The Stallion (1996) (14 page)

Angelo stood. He spoke without notes. “As with the case of the minutes and treasurer’s report, you have copies of my report and recommendations. Before his death, Mr. Hardeman the First somewhat reluctantly came to the conclusion that this company could not survive in the automobile business if it continued to build what we may call a traditional American car. Indeed, I will go so far as to say that the American automobile industry as we have known it cannot survive if it continues to build what has come to be regarded as the traditional American car.

“It is a joke in America, ladies and gentlemen, that when you drive a car out of the dealership it instantly depreciates fifty percent. That’s not too far from the truth. But it’s not true with a Volkswagen or a Mercedes. Ten days after you buy it, it’s worth only a few dollars less than what you paid for it. The same is true of Japanese cars, only more so.

“The reason is that foreign cars are better designed and better built. Not all foreign cars. British cars … well, see what you can get for your two-week-old Jaguar. I walked around a 1979 Jaguar on a dealer’s floor not long ago. It was rusting visibly, right there on the showroom floor. I’ve got a seventy-six Riviera. When it rains, the windshield leaks. Water drips in my lap. The dealer can’t seem to fix it. A friend of mine drives a Mercury. The power windows stick—sometimes open, sometimes shut. If it’s raining, he
can be sure they’re stuck open. When he approaches a tollbooth, he can be sure they’re stuck shut. I don’t have to go on with a list like this. What does your own car do?”

“What about a Sundancer?” asked Roberta with a subdued smile. She sat well down the table from Loren, as if to suggest she was not there just because she was his wife. She was dressed in a severe salt-and-pepper tweed suit. Her eyes met Angelo’s as she asked the question, and, he thought, it was lucky for both of them that Loren didn’t seem to see the innuendo in them.

Princess Alekhine noticed and glanced quizzically at Angelo. He could have warned Roberta that the princess was shrewd, that nothing much got past her. She was like Betsy in that respect. Wearing a burnt orange cashmere suit, the princess carried off her assumed aristocratic persona with total élan.

“This company doesn’t pay me enough to ask me to drive a Sundancer,” said Angelo. “On the other hand, GM couldn’t pay me enough to ask me to drive a Chevy. Chrysler couldn’t pay me enough to ask me to drive a Plymouth. They were good enough cars in their day, but technology has outrun them. When you drive a Shizoka out of the showroom, it doesn’t depreciate fifty percent in ten minutes; neither does a Honda or a Toyota. Why? Because those cars don’t start falling apart the first time you put them in gear and shove down the accelerator.”

“Quality control,” said Loren dryly. “Mr. Perino is a fanatic on the subject.”

“Quality control,” said Angelo. “But more than that. New ideas. GM put out the Corvair. It was a fine, innovative design; but Americans weren’t ready for rear engines, air cooled, and the Nader fanatics sent up a howl that killed it. Well, rear engines? No, not yet. Air cooled? No, not yet. But you’ve seen the design. A transverse engine. Fuel efficient. A sturdy body built to high standards of quality control. Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to build a car that will need service
twice a year
—fluids and filters changed and nothing more.”

“Our dealers have big service departments,” said Randolph.

“Which the company pays for, because most of what they do is warranty work,” said Angelo.

Congressman Briley stood and uncovered a drawing that sat on an easel. “This is the car that Mr. Hardeman the First wanted to build,” he said.

The drawing was of the car Angelo’s team had designed, softened by Number One’s French curve.

Princess Anne Alekhine sighed noisily. “There is only one good thing to say about Number One,” she said. “
He is dead.
And let us thank God it is so. Let there be an end to his destructive meddling in our business and our lives.”

“Anne!” cried Loren.

“Do you disagree,
nephew?”
she asked coldly.

Few in the room knew what she meant by “nephew,” and the directors glanced back and forth among themselves awkwardly.

Loren stared at Roberta, tapping his fingers nervously on the table. “Uh … the chair will entertain a motion that the design and manufacturing plan recommended by Mr. Perino be adopted.”

