom for all – and this embracing of eastern philosophies and western change appealed to her. The question was: would it only be the dream of the few? No, claimed the hippies. Love and peace were for everyone. Mimi was taken by that idea. Millions of people around the world were. It triggered the same thing in her as it did in everyone else. Glorious hope.

Mimi was listening, learning, trying it out. She was not blinkered enough to ignore it, to see this new age as nothing more than a generation gap she couldn’t leap, something she couldn’t understand or be a part of. That was not because it was there and sweeping the world, but because of Rick. He made it so easy for her. But then he made it easy for everyone else as well.

Mimi had met, through Rick, several of his Harvard friends, professors and doctors who had dropped out in various ways because they saw a bigger beyond and that it was the age to move in on it. Mimi loved that child-like
quality, innocence, frivolity, and most of all youth and energy harnessed by this generation on the hippy trail in search of they knew not what. Better than war, better than bullets, better than slavery, there were a lot of better thans, and a lot of bandwagons to climb on to.

The musicians, all of them students from the Juilliard School of Music, had joined the party for coffee. They had been as impressed with Rick’s mantra and powers of healing as everyone else in the room. A slender reed of a young man with haunting, pale blue eyes had listened possibly closer than anyone else to his exchange with Jay.

When the two men’s conversation had come to its natural end, the musician picked up his flute and played a haunting tune. Softly at first, almost imperceptibly, people felt it more than they heard it, sensed it as in a dream. Like a modern-day Pied Piper, he tamed forty-odd guests into silence and attention and they drifted on the young man’s fantasy. The sound of the flute tapered off. For several seconds, sweet, ethereal, it hung in the air. The cellist on the far side of the room took up her bow and played something equally haunting. When she stopped, the flautist picked up again. This time he enchanted the guests with the exquisite notes of Rimsky Korsakov’s
Scheherazade.

Chapter 19

Mimi arrived at Romeo Salta’s on time. Neither Rick nor his friend had arrived. It was crowded with people dining or waiting for tables, drinking Negronis at the small bar.

Mouthwatering Italian food in an uptown restaurant frequented by successful uptown businessmen: it seemed hardly the place two Californian surfing dropouts would choose. Somewhere was found for her to sit. She ordered a very dry martini with a twist of lemon.

The maître d’ smoothly, but somewhat confusingly asked, ‘Are you dining with us today, Mrs Steindler?’

‘Why, yes,’ she answered. It seemed an odd question. But when she remembered the table would not have been booked in her name or Jay’s, Carlo’s question did not seem so strange. ‘No, you wouldn’t have it under my name, Carlo, or Mr Steindler’s. I’m a guest.’

‘Ah.’ He looked relieved. ‘You see, we are in fact overbooked. I would not have wanted to disappoint you. The name?’ He looked at his list. He had neither of the men’s names down for a reservation. She was neither surprised nor annoyed, but rather amused.

‘How bad of them not to make a reservation. Can you do something for us?’

He looked even more concerned, frown lines appearing on his forehead. She half expected dots of nervous perspiration to appear on his upper lip. Finally, after some pencil-scratching and a good deal of tongue-clicking, ‘Yes, I’ll manage something.’

Mimi took another sip of the perfectly chilled martini. It felt good, the bite of the gin on her tongue. No reservation, and they were late. All very typical and just what she should have expected, she told herself.

An hour later, when the rush was over and the tables were filled, the scent of sizzling scampi in garlic and butter tormented her. The aroma perfumed the room. Mimi smiled to herself. Once, when dining there with Jay and a friend, Ronny, their guest had said of that scent, ‘Italian Chanel No.5’.

Mimi was fast getting bored with those games women play with themselves so as not to walk out of a restaurant in a huff when kept waiting far too long by a lover they want
right now.
I’ll count to ten. If they don’t come in by then, I’m going. A count to ten, then another. Eventually more than ten counts of ten, slow counts. Still they had not appeared. It was almost a relief when it was so late the restaurant door was hardly opened. But Italian Chanel No. 5 had done its work, she was famished.

A sizzling platter arrived with lovely large fresh scampi and a plate of Italian bread. Distracted by the food, its perfume, and her own hunger, she pronged one of the scampi.

‘God, they look good.’ Rick reached over her shoulder, took the fork from her hand when it was halfway to her mouth.

‘Oh, no!’ she exclaimed. But by the time she turned round to face him, she was smiling. Rick handed back the empty fork and kissed her on the cheek. So did his friend Allan as he took the empty fork from her hand, pronged another scampi and offered it to her. How could she be angry at Being kept waiting by two handsome young men who found time irrelevant, unimportant, and something never to get hung up about?

‘I’m starved.’

‘I’m famished.’

‘I thought you’d forgotten me.’ She couldn’t just let it
drop. Something had to be said.

‘We did.’ Even that didn’t upset her. ‘We got caught up in red tape at the Air India office.’

The maître d’ approached with a scowl. Rick held up his hand. ‘No problem.’ From their pockets the two tweed-jacketed young men produced clip-on bow ties that brought a look of gratitude to the maître d’s face.

