Lovers (20 page)

Amory Hopkins would have thought Victoria even more charming than he did if she’d let him make love to her, but she wouldn’t, implore though he would. She let him kiss her, she let him touch her neck and her arms, and once, when they were out by the swimming pool with everyone else, she let him rub her with suntan oil wherever he could reach, but she insisted that in her mother’s house, it was only decent that she sleep alone.

Once, just once, she contrived to meet Angus alone in the pool house late in the afternoon. He was waiting for her as she entered, grown painfully erect in the few minutes he’d been standing there planning how he would kiss her until she trembled, how he would lead her into one of the changing rooms, lock the door, lift up the skirt of her sun dress, and take her without the slightest regard for her own satisfaction. He owed her that for the way she’d been tormenting him. He knew she’d be so lubricated from the thought of this meeting that he could stick his cock into her without the slightest preliminary. He promised himself
to use her so quickly, selfishly, and remorselessly that she wouldn’t have time to achieve an orgasm, and then pull out and go away, leaving her lying there mad from humiliating desire. Let her suffer, Angus told himself, let her feel the same tormented arousal he’d felt all week and been unable to satisfy. Let her touch herself and think of him, as she used to, he thought, grinding his teeth in a rapture of anticipation.

Victoria entered the pool house and flew into his arms. He had only kissed her once before she thrust both of her hands into the fly of his swimming trunks, grasped his hard penis, and started to use her fingers in the way he adored the most, cupping and squeezing his balls with one hand while the other manipulated the shaft with a sure up-and-down motion of firmly increasing pressure and swiftness. Angus stood frozen, panting, with the beginning of the certainty that he was about to come, unable to carry out his plan. Suddenly Victoria jumped, startled, as if she’d heard someone at the door of the pool house. She snatched her hands out of his trunks, turned on her heel, and ran out of the pool house as quickly as she had entered.

Oh, she knew how much he was suffering, Victoria thought, as she walked lightly up to the house, for she was suffering just as much. She would give almost anything to have him inside her, anything but the victory she had just achieved.

“Do you think I don’t know that you did that on purpose?” Angus raged at her the first time they met again at the New York apartment near the office, shortly after the New Year’s Eve that ushered in 1982. “You were obscene!”

“You
have a life. I don’t,” Victoria said quietly, unaffected by his anger.

“We have
a life!”

“It’s not enough. I refuse to accept this little.” She spoke in a conversational tone.

“Good Christ, we have as much as we can, you must understand that.”

“No.” She shook her head with an air of finality, sitting on the edge of a chair, her gloves in her hand, like a lady waiting for a cup of tea. He had expected her to be as avid as he was, but she had never looked so removed from thoughts of sex. She was still playing with him, he thought as he walked over to her, bent down, and pulled her up to him, kissing her lips, pulling out the pins that held up her hair, undoing the buttons of her suit and blouse, and then bending to suck hard, hard on her nipples in the way that excited her the most. She allowed everything, she allowed him to push her back on the couch, to undress her, to make her as wet as he wanted to with his tongue, to part her legs, to push into her, but she responded not at all. He took her with a more intense excitement than he had ever known. The more she held herself in check, the more frenzied he became.

When it was over, she asked only, “Was that enough for you?”

“Shit, no! Was it enough for you?”

“It’s as much as I can give you,” she said implacably. “I have to leave. There’s the Lighthouse Ball tonight, and I have to go home and get ready.”

Unable to move, unable even to think with any coherence, Angus watched Victoria gather her clothes together and dress rapidly. It was only five-thirty in the evening, there was no need for her to be in a hurry, they still had an hour, even an hour and a half. How could she leave him, aroused and unfulfilled as she was, this girl who lived for his fucking, when it had been weeks and weeks since she’d had an orgasm? At least so far as he knew. He despised himself as he asked, shaking with jealousy, “Who’s taking you to the ball?”

“Not Amory. No one you know.” And she was gone, leaving him in incredulous despair.

