I'll Take Manhattan (13 page)

Necessary
. This incandescent woman was necessary to him, this woman who, of all women in the world, was his brother’s wife. She couldn’t possibly love Zachary. He knew that fact instantly without a single doubt, because if she loved his brother she wouldn’t, she
could not possibly
be looking at him as she was, with wild curiosity, with fear, a fear that made him hear a great tom-tom of triumph, a fear he could clearly see trembling on her lips, quenching her social smile, forcing her to lower her eyes, stiffening her posture so that she wouldn’t shake. There could be only one reason for that fear, a reason Cutter understood perfectly, for he felt it himself. It was the fear of someone whose life has, in the space of a minute, changed forever and ever.

“Cutter, by God, Cutter! I’ve been looking all over for you. Pepper told me you were here. Damn it, Cutter, it’s good to see you!” Zachary hugged him with a quick, embarrassed hug he couldn’t restrain. He had long been wounded by the cold, distant stiffness his brother displayed toward him, but he couldn’t seem to change it, try as he would. There had always been something strained in their relationship which he had never been able to understand. Finally, helplessly, he had decided to attribute it to the decade that separated them, to the cliché of the generation gap. But he was delighted to lay eyes on the boy. No, he corrected himself, the man, for Cutter was unquestionably a man now,
twenty-four years old and, in all ways but age, the most commanding presence in the room.

“I’m glad to see you too, Zack,” Cutter said smiling automatically. How had he
dared
, how had he had the monstrous effrontery to marry this girl? He had no right to her, didn’t he know that? He could deck her out all over with diamonds and sapphires and call her what he would, but she had never belonged to him. He stared down at Zachary, noting the few extra pounds around Zachary’s waist, the more obvious since he hadn’t had time to have a new dinner jacket made for several years, seeing the strands of gray that had begun to invade his dark hair. There were lines on Zachary’s face that were unfamiliar to Cutter, lines that had appeared during the last year, during the long nights that he stood outside of Toby’s room where, now, a lamp always burned.

“You look wonderful, Cutter! Doesn’t he look wonderful, darling? Listen, have you found an apartment yet? Because if you haven’t, you can always stay with us while you look.”

“Rented one today, Zack, on East Sixty-seventh, just a few blocks from your house. It’s a furnished sublet, just temporary, until I find the place I want to settle in, but perfectly adequate.”

“Great, that means that you have to come and see us—Lily, how about tomorrow … are we having dinner at home tomorrow night?”

“Yes.”

“Is that good for you, Cutter?”

“I’d love it.”

“Come early, so you can see the kids. We’ll eat at eight but if you can get to our place by six-thirty you can see both of them before Nanny spirits them away.”

“Terrific. I’ll count on it.”

“You’re not all supposed to be standing around talking to your own family,” Pepper Delafield said, sweeping up to the three of them, and scattering them strategically among her other guests as only she knew how to do.

Lily didn’t sleep at all that night, and finally, at five, she got up and wandered around the great house, touching
polished wood, picking up heavy silver boxes and putting them down, crushing velvet-covered pillows. When she found herself methodically destroying a bouquet of flowers, plucking petal after petal from the hearts of roses, rolling them in her hands until they grew limp and wet before she discarded them angrily on a table, she decided to go to the ballroom, which had been turned into her dance studio, and work at the barre. It was an infallible remedy for any kind of thought, an ingrained rhythm of body and mind that had never failed her. Yet, as dawn broke, so did her dancer’s discipline, and for the first time in her life she did not finish her barre, nor did she care. She was waiting, listening, in the quiet house, for something to happen, something she could not put a name to, and she knew that she was in no condition to face her day’s appointments. She would cancel them and stay at home.

She spent the morning flipping unseeingly through a pile of new magazines in her sitting room. For two years she and Zachary had had separate sets of rooms and the servants were accustomed to her taking an occasional day off from her exhausting schedule and, as now, ordering lunch on a tray. Lily sat looking at the untouched tray, counting the hours until six-thirty. Every few minutes she got up to look at herself in a mirror and each time she saw nothing except eyes that seemed strangely terrified, and burning cheeks. She tried to make a few phone calls but stopped in the act of dialing because she couldn’t imagine what she would talk about to any of her friends.