‘I suppose you were busy booking seats for your surfboards?’

‘Spot on.’ Only she among them thought of this as sarcastic. ‘Do you think it’s easy, travelling with a surfboard?’ Rick asked Mimi.

‘It should be,’ answered Allan.

‘It isn’t,’ Rick offered.

Mimi looked at the still sizzling, empty, oval metal dish on the wooden platter in front of her. They had made short shrift of that. She looked at the maître d’. ‘I’d like some more scampi, please. I think we all would, while we decide what else to order.’

He showed them to a table. The two men sat on the banquette on either side of her, still talking about the logistics of locating their first perfect wave in India. She listened and bit the side of her lip. Less from anxiety than the need to distract herself from a fit of the giggles. How could two grown men with an education and background such as theirs see that as, for the moment, the most important event of their life?

Rick ordered a bottle of Valpolicella, Allan pulled out a rolled joint from his pocket and placed it between his lips. He was just about to strike a match when he saw the look on Mimi’s face. ‘Oh, shit, I forgot where I am.’ He stuffed it back in his pocket.

Mimi smiled and said, ‘You thought you were already in India.’

‘You’re right. I was seeing a magnificent long beach fringed with palm trees.’

‘And that’s the place of your long wave?’

‘No, I don’t think so, not a surfer’s paradise there, but it’s a paradise for other things. Why don’t you drop all this, Mimi, and come with us? It’s going to be great.’

Again she had to try to suppress a smile. The last thing she wanted was for them to think she was laughing at them. She wasn’t. It was a kind of indulgent admiration of their ability to play with their lives. She was enjoying it, even being on the fringe was fun. She wanted to tease them with, ‘What happened to brown rice and vegetarianism, Zen food?’ when they were ordering escalope of veal marsala, osso buco, veal and peppers.

‘You look happy,’ said Allan, bending to kiss her on the cheek, ‘and beautiful.’

‘I am happy and beautiful, and a little tipsy. Two martinis, all that garlic and half a bottle of wine. It was irresistible,’ she told them. ‘I can hardly believe you fellows have abandoned vegetarian cutlets for the likes of this.’

‘Old habits die hard. Another thing I can blame on Benton and Bowles. Do you think being an advertising executive dropout is easy? It takes time,’ said Allan. She liked that about Rick and Allan: they laughed at themselves.

The risotto arrived, and they talked non-stop about Rome, food and India. And the men tried to explain to her the unimaginable excitement and beauty of the perfect wave, of what it was like to ride in the pipeline, that hollow place where the great wave rises, curves over and rolls. How, if you have been surfing as they had been since they were children, it’s part of living. To give it up would be to miss the great adrenaline high of all time.

When the main courses arrived, accompanied by a heaped dish of sautéd spinach in garlic and oil with yet another bottle of Valpolicella, she was amused again by the way the two handsome young men flummoxed the waiter. Unsure of who was to get what, he asked, ‘Who gets the osso buco?’ and was answered, ‘Does it matter?’ Of course it didn’t
matter to them. They were eating out of each other’s plates, sharing everything on the table, but that wasn’t exactly the norm at Romeo Salta’s. It was part of their new wave charm, sharing everything naturally, from the heart. But Mimi sometimes wondered about all that universal sharing. How natural could it be when so much was made of it? The sixties people were so insistent upon it, on not being selfish. Did they not protest too much sometimes?

One thing was for certain: Rick’s crowd opened their arms to anyone who wanted to walk into them. Mimi had been made to feel included, very much family. That was how his crowd was: one big extended family. Things that had been considered taboo and which she had missed in her life now seemed to be the norm with this Age of Aquarius. She knew she didn’t really belong in it, but it was nice, really great, to be a guest there, to see her own inhibitions slip away. The luxury of what’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine, took some getting used to, and it made life so easy. But there lurked a cynic in Mimi who kept asking herself how long would this Flower Power last? How long would it be before it ran its course? Still, while it was here, it was, to quote Zoe, ‘A trip and a half.’

A pretty woman all dressed in white with a small white hat and a veil of ivory just covering her eyes, stopped at their table. ‘Mimi.’ She touched her shoulder.

‘Nancy.’

The woman ignored the two handsome young men. As they began to rise she held out her hand. ‘Please don’t bother, carry on with your meal. This is just to say hello and my best to Jay.’

Mimi knew Nancy. It would never occur to the woman that these young men could be so important in Mimi’s life. As for Jay, he could easily have been dining at Romeo Salta’s, could have seen her with them and would actually have joined them, been amused, showed enthusiasm for their travel plans. It would never have entered his mind that
she might be sexually interested in them.