He sat for a long time on the couch, unable to dress, wrapped only in his overcoat, shivering in the warm room, trying to make sense out of what had happened, torn between jealousy of some man who would dance with her
tonight and look into her eyes and receive her smile, and the fact that he was again violently thirsty for her body, so ready that it hurt, so ready that now, this minute he would give anything to take her again.

“You
have a life,” she’d said to him. Indeed he did. He had a life that was filled from waking to sleeping; a life in which he was responsible for the fortunes of a huge company; a life in which he had to portion out every minute to meet the demands of his clients, each one of whom expected individual hand-holding, no matter how good the account supervisors were who worked with them; a life in which these same supervisors and their account executives and their creative teams looked to him and Millicent for final approval of the campaigns they planned to present to the clients; a life that included playing hard at the sports through which men like him consolidated their business relationships; a life that demanded that he entertain and be entertained on an increasingly grand scale, that he travel to touch base with his international branches and clients in other cities … a life that was crammed full to bursting with obligations that went with his position and achievements as one of the most important men in advertising.

The small spaces of time he’d been able to steal for Victoria could not, reasonably, be added to by more than a few hours at wide intervals, Angus Caldwell realized. What more could he give her?

Imagine, he said to himself, imagine that you got a divorce from Millicent. Imagine that the agency was thrown into confusion and its smooth functioning went to hell for a while, imagine a full-scale uproar, as bad as it could get. Nevertheless, a cadre of clients and creative people would most certainly stick it out with you, and you could start up all over again, on a smaller scale, with your own new agency, and be content with that and whatever growth came in time. Yes, that scenario
was
entirely possible. A number of agencies, headed by two or more partners,
endured when those people agreed to go their own ways, creating other agencies as they split.

He certainly had the right to divorce his wife, brilliant, popular Millicent, and marry any other woman, even a twenty-year-old, and risk no more than the loss of some of his business and many of his friends. He would probably seem heartless, considering Millicent’s age and her role in his success, but people always assumed that they never knew the truth of the inside of a marriage and made allowances. They hated to take sides.

But imagine instead that after you divorce Millicent, you marry
Victoria
. Angus now realized, finally, in hideous clarity, that Victoria’s agenda was marriage. How could he ever have been stupid enough to hope that she would be content with the arrangement they had?

Yes, just imagine that you marry your former wife’s one and only daughter, a young woman the people you know best have considered to be your stepdaughter for thirteen years, ever since so many of them had seen her as a flushed, tall, beautiful teenager in an emerald green minidress, walking in nervous dignity down the aisle of a church at your wedding, your wife’s only attendant.

No! Never!
He, Angus Caldwell, knew it wasn’t incest. Victoria and he shared no ties of blood. He had never adopted her, never even considered it. He knew she’d been a grown-up sixteen when he’d first laid eyes on her. He knew they hadn’t spent a night in the same house in her formative years, except for a few occasions when she was between trains or planes. He knew how distant she had always been from her mother, how rarely he’d even seen her in those six years before her graduation from college. He knew he hadn’t touched her until she was twenty-seven. He knew he had never, in those eleven years, considered her in the position of a stepdaughter. Not once, during those innocent dinners at her apartment, those dinners during which they had never touched each other, had he spared the time to remind himself who her mother was.
And afterwards … no, never. Particularly not afterwards.

Oh, he knew all this, and none of it mattered. Not one single fact. None of it could be explained away as he had just so convincingly explained it to himself. The facts were irrelevant. None of it—
none
—would be weighed in evidence when the scandal came to light, when people heard about it and started the storm of speculation that would never stop, even after his death. Everyone he knew in the world, every man in every club, every client who had confidence in him, every one of the hundreds of people who worked for him, would think of him as a man who had committed a crime against nature. A man who had fucked his stepdaughter.
A man who had fucked her for God knows how long
. A man who had betrayed his wife in the vilest way, A man who should be thrust outside of society. A man to be shunned by any decent person.