“So moved,” said Anne.

“Seconded,” said Roberta.

Loren flushed visibly. “May we have a unanimous vote?”

Myron Goldman, the banker, raised his hand. “Can the company afford this thing, Mr. Perino?”

“The financing is in place, sir,” said Angelo. “Some money from New York, some from London.”

“May I review the financing with you, Mr. Perino?”

“I’ll be happy to review every detail of it with you, Mr. Goldman.”

“Do we have, then, the unanimous vote?” asked Loren.

He had it.

Loren nodded dramatically. It was almost a bow. “So,” he said, “our company is off on a new venture. I’d like to break out champagne, but I have a few more things to bring to the attention of the board.”

“Before we take up anything else,” said Princess Anne, “would it be inappropriate for this board to put on its minutes a resolution of thanks to Mr. Angelo Perino for having presided over the design of a new venture that may be the salvation of Bethlehem Motors?”

“It will be
more
appropriate,” said Roberta, “when Mr. Perino’s
car has in fact saved Bethlehem Motors. But I will, for now, move a resolution of thanks to Mr. Perino.”

This time Princess Anne caught an unmistakable leer in the glance Loren’s wife shot at Angelo Perino.

“I assume Mrs. Hardeman seconds,” said Loren. “May we have a unanimous vote?”

They had it.

“Now,” said Loren, “I would like to recommend certain changes in … well, in basic matters. My grandfather built his first car in his bicycle shop in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. We all know the history. It was an odd contraption, but he brought it to Detroit and made it a success. He named his company Bethlehem Motors, after his hometown. He might have named it Hardeman Motors. Henry Ford named his company for himself, and so did Walter Chrysler. But the name Bethlehem has a religious connotation and, in my judgment, has become an albatross around the company’s neck. I would like to change the name. I wish we could call the company BM, but…” He paused and smiled slyly. “I guess it is obvious why we can’t. BM: bowel movement.”

This time Roberta grinned at Angelo. BM was the name he had suggested in London—showing that he, too, was capable of a stupid mistake. He laughed.

Loren grinned at Angelo—such a genuine grin that Angelo for an instant wondered if Roberta hadn’t told him Angelo had suggested the name—then he went on: “We’re entering a joint venture with Shizoka, but we can’t call our company BS either.”

Everyone chuckled.

Loren went on. “I hired a consulting firm that specializes in product and corporate names. They’ve been damned successful also in creating logos. They’ve got an idea that X is an intriguing letter. EXXON, LEXIS, and so on. God forbid that we should get stuck with a name like UNISYS. So, ladies and gentlemen, here is what they’ve come up with—”

The corporate counsel removed the cover sheet from an easel.

Loren shone with pleasure. “The new corporate name, ladies and gentlemen—XB Motors, Incorporated—and the name for our new car.”

The directors smiled and nodded.

“Can you imagine the chutzpah of a company that would call its car an Edsel or a Henry J? One or two suggested we call the new car a Loren.” He paused and grinned. “Even my grandfather resisted that.”

“A pretty radical change, isn’t it?” asked Goldman. “I mean, dropping the name Bethlehem Motors that has won the respect of—”

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Goldman,” said Angelo. “I think Mr. Hardeman is absolutely right, and I appreciate his contributing this idea.”

The board drank champagne before they disbanded. Loren looked for a chance to talk to Angelo alone before he left. He found it.

“Well,” he said. “We bet the store. All I can say to you, Angelo, is don’t plan on my going down and your surviving. If I go down, you come with me.”

“And vice versa,” said Angelo. “Loren, I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Roberta came up and took Loren’s arm as Angelo walked away. “Easy, lover.”

“How many times do I have to have my face rubbed in shit?” he asked, his voice breaking.
“That wop son of a
bitch!”

Amanda’s nudes of the teenager Greg created a stir in the art world. They bolstered her reputation as a talented new realist, and they sold for $20,000, $23,500, and $27,000. The fourth one was a gift to Cindy and hung in VKP Galleries for a long time before Cindy took it home.