The three of them left the restaurant. They took a taxi to the marina on the West Side where Allan kept his boat. When he had quit Benton and Bowles, and had sold his upper Eastside flat, he had bought a cabin cruiser. That was where he now lived when in New York. It was anchored on the Hudson River, several hundred yards off the dock. The marina attendant took them out to Allan’s boat in a small speedboat. Allan placed an arm around Mimi’s shoulder and kissed her cheek. The three were standing in the speedboat, hanging on to a safety bar. Allan shouted above the roar of the motors: ‘One year living on my houseboat in Kashmir did it for me. I love living like this, it’s so civilized and private. Come to Kashmir. You can stay with me on the
Khukavar
– that’s my houseboat.’ He kissed her cheek again and she knew he meant it, wanting her to share the experience of the Kashmiri lakes and living on a houseboat with him.

Once aboard, Mimi understood what he meant. Anchored just off the city, a few hundred yards away from the marine’s dock, with the peace and tranquillity of the river, Allan and his floating home were set apart from the other vessels. He had lit his joint in the taxi, and the three of them had shared another in the speedboat. They were replete with wine, dope, good food, and crashed out in the state room of
Madison Avenue Mouse.
It was a large bedroom with a kingsize bed in the centre of the room, a fourposter constructed from Narwal tusks with a canopy of transparent white silk. Curtains of the same material were tied back. The cover on the bed was black fox and reached luxuriously down to the floor of polished cherrywood. Large featherdown pillows in white cotton edged in embroidered flowers, black daisies with bright yellow centres, lay plumply on the fox fur. There were three portholes on either side of the room. The sun poured in to make it cheerful and bright. Wing chairs covered in white raw silk,
and small inlaid mother-of-pearl tables casually dotted around the room. Madison Avenue chic did die hard.

Rick put on some Mozart. They all collapsed on the bed, Mimi between the two men. They lay quietly listening to the music. She felt wonderful, lying there with them both. Safe, as if she belonged with them. She drifted with the marijuana. It was all so easy, so sweet to give herself up to them. It took no effort at all. It just happened. They undressed her and themselves and together they held her in their arms and kissed and fondled her. They took her in slow and easy stages, and the three of them had sex. It was exciting, but it was also beautiful to have first one man kiss you, make love to you in his own special way, and then to feel immediately the passion of another. To see two men sucking on your breasts, enjoying you, adoring you. To see their flagrant rampant erections, hold them, make love to two phalluses at the same time, and have these strapping, beautiful young men take turns fucking you. To be held in the arms of one, with his kisses and his fondling of your breasts, while the other takes possession of you in a long and luscious, steady fucking.

This was erotic beyond Mimi’s imagination, a reality she had never expected to partake of or derive such exquisite pleasure from. They knew how to pace her and themselves, to wring from her and themselves the ultimate in orgasms. How, for the three of them, to ride out all at the same time into sexual oblivion as they came together inside her. To lie in their arms replete with lust, to kiss them with affection and love for this shared experience, filled her heart with gratitude for having been enriched by them. And to see them caress each other, as they caressed her, not out of homosexual lust but with affection, humbly: it opened her eyes to the fact that men could and did love men. That was their first coupling that afternoon, and one she would remember for ever.

For the remainder of the day until early evening the
ménage à trois
was continually imaginative, exciting, adventurous with each other and with sex. Mimi would come so many times, she was to feel faint. They held her while she dozed, and fed her tea sweetened with honey. She drifted back to the real world the richer and happier for her experience. She had been in an erotic world where sex, affection and love had taken over and exercised their special magic on her. It was a foreign land she knew she could only visit with the right man, that one special lover of a lifetime.

Sobered now into the old Mimi, she realized how much more complete she felt, more whole as a human being for having given herself so completely. It humbled her. She felt a new confidence in herself for having had the courage to go where she wanted to with Rick and Allan. As those beautiful young girls who frequented Rick’s world said, all too frequently, ‘The trip of a lifetime.’ ‘Tripping out’ was an expression she had never understood before her sexual escapades with Rick and Allan. There was always the opportunity of another trip in the hippie world. To fuck, get stoned, eat ice cream, ride a wave, be a stockbroker, gambler, a baker, a candlestick-maker. The trips were endless.

This was sixties thinking, the chatter of the Age of Aquarius. Mimi, a woman born in the mid thirties, felt as if she were born again, were adding a new life to the one she had. As if there were more lives coming her way. She had just had a taste of real honey. That was exciting. But who in her intimate circle would understand this new feeling, how much these Flower Power people were contributing to her life? Her father? Yes, maybe he would understand. She could, of course, never talk to him about it, any more than she could have talked to him about her lost childhood, her identity lost because of a war and his will to fight for freedom. Laslo, her brother? They were friends, they loved each other, but this was nothing one could discuss with a brother who was conservative and withdrawn at the best of
times. She couldn’t share with him what she shared with these two young men, affection (never mind the sex), the loving without possessiveness, nor her past – family history made that impossible. Sophia would think she was mad. Her friends, the Peabody girls, would never understand this. In her mind she went through a list of friends, even distant ones such as Pierre, Max and Juliet. Max was King now, Pierre a Minister of State, Juliet a royal princess with five children. They were kind and wonderful to her, much as they had always been as children, but in adulthood were staid and conservative, just as she had imagined she would remain. How could she explain to them, when she could hardly explain to herself, her affiliation with the revolution of the young?