Nothing seemed important, nothing meant anything anymore. It was as if she had had no past and possessed no future. She put her hand to her throat and felt the pulse beating furiously. She walked around and around the room, repeating the few words that she and Cutter had exchanged, such banal words, their only comfort offered by the fact that he had said he was in New York for good. She had seen photographs of him, of course, family photos that her mother-in-law had shown her, but nothing about the pictures of a blond boy with severe, regular features had led her to expect him to be a magnificent man who struck her dumb with mute, primal longing, helpless and quivering and mad with restlessness, bewildered by a feeling of
unknown horizons opening before her unto wild and inevitable skies. Again and again she looked at her watch. Five and a half more hours.

There was a tap on the door and the houseman entered.

“Mr. Amberville, Madame,” he announced and crossed the room to remove her lunch tray. Cutter stood still, just inside her door. She dared only to glance up once at his face but she couldn’t bring herself to meet his gaze or to rise from the couch on which she was sitting. Both of them were motionless until the servant had left, closing the door behind him. Then Cutter came to the couch and picked her up easily until she stood against him, shaking, speechless yet without surprise, astonishingly without surprise. He put one hand on either side of her hot cheeks and, with the utmost deliberation and gravity, kissed her on the mouth, kissed her time after time until they both sank to their knees because they didn’t have the strength to stand. They exchanged no words but soon they were both naked, their clothes ripped off in silence, lying on the carpet, panting with haste. He was hard and he had only one goal. She was unsmiling. She had the same goal. Flesh to flesh, sighing, gasping, they made each other whole. They had exchanged no salutations, and no promises, but they had exchanged their separate solitudes, their unrealized selves, their lonely, craving souls. Afterwards, almost immediately, he took her again and this time, now that the world had reformed itself for her, Lily discovered that secret of human passion that she had never known, discovered her own rhythm, a rhythm that had waited, hidden in her body, until this moment in time. What, oh what if he had not been alive? How had she endured so long without him?

“I don’t know what to do,” she said at last, uncaring, scarcely able to form the words.

“I have to leave you now, beloved. It’s getting late and someone is sure to disturb you. Will you make my excuses about tonight? I couldn’t stand to see you with him … you understand that, don’t you? I’ll be back tomorrow, at the same time, if you say so. Do you love me, Lily? Do you?”

“Oh, God, yes!”

Cutter put his fingers deeply into her. She was ready for him again; she hadn’t closed up and tightened the way women did when they’d had enough. “Tomorrow,” he repeated and left.

There were hours of that afternoon, after Cutter left, that Lily could never account for. She supposed that she must have taken a bath, that she must have read to the children and watched them have their supper, that she must have had dinner herself and explained why Cutter wasn’t there. But for the rest of her life there were seconds of that first day that she would always remember; the smell of her hands after he had gone; the torn clothing she had hidden in the back of her closet; the way she had to leave the sitting room windows open so that the smell of their lovemaking wouldn’t hang in the air; the cream she had slowly, dreamily smoothed on her cheeks where the bristles of his beard had scratched her slightly; the feeling of the carpet under her open legs; the hour she had spent locked in her bathroom, unable to stop sobbing, tears of terrible joy cascading from her eyes; sounds, like those of the newly born, escaping her lips.

After dinner, knowing that she would be unable to function normally without the children or the servants around, she told Zachary that she felt the need of a brisk walk. He nodded, deep in thought, and she left him working in his library on the papers he had brought home from the office with him. Twice, three times she walked around the block, wondering if she could manage to get through the evening without going to Cutter’s door. Finally she realized that it was hopeless and she almost ran the three blocks to his apartment. She buzzed. If he weren’t there what could she do? She held her breath until the door clicked open and she stumbled up the two flights to his apartment not knowing what she was going to say. He was standing in his doorway, dressed only in a bathrobe.

“I willed you to come here. I’ve been thinking about nothing else since I left you,” he said. She walked into the room without noticing that it was furnished with the most nondescript of rented pieces, worn leather and mustard-colored
chairs. He stopped her before she had advanced farther than three steps. “Have you ever done this before? With anyone in the world?” he demanded sternly.