The boy’s parents would not let him pose again unless he was paid a much higher fee, arguing that the appearance of the paintings in magazines and gallery catalogs had caused him immense embarrassment at Greenwich High School. They suggested he should be paid a percentage of the sale price of any future paintings. Amanda shrugged and told them she would not require Gregory’s services again.

Her flower paintings did not sell nearly as well. She was established as a painter of photographically accurate nudes. One critic wrote, “The greatest of photographers—Weston, Steichen, Outerbridge—never succeeded as well as Ms. Finch in portraying the infinite subtleties of the human physique. She is a worthy heiress of the oldest tradition in graphic art.”

Her career took a strange new turn when Abraham and Corsica d’Alembert, two Wall Street brokers, commissioned
her to paint them nude together, holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes. Amanda injected a special dynamic into the painting by posing the husband on the model platform and his wife on the floor, with him reaching out with his hand to help her to mount the platform. The couple wanted a memorial of the early years of a middle-aged marriage and they were willing to pay $50,000 for it.

That painting was on an easel in the studio when Dietz von Keyserling posed for Amanda. Her picture of Dietz showed him in a reclining pose, lying on a dark blue blanket laid over a mattress pad on the platform, reading a book while the artist painted. He planned to display it prominently at VKP Galleries and not to sell it.

Dietz and Amanda became lovers. She could not see him naked hour after hour without developing an interest in him. The paintings she had done of herself had aroused in him a similar interest in her. It was understood between them that the affair was simply a physical attraction to each other and included no commitment. In fact, if he was committed to anyone, it was to Cindy. But he could not be with her often, and he was not a man who could make love only infrequently.

Amanda was a young woman with little experience who was content simply to lie underneath a man, spread and receive him, and get what enjoyment she could out of something that did not entirely satisfy her.

Cindy satisfied her more. The tongue was more supple and better controlled than the lingam. What Amanda really yearned for was to have them both, both at once.

And one afternoon in July, that was what she got.

She suggested it diffidently to Cindy, in the kitchen. Dietz lay naked on the platform. He really was reading the book he was being depicted as reading; otherwise, he had said, the hours of posing that her realism required would have daunted him.

Cindy shook her head. “I never thought I’d hear a proposition to do that,” she said.

“I hope I don’t offend you.”

“No…”

She glanced through the door at Dietz. Amanda was painting his small, uncircumcised penis exactly as it was; Cindy had wondered if he really wanted to put that on display in public. She knew it grew when it stiffened, but still … Amanda saw her glance at Dietz, then focused her own slightly myopic eyes on Cindy. It was a warm afternoon in the greenhouse studio, and Amanda wore only a pair of cut-off jeans and a halter, the jeans smeared with old paint. Cindy leaned forward and kissed Amanda. They’d been kissing often lately, with their tongues.

Dietz happened to look up at that moment. “Girls, really,” he said with a grin. “I had no idea.”

“You are observant as an art
dealer,
” said Cindy. “Not as an artist.”

“If what I failed to observe can be observed by any artist,” he said, “I think you two have created a serious problem for yourselves. Who knows who’s an artist?”

“I see the thought of it is giving you an erection, Dietz,” Cindy teased. “Congratulations. You can always use one. Amanda ought to run porno tapes for you while you pose, so you—”

“Don’t be a bitch, Cindy,” he said. “If you want to complain I’m not adequate, now is hardly the time.”

“I suggested to Cindy we try a threesome,” Amanda interjected.

“Like—”

“Use your imagination, Dietz,” said Cindy.

Following the suggestions of her imagination, not his, Cindy lay naked on her back on the blanket-covered pad on the model platform. Amanda squatted over her face and received her tongue into her furrow. Dietz mounted Cindy and drove himself into her with all the vigor he had. After a while they changed positions. Amanda offered her tongue to Cindy, and Cindy took Dietz in her mouth.