He had to give Victoria up, Angus saw in a jolt of clear reason. He had to get out of the fearful danger he had been too muddleheaded and blinded by sex to think through until today. He had trapped himself into the biggest mistake of his life. But he had to ease out of it cautiously, with infinite care, so that no one,
no one
, would ever know. Victoria had it in her power to destroy his life, to lay waste to everything that was important to him. She could be his ruin.

During the next months, whenever they met, Angus Caldwell forced himself to raise the question of their future together. He realized she couldn’t go on like this, he told Victoria, he realized how selfish he’d been, he couldn’t live this way either, it was against all natural human feeling for them not to be together openly, for them not to marry when they loved each other so. But, my God, they had to be patient a while longer, she must understand that, they had to find a way to have their lives together and still make as little mess as possible, she saw that, didn’t she, his intelligent darling? No, he understood that she had to go out
with other men, it would look peculiar if she didn’t, but he couldn’t help being jealous even though he knew she didn’t sleep with them, she had to forgive him his jealousy, she had to promise him, promise him that they never touched her, never touched his darling.

Yes, of course he trusted her, he knew how long she’d waited for him, and all he asked was that she make it easy for him while he found the best way to get his freedom, all he asked was that she never deny him her love, her kisses, her own satisfaction … he couldn’t endure that again. Of course he knew it was taking an eternity, but he couldn’t lay the groundwork for their future in weeks or even months. Yes, he realized that she’d be twenty-nine on her next birthday, but he promised that by then he’d have a plan, a workable plan. No, she couldn’t get up and leave now, not now, not when he was so ready again, no, she had to let him take her one more time, that was all he asked.

Angus bought almost another year while he searched for the way out.

“Los Angeles! You can’t be serious! Why do you want me to go there?” Victoria cried out.

“I want
us
to go there—”

“But—”

“Darling, shut up and let me talk. L.A. is the answer, I just don’t know why I didn’t see it sooner. It’s a chance to start fresh, to build a new life, to have each other and our work and—”

“But why do I have to go first, alone, without you?”

“Because something as big as this has to be done in steps. Listen to me carefully, Victoria. As long as you’re employed by Caldwell & Caldwell, you’re a prisoner of the company. But if you open your own shop, if you declare your independence, as soon as the divorce is over, I’ll join you.”

“You actually think I’d be willing to start a little one-woman agency in a city I hardly know, three thousand
miles away from the center of the action? Angus, it’s out of the question.”

“What if your agency opened with some twenty million dollars in billing? Wouldn’t a jump-start like that enable you to lure a few top creative people to come with you? And you’d be top dog in your own shop. What if you knew that when I joined you I’d be bringing many millions in billing with me? That we’d become a powerhouse? Wouldn’t that be better than staying in the same city as Millicent?”

“Twenty million?
Where would I get twenty million?”

“You have to leave that part up to me. I know how to make it work. Without it, you don’t go anywhere, my darling, and I’ll start work on Plan B.”

The next day, Angus Caldwell made a lunch date with his old loyal friend and first client, Joe Devane, who owed him so much for the success of Oak Hill Foods.

“Joe, I need a big favor.”

“It’s yours.”

“No, don’t say that so quickly. I’ll understand if you can’t help me out, but Victoria and her mother are having a lot of serious problems.”

“Now that’s too bad, Angus. I’m sorry to hear it.”

“They’ve never been close, Joe. I’ve tried and tried to repair the relationship, but when I married Millicent it must have been too late to solve their trouble, whatever it was.”

“That’s too bad, Angus, a real shame. I’ve never realized.”

“We’ve hoped to keep it in the family, but now, well, you’re the first to know, but Victoria is determined to leave the agency.”

“Damn! Now that’s really
rotten
news! You know how I count on that girl. She’s tops in my book! It’s a crying shame that she’s leaving, a crying shame! But what can I do about it? Do you want me to talk to her? Damn it, Angus, if you can’t keep her, how can I?”