“Of course not,” she replied in amazement, her face flushed from the wind, rosy with daring.

“That’s what I thought, that’s what I knew you’d say,” he told her, unbuttoning her coat and leading her into his small bedroom where the open bed waited for her. He pushed her skirt up to her waist and pulled down her brief underpants. She wore a garter belt and stockings and between the top of her pants and the lower edge of her garter belt her blond pubic tangle was framed. He bent down toward it, stuck out his tongue and licked her slowly between those delicately closed lips. She screamed. “Shut up, darling,” he whispered, and licked her again, deeper this time, so that the lips parted and his tongue met wetness. Ruthlessly his tongue dragged back and forth, traveling over her clitoris every time it made its trip. Her legs spread as wide as the pants around her knees would permit, her back arched, her mouth opened, she breathed shallowly, concentrated entirely on the voyage of his tongue, knowing, in a delirium of passion, that nothing in the world could make him stop. She lifted her hips off the bed to offer herself more easily to him, she pushed her mound into his face and rubbed it around in a circle, but he wouldn’t allow that. He was in charge, he was the boss, and he held her immobile between his elbows, withdrawing his tongue until she whimpered, until she pleaded, until she begged for it, begged out loud. Then he plunged his tongue as deeply into her as it could go, up to the root, in and out, flicking her clitoris every time and when she screamed and screamed he kept going until she was quiet at last.

“Do you
belong
to me?” he demanded.

“I belong to you.”

“You have to, don’t you, always? Nothing can change that, can it?”

“Never. Nothing. No one.”

“Feel me,” he commanded.

She put her hand on his penis. It was as hard as it had been when he had first undressed her in her room that afternoon.

“Last night, when I first saw you,” he whispered harshly, “I got hard, right away. I was hard all the time we were talking so politely at the party. In my dreams, last night, I came in my sleep and this morning, when I woke up, thinking about you, I had to come again, in my hand, because I was so hard that it hurt. Now I want to come in your mouth.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Oh, yes.”

They took risks only madmen take. They stood up, fully clothed, in the phone booth at L’Aiglon, his hand holding the door closed, while Zachary and Cutter’s date had another pre-dinner drink, and he rubbed her against his penis, rocklike under his trousers, until she came, biting back her cries. She went to his office, once he had started working on Wall Street, and while his secretary was out to lunch he knelt on the carpet and she sat on the couch, with her head thrown back and her eyes closed, and slowly, with just his fingers wet with her own juices, he worked her to a shuddering orgasm, watching her face every second.

Often, very often, when they weren’t in his apartment, he would not let her touch him no matter how she begged. He experienced a violent joy in withholding his own pleasure, in creating situations in which she would come but he could not. Lily stopped wearing underpants. She never knew in advance when he would let her have his penis, and he never told her.

He would take her casually by the elbow at a crowded party and lead her with deliberate lack of haste to a bathroom, lock the door and tell her to lie on the bathmat. Fully dressed himself, he would raise her wide skirts to her waist and suck her ruthlessly until she came, and then leave her immediately. The next night, at another party, he would guide her away from the other guests and, once in the bathroom, unzip his fly, take out his naked penis and put it in her with total self-absorption, coming quickly and pulling out, deliberately not waiting until she had an orgasm. He would leave the bathroom first and observe her during the rest of the evening, watching her as she moved across the
room, wet with his sperm under her gown, wet with her own wanting, but successfully maintaining her serenity by avoiding his eyes.

During intermissions of Broadway musicals, while Zachary waited in line to buy lemonade, they would stand in a corner, not looking at each other. “I want to suck you,” he whispered, licking his thumb and pressing it into her palm. “I want to suck you slowly, for an hour, so slowly, so slowly, and not let you come.” He reached under the flap of her evening coat, took out her breast from the low-cut bodice of her dress and held it in his hand, his wet thumb rubbing her nipple. She came, standing up, came in quick, shallow spasms that left her eyes brighter than before, came only halfway as he had known she would, so that she would spend the whole of the second act dying for more, unable to touch him.